As customers rapidly embrace messaging-style communication with brands, the need for businesses to have messenger chatbots is growing daily.
Given Facebook’s large audience, it has become more imperative for brands to have a Messenger chatbot. This prospect is made even juicier with Facebook’s plan to integrate Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram direct messages in a way that allows messages to be sent across any of the platforms without switching apps. That’s a sea of over 2.5 billion monthly users to tap into!
What is a Facebook Messenger Chatbot?
Want a succinct description of a Facebook Messenger Chatbot in 57 characters? It’s a chatbot that lives and works in Facebook Messenger. In other words, it is a piece of software that relies on code and a set of predefined responses (and in some cases AI) to hold engaging, interactive and human-like conversations on Facebook Messenger.
At the most recent F8 conference, Facebook announced that over 300,000 chatbots are active on their bot platform, facilitating a good chunk of the 20 billion messages exchanged monthly between businesses and customers.
According to Bot Academy, the great thing is that “Facebook wants you to create bots”. After all, the social network is investing heavily in Messenger and working aggressively to make it easier for brands to implement innovative chatbot ideas.
So, Messenger has the reach and Facebook is working to make your ideas a reality. But that brings us to a big question: “how can I build a chatbot for generating leads?”
Designing your Messenger Chatbot for Lead Generation
Chatbots can be considered as lead generation tools. In other words, one of the biggest benefits of a Messenger bot is its lead grabbing capability. Just being online 24/7 means that every visitor on your Facebook page is a potential lead. Messenger bots can easily capture and qualify prospects. After that, it’s just a matter of nurturing them until the deal is closed. Here are some of the tips and best practices to keep in mind when creating a Facebook messenger chatbot tailored for lead capturing.
- Define your goalRemember it’s “ready, aim, fire!” and not the other way around. Chatbots can be used for customer service, product marketing, discovery, sales and more — but that also means it’s easy to get sidetracked and distracted.From the get-go, it’s important to define the goal of the chatbot building project, so that you are focused on creating a strong narrative and chatbot flow that supports that target.
- Personalization is keyThe essence of a Messenger-Based Sales strategy is delivering a personalized and real-time experience throughout the customer journey. Design your chatbots to follow different routes based on the lead’s preferences.For example, let’s assume your business offers different products depending on the size of your customer’s business. During the initial lead qualification phase, your bot can ask a question to determine the size of the business. Based on the response, the bot will show them the suitable offering, filtering out the other options.This means less information for the lead to think about. Less information begets fewer questions, resulting in shorter decision-making time and improved purchasing ease for your customers.
- Get the marketing and sales teams on boardMost likely, your marketing and sales teams know your ideal customers more than any other team at your company. So get them involved. They will be excellent consultants for shaping the narrative and flows of your chatbot.
- Short and direct is bestAlthough Facebook Messenger is optimized to display your messages nicely on the desktop app, it’s crucial to keep your chatbot’s messages short, direct and relatable to your audience. In other words, get straight to the point quickly. Remember, nobody likes (or even reads) those long broadcast messages.
- Know when to pass the baton to a humanChatbots don’t have the ability to understand some nuances in human communication. At least not yet. So while building your bot, pick out typical moments when your bot should notify a sales rep and pull them into the conversation. This could be when the bot doesn’t understand the customer, or during milestones like when a lead has been qualified or moved to another stage of your pipeline.
- Use well-targeted Messenger adsTo drive even better results for your Messenger bot, use well-targeted Messenger ads if possible. These ads will help send interested people into conversations with your business. You can also create sponsored messages to retarget your customers.
Bonus tips:
- Make it easy to respond with answer buttons to speed up the conversation
- Make it easy to opt-out
- Be upfront about what data gets used and stored
- Avoid spamming (the fastest way to get prospects to opt-out)
- Set up, analyze, learn, improve and repeat
How to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger?
Now you know what Facebook Messenger Chatbots are and how to optimize them for grabbing leads. It’s time to build one.
First of all, you can build a Facebook bot by coding it yourself. However, since not everybody is code-savvy, there is an easier option. If you don’t have any coding skills, you can start building a chatbot today on any of the many visual chatbot building platforms out there.
Because it has a 100% integration with messaging apps, using it comes with one game-changing advantage: after you’ve built a chatbot for Facebook Messenger you can deploy it to multiple messaging platforms (like Instagram, Telegram or Skype) in just one click. 🤩
Create a chatbot with no coding skills with built-in Salesbot builder.Learn more
There’s no better time to build and implement a Facebook Messenger chatbot as a lead generation software than today. Facebook is there to help you create bots. Plus, their plan to integrate Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram presents the prospect of an extensive reach.
On top of all that, Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, will let your customers buy things or send money with ease and at nearly zero fees. Build a Facebook Messenger bot for your business today and start reaping the gains before it becomes mainstream.
