What is Facebook’s One-Time Notification & How To Use It?

Facebook has strict rules for messaging to prevent businesses from spamming uses.

Basically, Facebook Pages can only send promotional messages to people who have messaged them in the last 24 hours.

But after those 24 hours you can’t message them anymore.

That’s where the One-Time Notification comes in. So in this post, I will explain what the One-Time Notification is and how you can use it for your business.

Let’s dive in!

What is the One-Time Notification?

The One-Time Notification allows you to send messages to people outside the 24-hour window.

To do that, you need to get permissions from someone to send that message (inside the 24-hour window).

For example, if a product is out of stock, you can ask someone if they want to be notified when the product is back in stock. If they give permission, you are allowed to send them one message when the product is back in stock, outside the 24-hour window.

It works in two simple steps:

1. First, ask for permission from the user to send a message (inside the 24-hour window)
2. Send the One-Time Notification (outside the 24-hour window)

Another benefit is that when a person responds to your One-Time Notification, the 24-hour window will reopen. And then you get another 24 hours to send promotional messages.

How to Create a One-Time Notification

In the rest of this tutorial, I will use Manychat, which is one of the best Facebook chatbot platforms on the market.

We can create the One-Time Notification in two easy steps:

1. Create the One-Time Notification request
2. Send the One-Time Notificiaton

Step 1: Create the One-Time Notification request

To create our request, we need go to Automation and click on New Automation:

Then, I will add a Facebook Message to the flow and choose for More and select Messenger List:

Next, we will type in the name of the list. This related to the subject of your One-Time Notification. For One-Time Notification tutorial, I will use “Product Out of Stock”:

Following, we need to determine the List Name, Frequency and the text people will see in Facebook:

So it looks like this:

Step 2: Send the One-Time Notification

To send our One-Time Notification, we will use a Manychat Broadcast.

In Manychat, go to Broadcasting and click on New Broadcast:

Then, add a first message to the broadcast. This message bust set to Send outside 24 hour window and you must select the Reason we created before:

Next, the only thing you need to do is hit Send Now and your One-Time Notification is sent:

Best Practices for the One-Time Notification

Here are the best practices for the One-Time Notification:

It must be really specific

Can I just ask the user to subscribe to my updates and send them a message every time I put out a blog post? No, you can’t.

As I said before, the One-Time Notification allows you to send a single message per user request. So, 1 request = 1 message. This means that it is really specific. You cannot ask a user to get every update, because then it is 1 request, but multiple messages. So that won’t work.

To give you more insight, here are a few examples:

• Is it all right if I send you a message every time I post a new video?
• Is it all right if I send you a message if I upload my video about shoes next week?
• Is it all right if I send you a message if these 3 products are in stock again?
• Is it all right if I send you a message if the Adidas SL13 is in stock again?
• Is it all right if I send you a message when we have discounts?
• Is it all right if I send you a message when the discount for this December is there?

Use Segmentation

It makes no sense to send out a coupon for white wine to someone who is mainly interested in red wine.

So you need to make sure you make a message that is tailored to the customer. Research shows that:

91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands how recognize, remember and provide relevant offers and recommendations

How do you do that? In most chatbot software you can add tags to certain actions. For example, when a customer looked at the white wine collection in your chatbot, you can tag him with “interested in white wine”.

And you can do that with all kinds of actions. Based on those tags, you can send specific messages to users, instead of general messages to all users.

So make a tailored message for white wine lowers and a separate one for red wine lovers. The chance they interact with those is higher, because it’s now tailored to them.

Your Next Step

And that’s how you create a One-Time Notification and send messages outside the 24-hour window!

But did you know you can also send Marketing Messages via Facebook as well? This is basically the One-Time Notification on steroids. Check this post to learn more about it:

Frequently Asked Questions

How many times can you use the One-Time Notification?

You can use the One-Time Notification as many times as you want.

Every time you ask for a One-Time Notification and the user clicks on the “Notify Me” button, you can send them one message outside the 24-hour window.

So if the user clicks 5 times on that button, you can send 5 messages outside the 24-hour window.

The key here is to ask for the One-Time notification each time you send the One-Time Notification message.

If you do this, the user stays in a loop and you can always send a message outside the 24-hour window (because the user opted in for it).