Facebook recognizes that the current Message Tags doesn’t apply to every situation where Messenger conversations are useful to your subscribers. To overcome this obstacle, they introduced the One-time Notification (OTN), which allows you to send subscribers broadcasts beyond 24 hours as long as they give you explicit permission.
Similar to Message Tags, One-Time Notifications do have some specific rules:
- No Deception – The message you send utilizing an OTN must match what a user agreed to receive.
- No Incentives – You can’t provide subscribers something of monetary value or equivalent in exchange for signing up to receive an additional message. The message they sign up to receive should be valuable, IE a notification when a specific item goes on sale.
Violating any of the above or getting a high amount of negative user feedback will result in loss of access to the OTN API, meaning you will lose the capability to use OTNs in the future.
Setup One-Time Notifications from Start to Send
To get started with OTN’s follow these three steps, get access, request OTN permission from subscribers, then begin sending your OTN messages.
Apply For One-Time Notification Access
To start using One-Time Notifications, you first need to request permission to access it in your page’s settings under “Advanced Messaging.”
In most cases, OTN permission is granted instantly.
How To Request One-Time Notification permission From Subscribers
Once you’ve obtained access to One-Time Notifications, you’ll see a message block option in the Flow Builder actions called “OTN” (this stands for One-Time Notification).
After selecting the “OTN” message block, you will be asked to use existing or create an OTN. Creating an OTN is as easy as building a new reply template. Note that the OTN name would not be sent to Facebook, so it doesn’t need to match the content perfectly – feel free to use whatever identifying conventions work for you.
When building the OTN, you can customize the main text, but Facebook Messenger limits us from updating the text on the button.
It will always say, “Notify Me.” It will also be displayed in the subscriber’s language in the Messenger inbox.
Once you have your title set, add your new OTN Request to your flow wherever it’s appropriate. Some situations in which an OTN can be helpful include:
- When a subscriber requests a product that is out of stock
- When a subscriber requires an update regarding an upcoming event (when tickets go on sale, for instance)
- When a subscriber indicates they’re excited about a future sale, promotion, or sweepstake
- When a subscriber wants to get a particular piece of content that isn’t yet ready for distribution
- To continue drip sequences that have longer than 24-hour delays separating each message. If your subscribers agree to the next part of the sequence, you can keep sending.
Send A One-Time Notification
Utilizing an OTN to send a message works similar to sending a subscriber broadcast. When broadcasting, select the One-Time Notification Template.
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A list of your existing OTN will be displayed in a drop-down.
Choose the one that corresponds to the message that you desire to send.
Once implemented, the OTN acts like any other message tag: It enables you to send a message outside the 24-hour Window (to subscribers opted in). Consider one crucial caveat, though: you can only send a single message when using an OTN. To send any further messages, a user must first interact with your message.
So make sure that your OTN message:
- Delivers the content that a subscriber asked in the first message
- Offers a compelling urge for subscribers to interact with your brand and open up the 24-hour Window
More Info On One-Time Notifications
Besides the how-to, there are several other useful points to know about OTNs.
Amassing One-Time Notifications
While one-time notifications can just be used once (as the name implies), you can save multiple OTNs for a single subscriber. The drawback is that each one needs to be requested separately. So if you have several things you want to send to a subscriber, they’ll need to agree to each individually.
The same is applies if you need to remind a subscriber about the related topic on various occasions — they will need to consent to each reminder. For example, suppose a subscriber wants to get a reminder about a future sale one day before and one hour earlier. In that instance, those notifications must be agreed to individually (but both could use the same OTN Template inside of YakBot).
Important note: Be mindful of sending too many OTN requests in a row for a single subscriber in a short time. Such messenger chatbot behavior is observed by Facebook and is considered to be an abuse of OTN. If Facebook algorithms identify unusual amounts of OTN requests sent in a short time, you’re at risk of losing OTN access.
Type of One-Time Notification Content
The message you send using an OTN is restricted to a single message block, but the content type you send is not limited. That signifies you can send text, images, cards, galleries, videos, audio, or files.