Do you find yourself suffering from low conversion rates on your Facebook ads? Are you struggling to keep up with the volume of incoming messages on Facebook, and losing sales because of it?
Today we’d like to highlight an often overlooked, but incredibly valuable, feature on Facebook and Facebook ads: Facebook Messenger Chatbots.
What Are Facebook Messenger Chatbots?
If you’ve been on Facebook at all, you probably know what Facebook Messenger is. It’s their built-in messaging platform, which could soon be merged with Whatsapp and Instagram messages.
A Facebook Messenger Chatbot is, quite literally, a chatbot that integrates directly with Facebook messenger and allows you to have conversations with customers using pre-programmed responses.
This can serve as an amazing tool for improving conversion rates on Facebook ads and automating some basic customer service queries.
It’s far from perfect – but there are tons of reasons you might want to check them out, which we’ll go over next.
Why Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots?
The main use we’ve found for Facebook Messenger Chatbots is dramatically improving open rates, conversion rates and cost-per-conversion when running Facebook Ads.
You can integrate them into either your “organic” Facebook page – when users message your business via your page – or into your Facebook ads strategy.
A case study by Mobile Monkey found that Facebook Messenger Chatbots got, on average, a 10-80x better response rate than Facebook news feed ads, or email marketing.
Our own experience corroborates this, we’ve seen amazing results using these to run ads for certain clients.
Finally, they can be relatively simple to set up (as we’ll go over next).
How to Set up Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Using Facebook Messenger API
There are two main ways to set up Facebook Messenger Chatbots for your business.
The first method is more difficult but more customisable to your needs. That is using the built-in Facebook Messenger API to program a custom chatbot for your business’ page.
To do this you obviously need some coding skills or access to somebody who does, but the Facebook API is available 100% for free – so you save on costs too.
They have extensive documentation about how to use, and implement, their API – so take a look here if you want to go that route.
Using Prebuilt Solutions
The second method is to use a prebuilt solution, of which there are many. Research the best tool that matches your price point and use-case, and choose one which suits you.
They’ll then walk you through programming your chatbot – or let you do it yourself with an easy-to-use interface.
We recommend Mobile Monkey as a platform with a great free version, Botsify for those with no technical expertise (they have a lot of great templates) and WP-Chatbot for an easy plug-and-play solution for WordPress sites.
General Tips for Setting up Facebook Messenger Chatbots
When setting up your chatbot, there are a few things to look out for.
Firstly you want to give users enough freedom to interact with the bot – but not too much. Too much freedom and you risk losing them with irrelevant responses and off-topic information.
A great option is to offer them a leading question, and a preset list of potential responses.
For example:
“Hi there *Name*, and thanks for reaching out to us!
First thing’s first, are you looking to upgrade your insurance policy while reducing monthly premiums?”
“Reply: <Yes> <No>“
This then serves as a great qualifying question, to determine if this person is a potential customer or not.
Who Should Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots?
Functionally, setting up Facebook chatbots are very similar to setting up email campaigns. You choose a message you want to send users and schedule when to send it.
The difference is that you can be a lot more dynamic in how you interact with users. You can ask them leading questions, and funnel them down a particular sales process from there.
Or, you can gather some qualifying information before having a real salesperson step in. The possibilities are endless.
For these reasons, anybody can benefit from trying out Facebook Messenger Chatbots – but some businesses may benefit more than others.
The only way to know for sure is to try it out yourself.
Conclusion – The Place For Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Facebook Messenger Chatbots, in our experience, can form an amazing basis for a Facebook marketing campaign – when you really put in the effort to make them work.
You can think of them as a better version of an email, or an alternative to a landing page, that keeps all your interactions on Facebook.
Despite this, they may not work equally well for all industries. If your customers tend to have very intricate questions – the bot may struggle to answer them sufficiently and lead to frustration among your customer base.
The best way to know for sure is to try them out yourself – and see where they fit into your business’ marketing strategy.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce and lead generation digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
If you need any help running your business’ Facebook marketing strategy, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
