How to set up Out of Office and Welcome messages for Instagram

Introduction

Wati provides Welcome Message and OOO Message automation for Instagram DMs through the Rules builder under Automations.

When you first connect your Instagram account with Wati, two Rules are automatically created for you. In your Rules overview page you should see two new rules: IG Out Of Office message and IG Welcome message

You can adjust the Rules according to your needs and turn them on with 1-click!

Out of Office message

By default, we have created a Out of Office message Rule for you with 2 Filter conditions:

  • Incoming message Timestamp is not within Working hours setting
  • Contact initiates a new chat

With the default setup, this Rule will trigger when a contact starts a new chat with your IG account, outside of your working hours. You can modify your Working hours accordingly, and it will apply to both WhatsApp

If the same contact continues to message you, this Rule will not trigger again, because subsequent messages will be part of the same chat, only the first message that starts a new chat is considered.

Can I change this Rule?

Yes! You can customize the Filters or Actions.

For example, if you only want the Rule to trigger for brand new contacts, and not existing contacts, you can add a condition to the Filter like this:

This way, the Filter will only consider contacts that don’t currently exist in your Wati Contact list.

Welcome message

For the Welcome message, the Filter conditions would be different. Whenever a contact initiates a new chat, we will also check if the message is received within your working hours. You can further customise your Rule using Keyword filtering. For example if a new contact is asking about your products, instead of triggering a generic Welcome message, you can set an automated response about specific products.

How did we do?

Keyword filtering for Instagram

Contact