Conversational Marketing: How to Make Sales Using Messenger Bots

There’s a saying in the marketing world and that’s:

When you look at marketing channels - especially internet marketing channels - they seem to start off amazingly well, until everyone else hops on and the price skyrockets and the attention is lost.

You may feel you’re behind the game on social media or you haven’t even nailed email marketing yet. Facebook ads are costing you a lot and you’re losing hope.

Well, I’m here to offer you a solution.

It’s called conversational marketing and it all starts with Facebook messenger.

If you’re a personal trainer, or work in the fitness niche, your number one focus should be to understand your customer and get to know them one-on-one. That’s how retention happens. That's how you drive up the lifetime value of your customers.

How do you get these 1-1 conversations started? How do you get people to speak to you without thinking they are being sold to all the time?

Again, I have the solution and I’ve got a case study to show you...

Messenger bots allow you to converse with people on Messenger just like they do with their friends. These bots also allow you to create automations, build a subscriber list, and broadcast your messages. It’s all very similar to the strategies you're likely already taking with email marketing.

All it takes to get a Messenger subscriber is for them to interact with your bot. That interaction could be as simple as them clicking a button or tying a response to one of your posts or ads. It's really easy to engage people because they are already trained to use Messenger for, well, messaging.

Using software like Manychat, it becomes quite easy to run ads or to just ask people to message you and they get added to your list.

Here’s the hard part:

How do you scale this? How do you get 100s of subscribers who are part of your ideal client demographic?

Well, this is where the bots can get super effective...

Instead of simply using the bot as a lead generation form (like most people do), I use the bots like an automated quiz - the bots ask questions, people choose their answers and are then directed to a specific outcome based on those answers.

I create this "flow" or "sequence" in ManyChat and then market the quiz via Facebook ads to my target audience. People LOVE quizzes and the quizzes are SUPER interactive, so it doesn't cost a fortune in Facebook ads to build up your bot subscriber list.

Click here to visit the Rugby Warfare Facebook Page to test out the quiz I'm running right now. Just send us a message saying, “start quiz” to begin. This will give you some ideas as to what you could do with your brand.

Some ideas of Facebook quizzes you can use are:

#1 Fancy yourself a protein expert? Take our 2min quiz on messenger!

#2 The Fat Loss Quiz - Think you know all there is to fat loss? Take our quiz!

These quizzes allow you to educate your audience while building a rapport with them.

For the fat-loss quiz, you can simply ask them at the end of the quiz if they are looking to lose weight. If they reply “yes” that’s your queue to converse with them about your service. You could follow up manually in Messenger, or program your bot to offer weight-loss solutions that may be helpful.

It’s really that easy, and I got CRAZY results for my rugby clothing brand.

I run this quiz based on the Welsh rugby audience. I simply asked if they thought they were Welsh rugby experts. Anyone that got 5/5 then had access to our super Welsh deal which was 25% off all Welsh items.

Here are the results:

3078% ROI! Crazy.

I was also getting clicks for 0.04p from the Facebook ads, which is FAR less than you'd pay if you tried sending traffic to a page on your website. Facebook likes keeping people on Facebook.

The fact that these quizzes are SUPER interactive causes Facebook to boost your relevance score, which is why you can get super cheap clicks and cheap Messenger subscribers.

I’m now working on a quiz about flexible dieting for a fitness blog. With this quiz, we will ask people questions about their perceptions of dieting, their eating habits, and their goals. Based on their answers, we will sell them a relevant e-book available at the website's store.

(I’ll check in another time with the results for that!)

1. Firstly, head over to Manychat and set up a pro account. It only costs a few bucks per month.
2. Get familiar with the platform and watch their YouTube videos.
3. If you need any help with setting up a quiz, get in touch with me over at Flear Marketing.
4. Read the rules of using Facebook messenger broadcasts.

IMPORTANT: You can only send a promotional broadcast to subscribers who reply to a NON-promo message first. Once they’ve replied to your non-promo message (e.g. a quiz), then you can send them a promotional broadcast within 24 hours, and then once more 24 hours. After that, the cycle resets and you need to re-engage them with a non-promotional broadcast again.

I recommend you brainstorm some quizzes you can do for your target audience. Utilise this before everyone else jumps on it.

You’ll build up a Facebook messenger list which on average gets 80% open rates and 50% click through rates. Email averages 20% open rates and 5% click through rates!

By running quizzes on Facebook, you can quickly and inexpensively build up your Messenger list to 1000s of subscribers.

From this, you can do non-promotional broadcasts that will lead to 1-1 chats with your target audience about their fitness goals. Of course this will lead to more sales for your business because it all started with a conversation.

By creating a fun quiz and then chatting with them, with their best interests in mind, you’re already halfway there for winning them as a client.