With all the competition that’s out there these days, every day lots of companies, from the smaller to the bigger ones, are trying different strategies to generate leads and increase conversion, however, they’re not seeing a lot of results. For example, they are spending lots of money on SEO or Google Adwords, but the outcome is not what they’ve expected.

Something lots of companies take for granted, is that potential clients and people in general, like to have a personal interaction before purchasing something. With this in mind, here I am going to show you how you can convert cold traffic into potential customers. And of course, increase your sales!

One of the biggest challenges a “marketer” has to face, is finding qualified prospects, and this is where Facebook Messenger and Telegram Messenger together with chatbot, becomes a tool that allows you to optimize time and process, and communicate with your audience the way they want to: One on One, with their mobile devices and when they need it.

NOW, YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING, WHY USE  MESSENGER  TO CATCH PROSPECTS?

Before going there, let’s see some of the not so evident benefits Facebook Messenger has over a landing page. This is something that not every business has clear. The average conversion percentage of a landing page is usually no bigger than 5-10%, meaning that you “loose” that 90-95% of potential clients that you already paid for.

“And this is where  Messenger’s Chatbots have an unlimited potential to increase the conversion rate and considerably improve the user’s experience, especially in mobile devices.”

THE MAIN BENEFITS WHEN IT COMES TO IMPLEMENTING A CHATBOT ARE:

• You don’t need to have a website or landing page, you can start selling straight from your Facebook page.
• The conversion rates are significantly higher. Completing the form is much easier and convenient for the user in comparison to sending the traffic to a landing page. Remember more than 90% of Fb users use a mobile device.
• You don’t lose that 90% of people that didn’t convert in your landing page, because from the moment the user clicks on any of the chatbot tools, they become a subscriber, this way you can keep track on them, even if they didn’t give you their email from the beginning.
• Facebook Messenger allows you to provide with Customer Service and information about your product or service in a quick immediate way without having to change platforms.
• Facebook Messenger is a very personal way to communicate with your audience.
• You can create sequences that can be personalized with the name and information from the user’s history.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use landing pages or a website and that you shouldn’t pay attention to your design. In many occasions, landing pages are the best option and can perfectly complement a Messenger campaign and vice versa. It’ll all depend on how you integrate the tools with your strategies, and the phase of the Shopping Cycle your prospects are in.

Facebook Messenger is a platform carefully regulated and, in this game, those who don’t follow the rules and especially those that did not add some value will be considered as SPAM and will never see results from this channel.

HOW TO GENERATE IDEAS FOR YOUR CHATBOT.  

Every successful campaign requires a fan strategic preparation, so, before starting to configure your tools, keep these points in mind:

1. Create your Client’s Archetypes. Before selling, you must know who’s your ideal client.
2. Do some research and find out what’s the biggest need or issue of your audience, and offer a solution, creating interesting and appealing content with images or video.
3. Define the goals of your campaign. What do you want to achieve with your chatbot? Defining this clearly enough will help you generate ideas for your chatbot and Facebook ads.
4. Consider how it is that this strategy can be used within your selling funnel or shopping cycle. Is not the same to communicate with someone that is already a client, than to communicate with a complete stranger.

YOU CAN USE A CHATBOT THIS WAY:

• TOFU – Discovering Phase: Is all about getting to know your client and gaining their trust. Initiate a conversation, ask questions or answer their questions. Once the relationship is built, you can ask for their contact information.
• MOFU – Consideration Phase: To create a tracking sequence and nurture your prospects.
• BOFU – Conversion Phase: Add a clear and motivating Call-To-Action that invites the prospect to become a client.

Once you’ve dedicated some time to consider your goals, you’ll be ready to set your strategies to convert cold traffic to long-term clients. 

Now, how can you do this? Let’s see this chain of events.

Potential clients with just one click the lead is yours! Once the chatbot is activated, make sure you start sending them information about your product or service that you know is going to be useful for them. This chain of content will make it more likely to convert cold traffic into a hot lead, and then, a potential customer.

Why using this? This type of strategy allows you to qualify prospects that are really interested in your product or service. When the live chat starts you can solve specific doubts and take that conversion wherever you want. But you need to gain that potential client’s trust first, and you’ll do that with the chain of content and by having a personal interaction with them.

Benefits. Just with the chain of content, the chatbot will do the job for you, and you’ll see an increase in your conversions. This saves you time and money. But if after all, that potential client still needs more information, you can offer a live chat service with an agent to clarify all of their doubts. However, if you have everything well specified in your content chain, this won’t be necessary.

Let’s see an example. Here the service we are offering is medical services membership for 2 specific cities.

STEP 1: Facebook ad. You make a call to the audience; do you need medical attention at a reasonable price? You show the benefits: Protecting your family is really easy! Now you can enjoy these benefits… with a payment of… and at the end, the Call-To-Action: Press “Send Message” and we will send more information to your messenger.

STEP 2: Starting message. When the user clicks on the add, they will receive a starting message on Messenger. If they don’t respond or don’t click on your answer, the sequence won’t start. To increase the response rate your first message has to be relevant to the promise of your ad, and motivate the user to take the desired action, for example: “click on the button” to read your info.

