For businesses, Facebook messenger has become a crucial customer support channel to answer queries, track orders, and take grievances.
Alas, managing customer engagement through Facebook Messenger marketing is not feasible for all. Small businesses can’t afford to have a big sales and support team that can hold a conversation on yet another channel.
That’s where Facebook Messenger chatbots come to the rescue.
Facebook utilized its existing messaging service to allow businesses of different sizes to create a custom Facebook Messenger bot in the platform itself.
The hype around the Facebook chatbot marketing bandwagon is on the rise. As per Drift’s research, 55% of businesses get higher quality leads with a chatbot. Another study from Comm100 suggests that the average satisfaction chats are 87.58%.
With more than 400K chatbots on Facebook alone, it is time to look at how these chatbots will play an indispensable role in your current business scenario.
So, let’s learn everything about Facebook Messenger chatbots and understand how you can activate a custom Facebook messenger chatbot for your business.
What Are Facebook Messenger Bots?
While a chatbot or bot is a messaging program that uses AI to start and maintain conversations with users on a website, a Facebook messenger bot pertains to the Messenger platform in specific.
A Facebook Messenger chatbot is a messaging program that uses AI to start and maintain conversations with people engaging with you on Messenger.
The primary function of chatbots is to understand the user’s questions, give them relevant answers and execute tasks if necessary. Customers can type a regular message as they would to a friend, and the bots will reply to them with relevant results.
Why Should You Activate Facebook Messenger Bot for Your Business?
If we talk from a broader perspective, using Facebook Messenger bots has several significant advantages.
Firstly, Facebook Messenger is the second most-used messaging app globally, with over a billion messages exchanged among businesses per day. That makes Facebook messenger marketing a big bucket to draw from. Even if you get just a drop from that bucket, it’s still a pretty big drop.
The second advantage you get is less competition in Facebook chatbot marketing. The platform is home to over 10 million advertisers, and only a little over 400,000 bots are currently dealing with customers on Messenger.
Now, you have an idea of the scope Facebook Messenger marketing provides your business. Let’s dive deep into how Facebook Messenger Chatbots can help your business grow:
- Improved Reach: People like to open the messages received on Messenger and will always prefer them over marketing emails. Facebook Messenger already contains sponsored ads, which can be shared with the users who have expressed interest or been in touch with your brand on your Facebook page. Thus, a Facebook messenger bot can use these ads to target customers with a high intent to purchase your brand.
- 24X7 Customer Service: Customers can be in need of assistance at any time of the day or night. A bot eliminates the need to be put on hold and can deal with repetitive questions easily. Automation can improve customer service to a great extent and help you save time to focus on more pressing concerns in your organization.
- Lead Generation: A Facebook messenger chatbot can also identify your potential customers by finding out about their needs through a series of basic questions and help generate and forward quality leads to your sales team.
- Customer Re-engagement: A Facebook Messenger Bot always retains tons of information, which can help re-engage your customers even if they last showed up on your page a long time ago. You do not have to spend your money on hefty advertising budgets and let your bot do the heavy lifting. A bot can offer relevant content to the users and remind them of any products they still have in their cart.
- Complete Transactions: Bots can do anything if they are programmed right. Conversational commerce often allows the bots to make recommendations and helps in upselling products from your website. Since all this information is shared with the user within the comfort zone of Facebook Messenger, the drop-off rate for these transactions is very low as compared to other mediums.
How Do You Activate a Facebook Messenger Bot for Your Business?
Ever since the bots were announced, Facebook has tried to make things easier for organizations to create a connection between bots and Messenger. Here are a few tools that can help:
- Messenger Links: Once you have created a business page on Facebook, you will see that Messenger links use your Page’s username to create a link, and when a user clicks the link, it leads to a conversation with your business in the Messenger app.
- Matching Customer Profiles: If you have permission to reach out to the customers over the phone, they will be visible on Messenger using the Customer Matching feature. Once a conversation is initiated, a final opt-in is taken from the user.
- Codes: Messenger codes are unique images that act as a visual thumbprint for your brand and bot in the messenger app. These codes work similarly to Snapchat codes and redirect the users who scan them to a corresponding company’s bot or page.
- Buttons: Facebook provides Messenger buttons that can be embedded into your website to enable users to start a messenger conversation with a bot with a single click.
