Traffic & Conversion

Chatbot Marketing: Why 2018 is the Year of the Messenger Bot

by Ezra Firestone




What’s your #1 opportunity this year?

The experts in this video agree: 2018 is the year to build a Messenger bot.

With way higher open rates and click-through rates, a Messenger subscriber is already 5-10X more valuable than an email address…

Meaning that right now, it’s one of biggest opportunities to grow your brand.

That’s why so many marketers (including me) have jumped on the Messenger train early — because it’ll never be this cheap or this easy again.

In this video, you’ll hear about the amazing opportunity of chatbots from:

  • Zenovia Andrews
  • John Lee Dumas
  • Mackenzie Lieberman
  • And Pierre Beaini

Enjoy!

Chatbots Don’t Have to be Complicated

Sure, there are marketers out there pushing the envelope of what brands can do with Messenger, but if you’re just getting started, you don’t have to make it complicated.

Boiled down, a chatbot is just another tool to communicate with your customers.

Someone messages you on Facebook and — bleep-bloop — a chatbot automatically messages them back your response.

The marketing principles stay the same, Messenger just lets you communicate faster and more directly.

Chatbots are the Future of Marketing

I believe within 5 years, Messenger will be the largest marketing channel in the world.

People will want to buy groceries, order takeout and call Ubers all without leaving the Messenger app — but we’re not quite there yet.

It’s still new for a lot of audiences, and Facebook is regulating how much marketing you can actually do with it.

Still, there are plenty of really cool ways to incorporate Messenger into your current marketing cycles. Here a few:

  1. Connect Messenger to your Facebook posts
  2. Create a Welcome Menu to generate leads from your fans
  3. Run free giveaways and contests to your followers
  4. Broadcast blog posts and videos to your list
  5. Use Messenger as a customer support channel
  6. Even build out entire automated sales funnels

Currently, 3rd-party chatbot technology is what makes a lot of this automation possible.

For my ecommerce brand, we use a company called ManyChat. (Full disclosure: I’m an investor in ManyChat, and I love them, but there are plenty of other great companies to choose from.)

For my brands, I think it’s more important to focus on ways to generate new subscribers than trying to make it my top revenue channel right now.

Subscribers will never be this cheap again, and building an engaged list today is the priority — though I’m still making plenty of sales.

But just like email, Adwords or Facebook, the brands that will really win big will be the ones who adopt it early.

How Two Top Marketers Use Messenger

I asked two influencers of the marketing world, Zenovia Andrews and John Lee Dumas, for suggestions on how you can use Messenger to grow your brand.

Marketer #1: Zenovia is the CEO of MaxOUT Marketing Agency and a successful author, coach and speaker.

She recommends building a simple Messenger funnel to help nurture leads:

If you already have a lead magnet in your marketing cycle — like a free article or report — try delivering that via a Messenger bot directly from your website or your fan page.

It’s a straightforward way to add new subscribers to your Messenger list, and it’s more personal than email when you follow up to offer more free content or move them along to your products.

Marketer #2: John Lee Dumas is the founder of the Entrepreneur On Fire podcast…

And for John, the most exciting aspect of Messenger is that it allows brands more direct access to their fans.

This can make it a phenomenal resource for content creation.

That’s why John wants marketers everywhere to get comfortable using Messenger to ask questions and send surveys and polls.

This is how marketers can get a closer understanding of their audiences and create better, more engaging content.

And it can even help you take the next step in creating products or services your community is already asking for.


Looking for an in-depth training on how I’m using Messenger to grow my subscriber list and generate sales? Check out this hour-long webinar I did recently. It goes deep into:

  • What’s possible in Messenger marketing
  • How to build a chatbot and grow your subscriber list
  • Running Messenger Ads to drive sales
  • My best ecommerce Messenger funnels
  • Retargeting with Messenger, and a lot, lot more


Highlights:
0:01 A messenger bot is the messaging app on Facebook
0:45 Leverage messenger bots
0:58 You can create a messenger bot funnel to generate leads
1:37 Building bots is not a difficult process

Click Here For Video Transcript

Pierre: For those of you that don’t know what a Messenger bot is, it’s essentially the Messenger app on Facebook, and there’s ways to create automatic responses and interesting and engaging ways to communicate with people using Messenger. You click a button that is an automatic response. So, it’s like, “Hey, have you ever heard of this product?” The automatic response would be, “No, I haven’t.” And then, it leads to the next message.

John: Build your Facebook bots. It sounds confusing, it sounds techy, and it’s so not. You can literally Google it. You can go to YouTube, see how to build a Facebook bot, and just start having these type of conversations with people on Facebook Messenger.

Zenovia: My number one business hack right now, 2018, would be to really leverage the Messenger bots right now. The conversions are really great. So, for example, if you are, any type of business, it could be law, it could be medical, and you’re trying to generate leads, one of the things you could do is create a Messenger bot funnel where you’re just basically generating leads based off of interest from people viewing your website, a free article, a free report.

Mackenzie: In my business right now, I’m most focused on implementing Messenger bots that are very beneficial, not only to my clients, but also to the customers. That’s the main goal, is to have a win-win situation between the two. And so then, that way, users and subscribers will have a positive experience with bots and not a negative one, so that way, it doesn’t negatively affect future implementation with bots with other businesses.

John: It’s not a difficult process. It’s very simple. It allows you to glean so much information from people that are already connecting with you via Facebook Messenger. Send them a poll, send them a question, utilize Facebook bot for that, and that’s going to allow you to get all the information you need to then, again, take that next step and potentially create a product or a service, to try to build a community around the biggest pieces of information you’re getting back from that communication.