The Manychat Sequence feature allows you to automate message delivery by subscribing contacts to a series of scheduled messages sent with varying delays. This powerful tool helps streamline communication, ensuring timely and consistent engagement with your audience. In this article, we’ll walk you through creating a sequence, managing time settings, and troubleshooting common issues to optimize your automation performance.
How to set up a sequence
You can find your current sequences or create a new one in the Automation > Sequences tab.
To create a new sequence, click on the New Sequence button. You will see a prompt to name your sequence. Type the name you want and click the Create button:
To add the first message to your sequence, press the Message button:
You can either use an existing automation by choosing Select existing, or create a new one by clicking Create new reply:
Each message in the sequence is enabled individually, allowing you to choose which messages to send. If at least one message is enabled, the sequence is online, and the message will be sent to any contact subscribed to it according to the schedule.
To enable the message, simply enable this toggle:
💡 If you see a yellow dot next to the message name, it indicates that your automation has unpublished changes. Be sure to publish any edits before proceeding.
To add more messages to the sequence, press the + Message button:
Time settings for the sequence
You can schedule delays between messages by clicking on each message’s scheduled time. For the first message, the delay will be applied after the contact is subscribed to the sequence. For subsequent messages, the delay is applied after the previous message has been sent:
💡 Note: Sequences are sent according to the contact's time zone.
You can either schedule a message to be sent immediately upon being triggered, or set an interval of minutes, hours, or days:
It is also possible to limit when contacts receive sequence messages. By selecting the Send between option, you can choose a specific time window for the message delivery:
By pressing the Any day button, you can select the days of the week for message delivery:
💡 Example: Let’s say your sequence has completed, and all contacts subscribed to it have received the messages. However, you want to add new information or re-enable a disabled message in the middle of the sequence. What happens next? Once you enable the new or previously disabled message, it will be sent out immediately if its scheduled time has already passed.
How to subscribe/unsubscribe contacts to/from a sequence
💡 Important: Once you subscribe a contact to a sequence, it will immediately start sending messages or begin counting the timer for delivery.
There are three ways to subscribe/unsubscribe contacts:
1. Automatically, by assigning the Subscribe to sequence / Unsubscribe from sequence action to a button:
2. Manually, in the Contacts tab, by using Bulk action > Subscribe to sequence / Unsubscribe from sequence:
3. Directly, from a contact’s profile. Select the contact in the Contacts tab to open their profile and manage subscription settings:
⚠️ Note: A contact can receive the same sequence only once. If you're testing the sequence and want to restart it, you'll need to unsubscribe and then re-subscribe yourself.
Sequence troubleshooting
You might encounter a few common issues with sequences:
- The sequence gets stuck.
- Messages in the sequence aren’t being sent.
- Contacts aren’t being subscribed to the sequence.
- Messages are sent at the wrong time.
- The sequence sends duplicate messages.
These issues are usually caused by an incorrect sequence setup or global issues with Facebook.
If you've reviewed the sequence’s setup and still can't identify the problem, ensure the necessary messages are enabled, and check the automations within the sequence for the following:
- Condition blocks: If there is no follow-up after a condition, that particular message in the sequence won’t be fully sent.
- Smart Delay blocks: These work alongside sequence delays. If messages are getting mixed up, it could be because both the sequence and the automation delays triggered multiple messages at the same time.
- Data Collection blocks: The automation will pause in a Data Collection block and wait for a contact’s response for up to 30 minutes. Until the input is completed or the time limit is reached, the automation won’t proceed.
- Links: If a link isn’t authorized in Settings > Website Widgets, Facebook might block it, causing the remaining messages to stop. Also, avoid including links in the first step of a sequence, as Facebook may consider them promotional content.
If you're sure everything is set up correctly and you're still experiencing issues, please check our Status Page for any ongoing incidents.