How to Create Personalized Images for your Chatfuel Messenger Bot

8 Use Case for Personalized Images

Use Case 1 – Event Invitation & Confirmation

Do you have a webinar coming up soon? Or maybe a live event? Instead of sending out a message using text and a generic image, you can send out a virtual invite!

You can send a personalized image with the visitor’s name and any additional event details, such as their selected date and time.

Use Case 2 – Coupons & Discounts

Issue a unique coupon and discount to your most loyal customers or new visitors! You can personalize this virtual coupon with a specific deal (e.g., buy one get one free…or buy one get two free).

You can also customize the image to show the expiration date.

Use Case 3 – Thank You

Show your appreciation by sending your customers a quick note after they made a purchase or after they attended your event.

(Bonus Tip: You can also follow up with a special offer or coupon!)

Use Case 4 – Certificates

After your bot visitor completes the quiz, don’t send the results in a (boring) plain text message. Create a certificate that includes their name and score!

You can also ask users to post their certificate on social media or share the results with their friends to encourage more people to take your quiz!

Use Case 5 – Cart Abandonment

Capture your visitor’s attention with a funny image or a picture of your store to remind them to finalize their purchase.

Use Case 6 – Greetings

Welcome your new Messenger Bot visitors with a fun seasonal image, or send them a gift on special occasions!

Use Case 7 – Checklist, Ebooks & PDF

Sending out a free lead magnet? Customize the image with your subscriber’s name to make it more personalized. Or show them a sneak peek of what’s they’ll be receiving when they click on the download button.

Use Case 8 – Encourage Your Bot Visitors to Invite their Friend

Let your bot visitors generate a sharable card with a personalized image, a custom message, and their friend’s name!

You can ask your bot visitors to share a great deal, send their friends an invitation to join a challenge, or ask their friends to beat their quiz score. (Just a few ideas!)

What You’ll Need…

To send out a personalized image to your Messenger Bot Subscribers, you’ll need:

1.  A Bot Building Platform
2.  Information about your Bot Visitors or Subscriber
3. A Background Image or Design
4. A Tool to Generate your Personalized Image

Let’s talk about each one in more detail…

1. A Bot-Building Platform

To build a Messenger Bot, you could build it from “scratch”(using code and your own server), but it is so much simpler, quicker and easier if you relied on a bot-building platform that lets you build a Messenger bot without any coding!

In this tutorial, we’ll go over how to setup Business Hours using Chatfuel. A Pro account is recommended but a a regular free account will work too!

2. Information about your Bot Visitor or Subscriber

Even though a personalized image with your user’s name is eye-catching, it’ll be more interesting if you can include another piece of information. To do this, you’ll need to get your Messenger Bot to ask questions to learn more about their interests or preference. 

Then, save this information to a user attribute.

3. A Background Image or Design

There are plenty of sites where you can find free stock images, but here are 3 recommended free sites.

You can find over a million free gorgeous stock images at Unsplash. Pixabay has over a million high-quality stock images, but they also have illustrators and vectors!

Canva is an online image editor. It doesn’t have as many free images in comparison to Unsplash and Pixabay, but you can use it to edit your image design and add your “static” text.

4. A Tool to Generate your Personalized Image

You could spend hours manually create a personalized image for every single bot visitor using Canva…but you probably don’t want to do that!!

What you need is a tool that can automatically merge your visitor’s personalized information onto an image…and then have your bot send out the personalized image!

In the upcoming sections, you’ll learn:

• How to create personalized images with the help of the FotoScript Plugin and
• How to install FotoScript into your Chatfuel Bot

Want to Test Out FotoScript?

How to Create Personalized Images with FotoScript

As mentioned previously, we’ll be using the FotoScript Plugin in this tutorial to create a personalized image for your Messenger Bot. There’s no coding required and it only takes a few minutes to set up!

Here’s how FotoScript works:

Step 1 – Select a Design

Login to CodelessBot and click on FotoScript in the sidebar. Browse and select a design from the gallery.

Want to upload your own custom background? No problem. Just click on the Format tab to upload your image. To ensure that the image looks great on Messenger, we recommend that you upload an image with the dimension 955px by 500px.

Step 2 – Add a Text box with User Attribute

Next, enter in your message! To personalize the image, just enter a user attribute surrounded by two curly braces.

For example, to include the user’s first name, you would enter {{first name}}. If you know the person’s birthday, which you saved in the user attribute “birthday”, you would enter {{birthday}}! A FotoScript Design can have up to 12 user attributes!

To reposition the text box or adjust the size, simply click and drag to make the changes. You can also add additional text boxes, change the font size, style, alignment, and color with just a few clicks.

You can also preview your image by entering different values under the “Sample Text” section.

Step 3 – Select Format to Send to Users

Once you’re done customizing your FotoScript Design, click on the Format Tab and select what you want to send to your subscribers. You can send a:

• image
• sharable gallery with a custom title, subtitle, and buttons that opens a website or calls a phone number or another message in your bot (using a share link)
• PDF
• both image and PDF

If you selected the gallery or image with buttons option, you’ll need to enter in additional detail.

Next, click on the “Setup” tab and follow the instructions to “install” the FotoScript Plugin into your Chatfuel Bot.

In the sections below, we’ll walk through the installation steps so you know what’s involved…

How to Send Personalized Images using Chatfuel

Once you have your FotoScript Design set up and saved, you’ll need to “install” the FotoScript plugin into your Chatfuel Bot. Here’s how….

Step 1 – Download the Quick Start Template

In the CodelessBot Dashboard, click on “Templates” in the left-hand sidebar. Then click on “Chatfuel Templates” and follow the onscreen instructions to install the template.

Step 2 – Copy the FotoScript Block to your actual Bot

Open up the “JSON API Tutorial & CodelessBot Template” Bot that you just installed in the previous step. In the Automate tab, you’ll find a folder “FotoScript”. Hover over the three dots next to the folder name and click on “Copy”.

Then, select your Chatfuel Bot from the dropdown list to copy the block into your actual live bot.

Step 3 – Enter Information about your FotoScript Design

Navigate to your bot and open the new FotoScript block that you just copied. Scroll down until you see a “JSON API” card – which is where you’ll enter information about your FotoScript Design.

The quickest way to provide your Chatfuel Bot with all the necessary information is to open your FotoScript Design in CodelessBot. Then click on the Setup Tab. You’ll find the code automatically generated for you.

All you need to do is copy this code and paste it into your Chatfuel Bot.

Step 4 – Test your Block to see your Personalized Image

Summary

Messenger Bots are an extremely powerful tool since it allows you to build an interactive and fun experience for your visitors…so don’t just send a plain boring text message.

Try sending a personalized image to capture your audience’s attention.  Or create a personalized gallery card, to allow your bot visitors to share it with their friends! There’s no coding is required and it’s easy to setup. All you need to do is:

1. Create your image design (using the FotoScript Plugin)
2. Add custom fields/attributes to personalize the message
3. Install the FotoScript plugin into your Chatfuel