Meta has announced it’ll up its game on messenger, and in a move that should interest (and potentially delight marketers), will allow businesses to send automated messages to people who have opted in to getting them.

The news should have advertisers reaching for another cup of coffee as they look to create a whole new suite of drip campaigns for Facebook Messenger.

It is a complete culture shift for Meta, which had previously restricted businesses to just one message per customer. But here’s the kicker, who could only message someone who contacted you first.

Now, that’s all going to change.

A new way to message

Meta has called this new feature Recurring Notifications.

Ariel Smoliar, Product Manager, Meta

“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.”

Facebook has launched it to make more money, and to be fair to it, it’s not hiding that fact.

Meta for Developers

“Recurring Notifications is a new, optional premium feature that we intend to charge businesses for. It is currently available to all businesses in a free trial period.”

If it works well, it will solve a pretty big thorn in the side of Zuck and co. Facebook has struggled to monetise its messaging platforms for a while now, but it could have finally made itself a holy grail.

Interesting for business, too

Marketers can do a fair bit with Recurring Notifications. They can send people who have opted-in newsletters, updates, product recommendations, pre-sale alerts, discount codes via the Messenger app. Basically anything and everything that’s already in your armoury can be deployed via Recurring Notifications.

When people message your Page, they’ll be presented with the chance to subscribe to your notifications. As mentioned before, these can be daily, weekly or monthly.

Businesses could find this feature very useful, although it must be said that while it’s currently free, Meta will charge for it in the future. So, you may want to think twice before opening Pandora’s Box if you haven’t got a huge budget for add-ons like this.

Case studies

According to Meta, there are some case studies that should interest companies. For example, health foods company Outer Aisle experienced a 20x increase in notifications CTR vs email after sending out product alerts via Recurring Notifications.

Another business, eTicket, sent daily notifications for concert pre-sale and monthly messages about upcoming events. The result? A 72% opt-in rate to Recurring Notifications, from which 65% of fans who got a notification bought a ticket on the same day.

Finally, ChicMe used Recurring Notifications to drive a 13x increase in revenue per customer vs email campaigns, and a third of first-time buyers made repeat purchases within 60 days.

So, you can see that marketers have used it for a wide range of applications – and that’s the good thing about Recurring Notifications. It appears to be very flexible; brands can decide what to send to customers and how often, so there’ll always be the option to scale up or back.

However, it is worth bearing in mind that Meta will charge for this in the future, which is fine if you have the budget for it, but could cause issues for smaller businesses.

Three’s a crowd?

As things stand, you can only create separate campaigns through third-party apps, explained industry expert Jon Loomer.

Jon Loomer, Facebook Ads Strategist, via LinkedIn

“When a user messages your page, they can choose to subscribe to daily, weekly, or monthly notifications. In theory, you would craft different campaigns for each group. The subscriber would then receive the drip campaign that they choose.

“Right now, you can only create these using a third-party partner like ManyChat. And it sounds like Meta will eventually charge for this service (though it’s a “free trial” for now). While Meta may not charge for it, the third party likely will.

“Potentially exciting, all around. So many possibilities for this.”

There could be some interesting possibilities opened up thanks to Recurring Notifications, but for all its recent spiel about being on the side of SMBs, this may not be an update that everyone can afford.