Whatsapp Zapier Integrations have recently stepped into the limelight for their unique ability to not just connect multiple productivity and business apps but also to automate repetitive tasks without depending on developers or coding knowledge to create the integration.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty and throw light on Zapier Whatsapp API and its role in the integration process, let’s understand the basics first.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is an easy-to-use, no-code platform which allows businesses to "visually connect" their various applications and automate tedious tasks through what are popularly called "Zaps.”
Every Zap has two components:
- Trigger: A trigger is an event, which initiates the zap. In programming lingo, think of this as the typical “if this” condition. Zapier works smoothly with 2000+ applications and services, giving a business with countless triggers to base its zap on.
- Action: An action is an event, which completes a zap. It is the “if this is true, do this; Else, do that” command that’s executed. It’s the automation, which simplifies your workflow or task.
For example, you can write a zap to create a Google Calendar event based on your Trello card. Or you can even write a zap to create your to-do list in a mobile app based on the emails you flag/star in Gmail.
The beauty of using Zapier is that you neither need programming knowledge nor a coding environment. It has a user-friendly macro editor, where you will specify:
- The triggers and their actions
- Any other workflow steps like lookups etc
With so many apps, the next big question is: "how to perform a Zapier integration with WhatsApp. Can they actually play with each other?
The answer is: yes!
Step-by-step process for WhatsApp-Zapier Integration
Lets implement a simple but powerful flow. Say, you have a Google Sheet with a list of customers to whom you want to send a notification via a WhatsApp template. This template can be, say Reminder for the webinar to which you registered.
Let's say that you want to trigger this template whenever a new row is added to the Google sheet, i.e when a new customer is added to the sheet. The steps are as follows:
- Get your Zapier account and login.
- Click on “Create Zap.”
- In the "Trigger" (that tells Zapier about the event that the Zap should trigger), select "Google Sheets"
- In the Event, select "New Spreadsheet Row".
- This means that the Zap will trigger whenever a new row (i.e. a new customer record) is added to the Google sheet.
- Click on Continue.
- Choose the Google Sheet account that you want to trigger the Zap from.
- Click on Continue.
- Select the spreadsheet within your Google Sheet account that you want the Zap to read from.
- Choose a sheet within the selected Spreadsheet.
- Click on Test Trigger to test it.
- The results will be shown. If there is a row in the sheet, its values will be extracted and displayed (like below):
- Click on Continue.
- Select an Action. Here, we tell the Zap what to do when it is triggered.
- Our goal is to send a WhatsApp template to the customer whose data is in the new spreadsheet row. Select the ReferralYogi App as shown below
- Choose an Event.
- Select the "Send Message to a Channel" event. Click Continue
- If you are connecting for the 1st time, click on "Connect a New Account"
- In the screen that pops-up, enter the API Token and API Secret. You can get these by logging into your ReferralYogi page and going to the Settings --> API page. See screenshots below:
- After you enter the details, Zapier will authenticate you against the ReferralYogi platform. Once this step completes, you can choose the newly created account that you want to integrate with. Click Continue.
- Select the fields in the next page.
- Choose "WhatsApp" as the Channel (other channels like Google Business Messages, Instagram, Facebook Messenger etc are coming soon)
- Select the template that you wish to send to your customer.
- In the Mobile field (mandatory to send a WhatsApp message), select the appropriate field from your Google sheet which contains the mobile number of the customer (example below).
- In the Language field, select the language of the template to be used.
- The same WhatsApp template can be set up for multiple languages. Choose the language field in the Google sheet from where the appropriate language for the customer will be chosen. Please ensure that the languages populated in the Google sheet correspond to the languages that the template has approval for
- Next, enter the params (if any) required by the selected WhatsApp template.
- Please note that, in WhatsApp templates, the all the params expected in the template must be provided. So, ensure that your Google sheet row is created correctly.
- If there are 2 or more params, enter them all in the same Params field as shown below.
- Click Continue after adding all the params.
- Now, it's time to test the action.
- Click on the Test Action button.
- You will see a ‘Test was successful’ message.
- For testing, you can include a row in the Google sheet with your own phone number (please make sure it has the country code).
- When you click on Test & Continue, you should receive a WhatsApp message on your phone number.
- Congrats! Your test was successful!
- Now, its time to enable the Zap. Click on Turn on Zap.
- Give your Zap a name.
You are all set!
Your Zap will run whenever a new customer row is entered into your Google sheet. When that happens, a WhatsApp template will be sent to the customer's phone number!
You can see your live Zap in the Zapier dashboard page.
Hope you found these steps useful. Feel free to reach out to us if you need any help in setting up a WhatsApp Zapier integration!
