Messenger Parametric Codes

How to use Messenger Parametric Codes.

How to drive offline traffic to your chatbot and collect leads? Parametric codes to the rescue.

What are they and how they can be used to drive traffic to your chatbot?

In this guide, I’ll cover:
1.What are parametric codes
2.Why should you use parametric codes
3.What are the benefits and what do they allow you to measure
4.How to use and setup parametric codes in Manychat and Chatfuel

Parametric Codes… What are they?

Think of Parametric Codes as a QR code. By scanning it with your Facebook Messenger app camera a conversation with your bot will begin. This is a really efficient way of bringing users from the offline world (e.g. trade shows, events, banners, offline marketing materials etc) into your Messenger bot so that you can begin to interact with them online. They’re particularly great for sticking on fliers, ads or anywhere else in the real world.

For example here is the Messenger code for our bot. We could put this on a banner at a tradeshow with a call to action such as “Scan this code with your Messenger camera to get a 50% off coupon code for your next chatbot”. Then, when people scan it, the bot will send them the code and they can now opt in to receive further updates from us.

What are they useful for?
Let’s take a look at a few cool use cases.

A hotel ?

Let’s say you have a bot that lets people order room service, morning wake up service or something else straight via Facebook messenger. How do you get people to use it instead of calling?

Parametric codes to the rescue. You can just have a flyer on the desk in each room with a CTA “Scan this code to order room service straight via Messenger”. A person scans it, the room service block of the bot opens up and the user is good to go.

A conference ?

How do you collect visitor’s contact information at a conference?

That’s right, a parametric code. For example, you can have banners saying “scan this code to get the wifi password”.

A person scans the code, the bot sends the wifi password and can then follow up saying “is it okay if I send you important announcements here in messenger?”. The user taps “yes” and you have yourself a subscriber again.

Restaurant ?

You can do the same — instead of having to print out the specials every day or having to tell people the wifi password — just leave a flyer on each table with the parametric code and when people scan it you can send them the wifi password or specials and at the same time collect subscribers.

How to open a conversation from a Messenger Code?
1.Open your Messenger app
2.Open the camera inside the Messenger app
3.Scan a parametric code with the messenger camera app (Hold down your finger on the screen when scanning a messenger code) and the profile gets opened.
4. Talk with the bot 🙂

Alright let’s look at how to get a messenger code for your profile:

There’s basically two types of codes.
1.The code that just takes the user to your bot (no specific referrals and you cannot track where your users are coming from)

2.The parametric code that is unique and can have specific referral paths in it which allows you to do a bunch of cool stuff.

The simple code
Let’s look at the first option first. Getting this code is fairly easy and the process for getting it is irrelevant from the bot building platform you’re using.

Here’s how to get it.

1.Go to your bot’s Facebook page and click on “inbox”.
2.Click on the “i” sign on the bottom left corner of the screen.
3. Click on “download” and choose a resolution that you want and the image will be downloaded. . Congrats you now have your messenger code that you can use on promotional materials.

Unique parametric codes
Now this is where it gets interesting. Unique parametric codes allow you to:

1. See where the traffic is coming from (For example whether it’s coming from your banner in front of your store or the one inside the store.)

2.Start different conversations with users based on where the traffic is coming from.
I’ll show how to set them up in Chatfuel.

Chatfuel
Even though Chatfuel is awesome, they don’t have any direct simple way to get the parametric code easily. I’ve come up with a cool hack that works very nicely though and is just as simple.

1. Go to https://humtech.io/en/messenger-code-generator It’s a great tool that let’s you create a parametric code for your page. I don’t have any affiliation with them.

2. Log in with your facebook

3. Choose the facebook page from the list that you want to use for the parametric code. For example I will take “theme press”

Now the important thing is to insert the Ref parameter. That’s the referral parameter that we’ll use in chatfuel later to define where the traffic from the parametric code will be sent to.

For example, since I want to generate a parametric code that will send people a pdf of this guide then I will use “parametricguide”. Now choose the resolution and hit the “request” button.

4. Hit on download and your parametric code will generated. Just save it and keep it for now.
Here’s the result. Just store it somewhere right now and let’s head over to chatfuel.

5. Inside chatfuel
Create the content that you want the user to receive when they scan the code.

For example in my case I’ve generated a block that will send the a link to the pdf of this guide to the user when they scan the code. Check the screen below

6. Now in order to make the parametric code to work.

Hit the “LINK” button to the right of the title of the block that you want to be sent to the user.

7. Insert the same referral code that you inserted when generating the parametric code with humtech.io and place it in the field like in the screen below and hit “done”.

Congrats! You’ve just created a custom working parametric code