Send Recurring Notifications in Facebook Messenger

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can send recurring notifications in Facebook Messenger, by using ManyChat. I will explain:

• What recurring notifications are
• Why you need to use them
• And how you can set them up by using ManyChat

(I will also give you a free template at the end of this tutorial)

Let’s dive in!

 

A quick recap of the Facebook Messenger rules

Before I tell you what Recurring Notifications 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.

And within this 24-hour window, we can send non-promotional and promotional content to the user.

Outside the 24-hour window, we can only send:

• Message Tags
• Sponsored Messages
• One-Time Notifications

I will not go deep into that right now, but you can find more information about these features here.

Now, Facebook has introduced a new feature: The Recurring Notification, which is another way to send messages outside the 24-hour window:

What is a Recurring Notification?

With the Recurring Notification, we can send messages outside the 24-hour window.

What you basically need to do, is:

1. Ask for permission to send messages about a certain topic — this is called the opt-in (you ask this inside the 24-hour window)
2. Send messages about that topic (you send those outside the 24-hour window)

And we can send these messages on a recurring schedule.

Before, we had the One-Time Notification. And with the One-Time Notification, you could only send one message (if you got permission).

But with the Recurring Notification, we can send messages every day, every week or every month.

 

Example of a Recurring Notification

So here is a really simple example of the Recurring Notification request (provided by Facebook themselves):

This is a Recurring Notification request for a new product launch. So when the user clicks on this button, the business can send the user messages about new products that are launching every single week.

 

What topics can you send?

This is the best part about Recurring Notifications: 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)

 

For how long is the opt-in valid?

When the user has opted-in to receive messages for a certain topic, this opt-in is only available for a limited time.

There are three options:

• If the user has opted in for daily messages –> the opt-in is valid for 6 months
• If the user has opted in for weekly messages –> the opt-in is valid for 9 months
• If the user has opted in for monthly messages –> the opt-in is valid for 12 months

After those 6/9/12 months, you need to ask the user for a re-optin. Otherwise, you cannot send them recurring notifications anymore.

 

A few recommendations on using the Recurring Notification

Before I show you how you can set this up inside ManyChat, here a few recommendations on using Recurring Notifications:

• 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)

 

Create Recurring Notification Opt-in Flow

Now we know what the Recurring Notification is and why you need it, let’s see how we can set this up inside ManyChat.

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:

And we will call it “Recurring Notification Opt-In” and then you can click on Create:

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:

And you can just type in “Recurring Notification Date” and click on New user 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 for the Recurring Notification

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

So inside ManyChat, you can create a new flow (just as we did before) and call it Recurring Notification – 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, this is enough for a recurring notification flow.

But we also need to check if the user needs to re-optin anytime soon. So that’s why we are going to add a condition to the flow.

Just add a next step to the flow and select Condition:

The next step is to check whether the Recurring Notification date (the date we set before with + 260 days) of the user is within one month:

(On the image above, it was May 30, so that’s why I set the condition to June 30)

And lastly, we can connect that condition to another message, which asks if they want to re-optin for the Recurring Notification:

And that’s it! With this flow, we can:

• Send the Recurring Notification to the user
• Check if they need to re-optin for the Recurring Notification
• And ask for the re-optin if they need to

That is the complete flow and now we only need to set up the broadcast so that we can actually send the flow to the user.

 

Send the Recurring Notification 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 recurring notification. 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 Recurring Notification!

 

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

 

Now It’s Your Turn

And that’s how you send recurring notifications in Facebook Messenger with ManyChat.

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👇