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Transcript

Hi, I’m Travis Jordan from the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ product team. Today, I’m thrilled to provide an overview of the native WhatsApp channel and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Journey Optimizer. This powerful integration lets you deliver personalized real-time messages to your customers on one of the world’s largest messaging platforms, all within your existing AGO workflows.

To get started, let’s talk about why WhatsApp is such a powerful addition to Journey Optimizer. With nearly three billion active users across 180 countries, WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging platform in the world. Now with a direct WhatsApp connection in AGO, you can increase your reach in the context of an omni-channel journey or campaign.

Next, WhatsApp messages boast a 98 percent open rate and a 40 percent response rate outperforming many of the traditional channels. That means more people can see and act on your messages.

WhatsApp messages are secure, verified, and branded, helping you build credibility and confidence with every interaction.

Lastly, by delivering the WhatsApp channel natively, you can leverage all the amazing out-of-the-box channel capabilities including template integrations, message test and preview, business rules, personalization, experimentation, webhooks, consent management reporting, and a whole lot more. The native channel supports a direct connection to Meta and your WhatsApp business account. Before getting started in Journey Optimizer, ensure that the following prerequisites have been completed in Meta’s WhatsApp manager. First, set up a WhatsApp business account or WAVA with a verified sender name and phone number. Next, you need to generate an access token with the appropriate permissions. Lastly, you need to create approved WhatsApp templates. These template messages are generated in the WhatsApp manager and then seamlessly rendered, personalized, and then published in Journey Optimizer. For full setup details and prerequisites, check out our documentation on Experience League. Now let’s dive into a demo and show you step-by-step how to set up the WhatsApp channel and send messages using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Journey Optimizer. For this demo, I will show how Cruze’s a fictitious travel brand is leveraging WhatsApp business messaging through Journey Optimizer to elevate their guest experience and drive incremental value. To get started, let’s walk through how to set up your WhatsApp configuration in Journey Optimizer by adding your API credentials and setting up webhooks for real-time message delivery. First, let’s go to Channels in the left navigation. Under WhatsApp settings, click WhatsApp credentials, then Create WhatsApp API Credentials. Let’s go and add a name for our credentials. Now let’s add the already configured API token and enter the business account ID. Let’s go and click Continue and Journey Optimizer will fetch your account information. Go ahead and select your desired WhatsApp business account and select the sender name or phone number. As you can see here, after doing that, we bring in additional metadata that can help you. Go ahead and click Submit to continue.

Now we’ll go ahead and create a webhook and configure inbound settings for WhatsApp. Under WhatsApp settings, click WhatsApp webhooks, then Create webhook. Let’s go ahead and add a name. Here, we’ll select the API credential that was created in the previous step to ensure that your custom SMS credentials are associated with your webhook. Next, you can add custom opt-in, opt-out, and even help keywords and replies. Journey Optimizer will then listen to those keywords and messages accordingly. Go ahead and add opt-in keywords and replies. Now I’ll go ahead and add opt-out keywords and replies. Now go ahead and click Submit.

Once submitted, you will need to copy your verify token here and add it to Meta’s app dashboard to finalize the configuration of your webhook. Lastly, you can also access and copy and paste your webhook here. After creating the API credential webhook, you’ll need to create a channel configuration. To do this, let’s go ahead and close out of here and click Channels, and under General Settings, click Channel Configurations and Create Channel Configuration. Let’s enter a name and select the WhatsApp channel. You can also add marketing actions or also a description for your configuration. Next, we’ll select the already configured WhatsApp API credential generated in the previous step. Lastly, enter the sender name or phone number that was entered in the WhatsApp configuration.

Now we’re all ready. Go ahead and click Submit to save, and now we’ve wrapped up our configurations. Let’s move on to the next step. For this demo, 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.

We’ll go and add a name and click Save.

Now we need to determine the right audience for this campaign. Let’s go 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 timeframe. 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 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 personalized attributes for platform. In this case, I’ll go ahead and add a personalized variable to address the individual by their face. And then I’ll go ahead and add a first name. Now we’ll go ahead and click save. You can see that variable has now been updated. Now we will go 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? Let’s move on to the final step, which is to test and send your WhatsApp message.

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¶¹ÊÓƵ Journey Optimizer, you’re empowered to drive deeper customer relationships through real-time personalized messaging, ready to deliver impact. Thank you.