The Complete Guide to ChatBots for Messenger Marketing Funnels – Part 5
How Marketers can use Messenger Funnels
What if you could go back to the golden days of email marketing… getting 70% open rates and 30% Click through rates? What would that mean for your business? Right now maketers are getting 80%-90% response rates with Messenger Marketing
Want to know if Messenger Marketing is right for your business?
Get your Messenger Marketing Match Score…
The General Flow For a Messenger Marketing Funnel
- Deliver your lead magnet (e-book, quiz, or video)
- A fun and ultra engaging first interaction + (ask to talk again / tell them what will be coming)
- Educate and deliver value (could be daily tips or step by step process)
- Ask Qualifying questions (segment your subscribers)
- Soft sell in an educational context.
- Keep giving value & further qualify the lead
- Call to action
What a messenger funnel might look like.
Advantages of Messenger for Marketers
- Instant Response: As soon as someone engages with your chatbot, you can immediately push messages to them in Messenger with very few limitations.
- Automate workflows: the same way (and even better) than you would through email marketing automation.
- Relevant Content: Chatbots make personalization easy. Do it right and the prospect will think your offer was tailor made for them.
- Incredible Engagement: Typical Open rates are 3x-4x email open rates. Engaged Messenger lists are seeing 80% – 90% open rates.
- Run ads directly to Messenger: From Facebook ads you can open a conversation directly in Messenger. And you can retarget people who have already engaged with your bot.
- Send Location: has opened up an easy way to run location-based marketing campaigns.
- Promote live streaming events: Increase viewership
- Qualify leads: Asking qualifying questions has never been so easy & fun for the user
- Compliments your existing marketing: Chatbots can enhance the user experience across your whole marketing funnel.
Example Sequence #2
How to Qualify Your Leads in a Messenger Marketing Funnel More Easily than with Forms
Dollars to doughnuts your lead qualification starts with either capturing an email or a contact us form. Either way, the prospect HAS to fill out a form with information. And the more info you ask for, the higher barrier to entry and the more you’ll know about the prospect.
The formula has always been: More Questions = Fewer but more qualified Leads
With little exception that holds true… But, undoubtedly some qualified leads are abandoning the form before submitting.
We’re constantly trying new things to decrease friction and get better quality leads. But the problem is that traditional forms have an inherent flaw…
Formstack surveyed 650,000 of its form users. They found that lead gen forms (like content upgrades and gated content forms) have an average conversion rate of 17%. And multi-page forms have a higher conversion rate than single page forms.
Segment.com found a way to “increase the velocity & quality of leads” through frictionless signup. Segment pre-populates form fields for the user if data is available through an integration with Clear Bit.
Conversion rates went up 20%
The problem with traditional forms:
The interaction has to move to a different medium – email. And it’s not a seamless transition. According to GetResponse, in a typical double opt-in process, 20-30% of initial subscribers won’t confirm the opt-in. That’s a quarter of your list gone! Plus, people give false info.
“Research shows that 60% of consumers intentionally provide incorrect information when submitting their personal details online.”
Not a surprise – their age or Birthday is what people most often lie about. A fake birthday may not be the end of the world. But almost 33% of people give a fake email address and make up a name. Say goodbye to another 1/3 of your list.
That just doesn’t happen with Messenger Marketing. I’ll tell you exactly why in a minute.
With Messenger Marketing, you can qualify leads in a conversation fun way.
Swelly currently has over 850K monthly users. Users that LOVE to tell the bot about their tastes and preferences (some surprisingly personal). There’s an argument that people might be more comfortable revealing intimate thoughts with a machine rather than with a person. To the right is an example inspired by Swelly (that can easily be adapted to your lead qualifying process)
Imagine asking qualifying questions that your prospects had FUN answering?
This lets you better score leads, segment them, understand them, and personalize content.
No More FAKE Info:
Here’s a biggie. You’ll be 99% certain that basic information, like the prospect’s name and contact info, is true.
