How to Increase Sales using Messenger Marketing
Facebook Messenger Marketing Revolution
The first car ever invented was in 1886 and it had a top speed of 10mph; a horse could easily beat it in a race. From 1894 to 1914 cars went from 12 mph to 120 mph and by the early 1920’s they began completely replacing the horse and buggy.
Today, websites monetize 1–3% of their traffic and about 97% of visitors never buy. This whopping 97% is a complete waste of time, effort and money. Fortuenly, conversational marketing is quickly beginning to solve one of the biggest problems in the marketing space, waste!
In marketing world, we are going from horse and buggy to Model-T.
Why is this happening now?
For the first time technology, via Facebook Messenger, is allowing websites to talk back to their visitors after they have left.
Not only are websites starting to talk back, but they are doing it more intelligently. Their content is becoming dynamic, personalized, and tailor made for you.
This represent both a shift in the way we interact with the internet and a massive opportunity.
In this guide I will cover all the ways that this transformation is occurring. Where the biggest advantages lay and how to take advantage of them.
Things we will cover:
- Messenger Marketing’s 10 Big Advantages: Overview of how Messenger Marketing works and where the biggest advantages lay.
- How to Use Facebook Messenger Marketing on Your Site: How to implement Messenger on your site to get the biggest ROI.
- Expanding the Top of your Funnel: How to massively increase the number of people in your funnel.
- Using Messenger for Content Marketing: Using content marketing within your bot.
- Using Bots for each stage of the Customer Journey: Mapping the customer journey
- Personalization: How to segment users in your bot, personalize the experience and optimize sales.
- Turning your Bot into a Sales Machine and Lead Generation Tool: Framework for getting leads and sales via your Bot.
This is quite a detailed post. Feel free to skip around and focus on the topics that interest you most. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at anytime 😀.
Let’s begin….
Messenger Marketing’s 10 Big Advantages
Every marketer knows the value of email marketing. It is the go to strategy for most websites. Collecting emails is the way websites try to talk with us today, however Messenger Marketing has a number of big advantages over email.
These advantages are so powerful that ecommerce chatbots are increasing sales 7–25%.
MORE: See how ecommerce store are using our Shopify Bot.
Let’s take a look at the why.
- Getting Signups: Simply put it is easier to get website visitors to sing up to your bot than for them to give you their email. In the simplest terms, it is pressing one button vs typing out their email address.
- Open Rates: good open rates range from 70% to 90% which is 2 to 4x better than email.
- Click Through Rates: good click through rates are between 28% to 48% which is miles ahead of the single digit click through rates on email.
- Cost Per Lead: When HubSpot tried generating leads through Facebook Messenger, they “saw a staggering 477% reduction in our cost per lead, while lead quality only slightly decreased“.
- User Data: All conversations are are an exchange of information. Bots are an easy and natural way to gather user data and insights. Everytime our customer takes an action in our bot we are learning about his preferences.
- Content Marketing: Bots leverage the power of dynamic content over static content. Chatbots are dynamic and can personalize the content so customer gets exactly what he wants without guessing. Furthermore, the bot can know what content the user has consumed and naturally take him to the next step.
- Personalization: Chatbots allow us to personalize on scale.
- Micro Targeting: Once you have even a little data on your users, it is easy to send the right person the right message at the right time. Just consider that you can use conditional statements when sending a message. For example, you can send a message to everyone who is male, likes red polos, and has a birthday today.
- Automation: Essentially, a chatbot is a chat application which means that it can make decisions based on the rules. The bot can automatically respond when spoken to, gather data, and send users the appropriate messages based on the user’s behavior. Email can’t do this…
- User Base: Messaging apps have surpassed social media apps in popularity and usage. In face, Facebook Messenger grew to 1.3 Billion users in a fraction of the time it took Facebook to reach similar user numbers. Simply put, your customers are already on Messenger and will soon be expecting to be able to message your business. Moving forward, Messenger is a must have communication channel for businesses.
How to Use Messenger Marketing on your Website
So what is the best way to leverage a Messenger Chatbot on your Website? In order to achieve the best results, let’s first talk Goals.
