I know you know it. Facebook Messenger chatbots are a thing.
You see the ads on Facebook. Your colleague went on about them in a recent team meeting.
And maybe you’ve already read a few articles on DigitalMarketer’s blog about them.
But I’m not just going to tell you about chatbots. I want to show you the raw, unbridled, high-octane power of Messenger chatbots.
I’ve laid out 6 proven strategies that I have used, how they work, and the results they gave me. Trust me. By the end of this post you will be scrambling to get your own Messenger marketing going.
This is a tactic-driven article, unicorn style. If you’re ready to take your marketing skills to unicorn land, this is what you need.
1. Create a chat blast that achieves 70% open rates.
Getting 80% open rates sounds far-fetched, but it’s actually normal in the world of Facebook Messenger marketing, AKA Unicorn World.
Compare 80% open rates to the average email marketing open rate—what is it, 5–10% on a good day?
The chatbot builder MobileMonkey has a feature called “chat blaster” that I tried out to see if I could get a higher open rate than an email. The chat blaster sends a message to your entire contact list or a segmented group.
Here’s the read rate report from a chat blast I recently sent.
The 76% open rate isn’t some kind of data anomaly. It’s par for the course with chat blasts.
My Facebook Page has a large following. But the size of a page’s followers is more of a vanity metric, and it isn’t nearly as important as the levels of engagement.
But sending a chat blast like above generated a sizable swell in sessions.
Using a chat blast can boost your engagement rates, keep your contacts active, and ultimately drive more conversions.
2. Forget slow email drip campaigns. Use Messenger Drip campaigns instead.
For all the talk of email marketing being the Old Faithful of online marketing tactics, let’s just admit that email engagement metrics can be abysmal. See above.
But what about drip campaigns? How do you run a successful drip campaign without email?
Easy. Facebook Messenger.
You can lead a prospect through your entire campaign in a matter of minutes as opposed to a matter of days, as is the case with email. Plus, with sky-high engagement rates, I’ve had far better success when compared with email.
Typically, the drip campaigns that I use with my Page’s Messenger subscribers starts out with a simple welcome message and a CTA for the user to check out my blog.
The next day, I hit them with a tip and a nudge to take the next step—watching a demo or reading more.
Drip campaigns can take a wide variety of forms—leading up to a video, a free consultation, a webinar, or a download. And it all happens within the Messenger ecosystem.
3. Harness the power of marketing automation with RSS Blasting on Facebook Messenger.
RSS has been around for a long time—nearly 20 years! But the old technology gets new life when you supercharge it with a Messenger bot.
Here’s how RSS blasting works in its Facebook Messenger incarnation.
You add your feed in a chatbot builder, select your audience, configure a few options, and flip the switch.
As long as your RSS is up and running successfully, every time you publish something to the RSS, your Messenger contacts get pinged with the update.
You can create as many RSS blasters as you want, which will serve you well when it comes to segmenting audiences and delivering specific content forms to specific groups of users.
4. Slash Facebook Ad CPA by 95% using Click-to-Messenger ads instead of traditional Facebook display ads.
I’ve come to the point where I don’t even use traditional Facebook ads anymore.
Big waste of money.
What do I use instead? Click to Messenger ads.
(RELATED: Facebook’s Comment-to-Messenger Feature: Everything You Need to Know)
I was spending $150–200 per lead when I was using traditional ads, which was drying up my ad budget and getting me terrible results. Conversion rates were lousy, and even with my unicorn level targeting hacks, this was unacceptable.
That’s when I started using Click to Messenger ads. Instead of a $200 CPA, it dropped to $5 almost overnight.
Was it because I had some magic ad copy or an entrancing creative?
No. It’s because I changed the CTA from “Learn More” (or a variation thereof) to “Send Message.”
(You can see the whole ad here.)
When a prospect clicks on your ad CTA (“Send Message”) they are invited to join your contact list. Once they confirm, they remain a contact in perpetuity (unless they take action to unsubscribe).
Essentially, this means your ad conversion rate is 100%. When a contact clicks “Send Message,” you get their contact information and can message them in Facebook Messenger.
5. Put a Messenger Widget to your website and bring in buckets of new contacts.
Messenger widgets are, in my opinion, one of the must-have features of a website. It’s the kind of thing that turns ho-hum websites into glorious unicorn lead gushers.
A Messenger widget is a simple WordPress plugin that allows people to join your Messenger contact list directly from your website.
On MobileMonkey, our widget lives in the lower right-hand corner the site. If users are logged into Facebook or Messenger on their browser, the Messenger widget recognizes them, greets them by name, and invites them to send a message.
When not logged in, the widget presents them with the invitation to log into Messenger.
One of the reasons why the plugin is so powerful is because it allows potential customers another access point to join your Messenger contact list.
A lot of marketers become frustrated because their contact list isn’t growing like they want it to, and their reach is low. The plugin changes all of that by turning website traffic into new contact leads.
The leading Messenger chatbot plugin is WP Chatbot, with more than 20,000 active installations and 100% 5-star reviews.
(RELATED: Learn more about how to leverage Facebook Messenger marketing in your ad campaigns)
6. Blow up your Facebook Messenger contact list by turning post commenters into red-hot leads.
This is one of my favorite techniques, and I’m frankly surprised that more people don’t know about it.
It works like this:
- You create a normal organic Facebook post,
- You add a comment guard using MobileMonkey.
- Now, anyone who comments on the post will be invited to join your Messenger contact list
This is brilliant, because the more engaging your Facebook post, the more people you’ll add to your list.
Here’s one that I posted a while back.
Notice what I did with this one. I shared a silly but intriguing quiz.
In order to get the answer to the quiz, respondents have to post their guess in the comments.
Clever, huh?
There are plenty of ways to create ultra-engaging posts just like this.
- You can invite your followers to post their Monday morning mood with a gif
- Use their phone’s autocomplete to finish the sentence “At work, I really want to…”
- Or something equally silly
You’ll be amazed by the engagement. And all of that engagement translates into more Messenger contacts.
Pro Tip: To get even more engagement, boost the post. A few dollars of boost can translate into hundreds or even thousands of additional engagements, comments, and brand-new Messenger contact list leads.
Wrapping It Up
When you reach the end of any article like this (thank you, by the way), there’s a tendency to think “Cute. Another thing that takes time (that I don’t have), requires money (that my boss won’t permit), and involves a new skill (that I don’t have the patience to acquire).
But here are three points of assurance I can give you about the strategies I just laid out:
- Time—Creating a complete Messenger chatbot takes a few minutes, especially when using a Messenger template
- Money—The chatbot builder MobileMonkey is free. Obviously, there are plans that include more features and functionality, but you can build complete, working chatbot sequences without spending a dime.
- New Skill—As long as you select the right chatbot builder, creating a Messenger chatbot doesn’t require any coding skills.
Chatbots aren’t some ethereal, mysterious, someday-we-should-do-that kind of a thing.
These are the exact techniques that are getting unicorn results right now. Messenger chatbots are showing more online marketing muscle than any other marketing tactic I know of.
