Recurring notifications is Meta’s newly released feature on Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messenging, allowing brands to send free, regular notifications to opted-in users.
These days there are many options available for customers to contact a business. Besides traditional communications channels, like phone and email, customers can now message brands on an increasing number of online channels.
Brands have the same channels available for engaging potential customers. But customers have stopped paying attention due to irrelevant ads constantly popping up in their faces. As online channels are quickly becoming overcrowded, it’s getting more and more difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd and get their message across.
Traditional communications channels are seeing decreasing open rates year by year.
Email offers some measure of personalized updates on topics, but its effectiveness is drastically going down due to privacy updates. Apple’s Mail Privacy features give users the option of hiding if and when they open marketing emails, resulting in inflated open rates. Google cautiously follows Apple by filtering newsletters.
SMS is a great way of sending mass messages but it’s mainly used for one-way marketing blasts with limited functionality in terms of media types, and it doesn’t scale well globally.
These recent changes make messaging channels even more appealing. Nothing proves this better than our latest research, according to which 60% of customers prefer messaging over emails and phone calls.
People would like to receive personalized and relevant messages from the brands they want to engage with. But there’s no easy way to receive regular follow-on updates about topics they care about.
Messaging channels enable personalized offers, but they still have some limitations.
Businesses using Messenger can send a message to people within 24 hours after a person messages or initiates contact. After this window, they can only send a message if the business’ message falls into one of the limited use cases permitted by Message Tags (e.g., post-purchase update), Sponsored Messages or One-Time Notification. These restrictions disable a wide range of use cases that are valuable to customers, such as promotional updates, appointment reminders, and weekly digests.
Recurring notifications on Messenger, a new feature released by Meta, offers a solution exactly to this limitation.
Using the feature, businesses can turn customers into frequent buyers by offering them to opt in for promotional updates, new product announcements, appointment reminders, special discounts, loyalty program updates, and so on.
Recurring notifications offers a remedy to a long time challenge marketers are trying to overcome. How to build meaningful relationships and increase customer lifetime value by engaging the directly reachable audience they have built on Messenger.
Recurring Notifications: Definition and Main Benefits
Recurring notifications enables marketers to monetize that audience by creating hyper-specific audience segments on Messenger and targeting customers with personalized updates about things they’ve expressed interest in.
Below, we’ll show you everything you need to know about recurring notifications and valuable marketing use cases your business can build around the new feature.
As a beta partner, we’re happy to announce that recurring notifications is available on Spectrm’s platform, enabling our customers to turn their customers into frequent buyers.
Many businesses have invested to grow an audience on Messenger, but they’ve always had difficulties re-engaging and monetizing that high intent audience. Due to constant privacy updates and the shift towards a privacy-first world, tracking and targeting audiences on the open web has become more challenging and costly. As a result, marketers need to find new channels to connect, engage and convert their customers. Messenger and Instagram Messaging now offer the perfect opportunity to do this with recurring notifications.
As recurring notifications require customers to be opted-in, marketers can send notifications specific to customers’ needs without having to be concerned about violating privacy regulations. Furthermore, as customers opt in to receive updates only on topics they care about, brands can offer the ultimate personalized notifications experience for customers in their high intent moments.
People don’t pay attention to emails and ads anymore. It’s no surprise considering how many spammy emails and irrelevant ads are popping up in their faces. But one thing everyone pays attention to is the notifications they receive from messaging apps. That’s what makes recurring notifications so powerful as a re-engagement channel. It offers an excellent opportunity to bring clients back to the Messenger platform since brands will now have a way to use the user lists they have built up on Messenger.
Ultimately, recurring notifications enable businesses to re-engage their Messenger customer base in a compliant and customers-centric way. It’s compliant-centric as customers directly opt in to receive updates. It’s customer-centric as it allows customers to opt in to receive updates on the topics they are interested in.
Let’s have a look at below what are the most common use cases for recurring notifications.
Recurring Notifications Engagement Strategy Checklist
Get this 5 step checklist on how to launch a recurring notifications engagement strategy. 🚀🚀🚀
Top Marketing Use Cases
Recurring notifications unlocks valuable marketing use cases for business-initiated messages.
As e-commerce is growing at a tremendous rate, brands need to stand out from the crowd and attain a competitive advantage over their competitors. Using recurring notifications, your business can stay ahead of the game by proactively reengaging prospects in their high intent moments.
