Open Channel Campaign with Facebook Messenger Part1 – Overview and Facebook messenger configuration

[Introduction]

Welcome to the blog series of the Expert Services Marketing Practice.

We are happy to share our experience with you around Marketing Integration, Analytics and Business Technology.

You want to see more? Check out our blogs by searching for the tags assigned to this blog.

[Background]

We have faced multiple customers in the past that wanted to add additional outbound channels to optimize their media reach.

Therefore we had been very excited about the introduction of Open Channel with the February 2017 release of SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud.

It gives us a new option to integrate messaging services that are not available out-of-the-box already in a very easy and convenient way.

In our example we are going to integrate with Facebooks recently released Chat Bot API to broadcast messages with individual content.

This gives marketers the power to leverage Facebooks 1.2 billion (update: April 17) Messenger users.

[Briefing]

Over this series of posts, we will show how it is possible to build a Hybris Marketing open channel campaign by using HCI as a middleware to send message to facebook messenger.

As a result, ideally broadcast messages will be sent to facebook users when executing Hybris Marketing facebook messenger open channel campaign, and facebook users can check the campaign messages via web UI as well as mobile apps.

With this sample scenario, you will get a brief image of open channel campaign concept, and you will have the maximal flexibility to integrate your Hybris Marketing system with external systems, as long as the external systems’ API, terms and conditions allow such an integration.

[Disclaimer]

The information contained in this series of blogs is for proving of open channel campaign concept purposes only.

You must strictly follow the terms and conditions of external system and take your own risk when you are trying to implement such a scenario.

[Technical configurations]

In the chart below you can see an overview work flow of this integration scenario.

In order to build this integration scenario, you will need to cover the following tasks listed in table indicate below.

Let’s take a detail look at each task.

Facebook messenger tasks

1. Create an APP and Page

2. Get a Page Access Token

You can go through the following link to complete the first two tasks.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/guides/setup#app_and_page_setup

*You may also need to add the Webhook definition if you are going to gather page scoped user ID.

Ideally in real project, Webhook is able to gather facebook page scoped user ID and send to Hybris Marketing through Odata service, so as to enrich marketing contact information.

Please contact facebook support if you are not sure how to complete this step.

3. Check relevant send API

You can find the relevant facebook messenger send API from the following page.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/send-api-reference

Please notice that the recipient id here is a page-scoped user id rather than a facebook id, you may need to confirm with your development team regarding how to get this id in your project.

In real project, use API with phone number and user name should be a much more common requirement and choice, however when using this API, it will need an additional $99 fee in order to get access to facebook customer matching.

For detail information regarding facebook customer matching feature, please refer to the following page.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/guides/customer-matching

In additional to text message, following objects can also be sent in real project:

• Audio
• Image
• Video
• File

API payload will be kind like:

The send API will be used in HCI integration flow later.

In next post, we will introduce the technical configuration in Hybris Marketing side.

Open Channel Campaign with Facebook Messenger Part2 – Hybris Marketing configuration