20 Ways to Unlock Facebook Chatbots for Business in 2021

Facebook chatbots have come a long way since Facebook opened the gates to build Facebook Messenger bots in 2016.

Today there are 400K Facebook chatbots in the world, helping businesses get more leads, close more sales, recruit talent to their teams, and save money with automation.

A Facebook Messenger marketing chatbot has a wide range of functionality and at the end of the day, marketing bots have a direct impact on boosting your bottom line.

But how?

And more importantly, how can you leverage Facebook Messenger automation for your own company?

Read on for 20 ways to use Facebook chatbots for business today.

You’ll see real-life use cases of how to use Facebook Messenger for business.

Don’t have a chatbot just yet? Build a free chatbot using Customers.ai in under 5 minutes. It’s easy. Monkey see, monkey do.

How to Put Facebook Chatbots to Work for Business

Building a bot is surprisingly easy. However, achieving your goals with a Facebook chatbot takes a little more strategy.

We’ve broken down how to get started with Facebook Chatbots for business into three goals. Pick a focus to get started.

• Goal I. Prospecting & Nurturing Leads
• Goal II. Increase Conversions & Customer Retention
• Goal III. Automate to Boost Efficiency

Goal I. Prospecting & Nurturing Leads with Bots

Get more leads from Facebook, qualify those leads, and then nurture your leads to customers with multi-channel drip campaigns.

1. Grow Your Contacts to Generate Leads

Anytime someone responds to the live chat widget on your site, you’ll capture them as a contact in Customers.ai. This happens automatically. But, you can take that one step further with Facebook auto-responders. Basically, these posts auto-respond anytime a friend or fan interacts with your content.

Learn how to hack growth organically with a Facebook auto reply bot here. Facebook advertisers can use Facebook Click-to-Messenger Ads to grow contacts with ad budget and laser-focused audience targeting.

Check out these 4 lead generation tactics to get email addresses from Facebook in order to build your contact lists.

2. Run Giveaways to Get More Contacts

Who doesn’t get excited over a product giveaway? You can use your bot to inform your audience and encourage them to enter. Achieve that 20% average click rate.

This unicorn of how to do a giveaway on Facebook generated 200 quality leads that turned into major sales:

When you’re ready to launch your own Facebook Messenger chatbot contest take a look at Customers.ai’s guide and featured examples.

3. Share Insider Knowledge via Facebook Chatbots

Everyone wants to be on the VIP list, right? Offer your future customers a way to stay on the inside track with your company. Then make your audience feel important with Messenger updates.

Send out a chat blast to let them know about a new store opening or an exciting product announcement first. Sure, put the news on social media and send an email, but give a heads-up to your Facebook Messenger bot contacts first to treat them like the insiders they are.

Give Gary Vaynerchuk’s VIP Facebook chatbot a spin to see how Gary Vee keeps Messenger subscribers on the inside track.

4. Make Messaging Interactive & Engaging

Messenger chatbots are a great opportunity to showcase your brand voice and personality. Keep text succinct. Use GIFs, entertainment, and witty copy to connect with users.

Want to get on the list for Customers.ai’s engaging chat blasts? We always demonstrate the ways you can use Messenger chatbots in engaging and interactive ways. Subscribe to our updates and see what’s possible with Facebook chatbots 2x a week!

Yeah, we think our bot is pretty engaging, but don’t take our word for it. Check out what Baby Got Bot’s Kelly Noble Mirabella has to say about ways to humanize your conversational chatbot to make it super engaging and interactive.

Take a look at these 10 tactics guaranteed to increase engagement on Facebook for more ideas! 

5. Personalize Messaging with a Facebook Chatbot

With Messenger chatbots, you know who you’re talking to. That’s because it’s tied to the Facebook user. Optimize their customer journey to increase sales by sending customized content and products based on their interests.

It’s easy for marketers to leverage personalization with Facebook chatbots because you can use system attributes and custom chatbot attributes right in the messaging. Chatbot software, like Customers.ai, gives you the ability to segment your audience and serve up relevant content via lists, attributes, and tags.

6. Revamp Email Marketing

You have a whole new channel to reach your customers. And guess what? It has much higher rates of engagement than email. So, leverage that power to sell products online using chatbots. 

However, we’re of course not advocating for you to stop using email. Quite the opposite actually. One of the reasons why chat and email marketing tools aren’t competitors is the distinctly different communications style of each medium.

