Let's start off with a fun fact.
Did you know that about 2.5 billion people are on mobile messaging apps, according to eMarketer? So ask yourself: are you communicating to your audience on their preferred channel?
Going onto Facebook Messenger gives you the opportunity to connect with a wide audience and communicate with them immediately. Using a chatbot is an instant, automatic, and affordable way to connect with your user and drive qualified leads to your site. Facebook Messenger bots are an effective marketing tactic that can save you time and money as you work to scale your business.
About seven billion conversations take place on Facebook Messenger every day! In fact, messages are opened more often than emails, with a 30 to 40 percent click-through rate (four to 10 times the overall email marketing average). Therefore, marketers who’ve adopted into using a Facebook Messenger bot have seen incredible ROI.
Take The Beard Club, a direct-to-consumer supplier of beard care kits and growth products, for example. Within four weeks of using their bot, they were able to acquire 30,000 new subscribers, 92 percent open rate, and 62 percent click-through rate (CTR).
In addition to a quick-ROI win, Facebook Messenger bots are cost-effective and easy to get off the ground. All you need is a Facebook business page to connect your bot to, and then you can start building your conversation.
Emails, landing pages, social media – we’ve all used at least one – if not all – of these channels. So why add one more to the mix? Simple, ROI.
The average open rates for email is about 18 percent, and CTR around 2.69 percent, which means people aren’t seeing your messages. Most companies still find email difficult to crack — they send bulk emails full of promotions, announcements, and newsletters with a personalized touch like “Hey Joyce!” or “We’ve noticed you forgot something in your cart, Max”. It’s the same strategy everyone’s been using for the past decade. It’s time to step up your marketing efforts and try something different.
Short answer: Anyone. From e-commerce agencies and online coaching to education, restaurants, beauty salons, and professional services, a Facebook Messenger bot gives every business a better way to automate hundreds of customer conversations at once so you can answer more questions, generate leads, and close more business instead of doing it manually.
A chatbot allows you to automate conversations and scale your social media marketing efforts, nurture leads, manage sales, improve retargeting, and offer 24/7 customer service all in one place. In addition, it also tracks and stores customer information, including interactions and demographics for everyone to access and use.
Using past conversations, you can learn a great deal about your target audience. You can understand how people interact with your company, what content they’ve seen and clicked, and what they purchased. Facebook Messenger bots allow businesses to automate conversations which essentially allows them to scale on autopilot. You’re doing more with less effort.
A benefit of using a bot is the affordable cost to acquire a customer. Between creating and launching ads, consistently posting to social, or creating free content as lead magnets, the time and resources it takes to execute a profitable lead generation strategy are challenging for smaller businesses.
Jason Swenk, an online coach for enterprise agencies, is a major advocate for chat marketing and stresses the importance of a well-designed Messenger Marketing strategy. After two months of using a bot, his program sales doubled, high-end services increased by 74 percent, and revenue generated hit $250,000.
Using a chatbot has been shown to create tangible results.
Discover and segment your audiences based on select criteria with the help of using a bot. Using targeted groups, ad dollars can be spent attracting the right leads, and sequences can nurture leads to become paying customers.
No more calling and waiting for hours to speak with customer support. With easy-to-follow self-service tools, a Facebook Messenger bot delivers 24/7 personalized support. You can offer real-time, one-to-one conversations that help customers solve their problems, track customer satisfaction, and respond to thousands of queries at once. If customers want human conversations, you can easily jump into live chat and respond to questions, manually.
As with any strong marketing plan, using a Facebook Messenger bot is the same. You want to deliver value to customers, whether that’s through content, deals, loyalty programs, or customer support. With customized interactions, you can improve your offer and turn customers into brand advocates.
Customer engagement is important, and with a Facebook Messenger bot, you’re able to deliver instant answers to help solve your customer’s needs. To drive engagement with your bot, use the following suggestions to help build trust which can eventually lead to your customer taking an action.
Keep an eye on the conversations your bot is having with customers. If you notice a common question, adjust your flow to add it. This way you’ll be able to give the person the answer they are looking for.
You can be straight forward or make it entertaining, but questions and quizzes are an excellent strategy to engage with your customers and find out exactly what they are searching for.
For example, if you own a shoe store, you might want to ask if they’re shopping for an event or specific activity. Ask a specific style they are looking for. And can ask a price range. You can offer specific products or services to help make the customer’s buying journey more enjoyable.
You know when you’re shopping online and you see below, other’s who bought this also bought x, y, z? Well, you can do something similar with a bot.
Based on the information you learned by asking questions, you can have your bot make product or service recommendations. That message may look something like this: “Since you indicated you want to tone up and build muscle, we think our Full-Body Blast workout class would be a great fit for you.”
Take it a step further and give them a direct link to purchase or sign up for your product or service. Example: “This class happens on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:00 P.M. Click here to register or give us a call at 123-456-7890 to talk further about the classes we offer.” Recommendations can help improve customer engagement.
The goal, besides getting a conversion, is to build trust and a loyal relationship. So it’s encouraged to let the user know they are speaking to a bot. And not just any bot, give it a name and personality. This will help you make the voice and style you use consistent and fun. It will also help make the conversation for humanized. In addition, it always offer a way to opt-out. This will also let your user know that they are not tied into the bot and always have a way out. It actually builds more trust.
Facebook Messenger bots are an excellent tool to capture additional contact information. You can ask the user to confirm their email or phone number during the conversation. Once they confirm, they’ve opted in. Be direct and let them know what you’ll use the email and phone number for.
If you send them an email or text message, always confirm that they want to continue receiving messages. As with your bot conversation, give them the opportunity to opt-out. No one wants to feel trapped into something, so don’t make them feel that way through your bot or other channels.
Facebook Messenger bots are cost-effective and easy to set up and use. Plus, their engagement rate supersedes that of email marketing. And since a small percent of businesses are using chatbots right now, and they're not yet as widely used as other forms of marketing, this is a place where you can get ahead of the competition.
Get started with chatbots for your strategy today. Discover all available chatbot software solutions on G2.
Letting your customers and leads know about a grand opening, new product, or just an employee...
by Daniella Alscher
We all know that feeling: You hit the “send” button only to have that deep regret sink into...
by Kristen McCabe
The original purpose of the world’s most popular social media platform is long gone.
by Daniella Alscher