Back to blog
These days, all businesses are looking for ways to get ahead of the competition.
All businesses need an effective social media strategy more than ever in order to engage the audiences they need to reach. This is where Facebook chatbots can be of assistance.
Some companies are extremely proficient at using Facebook to target their marketing.
However, when it comes to Facebook Messenger chatbots, many businesses haven’t even gotten started yet.
This growing sector is going to be vital when it comes to growing your business and keeping your customers engaged with your brand.
We have put together this guide to bots on Facebook, explaining some of the many benefits and showing how to use bots in order to achieve the best possible results.
How do Facebook bots work?
Chatbots have been a regular feature on many websites for a number of years now.
A chatbot is a type of automated messaging software that can converse with your customers without any need for human interaction at your end.
It uses artificial intelligence to converse with people in a realistic way, as it has been programmed to understand questions and provide basic information.
This can save you a lot of effort when it comes to answering queries and dealing with FAQs.
Bots on Facebook Messenger
Recently, bots for business have become increasingly popular on Facebook Messenger. With 1.3 billion monthly users, Facebook Messenger offers a huge market for your business to tap into.
However, if you want to stand out from the crowd on Facebook Messenger, you will need all the latest tools at your disposal in order to navigate the platform successfully and use it to increase your sales.
Facebook Messenger’s chatbot can interact and respond to questions in the way a human would, so it is far less intrusive than regular advertising.
This means users are more likely to engage with a bot than they would be to click on an advertisement. The reason is that it feels as if they are having a real conversation.
Ideal platform for chatbots
Businesses considering using chatbots on Messenger already have a built-in advantage because of the nature of the platform.
Messenger users are very open to the idea of using the app to converse with businesses as well as with individuals.
Every month, over twenty billion messages are exchanged between consumers and businesses on Messenger.
Yet so far, extremely few of these messages are being exchanged between users and chatbots.
The use of bots on Facebook Messenger has only started gaining popularity. This means there is not nearly as much competition here as you will find in other areas of Facebook marketing.
There are currently only 300,000 chatbots operating via Facebook, while eight million businesses use the platform for advertising.
This marketplace is relatively new, but it is growing.
Now is the ideal time to jump into using Messenger chatbots and give your business a great advantage over your competitors.
Why you should use bots to boost your business
Using bots on Facebook Messenger gives your business a number of important benefits that you can’t afford to miss out on.
1. They save you time
Running a business is hard due to the number of different tasks you have to handle each day.
A bot can easily be programmed to take care of some of the more mundane tasks you have to deal with, such as:
- Answering FAQs.
- Booking consultations.
- Tracking orders.
These things can take up a surprising amount of time during your working day.
A chatbot enables you to automate these basic tasks while still providing your customers with a seamless experience.
This frees you up to concentrate on the more interesting and profitable aspects of your business.
These were the reasons you set up the business in the first place.
You will enjoy your work more, be more productive and create a higher-quality experience for your customers.
2. They generate more leads
Have you become frustrated with the low click-through rates your marketing emails are getting?
Email is notoriously poor when it comes to generating leads for your business.
On average, just 3 percent of marketing emails are clicked on.
By contrast, people are 70 percent more likely to open a message on Facebook Messenger, as they won’t be aware that the message has been generated by a bot.
They are also far more likely to respond to the message, creating more leads and more potential sales for your business.
With Facebook Messenger, you can drastically cut down on the number of marketing emails you send each week.
Using Messenger chatbots enables you to automate a large part of your marketing while still getting improved click-through and response rates.
3. They can create a subscriber list
Are you spending a lot of time and effort getting people to sign up to your email subscriber list?
With a Messenger chatbot, this can be a thing of the past, as the bot can create a subscriber list for you automatically.
It works in a very simple way. Whenever a user has previously interacted with your page, the chatbot will send sponsored ads to them on Facebook automatically.
Used in conjunction with tailored messages from the bot, this helps keep your business at the forefront of consumers’ minds, without them having to sign up to anything.
This makes the experience less intrusive for the customer, and you also gain a great advantage over your competitors when it comes to brand awareness.
4. They can even handle sales
Messenger chatbots can now be made so sophisticated that they can even handle sales.
This is huge news for businesses, as it takes some of the effort out of generating quality leads for your business.
As the conversation with the customer evolves, the chatbot can respond to the customer’s actions and make suggestions, providing an ideal opportunity for upselling.
For example, if a customer is ordering an item of holiday clothing, the bot could suggest other items that are frequently bought together, such as a top to go with a pair of jeans.
They can also help secure repeat business; you can program your chatbot to remind previous customers that they ordered a gift for someone on a particular day the previous year.
And when it comes to new customers, Facebook chatbots can be programmed to identify high-value leads.
These inquiries can then be passed to your sales team quickly and effectively so a human is only needed to close the sale.
This can save you a considerable amount of time and money, at the same time increasing your sales and growing your business. Not bad for a little piece of technology!
5. They can be tailored to suit your business
A chatbot is not a “one size fits all” type solution. Every business is different, and all have their own needs.
Luckily, Facebook chatbots can be as unique as businesses are — you can program it to perform functions that are relevant and useful to your target market.
Chatbots can remind your customers about products that they have in their shopping carts but have not purchased yet.
They can follow up after a purchase to make sure that the item meets the customer’s expectations.
They can even notify customers about special offers and make sure these offers suit their needs, taking into account previous details they have shared, such as their clothes sizes or dietary preferences.
A chatbot can be as sophisticated or as basic as you want it to be, but it’s a tool you won’t want to be without if you want to use Facebook Messenger successfully to boost your business.
Examples of Facebook chatbots
Businesses worldwide are becoming increasingly creative in the ways they use chatbots to increase their business success. Some outstanding Facebook chatbot examples include:
- A charity’s chatbot that collected information from its users about the issues and causes that mattered most to them. This enabled the charity to campaign for policy change with huge numbers of public voices to support them.
- A makeup brand’s chatbot that made it much easier for customers to book a free in-store makeover. By increasing the take-up for makeovers by 11 percent, the bot also helped the company increase their sales, as customers who went for the makeover were likely to buy around $50 on average of makeup in-store.
- A hotel chain’s chatbot that enabled customers to make their reservations directly through the platform as if they were actually conversing with a real person. The hotel chain also helped drive recruitment through launching a careers chatbot, giving information to prospective employees and helping them apply for the right roles. This enabled the company to put together a talented workforce while cutting down on their administrative tasks.
How to create a Facebook chatbot
There has never been a better time to enter the field of Facebook Messenger chatbots.
It is still relatively uncrowded, so you will have less competition. However, it is important to create a chatbot that is capable of performing a lot of the functions you need.
The whole point of it is to help your business run more smoothly and efficiently.
There are many different online tools you can use to create Facebook chatbots.
They range from the most basic to the most sophisticated (take Botsurfer as an example).
For an inexperienced user, however, these can take some time and effort to navigate.
It can be better to engage a company that has a successful track record in social media marketing.
They will be able to work with you to design a bot that perfectly meets your needs.