When prospects are chatting with a bot, they’re engaging with your brand, which is a great time to capture their email.

Chatbots are an excellent email capture tool because they’re interactive, convenient, and instant. Additionally, bots can be connected directly to an email marketing platform to send contact data, including email addresses automatically.

So, use an omnichannel chatbot in tandem with your email to grow your email list fast. Test out drip campaigns and experiment with messaging and psychological marketing principles to get results.

7. Qualify Leads using Facebook Chatbots

Screen your inquiries with questions so that by the time they get to your customer support chat team, there’s already information to act on.

Ask questions of your Facebook chatbot contacts and engage them in two-way conversations where you can find out what they like and need. This is an important lead qualification that your Facebook chatbot can do in a natural, mobile-friendly conversational interface.

A great way to engage contacts and get them the information they desire, is to build what’s known as a menu-based chatbot. With Customers.ai, you can add a menu-based bot to your website chatbot, Facebook Messenger bot, Instagram Messenger bot, and others.

Follow-up with your leads with a chatbot funnel designed just for them and with your sales and marketing as appropriate.

Learn how to create a Facebook Messenger funnel that drives conversions in this guide.

Goal II. Increase Conversions & Customer Retention with Chatbots

Next, we’re going to cover how to improve and groom customer relationships using Facebook chatbots.

8. Highlight Promotions via Facebook Chatbots

Sending promotional messages via chatbots should be commonplace for today’s digital marketer! Customers are more likely to open what you send out on a Messenger blast than they are the average email.

This is the latest, and most effective, form of direct response marketing, which is designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action. One direct response marketing example would be to send a chat blast to your Facebook contacts offering an exclusive deal via Messenger Sponsored Messages.

So, send out a sale announcement, as well as a 1-hour left reminder, or any combination that you’d like.

There’s an art and a science behind using Facebook chatbots to send promotional messages. Read the guide to Facebook Sponsored Messages Ads to learn everything there is to know.

9. Extend Special Offers to Key Audiences

Send out discounts and offers through Messenger, exclusively to your chatbot audience.

Check out how IMStonegifts sends exclusive offers to Facebook chatbot subscribers to drive sales and brand loyalty.

These work great and are one of the best Facebook retargeting strategies available to digital marketers in 2021.

10. Send Exclusive Invitations via Facebook Chatbots

Have a rewards program or a beta test running? You can target specific customers and invite them through your Messenger chatbot. It sounds simple, but it can do a lot for your customers’ experience.

Celebrity and social media influencer Christina Milian uses a Facebook chatbot as an ecommerce storefront and a channel for sending exclusive invitations to connect more deeply. 

Learn how Customers.ai was able to generate half of their event registratns at a CPA (cost per acquisition) of under $2 from this amazing Facebook Messenger ads example.

11. Make Checkout / Conversion More Engaging

Improve your customer’s experience with order processing. Using Facebook Messenger chatbots, you can offer up engaging order status updates every step of the way. Showcase your brand voice and make the waiting step of the process more enjoyable for everyone.

Get the complete guide to Facebook Messenger chatbots for ecommerce here.

12. Offer Add-Ons and Upsells via Facebook Chatbots

You know you can increase sales by upselling. So, don’t limit add-ons and upsells to email marketing and your site interface. Use your Facebook chatbot. And make it fun. If you know what customers ordered, you can now target them with complementary products.

There three big money-making tactics you can use to sell products online using Facebook chatbots:

1. Run promotions to chat marketing contacts.
2. Send highly personalized messages and ask valuable questions to gather feedback and data.
3. Send non-sales content to chat contacts to nurture, educate, and engage your audience.

Learn more here with this step-by-step analysis of how to sell products online using Facebook bots!

13. Get Customer Feedback using Facebook Chatbots

Ask for feedback and reviews with pre-filled buttons and easy-to-click designs. And then actually listen to that feedback. Not only can this help improve your product, but it’ll show you care about what your customers have to say.

This simple survey Facebook chatbot example will show you how easy it is to take a survey with a bot. And here’s the guide to how to run a customer survey with a Messenger bot.

Goal III. Automate to Boost Efficiency

Your Facebook chatbot is up and running. Now what? Make your job easier and start automating. This strategy is a no-brainer. Improve customer experience and save your team time.

