Picture this:
You walk into a shoe store, and no one greets you.
You’re pretty sure they have what you’re looking for, but you have no idea where to find the specific style. Plus, you have a few questions you’d like to ask before you buy, but no one seems to notice you! So, you leave the store.
That’s what happens with potential customers when you fail to follow up immediately with them using messenger automation.
In this post, I’m going to share with you my top 3 ways to use messenger marketing to have more conversations you want to have with your audience (i.e. personalized sales and lead gen) while gaining time by automating conversations you don’t.
But first…
What is Conversational Marketing with Bot Messengers?
“What are bot messengers? What does they do? Are they those annoying things that pop up when I visit a site?”
This automated response system can live on your website, Facebook business page, and tie in with your ad campaigns on social media to help you have more personalized conversations with your audience at scale.
Your brand can enjoy open rates at upwards of 88% and click-through rates of 56% within Facebook messenger versus 20.81% and 2.43% respectively with email.
Chatbots, conversational marketing, messenger marketing, bot messengers, messenger automation – no matter what you call it, a well-designed messenger experience allows you to reduce friction for site visitors, shrink the sales timeline (i.e. the buyer’s journey), and increase the likelihood of turning visitors into customers. And the reason many people found them annoying before was…
- The technology allowing marketers to create personalized and engaging conversational experiences within the bot was limited and
- Now that the tech exists, people still use it wrong. Much like with email, you can’t “blast your list” with offers and expect it to go well.
So, let’s dive into how you can use conversational marketing the right way in conjunction with your current marketing efforts to achieve an even greater ROI for your business.
Learn more about saving time by automating responses on social
1. Automate responses to inbound messages and FAQ
I get it:
You’re already running a million different aspects of your business, and you don’t have time to answer every question on your Facebook business page or site each week.
But when you fail to follow up quickly with a visitor’s question, they’re already moving on to your competitor.
Luckily, you already have a good idea of the questions your customers ask over and over again.
With a messenger chatbot, you can automate responses to common questions, giving you and your sales team more time to focus on serving your customers better while reducing friction for your visitors. They ask their questions, the chatbot responds instantly at any time of day, and they no longer have a reason to look elsewhere.
Now, one of the most common objections I get is “Jason, I like doing it myself. People deserve to get me not anyone or anything else.”
First, I agree with offering a personalized service to your potential customers. As Digital Marketer founder, Ryan Deiss said, “…it’s not about B2B or B2C, it’s about H2H, human-to-human.“
But if you’re not getting back to these people in time, it doesn’t matter how you choose to respond.
Plus, chatbots do not replace humans.
They’re like oil in your marketing machine, used to smooth friction in the buyer’s journey and guide them to the resources they’re looking for. If it can’t do this effectively, your bot pauses and hands the conversation off to a live representative.
2. Generate leads and grow a subscriber list
It’s no secret having an audience to re-engage and nurture serves as an important element of successful businesses. Marketing with bot messengers makes that easy.
a. With organic traffic using content upgrades ($1.2 million in revenue with $0 ad spend!)
Offset Solar generated $1.2 million in revenue during 6 months with $0 ad spend using conversational marketing with Facebook messenger.
And before you say “But we don’t get enough organic traffic to our site for this to work”, let me ask you:
Wouldn’t you want to treat the potential customers who do make it to your site like gold?
So, how can you get these results?
- Organic traffic arrives to your site thanks to your SEO content and branding work (thanks TQP Studio!).
- Your chatbot greets them and asks if they have any questions. It guides them along the buyer’s journey to your most popular posts about the topic they’re interested in.
- A Johnson Box in the post offers a topic-specific checklist, quiz, mini-course, etc. delivered in messenger as a content upgrade to further educate your audience. Users won’t have to enter their email every time they want to get the value from one of your upgrades, as they’re already subscribed within messenger and simply download the new piece of content.
- Using Facebook pixel data, retarget your site visitors…
Learn more about growing a list and generating leads on autopilot
b. With social media ads
I’ve seen businesses put money into running send-to-messenger ads on Instagram and Facebook. But what’s waiting for you when you click through?
If you’re lucky, they have a simple response saying someone will get back to you asap (again, not quickly enough). Most times, it’s a blank conversation within messenger with some preset questions Facebook thinks fit your business. Other times, you arrive right at a sales page – the marketing equivalent of a marriage proposal on the first date.
Instead, deliver value to potential customers and reduce friction on their journey from where they are now to the solution you want to offer them.
What do you give them?
Think about a best-performing offer you’ve used in the past like a free trial, mini-course, or value-packed blueprint to help them solve an immediate problem quickly and simply.
You can also deliver a quiz using something like Ryan Levesque’s ASK Method to provide potential customers with valuable information about themselves. Plus, this serves double-duty, as it helps you to better understand and segment your audience to tailor your offers to them.
The best part about doing this within messenger?
Users’ first interactions serve as micro-commitments – they build momentum by answering an initial easy question that propels them forward through the conversational flows.
No filling out forms, no entering email addresses to get their value, and much less friction.
They are now a part of your audience so you can drip content to educate them about your brand and ensure you’re cultivating the most important factor of the buying decision:
Trust
Offer to send them their results or their download via email last and zap that info to your CRM for additional touchpoints to keep your brand top of mind.
3. Segmenting and qualifying leads for conversions
Once you’ve helped your users, it’s time to learn how to better serve them by asking questions important to you in segmenting and qualifying your audience.
User responses to these questions save automatically in their profiles so you can follow up with targeted and relevant content going forward.
One of the best questions to start with?
What are you struggling with most when it comes to [insert common niche problem]?
Now, you’ll send them content relevant to their response and even use their responses to create new content you hadn’t thought of. Using lead scoring, you can increase their score each time they interact with your content to trigger personalized offers (like a webinar or one-to-one call) when they’ve hit a certain score and warmed up.
You can even use messenger to increase attendance to the webinar or call.
But let’s say you have one qualifying factor that, if the reader meets it, requires reaching out immediately.
With messenger automation, you create the chatbot to notify you or your sales team via email and messenger when a user triggers a specific action, so your sales team can start a conversation with your most valuable leads right away.
Next Steps: Ask yourself where a chatbot fits in your funnel
While it’s true using conversational marketing can help most brands serve their visitors better, don’t implement it without getting clear on where it fits in with your existing marketing efforts. This requires an understanding of your site analytics:
- What path do your users take before making a purchase on your site?
- Which pages, posts, or landing pages resonate most with your readers and lead to them taking a desired action?
Once you’ve got that down:
Start with high-intent pages
We shared how segmentation and lead scoring helps you better understand what a user wants and when they’re ready to move forward on the buyer’s journey.
You can get some quick wins by creating a chatbot conversation for visitors who move right to pages that normally precede a conversion event (e.g. your pricing page).
To avoid missing out on sales, don’t make them waste time searching for answers to questions or waiting for the conversion event. Instead, help them overcome their objections right there on the high-intent page within messenger and smooth out the path to converting!
Learn how to incorporate chatbots into your content strategy – schedule a Strategy Session with us!
Meet the guest blogger: Jason
WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | LINKEDIN
Jason Cane loves helping brands engage in personalized conversations at scale with their audiences using messenger marketing. He’s good at getting lost, and he’ll try any food or drink put in front of him (twice, just to be sure). Jason’s curiosity about other cultures began at a young age, and it shows no signs of diminishing as he continues learning and exploring.
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