Are Messenger Chatbots A Waste of Time?

In the past 18 months, I’ve run a specialist chatbot development agency called All Chat Solutions. I’ve built bots for small and large businesses throughout the world and written extensively on my thoughts about Messenger and chatbots.

Until recently, I offered custom-made chatbots and also templated generic bots.

I built bots for sales, customer service, lead generation, research, content distribution and more.

But I no longer do this for clients.

As someone who has dedicated much of the past two years to building and learning about chatbots, this is hard for me to say…

…Most chatbots are a waste of time.

Probably not what you expected to hear from a specialist chatbot development agency huh?

Two years ago when Facebook first opened up Messenger for chatbots, there was a lot of hype and excitement about bots in the marketing world.

A lot of people started building some really impressive bots. And there were also a lot of shitty bots built.

But most bots failed because they either tried to get too fancy, but with no purpose. Or they were just poorly built, with very little consideration for the end-user and no specific goal in mind.

Facebook Messenger is still an incredible tool for businesses. But only when used the right way.

The main benefits of Messenger are….

• High message open rates
• High engagement — clicks, responses, etc…
• Ability to reach audience 1 to 1

From my experience, the biggest benefit of Messenger right now is that it’s probably the most cost-effective way online to remind your audience that you exist.

Obscurity kills businesses.

If people don’t know your business exists (or your client’s business), it won’t make money.

Gary Vaynerchuk says attention is like oxygen. It’s that important. But how do you get attention?

Facebook ads or PPC advertising — Facebook ads and other online advertising mediums are great. And it probably should be part of your digital marketing strategy. But you have to keep putting more money back into it to continue getting attention.

Organic social media — good because it’s free but the organic reach on all major social media platforms is extremely low and continuing to decline. Also very time-consuming.

Email marketing — has a high ROI if done well, should be part of your strategy. Once your list is built, you don’t have to keep paying to reach them. But open rates are low, as well as engagement.

Content (blogging/video/podcasting, etc..) — can be very effective, builds trust with the audience. But very time consuming and often requires advertising money to drive traffic to it.

Facebook Messenger offers similar benefits to email. Once you build a list of subscribers, you can reach them at no extra cost. Facebook does have some restrictions on what you can and can not send so it’s not quite as flexible as email. But you do have the extremely high open rates and engagement.

And then when someone opens your message through Messenger, they are far more likely to click through to a webinar registration page, landing page or some other type of offer.

For me, I’m done with fancy, over-complicated chatbots. I’m more interested in a simple strategy that actually delivers results.

The strategy is simple — drive traffic to Messenger from other platforms. Then use Messenger to remind your audience that you exist. Not in a spammy way. And it should always be done within Facebook’s rules (24 + 1 rule, etc..).

Messenger is one way of getting attention. But it shouldn’t be the only way you get attention. Still use tools like email, social media, and paid advertising to remind people who you are and what you do.

From my experience, Messenger will give you the greatest reward for the time and money you invest into it when used for this purpose. But it will be even more effective when combined with these other platforms.

Then take advantage of Messenger’s high engagement rates and occasionally throw in a call to action. The conversion rates will stun you.

This is where Messenger can actually have an impact on your business.

For some businesses, it might make sense to get people outside of Messenger as quickly as possible. Either, onto a consultation call, onto your email list or into your store.

From my experience, this is ideal if you can do this. In my own business, I try to get users to go from Messenger to booking a consultation call as quickly as possible.

And with the high engagement on Messenger, you can often do this with a high conversion rate. But not everyone will be ready for that next step yet. Th

And most of all, keep it simple. It’s possible to build very advanced bots using tools like ManyChat and Dialogflow. These bots can be cool but probably won’t make you any money.