Table of Contents

What is a template message?

Effective June 1, 2023 all the business initiated conversations will be charged based on the new template categories. We will be informing our users of this change in conversation pricing with new rates soon.

Message Templates are message formats for common reusable messages a business may want to send. Businesses must use Message Templates for sending notifications to customers.

This allows a business to send just the template identifier along with the appropriate parameters instead of the full message content.

This also allows businesses to send well-organized messages to serial customers including media (file/audio/video), customized contents for each customer base on parameters, and having buttons in messages.

Template Messages must be approved before sending them.

Present Scenario

At present while creating a message template we need to select a category before submitting the template for review. The different options in Category section at present to choose from are

Account Update, Alert Update, Appointment update, Auto reply etc.

New Scenario

Starting April 1st 2023 the message template approval will require category validation using new categories(this was made compulsory by META). And the new category options will be:

  • Utility conversations - Facilitate a specific, agreed-upon request or transaction or update to a customer about an ongoing transaction, including post-purchase notifications and recurring billing statements
  • Authentication conversations - Enable businesses to authenticate users with one-time passcodes, potentially at multiple steps in the login process (e.g., account verification, account recovery, integrity challenges)
  • Marketing conversations - Include promotions or offers, informational updates, or invitations for customers to respond / take action. Any conversation that does not qualify as utility or authentication is a marketing conversation.

So now when creating a template the following category should be shown as below.

Meta has conveyed that while template submission, the WhatsApp Manager will now validate a template's category as part of the creation or editing process and warn you if the submission will be rejected for categorisation.

For example:  If for existing templates someone had selected the ‘Utility’ category, but if META thinks that the relevant category should be ‘Marketing’ then users can see this error in WhatsApp Manager.

This ‘Category does-not match’ pop up will also be displayed while template submission from WATI account. It will be displayed only when there is a category mismatch, otherwise the pop up wont get displayed. 
As conveyed by Facebook earlier they have started the migration of all old templates created before April 1st 2023 to the new categories that has been introduced. These category change of templates will now be reflected in your WATI account. Old templates will appear at the top if the categories are updated for them.

How did we do?

What are template formatting rules?

What are actions in Template Messages Page?

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