Persistent menu
The Persistent menu on Facebook Messenger is a small menu displayed near the message entry box. Most often it’s used for chatbot navigation and frequent actions. It can contain up to three chatbot buttons – either with events to trigger specific chatbot skills or with URL links.
Before December 2019, these menus were “Page-level”, i.e. unified across all users of the same chatbot. In December 2019 Facebook introduced the ability to override Page-level menus with user-level menus, thus making it easier for a chatbot designer to build personalized Messenger experiences for specific users. Also, multi-level menus were disabled, allowing just a single-level menu with up to three buttons.
As of Jan 2020, Activechat supports only Page-level persistent menus. We’re working on adding user-level persistent menu functionality and we’ll update this manual once it is available in the LISTEN block.
Setting up a persistent menu
To set up a persistent menu for your chatbot, choose “Marketing – Grow tools” in the main menu and go to the “Facebook persistent menu” tab.
Click “Add new item” to add buttons to the menu.
Persistent menu best practices
When building your persistent menu, try to make it really valuable for your chatbot users:
Be descriptive. A persistent menu tells your users what your chatbot can do, and when designed wisely can immensely increase retention, bringing your users back even outside the 24-hour window.
Use the menu to provide access to key features of your chatbot, adding event buttons to trigger chatbot skills.
Don’t use the menu for generic actions like “Restart”.
Don’t put a “Menu” button sending the user to a skill displaying the menu. Be smart – the menu is already there, why need another?
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