5 Smart Ways to Re-Engage Your Chatbot Subscribers (Without Breaking Facebook’s 24 Hour Rule)
Now that Facebook has instilled its 24 hour rule, Facebook pages with a chatbot can only message subscribers who have interacted with their bot in the past 24 hours.
Makes you feel a little like…
Look, I feel you.
A lot of marketers and business owners alike have struggled to develop a strategy so they can re-engage their subscribers without being sent to “Facebook jail” since the 24-hour change came into play earlier this year.
Let’s unpack some ways you can re-engage subscribers and restart the 24-hour window to get your subscribers’ attention.
(Before we dive in, I use ManyChat, so all of my recommendations below are for the ManyChat platform.)
1. Customer Chat
Install the customer chat widget on your website to bring subscribers back into your bot or get new subscribers.
Your subscribers may be visiting you over several touchpoints, or if you have an online coaching program, they need to reach out to ask questions.
Having a customer chat widget on your website or landing pages means your current subscribers and new leads enter your chatbot from another source, which will restart the 24-hour window.
2. Ref URLs
Generate a Ref URL under Growth Tools, and include it in emails and blog posts to send people back into your chatbot.
I’ve used Ref URLs in many of my blog posts as part of my call-to-action at the bottom, and received many new subscribers that way. Sometimes, current subscribers re-enter through the Ref URL.
If you send an email to your list, include the Ref URL in the body of the email (or in the P.S.) to bring your email subscribers into your chatbot or re-engage them there if they’re already subscribers.
The best way to do this is to offer a discount or package deal, or a free lead magnet.
3. Go Omnichannel — Use Email & SMS
In ManyChat, you have the options to use SMS and email to reach your subscribers and bring them back into your chatbot after the 24-hour window has ended.
You will need to send a message to get permission from your subscribers first (reach me via my chatbot here and I’ll share the SMS and email permission flow templates with you).
It’s best to build this into your strategy from the beginning. Think about how you’ll re-engage them: Will you add them to a sequence that fires off the consent message for SMS or email from the welcome message?
If you’re in the US and UK, you can use SMS natively within the ManyChat platform. (If you’re not — you can use Zapier and Twilio to connect SMS.)
If you’re unsure of how to use SMS in your strategy, check out my article here that outlines how to use SMS to boost your bottom line.
4. Sponsored Messages
Facebook sponsored messages are paid messages you send to your current bot subscribers.
People who have interacted with your bot, including through live chat, a Messenger ad, a Ref URL, as well as those who have unsubscribed from your chatbot, can receive this message.
Just be aware that Facebook can’t ensure 100% deliverability with sponsored messages. I’ve had about half of my chatbot subscriber list receive my sponsored message within a 7-day campaign period.
It is an affordable option — sponsored messages usually cost between 6 cents and 25 cents each.
Sponsored Messages can contain promotional or non-promotional content, so you can share a blog post or a sale coupon.
5. One-Time Notifications (OTN)
Use one-time notifications to send one message to your list if they have consented to receiving the message.
One-time notifications (aka OTN) are messages you can send to your list within the 24-hour period asking them if they would like to be notified about particular content or item.
For example, if you’re an online store and you have sold out of a particular item, you can send a OTN to your subscriber within the 24-hour window to ask them to consent to receiving a message when that item is back in stock.
I use OTN to ask subscribers if they’d like to receive my latest blog post.
You can only use OTN once, but you can use many OTNs for one subscriber.
For example, if your subscriber is interested in 3 items in your store that are currently out of stock, you can send them 3 OTNs (one OTN per item).
If they interact with the OTN telling them the item is back in stock, you re-open the 24-hour window to communicate with them.
If you spend some time working out your chatbot entry points and devise how to make the most of the first 24 hours within your chatbot strategy, you’ll be able to re-engage subscribers effectively.
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