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Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.
In this lecture, we’re gonna briefly talk about how you could begin conceptualizing your bots comparing it to different strategies primarily email marketing campaigns because it is very similar building bots. It’s pretty similar to building email marketing campaigns, but it’s also drastically different. And I apologize if some of this stuff is rudimentary or common sense to some of you.
You always could skip these lectures and get right back into the bot building but, I do know from specific feedback that I’ve gotten that a lot of students do like to go through these more conceptual theoretical parts of the training. email marketing, right, we’ve all done email marketing it’s a very very powerful tool we still do it a lot and you still should do it a lot but it’s getting overwhelming to customers over the last few years. Everyone’s doing email marketing, and you’re sort you sort of start tuning it out.
We get lots of email marketing emails every single day, and we have this perception that it’s just another advertisement. It’s just another piece of marketing. That perception does not exist with Facebook Messenger. No one views Facebook Messenger as a marketing platform, and hopefully it will never become that way because it’s very natural language.
It’s conversational, it’s very personal, and it’s one-on-one discussions and texting and chatting. That’s a big reason why the engagement rates are so high with Facebook Chatbots, and it’s also very important for you to realize that when you start thinking about how you want to structure your bots.
With email marketing, and we’ll talk about this in just quick second, it’s longer it’s more one-sided it’s your message. With Facebook bots, you have to realize that this is a one-on-one conversation. Think about how you would talk to your customers in that one-on-one context.
With email marketing, and we touched upon this in the previous lecture, you have to send traffic to a landing page, so you work really hard to build these email funnels and you build and you send all this traffic to a landing page, and then they have to sign up for a forum or they have to read it for something or they have to check out for something you replace all that that entire experience with Facebook Messenger marketing through chatbots, and that’s another massive difference between your typical email marketing.
And it’s another thing to think about when you start thinking about how you want to structure and build your bots as well. List building. Using forms getting the variables and the characteristics of your customers that you want is insanely easy and insanely quick using Facebook Messenger. It’s just so much more rapid. It happens so much more quickly. It’s also very very cheap.
Getting leads right now it’s the cheapest form of digital advertising that is high quality that I know of. It’s because you’re keeping all the experience within the Facebook ecosystem and because, relatively, there’s I think there’s around 100,000 active bots on Facebook or something like that, and counting but still it’s a relatively tiny tiny fraction of all the different advertising.
It’s a negligible fraction of the advertising activity that takes place on Facebook, and Facebook Awards you the marketer by keeping the experience in Facebook with cheaper clicks and cheaper leads. It’s also just much less competitive right now, so the faster you get on this bandwagon the faster you’re gonna be able to take all this.
Just literally jumping into a pile of gold; it’s incredible. You’re also able to get actual data from Facebook. No more fake emails or fake first names or fake last names. When you interact with a lead through your bot, you’re getting an actual email address, you’re getting an actual name, and some other information as well and we’re gonna talk about all that in future lectures.
These are all incredibly worthwhile differences to note between email marketing and messenger marketing although the concept is similar, like I have something to say.
I think I have something valuable to sell you or offer you, but the context and the approach and the whole dynamic is completely changed around. It’s what I would call a paradigm shift in selling online.
Whereas, email marketing progress from direct marketing where you would send mail to someone’s house. we just we still have clients that spend a lot of money on direct mail; it could still work for certain demographics using similar principles of a long-form copyright, long emails persuasive selling techniques, aggressive selling techniques, sort of these in-your-face technique which could work, and you needed multiple touch points of a long period of time.
Chatbots are completely completely different. They’re conversational in nature, things are happening much quicker, people are making decisions much quicker, people are progressing through that buying funnel much quicker.
Think about the way you want to communicate your marketing messages the same as if you were discussing a great product you bought with a close friend. With an email– and you as could see on this picture on the right, this is a long email.
You have nicer beautiful well-designed marketing emails, but they’re not– you don’t write them in the way your you would have a conversation with your friend because you’re not having a back and forth back and forth back and forth back and forth.
When you think about Facebook Messenger campaigns, that’s what this is; back and forth back and forth back and forth. I say something you say something. I respond to what you said. You simulate that with a Facebook bot and that doesn’t exist by email.
We spoke about this engagement rates are much much higher for chatbots, and they’ve continued to increase. Email marketing engagements are actually decreasing year over year, and Facebook chatbot engagement rates are actually increasing year over year.
Lastly, with Chatbots, you’re doing less talking and more listening. That’s how I like to describe it to potential clients. Putting it all together, now just say 30,000 foot view of what we’ve discussed in the last two lectures at a very high conceptual level.
Messenger marketing is the act of engaging with prospects, leads, fans, anyone in your system, anyone who might be potentially interested in your product or services customers through a messenger chat platform. When we say messenger marketing, that’s what it means.
I’m engaging with you through chat as opposed to through email or through phone or through direct mail or anything else that’s chat.
A Chatbot is the technology, it’s the software that allows you to use Messenger Marketing at scale automatically and as one of the most powerful tools at your disposal today.
So those are the very high-level concepts, and I hope you’re beginning to get a clearer understanding of what we’re dealing with here. If you came into this course not really knowing exactly how to conceptualize or think about a Facebook chatbot, or what it was, or where it lived, or what you could do with it.
I’m really hoping that by now you’re starting to fill in the blanks putting a little bit of color to the monochromatic view you might have had of it previously, and I certainly hope you’re starting to get excited to see all the possibilities and all the potential that we have when it comes to building these Facebook bots.