Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular apps on the planet. Boasting over two billion monthly active users worldwide. Messenger allows its users to quickie connect, text, send media files, and even video call each other.
As messaging platforms go, it’s a daily standard one, but where Facebook Messenger truly shines is its uses in digital marketing.
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How Can Businesses Use Facebook Messenger?
Social media’s purpose is to provide brands and businesses with a direct line to their consumers. It’s now not enough to simply disseminate information about your products and services – consumers want to directly interact with you.
Through a Facebook Messenger Marketing strategy, you can effectively leverage the messaging app to improve your communication with your consumers and reach a variety of goals such as:
- Lead generation
- Boosting the conversion rate
- Increasing brand awareness
- Direct purchases, etc.
There are two major ways brands can leverage Facebook Messenger in their strategy:
1. Using It as a Customer Service Tool
Offering customer support is very important for a business in 2021, and it will remain so for a long time. Consumers have become rather accustomed to interacting directly with brands and companies at virtually any time, anywhere.
For big companies, that’s not necessarily a problem. But smaller businesses can have a much harder time keeping up with the demands, as they likely cannot afford to have a dedicated team for customer support on call 24/7.
But, Facebook Messenger could provide a way for even businesses without a lot of resources to answer consumers’ burning questions all the time: the Facebook Messenger chatbot. It is an integrated feature of Messenger chat where brands can establish a few automated replies for common questions they know audience members usually have about their products or services, such as:
- How long does the delivery take?
- When are your opening hours?
- What deals do you offer? etc.
However, the Facebook Messenger bot is rather limited in its ability to carry a conversation with customers, which is why a lot of brands look for third-party Messenger chatbots that can do a lot more things.
Such apps can also be added directly to the website in the form of a website chat widget, and assist consumers throughout their journey from the Messenger chat, and on to the site.
2. Running Paid Ads Through the App
Facebook advertising has many different twists and corners, but a rather exciting section is the one exclusive to Facebook Messenger Marketing.
You can run big campaigns through your Facebook page on all the social media products, including the messenger app. Brands can run click to Messenger ads when they want to encourage new audience members to send them a message and interact with them directly. Then, the chatbot can take it from there (or a member of your customer support), and continue the sales funnel.
But you can also run ads and campaigns right in the Messenger app, either that appear in the Messenger Stories or even ad boxes placed in between the user’s contact list. They redirect consumers to a certain landing page, where they can take the action you want. These campaigns can help you reach different goals, just like the regular campaign, and can even be integrated into a wider strategy run across all the Facebook products.
Messenger versus Email: Which One’s the Best?
A natural next question here is if you go into Facebook Messenger ads and a wider strategy with the app, where does that leave email marketing? At first glance, they seem to serve the same purpose, that of reaching potential customers directly.
But an experienced digital marketer will tell you that’s not true.
The bane of email marketing’s existence is the open rate. On average, the open rate with these efforts is rather low, with Australia’s average open rate staying put at around 20%. In Messenger chat, the open rate is an astounding 70%, even higher in some cases. It may be because people are used to the urgency that a direct message through the app presents. Unlike emails, which are more easily ignored, a notification on Messenger, even from a brand, is more intriguing to users, so they are quick to click on it and see what you’re trying to say.
However, don’t discount emails just yet. Email marketing remains a great tool to engage consumers, and reach them with special offers, news, and updates on your operations, especially since the medium allows you to go more in-depth with your messages.
In a Facebook Marketing campaign, the messages are presented in bite-sizes, and there is also the benefit of your contact list being an asset that you own, as users provide you for their information and consent to receiving these messages from you.
Email marketing is an essential component to lead nurturing and supporting your content marketing strategy, while Messenger ads are great when it comes to moving along the sales funnel. Both the tools can overlap, of course, but it’s not necessarily wise to choose one over the other.
You need Messenger to instantly communicate with your audience members, and keep them engaged. But you also need email to go more in-depth with your existing customers, and give them your best content and offers through a medium that lets you go more in-depth.
What Tool to Use for a Good Facebook Messenger Marketing Strategy
If you want to go into Facebook Messenger Marketing, the best tool you can use to optimise your campaign is a chatbot builder.
The Facebook Messenger Bot is great for establishing a handful of automated responses, but if you really want to leverage the social media messaging platform, a third-party bot is the way to go. And, there are a lot of them on the market, such as:
- MobileMonkey
- Chatfuel
- SendPulse
- Botsify, etc.
There are plenty of options, so instead of listing examples, let’s look at some of the most important features to look out for in a good chatbot builder:
1. The Building Process Itself
A chatbot is essentially a piece of software, and you can create it from scratch. But the purpose of the chatbot builder is to allow everyone, regardless of programming experience, to set up their own chatbot in order to start interacting with their audiences.
The easiest way builders allow this is through a drag and drop builder which allows you to basically create the chatbot and how it will interact with users. You can therefore visually see the journey potential customers will go through with the chatbot
2. The Features
The chatbot builder should provide the necessary features to support your goals in Facebook Messenger Marketing. Ideally, the platform should provide an easy way for you to set up different types of campaigns, track results, and easily make changes that are needed for optimisation.
For instance, if you want to run drip campaigns, the platform should enable easy to easily set up message sequences that allow you to nurture leads from the first moment you contact them. The campaign should be automated to a certain degree, such as beginning the sequence every time a particular event is triggered so that you don’t have to do it manually.
3. Personalisation Options
The biggest use of the chatbot builder will likely be its ability to send messages and interact with users. However, you want a chatbot that can communicate with audiences, not just provide ‘yes’ and ‘no’ replies.
Personalisation is key to engaging consumers through the messenger app, and can be achieved easily through:
- Using the person’s name
- Providing additional media such as images or GIFs
- Using ‘real’ language
- Learning from previous interactions to make their messages better
This can be a lot to take in, but remember that most of these tools offer free trials that allow you to test out the services before committing to a plan. You can run a few mock-up ads at a smaller scale to see if the platform provides what you need, and learn a bit more about what kind of messages your target audience responds to best.
Can We Help?
If you truly want to leverage Facebook Messenger Marketing, a well-rounded strategy will lay out the exact steps that will take you closer to your goals. At Australian Internet Advertising, we can help you design a strategy tailored to the specific needs of your business, whether it’s for Facebook Messenger Ads or wider campaigns on the social media platform.
If you want to learn more about our services and how we can help, don’t hesitate to reach out! You can contact us online, or give our office a call at 1300 304 640 to get started on making the most out of Facebook Messenger.