14. Send Order Updates or Event Reminders in Messenger

If your customer or contact is connected to you in Messenger, or even signed up for that event or asked to receive order updates through Messenger, you can keep the chat convo going. Integrate your chatbot to your other business applications to give your customers a seamless experience while you save time through automation.

Even better, by using Messenger tools to get more SMS subscribers, you can implement automated appointment reminder text messages. 

Not only do scheduling assistant chatbots save you time and money, but just as important, an appointment reminder SMS bot is super convenient for your clients to use. Additionally, sending business appointment reminders to customers through chat reduces missed appointments by 26%, and 67% or people would rather text with a business about scheduling than by email or phone.

Learn how to build an appointment reminder text chatbot for Facebook or SMS to increase your bottom line with the clients you already have!

15. Be Available 24/7 with Answers to FAQs with Facebook Chatbots

Got a list of FAQs? Repurpose the content and add it to the Facebook chatbot. Not only will this create fast responses for your visitors (and everyone appreciates instant information) but it will improve efficiency. Now, your customer service team doesn’t have to answer one question dozens of times and can focus on other important tasks. 

Yes, you already have your hours and location on your site. But, don’t make your visitors search. Add the basic details to your Facebook chatbot: hours, location, contact information, maps. For easy accessibility, install the best Facebook chatbot on your website.

Ready to roll? Here’s how to answer FAQs in Messenger in 3 steps using Customers.ai.

16. Fix a Service or Support Bottleneck

Do you have an info@company.com email address that never gets answered? Or a few negative reviews because of a customer service line that’s not 24 hours?

Look for holdups and incorporate solutions in your Facebook Messenger chatbot. You can even notify a sales or customer support team if someone talking to your chatbot needs help. Jump into the chat conversation with live chat takeover any time. That’s the beauty of automation.

Furthermore, the best chatbot software should strive to create a better CX (customer experience) from the first touchpoint with a prospect to actions that help to retain long-time customers.

There are incredible benefits to gain from customer support chat software, such as:

• Increased customer loyalty, sales, and revenue as a result of live chat, according to 79% of businesses surveyed.  (Kayako)
• A 10% lift in AOV (average order value) when a buyer’s journey includes customer support chat. (ICMI)
• Chat support (41%) is preferred to phone support (32%), email support (23%), and support via social media (3% ). (Kayako)

And by using a unified omnichannel live chat inbox, you can field customer quesitons around the clock from your Facebook chatbot, your website, Instagram Messenger, SMS, and other chat channels! 

17. Drip Content in Chat for Increased Reach using Facebook Chatbots

White papers, eBooks, guides, infographics, tools like Google Chrome Extensions—if you’ve got it, send it. Push out in automated messaging sequences (aka drip campaigns) encouraging users to download the tool or content most useful to them. The more personalized, the better.

Designing and launching Facebook chatbot drip campaigns are free to do with Customers.ai! This interactive chatbot drip campaign example will give you a sense of what the experience is like for customers. Create a chatbot drip campaign for your business with this guide.

18. Get Better Survey Results using a Facebook Chatbot

Sending out surveys is a breeze with chatbots. You can even set them up on a drip campaign so customers get them 3 days, 10 days, or any interval, after their experience with you.

Facebook Messenger surveys created in a chatbot builder like Customers.ai are:

• Quick and easy to fill out.
• Mobile friendly.
• Have high engagement rates.
• Save your survey info in customer profiles.
• Allow for follow-up messages.
• Deliver super-high marketing value from both a data and conversion standpoint.

Get more responses by pre-filling answers so all users have to do is click. See chatbot templates here, including a survey chatbot.

19. Repurpose Content

Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you have content, you can get creative and reuse that content to delight customers with your chatbot. Segment users and push content related to their purchase or interests.

20. Automate Appointment Scheduling using Facebook Chatbots

In a service-based industry? Have workshops or tutorial classes? Automate sign-ups and appointment scheduling for a more seamless process.

When Sephora implemented its appointment scheduling Facebook chatbot, the rate of appointments rose 11%!

Facebook Chatbots: Important Next Steps

There are never-ending possibilities when it comes to these smart bots, so focus in on a few ideas and get a jumpstart on Messenger chatbot marketing today.

Have any questions? You know where you can reach us – right at the Facebook Live Chat bot in the corner of this page.

And don’t forget: