B (3:01)

Yeah, so basically you'll need a third party software or service that you can connect to your Facebook page. There's quite a few out there. The two that I'm most familiar with are manychat and chatfuel. I personally use manychat for all of my campaigns as I found it to be basically the easiest to use. And they have a fantastic community, they have a Facebook group where they answer any questions you have about Messenger. And manychat is a fantastic platform to use. So I Personally recommend using ManyChat if you want to create a Messenger bot for your business.

A (3:36)

So how do our customers opt in to this? Do the people you're contacting opt in to receive this? How does this work?

B (3:43)

Yeah, so we're only sending messages to people that have actually opted in. So similarly to email marketing, in order to get on someone's list, you have to opt in. And with messenger, there's various different ways that you can opt in. You can have someone go to a specific URL, you can have them click on, for example, a Facebook ad. And there's many different ways that someone can subscribe to your messenger sequence, but you can't send someone a message until they're subscribed.

A (4:09)

Okay, and so how would you go about building your initial list?

B (4:13)

Yeah, so that would definitely depend on kind of where you're at with your business. If you already have an audience, if you already have an audience on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, or if you already have an email list, you can use those existing audience to send people into Messenger. And the way that you can do that is simply by sending them a link. You can just say, hey, you know, we have this, maybe like a free resource or something like that. If you click this link, we'll send it right to you. They click that link, it takes them right to Facebook messenger, and then once that happens, they're subscribed, they can get whatever you promised them and then basically they're opted into your list. So in terms of getting people onto your list, you can leverage your existing audience for that. And then the way that I focus on for most of my clients is actually using Facebook ads. And with Facebook ads, you can have it set up very simply where all you need to do to have someone subscribe into messenger is have them click on a Facebook ad, then click once within Facebook Messenger. Whereas if you want someone to subscribe to your email list, they have to click onto a landing page, then type out their whole email and then click Submit. Whereas with messenger it's literally just two clicks to get someone opted into your list.

A (5:24)

Okay, great. So I've got that. That's straight in my head. What I want to know. Now you mentioned kind of chatbot technology and sort of automating sequences. Tell us more about that. How does that work? How would you employ that within a Messenger campaign?

B (5:40)

Yeah, so the purpose for follow up sequences is really just to kind of keep your audience engaged and get them to eventually turn into a customer for whatever type of business you run. So let's say for example, you run a gym, for example. So what you could do to get people onto your messenger list is you could give away, for example, a free seven day pass. Then what happens once someone comes into messenger and claims that pass is you can have messages that go out to them, let's say after two days, then after five days, then after eight days, that basically encourage that person to come into the gym so that your business stays top of mind for them rather than them getting that free pass and then totally forgetting about it, which we've seen happen all the time.

A (6:26)

So it's kind of like an email drink feed campaign.

B (6:29)

Yeah, exactly. It's very comparable to email marketing. Like the way that I would describe messenger is really an email, a mix of email marketing as well as text message marketing. And the reason why I say that is because what messenger gives you is all of the bells and whistles that you have with email marketing. You know, you can, you can use gifs, you can use videos, you can create advanced automation sequences and you can segment your audience. But what text messages have is they have that instant deliver deliverability where it sends a notification right to someone's phone. And that's something that messenger has as well. So that's why messenger is really such a powerful channel in terms of it.

A (7:09)

Being different from email marketing. What would you say are the key, key differences marketing on messenger has?

B (7:15)

Yeah, yeah. So the number one thing that I would say is as great as messenger marketing is, and we love messenger marketing, you always want to collect these people's emails, you want to get them onto different channels. And the reason why is because at the end of the day, you're playing on Facebook's turf and we don't know what's going to happen, you know, next month or six months down the line or a year down the line or you know, what they decide to do to change the way that messenger marketing is done. Because we don't think that we're going to get 80 to 90% open rates forever. Right. Like I think we're in a really golden window at the moment. So the biggest thing that I would say is really focus on getting these people into your audience but getting them onto kind of different channels so for example, onto Instagram or onto your email list so that you can reach them with different touch points. And then also what I would say about that is messenger is a lot more kind of personal and interactive than email marketing is. And the reason why is because you can do things like, you know, create surveys and do all of these different things right within Facebook messenger where you can ask someone what they're looking for and then provide them with exactly that. Right in messenger. Whereas with email marketing you can ask someone a question but when they respond to you, you know you're going to have to go back and manually respond to them. Where with messenger you can have that completely automated.

A (8:42)

We did some research earlier on this year on largest growth between various different social networks and it is interesting. I'll include a link to it in the show notes guys. But it is interesting to me to see much more sort of one to one communication channels and mediums, particularly instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger have grown phenomenally. I think sort of last year they've had double the growth that the main Facebook has had. Look at it as a percentage. The numbers aren't quite quite there yet, but it's catching up rapidly. I don't know, people just don't seem so obsessed with sharing everything anymore. If they do share, they want to share it more one to one. So I guess it makes sense.