Note: In case you have not developed a bot, the result of any of the aforementioned actions will lead to a standard conversation between your brand and the customer.
How to Set up a Facebook Messenger Bot for Your Business?
Before you start, make sure you have the following things ready:
- Facebook Page: It will be used as your bot’s identity, and whenever users will interact with your bot, they will see your brand’s name and profile picture.
- Facebook Developer Account: This account is required to create apps that are required for any kind of Facebook integration.
- Facebook App: This app contains the settings required for your Facebook Messenger bot as well as access tokens.
- Webhook URL: Actions inside the conversations with a bot are sent as events to the webhook. Make sure you set up your webhook beforehand.
How to Set Up your Facebook Messenger Chatbot?
Step 1: Adding the Messenger Platform to the Facebook App
- From the sidebar of the app setting, click on Add Product under Product.
- Display options by hovering over ‘Messenger.’
- Click the ‘Setup’ button.
This will add the Messenger Platform to your app, and a settings console will appear.
Step 2: Configuring the Webhook for Your App
- Click the ‘Setup Webhooks’ button from the ‘Webhooks’ section in Messenger’s setting console.
- Enter your public webhook URL in the ‘Callback URL’ field.
- Enter your webhook token in the ‘Verify Token’ field.
- Confirm your callback URL by clicking on the ‘Verify and Save’ button.
This will enable the Messenger Platform to send a GET request to a webhook using the verified token. A valid and properly set up webhook will respond to the verification request, and its settings will be saved.
Step 3: Subscribing Your App to a Facebook Page
- Select the pages you want to subscribe to your app using the ‘Add or Remove Pages’ button. Whenever users chat through messenger, your webhook will receive events for every subscribed page.
- Every authorized page will have a Generate Token button in the ‘Access Tokens’ section. Save them as it is required to send messages using the Send API.
- Click on the ‘Add Subscriptions’ button to select the field in the ‘Webhooks’ section on each authorized page. To start, it recommended choosing messages and messagin_postbacks.
After this step is complete, the Messenger Platform will now send webhook events for the selected Page to your Webhook.
Step 4: Testing It Out
- In order to test if your setup was successful, try sending a message to your page from Messenger. If you receive a webhook event from the callback URL, then you have successfully set up your app to receive messages from users.
Once your bot is built, integrate it into the marketing calendar and make it a prominent part of your overall Facebook strategy.
3 Tips to Deliver a Great Experience With Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Set Expectation From the Start
Your Facebook Messenger bot must initiate the conversation by introducing itself.
This will tell your audience that there is a bot on the other end and will set expectations for the kind of communication they will have. One good technique to make the conversation more human is to name your bot.
After that, you need to briefly describe your bot’s core purpose and features, i.e., what it can do.
Defining a core use case will also help you to establish the responses and prompts you will send to keep the interaction helpful.
Take a look at this Bot of UPS, a shipping company, setting expectations from the first message and then continuing the conversation by giving related prompts.
Maintain Your Brand Voice
Maintaining your brand voice on every channel is a no-brainer. Facebook suggests, “Your voice is your personality; continue to use it with a tone that feels natural and human.” So implementing this strategy for your Facebook chatbot marketing is a no-brainer.
Your customer must feel familiar while talking to your bot. Surely they have visited your website and probably have been following you on different channels.
To make them feel they are interacting with the genuine brand account on messenger, you will need to use a tone of voice that they can associate with your brand.
Keep the Texts Brief
Messenger, after all, is a texting platform. And you can’t help but be conversational over it. However, while communicating, you need to use words very miserly.
Understand that Messenger is mostly used on mobile devices. If your bot sends long messages, it will be harder for people to interact with it on their tiny screens amid the interruption of bazillions of app notifications.
Conclusion
It is always beneficial to be an early adopter of new technology like Facebook Messenger bots. Since the competition is less here, now would be the right time to get on the FB chatbot marketing bandwagon.
Test it out, measure the performance, and keep a close eye on how these bots develop to shape customer interactions in the future. Then, make way for your leads to engage with your other customers and those interested in buying from your brand.
You can also use SocialPilot to skyrocket your Facebook presence.
Another way is to create your Facebook page group where people can converse with one another and the brand, sharing views and giving you an opportunity to make improvements wherever required.
