Can Facebook Messenger Bots Beat Email Marketing?

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Facebook Messenger bots as an alternative to email marketing. Until now, I haven’t seen any communication channel come close to beating email in terms of engagement and personalization. Email marketing is, and hopefully will be, the holy grail of traffic and conversion for most of the digital marketers.

Though email is far from dead, Facebook Messenger seems to threaten email marketing as we know it. Facebook has opened up APIs so that marketers can message their subscribers on the messenger platform. And a lot of third-party tools have come up that helps marketers send messages without the need to code. I believe Facebook is betting big on Messenger and they’ve even acquired the domain name Messenger.com.

One of the biggest advantages that Facebook has over email is 100% delivery. It’s a single system that they can control, unlike email where there are so many ISPs and email clients. Also, since Facebook users cannot have multiple Facebook accounts, it also gives a huge benefit to marketers to send laser targeted communication to their followers.

(Click here to test my Facebook Messenger Bot!)

Right now, since not every marketer is using Messengers, the engagement is really high and you should start using it soon. This can be the best time to start leveraging a new platform to engage with your followers.

When a person subscribes, you get their real name and gender which you do not get with emails.

Here’s how the audience tab looks like:

The subscriber’s name is not shown until they interact with one of the messages we’ve sent. This is more like double optin in email subscription. If they do not interact with any of the messages, they’re not counted as a subscriber.

You can see that I’ve added Facebook Messenger subscription for my free digital marketing course instead of email subscription. I am using a popup on the page which asks people to subscribe via messenger instead of asking for email IDs.

The tool I use also has link based subscriptions like the one I’ve shared before. I’ve used SMS and Email channels to get people to optin into my Facebook Messenger sequence.

I’ve been using it only for 2 days, but the results are promising. The open rates are close to 90% and click rates are always above 20% (which is unheard of with email marketing). In the following drip sequence you can see that the click rates ranges from 30% to 58%!

I can also send broadcast messages to my audience and tag the audience based on their behaviour. You can see that the stats for broadcast messages are also promising.

86% open rate and 22.8% click through rate. And it’s not just about the high open rates and CTR. I’ve also observed that it reaches this level quite fast. People are quite responsive to messages on their Messenger. There is an urge to get the Messenger inbox to zero.

There are many tools for collecting messenger subscribers and sending messages. Right now, I am using ManyChat.

I will be exploring other tools and reviewing them soon. I will also post more insights from my experience on Messenger bots. I might even launch a course on this. 🙂

Questions? Leave a comment below!