Facebook Messenger Marketing: 10 Tips To Ace It

Want mind-blowing results for your marketing campaigns? Learn how Facebook Messenger Marketing can do that for you.
Devesh Pinjani
Devesh Pinjani

Content Writer

Reading time: 5 minutes

Over 2.93 billion people actively use Facebook, making it the biggest social media platform today. This comes as no surprise, but it’s currently the number one platform used by businesses to raise brand awareness and connect with their customers.

You read that right! 

Facebook is by far the best place to market your business and acquire loyal customers. Facebook ads alone offer companies a 152% return on their investments. Not only that, their average conversion rates go up to 2%.

But what if I tell you that you can get even more sales just by incorporating Messenger into your Facebook marketing strategy

Continue reading on as we discuss one of the most overlooked marketing channels, Facebook Messenger, and how you can use this to get the most profitable returns for your business.

Contents

What is Facebook Messenger marketing?

Facebook Messenger marketing can be defined as the process of reaching out to consumers using Messenger in an effort to spark their interest in your brand and products. 

The primary objective of this is to build a connection with your customers and get them to sign-up for your email list, join your Facebook community, etc. This is so that the business can continue to have meaningful discussions with customers, which in turn helps brands to generate qualified leads

According to research done by Medium, Messenger marketing offers a whopping 90% open rate and a 20% average click-through rate. For better understanding, here are the average rates email marketing offers in comparison to Messenger:

Messenger marketing vs email marketing open and click-through rates
Messenger marketing vs email marketing open and click-through rates

As a result, with each passing day more and more businesses around the world are adopting Messenger marketing.

Facebook Messenger statistics

Aside from being tagged to the most popular social media platform, Facebook Messenger has also made a name for itself and is a widely used communication tool. Here are some statistics that show how powerful Messenger is:

  • There are almost 1 billion active users on Facebook Messenger 
  • 2.6% of internet users say that Messenger is their favorite messaging platform
  • 20 billion messages are sent between Messenger users every month
  • Facebook Messenger marketing can deliver 10x to 80x better engagement

10 tips on how to ace your Messenger marketing strategy

1. Provide quick replies

The reason why customers are turning to messaging platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp is because they’re expecting much quicker responses from businesses as opposed to email. 

And because businesses make sure to deliver fast replies, you can’t be falling behind in your response rates. 

One way to ensure you’re providing quick replies is to use a Messenger marketing platform, something like NovoChat (that’s us!). Such tools help to consolidate all your conversations on one dashboard, so you can view them at a glance and easily reply to incoming messages.

Furthermore, you can automate replies such as welcome messages, FAQs, and out-of-office messages so your customers aren’t just left hanging and waiting around for you to attend to them.

2. Understand who your audience is

A common mistake we’ve seen brands make is that either they do random stuff to raise brand awareness, or they outright copy what their competition is doing and often end up wasting a lot of time and money. 

The best way to avoid it? Doing research to understand YOUR audience. 

Finding the right audience is the solid foundation of any marketing strategy. Once you know who your audience is, you’ll be able to figure out their likes, dislikes, interests, etc are. 

Knowing what they like has a direct connection to whether they will acknowledge your efforts or not. For instance, if you include the same old generic hooks, commonly used sale taglines, etc, in your messages, most people aren’t going to read it. 

Whereas, if you craft personalized messages that speak directly to your audience, you have a much higher chance to hook them. But for that, you’ll first need to know your audience inside out.

3. Establish a two-way connection

While designing your Facebook Messenger marketing strategy, it’s crucial to remember that this isn’t the same as Facebook ads or email marketing, where it needs only one-way communication with the general public. 

The whole point of using Messenger is to establish a two-way connection. 

They’ll listen to you only if you listen to them!

You need to make sure that both sides are comfortable with the medium and understand what it is that they are trying to accomplish before moving on with the conversation. 

Meanwhile, there’ll be situations when you’ll face resistance from individuals who do not want to use Facebook Messenger because it makes them feel like they are getting spammed. It’s best to not include them within your target audience in the future. 

4. Don’t be sales-y

First rule of sales — don’t be desperate to sell. 

While Facebook Messenger provides businesses with the ability to interact with customers in real-time — without bombarding them with advertisements, most businesses tend to do exactly that. They often overdo their sales tactics and as a result, customers quickly lose interest. 

The key to having a successful Messenger marketing campaign is to converse like a human, rather than a salesperson for a brand.  

When crafting a message for the customers, be mindful of the tone of the communication. It should be less sales-y and more like that of a message from a friend

If you approach the process of developing the language and creativity for your Messenger strategy with this human factor in mind, you will notice improved outcomes from your efforts.

