Facebook Messenger is a powerful communications tool for any business or brand.
If you are using Manychat to help automate your Facebook Messenger messages, you might notice that some of your users are stuck in a loop, seeing duplicate messages or just stuck.
And being stuck sucks. For you, for the user, and for your business!
Today I am going to show you how to resolve any conversations being stuck and what else you can do to follow up!
Prevent Looped Messages
Looped messages are ones that cause the person to be receiving the same messages or same sequence of messages over and over.
This causes the user to be stuck, which means they cannot move forward in the conversation.
This could be very annoying to the user and frustrating for you!
One of the reasons why they could be stuck in a loop is because you are using Buttons are replies instead of Quick replies as replies.
When you use Buttons, your users can go back to the previous messages and click those buttons again. This can cause them to restart the conversation as if they clicked the button after they received the message.
Prevent Duplicate Messages
You might also see your users receiving duplicate messages from you.
This can also happen because they press the button twice in a row. Double-click is very common in people.
So, try to only use buttons for options that need to be static and don’t continue the conversions.
Use buttons only for things like getting the address or other static information from.
Use quick replies for continuing the conversation.
Prevent Stuck Users
We want to send a reminder message to people less than 24 hours later if they didn’t continue the conversation. We can do that with a delay and a condition.
Basically, we want to wait until the 20-24 hour mark, then check to see if they continued the conversation. If they didn’t continue the conversation, then we will send them a reminder message.
How will we check if they continued on with the conversation? We are going to make a very special use of tags that I actually haven’t seen anywhere. So you can say that I pioneered this idea.
Remember the tags you made for {Offer Name} Stopped?
We are going to automatically attach this tag to the user right after they see the coupon message. Then, if they click any button to continue the coupon use, then we will remove the tag. Clever, isn’t it?
So, to start, let’s add the {Offer Name} Stopped tag first:
Click and hold the open white circle, then drag to an open area to make the list of possible next steps show up:
Choose +Actions and you will see the actions box show up.
Then you can see that the Actions editor pops up on the left side. Click on +Action to choose your action, then choose Add Tag. Type in your {Offer Name} Stopped tag to find it, then select it.
Now, everytime someone sees the coupon, they will automatically be tagged with “Stopped” so we know that they haven’t moved forward in the conversation.
To know if they moved forward in the conversation, we are going to add a step in between the “Use In Restaurant” button and the coupon confirmation message.
Now, everytime someone clicks on the “Use In Restaurant” button, we know that they continued the conversation. So we will remove the tag Stopped tag immediately after they click on the button.
We have easily differentiated between people who could be stuck in the conversation and people who have moved forward in the conversation.
Now let’s continue setting up the reminder message. The first thing we need to do is add a delay that is less than 24 hours.
Click and hold the white circle next to “Next Step” in your {Offer Name} Stopped Add Tag action.
Choose Smart Delay. You will see the Smart Delay box show up and the Smart Delay editor slide in from from the left side.
Choose any duration less than 24 hours. I usually like to go with 23 hours just in case I cut it too close to Facebook’s 24 hour timer.
After your smart delay, you want to check for conditions to see if the person continued the conversation or not.
In the Next Step circle on the Smart Delay, click, hold and drag it to an empty area.
Select Conditions and let’s set some conditions to check if the person has continued the conversation or not.
The first condition we want to set is if the person is still marked as Stopped. If they are, then we want to send them a reminder message.
The second condition we want to set is if the person has interacted with us in the last 24 hours. I know we put a smart delay of 23 hours already, but I like to put in redundancies just so nothing happens to my account (I believe if you send too many messages outside the 24 hour window, your account could get flagged or blocked).
Let’s put in these conditions on the left side window.
If the person is still marked as stopped after 23 hours and has interacted with us less than 1 day ago, then we want to send them a reminder message.
If they aren’t marked as stopped, then we will not send them a reminder message.
Remember that the open green circle on a condition box means that the conditions are met. So let’s click, drag and hold that open green circle towards an open area. Then release the click on the open area to see a list of possible next steps.
We want to send a reminder message, so click on Message. Then we are going to put a small reminder message and loop it back towards the coupon. Watch how this saves us from writing a whole other message on here.
Pretty awesome isn’t it? They will just get a short reminder message then it will continue back to the original message that they last saw before they moved forward.
You can apply this to any part of this flow or any part of your future flows and I guarantee you that this will help keep the conversation going!
In fact, over 20% of my Manychat subscribers have continued on only AFTER being reminded.
To apply this to any part of your current flow or any of your other flows, Manychat has a great copy and paste feature.
While you are editing the flow, you can select a group of boxes, copy them, then paste them anywhere else.
