whatsapp integration with salesforce marketing cloud

Is your organization aiming to track leads coming in from unconventional channels like Whatsapp and grow their lead pipeline? If yes, there’s some good news for you! Salesforce can now be easily integrated with Whatsapp, the most powerful global mobile messenger app worldwide with approximately 2 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp helps businesses mainly by increasing their reach and improving communication with potential customers, enabling teams to provide faster resolution to customer issues. As a result, this provides customers a superior service experience. 

To help you visualize how Whatsapp Integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud will work, we will share some of the common use cases that can be implemented. We can use chatbots to implement the starting conversation or the basic repeating issues to which the chatbot can reply without any human intervention. Also, this integration will help us track how many messages are sent and how many are read by customers which will help us separate our potential customers from the non interested ones.

We as businesses need to label the customers correctly (like New cx, New orders etc.) which will help target them properly and maintain a profound relationship with them. Also, rich content is supported by Whatsapp where we can send catalog files, voice messages and push notifications with a good number of character limits.

Salesforce marketing cloud has integrated with Sinch and by utilizing this we can use the whatsapp channel to benefit from it involving Salesforce.

Steps involved in Sinch Implementation

1. Purchasing of whatsapp account is done by Salesforce Account Executive where the SKU is bought
2. Download the “Chat Messaging Setup App” using the link provided with the SKU purchase
3. Facebook Business Manager account Setup to get Business Manager Id. Create a Whatsapp Business Account via Business Manager Id. We can set up multiple channels and each channel can have its own look and feel and channel name based on the branding assets to be configured.
4. Create templates and take approval
5. Default messages setup
6. Journey creation to send template messages and respond to inbound messages as per keywords

In Whatsapp We Have 2 Types of Messages:

1) Transactional Message – These are event based messages (like shipping notifications, order confirmations, payment updates, issue resolutions, etc.) which are created using the whatsapp template for which we need to receive approval from the Whatsapp before sending it to users. To send these messages, a user opt-in is required, else the messages can’t be sent so we need to receive the opt-ins from the customers at one place.

📌Let us take an instance and understand it. Any customer who has placed an order and needs to know the shipping details and order tracking, under such requirements we prefer to use transactional messages. Firstly, we create a new template and then configure the message template by selecting the template category and mentioning the template body with dynamic elements. Next we move over to building the journey from Journey Builder. Here we use a data extension(table of records of customers) and then select the message template we want to use from the content builder and select what phone number we are sending a message to and then activate the flow at the end.

2) Session Message – These are response messages for user initiated conversations(two – way communication) and here the content need not be approved from Whatsapp before sending to users. It is important that we keep in mind that we don’t use phishing languages and keep the brand guidelines in mind however free form communication like this increases selling opportunities.

📌For user initiated chats we prefer using session messages where we set up the whatsapp channel and continue with setting up a maximum of 10 keywords as conversation starters. These conversation starters act as the starting point of the journey builder and sets up a 2 way communication by replying with a default introduction message which was setup during the process. User responses are sorted based on the issue keywords which were already mentioned during the setup process and follow the linked communication path for the same. If the response has no match to the mentioned issue keywords, the default path which was set is followed which in most cases are set to raise a case where the service team reaches the users in need within a mentioned time. Apart from providing resolution, it can also serve a purpose to add value to the brand by imparting similar products to customers when checking on product information or searching for products. 

📌To set the session messages, data extension is chosen as the input source and the journey builder is set by choosing a pre-approved message template (includes personalized parameters) and recipient number. This flow is activated after validating all the chosen details. 

📌Whatsapp analytics is also a provided feature which is used to conclude on how things are working and analyze the journey to understand parts which are serving the needs and which are not to help fix and provide a better experience to the users by tracking the delivery and open rate of the messages.

📌With this impressive suite of capabilities, organizations can now connect seamlessly and transform how they communicate with distributed customers worldwide. 

Conclusion:

It is important to tailor your marketing tactics based on what your target audience wants. You can develop the best message for your clients and prospects if you have the correct insights. And you can achieve it by utilizing Whatsapp Integration With Salesforce Marketing Cloud.