Why Meta’s Recurring Notifications in Messenger is a Game Changer for Your Business

In May, at Meta’s first-ever ‘Conversations’ messaging conference, They announced ‘Recurring Notifications’ on its Messenger Platform, which will enable businesses to send ‘proactive, automated messages, to people who have opted in to receiving them’.

This will mean that businesses will be able to send sales notifications, updates, newsletters – pretty much whatever they like, with the frequency options ranging from daily to monthly,

‘so businesses can reach customers at any moment in their journey’.

Meta

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of how Meta has run its messaging platform this far, with strict limits on how many times a business can message users, even if they’ve opted in.

Broadcast messaging has changed over the years as explained by Hootsuite: 

“Businesses can only contact someone after receiving a message from them first. Once you’ve received a message, you have 24 hours to reply. After that, Facebook used to let businesses send one message. But as of March 4th, 2020, that option will was gone. Beyond that, the only remaining option is to send a Sponsored Message. These ads can only be sent to existing conversations.”

But Meta has been very careful about allowing businesses to potentially overuse its messaging API, for fear of them spamming their device to notifications hell, through random promotions and alerts that could quickly become very annoying for users.

It seems however that Meta is no longer as concerned about this, and with users having to opt in, with a clear overview of how many messages they can expect if they do, that looks like it’s now enough for Meta to be fine with letting brands unleash in customer DMs, if they allow them.

And there’s good reason for this – Meta will evently charge for this service,

“Recurring Notifications is a new, optional premium feature that we intend to charge businesses for in the future. It is currently available to all businesses using Messenger Platform as part of a free trial period. We currently charge businesses to send messages from the WhatsApp Business API and we’re listening to customer feedback to guide decisions on our pricing model.”

So now would be a great time for businesses to add this sign up feature into their message automation and start testing the responses and effectivness – which we think will be a game changer and much more effective than email marketing!

If you’d like to test this on your business’s messenger, we would love to work with you, just drop us a email to info@smartoctopusvoiceagency.com