automation

How to schedule WhatsApp messages

How to loop through a Google Sheet to find birthdays today, and send a custom WhatsApp message to each one we find.

2Chat

Dec 9, 2023 • 3 min read

In this tutorial, we will learn how to send WhatsApp messages automatically based on a date as the trigger.

For this example, we will be using Google Sheets and Zapier to trigger the automatic sending of happy birthday messages. Our integration will look every day at 9 am for birthdays, and depending on the current day and month combination will send a custom message we defined.

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Check out the Zapier template we created for this tutorial.

Requisites

A 2Chat account. You can create one here.
A Google Sheet with the data and dates.
A Zapier account.

Our database: list of birthdays

We defined a simple spreadsheet on Google Sheets that contains the basic information we need. Among the most important fields are:

First name: we will use this field to create our dynamic message.
Phone number: we must store it using the international format.
Birthday: a date field with the exact birth date.
Month-Day: it's a calculated field we use to combine the month and day of the birthday. We will later use this value to determine if today matches the month and day stored in that field to retrieve the list of birthdays.

=CONCAT(CONCAT(Month(E2),"-"), Day(E2))

The formula used to calculate the Month-Day field

Custom message: another calculated field where we use the first name to create a more personalized message.

=CONCAT(CONCAT("Happy birthday, ", B2), ". I hope you enjoy your day!")

The formula used to calculate the Custom Message field

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You can download our Google Sheet template using this link.

Sending a birthday message automatically

For this last part, we will use Zapier to check every day if there is a birthday, and if so, send our custom message for each one we find.

Let's use the Schedule by Zapier trigger to run every day at 9 am.

We then choose Google Sheet's Lookup Spreadsheet Rows, and select the birthday sheet we created before.

We now need to configure the Lookup action by telling Zapier which field contains the value we are looking for. This is where our calculated Month-Day field comes into action.

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This step needs to succeed during the initial configuration, so make sure there is a birthday the day you are creating this Zap, or create a fake one if there isn't any.

If today is the 9th of December, we will look for **`12-9`** inside each row of the **Month-Day** column

Now we need to loop through each of the birthdays we found, and we will use Looping by Zapier for that.

Next, create an action inside Looping by Zapier so that we can store the phone number and message fields into custom variables. We will need them to send the WhatsApp messages.

`message` and `phone_number` are our custom variables

The next step is to connect to 2Chat with Send a WhatsApp Message as action, and to use the variables we configured in the previous step for the To Number and Text Message parameters.

Find and select the variables (*message* and *phone number*) we created previously and add them to their corresponding 2Chat parameter

Finally, click on continue, test the Zap, and set it live to start scheduling WhatsApp messages automatically.

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If you need help configuring your 2Chat account with Zapier, please send us a message using our support channels.

Create your 2Chat account

Requisites

Our database: list of birthdays

Sending a birthday message automatically

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