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You’ve heard that Messenger Marketing can benefit your ecommerce business. But you have to avoid the key mistakes many make to use them to their full potential.

Marketing using bots has become an essential part of the modern ecommerce sector.

With a Facebook Messenger bot, you can stay in touch with existing clients. Plus when combined with targeted ad campaigns, you can attract potential clients with offers and content. 

Not only that, consumers love them! We’ve seen open rates of upwards of 84% – as high as the “glory days” of email marketing. 

But it’s different from email. 

And as powerful as messenger marketing is, you need to understand some important principles in order to use it effectively. Here, we’re going to look at some of the key mistakes that people make when implementing a Messenger marketing strategy.

Mistake #1 – Treating Messenger Marketing Like Email Marketing

This mistake often occurs because people have used email marketing for so long that it’s difficult to comprehend another way to send messages to customers.

When making the transition to Messenger, the temptation is to send long-winded and one-sided messages to people. They don’t respond and the senders ends up wondering where they went wrong.

The solution to this is to take a more conversational approach. Think about how you use Messenger when you’re chatting with your friends. That’s the approach that you want to take with your Messenger marketing.

Design conversations that focus on engaging the user based on what they tell you about themselves. This personalises the experience and makes the user more likely to continue engaging with your Messenger bot.

Mistake #2 – Being Too Formal

Traditional marketing techniques suggest that you should try to present an air of professionalism at all times.

That leads to another key Messenger marketing mistake. Some marketers try to use professional or corporate-sounding language, but it just comes off as stiff and robotic, which doesn’t engage the user.

Again, being more conversational is the solution here. Don’t be afraid of throwing the occasional emoji into the conversation. Use gifs, videos, and images to keep the user’s interest and ensure they keep talking.

Mistake #3 – Taking the “Stamp Collector” Approach

It feels really good to see your subscriber list grow.

In fact, it can feel so good that a lot of marketers and business owners can end up with the “stamp collector” mentality. Instead of using Messenger marketing for engagement, they use it to build a list that they don’t do a whole lot with.

Low engagement and higher operational costs are the end result of this mentality.

Achieving true value in Messenger is about what you do with the audience you have rather than building as large an audience as possible. Use Messenger to re-engage your existing customer base. Importantly, weed out the Messenger subscribers who don’t want to engage with your business anymore.

Mistake #4 – Not Understanding Facebook’s Messenger Rules

Since it’s so easy to talk to a customer via Messenger, there’s a temptation to spam them with a ton of messages. 

However, there are rules surrounding how you message people that you need to take into account. The key rule is that there’s a 24-hour window for standard messaging that you need to adhere to. You can send messages outside of this window to a subscriber.

Furthermore, there are limitations in terms of how much promotional content you can send to subscribers.

Failing to follow these rules could lead to Facebook revoking your Messenger privileges.

Keep the 24+1 Rule in mind for your subscriber list. For the first 24 hours, you’re able to send as much promotional and non-promotional content as you want to the new subscriber.

After that 24 hours, you can send as many non-promotional items and one promotional follow-up item.

This resets whenever you experience an engagement with the user. Follow this rule at all times and you’re unlikely to run afoul of Facebook.

Mistake #5 – Not Properly Managing The Audience

Many ecommerce business owners see their Messenger bot builder software through the lens of managing flows and broadcasts.

While that’s part of the equation, this narrow view doesn’t allow you to take full advantage of a bot.

They miss the chance to build hyper-targeted audiences, which results in low funnel conversion.

The solution is to make better use of tags and custom fields with the CRM. Segment your audience based on where they are in your funnel, the products they’ve shown interest in, and any other relevant criteria. From these segments, you can create targeted Messenger campaigns that appeal directly to a specific audience.

Mistake #6 – Treating Messenger Like a Marketing Silo

Some ecommerce business owners treat Messenger marketing as a separate marketing strategy. They don’t integrate it into their other channels.

This results in them missing opportunities to more effectively market their products.

Messenger should be part of an omni-channel marketing strategy. After all, your Messenger bot collects a lot of valuable information about your customers. You can use this information to help you target other campaigns.

Of course, this works both ways as the data you collect from other campaigns can help you to tighten your Messenger marketing. 

Mistake #7 – Not Covering the Basic Touchpoints

Every customer that you have went on a journey with your business.

They discovered who you were, learned about you and your products, and engaged with you at several points before making their decision.

The key mistake that many make with Messenger marketing is to not use it to hit on all of these touchpoints. They end up having to hit them manually, which takes more of their time. In the worst-case scenario, they miss the opportunity to engage with a customer when they really need your help.

Defining your sales funnel is the first step to remedying this issue. When you know what customers need to know at each stage of the journey, you can use Messenger to deliver the appropriate messages to them. 

