How To Organize Marketing In Messengers
Messengers are so popular today that almost a quarter of the world’s population uses them daily.
According to Google, 65 percent of clients prefer messaging to companies and not ringing them up, another good reason for using the channel. You can always send an e-mail, for sure, but more than half of customers believe that businesses should be available 24/7.
We may long talk about all the benefits that messenger marketing brings in, but it is enough to look at the performance figures to understand its true effectiveness.
Messenger marketing performance compared to emailing (based on 2019 survey findings).
- Open rate — four times higher.
- CTR — ten times more frequent.
- Open speed — it takes 90 seconds to read a new message received via a messenger and 90 minutes if it’s been received via an e-mail (it’s even more productive than SMS channels where 90 percent of messages are open within three minutes after they are received) (according to CTIA survey).
- Perfectly suits the purpose of communicating events with a shelf life.
- Costs are much lower.
Messengers do not only facilitate customers experience, they also have advantages for the companies and help them gleaning information about the leads. Primarily, messengers are suitable for quickly gaining awareness about the clients and segmenting databases. Customers are more inclined to answer messages. They may be asked, such as:
- Are you a marketer or an owner?
- Are you fond of knitting?
- Are you looking to buy a house, an apartment or a room?
That allows segmenting them according to their interests, occupation and even specific life situations (such as buying a house).
Moreover, messengers provide for quickly guiding the leads through the funnel stages, step by step, utilizing micro-interactions. It helps to set up a trustful relationship between the client and the company. That is very important during decision-making.
What is a messenger funnel (or autofunnel)? It is an automatic sequence of actions for guiding the customer from the search query stage to the purchasing stage.
Thus, autofunnel consists of various stages, each guiding the potential client to a certain action. Each stage has two ways out:
1. Has committed the target action
2. Hasn’t committed the target action
It’s worth understanding that each stage has its own conversion. Not everyone will download the material offered, or leave a request, or buy the core product.
Creating an autofunnel requires a number of simple consecutive steps.
Stage 1: Lead Magnet
It may refer to a regular lead magnet offering a free trial product. It usually speeds up the process of getting a lead and, as a result, establishing contact with your future client.
Stage 2: Tripwire
It is at this stage that you may offer a cheaper product. Thus, customers may shape their opinion about the service (product) and develop desire to buy from you something more expensive (if the time for decision-making while acquiring your product usually exceeds three or four days).
Stage 3: Core Offer
At this stage selling the product is much easier, besides the likelihood of losing customers isn’t high.
Stage 4: Maximizer (optionally)
Maximizer refers to up-sale or cross-selling usually in situations when the core product is expensive or meant to be purchased just once.
Stage 5: Subscription
The last stage features selling goods/services to the returning customers who have already reached the bottom of the funnel (in cases when a single client can purchase goods/services more than once) or further selling through attracting new leads on referral program.
Constructing a more detailed messenger autofunnel requires the following.
— Analyzing Markets and Identifying Target Customers
Markets, niches and target audiences surveying gives you awareness of whom you offer your product and why, as well as of advantages of your offer over your competitors’. It is at this stage that you will come up with a detailed description of your product and USP aiming at attracting leads’ attention.
To study a niche, have a look at the supply and demand figures, their ratio and service costs. If the niche is replete with offers it is time to think about some special positioning. If not, go to the next step and draft the portrait of your target audience mentioning age, sex, income, hobbies, preferences and interests of the clients to gain a better awareness of them. Give thorough descriptions of your clients’ main stress points. All of these will help you with compiling a smart USP.
— Designing Tunnel Algorithm
It is at this stage that you should thoroughly spell out all the steps that your client would follow as well as the stages of an autofunnel. For example, let’s have a look at the sales tunnel of a wholesale online toy shop.
- A customer has visited the landing page, seen the USP and asked for an online consultation via a messenger.
- The system automatically redirects him to the messenger or provides a number for communication.
- A chat-bot appears in the dialogue window. It answers customer’s questions and gives consultation.
- The chat-bot asks the customer to do a short test and based on the results offers a number of specially selected categories of goods.
- The chatbot routinely informs about new posts in the blog, podcasts and about other useful information provided by the company.
It is highly recommended to spell all the algorithms including chat-bot communication algorithm, customer actions algorithm and others in every little detail. For example, include a thank-you message to be sent to the client after the purchase, or news message informing them about personal discounts.
— Creating and Setting Up the Tunnel
This stage refers to creating landing pages, designing messengers’ chat-bots, setting up automatic redirection to dialogue windows and other technology-related activities. It is almost impossible to go through this stage on your own. So, it is better to hire a specialized company offering a complete cycle service of creating sales tunnels.
— Tunnel Testing
After the autofunnel is created and launched it does need to be tested. Leave a purchase request on your own or ask several friends to go down the entire customer path. Thus, you may single out potential errors and correct them on-the-fly without losing potential clients on account of the bugs.
