Product updates, promotional materials, inspirational content – you can send all of these in push notifications on Messenger to keep clients up to date and increase engagement. I can’t stress enough on how important this is. If you are reading this article you are probably already aware of this. I will show you how to create push notifications in the Chatbot Creator platform – how to add messages, how to set a target group and what kind of materials can work for your users. Ready?
Let’s briefly explain what a push notification is and how it works.
A push notification is a message sent to chatbot users on Messenger from a chatbot platform like Chatbot Creator. It works as an email newsletter but is sent in the communicator. With a significant difference – it’s much more effective. The proof is statistics showing a much higher Open Rate and CTR of chatbot pushes in comparison to newsletter emails.
What’s more, it enables to build a different type of relationship with your audience. To let you keep them updated on important facts in a more dialogue-like and closer style.
The example of a push message from the users' perspective
In Chatbot Creator you set push notification in just one place – the Broadcast panel. Here you create your message, add interactive materials, choose a type of message and your target group.
We are taking you on a small journey to show you 6 simple steps that will guide you in how to send your very own pushletter with Chatbot Creator. Come along 🙂
The first step is choosing what kind of message you want to create. You can choose from:
Now you should decide if you want to create your push from scratch – add completely different elements, graphics etc. Or perhaps you want to make it out of something that is already within the chatbot’s structure?
What’s the difference?
You can create a message in a block – as you do in the “build a bot” bookmark, with available elements.
And it works exactly the same as creating a bot – you add messages with buttons, images, actions, quick responses and whatever you please.
The second option when you create a push message is “create from the block”. This is really useful and time-saving when you want to add a block that already exists in the chatbot’s structure. Like a carousel which takes more time to create.
You choose from blocks that you create in a chatbot structure. You can duplicate them, go back to them and modify them however you want.
The example of a push message created from a block
If you’ve chosen planned, cyclic or event-triggered message, you can set all the time settings on the left upper corner of the Broadcast dashboard. If you change your mind, you can go back here and change it anytime – at least until your message is sent.
Setting a sending time of a push message
Messenger has increasingly more restrictive rules when it comes to sending push messages to users. That’s why you can see the window called type of campaign in the Chatbot Creator platform. You can choose if you want to send free non-promotional messages or those promotional messages that are paid.
In short, the following message types are available:
1) Promotional pushes
At present, since Facebook introduced Messenger Ads, these types of promotional messages have to be sent from the Ad Manager.
2) “Follow up” pushes
Facebook gives chatbot makers the option to contact chatbot users, even those who didn’t sign up for a subscription, up to 24 hours + 1 from the last interaction (so-called 24+1 rule).
This means that during this time you have the right to send any kind of message, even a promotional one.
It’s really useful if we have a campaign that brought a lot of people to our chatbot. We can choose to follow up to turn them into our chatbot subscribers
3) Subscription campaigns
This is the basic, and the most popular, type of Messenger push message. Subscribers are users who agreed to receive push notifications from your chatbot and are saved in chatbot variables. (If you want to know how to set variables, scroll down and read our “Quick reminder”). Here you also choose a specific type of notification that is to be sent to your customers. You set them according to the content you want to set. Due to the Facebook recommendation, your possibilities in the Chatbot Creator platform are:
And now, the final step. You decide, who will receive the message from your chatbot. This is a place where you will finally use our user data boxes called variables.
Setting variables in the Chatbot Creator platform
Example
We want to send a message to all people who have the name Mark and John – we know that this is impossible, one person cannot have both names so: we set “first name” Mark “first name” John and “at least one”.
Combining variables in the platform
Quick reminder – how you collect users in variables
In the beginning, we simply ask the user, in a message, if they want to receive such subscription messages or not and then (in Action) note it down to the “pushes” variable. This is the basis that users should meet to receive messages because we do not want to SPAM people with messages they do not want.” They will block the conversation, block the company on Messenger, which may later result in a warning from Facebook, and even blocking the company.
You collect variables in different places in Actions that are placed 1) straight as a block element 2) as additional option while adding buttons. You save variables of people who agreed to receive materials by clicking a button you go to the create a bot panel, choose a button —> You simply open menu in a button → click “actions” and enter name, for example “pushes” yes or “pushes” no. Then while sending your push, just choose a name for this specific box. ]
Remember to save your push messages as a sketch during the entire creation process. You’ll be surprised how easy you can lose all your work. This hurts especially when you were making a special carousel or spending a lot of time on connecting messages with buttons and so on.
When you save the message as a sketch it’s still flagged by the platform as unfinished so it won’t be sent nor scheduled.
The second option is save which works as send or schedule your message. So if you press save your message it will be sent to your target group at the time you set. You can, of course, still change your message’s structure and settings until the time the message is sent.
All messages you planned or save as a sketch appear in a upper table in the Broadcast panel. You can go back to them and change them whenever you want.
All the messages you’ve sent show up in the archive table on the lower main view of the Broadcast panel. You can find such information as:
The last 3 points are the most important when it comes to analyzing your pushletter effects.
A lump appears next to each campaign in the table. After clicking it, you will be able to see more detailed information about your pushletter. You can also filter all your campaigns to search for a specific one.
We have come to the end of the technical side of sending pushes. Now we’ll introduce you a few tips to make your subscribers more interested in opening your messages, and not tired of your chatbot.
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