The latest eCommerce Growth Show presented a new topic: Facebook Messenger marketing and the little wonders you can do with it – if implemented correctly, of course – to gain more than 100 times the ROI you were used to seeing in your analytics.
Let’s get straight to it because this is a short, but extremely insightful session!
Who is Soma Toth?
Soma Toth is the Founder and CEO of Recart, the #1 Messenger marketing app for eCommerce.
As CEO, he makes sure that all 110,000 businesses powered by Recart continue to see amazing growth.
Key takeaways from this episode
Differences between email, SMS and Messenger – what should you use?
The main marketing channel for e-commerce was email – and still is – for a very long time. And while email should be the backbone of your own marketing and for your e-commerce store, you have to admit that email has a very limited engagement free. So basically, the average open rate for a newsletter is 12 percent according to Klaviyo stats, and the average click rate is somewhere between 1 – 1.5%.
While you can design beautiful emails and you can personalize them at a high level, the engagement is going to be quite low since Gmail and all of the email inboxes are working really hard to make sure that their customers only get notified by the things they are truly interested in. And even if they are interested in a promotion, it’s going to be in the promotions folder – they’re buried under all the other brands that are trying to get your customer’s attention.
Basically, the idea of chat marketing – which includes both SMS and messenger marketing – is to provide a channel to the business that can be used to communicate with their customers at a high engagement rate.
When it comes to SMS, the advantage is clear. The engagement is super high, although software cannot really measure the open rates properly, but we know that it’s somewhere close to 90-95%. Just imagine yourself when was the last time you have not opened a text. That’s pretty powerful and you can make sure that what you are trying to say is going to get noticed by your customers or your subscribers.
However, SMS is a quite limited platform. So if you want to send your messages for cheap or for an acceptable price, you’ve got to send a concise message with only 160 characters without buttons, without images, without the design you got used to with your emails. Your message is going to be very powerful still, but you have the limitations on the experience.
That’s where Messenger comes in because Messenger has the ability to be beautiful, personalized and also carries the same high-level engagement and even a higher level of engagement than SMS.
While there is no one better than the other – we are not trying to sell the idea that you shouldn’t do email or shouldn’t do SMS – what we are trying to explain is the real differences between the different channels and while email and SMS are very very good platforms to help you grow your business and you’re probably should use them, Messenger is definitely something you don’t want to miss out due to the high engagement rates and the experience it can give to you and to your customers.
What’s a really important point here is that Messenger is a two-way channel. So while for text messages, technically your customers can respond and will respond if they have a question or a concern or something like that, but for Messenger for example for abandoned cart messages, we record an average 20 percent response rate. It’s not open, it’s not a click, 20 percent of those people reach back to you and say hi or ask their questions or place with the chatbot you can use to automate the conversation here
What’s really important about Messenger is it’s very effective – almost 100% open rates – and the experience is much better with two-way communication and with all the rich videos, texts, quizzes and answers.
Messenger marketing tactics from high-growth DTC brands
- Integration with other channels
Messenger is technically designed to play very well with all these channels [e.g. email ads]. So to follow your thoughts, to reflect on your first point, it’s really easy to integrate Messenger conversations into your ads. You can turn your Facebook and Instagram ads into Messenger conversations anytime using Recart or any other messenger platform out there.
It’s pretty easy to do and instead of taking people directly to the website or the product page, you can take them through a series of questions, you can unlock a special discount or you can give them special content that they are interested in.
This messenger conversation can very effectively pull in the customer’s email address and phone numbers. So what’s really effective here is that customers can tap on their email address and their phone number giving it to you without typing in anything.
- Subscription
The first pillar of a successful Messenger strategy is always subscription. The same with email or the same with SMS, you got to have some people on your list. There is an entry point.
Off-site tactics:
- Facebook and Instagram ads that take people to Messenger
- Use comments to trigger conversations
On-site tactics:
- Pop-ups
- Different widgets
- Messenger’s chat plug-in
- The order page widget
Step-by-step guide to achieve 100x+ ROI
- Step 1: You have to have a strong subscription strategy based on the composition of your traffic.
If it comes from Instagram or Facebook or Google, we can give you a quite sharp recommendation on what you should use on your website. If you have a strong subscription strategy, it’s already half success.
- Step 2: Activate your flows and campaigns.
Flows are the things that are being triggered automatically based on customer behavior or any other triggers. Campaigns are the ones that you usually send out [during specific times].
- Get the welcome flow right in messenger. For most of the merchants, welcome flows are the most profitable flows out there. The most effective messenger marketing is when you remind your customers that you are there, te offer is there and they should move forward in the customer journey.
- The second most important flow that our merchants use is the abandoned cart. It generates a ton of revenue for them. If you get it right and if you get the first reminder without a discount and a second reminder with a discount, it gets very, very effective. Also, you have to make sure that you provide additional context to the customers: shipping times, additional info about the product. They can iron out all their concerns and questions they might have with a purchase.
- The third one is the receipt. We can talk about receipt and shipping notifications. If you want to make sure that your customer will become a repeat customer, you have to make sure that the experience is amazing post-purchase as well. Messenger allows you to send them their receipt on Facebook Messenger but at the same time provide an easy way to track their shipment.
For campaigns, there are many different ways to re-engage with your Messenger subscribers. But the most important is a tool called Sponsored Messages. They are the ways you can use to re-engage with your customers once they are not active with your Messenger conversation.
It’s basically a blast when it’s very similar to your email newsletter or your SMS broadcast campaign. Sponsored Messages are paid ads basically and we build an integration with your Ad Manager so we handle all the ads related stuff and we upload the conversation into your ad account and you directly pay Facebook for the messages.
What’s really cool about that is that it’s currently almost four times cheaper than an average SMS you send. So it’s a huge opportunity and you can include the gifts. the images. the buttons and all the two-way conversation that we spoke about.
What’s really important here is not just sending promotions all the time, instead of turning your customers’ messenger inbox into a technical spam folder, we encourage you to send out interesting information, recipes, exclusive content about your product or around the problem of your customers.
What we recommend is to send at least two sponsored messages every single month and one should not be promotional: giving value, talking about the problem of your customer, trying to help them.
- Step 3: Messenger Ads
If you compare Messenger to a regular ad which basically gives you a click – a visitor on your website – and the ability to retarget that person later on based on their activities on the website. That’s what you usually buy with a click from Facebook.
If your CPC is one dollar, you pay one dollar for having a single visitor on your website and having the ability to retarget them later on. When it comes to Messenger Ads and you run Messenger Ads on Facebook or Instagram that take people to a Messenger conversation, for the same one dollar you pay for Facebook for a single click, you get a Messenger subscriber immediately.
Once they tap on the ad, they become a Messenger subscriber and you can follow up with them and send messages to them later on. It gives them a proper personalized experience as well. You can take them through a quiz, you can give them context about your brand then your products. You can also capture their phone numbers and email addresses.
Basically, instead of two things you usually buy with your regular ads, with Messenger Ads you can buy six different things and take them to Klaviyo or whatever marketing software you use for this purpose.
The next episode awaits with a new guest, Alex O’Byrne, the CEO of We Make Websites, prepared to talk about how to scale internationally on Shopify. You can’t miss it!