Mistake #8 – Not Starting Free Conversations

Many ecommerce business owners believe that they can only start conversations through Facebook ads. They have to pay to engage the customer in the first place before they can start guiding them through their sales funnel.

There are plenty of opportunities to acquire new customers without paid Ads.  In fact, you can acquire a customer anywhere you can use a URL or QR code. Think about packaging, flyers, event stands, magazines, business cards.  The list is endless. 

This mistake may stem from the thought that you can only use Messenger to attract new customers. However, there are also plenty of opportunities to start free conversations with the people who are already on your list.

Of course, you also need a strategy in place to provide instant responses to people who message your business. They’ve taken the initiative, which means there’s usually a defined interest there. Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to nurture any new leads that come to you for free.

Create a Great Facebook Messenger Strategy

A Messenger marketing strategy gives you the opportunity to market your products to a huge audience.

But you have to avoid the mistakes covered in this article. Messenger is about so much more than blasting your list with content. With the right strategy, you can drive engagement, lower your CPA, and increase your profits.

Perhaps you need a little help with creating your strategy.

That’s where Beyond Points comes in. 

We can help you to use Facebook Messenger bots for your ecommerce business. Send us a message to book your strategy session.

Amazon can be a gold mine for sellers. But it comes with challenges, too. Find out how savvy marketers use Messenger marketing to grow business both on and off the channel.

There’s no denying that Amazon is one of the best platforms to find retail traffic. By the end of 2018, Amazon ranked #1 with 20.6 million users per month.

There are many benefits of using Amazon for your online business. However, there are also some pretty significant risks if you build your brand only using the Amazon platform. 

It’s certainly tempting to use Amazon to build your brand – no doubt about that at all. But one of the biggest negatives is that the customers belong to Amazon. That may prove problematic for profitability and repeat business.

The Messenger Marketing Solution

The big issue for most Amazon sellers is relying on Amazon as the sole source of business.

What happens if something goes wrong?

For example, Amazon could decide to delist or derank one of your products. If it’s a product that drives a large source of your revenue, your business faces a severe cashflow risk as a result. 

There are also occasions when Amazon has banned an entire business. Typically, such bans relate to selling prohibited or counterfeit products. However, it’s possible that they may ban you for consistent shipping issues or for not responding to messages fast enough. An overabundance of negative feedback can also lead to a ban.

While these are hopefully not current concerns for your Amazon business, most sellers lose sleep over them, particularly as with great expectations, they approach the big sales seasons.

In the absence of being able to reach out to and connect with your buyers (all purchases on Amazon are by Amazon’s customers and they go to great lengths to prevent sellers from marketing to them), the typical go-to strategy for clawing back lost ground is paid traffic. 

That’s where a Messenger marketing solution can make a huge difference. With an effective Messenger marketing strategy, you can capture your audience before sending them to Amazon, thus getting the best of both worlds. 

Three Ways to De-Risk Your Amazon Business

The goal is to take control back from Amazon so that you can build a real off-Amazon business. You can use Messenger marketing to build your own customer base for this. We’re going to look at three ways that you can do this.

Method #1 – Leverage Amazon’s Data

In the past, Amazon has been very shy about sharing buyer data with sellers. It’s still possible to extract a list of orders using tools like ManageByStats, and use that data to build a custom audience in Facebook, but the degree of data matching is lower now than it used to be.

If you’re starting from scratch with learning about your real buyers, a great place to start is the Amazon Brand Analytics tool, released inside Seller Central in February 2019. You can use this to access a demographics report. The data is still sketchy after only a few months, but there still may be some eye openers you can use to refind a custom audience, including average age, income, and even education of your buyers. Plus, you can filter the results down to gender and even marital status.

All of this is data can be used to build a strong click-to-Messenger Ad campaign, and capture more targeted customers.  From there, you can choose whether to send them to Amazon, or bring them to your own Shopify or WooCommercs store. 

This is a great way for you to build your off-Amazon revenue. Better yet, you may get to appeal to an audience who might otherwise never discover your product among the sea of other products on Amazon.
 

Method #2 – Use Messenger to Ask for Reviews

Amaaon is a review battle ground. Customers are 9X more likely to leave a review from a bad experience than if they get the result they expected – a perfect product.

The good news is that customers you’ve acquired through Messenger are much more likely to leave a review for you. To maximise your review rate, you’ll need to run an automated campaign that takes the buyer from discovery through to providing feedback.

For example, you could create a Messenger ad campaign to buy the product from your Amazon store. Follow up a few days later to see if they managed to purchase, and if so, ask then for their feedback. If you’re sending coupon traffic to Amazon, remember that discounts above 30% result in non-verified reviews, which don’t count towards your overall star rating.

