7 Facebook Messenger Marketing Strategies

Facebook Messenger marketing is one of the most influential tactics available to marketers today.

Messenger marketing gains enormous scale when it’s backed by powerful conversation driven automated messages.

First, the 30,000-foot view.

Facebook Messenger Marketing is the use of Facebook Messenger as a conversational channel for reaching individuals at scale with targeted messages.

The concept is about as simple as it gets. You use Facebook Messenger to send messages to individual users.

But isn’t that kind of like email marketing?

Yes and no. Conceptually, it’s the same thing — a contact receives digital communication from a business.

But in practice, it’s very different. Messenger is conversational, interactive, and instantaneous. Email marketing tends to be more detached, impersonal and delayed.

We often think of social media as just the major social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But that thinking misses a big part — a bigger part, in fact — of social media. And that’s messaging apps.

According to BI Intelligence, more people are using the top four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) every month than the top four social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn). And it seems that the gap between the two lines is getting bigger.

Instead of being a one-to-many channel, social media is becoming a one-to-few — and often one-to-one — channel.

Facebook IQ conducted a study on the use of mobile messaging with 12,500 people across the world and found several promising trends among the people surveyed:

• Sixty-three percent said that their messaging with businesses has increased over the past two years
• Fifty-six percent would rather message than call a business for customer service
• Sixty-one percent likes personalized messages from businesses
• More than 50 percent are more likely to shop with a business they can message

If you are starting to think that messaging might be great for your business, read on to find out the seven ways of using Facebook Messenger for your marketing.

1. Deliver your content

The most common approach to deliver content to your readers is to use email. HubSpot (a market leader in online marketing, sales and customer service) wanted to find out if using Facebook Messenger is a better alternative. So instead of just asking people to fill out a form and get the gated content via email, they offered the option to skip the form and get the content via Facebook Messenger.

After four weeks of testing, they found a clear winner.

The Messenger strategy results in a 242 percent higher open rate and a 619 percent higher click rate.

2. Help your followers find the most relevant content

Besides pushing content to your followers, you can also use Facebook Messenger to help your followers “pull” content to themselves.

There are many great examples of this use case on Facebook Messenger. Many companies around the world have Messenger chatbots that can help their followers find articles that they want to read.

For example, you can find articles related to Elon Musk on TechCrunch, using their chatbot:

This turns things around for content marketing. You now have a non-intrusive way to deliver personalized content to your target audience.

3. Engage participants during event

Another way to use Facebook Messenger is to send important information and reminders about events that people have signed up to. Similar to the example above, we found that the response rate on Facebook Messenger was significantly higher than that on email.

Here’s a recent experience we had with a HubSpot event:

• We signed up for their Four Days of Facebook event through Facebook Messenger (which felt much nicer than filling up a form).
• The day before the event, they sent me a reminder with links to add the schedule to my calendar app.
• During the four days, they updated me about the day’s talk and sent me a link to watch the session online.
• At the end of the four days, they followed up to ask if I enjoyed the event.

The entire experience felt smooth and appropriate for an event on Facebook.

And it works well for events that are not on Facebook, too. For example, for their offline events, they made use of Messenger to allow attendees to receive real-time updates.

4. Generate high-quality sales leads

Since Facebook Messenger is still a relatively new and novel marketing channel, it is a great way to get people’s attention and to generate high-quality sales leads. The response rate on Facebook Messenger is incredibly high.

Obviously, numbers vary across the board – and better bot experiences with more engaged audiences are getting 80-90% response rates. While even the least favorable experiences are in the 50-60% range.

As an example, we built a Facebook Messenger chatbot for an international car dealership to help drive leads and sales for their auto dealers.

They ran click-to-Messenger ads with location targeting to reach their target audience on Facebook. When a person clicks on the ad to learn more, they are brought into a Messenger conversation with a chatbot that would ask a series of questions specific to the type of car they were looking for. (They also had the option to speak to a real sales rep, too.)

Within a few months, we reached more than 100,000 people and generated about 50 sales per month through the Facebook Messenger chatbot.

When we conducted a similar approach to generate leads through Facebook Messenger with another brand, they saw a staggering 477% reduction in the cost per lead, while lead quality only slightly decreased.

Our advice...
It might take a little muscle to build a Facebook Messenger bot to collect lead information, but the effort is well worth it. Use Facebook ads plus Messenger as a powerful one-two punch.

5. Re-engage potential customers

One thing you might be wondering is this: how do I get people to talk to me on Facebook Messenger in the first place?

Facebook ads.

There are two types of Facebook Messenger ads you could use. The first type, click-to-Messenger ads, which we mentioned briefly above, allows you to direct people from the Facebook News Feed to a Messenger conversation with you. The second type, sponsored messages, allows you to initiate a Messenger conversation with anyone who has messaged your Facebook Page before.

A great way to use these Facebook Messenger ads is to re-engage potential customers, such as people who have visited your pricing page but didn’t purchase your product or people who have asked you questions via Facebook Messenger before. For example, you can use the click-to-Messenger ads offer them a channel to ask any questions they have or you can use sponsored messages to send relevant content and offers to them.

6. Reach your target audience one-to-one

The Facebook News Feed is saturated with ads. Imagine being able to reach your target audience without all the noise. One-to-one

With Messenger ads, you can do just that. People will see your ad in the home tab of their Messenger mobile app. When they tap on the ad, they will be brought to your preferred destination — your website or a Messenger conversation.

But here’s something to consider: the reaction to such ads is mixed. While marketers are likely rejoicing at this opportunity, some people are finding such ads unpleasant. The best way to do this is the same as drafting quality email copy to increase open and click though rates and reduce email unsubscribes.

Messenger Marketing allows you to be interactive, conversational and engaging so you need to have a conversation with your subscribers to engage them about what they want to know, hear, see and purchase, rather than just try to sell to them! Give them options and let them choose their own journey to a solution they want.

7. Provide speedy customer support

The last strategy (of this list, there are many others though) for using Facebook Messenger is something you might be already doing. That’s providing timely customer support through Facebook Messenger. As Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert, suggests, social media customer service is the new marketing.

It’s clear that people prefer to contact brands through messaging than through other channels.

And they want a response from brands — a quick one.

As mentioned earlier, Facebook found that 56 percent of their study’s respondents would rather message than call a business for customer service. In a survey of more than 1,000 people, Sprout Social found that most consumers expect a response on social media within four hours (while brands take an average of 10 hours to reply). They also found that 30 percent of the people would go to a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond.

It’s very easy to get started with this strategy.

First, you want to allow people to message you on Facebook Messenger. You can enable this in your Facebook Page settings (1). Under the “General” tab (2), look for “Messages” (3) and click “Edit”. Then, check the box and click “Save Changes”.

Now, visitors to your Page will see a “Message” button on your Page, which they can use to initiate a conversation with you on Facebook Messenger.

As more and more people adopt messaging, the potential for you to market and grow your business through Facebook Messenger becomes even bigger. And Facebook is working hard to make Facebook Messenger a great channel for businesses. For example, Facebook created a new Messages objective for Facebook ads, which allows you to reach people who will most likely reply your business on Facebook Messenger.

We believe all businesses should follow this trend and not to be left behind. Here are the seven ways you can get started with Facebook Messenger marketing:

• Deliver amazing content
• Help your followers find the most relevant content
• Engage participants during events
• Generate high-quality sales leads
• Re-engage your potential customers
• Reach your target audience one-to-one
• Provide speedy customer support