Every month, there are 2 billion messages exchanged between businesses and consumers alone. And studies have shown that being able to chat with a business socially makes 63% of people feel more positive about a brand. And just over half of consumers agree that social dialogue helps build trust.
After you’ve worked hard on perfecting your service or product, building a team, designing a site with WordPress web hosting, etc., it’s time to use these statistics to your advantage. Fortunately, although Facebook Messenger is primarily used to chat with family and friends, it’s growing as a business tool and there are several ways you can use it to grow your business.
Customer support
Customer support is becoming increasingly important in today’s business landscape, where competition is fiercer than ever. In fact, some may argue that customer service is the most important area for business. According to Marketing at Work, the average American business will lose between 10 to 25 percent of its customers each year. Furthermore, Harvard Business Review learned the average business businesses lose half their customers every five years. And lastly, every year, bad customer service cost businesses an estimated $75 billion.
As you can see, how you treat your customer service strategy can make or break your business. Facebook Messenger is a great communication channel to help you improve your customer service. There are several Facebook chat bot tools like ChatFuel and WeChat that make it easy to spearhead your service efforts. Not only can you reduce the labor costs that are associated with customer care, but you can make it easier for your customers to have more consistent access to your business. Many of today’s chatbots are extremely advanced, allowing your business to capitalize on every hour of every day.
Email marketing
Believe it or not, you can use Facebook Messenger as an email marketing tool. Programs like Botletter make this possible. With Botletter (self-described as a “Mailchimp for Messenger”), you can easily create drip campaigns that live within the social network. And studies have shown that, as of now, this is actually more effective. A traditional campaign will generate email open rates that are in the 20% and below range, while open rates for campaigns delivered through Messenger can be up to 10x higher than the average. It’s important for businesses to reach their customers where they’re most active, and to take advantage of the fact that delivering content through these social networks is still considered somewhat of a novelty.
Push an email opt-in
As previously mentioned, Facebook Messenger currently has a higher potential for open rates than traditional email. However, this doesn’t dispute the fact that email is still currently the preferred method of communication between consumers and brands. This is why it’s also important to have a traditional subscriber list for email campaigns. However, soliciting sign-ups can be very difficult. For this reason, using Facebook Messenger as a tool to push your opt-in forms is a great way to both communicate via social and still acquire the coveted consumer email.
Even marketing
Facebook Messenger is also a great way to spearhead your marketing efforts. For example, marketing automation platform HubSpot uses Messenger to send important updates regarding events. According to them, the response rates they receive are much higher than with email. Not only do they send updates about their events, but they also allow attendees to sign up through Messenger, which offers a much more seamless and personalized experienced than by filling out a web form or replying to an email. At the end of the event, they used Messenger to further request feedback about the event.
Create click-to messenger ads
You can generate high-quality leads by creating click-to ads on Messenger. And that’s exactly what marketing agency Valassis did. According to the company, they used click-to Messenger ads that were tied into location services to communicate with potential customers that wanted to learn more. When a person clicks it, they would be taken to Messenger where a chatbot asks a series of questions and delivers the most pertinent information. They were able to get 50 sales per month with this method alone.