As we all know, new channels are quickly becoming overcrowded. By sending regular updates to your customers, you can start building a strong relationship with them. But what if they receive notifications from each brand they are shopping from? The more companies send recurring notifications the more challenging it will be for your brand to get your message across. That’s why it’s essential to be a first mover and reap the benefits of being among the first companies that send recurring notifications to their customers.
Promotions
One popular use case for recurring notifications is sending regular updates on promotions. Besides building hype for upcoming sales, it’s also a great way to reward your most loyal buyers. You can, for example, offer your most loyal customers early access to promotions, mentioning that you want to say thank you for their loyalty by giving them this exclusive offer. Or sending them a 20% special offer for signing up for your regular updates. Personalized offers are more likely to be redeemed and enable you to segment offers to generate more customer lifetime value.
Product Alerts
What better way to promote your new products than creating demand even before you launch them. That is exactly what you can do with recurring notifications. Customers who opt in to receive product alerts can be notified when exactly your new products will be available on your website or application. They can even opt in to receive a reminder just a few minutes before your new product line goes live, ensuring that they don’t miss out on bestseller deals.
When customers can’t purchase certain products as they are out of stock, they might feel frustrated about it. With recurring notifications, you can mitigate the risk of hurting the customer experience. How? Encourage customers to sign up for regular updates about product alerts, enabling them to be immediately notified when the product they are looking for is back in stock.
Content Digests
With recurring notifications, customers can opt in for daily, weekly or monthly content digests. It’s an effective way to ensure that customers constantly hear about your business. Content digest notifications are especially useful because instead of just one short message you can send a summary of recent news, informing your customers about upcoming events, promotions and product launches.
A good example here is to send a private reply to a Facebook comment asking about new products. Since they are already engaged with your brands, it’s a great opportunity to offer them to sign up for regular updates, so that instead of having to ask, they get regularly informed about new product launches and additional news about your brand.
Events
Recurring notifications can be used for promoting your events as well. The traditional ways of promoting upcoming events, such as website banners, online ads, newsletters, and social media posts, are not as effective as they used to be. Given the huge amount of information customers see online, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. That’s why recurring notifications are so powerful. Because they allow you to send one to one, personalized messages to your customers, making sure that your message is getting noticed.
You can use recurring notifications for inviting customers to attend in-store or live shopping events. Once they sign up for the event, you can follow up with regular updates and reminders about the event.
Live shopping events are a great strategy to multiply social engagement. By sending notification messages to customers who opted in, you can build hype around the event while reaching out to an already engaged audience. Ultimately, you have a good chance of increasing the number of attendees and encouraging engagement, such as likes, shares, and comments.
Entry points to Get New Customers Subscribed for Recurring Notifications
Recurring notifications offer an efficient way to reengage customers and bring them back to the Messenger platform. However, they will only pay off if you have a directly reachable customer audience that you can nurture with notifications. That is why it’s essential to proactively grow your audience on Messenger. One great way to do that is by using different entry points to get more prospects into your bot.
Entry points can help you bring people at every stage of your marketing funnel into a direct relationship with your brand so you can start engaging and nurturing them with recurring notifications.
There are several entry points we differentiate between, including paid, organic, owned, and offline entry points. Each of these entry points can be used to nurture your customers at different stages of your funnel.
Paid Entry Points
Considering ad fatigue and shrinking customer attention span, showing around your products and hoping that customers will start talking to you is not efficient enough anymore. But what if you could invite them to talk to your brand and ask their questions directly in a one to one chat in Messenger?
This is exactly what, paid entry points, such as click to chat ads on social, search and display, allow you to do.
The great thing about click to chat ads is that you can have a conversation with prospects even before they reach your website or collect any information about your products. What’s even better is that you can start collecting data as soon as they click on your ad, which you can use to build and grow your audience on social.
And if people who click your ad don’t convert immediately, you have still opened a direct retargeting channel on Messenger where you can re-engage them with notifications.
One popular type of click to chat ads is click to Messenger ads, directing prospects from your Facebook or Instagram feed to your Messenger bot. If you want to learn more about why your business should send prospects to Messenger from online ads, read our in-depth article on the main benefits of Click to Messenger Ads.
