Templates

A template is a ready-made text that the app itself fills in with customer data: the name, the deal amount, the waybill number. One template gives you thousands of personal messages. Templates are required for campaigns and automatic messages, and in the card they save the manager time.

Open the app → Templates.

1. Click New template.
2. Fill in the fields:

Field	What to enter
Title	what the template is called in lists (the customer does not see it)
Channel	SMS, Viber or Cascade (Viber → SMS)
Record type	which records the template is for: deals, leads, contacts… or Any
Sender	the alpha name the message is sent from
Message text	the text itself, with variables in curly braces

3. Click Save.

CRM fields differ from one record type to another: a deal has an amount, a lead does not. A template with the Deals type is offered only where deals are involved: in a deal card, in a campaign for deals, in a rule for deals. This way the customer does not get an empty gap instead of an amount.

An Any template works everywhere, but only the basic variables are available in it.

The Insert variable button shows what you can insert.

Group	Variables	Where the value comes from
Basic	{name} — first name or title, {phone} — phone, {title} — record title, {amount} — amount	available in any template
CRM fields	any field of a record of the chosen type	appear once “Record type” is chosen
Your variables	your own short name for a CRM field, for example {ttn}	you create them yourself, see below

Below the template list is the Your variables block. Choose a record type, think of a short name (Latin letters, no spaces) and specify the CRM field. After that, {ttn} in a template inserts, for example, the deal’s waybill number. A custom variable works in templates of the same record type.

Sometimes a field in the record is empty. What to insert then is decided by the When a variable is missing setting in Settings: remove the variable, insert a dash or keep the {placeholder} as is.

Below the text you see the number of characters, the number of segments and the encoding. This is an estimate without variable values: the real length depends on the record’s data. For example, Cyrillic in the customer’s name switches the encoding to UCS-2, and one segment then holds 70 characters instead of 160.

For the Viber and Cascade channels, choose the Viber message type:

Type	What it contains
Text	text only
Text + image + button	text, a picture and a button linking to a site or a payment page
Carousel	two or more cards, each with its own title, image and button

• Images can be uploaded from your computer with the Upload button: JPEG, PNG or GIF, up to 1 MB.
• Lifetime (optional, 60–86400 seconds) — how long Viber keeps trying to deliver the message.
• Text formatting (bold, italic) shows in Viber 14.6 and later; it is not available in carousels.

In a cascade template you fill in both parts: the Viber message and the Message text, which is the SMS that goes out if the Viber message is not delivered.

If you already have templates in your AlphaSMS account, click Import from AlphaSMS. In the window:

• find the templates you need by searching by title or text;
• tick them and click Import.

Identical texts are shown once, and those already imported are marked. A Viber template marked Not approved in Viber cannot be imported: Viber has to approve it first in your AlphaSMS account.

• Edit — the change applies to future messages; messages already sent do not change.
• Delete — if the template is used by an auto-send rule or a campaign, the app names them: change or delete them first. If messages were already sent with the template, it disappears from the lists but stays in the history.