Rather read than watch?
Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.
Howdy, chatbot fans! And welcome back.
In this lecture we’re gonna talk briefly about the size and scope and potential power of this industry and using Facebook chat bots on Facebook.
So a couple advantages to using Facebook bots, but first of all why should you even care about facebook messenger bots? Well, take a look at this chart. This orange line over here represents the big four messaging apps and as you could see right around Q1 of 2014, right over here, the big four messaging apps became more popular used, more frequently, by the big four social networking apps.
Which means Facebook messenger, and this is actually the case today, Facebook messenger is by far a more popular and more used app than Facebook itself. And just think about how crazy that is the problem is. Only 1% of businesses are able to engage with their customers automatically and that scale using chat bots, which is what we discussed before, because no one knows how to code, or very few people know how to actually write code for Facebook chat bot API. So this is the hottest space in digital advertising today.
Let’s take a look at the most popular messaging apps in the US – and this is by monthly active users – Facebook messenger by far has the most monthly users at around one hundred and three and a half million active monthly users. So not only is it by far the most popular messaging app, it’s also the only messaging app with an API. It’s something that we mentioned, but just this chart just gives you a sense of scale of just how much bigger Facebook messenger is than any other chat platform.
So if you’re interested in getting involved in a chat platform and, again you might think that this information is stupid or it’s irrelevant, it’s not. Because you could take these slides and you could show them to your boss. You could show them to your partners you can get corporate buy-in by having them understand how big of an opportunity this actually is. Just briefly Facebook messenger users, this is data put together by TechCrunch, has now reached 1.3 billion. That’s a crazy number
There’s 1.3 billion active users on Facebook messenger, so it’s worthwhile to engage with your customers where they are. Your customers are on Facebook messenger, they’re talking about your brand, they’re talking about your company, your products or services, or at least your market and your industry with their friends and connections on Facebook. You have the opportunity with bots, good Facebook bots, to interject yourself into that conversation and actually engage with them.
But let’s talk for a moment about engagement rates. Facebook messenger bot engagement rates are 10 to 80 times better than email or newsfeed engagement rates and that is a metric which is not only true but it’s astounding, literally astounding. Most of you have run email campaigns before most of you have used you know tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact or HubSpot to send out email marketing campaigns, drip campaigns and that’s a good thing to continue to do. It’s still a very powerful form of marketing because essentially it’s still free once you have a list. Of course your typical campaign will probably generate 5 to 10% open rates a really good campaign could generate 20 to 25% open rates, but that’s hitting the the top of your typical high-level mass email campaign. Facebook newsfeed, when you post something organically to Facebook in your newsfeed, it has a 0 to 1% organic post visibility. These are actual metrics.
There’s a number of different ways to use bots one of them is a blast one of them’s a drip campaign one of them is a Facebook message guard. Another one is actually creating Facebook messenger ads and we’re gonna talk about all of those.
I’m sorry for speaking so fast, but I don’t want to get bogged down in what’s coming, but the messenger blast, which is one of the most powerful features of Customers.ai, gives you – if you do it right and and I have done this over and over and over again and I’m still like freaked out by how high these engagement rates are – 70 to 80% open rates within the first 60 minutes that means and I’ve seen them at 95%. And I’m telling you I don’t want to say 95% like in my slide because if you don’t get 95%, like, you’re gonna be upset at me.
But easily 70 to 80% open rates 50 to 60% engagement rates off the charts people actually engage and these engagement rates don’t necessarily apply only when the customer or the prospect does not know this is a bot. I have bots that I built – and we’re gonna build these together – that literally start off ‘Hey (first name), it’s your friendly neighborhood Facebook messenger bot!’ and you’re just totally upfront about it that I’m a bot. And you still get these incredibly high engagement rates so that’s a massive, massive reason to take this very seriously.
Because there is no other marketing channel right now that exists and I’m telling you this and I mean this sincerely, because I I this is what I do for a living. All I do all day is run campaigns on these different marketing channels; there is no other marketing channel that exists today that has these sorts of engagement rates. It’s it’s off the charts.
Live chat right could be slow, could be frustrating. You need to staff 24/7, right?, waiting. And you have all done this. You go online, unless you you’re dealing with Zappos, which hasn’t. But you’re not Zappos, right?, as Zappos has a great great customer service team they’re known for that. But most companies are not Zappos.
Waiting in chat queues on live chat just to ask directions, get a quote, to see if an item is in stock, right?, it’s so inefficient. It takes so much time. It’s so frustrating. And that’s from the customer’s perspective. From the companies, from the brands perspective, they have to staff and pay actual people to respond to routine questions 90% of the time because 90% of chats are just routine questions that could be answered with bots and that could be answered better faster. And again, the key here is at scale, right?, so you have that expense of being staffed.
You can’t with live chat on the website. You can’t blast a marketing message or a sale or a new coupon to thousands and tens of thousands or even millions of engaged prospects at once with Facebook messenger marketing through chat bots. You can do that with live chat. You can’t automate a drip campaign which is like basically taking complex email marketing campaigns that take a long time and are don’t have a fraction of the current engagement rates as Facebook.
Messenger marketing doesn’t create a drip campaign and Facebook messenger, you could you could do that with Facebook messenger so it’s it’s big. It’s big, it’s highly engaging and it’s significantly better than the other alternative to chat, which is, you know, live chat at this point.
Another thing that’s really important is thinking about mobile. In particular, this type of marketing has the opportunity, it has the ability, to change the game entirely for you when it comes to mobile engagement rates, mobile conversion rates so take a look at some of these metrics when it comes to mobile versus desktop page views and total time on site.