B (9:24)

Yeah, definitely. And the biggest thing that you mentioned is people are looking for that one to one personalized experience. And what you can set up in messenger allows for that. Because what you're doing in messenger is you're learning about your audience. You're learning about people that are subscribed to you youu know what they're interested in, what they aren't interested in. And you can create segments and basically create different pockets of your audience that you know are interested in. For example, let's say, you know, some people are really, really interested in email marketing because they've told you that they like email. You can make all of Your content for them, email marketing related because you already know that that's what they care about. So you can create all of these, you know, follow up sequences that are based upon what people's preferences are.

A (10:08)

So where do people often go wrong when they get into messenger marketing? Because we're all relatively new to this, we don't want to tread in any landmines. Where are the areas we should avoid? What shouldn't we do?

B (10:21)

Yeah, there's, there's quite a few things. To be honest, just thinking off the top of my head, it's really easy. It's a lot easier to annoy someone through messenger than through email. So I know a lot of people have sequences where they're sending out like, you know, two, three emails a day. And with messenger, unless you've told that person before and they're expecting three messages a day, they're gonna be like, totally like, oh my God, this is insane. Like, stop messaging me. Like all of the, all of this stuff. Like they're not gonna be. So the biggest thing is really understanding what your audience wants and giving it to them, as simple as that sounds. But literally asking, hey, you know, how often should we send you messages? Because some people are going to want messages every few days. Some people might only want like a wrap up once a week. So this, for example, like let's say you want to turn your newsletter into a messenger, basically a messenger sequence. What you would want to do is you would want to ask those subscribers, hey, you know, we're going to be sending you content. What topics are you interested in? Then you could say, for example, I'm interested in copywriting, I'm interested in graphic design, etc. And then the next question might be, okay, so how often do you want to receive messages? And that could be once a week, three times a week, once a month, whatever that might be. And based upon those preferences, you'll only receive messages when you actually want to receive messages. So the biggest thing is really just finding out what your audience wants from you and giving it to them.

A (11:51)

So it's quite a different mindset from traditional email marketing, which there's a few people, you know, really going the full nine yards and really personalizing email. But most, most of your marketing that I come across is very much kind of mass market. One message gets sent out to everybody. It sounds like Messenger's much more targeted.

B (12:13)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what makes it more, more targeted is just really the engagement rate. So with, with messenger sequences, like you're going to be getting so many more people clicking on your messages, responding to your messages than you ever had with email marketing, simply because it's so easy to do so. And people are used to kind of sending messages and interacting within Facebook Messenger. So as a result, because the engagement rate is so high, it's really easy to, as I mentioned, find out what your audience is looking for and then provide them with exactly that. So when you want to say, hey, you know, like, what are you interested in? You're going to get like a really, really high response rate. Like with email marketing, if you ask a question and you're like, hey, what are you interested in? You might only get like 1 to 3% of people that respond and say, hey, I'm interested in this, I'm interested in that. Whereas with, with messenger you might get 30, 40% of people saying, hey, I like this, I like that. And it allows you to really break down what your audience is looking for from you.

A (13:10)

So in the back end, when you're managing this, what kind of access to reports and data do you you get from the third party services? So walk us through it, what does it look like?

B (13:21)

Yeah, so basically kind of what you get is you can see what you have set up, so you can see different growth tools that you have to gain subscribers, you can see all of your automation sequences. And it's similar to email marketing where you can kind of see how many messages have been sent. What's the open rate, what's the click rate? And you can see that if you're creating long sequences with multiple messages, you can see what the open rate, click through rate of every single message is. So you can break that down afterwards and see, okay, this message is something that people aren't engaging with, but this other message, a lot of people are engaging with it. So it allows you to kind of see what content people are really enjoying and interacting with. So I would say that's one of the biggest things that you get is just data on who your message has been sent to, whether they opened it or not, and what the click through rate was.

A (14:13)

Okay, so let's talk about recommended best practices with a really super effective messenger marketing campaign. What are the kind of key ingredients you would say that that sort of campaign should have?

B (14:26)

Yeah, so the number one thing that I would say, and I see this like time and time again, is you really need to know what you're trying to get out of Messenger. So you need to go into messenger with some sort of plan. You can't just go in and say, I'm going to create a Messenger sequence, you need to know, okay, you know, where are people going to opt into the sequence from? Where are they going to go as a result of this sequence? Like, you, you want to have an idea of what the full funnel looks like and what effect messenger plays as a, as a result. So the biggest thing that I would say is just kind of before you set anything up in messenger, like get out, get out a piece of paper, use, you know, use something like draw IO and really map everything out so that you can see. Okay. So, you know, this is where a subscriber is going to come into messenger from. And this is my goal. For someone that is subscribed in Messenger, I want them to eventually, you know, purchase this product or purchase this service or whatever it is. And then that allows you to kind of figure out how messenger plays a part in that sequence. And then it makes it a lot easier to really create messages because you know where that person is before and where you want to get that person to.

