How to setup a Messenger bot and Facebook Ads to generate more leads
Facebook advertising has a powerful feature which taps into a platform where more than a billion people communicate regularly — Messenger!
Facebook now allows advertisers to use Messenger for communicating directly with a customer instead of redirecting them to a website. While configuring an ad, there is an option called “Messenger as a destination” found below the website clicks objective. You may use “Send Message” as call-to-action in the ad.
Choosing this, whenever someone clicks on an ad in their newsfeed, it will open their Messenger and start a direct conversation. This conversation will be started with a copy of the ad or a welcome message configured by you beforehand. People can respond to it at any time and on any device with Messenger installed.
In case you didn’t know, WhatsHelp is a Messenger Marketing Platform that allows you to build Facebook bots without having to know any coding whatsoever. These bots allow you to automate parts of your sales or leads qualification process. Also, the platform lets you send relevant content and personalized offers in specific segments or all at once to your customer.
Choosing the right type of bot flow
Before creating your first bot, we recommend that you come up with some ideas for campaigns and bot flows. This guide will not cover this topic in full detail but here are some possible flows to give you some ideas:
- Lead qualification + live chat with an agent: When a user clicks the ad, the bots asks several questions. After that, the user starts a conversation with a live agent.
- Content + lead qualification -> CRM : In this case after clicking the ad, the bot sends configured content and asks few questions to gather lead’s details. The details will automatically be sent and saved in CRM, Google sheets or an email.
- Content promotion + with follow-up (chat/call/offer): After clicking the ad, bot sends the promotional content. Following to that, user can call or chat with an agent.
- Special offer + with follow-up (chat/call/offer): Here, a user clicks the ad, bot sends a promo-code and offers to chat/call.
A bot is as smart as you make it. It is always good to have a workflow and a script ready for the bot conversation. Basically, you need to decide what and when will the bot ask or reply while chatting with the user.
Create a WhatsHelp bot
Pre-Steps
To create a bot, your Facebook account should be connected with the Facebook Page with all required permissions. When integrated with WhatsHelp, it gets the permissions to manage the page’s messages in order to automate the replies.
Step 1: Basic settings of Bot
The first thing you need to do is login to your WhatsHelp account and select ‘Bots’ option present in the left menu. Click the ‘Create a Bot’ button and get started with the configuration.
With the easily comprehensible field names and default settings, you can set up a new bot as per your business requirements. Once you follow all the steps mentioned in this guide, you can create several bots with different flows and connect them to different Facebook Ad campaigns.
Bot Title. To set up a bot, decide a nice bot title which actually relates to the planned campaign. It can also be same as Facebook Ads campaign name like “Drive Leads campaign-1”.
Bot Referral. The Bot Referral field is a unique bot ID. In some cases, bots are designed in such a way that they are supposed to trigger another bot. This is where unique bot Referral ID is used to identify the respective bots. Keep it simple like “dr_leads_cam1”.
Facebook Page. Connect the bot with your Facebook Page.
Start a conversation with the agent. This option should be checked if you want a human agent to take over the conversation after the bot is done communicating to user. This is an important step to factor-in when deciding for the kind of bot flow.
Export user data: Facebook Ads with Messenger campaigns start gathering user attention at a large scale. To make most of it, you should keep data of all users in a central repository.
So if necessary, our next step will be sending all user attributes to a CRM and Email or collect them in Google Sheets.
You can use Zapier to extract leads from the chats and integrate the survey response data in real time with any 3d party solutions. Zapier gives you the power to integrate WhatsHelp with multiple CRM apps (like Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive and etc.) to automate your work.
Simply, enter the webhook URL you get from Zapier and WhatsHelp will start sending the data to the required destination. Map the user field names/attributes to the respective columns in a Google Sheet. WhatsHelp will start sending all leads data to the sheet via Zapier.
Bot Type and Opt-in Message. Keep the bot type Facebook Ads Bot (default settings) and we move on to set opt-in message for Facebook ads. For the Facebook Ads bot, you have to set an opt-in message. Draft a message relevant to the advertisement in such a way that it gets maximum attention and clicks on the call-to-action button.
