The company receives a message from the customer initiating contact. Like any message received, this is a session message.
From that moment on, a 24-hour session begins, during which the messages sent and received are called session or service messages.
With each response from the customer, the session is extended and the 24-hour period starts to be counted from the last message received.
If the company wants to resume a conversation that the customer stopped responding to, if it is before 24 hours of the last response, it can resume with a session message. If it is after 24 hours, it will have to be with a template message.
Note that steps 2, 3, and 4 are the same in both situations.
Now we can detail the differences between the two types of messages a little better.
– Template Message (or Notification or HSM): is an ACTIVE message, sent by the company outside of a session. The message template must be predefined and registered and previously approved by WhatsApp before it can be used.
Its price is higher. At June/2020 prices, WhatsApp charges US$0.0473 per message (the price varies according to the country). In addition, there is the GupShup fee, which is US$0.001 each, and may be higher if the message exceeds 64Kb in size.
– Session (or service) message: Session messages are any messages received and active messages exchanged within a session. Session messages are not charged by WhatsApp. There is only a GupShup fee, which is US$ 0.001 each, and may be higher if the message exceeds 64Kb in size.
To better explain the Template or HSM message, it is cayman islands whatsapp data essential to think in advance about how the conversation will be opened or resumed with your customer in order to pre-register and approve the messages on the platform.
For example: we can create a template “Hello, {x}! Your request {y} is under analysis”. Where {x} is the customer's name and {y} is a text referring to the request. The variable data represents the information required for a given request, which will be configured in TACTIUM for merging at the time of sending.
In terms of values, in addition to the charge already mentioned, when you enable your number on Gupshup to test the platform, you already earn a credit of US$1 – which, as explained previously, is the equivalent of sending a thousand customer service messages.
Starting in July/2020, GupShup will start charging a different price for messages with media larger than 64kb
In this case, regardless of the type of message sent (session or template), the amounts charged are higher than US$ 0.0010 per message, and follow the table below:
From 64KB to 5MB + US$0.0020 per message sent;
From 5MB to 10MB + US$0.0030 per message sent;
From 10MB to 15MB + US$0.0040 per message sent.
For more details, visit the Gupshup website where you can view the pricing section or the Facebook page for developers . These pages provide detailed information about the fixed pricing plans of WhatsApp and GupShup.