Organic Entry Points
Organic entry points are free entry points you can use to get more prospects into your bot. These are low-hanging fruits that will allow you to drive more leads while staying cost effective.
Customers these days use social media channels to discover new products. The majority of them also check out brands’ social page to get more information about the company. Inserting a ‘Send Message’ button to social pages is an effective entry point to direct prospects into a one to one conversation with a brand.
Private replies on Messenger trigger conversations from Facebook post comments and Facebook/Instagram live comments to provide helpful information when the user needs it. Once a prospect comments on a post or live event, you can direct them into your Messenger and answer their questions in a one to one conversation. Using this entry point, you can turn discovery on Facebook and Instagram into customer relationships. At the same time, one to one conversations is the best way to collect zero-party data, which is data directly shared by the customer.
Instagram offers another great opportunity for brands to direct discovery into customer relationships through messaging. How? By creating an entry point to your chat experience from any link displayed in Instagram stories.
By inserting the link sticker from the sticker tool into your Stories, you’ll be able to invite prospects to start a conversation with your brand in Messenger. You can send them offers based on their preferences and answer any questions in real-time with an automated chat experience.
Owned Entry Points
Owned entry points, such as a send to Messenger plugin, checkbox plugin, or Facebook chat plugin, allow businesses to engage potential customers even after they leave their website. It’s a great way to create omnichannel communications and retarget them on a different channel.
The send to Messenger plugin allows consumers to opt-in to receive messages from a business on Messenger. You can leverage this entry point to convert website visitors into subscribers and frequent buyers.
In e-commerce, send to Messenger plugins can be used for a wide range of marketing use cases. You can, for example, send out special coupons, inform customers about new product drops or send them back in stock notifications. You can also strengthen your loyalty program by offering pre-order information to VIP customers.
The checkbox plugin allows businesses to display a checkbox on landing pages, like a checkout page, that enables users to opt-in to receive messages from the business in Messenger. It’s similar to the send to Messenger plugin, but is optimized for forms, and can be used for any form-based flow on the business site.
Last but not least, the Facebook chat plugin is a free website extension that businesses can use to generate more sales and provide support to their customers browsing their website. Using Facebook chat plugins on relevant landing pages can provide customers with helpful information in high intent moments, allowing you to turn visitors into frequent buyers.
Offline Entry Points
Inviting customers to directly chat with you from other platforms is an efficient strategy to grow your audience on Messenger. But don’t underestimate the power of offline and out-of-home advertising, such as product packaging, receipts, billboards, subway signs and more.
A QR code printed on product packaging, receipts, or other offline advertising makes it super easy for people to connect with your business even when they are not online. Customers can simply scan your code to start a conversation with your business in Messenger.
By displaying QR codes on out-of-home advertising, such as billboards and subway signs, you can benefit from a massive reach and exposure. This is the perfect opportunity to turn a traditionally non-active entry point (such as billboards) into an active entry point.
The greatest thing about QR codes is that they are super convenient and easy to use. Customers can easily scan the code to connect without having to enter a long product number into their device.
Take Away
Recurring notifications, a new feature released by Meta, allows brands to send free promotional, service, and event notifications to opted-in users on Instagram & Messenger.
The new feature offers a great opportunity for brands to utilize and monetize the audiences they have built on Messenger. How? By sending regular notifications to opted-in customers on the topics they are interested in.
The true potential of recurring notifications lies in marketing use cases:
Promotions: besides building hype for upcoming promotions, recurring notifications can be used to reward your most loyal buyers. You can offer them early access to promotions, showing your gratitude for their loyalty.
Product Alerts: customers who opt in to receive product alerts can be notified when your new products will be available on your website or application.
Content: customers can opt in for weekly or monthly content digest. It’s an effective way to ensure that customers stay on top of all the news that is happening to your business.
Events: with recurring notifications, you can send one to one, personalized messages to your customers, ensuring that your message is getting noticed.
Interested in how you can take your business to the next level with recurring notifications? Book a demo with one of our conversational marketing experts to learn how Spectrm’s conversational commerce platform can help you grow your business at scale!
What is recurring notifications?
Recurring Notifications is Meta’s new feature, allowing brands to send free, regular notifications to opted-in users on Facebook Messenger & Instagram Messaging. The feature is an evolution of the current One-Time Notification feature, giving customers the control to opt in and manage the frequency of notifications they receive.
