There is no point in having a chatbot (especially one for sales/marketing purposes) if you don’t have a way of getting people to use it. Does it bother you why more people aren’t interacting with your Facebook Messenger Chatbot? Are you looking for ways to promote your chatbot and encourage more people to engage with it? Read on to know how to make your chatbot reach out to more users:
1. Incentivize Messenger Bot Subscribers With Exclusive Access
Messenger bots are a rather inconspicuous marketing channel, so it can be a tough nut to crack to drive traffic to them. You might have your own reasons for setting up a chatbot for your Facebook business page. Perhaps you are leveraging bots to handle FAQs and customer service queries for inbound purposes. For instance, look how Lego set up an automated eCommerce experience with their clever Ralph, the Gift Bot. For outbound purposes, you can capitalize on chatbots as a content delivery channel to push out regular updates to your subscribers.
The challenge however is to get people to subscribe to your bot in the first place. Why not try incentivizing it with exclusive content to reel in customers? For instance, when the English punk rock band Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes gave a promise of exclusive presale access to a limited edition vinyl of their new album, they used the direct m.me link to drive traffic to the Messenger bot. The Platform-agnostic link opens the stand-alone Messenger app on mobile devices when tapped, while on desktop, it opens messenger in a new tab.
2. Send Push Notifications
Notifications marketing is one of the most potent tools for chatbots. Be it a Kik gaming bot for teenagers, a Facebook Messenger consumers chatbot, or an enterprise-oriented Slack bot, sending out push notifications can help you scale and grow the bot’s audience. If you are wondering what types of updates to send to your users, here are a few ideas:
- Numbers
Send numbers which could double as a trigger to start using the bot more often. Numbers that help portray your bot as something helpful and popular. Use numbers to narrate a story. For instance, you could tell how many sessions an average active user has with your bot, or how often people use it. You can include the number of monthly active users (MAU) in your message as well.
- Educate users
Use push-notifications of how the chatbot can be used as soon as you implement a new feature. For instance, it could be new commands that the chatbot can answer or new types of questions. Users are always excited to explore new ways of using the bot, so tell them how to use it.
- Reminders
Sometimes your users are asked to take some kind of action, but they don’t start it at all or forget to finish. For instance, when your chatbot registers users for an event, you might want to ping all those who overlooked to provide some key piece of information or didn’t finish the submission form.
3. Submit your Messenger Bot to Facebook’s Discover Tab
Have you ever noticed the “Discover” tab in Facebook’s mobile messenger, which lets you browse bots set up by businesses? The bots are organized by featured experiences, recent activity, and category. To enhance the visibility of your Messenger bot, you can try to have your Bot listed on the Discover Bot.
If you want to submit your bot, click on Facebook’s page settings, and scroll down to the Messenger platform section. Tap on it and scroll down to “Discover Settings”. In front of Discover Visibility, set the toggle to “show”, and click the Set Up button in front of “Discover Preference”.
Fill out the following fields on the submission form:
- Category: Select the primary and secondary category most pertinent to your business. Your Facebook bot will appear in the second category if it doesn’t make it in the first.
- Overview: Include a description of your bot. This information is crucial when Facebook is evaluating your submission.
- Keywords: Include as many as 10 keywords to set the tone for how the bot appears in search results.
- Language: Choose the language in which your bot will appear.
- Summary: Summarize your bot in up to 40 characters. This description will show in Discover results beneath your bot.
When you’re done, click the Submit button to have your bot evaluated by Facebook. If your Bot appears on the Discover Tab, you can gain more subscribers, especially if it gets featured in the popular category. Imagine the traction it would gain.
4. Link to Your Facebook Messenger Bot in Emails
You must append links to your social pages in your email signatures, so why not do the same for your Facebook messenger bot? Simply embed a Facebook Messenger icon that hyperlinks to your m.me link, and voila! You can use an email signature generator is you are finding this hard.
For instance, you can consider using the HubSpot’s recently revamped Email Signature Template Generator. While you cannot add a custom Messenger icon to its native social sharing options, you can nevertheless hide the link to your bot behind the Facebook icon. Not to mention, it allows you to add a CTA to your email signature up to 24 characters of copy, a button, and a link. The color and the font are customizable. Increase traffic to your bot with an eye-grabbing CTA, so that every email you send reels in a new subscriber to your Messenger bot.
A lot of marketers choose Messenger over run-of-the-mill email newsletter marketing because of the higher open rates of Messenger. But why compromise when you have the resources and time to spear. Better yet, kill two birds with one stone and cross-promote both marketing channels simultaneously.
You can mention about your Messenger bot in your newsletter or emails, or include an option to subscribe to your email newsletter in your Messenger bot. You can even send the Messenger version of your newsletter to your audience but after repurposing the newsletter’s content to better suit the chat style.
5. MESSENGER SCAN CODES
Think of this as QR codes. Like QR codes for products, a scannable code can also be generated for your chatbot. Anytime someone scans this code on their phones using the Messenger app, it leads to your Messenger chatbot. This is a great idea for retail stores, gyms, and restaurant like businesses to convert users into chatbot users, or in any other business that gets prospects. This includes public speakers, salespeople, or anyone who is a frequent attendee at networking events. To make sure people don’t get confused in scanning codes, we suggest making your scan codes at least 4x4cm to improve the chances of someone successfully scanning your code.
6. Paid Ads
Be it Instagram ads, Google AdWords, or Facebook Ads, Online advertising channels are one of the best ways of channeling targeted users towards your Messenger bot. A great place to start is the Facebook, Messenger ads. While the ads can be run directly within the Messenger platform, we are talking about ads that appear in your Facebook newsfeed. They can be leveraged to connect users to your Messenger chatbot. Make sure the ads have clear and unambiguous buttons that lead users directly to the Messenger bot.
If your chatbot has been developed by a developer or an agency, you will be provided with a JSON code that can be copied and pasted directly during ad setup, connecting your Facebook ad directly to Messenger bot. Even if you created a chatbot using an online tool, you can still generate your own JSON code using that tool.
Another less popular option is to make use of Google AdWords. While Google ads can’t run directly into a Messenger chatbot, they can instead lead users to a landing page, from where they can click on a button to go to the chatbot.