Setting Call-To-Action button text is one of the most important and decisive action here. Clicking this button will subscribe the user to your Messenger channel and the bot flow is ready to start.
This how Opt-in message configuration will look like in messenger:
Step 2: Set Up the Conversation Flow
Now comes the actual conversation part. Here you will create a flow of messages (text, pictures, files) and questions for the data you need from the user.
You can draft all questions which the bot needs to ask the user in User Input blocks. The answer from the customer gets saved in the profile attributes. If you need a custom field to save data, just chose “+ Create a field” in a dropdown list and enter the field name. The ‘User Input’ block is used to gather some data from a customer, like phone number, favorite fruit, etc. The user input is stored with us and can be checked in later in People section.
Pay attention, that a customer Name field will be saved automatically. So you don’t need to ask it again. The ‘Text Message’ block is used just for sending some text message to the customer.
For example, after an opt-in message, we can send a text message or a picture with some additional information about our product. And after that ask the customer a phone number.
Suppose you want to collect lead’s email or mobile number to save in the profile. This is how the messages can be drafted.
Few tips:
- Keep the conversational tone normal and personalized. People know when they are talking to machines.
- Keep the script ready by figuring out useful situations.
- Be friendly and use Emoji =)
Step 3 : Ready to Set live
You are on the last step to configure your very first bot. At the last step, copy the JSON code in any editor and click on the button “Set live” to activate our bot. You will need the code while creating the Facebook Ad.
Connect Messenger chat bot to the Facebook Ad campaign
In Facebook Advert manager, while creating an ad, select traffic or conversion campaign as it will lead users to chat. Only by doing this can can select Messenger as a destination option.
For the rest of Ad campaign creation, You can follow regular steps with set images, carousel or video as a promotional content. There will be a minute change which needs to be done in default settings.
While creating an ad, in the Links section, change default settings from selecting ‘Website URL’ to ‘Messenger’. Then click ‘Set up Messenger Content’ button. In ‘JSON creation’ tab, replace the replace the present code with WhatsHelp’s JSON code (see step 3).
Call to action button is one of the most important elements of your Ad to convince people to click. Facebook offers about 12 options to select from the list.
The one you select should be relevant to your goal and product. For example, if you are advertising a book or a PDF, the button should say ‘Download’ . If you are a retail brand, then of course, Download button won’t be relevant for the product and service. CTAs like “Contact us” and “Shop Now” will make more sense. When the text, headline and CTA should be consistent your ad will get better attention.
Finish the ad creation process and put your new chatbot lead generation tool in action! Also, we recommend setting the campaign start date in future so that you can test the Ad and bot flow before you spend.
Important! If you need to change the welcome/opt-in message, go to your WhatsHelp dashboard and edit the bot configuration (the first step). Get the new JSON and change the same in the Facebook Ad campaign setting.
Test your lead generation bot
Even if Facebook hasn’t approved the ad creation request, you can preview your created ad.
To preview the ad:
- You may go to Facebook Ads Manager .
- Click the Ads section and select the checkbox for the ad you want to preview.
- Click ‘Preview’ button
- Use options in the dropdown menu to see how the ad looks across all placements.
- Click on the button on the right top.
- We recommend to select ‘Facebook Desktop News Feed’ or ‘Facebook Mobile News Feed’
- Facebook will open a new tab showing the ad in your News Feed.
- Click on the CTA and bot will be started. Start texting in the messenger.
Your WhatsHelp account dashboard will show the live conversation. If the conversation needs to be taken over by human interaction, you can just use WhatsHelp conversation tab.
CLICK HERE AND CREATE YOUR WHATSHELP ACCOUNT TODAY >
We hope this quick guide helped you to set up a Messenger bot and Facebook Ads to generate more leads. If you can, we would appreciate sharing this and telling others about our platform. And, in case you come across any issue while setting up the bot, you can write us at hello@whatshelp.com.