Chances are your goals are to increase sales and monetize your traffic as much as humanly possible. Given this assumptions, we will focus on Expanding the Top of your Funnel, and Optimizing Each Stage of the Funnel using a Chatbot. Let’s jump right in…
How to Expand the Top of your Funnel
Goals: We want to drive as much traffic to our bot as possible while getting the highest number of sing ups/opt-ins achievable. To accomplish this we will try to drive as much traffic as we can to our bot.
The best part is that we can send people to a specific part of our bot. For example, we can send coupon request to the coupon flow, and the customer service request to the customer service flow. In this way, the bot will automatically respond to the user in the most appropriate way and automatically put them in that segment!
Pop Ups: One of the more popular techniques is to drive traffic to your Messenger Bot using popups. This is effective because Opt-ins for Messenger are much higher than email. For one it is easier for users to press one button instead of typing out their email address.
Best Practice: Replace you email pop up with a Messenger Pop Up and start driving traffic to your Bot. Even better, you can create a 1–2 punch by combining both techniques using the checkbox plugin in to also capture the email. The downside here is that you might capture less users, however you will also capture their email which is valuable. Best practice is to test these 2 options. If there is not a significant drop off than ask for the email. If there is a significant drop off, you can ask for their email within the bot.
Message Plugins: This widget sits on your home page and lets users message your business. The plugin automatically recognizes the user and has a changeable “Hi! How can I help you?” call to action. When selected the widget opens up on the webpage and the bot begins responding.
When a user engages with your plugin it allows you to message them at a later time. One of the biggest benefits here is that the entire sign-up process has been eliminated. They are in your funnel by virtue of using you bot.
If your need a Bot for your Shopify store check out GoBeyond 👇
Using Messenger for Content Marketing & Optimizing the Your Funnel
Think about the journey your users take before purchasing. Chances are they go through a number of steps and by know how they make a decision, we can automate much of this process using your chatbot.
- Awareness Stage: The buyer realizes they have a problem.
- Consideration/Evaluation Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
- Decision/Purchase Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.
Best Practice: A Chatbot can automatically take a user down your funnel from Awareness to Consideration to Decision. Each step of the way the bot can gather customer information and deliver super relevant information that will help the customer make a decision. This is key, let’s look at how to implement this.
Using Chatbots at Each Stage of the Customer Journey
Awareness Stage
Bot helps define the problem and begins sending relevant content:
- Bot Helps Diagnose the Problem: Use Quizzes, Calculators, Questionnaire to help the customer diagnose their problem.
- Bot Sends Content of Value: Send guides, tutorials, videos to confirm that this is the problem.
Best Practice: Connect your the Chatbot to every piece of awareness content on your site. Incentivise customers to use the bot as a way to self diagnose. Bot will then automatically take users from awareness to decision once it as calculated what segment they belong in.
Consideration/Evaluation Stage
Bot helps compare solutions and guides customer towards purchase:
- Bot Helps Compare Options: Shows user how they can solve the problem and the benefits of each solution. Drills down on what is important to the customer and helps guide them to that solution.
- Best Practice: Connect your the Chatbot to every piece of decision content on your site.
Decision/Purchase Stage
The buyer chooses a solution:
- Purchasing via Bot: Use webviews for your purchase page. They convert better and have some much need information such as reviews, product description, pictures, etc
- Abandoned Carts: If/when a customer abandon their cart, the bot will remind them. This feature is so powerful that as many as 50% of abandoned carts are recovered! Learn MORE: Abandoned Cart Guide
- Receipts & Shipping: After purchase, the bot gives the customer a receipt and updates them on shipping status. This substantially decreases the number of customer service requests and costs.
- Upselling: After the purchase, the bot can recommend other similar items. About 1/3rd of customers will buy a second item.
- Reviews: After the customer has received the product, the Bot can ask them how they like it and gather a customer review.
- Customer Service Chatbot: After the purchase, you can provide follow up support via your bot.
GoBeyond’s Chatbot for Shopify Stores automatically does most of these things for you. Check it out👇
How to Use Sales Funnels & Personalize Content
Chatbots can personalize and customize content in a scalable way. Once you know what your users like, you can deliver them the exact right content at the right time. The key to getting this right is in knowing your customers and being able to ask the right questions.
