While chatbot marketing in Facebook Messenger is a new marketing discipline, we aren’t executing campaigns in the Wild West.
With Facebook Messenger marketing best practices in place, the reward is audience engagement to the tune of 80% engagement rates.
Chatbots done well delight customers and streamline purchasing.
If you think chatbots can help your business, there aren’t too many Messenger marketing playbooks available.
When you’re looking for guidance and best practices in the uncharted territory of Facebook Messenger marketing, you can start here.
Facebook Messenger Marketing
Here are five rules for marketing on Facebook Messenger.
1. Using Facebook’s One-Free-Reply Rule
What’s the One-Free-Reply Rule?
When someone messages your chatbot, you’re allowed one free reply. If they, in turn, reply to your reply, they’re opting in to receive follow-up messaging from your business.
Knowing this rule, a feature like a post comment autoresponder is useful. A Facebook post autoresponder automatically replies to comments on your post with an invitation that can help you grow your Messenger contact list.
It works best to entice people to comment with your post. A riddle like this works great:
After people comment on the post, our chatbot automatically replies with the following message:
It’s a win-win: they get the answer, and we have a new contact added to our Facebook Messenger marketing list.
2. Introducing Yourself
As with traditional email marketing, it’s best to remind people right off the bat who you are and why you’re contacting them.
This can be done with a quick welcome message where you re-introduce yourself and confirm their interest in receiving messages.
3. Giving Users the Option to Unsubscribe
Here’s another best practice from email marketing that applies to your Facebook Messenger marketing: Always end chats with a reminder that they can unsubscribe any time.
There’s no actual rule from Facebook that you should do this, but it will save a lot of trouble.
If someone doesn’t want to receive messages from your business and there’s no clear reminder that they can unsubscribe, they may choose to complain and report you to Facebook. Avoidable.
Just a quick reminder that they can type UNSUBSCRIBE or STOP keeps communication flowing.
4. Using Facebook’s 24-1 Rule
Once someone has opted into receive Facebook Messenger messages from your business, there are no limits on what you can send in the first 24 hours.
You can send unlimited promotional and non-promotional messages.
When 24 hours have passed, the rule changes: You can still send non-promotional messages, but you can only send 1 more promotional message (hence “24+1”).
But remember, whenever a user sends you a message, that 24-hour clock starts over.
That being said, strategically chat blast your contacts with non-promotional content that’s highly engaging.
5. Keeping Messages Short, Using Pictures
Listen up, because this tip come from Facebook’s own best practices for developers.
Facebook recommends using pictures and GIFs in chatbot-powered conversations.
And Facebook encourages businesses to use compact messages as they’re easier to digest (especially on mobile).
Just watch out for sending too many messages at once. No need to blow up their phone with five pings in a row.
Republished by permission. Original here.
Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “The Secret Behind Facebook Messenger Marketing, 5 Best Practices for Better ROI” was first published on Small Business Trends