Marketer's Space - Mastering Utility Templates in WhatsApp Journeys

Hello marketers!

Welcome back to Marketer's Space! We’re continuing our WhatsApp Journeys series, diving deeper into how to make your marketing efforts more efficient and personalized. This week, we’ll be looking at utility templates and how to make use of them through WhatsApp Journeys in Zoho Marketing Automation.

What Are Utility Templates and How Are They Different from Marketing Templates?

Utility templates are specialized message formats designed for non-promotional, transactional and service-based communications. They focus on delivering important updates, notifications, or transactional information. Unlike marketing templates, which aim to promote products or services, utility templates serve to enhance the customer experience by providing valuable information like appointment reminders, account updates, or account notifications.These templates are less about persuasion and more about providing value at the right moment.

The key difference lies in their purpose and usage. Marketing templates are designed to drive engagement and conversions, while utility templates are meant to maintain a seamless flow of information, ensuring that your customers are always in the loop with the necessary updates. Here are some examples:

The Different Types of Utility Templates

Utility templates include notifications, alerts, updates, and more. Each type serves a unique purpose in maintaining a smooth and informative customer journey.

You can send:

Account Updates - Notifications regarding changes in a user’s account or profile.
Appointment Reminders - Messages reminding customers about upcoming appointments or events.
Payment Alerts - Notifications about payment due dates, successful payments, or failed transactions.

For more details, here’s a link to Meta’s guidelines for creating templates.

Creating Utility Templates in Zoho Marketing Automation

In Zoho Marketing Automation, utility templates can be created in two ways:

Through the Library: Navigate to the WhatsApp Templates section within the library and create your utility template. You can save the template for use in any future journeys.
Within a Journey: When creating a new WhatsApp action within a journey, select "Send WhatsApp" and choose to create a campaign. At this point, you can decide whether the message will be a marketing or utility template. This method integrates template creation directly into your workflow.

Using WhatsApp Journeys to Send a Utility Message

One key aspect of utility templates is that they are triggered by user actions. Unlike marketing campaigns, utility messages cannot be sent out as a broadcast; they must be triggered by specific customer interactions. This is where WhatsApp Journeys in Zoho Marketing Automation become essential. Journeys can identify these triggers and allow you to customize your actions, such as sending a utility message to the customer.

Let’s look at a use case where Sarah, a marketer, wants to send reminder messages to customers about an upcoming webinar. Sarah uses Zoho Marketing Automation to set up a WhatsApp Journey.

Sarah creates a signup form for the webinar and configures the response action so that each new contact is automatically added to a list named “Attending the Webinar.”

She creates a new Journey called "Webinar Reminder" and then selects the “Date Field” trigger and sets it to start the journey one day before the webinar date. She sets the criteria for entering the journey to only include contacts whose list membership is “Attending the Webinar.”

Finally, she adds the action “Send WhatsApp” to send a reminder message using a utility template that includes the event details and a CTA Button to join.

This WhatsApp Journey helps Sarah ensure that her customers receive timely reminders and are well prepared to attend the webinar.

Now you know how to use WhatsApp Journeys to send utility messages effectively. Stay tuned for more insights in our WhatsApp Journeys series. Until then, happy marketing!

Regards,

Pearlin Nitika

User Education | Zoho Marketing Automation

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