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“Let’s say someone is new to Messenger… what would you tell them to do first?”

Remember the days before social distancing when you could do interviews in person?

Well, as a throwback to simpler times, I wanted to share this great conversation I had with Natasha Takahashi of School of Bots where we talked about how business owners can get started with Messenger marketing.

Messenger is a fast-growing communication medium with unbelieve open rates and click-through rates.

It’s also where a lot of your customers are already hanging out, so it’s important that you know how to use this channel to engage them in a conversation.

Some people think this technology is still too new to be used consistently or effectively, but we definitely don’t agree — we think you should get started right now!

So, what are the first steps in adopting Messenger marketing?

Watch the video for Natasha’s expert advice, or read the conversation transcript below.

Natasha Takahashi on Messenger Marketing

Ezra: Let’s say someone is new to Messenger. They maybe don’t have a Welcome Flow or much else set up yet.

What would you tell someone to do first? Would it be to make their Main Menu, a Welcome Flow, use Ref URLs to get people from their email list over to Messenger… What are the first steps to adopt this technology?

Because a lot of ecommerce business owners feel that the technology is too young, and they’re waiting for it to grow a little bit. So it’s like, “This is the playbook, then i’ll adopt it.”

We feel differently — like hey, you should use this now.

So what are some things that people should do?

Natasha: Yeah absolutely. I’d say the 2 parts of it are experience, which i’ll get into in a second, and then community obviously is really big too, just because there’s not like 100 videos available on this just yet.

So, finding community of people who are doing this well…

E: #SchoolOfBots.

N: #SchoolOfBots! Yeah, that’s really important because then you can get the support you need and see what people are doing and stuff like that.

But in terms of going into ManyChat for the first time, for example, first you want a Facebook page. Some people ask, “Should I build it on a demo page and then move it to my actual page?”

No. What I would suggest is to actually build your chatbot on the page you want to use it for, and then you can disable certain parts like you were saying — the welcome message, default reply, a couple other things…

You can essentially disable everything inside your chatbot inside ManyChat while you work on it. So that’s a great way to start testing and see what you actually want those messages to look like.

Then what we usually do is, it’s probably a 7-step process, where we go into the flows tab where all the meat and the content of the chatbot will live.

E: The equivalent of an email automation.

N: Exactly. And then you can create folders in there for all the content that you want to put into your chatbot. So usually what we’ll have is, from the marketing operations and sales umbrella, we’re like, “Okay are we going to be sending campaigns every week?” Then we’re going to create a folder called Weekly Campaigns.

Then from there we’re going to create a folder called Customer Support, so we can put in an FAQ and get people in touch with an actual human.

And then from there, from the sales side, we create our Money Flow — so it’s actually going to get people to your products and offer them at the right time. So we’ll make a folder for that as well.

And from there we’ll create the content inside the folders and start to think about what types of fields or yield scoring or tagging do we want to do. That’s going to be important…

E: For tracking…

N: Exactly. Like, essentially taking what you’re already doing with email marketing automation and moving it into the chatbot and then actually being able to later sync those through something like Zapier.

E: This was good! This was a really good overview to give people a sense that they should be doing this. This communication medium is on the rise. Everyone is using Messenger, especially our generation…

SchoolOfBots.co. Natasha Takahashi. Thank you so much for coming on the show. it was great.

N: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Natasha Takahashi is the Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of School of Bots, one of the leading chatbot education brands in the world for marketers, agencies, and teams.

Everything they teach comes from real experience serving 100+ clients in over 30 niches with chatbot services, and they aim to help businesses generate real, repeatable, and predictable results with chat marketing.