Most of your customers read WhatsApp before email, and many still answer a text faster than either. From 12 October the SMS and WhatsApp steps in NETICS automations send for real. A contact fills in your form, joins a list or gets a tag, and the right message goes out on the channel they use, with the consent and WhatsApp rules checked for every person.
This post covers where to find the steps, the rules each one follows, and how to get NETICS to build the automation with you.
Where to find it
Open NETICS CRM > CRM workspace > Automations > Workflows and create or open an automation. The canvas starts from a trigger: contact created, tag added, list joined, form submitted, call completed, or manual. Add an action with the plus button and you will find the message steps under Messages, next to email.
Since 20 October, up to three automations can be switched on at once on the free trial and Pay as you go, ten on Starter and 100 on Growth. Enterprise has no limit. See Automations.
The SMS step
The SMS step is described on the canvas as "Send a text message to contacts who opted in." You write the text, up to 640 characters, with {name}, {business} and {interest} filled in for each contact.
- Your name on every text. It goes out as "Your business: your text", so the customer knows who is writing.
- Reply STOP on every text. "Reply STOP to opt out" is added to the end. NETICS does not read SMS replies yet, so when someone asks to stop, mark them unsubscribed on their contact and they get no further marketing texts or emails.
- Opted-in contacts only. A contact must be subscribed and have a phone number. Anyone else is skipped with the reason, for example "Explicit marketing opt-in is required".
- What it costs. Since 20 October, each automation text is NGN 10 from your usage credits on every plan, Growth included; if there are not enough, the text is skipped rather than sent unpaid.
The WhatsApp step
The WhatsApp step sends "a WhatsApp message, or an approved template to people who have not written." It follows WhatsApp's own rules so your messages arrive instead of quietly disappearing.
- From your own number. Messages leave from the WhatsApp number you connected under Platform > Integrations. Without one, the step is skipped and tells you to connect it first.
- Free text inside the 24-hour window. The box "Message (for contacts who wrote in the last 24 hours)" goes to anyone who messaged you on WhatsApp in the last day.
- An approved template for everyone else. WhatsApp only lets a business start a conversation with a template it has had approved. Fill in Approved template name, Template language (for example
en) and Template values, in order (for example{name}, {business}). Contacts outside the window get the template. - No template, no message. If a contact is outside the window and the step has no template, they are skipped. NETICS never sends free text that WhatsApp would silently drop.
- Opted-in contacts only, the same rule as SMS and email.
See WhatsApp for connecting your number.
Honest results
Every message step reports what happened to each contact. A message that could not go is recorded as skipped, with the reason. A provider error is recorded as failed and is not retried, so nobody gets the same message twice because of a retry.
Ask NETICS on the canvas
You do not have to build the workflow node by node. Press Ask NETICS on the canvas bar and a panel opens: "Work on this automation with NETICS". NETICS can see the whole workflow and which step you have selected. Tell it what you want in plain words, for example "after a form is submitted, wait a day, then send a WhatsApp follow-up".
NETICS can add SMS and WhatsApp steps, and it asks which approved template to use rather than guessing. Its suggestion comes back as Review with the number of changes, and you choose Apply changes or Discard suggestion. Undo change takes back the last one you applied. Nothing goes live from the panel: "Changes affect this canvas only. Save draft to keep them, or Activate to go live."
A typical example
A Lagos clinic keeps the patients who agreed to hear from it as subscribed contacts in NETICS CRM. An automation on "form submitted" sends a WhatsApp thank-you as free text to anyone who has just chatted with the clinic and as an approved template to everyone else, then waits three days and sends a text asking whether they would like to book their next visit. Patients who did not opt in get nothing, and the clinic can see exactly who was skipped and why.
For one-off messages to many people at once, see Email and SMS broadcasts, and for the contacts behind all of this, NETICS CRM.