How to Send Marketing Messages in Facebook Messenger

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can send Marketing Messages in Facebook, by using ManyChat. I will explain:

• What Marketing Messages are
• Why you should use them
• And how you can set them up by using the Messenger List in Manychat

At the end, I will give you my FREE template, so you can get started today.

Let’s dive in!

 

A quick recap of the Facebook Messenger rules

Before I tell you what Marketing Messages are and how you can use them, I will first give a quick recap of the Facebook Messenger rules.

Every time a user interacts with your chatbot in Facebook Messenger, a 24-hour window will open.

Within this 24-hour window, you can send any message to the user, with absolutely no constraints.

Please note that this 24-hour window will reopen, every time the user sends a message. Take this example:

• User sends message to chatbot *24-hour window will open*
• User says nothing for 8 hours *There are 16 hours left in the 24-hour window*
• After 8 hours, the user sends another message *24-hour window will re-open*

But if you want to send a message outside the 24-hour window or you want to start a conversation as a business, then you can use a new feature: the Marketing Message.

What is a Marketing Message?

With a Marketing Message, you can send a message outside the 24-hour window or start a conversation as a business.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get permissions to send messages about a topic. This is called the opt-in, and you must get within the 24-hour window
2. Send messages about that topic,. outside the 24-hour window

The great part about Marketing Messages is that you only need to get the opt-in once. Once you got it, you can basically send messages every day.

 

Example of a Marketing Message on Facebook

So here is a simple example of an opt-in request for a Marketing Message (provided by Facebook themselves):

This is a Marketing Message request for a new product launch. So when the user clicks on this button, the business can send the user messages about new products launching.

 

How To Create Marketing Message Request with Manychat

Now we know what a Marketing Message is and why you need it, let’s see how we can set this up inside Manychat.

If you don’t have a Manychat account, just click the button below to create one for free (when you click, a discount code will apear):

Create Free Manychat Account

And the first thing that we are going to do is create a flow that asks if the user wants to receive a message about a certain topic.

So, head over to ManyChat, go to Automation and click on New Flow:

Then, we will add the first message to the flow by selecting Messenger:

If you open this message, we can add a “Notification Request”:

And for this example, we will set up a notification request for a new fashion collection.

So you can just type in “new-fashion-collection” in the “Topic” field and click on “Create”:

And because we don’t have any topics yet, we also need to add this topic in the pop-up. Also, we will set the frequency to “Weekly”, because we want to send weekly messages to our users:

Then, you can add an image to our notification request and a title, so that it looks like this:

Also, it is good to know that we cannot change the description and the button in our notification request, because Facebook will automatically generate those for us.

The next thing that we need to do, is that if someone clicks on the button, we need to perform an action.

So you can just click on the button, drag it to somewhere else in the flow builder and select the action:

And inside this action, we are going to set a custom field. So you can click on Add action and select Set custom field:

Then a pop-up opens up, and here you need to type in “Recurring Notification Date” again and set the type to Date & Time:

Now, we will set the Recurring Notification Date custom field to the date/time of the action with an offset of “+ 260 days”:

What this will do, is that it will get the current date and it adds 260 days to it.

And the reason why we do this, is because in 9 months (approximately 260 days) we want to send them a re-optin request. That’s the reason we set up this custom field.

The last thing for this flow, is to add a message with “Thank you for signing up! We will send you a message when a new fashion collection launches” so the final flow looks like this:

 

Set up a flow to send the Marketing Message with the Messenger List

After the user has opted-in to get the messages, we need to create a flow that actually sends the marketing message.

So inside ManyChat, you can create a new flow (just as we did before) and call it Marketing Message – Broadcast.

Again, you need to add a Messenger message and open it up.

And what’s really important here, is that we need to set this message to send outside the 24-hour window. So you can just click at the top of the message and select “outside 24-hour window”:

And you need to set the reason to “new-fashion-collection” that we created before:

Now, we can just add the text to the first message:

Hi {first-name}! 👋

Here is your requested notification about our new fashion collection!

We just launched the A Collection and it contains new shirts, jeans and much more!

Do you want to see the collection?

And we also add a button so it looks like this:

Then, we connect this button to the next message, which contains the following text and a button that goes to our website:

Basically, that’s enough to send a Marketing Message. So now the flow is ready, we only need to set up the broadcast so that we can actually send the message to the user.

 

How to Send the Marketing Message with a Broadcast

In ManyChat, go to Broadcasting and click on Broadcast from flow:

And then you select the flow we just created and click on Select this flow:

ManyChat will now show you the flow that you are going to use the broadcast and you can just click on Go Next:

Select Promotional content only as the Message Type and scroll down:

Then, we also need to add a condition. This is because we don’t want to send this message to all subscribers, but only to the user that signed up for our marketing message. So can just click on + Condition:

Click on Notification topic available right now:

And select the Notification topic we created before (new-fashion-collection):

Lastly, you only need to set when you want to send it (immediately or in the future) and click on Send:

And that’s it! Now you sent your Marketing Message!

 

Get your free template

If you want to get everything I explained in this tutorial in a template so you can get started right away, just click the button below 👇 (This will open up in Messenger):

Receive in Messenger

 

Tips on sending Marketing Messages on Facebook

Here a few recommendations on sending Marketing Messages:

• Don’t spam people
• Do not offer rewards in return for getting the notification (that’s not allowed)
• You can send a maximum of 10 opt-in requests per week, per user (and 5 opt-in requests per day)

 

Now It’s Your Turn

And that’s how you send Marketing Messages in Facebook Messenger with ManyChat’s Messenger List.

Now I have a question for you:

How are you going to use this feature for your own business? (Or your clients?)

Please let me know by leaving a comment below👇

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What topics can you send?

This is the best part about Marketing Messages: You can send any topic you want!

You can even send promotional content and campaigns.

And here are a few examples of what you can send:

• New product collection coming up
• Updates about a music festival (if you are hosting one)
• New discount campaigns (such as a Black Friday sale)