Create quality customer engagement with WhatsApp Templates

Achieving engagement from your target audience is the goal. But does that mean that you can simply pick any messaging channel and send endless messages? For your communication efforts to benefit your business and your customers, you'll need to do a bit more than just broadcasting.

WhatsApp recognises this need for meaningful customer interactions and set up a couple of protocols to help businesses enhance their communication strategies, via the WhatsApp Business Platform.

Quality customer engagement via WhatsApp Business Platform

WhatsApp Templates

One of the first helpful tools for your customer engagement strategy is WhatsApp Templates. WhatsApp message templates are message formats that you can use to send messages to your customers proactively. These templates are designed to provide you with a way to send structured messages to customers, such as appointment reminders, delivery notifications or order updates, in a way that is consistent with WhatsApp's policies. Each message template must also be pre-approved by WhatsApp before use. By adding the need to use pre-approved messages, WhatsApp Business Platform strives to keep the quality of the messages high, both structurally and in terms of content.

WhatsApp Message Metrics

Sending pre-approved message templates helps you to get started with your customer communication, but it doesn't end there. To continuously monitor the quality of the content, the WhatsApp Business Platform offers data insights. Real-time metrics and reports in a dedicated dashboard will give you an indication of how your templated messages are performing. This performance data can be seen up to the individual template level.

WhatsApp Messages Rating

The WhatsApp Business Platform uses a message quality rating system based on three metrics, to help you recognise and target lower-performing content for optimisation. WhatsApp message templates receive quality ratings based on the behaviour of your customers. This behaviour is measured with three metrics:

• Read Rates

• Reports

• Blocks

These metrics are a crucial indicator of user engagement and interest. Whether customers block your business or report your messages, for example. If so, then the quality rating of that message template will drop significantly. As of April 2024, WhatsApp Business introduced a new policy based on the read rates. These read rates now also directly influence the status of your templates.

WhatsApp may temporarily pause messaging campaigns with low read rates or negative feedback, giving you time to revisit the templates with the lowest engagement to improve them before you scale up in volume.

When a message template reaches the lowest quality rating, which would be shown as 'Active - Low Quality', it will automatically be paused for a period of time to protect your quality rating. Curbing low-quality message templates will help improve engagement metrics and read rates, and ultimately increase the return on investment for your business.

The pausing duration can vary in time:

• Strike one: Paused for three hours

• Strike two: Paused for six hours

• Strike three: The template is disabled

The paused message templates will reactivate automatically after the pause duration, but you can also restart them actively. WhatsApp Business Platform will give notifications when templates change in quality from green (good quality) to yellow (medium quality/warning) or from yellow to red(low quality/template paused).

Improve your customer engagement with four simple steps

The message quality rating system is a fallback safety measure to ensure your messaging campaigns keep performing well. Ideally, you don't want any of your templates to be paused. But how do you achieve that? There are four easy steps to consider:

1. Know your target audience

Segment your audience and personalise your messages to them to make your communication relevant. In addition, make sure to get an opt-in for marketing-related content, so your customers will know to expect that type of communication from you, and make sure opting out of your promotional messages is easy for customers, to prevent negative feedback.

2. Send timely messages

Consider not sending messages on high-traffic days when other businesses are also competing for attention, such as holidays, weekends or seasonal peaks. It's easier to grab the attention if you're not one of many businesses contacting the same customer at the same time.

3. Take an omnichannel approach

Meta offers a wide range of customer engagement tools. This goes hand-in-hand with step one 'Know your target audience'. Investigate how and where your audience prefers to be contacted and edit your strategies based on this.

Do you want to promote your new products to the majority of your audience? Use Facebook or Instagram ads to promote your products and use Click-to-chat WhatsApp ads to encourage engagement. Or do you want to promote a specific service or event to a segment of your audience? Send them a promotional message template via WhatsApp Business Platform and let them sign up via a user-friendly flow.

Think about the different entry points for customer communication and pick the channels and tools that fit both the goal of your messages and your target audience.

You can even think outside the box and mix and match a wider range of channels and options. CM.com's Business Messaging API offers a wide range of communication channels to choose from, so you'll find the perfect fit for every audience and use case.

4. Create clear and concise messages

Make sure the subject line or preview text of your messages clearly states the relevance of that message to your customers. The first 60-65 characters of your WhatsApp message will appear as the preview text in your customer's WhatsApp. Make it engaging, personal and convey your message clearly. You can even test different approaches to see what works best. This will entice them to open and read your messages, enhancing engagement.

Enhance the quality of your customer engagement with the WhatsApp Business Platform

The WhatsApp Business Platform helps you improve and optimise your customer communication strategies by actively monitoring your content output and pausing underperforming templates to allow you to 'fix' your communication while safeguarding your KPIs and ROI.

Are you ready to get started with the WhatsApp Business Platform and benefit from this powerful customer engagement channel? Reach out to a member of our team.