Introducing Recurring Notifications: Automated Messages to Delight Customers on Messenger

Facebook and Instagram help people discover and connect with what matters most to them. And it’s not just between family and friends. People are building relationships, and messaging with their favorite businesses, too. Businesses who can cultivate these ongoing relationships are more likely to drive not only new sales, but loyalty.

But after people purchased their product or got the help they needed, the conversation ended and businesses couldn't provide important updates to people who’d like to hear from them. So, to help businesses drive more meaningful conversations, today we are announcing Recurring Notifications on the Messenger Platform which will allow businesses to send proactive, automated messages, to people who have opted in to receiving them, that drive re-engagement and keep the conversation going, right in the thread.

This unlocks a whole new world of use cases that will benefit people and businesses. And for developers, this opens up new opportunities for you to help your customers transform their businesses.

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Driving Deeper Engagement with Business Notifications

Recurring Notifications make it easy to deliver tailored messaging at the right time to your customers, ranging from conversion-focused messages, like sales notifications, to content that drives engagement, such as newsletters. With Recurring Notifications, businesses can:

• Send tailored and timely messages that drive action: Businesses can create personalized messages about their chosen topic, for example a shoe store can notify customers when their size is back in stock, so messages resonate more effectively and meet their business goals:
  • Discovery: Product discovery recommendations, brand inspiration content, newsletters
  • Consideration: Product alerts, behind-the-scenes news, pre-sale alerts, recommendations based on past purchases
  • Conversion: Discount codes, promotional content, loyalty rewards, partner offers
  • Engagement: Tips, community stories, cross-sells, product service reminders
• Message across the customer journey: Messages can be sent daily, weekly or monthly so businesses can reach customers at any moment in their journey.
• Initiate messages that deepen relationships: To ensure a high quality experience, customers are shown the topic and frequency in advance and must opt-in before businesses can send recurring messages. Also, they have one-tap access to opt-out at any time.

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.

We will inform customers and partners of any changes to the free trial with ample advance notice.

Business Already Driving Engagement and Sales

Businesses that have tested Recurring Notifications are seeing deeper connections and new business value:

Outer Aisle, a health foods company, partnering with Paloma, sent promotions and product alerts through Recurring Notifications. Customers were excited - Outer Aisle saw a 20x increase in notifications CTR versus email.

As businesses connect with customers through Recurring Notifications they are also driving more sales.

eTicket, a leading ticketing platform in LATAM, engaged fans through daily notifications for concert pre-sales and monthly messages on upcoming events. They used the Send to Messenger Plugin to open conversations with customers on Messenger and captured a 72% opt-in rate to Recurring Notifications. And this translated to sales. 65% of fans who received a notification purchased a ticket on the same day!

ChicMe, a womenswear retailer, working with Sanuker, refreshed their marketing beyond email and SMS campaigns by using Recurring Notifications. Shoppers opted-in to weekly notifications of coupons and new offers. It drove a 13x increase in revenue per customer versus email campaigns. What’s more, 33% of first-time buyers from notifications made repeat purchases within 60 days.

Developer Partner Ecosystem

Recurring Notifications is easy for developers to implement and we have many developers across the world ready to help businesses re-engage with customers.

Want to start driving results faster with Recurring Notifications? Check out our playbook and case studies and review our developer docs to start building your notifications.

We’re also excited to announce that Recurring Notifications is coming later this year to Messenger API for Instagram. Developers can sign up for our beta interest list.