With more businesses looking to messaging to connect with prospective customers, Meta’s aiming to help brands maintain DM connections, with the addition of follow-up notifications on Messenger for important order updates.
Which has always been a sensitive area for business messaging, in that you’re intruding in people’s DMs, which is a more private space.
But Meta’s latest business messaging update seeks to maintain the right balance on this front, while also enabling more follow-up opportunities.
As per Meta:
“Timely communication plays a crucial role in enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering loyalty. While customers often use chat to make purchases, book appointments, or seek support, businesses frequently struggle to send important follow-up notifications, such as order updates, appointment reminders, or account alerts. Without these timely messages, businesses risk losing customer engagement and trust. To address this challenge, we’re introducing utility messages on Messenger – enabling businesses to effortlessly send key updates after purchases, events, or account activities using pre-approved templates from Meta.”
So your response options will be limited, you won’t be able to send ongoing DMs to anyone who’s ever got in contact. But Meta is looking to give brands more capacity to send additional follow-up notifications, in order to enhance the business messaging experience.
Meta’s new follow-up messages will be available via templated notifications, based on different notification types.
At present, Meta’s offering three follow-up options:
- Post Purchase Update
- Confirmed Event Update
- Account Update message
So there are restrictions on the types of updates that you can send (e.g. you can’t send promotional messages via this option), while follow-up messages are also subject to Meta’s broader marketing message rules, which include more specifics on how many messages you can send.
Your follow-up messages can be personalized with a customer’s name, location, appointment or event date, and more. You can also create your own utility message templates but you do have to use a template for these DMs.
It could be a handy option, particularly, as noted, with more people switching to DM connection, and conducting more and more of their interactions via private message.
That more direct, more intimate connection can be a powerful brand element, but you do need to respect that connection, and ensure you don’t overstay your welcome in their inbox.
Meta’s utility messages on Messenger are now available in the Messenger Platform to all developers, businesses, and users in Philippines, Thailand, USA, and Vietnam.
