WhatsApp onboarding

Setting up WhatsApp messaging has two parts: getting a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) approved with Meta, and setting up senders in Bloomreach.

Set up your WhatsApp Business Account

A WhatsApp Business Account is the account Meta uses to verify your business and approve the message templates you send through Bloomreach. You need an approved WABA and approved templates before Bloomreach can send WhatsApp marketing messages on your behalf.

Set up your WhatsApp business account.

Set up WhatsApp sender profiles

A WhatsApp sender profile connects a sender from your WhatsApp Business Account to a project in Bloomreach with the help of an Integration. Each sender profile also maps an integration to the external ID that identifies your customers, and lets you configure two-way messaging consent settings, including when a new customer profile gets created from an inbound message.

Before you set one up, it helps to understand the WhatsApp identity states a sender profile supports.

Set up your WhatsApp senders.

Understanding Business-Scoped User IDs (BSUIDs)

Meta assigns a Business-Scoped User ID (BSUID) to a WhatsApp user regardless of whether or not the customer has enabled the username feature.

A BSUID follows Meta's format: a two-letter country code, a period, then an alphanumeric identifier, for example US.13491208655302741918. This identifier isn't the customer's phone number. Instead, Meta generates it separately for each business portfolio, so the same customer gets a different BSUID for each business they message, and a BSUID can’t be reused across companies.

Bloomreach stores a customer's BSUID in two places: the external ID field, and a matching customer property (whatsapp_{messaging_provider}_{channel_id}). The external ID field is used for profile matching and the customer property is used in your scenarios and segments.

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Note
Most of your existing WhatsApp audience isn't affected by BSUID at all. A customer only arrives as BSUID-only if they've adopted a username and haven't exchanged a message with you in a while. Any customer you've messaged recently, or who's in your WhatsApp Contact Book (enabled by default by Meta), keeps sending phone number in inbound messages.

WhatsApp identity states

A WhatsApp customer can be in one of three states. Bloomreach handles all once you set up a sender profile:

State	When it applies	How Bloomreach sends and matches messages
Phone-only	The customer has no WhatsApp username yet.	Using the `phone` attribute, same as today.
Phone and BSUID	The customer already has a profile identified by phone, and a later message also includes a BSUID. Bloomreach writes the BSUID onto that same profile, it doesn't create a second one.	To the phone number first, following Meta's own advice, falling back to BSUID if phone isn't there.
BSUID-only	Customers who contact you for the first time after they've already set up a username.	Using the BSUID stored in the sender profile.

What happens next

Once both parts are complete, you can:

Create and test WhatsApp campaigns.
Set up automated messaging scenarios.
Start collecting customer consent and building your WhatsApp audience.