Managing your WeChat Menus in Grata
Grata’s menu editor provides a few additional features beyond WeChat’s default menu editor, notably the ability to offer separate versions of your menus for English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese WeChat users. WeChat refers to these as “personalized menus”.
Note: If you link your WeChat Official Account to Grata using the old server-forwarding, your WeChat menus, welcome message, and any keyword auto-replies must be managed on Grata, not on the WeChat backend. If you connected your account using Grata’s WeChat plug-in you can choose to use either the WeChat backend or Grata for any of these features.
Grata’s WeChat menu editor is located in the Admin Panel, in the side menu under Content.
How to Create WeChat Menus in Grata
Your first step is to create your default menu configuration. This is required by WeChat if you intend to later add personalized menus for different languages. Your default menu configuration will be shown for any user with a WeChat language other than a language for which you have saved menus. If you add English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese menus, for example, a German user would see your default menus. For organizations servicing China, you might consider using the Simplified and Traditional Chinese menus for your Chinese speakers, while using your Default menus (in English) for all non-Chinese users (you wouldn’t need to bother maintaining the English menus in this configuration).
WeChat Menus can consist of up to three first-level menu buttons and five sub-menu buttons, for a total of eighteen items, but you can also use as few buttons as you like.
Click “+Menu” to add your first button
Enter a Display Name and Function for the button
As you add menu buttons you will need to enter the display name and choose a function for the button. Your first-level buttons are limited to four Chinese characters or ten Roman characters and your sub-menu buttons are limited to eight Chinese characters or sixteen Roman characters. Many emoji are also supported, but we recommend you confirm each emoji renders properly on both Android and iPhones to be safe.
Most Official Accounts use the first-level buttons as sub-menus in order to expose more content.
Creating a Sub-menu
If you select “Open a sub-menu” for a first-level button, the editor will open your first sub-menu button and you can then give that button a display name and function. In this example we’ll make a column of menu’s designed to let customers talk to specific departments at our company.
Sending a Text Message
This is the fastest response option through WeChat menus and appropriate for this example as we want to engage the user in a chat.
Opening a webpage
You can also designate WeChat menus to open a webpage. You’ll want to make sure any webpage you link to is formatted to display well on mobile devices and, for China users, has ICP registration. If your website doesn’t have ICP registration, users may be blocked from opening the page or, at a minimum, see a warning screen before tapping through to your site.