Okay, over between 2016 mobile page views went from 40 and this is the total share of all page views and time on site for four websites 41 to 53%, right?, while desktop which is the light blue one from 59 to 47%. Mobile gets more page views then desktop does now and it’s been doing so for a year time.
On site people are spending more time on mobile 40% to 49% while desktop one from 60% to 51%. Okay, this is extremely important because this trend is continuing. More and more people are engaging with brands on mobile devices than they are on desktop and this is different than saying that mobile is increasing. Mobile has been increasing for many years. It is now more common or more likely that a customer is gonna look for your brand and interact with your brand on mobile then it is for desktop. It’s a massive, massive tectonic shift in the industry and it has to be talked about for a very specific reason. And that reason is because conversion rates on mobile are still so abysmal.
This is a table that shows conversion rate or typical conversion rate by device in the retail industry. And every industry has different has metrics, but this paints a very accurate overall picture so in 2015, 2016 and 2017 desktop – if you look down the line here – you know 3.2 to 3.9% typical ecommerce conversion on desktop. Tablet in the 2% range. And then look at smart phones. Right? Smart phones over here – 0.9% in 2015 – in 2017 and went up to 1.3/1.4%. Right? Still less than half of what desktop conversion rates are, right?, so more and more of your customers are using mobile devices more and more customers are spending time on your mobile website. More so than they are in desktop, yet conversion rates are so terrible on mobile phones because the experience has never really optimized for mobile so many brands have been so slow. And I’ve been telling I tell this to my clients.
Every day, I don’t think a day goes by without how, without having this conversation you need to redo your site. No don’t just make it responsive. Restructure the content from a mobile-first perspective. You can’t allow your customers to have to hunt for 15 minutes on a slow lagging site scrolling for three minutes to find a customer service number, or to find directions to your store, or to find basic product pricing information. It’s a disaster. The problem is it’s very, very expensive to go and redo a big website. It’s expensive. It takes time; it takes months. It takes planning. It takes conversion optimization specialist, it takes market research, it takes usability testing. All these sorts of things. So how do chatbots solve the mobile problem?
Well, the Facebook Messenger bot experience is completely mobile optimized, right?, that’s the first step. The entire experience of a customer or a prospect engaging with your bot through messenger it is it’s an app. It’s a chat app. There is nothing in the world more mobile optimized, more mobile friendly. You’re able to prime users and give them essential information about your product and brands or services before they visit your mobile site. This is incredibly important to realize and to think about. And when you start actually thinking about this you’re going to start getting some good strategies for how to build a mobile bot.
So start writing down on scratch pad some ideas. If you’re an auto transport company you’re able to build a custom quote engine using a chat bot so they don’t have to go to your site. And before they go to your site to get additional information (or they might not even have to go to your site at all cuz we’ll talk about strategies like that shortly) you can actually produce a quote for an eight hour auto transport, or a quote for a doctor’s visit, or a quote for a custom catering business and that could all be done through chatbot marketing.
Imagine if I was looking for a pair of shoes and I chatted the company through Facebook Messenger, I was talking to a bot, and I said, Hey guys, do you have a size 15? I have a freaking large foot. I say do you have a size 15 of this shoe in stock?’ And they got back to me. They’re like, No, we actually don’t have this stock of this shoe in a size 15, but we have these four shoes in a size 15.’ They spit those shoes out to me with links to where I could buy them. That all took place on Facebook messenger and imagine how frustrating that would be if I had to go to a mobile site.
You’ve all been, you’ve all tried to shop ecommerce sites on a mobile site. And if, and unless it’s like the best most optimized app in the world, unless you’re Amazon or Wayfarer, it’s annoying to have to go and filter by size and filter by style.
They sent me links to the size that I need, that are in stock. Right? Crazy, crazy efficient if people want your store hours, or directions to your store, or store locations, just other pricing information, basic facts, frequently asked questions about your products or services – all that could be done on the customers own schedule. When they want to look at their messaging app, when they want to engage, it can be done at scale for free. It’s a thousands of prospects at once right without them ever having to go to your mobile site. So it’s wild, so there’s no more hunting for customer support numbers, FAQ, store locations and things like that.
If you do this right, you can get your prospects from the top of the funnel right when they’re just in the awareness stage and my other courses we’ve talked about the Aida Boni final awareness
interest desire action. You could take them from the awareness stage – ‘Oh, I became aware of that this product or service exists’ – and through the Facebook messenger platform I’ve made you interested, I’ve made you desire it and now I could even get you prompt you to take an action, go to the site and buy or sign up for a webinar, or register for an event right within Facebook messenger. So you could supplement the poor mobile experience that you have. You could even replace, you could literally replace the mobile experience, that you have by bringing your website experience bringing your website funnel into Facebook messenger. It’s a wild, wild concept. Like you could.
You might have spent – and I’ve done this – myself and four clients spend hours and weeks building landing pages, building a funnel, building forms, building a checkout process. You could take that experience which is not very mobile friendly, as indicated by the poor conversion rates, you could take that all and you could literally reconfigure and redesign it for the Facebook messenger platform through a chat bot. And have it work so much better so much more profitably so much more efficiently. It’s extremely exciting, as you could tell, I’m excited about this because I’ve seen it at work.
I’ve been doing this and it like. I said a few times it blows my mind.
Now that you have a sense of why this is so fantastically huge and big we’re gonna do a quick next lecture that talks about just some differences between conceptual understanding of how to go about and best practices for thinking about Facebook bots.
First let’s say you know your traditional email marketing campaigns and then we’re gonna start diving into a lot more exciting things, but I hope you’re finding all this stuff useful as it is. So anyway, thank you for joining me for this lecture and I look forward to seeing you in a few seconds in the very next one.
