Salesforce Marketing Cloud Group Connect with Journey Builder and GroupConnect API

Group Connect is a tool inside the Mobile Studio capable of delivering personalized Facebook and LINE messages to your customers.

GroupConnect offers you highly targeted messaging for a specific group of contacts. Because GroupConnect interacts solely with the LINE messaging app and Facebook Messenger (via REST API), you already know a lot about your audience based on their profiles. The best ways to make use of this information and bring your GroupConnect strategy into Journey Builder.

How to set up triggered messages for both LINE and Facebook Messenger using GroupConnect API

GroupConnect already includes automated messages for the LINE app, and you can use the GroupConnect API to set up triggered messages for both LINE and Facebook Messenger. Automation Studio also helps you set up recurring messages in GroupConnect. All of these features help you maintain regular activity with your contacts without overwhelming them with irrelevant or too-frequent messages.

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Send LINE Messages with Journey Builder

LINE messages can include several different types of content.

Text
Images
Videos (from a URL)
Audio (from a URL)
Imagemaps
Carousels
LINE stickers

And get this: A LINE message can include five of these elements, and the larger carousel messages can include up to 10 messages in a single send! Simply put, you can send a lot of content. Once you’ve crafted your messages, you can include them in Journey Builder activities. For example, you can send a message to a new contact, then follow up with a random split to test messages and see which gets a better response.

Before sending Line Messages

📌 To create journeys with LINE, select a data extension that has a contact key as the primary key and relate the contact key to the subscriber key. Ensure that selected contact key has a LINE address ID (Aka LINE User ID) associated with it. To add Email or SMS activities to your journey, check that your data extension has email and mobile attributes. Journeys with LINE plus Push or Inbox activities are not supported.

📌 NOTE: To create LINE messages, your account must have LINE channels enabled. Below steps explains you how to create a Line Channel and get registered, if you still don’t have any idea, then please reach out to your Account Executive of Marketing Cloud

How to Setup Line Channel and Get Registered with Marketing Cloud

1. Make a registration on LINE Developer website (Once you log in to your LINE developers console, you create a Provider and a Messaging API channel.), Gather Line Channel ID and Channel Secret.

📌 After you’ve registered a new channel, it can take up to 30 minutes before you can send messages.

2. Integration with SFMC (In the main setup in SFMC –> Feature Settings –> Mobile Studio –> Chat messaging –> LINE –> register the channel.)

In the main setup in SFMC, search for LINE to register the channel as per below screenshot.

Fill in the LINE Channel ID and LINE Channel Secret provided by LINE in the previous step.

🔵 The destination Webhook allows SFMC to reach LINE for delivering the messages you send, and Marketing Cloud Endpoint allows LINE to reach your marketing cloud instance with events coming from LINE such as Follows and Unfollows. These two fields are automatically populated based on the information you provide.

🔵 Marketing Cloud End Point should be “Add your LINE Channel ID to the URL and add the webhook URL to LINE Developers Console. See more here

Destination Webhook Should be by default: https://api.line.me. Update this URL only if you are testing messages with a temporary endpoint, such as a third party endpoint.

🔵 Once you have the webhook URL of your Marketing Cloud Endpoint populated, add it to LINE developers console where you can finish the configuration.

📌 You can’t edit the channel ID after Creation. If there’s a mistake in the channel ID, deactivate the channel and create another one.

Campaign Tips

📌 For one time sends, create a LINE Outbound Message directly in Mobile Studio -> GroupConnect, where you can define the content, select contacts, and review the message before sending it. Single sends can be performed only to GroupConnect Lists.

📌 For recurrent sends and to use data extensions as a source, use journey builder. Find the “LINE Message” activity and drag and drop it on your canvas. Once dropped, click on the activity and select from the existing messages in Content Builder or create a new one directly in journey builder.

📌 For advanced personalization, include AMPScript. Before the final campaign execution, do not forget to preview and test the message first.

There are different types of content that you can use with LINE messages: