You can send communications or transactionals using the Telegram custom channel configured on the platform. The platform will send the messages to the contact's Telegram application using the field TELEGRAMID, wich is used to retrieve the contact's identifier.
Telegram doesn't refer to its users by their mobile phone numbers but with simple numeric identifiers so the platform has to create an additional field to identify each contact.
You first need to have a valid Telegram bot channel associated with your Sinch Engage account before being able to send messages via our platform.
Configuration
Communications
To create a communication, follow the path:
Journey Lab > My Journey > Communications > New communication
and select the Telegram channel.
In the following step you will be asked to choose the Sinch Engage channel (among the connected ones), the text of the message that you want to send, an optional attachment and buttons.
Text
The text of the message can include:
- our platform's placeholders (through the little black profile icon),
- Sinch Engage's user properties (through the select below the text area)
- Telegram's formatting options.
You can leave the text empty if you're planning to send just an attachment. Remember that all links are shortened by Sinch Engage so your contact won't see the URL that you write in the message but will first have to go through Sinch Engage's servers to be redirected to the original destination.
Attachment
An attachment is a resource that you may add to your message, either standalone or with some text in a bubble below it. Our platform's placeholders can be used. The attachment must have a URL accessible from the Internet, meaning that Sinch Engage's servers must be able to download that resource using the HTTP/HTTPS protocol. If not, they won't be able to cache the resource to speed up the download in case you send the same message to many recipients.
In addition, only some types of media are supported: audio, video, images and documents. If the attachment isn't reachable or a supported content type, Sinch Engage's servers will reject the message and you'll see an hard bounce in the statistics.
Usually an inline preview is shown above the text bubble. If a device can't support displaying the inline preview, the attachment name is shown as a simple link to the resource. If you specify an attachment name but not the URL, the file will not be attached.
Buttons
Buttons can be of two kinds: links and postback. The link is used to simply create an UI button below the message that the user can click and be redirected to an external resource. Our platform's placeholders can be put in the label and link sections. The postback is used to simulate a user reply to the bot, so you should use it if you plan to use this message in conjunction with the bot's functionality.
The second column is the caption of the button. The third column is the destination URL in case of a link and the automatically-sent user message for the postback.
Transactionals
Following the path:
Journey Lab > My Journey > Transactional ommunications > New communication
select the channel Telegram. Follow the same steps as the Communication creation explained above.
Validation
Your communication will be validated. We will be looking for: missing or incomplete message configuration, invalid URLs in the buttons and invalid Sinch Engage's placeholders. Some errors don't let you send your communication to the recipients. Example:
Preview
You can see an approximation of the message that your contacts will receive using the preview button. The preview is going to be significantly different from what the contact will see. In general, the preview will show you clickable buttons and simulate the shortened links.
The attachment is previewed as a simple bubble with the name (if specified), it will bring you to the resource that you specified.