In this article, I’m going to show you never-before-revealed data from some of my recent Facebook Messenger marketing campaigns.
I’m sharing these behind-the-scenes Messenger analytics (against my better judgement…) for 3 main reasons:
- Authenticity: Seeing is believing. You’ve heard the hype about chatbots. I want to pull back the curtain so you can determine, based on real data, whether or not the hype is deserved
- Motivation: I want to show you that you can get similar results by applying specific marketing tactics
- Comparable analysis: If you’re already using chatbots and Facebook Messenger marketing, you’ll be able to assess whether or not your results are in the range of typical outcomes
I’ll not only show you the numbers I achieved, but also exactly how I achieved them. By reverse-engineering the process, you can get similar levels of marketing success.
Survey Sent via Facebook Messenger: 52% open rate and 15% response rate.
In this digital marketing campaign, I sent a survey to a group of contacts (12,680 of them).
The survey was called “What’s Your Bot Level” in which I tried to gauge how familiar my audience was with chatbot marketing.
It started out with a quick question, “I’m a chatbot marketing…” and then you would fill in the blank with your experience level—novice, fan, or pro, basically.
Here are the results that I got after sending that exact survey:
- The survey was delivered to 10,689 contacts
- 52% or 5,639 of the contacts opened the survey
- 2% or 1,733 of the contacts responded, i.e. answered questions, on the survey
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the campaign. (Names have been blurred for privacy reasons.)
Why am I showing you this particular campaign?
After all, a lot of my campaigns have 75% response rates and higher!
This survey was only 52%. Why brag about a comparatively ho-hum open rate?
Here’s why I’m showing you mediocre results:
- These results, though mediocre by chatbot marketing standards, are way higher than what you’d get from an email marketing campaign. See chart below for a breakdown of the analytics
- It’s a survey. Surveys are notoriously difficult to get people to respond to
- It was sent to over 10,000 respondents. That means over 5,000 people read my survey, and 1,733 responded to it. These are significant numbers
Let’s draw a comparison between this survey campaign (sent via Messenger) and an equivalent survey that we sent via email.
The survey sent via Messenger had a 5,303% higher engagement than the one sent via email.
Besides, surveys are invaluable for marketing teams.
What if you could get more than 16% of your mailing list to respond to a survey? How would this inform your marketing, engage your users, or empower your sales team?
This is the power of Messenger chatbot marketing.
To create a chatbot survey, you’ll need to use a chatbot builder, (MobileMonkey is a great option, and what I use). You simply create a dialogue—questions, followed by answers, followed by another question, etc.
Most MobileMonkey users take a survey template and customize it to their specific needs.
You can also create surveys from scratch using the MobileMonkey bot builder.
You’re probably well aware that a survey isn’t just for information-gathering purposes. A survey is also a powerful engagement tool, compelling your users to take action.
Here are some tips for a successful Facebook Messenger chatbot survey:
- Make it easy for people to respond. Multiple choice questions in which they tap answers are best
- Make the survey short. People bail from long surveys
- Make it obvious what the survey is about. Confusion leads to rejection
Facebook Messenger Drip Campaign: 81% Read Rate and 14% Response Rate
Drip campaigns are the bread and butter of email marketing.
Done right, a strategic drip campaign can nurture a cohort of email marketing leads to some conversion action.
And guess what. It takes days.
Chatbot marketing has taken drip campaign success rates to a whole new level, like the one I’m sharing with you here.
What email marketer in the last 15 years has seen results like these?
- 81% of the recipients read or opened the drip campaign
- 14% of the recipients responded to the drip campaign
Why am I showing you this one?
Because it’s a small sample size. Not everyone who’s reading this is working with audiences of 31,000+ respondents, as we sometimes do. If you’re just getting started with Facebook Messenger marketing, your audience size may be in the few hundreds, not the tens of thousands.
While there are times that it’s acceptable to send a message to a huge list, it’s much more strategic to define small audience segments for effective hypertargeting.
The example I’m showing you above is such a segment—a cohort of contacts that share certain engagement characteristics.
I also show it to you because 90% of these respondents took action within the first 60 minutes of receiving the chatbot sequence.
