If your team rewrites the same message from scratch every day, you're paying time for work that should happen once — and worse, everyone writes it differently, so your brand sounds like a different company depending on who replied.
Three template types
- SMS templates: short text with variables. Watch the character count — Arabic messages are counted as Unicode, which means 70 characters per message.
- WhatsApp templates: text, media, buttons or lists. Here the template isn't just wording — it's the entire message structure.
- Email templates: built in the BeeFree drag-and-drop editor, so you can produce a professional design without writing HTML.
SMS character counting in detail
This is the point that most often surprises people on the invoice. An English message gets 160 characters, but the moment you type a single Arabic character the whole message becomes Unicode:
- One Arabic message = 70 characters.
- Beyond that it splits into parts of 67 characters each (3 characters go to concatenation data).
- So a 210-character message is 4 messages, not 3.
- An emoji sometimes occupies two characters' worth of space.
The practical rule: write an SMS variant under 70 characters where you can. And if you must go over, remember 71 characters costs exactly double 70.
Approved WhatsApp templates
On the official Cloud API, templates need Meta's approval before use. What usually causes a rejection:
- Overtly marketing language in a template categorised as transactional.
- Variables at the very start or end with no surrounding text.
- Consecutive variables with no separator between them.
- Spelling errors, or text that makes no sense out of context.
Submit templates days before the campaign. Approval usually takes minutes to hours, but a rejection means rewriting and waiting again.
Templates worth preparing
- New customer welcome.
- Order / booking confirmation.
- Appointment reminder.
- Promotional offer (fixed structure, changing details).
- Post-sale follow-up and review request.
- Reply to a pricing enquiry.
- Apology for a delay.
Variables are the whole point
A template without variables is just text. With variables it becomes a personal message: customer name, order number, appointment time, amount, rep name. Any custom attribute on your contacts can be used.
An important rule: always set a default value. A message that reads "Hello ," because the field was empty looks careless.
Naming and organisation
Past 30 templates the list becomes chaos without a naming scheme. Use a fixed format:
[channel] - [purpose] - [version] — for example whatsapp - order confirmation - v2
- Keep old templates rather than deleting them, marked
(old)— so you can roll back. - Put the campaign in the name for seasonal ones:
whatsapp - Ramadan 2026 offer. - Review any template containing a price or a date once a quarter.
A template isn't a straitjacket
The best use is as a starting point: the agent opens it and edits one line for the situation. That gives you the speed of a template with the warmth of a personal reply.
With the shared inbox
Templates surface as canned replies inside WhatsApp Manager, so the team answers repeated questions in a second. It also unifies the answer: everyone says the same correct thing about the return policy or opening hours.
Common mistakes
- An over-long template — the agent edits it every time, which defeats the purpose.
- A variable with no default value.
- A price hardcoded into the template instead of being a variable.
- Near-identical template names — the team picks the wrong one.
- Forgetting to update a template after a policy or price change.
Review them every three months
Prices change, offers expire, hours get adjusted. An old template containing wrong information is more dangerous than having no template at all.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use one template across channels? The idea, yes — but the text has to be shortened for SMS.
Are templates shared with the team? Yes, they live at account level so everyone sees them.
What if a WhatsApp template is rejected? Adjust the wording and resubmit — most rejections are marketing language in a transactional template.