Because who uses a fake facebook profile? Not many people.
It’s estimated that only 4.7% of profiles are fake.
Just a guess, but I doubt those are the people who will be interacting with your business. A majority of these fake accounts were created to sell page likes through marketplaces like Fiverr. So there’s a darn good chance (better than 95%) that the info you’re getting is the real deal.
Gain Customer Insights
Every time a person interacts with your chatbot, you know exactly who they are and how they’ve interacted with you in the past.
On a website or even on a mobile app, most visitors remain anonymous. And a good percentage will lie to you about their identity when giving an email address. This makes getting good, clean customer data very hard with traditional methods. Not an issue in a chatbot. The more the person interacts the more data you’ll accumulate about that user. And that data should be saved to a CRM, or other database. To be used in all sorts of advertising and sales.
How do you do this?
The simplest way is to use a tag.
User does X gets tagged in the system with X complete.
You can store user answers as variables.
Ie. What’s your favorite brand of beer? Var favBeer = Stone
Export answers to your CMS or a spreadsheet.
Logistically it’s something that most chatbots won’t have an issue doing.
Bots make personalization easy and effective
According to Aberdeen, 75% of customers prefer personalized offers. This is true whether you’re marketing and selling directly to consumers in B2B.
It’s long been true that it’s hard to personalize marketing. Only 10% of marketers think they’re good at it. The extent of personalization for most is the first line of an email… “Hey $Fname, “
Mass email wasn’t made with personalized interactions in mind. Just wasn’t.
Personalization is hard on websites too.
Ideally, we’d be able to know if a visitor has been there before and show different offers, different CTA’s and even change layouts based on their previous actions and preferences. We can. But it’s not easy to do and it’s not cheap to do.
Messenger Marketing is the perfect vehicle for personalization.
With Messenger, you don’t ask for a first name. Because Facebook already knows the person’s real first name. You can ask someone to share their location. And they can -with one click.
Because of the conversation, Q&A style of interaction, Chatbots will accumulate massive amounts of data. Stored data should be used to personalize the customer experience.
- You can remind a user of an old answer.
- You can send them down a personalized path based on previous preferences.
- You can show different offers based on engagement
Personalization lets deliver the right content at the right time.
Easier Viral Sharing
Sharing features are baked into messaging platforms.
On Facebook someone can share an article or link directly from Messenger. Because people are already on a social network or messaging platform to use the bot, they’re more likely to share content.
How Messenger Marketing Fits in with Your Email List and the Rest of Your Funnel
Get higher user engagement and re-invigorate your marketing
Have you experienced the effects of Email Marketing Fatigue?
Are your open rates and click-through-rates down?
You’re not alone.
Email far from dead. According to Salesforce’s 2016 State of Marketing Report, “80 percent of marketers agree that email is core to their business.” And email still has a in impressive ROI – $38 for every $1 spent (as of 2015).
But email’s got some big problems. Email open rates are currently hovering around 34%. Just about the highest they’ve been since 2010. But, click-through rates (CTR) have been steadily declining. They’re now at 3%. The LOWEST they’ve been since 2010.
For the most part, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. According to these stats by mailchimp the hobby industry gets the highest CTR at just over 5% while the restaurant industry gets the lowest at 1.25%
The fact is, email marketing is getting harder. Because it’s a mature platform and there’s stiff competition for inbox attention. If you’re already sending emails, at some point you’re going to run into the law of diminishing returns. Sending one more email isn’t going to transform your business.
Chatbot Response rates
Andrew warner of Mixergy has been seeing 80% Open rates with messenger. Matthew Barby reports that in his conversation with Dimirty Kachin of Chatfuel, Dimitry reported that “Bot experiences with more engaged audiences are getting 80-90% response rates.” Worst case – the bots and companies who don’t have the chops for creating bots were still getting 35%-40% response rates.
