Messaging apps are becoming even more popular than social media platforms and this means businesses are looking at a huge, largely untapped opportunity to personally connect with customers and generate viable leads.
People are increasingly moving toward messenger apps as their preferred way of communicating with businesses, and the statistics are promising for marketers.
Facebook IQ, for example, conducted a worldwide survey that found the following:
- Fifty-six percent prefer to message rather than call a business.
- Sixty-one percent are favorable to personal messages from businesses.
- Fifty percent-plus are more likely to shop with a business they can message.
- Sixty-three percent reported that their messaging with businesses is increasing.
Why are messaging apps beating out social media platforms? According to research conducted by Business Insider, Apps come with size, retention and usage rates, and user demographics that hold special appeal for businesses and marketers.
For as many people as there are on social networks, the combined user base of the top four message apps is even larger. And not only are message apps the most used of mobile apps, they’re also most heavily used by young demographics that brands are eager to reach.
The trends reflected by this research are only accelerating, and now is the time to make message marketing a key part of your overall strategy with the following tips.
Use your email marketing experience to guide your message marketing efforts.
You might say that right now, message marketing is email marketing on steroids.
While email marketing’s open and click-through rates continue to decline, message marketing’s are steadily rising.
With average email open rates topping out around 19 percent and click-through rates capped at around 2 percent, message marketing is flexing its muscle with open rates greater than 80 percent and click-through rates greater than 30 percent.
With what appears to be the beginning of a mass migration of customers from email to messaging, businesses need to move quickly on this strategy.
Fortunately, almost all digital marketers have years of experience with email marketing. This is great news because rather than needing to learn a whole new skill set to reach your target audience, you can simply expand your engagement efforts into this new channel.
In other words, you can market through message apps in the same way you do through email. It’s really just as simple as building a list by attracting new leads, nurturing those leads, supplying relevant content, answering questions, and converting the leads you generate into paying customers. (And you can easily build a chatbot to handle the bulk of this communication for you, no coding experience required.)
Use message marketing to get personal and have one-to-one conversations to build relationships with your audience.
Message marketing has many advantages over email marketing. For one, email marketing is a one-to-many approach, and message marketing is much more one-to-one, interactive, customized, and conversational.
By building a good chatbot, you can customize your messages as guided by the links a follower clicks as they progress through various phases of the message. Though the chatbot can kick off the conversation and in many cases handle it from start to finish, you can also build in the option for your follower to connect with a live customer service rep at any point in the messaging process.
Not only can you “push” content to followers, but you can also help them “pull” customized content to themselves. This is a value-added service to followers that puts even greater control in their hands to help them get exactly what they want on-demand, thus further building trust with your business.
Combine ads and messaging apps to generate and nurture sales leads.
Rather than your business being lost in the shuffle of a long parade of ads on your target audience’s feed, make your business stand out by bypassing the crowds and interacting directly and personally with a potential lead.
You can do this with message ads, and here’s how it works.
Your ad will appear in the home tab of your target audience’s message mobile app. As soon as they tap on the ad, they’ll automatically land on the destination of your choice — either your website or a message conversation.
If Facebook’s numbers are any indication, the incredibly high response rate to message marketing is only growing. According to one analyst, high-quality chatbot conversations with engaged audiences are getting 80-90 percent response rates, with even non-optimized chatbot conversations coming in at 35-40 percent.
Just to give you an idea of how powerful this approach can be, a business ran click-to-Messenger ads on Facebook to reach their target audience to drive leads and sales. When a person clicked the ad to get more information, they’d begin a conversation with a chatbot. (They’d also be given the option to talk to a live service rep.).
Within three months, the business reached more than 100,000 people and converted about 50 leads per month into sales. And this isn’t an anomaly. When HubSpot went with a similar approach to generating leads, they saw a whopping 477% reduction in their cost per lead, while lead quality was only marginally reduced.
In conclusion
Message marketing needs to be a key part of your overall strategy, especially considering that Facebook Messenger is poised to take the lead as the world’s top marketing channel. (Which suggests that Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn won’t be far behind.) For businesses who get in on the “ground floor” of this new wave of content marketing, the investment will be well worth the effort.
