Take a quick look at your marketing plan. Skip to the part where it talks about how your company are going to leverage messenger to market directly to your customers, and build a relationship based on open one-to-one communication.
Are you back? I’m guessing that didn’t take long?
Most businesses don’t have messenger as part of their marketing plan. They’ll surely have a website, social media and Google Ads so why no messenger marketing?
Here are some sobering statistics:
- Facebook messenger has 1.3 billion people using it every month.
- WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users with over 600 million messages sent each month
- Facebook IQ conducted a study on the use of mobile messaging with 12,500 people across the world and found:
- 63% said that they had increased their messaging to the businesses in the last two years
- 56% preferred to message than call a business
- 61% percent liked personalised messages from businesses
- 50% said they are more likely to shop with a business they can message
According to BI Intelligence, more people use 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.
If you’re looking for ways to get a better return on your social media marketing, then book a place on our Social Media Masterclass.
So, are you thinking messaging could be a nice addition to your marketing plan now?
Still not sure, here are a few more stats
In Australia, HubSpot were curious about how well messaging would really do, so they ran a few tests. So they ran a few tests against their email list for lead generation the results are very interesting.
- Email open rate – 32%
-
Messenger open rate – 79%
Pretty drastic difference I’m sure you’ll agree. So how did that translate into click through rate where it really matters
- Email – 2%
-
Messenger – 12%
A massive leap in click through we’re sure you’ll agree.
How can you use messenger as part of your marketing?
You’ve hopefully noticed, we’ve added messenger to our website now, it’s sitting down at the bottom right of your screen, go ahead and send our Facebook business page a message.
When you use messenger on our site, it picks up your Facebook account details and sends us a direct message so we can talk to you.
There’s no form to fill in, so no miss-typed entries, very little barrier to connect and much less spam. And with 1.3 billion users each month, you can pretty much guarantee all your customers have a Facebook messenger account.
But what about B2B we can hear you muttering?
The lines are blurring between people’s business personas and their personal life. Your customers want information and they want to do it as easily as possible. Yes, there’ll be B2B customers who don’t want to use messenger, but they can still phone or email you.
As an aside we get plenty of enquiries via messenger not just on Facebook but LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter as well as the phone, email and website forms – It can get a little exhausting!
If customers want your services they’ll contact you in a way that suits them, so make it easy.
How to add Facebook Messenger to your website
- Go to your Facebook Business Page and click on Settings
- Click on Messenger Platform in the Left-hand column
- Scroll down the page to Customer Chat Plugin and press Set Up
In the next screen you can set the language and greeting
Next set your response time and add customer colours
Then specify the websites you want it to appear on and send the instructions on installing to your website developer.
Installing the code should be really easy for your developer, if you are doing this yourself there are plenty of plugins for WordPress which will enable you to add the code to your site.
Managing your messages
Once you have this added, you can now look at adding a little bit more personalisation to your messenger.
On the Left-hand column click on Messaging. In here there are several settings.
Prompt people to send messages is a really good way to get them to send them – Click that on!
Set your out of office – People want quick answers but will understand if you’re not about so turn this option on. You can personalise this as well adding First Name, Last Name etc improves the feel of the whole system.
Show a greeting – This lets you get the conversation started and can be personalised too.
We hope you can see that setting up Facebook Messenger for your business isn’t that hard to do. And the rewards are pretty good if you manage it well.
