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How I Developed a Winning Messenger Chatbot for a Shopify Store

Literally, EVERYONE, in the digital marketing space has been talking about messenger bots lately…

“It’s the best marketing channel in 2019”

“I have never seen this low cost per lead in ages”

“The conversion rate is higher than I’ve ever seen”

Still, not many companies are using Messenger bots yet…

Why is that?

Do you remember the year 2014? Everyone was turning their heads towards Facebook and wanted their piece of the pie. On the other hand, most of these people left A LOT of money on the table by not actively spending money on Instagram.

Just like currency, the value of each $ $ is relative to the number of dollars on the market. With inflation, your money is losing value each day due to the high supply. The demand is still the same, but the increase in supply makes each dollar less worth.

Social media is just like trading with currencies. Instead of buying USD, EUR, and other currencies, you are paying for peoples attention.

Why then, are companies still paying valuable $ $ $ to advertise in the same way as EVERYBODY ELSE when better alternatives are available?

A fast-changing environment requires companies to innovate faster than ever.

It’s all about speed. In a world that is changing faster than ever, it’s not easy to keep up with all the technological changes.

Imagine you are the CEO of a company that has 5 people in the marketing department.

You have a manager, a graphic designer, a copywriter, social media manager, and a filmmaker.

There are systems in place and procedures that need to be followed. Small changes will affect a lot of people and it’s not easy to keep up with the quick changes from the market. The bigger the company gets, the harder it will be too agile to quick changes in the marketplace. Moving from one platform to the other can take years to implement successfully… and the big problem is that when the company successfully has implemented the changes successfully; it’s already too late!

I’m not saying that Instagram or Facebook is out of date… Absolutely not! But the big winners will always be the innovators who are quick to adapt.

Look at Daniel Wellington.

Look at FashionNova.

Look at MVMT Watches.

They have a big portion of their success thanks to their willingness to dominate a platform at an early stage. Before it’s saturated and before the users’ behavior starting to get unconscious.

Is the user paying attention to your content?

The Story About The Company Who Wanted To Win:

NicheForBeach sells eco-friendly and handmade premium beach-wear accessories. They were entering a market with a huge competition (handbags, sandals, clothing) and creative solutions were an absolute must. Doing just like everybody else would quickly lead to their death…

Instead of taking a big risk and do like everybody else, they were minimizing the risk by finding a unique way of promoting their products.

To make the whole process quick and easy, but also to use a proven structure and strategy of the bot they decided to hire me. Since I’m a certified bot professional by Botacademy and have built 10+ chatbots for different eCommerce stores they knew that the bot would be built with the highest quality.

What’s the first step when building a chatbot?

When building a chatbot, the absolute first step is to define the objective. For some companies, the role of the chatbot is to qualify leads by asking pre-defined questions. For another, it is to handle customer service. For a third, it has the objective to sell.

Imagine this: You have a team of 100 salespeople who’s job is to reach out to customers, and bring in the money. Now, if you could have conversations with your customers just like your salespeople would but on the customers’ terms. No intriguing conversation that will degenerate your brand, no anxiety from the customers’ side… a comfortable experience where the customer is in the driving position.. You give the vehicle, the customer steers the wheel.

What would it be worth to have a conversation with your customers, on their favourite platform, all personalized, at scale?

How a chatbot mindmap can look like.

When starting out, I do always design a bot map for my clients so it’s easy to understand the different functionalities of the chatbot and how it will work. My clients are always free to request changes and give me feedback on the structure. This way we can customize the chatbot to both serve the customers, but also the business by giving more time (a LOT) to other aspects than generating customers.

Whit that said, a chatbot is like gasoline to the fire. It does not only have the possibility to increase the number of customers. It has the possibility to blow up businesses BIG time.

No wonder why companies in 2019 designing their business model with the chatbot in mind from the very first beginning.

I built a chatbot that was connected to Shopify and recovered 12,2% of the abandonment carts.

  • On average, the store missed 32 sales a day, which equaled 3.84 saved sales per day.
  • On average the pricing was $42 for each sale… which recovered $161.28 each day, $1,128.96 each week, and over $58K per year…
This is the type of message you can send to your customers if they abandon their cart.

What a pleasant shopping experience! Immediately after the customer place the order, their phone is buzzing. Yes, it’s a message via messenger that confirms that the order has been placed. Instead of checking e-mails, getting stressed, or feeling anxiety the customer will immediately get a confirmation on Facebook Messenger that their order successfully has been placed. This is will be synced with the data from your Shopify store.

This is how an order confirmation message can look like.

As it wouldn’t be enough to receive order confirmation, the customer will also receive a notification when the order has been shipped. Pretty cool, right

What if, you could send a message to your customer via messenger and ask them to rate their experience with you? How would that differ from sending an email?

The experience would be much more engaging, and it would also allow your brand to personalize each customers experience.

  • Did the customer think the price was too high? Target the user when you are having a sale.
  • Did they love the product? Ask them to share it on Instagram
  • They already left a review? The chatbot can via a conversation sell even more products from your store.

The best part is that this is 100% free!

Times are past when brands are having one-way conversations with customers. Conversational marketing is the way to go!

A chatbot is a great way to generate leads! The conversion rate for messenger subscribers is almost 100%, and at the same time, you can collect email addresses. Just like email, you can reach out to your customers for free in the future.

Step 1 — Set up a Facebook/Instagram/Messenger ad. In this example, we are running a Facebook Ad campaign with a giveaway.

When the user clicks on the ad, they automatically become messenger subscribers.

Step 2 — The user enters the messenger chatbot and selects a product he/she wants to win. The user is then confirming their email address (which is automatically generated). The email is connected via Zapier to my clients email CRM (in this case Klayvio) and inserted to the email sequence.

The messages the user receives.

I should also mention that the leads are really cheap…

We are generating leads for $0.25

Every time someone subscribes to the bot they will be entered into an automated sequence of messages. This is a great way of engaging the customer and tell your story! You can ask them questions about what they like, their preferences, ask them to follow you on other social channels, etc…

Screenshot from the sequence inside Manychat

The open rate and click-through rate in messenger are extremely high. With NicheForBeach I am averaging an open rate of 94,7% and a click-through rate of 32,8%.

Did I mention that users who are entering the chatbot automatically become subscribers to it? Well, that’s one of the benefits with messenger ads.

But before we are sending broadcast messages to the users, we start by asking them what their preferences are with the automated sequence. Just like this:

We now know what the customers like, and we can tailor our messages for each user. Depending on how they interact with the bot they will get certain tags for their customer profile inside the Messenger CRM system, that later on will be used for marketing.

And as long as you are not trying to promote anything and focus on 100% value for the customers you can send these messages for free with an open rate of +90% and a CTR of 30% and higher.

What are you waiting for?

Do you want your competitors to act first?

Are you “too busy”?

You don’t “think” that messenger will benefit your business?

Let me tell you this: Chatbots will disrupt every single industry, just like social media did when it first started. Social media is getting more and more advanced, and so does Messenger. Facebook has barely started with advertisements on Messenger, but this is the platform they themselves are telling the business to focus at in the upcoming years. With over 1,6 billion users, Messenger is the next goldmine for your business. Dig the same whole that everyone else, or be first and experience the transformation.

Do you want results like this?