You benefit no matter where they leave that review. If they post it on Amazon, you’re guarding yourself against black hatters and sales dips due to negative reviews. But you should also consider asking  them to leave a review on Facebook, Google or your own site. If they post it on Facebook, your traffic will be better and click rate from Ads can improve. More reviews on your own site will improve your store conversion (and there are no issues with coupon codes here!) Google reviews will improve your Shopping campaigns as well as natural organic traffic to your store.

Method #3 – Create Your Own Ecosystem

The ultimate insurance is to have your own eComm store up and firing. 

For example, your Messenger campaigns don’t have to push people towards your Amazon store. Instead, direct them to a landing page that relates to the specific product they’re looking for. This is particularly effective for people who have already purchased from your brand on Amazon, and therefore have already established a level of trust in your service.

Building relationships with your customers is the best way to ensure they keep your brand front of mind. Do everything you can to engage them on Messenger, both before and After an Amazon sale.  For example, why not leverage packaging iserts to deliver outstanding customer service and answer your FAQs. Deliver a unique content piece showing how to get the best from your product, or offer the ability to download a manual. 

Ultimately, unusual experiences are what stick in people’s minds, long after your Amazon listing page has been forgotten.  Messenger provides an unprecedented way to engage the customer and make memorable moments all through the lifecycle.

Eventually, Amazon will become part of a multi-channel ecommerce ecosystem. As a result, any issues that you experience with the platform will have less of an effect on your business.

Build Your Off-Amazon Ecosystem

Relying solely on Amazon for your revenue opens your business up to all sorts of potential problems. Instead of focusing solely on driving traffic there, use the platform to build an audience and have conversations to understand your customers better and create lasting memories of exceptional service.

Facebook Messenger is one of the most effective channels for doing this. The methods described above can help you to de-risk your Amazon business because they help you to build an audience away from the platform.

Beyond Points can help you to put these techniques into practice. Have a chat with our team to find out more about how we can help you to take the risk away from selling on Amazon.

Facebook is constantly evolving their platform, and regularly makes changes to uphold and improve user experience. While this is clearly good for the long term sustainability of both the Ad Platform and the Messenger platform, many changes have an impact on business’ ability to reach & engage their customers. In this article, we discuss the recent changes and propose some actions you may need to take as a result.

The 24+1 Rule

When a customer messages your page, it opens a window of time during which you’re allowed to send messages back. In essence, you can send whatever type of messages you like (subject to Facebook’s content policies) for a 24 hour period. Each time a customer engages by sending a message back in return, that re-opens the 24 hour window.

Of course, what Facebook’s looking for here is engagement. As long as you’re having a conversation, you can keep sending messages. Facebook do not want you to be spamming people with messages. For that reason, if the customer has not interacted with you for 24 hours, you have 1 more allowed message of promotional nature, after which you’re only allowed to send messages related to one of 17 prescribed types (see below).

Theoretically, the 24+1 rule has been in effect for over a year, however with the broad-scale removal of app-level subscriptions in June 2019, Facebook is increasingly policing this policy, and pages that continue to send messages outside the prescribed types could end up seeing their Messaging privileges revoked, or even their page closed.

While this is a good rule to prevent unscrupulous marketers from spamming customers en-masse and destroying the wonderful open rates we all currently enjoy, it means that we need to be very selective about the messages we send out, when we send them, and focus on encouraging re-engagement. Engagement after all is what Facebook are after.

Actions

1. Review any sequences you have set up in your bots and ensure that you’re tagging users appropriately.
2. Where possible, restructure your sequences so that when a user replies to the first message, they are activated for future messages. In that way you know you won’t be falling foul of the 24 +1 rule.
3. Structure your chats to encourage interaction – your opening message should encourage the user to respond before getting more content, thereby reopening your 24+1 cycle.

Prescribed Message Types

Certain messages types are permitted to be sent at any time (ie, outside of the 24+1 rule), and by and large relate to event, order, or other important updates of a transactional nature that a user may need to know about. There are 17 types in total, and you can learn about them here.

Updates to Broadcasting

Unless you have a Page-Level subscription approved by Facebook, you will not be able to send non-promotional broadcasts that do not fall under one of the above approved tags, unless you are ONLY sending as a ‘+1’ follow up message. If you want to engage your audience with things like blog updates, value & engagement sequences inside Messenger, or any other type of non-promotional content, you must apply for a Page Subscription.

Previously, much like email enables mass mail-outs to your list, Facebook allowed businesses to send a message simultaneously to all active subscribers. Tied up with the increased enforcement of 24+1, that function is now being removed. Furthermore, until 30/04/2019 you were able to piggyback of your bot platform page subscription to send messages after 24+1 had expired. This was extended to 30.06 for Manychat users but from July 1 st , you must apply for individual page subscription.