Creating a Sales Machine in 5 Steps
Step 1: Who are your Customers?
- Create Personas for each of your top customer groups. Be sure to know their demographics, behaviors, motivations, fears, desires, pain points, and so on.
Step 2: Asking the Right Questions
- What 5–10 questions can you ask that will help you quickly identify which group the customer belongs in?
Step 3: Map out your Content and the Customer Journey
- Map out the mindset of the customer at each stage: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
- Map out the correspond sales content.
Step 4: Matchmaking
- Auto Segmentation: Ask your customers 5–10 most critical questions when they first user the bot so you segment your users.
- Sales: Send the down the corresponding sales funnel.
A Sales Sequence that Works
Use this format after you have identified which segment the customer belongs in.
Message 1: High Value Content
Message 2: Playful Fun Content
Message 3: Soft Sell
Message 4: Playful Fun Content
Message 5: High Value Content
Message 6: Hard Sell
A/B Testing: By using the ‘Go To Block’ plugin on Chatfuel you can randomly send users to different sequences. What this means is that you can send one part of you segment to one sequence and another part of your segment to another sequence thereby doing an A/B test.
This is so easy to do, that I highly recommend that you take advantage of A/B testing and always work on improving your flows.
GoBeyond’s Chatbot for Shopify Stores automatically does most of these things for you. Check it out👇
Turning your Bot into a Lead Generation Tool
Getting sales and leads should be a naturally extension of a good product/service and content marketing. If you did all of the above well, sales should happen naturally. That being said, there are a couple of things you should do to take your bot to the next level.
7 Tips on Generating Even More Leads
Tip 1: Where are users coming from?
Ideally different traffic sources should send users to different parts of your bot. Doing this will help increase your conversion rates. For example, if someone found your Bot via Facebook’s Discovery Tab which means that they don’t know much about your company, their experience should be a lot different than a person who said they were interested in buying a Polo from your store.
Tip 2: Generic Onboarding
Be sure to have a generic flow that onboards users who randomly find your bot and be sure to ask them the right questions so you can put them in the right segment. Later you can see how well different groups of people convert into customers and where they came from.
Tip 3: Give Gifts & Capture their Emails
Experiment with Gift Giving in exchange for a lead. One of the things GoBeyond does automatically is offer new users a store wide discount in exchange for their email.
Tip 4: Use Games to Gather Leads
One of the features we are working on is gamifying customers preferences. For example, you can ask users how much they like an item from 1–10. By playing a ranking game like this, we can quickly get an idea of what the user likes most. After the game is complete, we can send the a coupon towards their favorite items.
Tip 5: Give Dollars not Percentages
Giving a customer $10 towards their purchase is far more powerful than giving them 10% Off of a $100 item. When using a percentage, the customer is one level of abstraction removed from the end result…. in other words they have to think! We don’t want the to think, we want them to make a quick decision and receiving $10 is very concrete, everyone knows exactly what it means without a second thought.
Tip 6: We’re Running Out of that Item…
Scarcity is a powerful motivator. Your items should always be running out, your discounts should have an expiry date and it should be a no-brainer that this is the best time to purchase from your store…. not tomorrow.
Tip 7: Customer’s Patterns
One of the biggest opportunities for bots is in tracking customer’s patterns. For example, you might discover that a customer only likes to buy clothes 3 times per year. By knowing this we can pre-empt the customer in 4 months when he will be ready for the next round of clothes buying. This is one of the features we are working on at GoBeyond and when we nail it, it will be automatic.
About Stefan
Stefan Kojouharov is a pioneering figure in the AI and chatbot industry, with a rich history of contributing to its evolution since 2016. Through his influential publications, conferences, and workshops, Stefan has been at the forefront of shaping the landscape of conversational AI.
Current Focus: Currently, Stefan is channeling his expertise into developing AI agents within the mental health and wellbeing sector. These projects aim to revolutionize the way we approach wellness, merging cutting-edge AI with human-centric care.
Join the Journey on Substack: For exclusive insights into the development process, breakthrough experiments, and in-depth tutorials, follow Stefan’s journey on Substack. Join a community of forward-thinkers and be a part of the conversation shaping the future of AI in mental health and wellbeing.
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