Getting started in Messenger Marketing
I’m regularly asked what Messenger marketing is, and exactly how it can benefit a business, so I’ve decided to write an article covering some of the main points, and showing you how you can get started today.
First of all, I want to point out that there are 1.3 billion FaceBook Messenger users, and not to mention millions more on FaceBook’s other messaging platforms.
And what’s most interesting to me is that those 1.3 billion users are having 7 billion conversations each day! That means there’s a hell of a lot of activity across FaceBook Messenger each day.
Platforms like FaceBook Messenger are the new trend for Social Media marketing, since they allow businesses to reach out to consumers on a large scale through advertisements, and can then interact with them on a more individual level. I believe that a well-designed Messenger chatbot can effectively do the work of an entire marketing department. Chatbot’s will allow you to provide instant responses to your customers questions, and alert real people when there’s a question that needs to be answered by a human.
Why choose Messenger marketing?
When marketing a business or product, your aim should be to target your customers across the platforms that they are most active with. Messenger marketing will allow businesses to engage with customers and leads in a more conversational way than traditional email marketing. This is giving businesses an opportunity to develop personalised relationships with their customers.
Messenger Is Quickly Becoming A Mainstream Channel For Businesses!
When email first came out, email marketing was born, everyone was sending emails and this was a perfect opportunity for businesses to communicate with their customers. The same happened when phones became common, telemarketing came out. Today, people communicate across Messenger apps and the popularity with this channel keeps on growing, year by year!
How to use Messenger marketing
There are a number of ways in which you can use Messenger marketing, but I tend to break the different methods into the following:
Lead generation: Lead generation is one of the biggest reasons why many businesses are adopting Messenger marketing. Build out a marketing funnel which uses Messenger as a warm way to introduce your business to your target audience. For example, let’s say you’re a restaurant that wants to drive new people down to your business…
You could boost a FaceBook post promoting a special offer to new customers. You can then setup a Chatbot to automatically respond to people who leave a comment on the post with a specific keyword. You then run both Messenger ads and post engagement ads driving people to leave comments, or click into your Messenger to claim that offer. Each time this happens, the page can automatically respond with the offer.
You then have this user subscribed to your Messenger marketing list. This means you can keep running promotional messages to this user from your chosen bot platform, without having to pay for ads. It’s the same process as running an email campaign to your email subscribers.
Content delivery:
The majority of sites send new content to users through people who have opted in through email, but this is now something that you can do through Messenger. You can ask your users to optin through Messenger to be delivered new content through their inboxes.
Most bot platforms allow you to connect an RSS feed with your site, so for each time you post, it’s delivered into their inbox automatically.
You can also offer your users to search for specific content, by adding in some categories to your Chatbot. Tech Crunch has a great example for doing this.
One of the best features with content delivery is that you can personalise the content that you deliver to your users. For example, adding tags to your Messenger subscribers will allow you to fire more personalised/desired content.
Customer support:
As well as being able to provide your subscribers with instant customer support, there are many other ways of being able to support your customers with Messenger marketing.
One of my favourite ways is to achieve valuable feedback from your customers. If you’re running an event, broadcast messages to your attenders asking for feedback on how well the event went. This method is often used in eCommerce, as you can ask your customers to leave reviews on the products that they’ve purchased.
You’ll also find a much higher feedback response through Messenger rather than email!
Some interesting facts about Messenger marketing:
- Messenger has a 4x higher open rate.
- Messenger has an 8x-12.5x higher click-through rate.
- Messenger Generates 1.6x more revenue.
- Our latest client achieved 16K in table bookings
- Our average Messenger campaign gets an open rate of 96%
- We’ve helped a startup achieve 11,500 Messenger subscribers in a short period of time!
Start your first campaign today!
If you’ve got this far, then you may be considering a Messenger campaign. If that’s the case then I encourage you to continue with those thoughts! If you’re a little stuck, then here are some steps for launching your first Messenger marketing campaign:
- Find a platform to build your Chatbot with. I’d recommend either ManyChat or ChatFuel. In these instructions I’ll talk about ManyChat. Create an account with them, and connect the bot to your page.
2. Create a post on FaceBook with a great offer. Think of something catchy that will instantly capture the attention of your audience. Tell them to comment a keyword which will enable them to claim their offer. The page will message those who comment with the relevant keyword. In this case I’ll use the keyword “interested”.
3. Go back to ManyChat, head over to the growth tools, click new growth tool and select the FaceBook comment tool.
4. Here’s where it may get tricky, I’ll write an in depth article about how to correctly set this up in a few days but, you basically want to select the post you have created with the offer in, and connect the comment tool. You want to setup the tool to only reply to users who have left a specific keyword in their comment. In this case, it’s for anyone who commented “interested”
You should see something that looks like this:
Make sure you’ve selected that checkbox below the “change post” button. Then click next.
5. Now create an opt in message. As your page is sending a message to someone who left a comment on your post, I always recommend putting something like:
“Hey Full Name! We’re messaging you because you left a comment on our recent post. Reply with “yes” to be sent the offer.”
When someone leaves a comment saying “yes” they become subscribed to your Messenger marketing list, because they’ve technically opted into your bot by leaving a reply.
6. When you reach the optin message section, you want to select “send only to users who reply with a specific keyword”. This is where you’ll enter the keyword “yes” in our case. You’ll then see a field which is your optin message.
Think of this as the response to the user, after they have replied with “yes”. For now, keep the default message in there, but remember what it’s called. You can then press save and activate.
Now whenever someone leaves a comment with “interested” and responds with “yes” the page will send across the offer, and also add the user to the pages Messenger subscriber list. Also, make sure that it’s set to active in the top left and not draft.
7. Now head to the flows tab. You should be able to see “optin messages”, click on this and select that optin message that you took note of before, when we setup the comment response. You need to click on this, and edit the flow.
Whatever text is inside of the flow will be what is sent to users who respond with “yes”. Once you’re finished with your message, click publish and now that response will be fired to the user once they have replied.
8. The very final step is to now boost that post you created earlier on. I’d recommend boosting it with the objective of post engagements, to drive the most comments for the budget that you have. Make sure you’re targeting the right people, and you’ll soon start seeing comments.
You’ve now created your first Messenger ad!
This can go really advanced, such as subscribing these users to a specific sequence, or adding tags to them so you know where the leads have come from. If you’re a restaurant then you could even fire up a second message asking when they’d like to book a table.. the possibilities are endless!
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If you’re interested in learning more about how Messenger marketing can help you, then feel free to send me an email, I’d be more than happy to show you a live demo and answer any questions that you have! [email protected]
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