Again, Facebook have ostensibly made this change to protect the user experience, however the ulterior motive would appear to be to encourage re-engagement by Sponsored Messages (that is, Ads inside Facebook Messenger). You got it, Messenger Marketing is super effective and Facebook wants to cash in.

To use the broadcast feature going forward, you must either:

1. Apply for a Page-level subscription on the basis of 1 of 3 categories of non-promotional content, including News, Personal Development and Productivity.
2. Only send broadcasts using the ‘follow up message’ type. Note that users who don’t engage with one of these messages should not be messaged again by your page.

Frankly, this could be seen as a major issue for most eCommerce brands, who often don’t fall under one of these 3 categories. It has been common practice for many brands to acquire subscribers ahead of big sales events such as Black Friday, Prime Day and Christmas sales in order to keep them updated with deals, and customers who subscribe for such updates obviously want them, however Facebook have yet to respond to that demand. At the present time, you are not allowed to send promotional messages outside the 24+1 rule.

Actions

1. Consider whether you can create valuable content that could fall under one of the three subscription types. For example, if your store sells health food, can you create a weekly or monthly series of health food recipes and apply under Health & Personal Development? For more information on whether your business may qualify, visit Facebook’s guidance here. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/policy/policy-overview#subscription_messaging%23eligible_use_cases
2. Make sure you’re capturing email addresses or some other type of contact information so you can reach out at a later date and entice your customers to come back into your messenger bot. For more information on ways to make email and Messenger work in tandem, checkout our recent blog post {link}
3. Take a fresh look at how well you’re segmenting your Messenger subscribers with tags. A smart tag strategy will mean super-targeted Sponsored Messages and other re-engagement Ad campaigns. Meaning you don’t waste money on offers that are unlikely to appeal to some of your customers.
4. We know that Email open rates for eComm stores are not that great, and sending SMS messages has a cost attached. For that reason, if your eComm store is primed for returning customers, our Amplifier solution can help insulate yourself from both poor Email open rates and future restrictions in Facebook Messenger. Find out more about Amplifier here.

Were you following the world’s biggest ever LIVE launch recently? Three of the biggest names in Marketing, Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi and Russel Brunson came together to release their new training programme the KBB Blueprint. But what’s really impressive is how they marketed their launch.

If you were following the launch, you’ll know that they took a truly omni-channel approach. Sure, they captured attention on all major social channels, including influencers and affiliates, but what made the difference is what happened once a lead was in their funnel. Over a 7 day period they kept their audience at the edge of their seats in anticipation with a combination of email, Messenger and mobile wallet.

The result prompted Manychat Messenger Bot CEO Mikael Yang to proclaim it the ‘biggest Messenger launch in history’, reportedly netting the trio a cool $3m in just under an hour, all from Messenger subscribers!

What can mere mortals learn from this?

Firstly, the days of engaging on a single medium are long gone. If all you’re doing right now is building an email list, you’re probably missing a trick. Or in this case, 3 million tricks. The massive success of this record breaking event had everything to do with the cohesive and integrated customer experience.

It exemplified a completely seamless multi-channel traffic strategy and a perfect omni-channel experience. Whether you were attracted to them via an ad, a social post, a referral or an email, your experience of their resulting funnel was brand consistent at every touchpoint, and updates were easy to find because they existed in more than 1 channel.

“..the days of engaging on a single medium are long gone… The massive success of this record breaking event had everything to do with the cohesive and integrated customer experience.”

– Sue Prentice, Founder, Beyond Points

Secondly, what they did right was the depth of integration across the channels. No matter which way you were attracted to the top of funnel landing page, every person was comfortably transcended via Messenger to collect their personal eWallet ticket, and reminded on email.

That means that at the very least, you would have received updates and reminders on 3 separate mediums, and up to 5 if you’d entered a phone number on their sign up page as well.

That’s not all. That data is then collated so the customer journey is mapped for each platform and device to deliver an integrated user experience that meets the campaign objectives.

What Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi and Russel Brunson achieved is the power of getting multiple touchpoints activated as the key to engaging an audience, to the point that the sale is ultimately ‘easy’ by the time the offer is presented. The omni channel experience did the work to build authority and trust.

To see how some major brands are using omni-channel, take a look at 12 brilliant examples from Hubspot.

The BIG news though is this. The technology used to achieve this outstanding online event is the exact same stack we use at Beyond Points to build phenomenal engagement and loyalty for our customers with our Amplifier solution.

The only difference is, they used the technology to promote a single event. OK, collectively they’re three of the biggest & most influential names of the era (hence a 3million result in 1 hour), but what could the same solution do for your business over months or years to generate loyalty and be remembered as a brand?

Talk to the experts at Beyond Points & see how to leverage the exact same technology to build your business.