Messenger Bot Strategy: How Businesses Can Use Bots

Want to boost conversions while lowering marketing costs?

Wondering how Facebook Messenger bots can help?

To explore how to improve your marketing and sales with Messenger bots, I interview Molly Pittman.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Molly Pittman. She's a Facebook Messenger bot expert. She also co-hosts the Perpetual Traffic podcast. Her business is Digital Strategy Book Camps, and she's an ambassador for ManyChat.

Molly explains why Messenger bots have high open rates and convert customers without being pushy.

You'll also discover how you can easily improve marketing campaigns with Messenger bots and ManyChat Growth Tools.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Messenger Bots
Molly's Start With Messenger Bots

When Facebook released a Messenger ad placement in November 2016, Molly was actively running Facebook ads and covering Facebook ads for Digital Marketer. She immediately realized bots would become more important because Messenger ads would require marketers to automate different responses. So along with Messenger ads, Molly became interested in bots and ManyChat.

Molly focused on ManyChat because so many people mentioned it to her. Ezra Firestone told her the tool could build a Messenger subscriber list. When 10 other people told her the same thing, she knew ManyChat was something she needed to check out. To see how it worked, she installed it on the Digital Marketer and Ryan Deiss pages.

Soon, Molly was on this podcast talking about her early experiments with ManyChat because it was a marketer-centric platform. At Social Media Marketing World 2018, Molly also moderated a keynote with Chatfuel and ManyChat, which are two major contenders in the marketing world. Now she's doing some work for ManyChat.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts about Social Media Examiner's chatbot strategy.

The Present and Future of Messenger Bots

To begin our conversation, I note that the 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed that only 15% of marketers are using Messenger bots, but 51% plan on using Messenger bots in the next year. So these bots have come a long way but are still a growing, early-stage technology.

Molly says marketing on Messenger and communicating with bots present a huge opportunity for marketers because you can communicate with people in a place where they want to have the conversation. Any communication channel where people exchange short, simple messages, whether that's Messenger or WhatsApp, is hot right now.

Specifically, Facebook Messenger has more than 2 billion active monthly users, which is more people than those who use the Facebook app with the news feed. So Messenger is important because it's where people are having conversations with their family and friends.

Also, the consumption and adoption rates for Messenger are incredibly high. For example, Molly has a client with a campaign audience of more than 10,000 people and a 96% open rate on Day 6 of a follow-up sequence. Open rates are so high because people tend to open messages in Messenger. It's less crowded and more personal than email. Also, many people receive message notifications.

When you look at using bots to help you have those conversations on Messenger, the present state of bots is different from the future-focused examples you see at Facebook's F8 developer conference or those created by large companies that have invested in state-of-the-art bots.

Right now, most people don't program Facebook Messenger bots to answer any question that a consumer might ask your brand. Instead,