Introduction

A notifications campaign in WhatsApp is a planned sequence of activities that sends information about a product or service to a targeted audience. The campaign creator allows you to create and send notification campaigns to your end-users by uploading a list of contacts via a CSV file.

Example

A typical use case for sending out a notification campaign would be to inform a list of customers about a special sale going on. For example, a user subscribed to a airlines' customer list would be interested in a special sale for a new travel route or cheaper ticket costs.

Actors

• Yalo Platform
• WhatsApp/Facebook User

Requirements

• Approved Whatsapp Template

Sending a campaign using a CSV file

A CSV (comma separated value) is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. You can have any variables required on your CSV file. However, it's mandatory that the first column of your file is labeled phone and contains the phone number of the users, including country codes. Add a "+" before the country code.

To send a campaign using a CSV file:

Go to the Campaigns section and click on New Campaign.

Or, if this is the first campaign of the channel click on the Let's go button on the welcome screen:

You will see this screen:

In the Info tab fill out this information.

1. Name (Required): This field allows you to identify your campaign in the future. You may also filter your campaigns by name in the Metrics Dashboard.
2. Description: Provides more context and details about the campaign.
3. Team: Enter the team or area in charge of this campaign. This is useful for customers with multiple areas sending campaigns and sharing the cost of the service. You can select preexisting teams or insert a new one that will be saved automatically. You can filter your campaigns by team name in the Metrics Dashboard.
4. Tags: Add tags to index certain campaigns. You may select preexisting tags or insert new ones that will also be saved automatically. You may also filter your campaigns by tag/s in the Metrics Dashboard.
5. Emails: Keep the rest of your team or manager informed of the progress by adding their email to the campaign. They will be notified once it's sent.

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Team Names and Tags are customizable, you can modify the content and color of each one.

On the Message tab select the notification you’ll be sending out from the list of available templates. Templates are only available once they have been approved by WhatsApp/Facebook. There’s also a search bar to find them easily by name.

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You may be interested in: How to create a new notification

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A best practices guide for creating WhatsApp templates is available here: Best practices for Creating WhatsApp Templates

After choosing your template, you can select the Yes/No slider to enable this mini flow.

The Yes/No Miniflow gives the customer a chance to start a conversation after receiving a notification. Customers can answer yes or no, and get a reply with more information or a goodbye message.

This opens the message box with a preview of the message template. Here you can enter a message that the user will receive. Users can answer in the following ways:

• Yes or any type of affirmative answer
• No or any negative answer
• Unsubscribe, when the user doesn't want to get messages of this type.

The reply messages can include media such as Images (jpg, png) or PDF documents.

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Notification messages image format requirements:

1.91:1 structure
800 x 410 PX
72dpi and .jpg
500 KB
Optimized for web high quality (80%)
Without bullets or “promo discounts visible”

These messages are customized by the campaign so it doesn't matter if you use the same template in many campaigns, you can set a different message for each one.

On the Audience tab select or drag & drop the CSV file with the users' database.

The columns on your CSV file should match the parameters that appear on your template. For example, the following CSV files contains these parameters:
phone
name
area
updates

If no parameters are required you will only need to include the phone information in the first column.

Once selected click Continue. Your file may take a while to upload if it’s a large database.

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File Size

The CSV file size limit is 150MB.

Before releasing your campaign into the world, it’s necessary to test it with the first 10 numbers or less from your database.

Once the test is done, you are moved to the Send tab where you can click on the "Send Campaign" button to start with the shipping.

Before sending the campaign the system validates that the phone numbers in the database are Whatsapp numbers. If the numbers are not valid, they will not get the message. While this validation is going on, you’ll see the status Processing appear on the campaigns screen. If there is a problem with the validation you will get an email to let you know of it.

While the campaign is Processing you may click on Stop to pause or cancel it. You cannot take back the notifications already sent. Click on Continue to resume the campaign.

The campaign might take a while to send depending on the number of users. The server is capable of sending a thousand notifications per second, but WhatsApp limits it to 20 per second.

At the end of the process, you’ll get an email with the campaign details.