Create a WhatsApp journey
This tutorial walks you through creating a multi-step WhatsApp journey using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓÆµ Journey Optimizer.
What you’ll learn:
- Set up a journey that sends a cruise booking confirmation, waits three days, then delivers a targeted upsell message.
- Define your audience, configure WhatsApp actions, and personalize messages using approved templates.
- Preview and test messages with media and dynamic variables before publishing.
Ideal for marketers looking to automate personalized customer engagement through WhatsApp.
Hi, I’m Travis Jordan from the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓÆµ Product Team. Today, we will create a WhatsApp journey, demonstrating a multi-step event from Luma Cruises by sending a booking cruise confirmation message, waiting three days, and then sending a follow-up targeted upsell message to their customer. I’ll show you how this is done. To get started, let’s go ahead and click Journeys in the left navigation. Click Create journey. And click Save.
Now, we need to determine the right audience for this campaign. Let’s go ahead and drag the Read Audience item from the left navigation to the canvas. Select a pre-configured audience. In this case, the audience may be a streaming segment that includes all customers that booked a cruise during a given time frame. And let’s select the Identity type.
In this case, we’ll use Phone. Let’s add a label. Now, let’s set up the rest of the journey. First, let’s add the WhatsApp message to the canvas. For this demo, as you recall, we will send out a cruise confirmation message. To do this, simply drag and drop the WhatsApp action to the canvas. Let’s go ahead and add a label. And select the previously configured channel configuration. And go ahead and click Save. We will come back and add the message to WhatsApp once the end-to-end journey is set up. Now, we will add a condition to the canvas.
And quickly configure that condition. And click Save.
Now, let’s go ahead and add the second WhatsApp message to the canvas, which is the cruise upsell offer. Once again, we will drag the WhatsApp action to the canvas. We’ll add the label.
And select the WhatsApp configuration.
And click Save. Now that the journey is all set up, let’s go back and add the messages to each of the WhatsApp actions on the canvas. Let’s go ahead and click the Trip confirmation action and Edit content. Now, you can see both of our messages here on the left row. Let’s go ahead and get started with the first message. To get started, we will select the already created Meta WhatsApp template. These templates are created and managed in your WhatsApp business account. And then rendered in the Journey Optimizer UI. Note, templates show in the Journey Optimizer UI only after they are approved by Meta. Although usually faster, it can take up to 24 hours for a message template to be approved. Once approved, I will find and select the template. And look at that, now we have a nice preview of our WhatsApp messages. Note, the media assets uploaded in the Meta UI are placeholders and should be updated in Journey Optimizer. To do this, simply add a link to the media asset from AM or another media repository. Next, you can also update variables and personalize attributes for platform. In this case, I’ll go ahead and add a personalized variable to address the individual by their first name. Now we’ll go ahead and click save. You can see that variable has now been updated. Now we will go ahead and add the content for the Upsell WhatsApp message in Journey Optimizer.
Now let’s go ahead and click the WhatsApp Cruise Upsell message here. And we’ll select once again the template category and the WhatsApp template. And there you go, once again we have a nice preview of our message coming from the WhatsApp manager. Let’s go ahead and update our assets. In this case, we just have a media URL. The message is looking pretty good, right? Now that your Journey and WhatsApp messages are configured, it’s time to test and publish. Before sending your message, you can use test profiles or sample data to preview your content. For example, if you inserted personalized content, you could check out how this content is displayed in your message. To do this, simply click simulate content. You can also set up content variations and tests. To do this, click create experiment here. Okay, now that everything is set up and ready to go, let’s run a quick test. To do this, click test mode and then trigger profile entrance. This looks good, let’s go ahead and publish the journey. And there you go, your journey has been published and your first WhatsApp message is on its way. Note, after your journey is published, you can click reports to view out of the box reporting, including delivery reports, error logs, bounce reasons, and even read receipts. These metrics are available for both live reports and business reports. And this wraps up our demo. With the WhatsApp channel and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓÆµ Journey Optimizer, you’re empowered to drive deeper customer relationships through real-time personalized messaging ready to deliver impact. Thank you.