Chatbots turbocharge drip campaigns. Instead of waiting a period of days to send the next message, you need only wait minutes. When you’re able to accelerate the process, you can close conversions much faster and with a higher success rate.
Creating a drip campaign in the MobileMonkey chatbot builder is a simple drag-and-drop process. First, you’ll create the dialogues, and then you’ll organize them in the Drip Campaign builder.
As the efficacy of email marketing fades, I want marketers to have confidence in drip campaigns—but not email drip campaigns.
Facebook Messenger drip campaigns powered by chatbots are alive and well, and scoring 80% open rates mere minutes after launching.
Facebook Messenger Data: Cumulative Metrics
The final set of data I want to show you isn’t from a specific Messenger campaign. Rather, it’s drawn from the collective online marketing campaigns that I’ve been executing using MobileMonkey and Facebook Messenger.
As a preamble to the actual data, let me tell you yet again why I’m sharing these specific numbers with you.
The most fundamental reason is this—it’s data. Data is omnipotent. Acting upon data is the only effective way to make informed marketing decisions. If you know and understand your data, you can adjust your marketing accordingly.
When opening up any new digital marketing channel, it is essential to have a sense of the numbers—how many, how fast, who, why, and when.
Here are some of those numbers.
This metric shows the total number of contacts acquired in Messenger over time (the date range is, of course, adjustable).
Let’s compare this with email. One Messenger contact is the equivalent of anywhere from 20 to 100 emails in terms of the engagement driven. Thus, a Messenger contact list of this size gets the same engagement levels that you would expect from a 400,000-person email list.
This number—total contacts in Messenger—is the guiding light for the emerging class of chatbot marketers.
Whereas traditional marketers pour effort and energy into amassing email leads, today’s Facebook Messenger marketers measure their success by the number of Messenger contacts.
With email marketing, the contacts consist of, well, an email address—hardly anything else.
With Messenger marketing, the data on each contact is much richer, leading to extremely effective segmentation, retargeting, and campaign refinement.
Every contact goes into a contact list that is organized, searchable, and can even be exported automatically to any other business apps, CRMs, databases, etc.
For each contact that subscribes to your Messenger contact list, you have automatic visibility on the following information:
- Profile picture
- First name
- Last name
- Unique ID
- Gender
- Country
- Time zone
- Date and time created
- Time of last activity
You can create an infinite number of attributes and tags that will help to further refine your contacts based on your own selections and parameters.
Another helpful data point is the rate of acquisition.
The chart below indicates the number of new contacts per day. It’s helpful for analyzing trends, specific campaign effectiveness, and overall trends.
Knowing the total number of sessions generated by chatbots is another integral number for measuring chatbot marketing success. This chart shows the total number of sessions (orange) plotted with the number of unique sessions (purple).
These are just a few of the many metrics available within MobileMonkey’s bot analytics.
To get a rounded view of my data, I often take a look at any paid entry points to my Messenger contact list, which is usually click-to-messenger ads. Doing so helps me understand the costs associated with Messenger list building.
For example, here’s a glance at a recent Messenger ad campaign. Here’s a quick rundown of the salient data points:
- Campaign duration: 5 days
- Total amount spent: $12.36
- Total impressions: 1,373
- Results: 158
- Cost per result: $0.08
Each of the number sets discussed above is important for the role they play in refining and developing my Messenger marketing strategy.
Data from Facebook Messenger Campaigns: Your Turn
We’re in the infancy of Messenger chatbot marketing.
Sure, it’s an exciting field and a lot of marketers are jumping in, but there is no track record of people sharing data or metrical insights into the success of their chatbot marketing efforts.
That’s yet another reason why I chose to share this information with you.
The scarcity of data may lead marketers to conclude that 1) chatbot marketing isn’t effective and/or 2) all these marketers are lying about their 70% open rates.
I hope these few data points will provide a glimpse of authenticity to strip away the veneer of hype that masks the chatbot marketing world.
None of the data I shared with you is anomalous. None of it is sensational. And all of it is real.
Now it’s your turn.
Using chatbot marketing, what kind of results do you think you can achieve?