A (15:34)

And from a customer perspective, you know, is it easy for them to opt out of these messages if, if they do end up in a stream that they're just not really having fun with?

B (15:44)

Yeah, so that's one of the, that's another important thing with messenger marketing is really because everybody's going to open almost every message you get. If someone doesn't want to receive your messages, they're, they're going to get pretty annoyed after a while because it's Facebook, people are on Facebook all the time, so it's easier for your kind of spam complaints to go up. And as a result, what we do is we send a unsubscribe button on almost every message we send out. And yeah, it's just a little link at the bottom of the message that says unsubscribe. And basically the reason why that's there is we want to keep our spam complaints as low as possible. We know that messenger is a very intimate channel, so if someone doesn't want to receive messages there, we want to get them off as soon as we can.

A (16:28)

Okay. And that unsubscribe link, that's something provided by the third party service?

B (16:34)

Yep, exactly. So it's something that, you know, you would just add into your message super easy.

A (16:38)

And are there any kind of guidelines on what a reasonable unsubscribe opt out level is if you're sending messages? I know obviously these things vary quite, quite greatly from list to list, but.

B (16:50)

Yeah, so I would say there's not like a hard and fast rule for this, I would say that expect your unsubscribe rates to be a lot higher than email because people can easily forget that they opted in with email. So if your unsubscribe rates are like 10 to 15%, that's okay. That's totally fine. Just because a lot of people will maybe only opt in for one thing or didn't even realize that they opted in. So I would say on average we see around 10 to 15% unsubscribe rates, but it's not something that is a concern for us.

A (17:21)

And is there a sort of a recommended time window when somebody's sort of first signed up to something like this that you need to have your messages go out within, within a specific window? We talked about people forgetting that they sort of opted in. How do you manage that?

B (17:37)

Yeah, like I set up follow up sequences. Obviously it depends on, you know, what the goal is and you know, what they're opting into messenger for. But I would say on, on average you want to send at least a couple of messages within that first seven days. What we'll often do for, for example, for if we're working with an E Commerce client and we're trying to get them to purchase a product, what we do after they opt in is we send them a message one hour later that just says, hey, did you have a chance to purchase this product? And we set up something very similarly with local businesses where after they've opted in, we send them a message right after that says, hey, did you have a chance to call yet? Well, it's still kind of on the top of their mind.

A (18:16)

Can messenger be integrated with your E Commerce store?

B (18:19)

Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways that you can integrate messenger with E Commerce. There's one app called Recart that you can connect with Shopify and that's great to use that you can set up basically abandoned cart messages. The way that we were setting it up is we were driving traffic from Facebook ads through messenger to the E Commerce Store. And basically the reason why we use messenger is just so that we can follow up with these people after we sent them to the E Commerce Store.

A (18:49)

Any other recommended best practices we should all be aware of?

B (18:52)

Yeah, the biggest thing I would say is you really want to know what your audience wants get use messenger as an opportunity to understand your customers better and basically just kind of ask them what they're looking for, what their goal is or what their goals are, and then really just make content that tailors to whatever they're looking for. That's the biggest thing that I would say. We use that type of strategy with all of our clients and it's something that works incredibly effectively.

A (19:22)

Fantastic. Well, Jaden, it's been fab speaking to you. You've certainly whet my appetite to find out more. So that really leads me on to my next question. If you want to find out more about Axis Marketing and Messenger marketing, where do we go? Who do we speak to?

B (19:36)

Yeah, so I have a Facebook group that I'm fairly active in talking about messenger marketing as well as Facebook ads. So I can post a link to that for sure. I also have a website that you can check out. It's Axis Marketing co. Not dot com. I couldn't get the dot com. It wasn't so Accessmarketing co. You can, you can check out the website, but really I would go to the Facebook group if you. If you want to chat with me and kind of learn more about Messenger, I would definitely check out the Facebook group and I think Kieran's gonna post a link to that in the show notes.

A (20:10)

Absolutely. Yeah. We'll post a link both to your site and to the Facebook group. And I know you've got a lot of video content on there, so I'm gonna be hurriedly consuming that to get ahead and get my head around this. Jayden, thank you so much for reaching out and in the first place and really enjoyed chatting to you and I wish you the best of luck with it.

B (20:31)

Thanks, Kieran. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on and I hope this was helpful for your subscribers.

C (20:42)

Thanks very much for listening to the digital marketing podcast. If you want to continue your learning journey, get over to Targetinternet.com and do our digital skills benchmark. It's completely free. It will assess all of your digital skills, tell you where your skills gaps are, and recommend lots of free content to continue your learning journey. So get over, do the digital marketing skills benchmark and continue your learning journey today.