STEP 3: Provide with valuable information. If the beginning was successful and your sequence was activated, you can ask some questions that will help you obtain relevant information to improve the experience. At the same time, you can rely on the label system to keep segmenting your prospects.

STEP 4: Offer personalized assistance with a consultant. Once the user has interacted with the chatbot, you have some answers and the prospects have been labelled, you can offer a free consultation.

STEP 5: Chat. If now your subscriber decides they want to talk to someone, send a notification letting them know about the estimated time of response, and another notification to your team to let them know they need to get their hands on it as soon as possible.

There are several tools you can use to do this, that will allow you to not only to use it with Facebook but Telegram and Viber as well. These tools will not only work to send a chain of content once the lead has clicked on your ad, but you can also send messages to your subscribers with the latest news of special offers, kind of like what we do with email marketing campaigns, but better, as the opening rate with this tools is 80%, 60% higher than with mailing.

FLOW FOR GENERATING QUALIFIED PROSPECTS.

This method works well for real estate agents, service selling, consultancy, car selling, insurance selling and any other business that requires the contact’s information to track sales.

By offering useful content to your audience, this will help you caught their attention, as they’ll receive the content they subscribed to via messenger after they “click”. Once you’ve gained their trust, you’ll be able to communicate with them not only with a messenger but other channels as well.

Benefit. Of course, collecting a good amount of leads is great for closing deals, because you’ll have several opportunities to do it. However, more important than the quantity is the quality, is not about collecting leads just because, you need to make sure those leads have the potential to become long-term clients. And yes, a well-designed strategy is also helpful.  

In this example, you can see how we promote one of our webinars combining the use of a chatbot on Messenger to obtain the email, and the help of a landing page to conclude the register:

STEP 1: Facebook ad. Create an Ad with an image or a video inviting the audience to read your content or watch your video.

STEP 2:  Starting message. Similar to the first instructions create a relevant message that motivates people to initiate a conversation.

STEP 3: Provide with valuable information. Explain more information about your offer. Focus on highlighting the benefits of your offer and why the user should register right now. Remember the lead doesn’t register by just clicking the ad, they’ll be able to read the information you’re providing them first, so this is a good moment to start sending your chain of useful content and warm them up. For example: “Learn how to turn strangers into clients with a chatbot in your fan page. In this webinar, you’ll learn…”.

 STEP 4: Qualify your prospect. If you want, you can prepare a little form that will help you know more about your future client. Add some categories, ask when it will be the best day or time to schedule a meeting or contact them. In this example, we send the details of the register to the prospect’s email offering more information about the webinar, and a link to a landing page for them to be able to finish the register part. Now, if you want, you can do all this without leaving Messenger.

STEP 5: Collect the data of your qualified prospects. All the previews steps have been prepared for them to give us the information we really need: their contact information.

This sequence will allow you to promote valuable content such as blog articles, eBooks, infographics or informative videos together with a unique offer or a call to action at the end of the sequence.

Using this type of campaign will allow you to deliver value and interact with your potential clients.

It will position your brand and create a good impression, it is also an excellent way to nurture a positive relationship and creating trust with your prospects.

Now let’s see the example of this strategy:

STEP 1: Facebook Ad. In this case, let’s take as an example a post inviting people to comment the word “eBook” to receive the guide, and we’ve created a campaign with the goal of interaction to increase its scope.

STEP 2: The lead chooses the messenger they want to use, could be Facebook, Telegram or Viber for example. Also, you can qualify your prospect before offering the content, however, this is not extremely necessary and you can go past this because the main goal must be to deliver the valuable content as soon as possible.

STEP 3: Deliver the content. Is time for you to deliver the content you’ve promised. Don’t make it so difficult, it can be a series of explaining messages and you can add a PDF or a file with the content, a link to your Dropbox, google drive, etc.  Depending on your product or service, you can offer discount codes or coupons in case these strategies makes you closer to your goals.

Step 4: By this point, you already have a subscriber in your Messenger’s, however, the main goal is to generate a Lead/Register. According to new Facebook policies, you must keep track of your offer within the first 24 hours after sharing your last message. Also, another new Facebook policy is that they are going to charge you if the messages have a promotional character.

Ok, now that we know all of these… What should you do to create any of these strategies to catch prospects with Messenger’s chatbot?

To create any of the sequences we just mentioned, you can use one of the several Chatbots solutions available on the market at the moment, most of them are easy to use and offer functionalities that will allow you to configure these sequences and many more things.

EXAMPLES.

1. CNN

2. JOB PAL

3. HEALTH TAP

4. POKEMON GO BOT

Conclusion

This is a good time to adopt this technology and use it to your benefit. We can assure you that not a lot of your competition has implemented sales automation channels on Facebook Messenger, or Botfather in Telegram, and we also believe that not many of them are using one of these strategies to catch prospects with a chatbot on Messenger.

However, it shouldn’t be much longer until everyone starts using chatbots on Messenger. And, the more saturated this channel is, the less will the response rate be.

We are not hoping for this to last forever, so, start applying these strategies to convert leads into long-term clients with a chatbot on Messenger, and take advantage of it right now.

Want to know more? Get in touch  for a free consultation!

 

Vera Firman

Digital Marketing Director