I designed the One-Time Notification experience in Messenger, which expanded in scope over the past three years to eventually become Marketing Messages across Messenger and Instagram (IG) and the Click-to-Subscribe ads product (all three are 0→1 projects)
Impact:
Marketing Messages in Messenger premiered as Recurring Notifications at Meta’s inaugural business messaging conference Conversations in May 2022; business usage grew by 429% within the first five months
IG beta was also announced at the conference, with 180+ signups from notable global businesses within three hours of the announcement, doubling our expected partner adoption goals
Consumer opt-in rates are 2x more than email and SMS, with <0.25% opting out
Amazon invested [$redacted] for their inaugural Thursday Night Football messaging campaign; Game 1 drew in 13–15 million viewers from a target of 12.5 million viewers. According to Jay Marine, Prime Video vice president:
<aside> 🔥 “The audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership…[w]e also saw the biggest three hours for U.S. Prime sign-ups ever in the history of Amazon.”
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c. 2018, Messenger launched the Page Subscription Messaging API, which was intended to be non-promotional, but was abused by businesses and resulted in a spammy experience for people. We updated our policies on 8/29/19 (wef 1/15/20) to limit Subscriptions only to Pages registered with our News Page Index.
In our efforts to give businesses some ability to follow up with people outside of the 24-hour message window, we officially launched One-Time Notification as part of the API 6.0 update on 2/4/20. While effective in its very focused topic scope, businesses wanted more from us.
Today, people can initiate conversations with businesses but have no easy way to receive follow-on personalized updates about topics they care about from that business, e.g. new product launches, concerts by a favorite artist in a city.
Email and SMS offer some measure of personalized updates on topics, but have limited controls for delivery frequency, and no integrity functionality for people to feel safe vs. getting spammed.
Today, businesses using the Messenger Platform can only send a message to people within 24 hours after a person messages or initiates contact, or after this window only if the business' message falls into one of the limited use cases permitted by Message Tags (e.g. post-purchase update), Sponsored Messages or One-Time Notification. These rules don’t enable a wide range of use-cases that are valuable to people and businesses, e.g. promotional updates, appointment reminders, weekly digests.
Recurring Notifications is an evolution of our current One-Time Notification feature, giving people controls to opt-in and manage the frequency of notifications they receive. This unlocks valuable use cases for business-initiated messages.
People:
Create a desirable experience with controls to manage every point of receiving notification topics
Businesses:
Provide scalable way to notifying people on topics they care about
Meta:
Drive adoption of business-initiated messaging opportunities
Comprehension:
Businesses can provide people with context for what they’re opting-in to receive, and our platform will provide context everytime a notification is sent
Consent:
People are clear about the specific topic they’re opting (or subsequently re-opting) to be notified of
Control:
People have clear entry points at every step to manage their experience, be it Stopping/Resuming notifications, Muting, or Reporting if they do not feel safe