5. Leverage your ad campaigns’ audience

If you have run Facebook ads or created content for your marketing campaigns in the past, you most probably have some audience — use that audience to kickstart your Messenger marketing campaigns. 

Using this strategy would save you the time and trouble of approaching uninterested strangers, identifying and building an audience again from scratch, etc.

If done correctly, this can make it so easy to reach people who have already been kind of exposed to your brand, but don’t know it in detail yet. 

Once you’ve identified these audience groups, you can send them a personalized message directly via Messenger asking them if they’d be interested in receiving more information about what you do and what’s in it for them.

Since they already have seen your ads/posts and are aware of your brand, chances of them saying yes are really high.

6. Build drip campaigns

A drip campaign is an ongoing series of messages that are delivered over time, often bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly. 

It is widely used in email marketing, but if you want to take your marketing game to the next level, you must try using the same concept in Messenger marketing.

They are usually built around an ongoing theme or topic so that they can continue to provide value over time without repeating themselves too much.

Not only it helps marketers to keep in touch with audiences at a much cheaper cost, it also opens up newer ways to keep your brand image fresh in their minds and further influence them to buy your products.

For instance,  you can build drip campaigns around new product launches, retargeting cart-abandoning customers, upselling related products, etc. 

7. Time it right

Another major factor influencing the success of any marketing campaign is its timing. 

Keep in mind that people use Facebook when they are in one of these two states — they are either using it for relaxation or a break from work, or they are actively looking for something (either to gather info about it or buy it). 

We don’t think we need to tell you when (out of the two stages) you should market your brand. 

Moreover, you should develop the plan for the content, the tone and phrases, specifically based on that timing, so that you can ensure that the message you send is one that is enjoyable and appreciated and that you do not spoil their good time.

8. Automate interactions using chatbots

Let’s face it, you can’t be present 24 hours a day, seven days a week to monitor your campaigns, assist your customers, and so on. Chatbots help to fill this void in the market. 

By integrating AI chatbot systems in your Facebook Messenger, you will have the ability to automate and personalize communication with customers at all hours of the day. 

You can also assign them small tasks like helping users by guiding them through your website, answering basic questions, etc. 

But that’s not all, the main benefit of chatbots is that with the right script and programming, they can be made capable of generating leads and potentially converting them into sales without the need for human reps to step in.

9. Include a clear opt-in

More often than not, it’s your responsibility to tell users what’s the next step, and what they should do to proceed further. That’s why you must include a clear opt-in in all your conversations. 

Opt-in is a form of permission marketing in which customers expressly agree to receive updates/notifications from a brand.

Opt-ins may be done through a variety of media, such as email or SMS, and may contain various marketing materials, including catalogues, product updates, advertisements, promotional codes, and more. 

Some common opt-in examples are pop-ups (asking to subscribe to email newsletter), integrated website links (to quickly check out their website/buy their course), links to track their orders, etc. 

Although, using opt-ins doesn’t necessarily guarantee sales, they massively help in taking customers to the next step of your sales funnel. In other words, an opt-in is just like a Call-to-action (CTA), an important step to convert cold leads to hot leads.

10. Use Messenger ads

Facebook Messenger ads are a new ad feature that is intended to help advertisers start conversations with users and drive interactions and sales.

You can re-use your traditional Facebook ads by integrating them into messages. 

There are 3 subtypes of ads (Destination Ads, Sponsored Messages, and Home Section Ads) within Messenger ads that allow you to add more details into your messenger marketing campaign:

  • Destination Messenger Ads appear in users’ Facebook newsfeed like any other ad, but their conversion goal is vastly different. Instead of ‘Buy Now’, users see ‘Send Message’. Contrary to traditional Ads, which intimidate people into buying their products, these ads allow them to reach you first. 
  • The second type are Sponsored Messages, which essentially means that you can deliver custom messages directly to a user’s inbox. 
  • Finally, a Home Section Ad is one that appears directly in the home dashboard of your Facebook messenger app.

Messenger Ads have shown to be better than traditional Facebook ads because they not only cost a lot less, but their open rates are also much higher.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to reach the next generation of consumers, then Messenger is a great way to do it. 

Your customers aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago — you have to evolve with them as their spending habits and purchasing behaviors change. 

We hope that this post has helped you understand Messenger marketing better and given you the tips you need to ace your Facebook Messenger marketing!

Try NovoChat for free! 🚀

An e-commerce chat marketing platform to grow your sales. 

© Novochat

Are you really leaving all these resources behind? 🤔

100+ copy-and-paste message templates for multiple industries and use cases. All these can be yours in a single click.

Drive more sales with chat marketing.

Market your business on WhatsApp with NovoChat.