Ditch the Emails and Embrace The Bots — How AI is Changing the Marketing Game

The number of chatbots that exist has grown by more than 100,000 since Facebook opened its Messenger API. While some are made just for fun, others have been created by businesses to help them improve communication with their customers. A Messenger chatbot has some excellent benefits, including several that are similar to email marketing. However, the two channels provide differing results, so it’s worth exploring them both. Let’s take a look at why you should use Facebook Messenger, how Messenger bots can do the same tasks as email campaigns, but how they can also do so much more.

Why Facebook Messenger?

A 2016 study showed that people open emails at a rate of 21.8%. In other words, the large majority of people don’t want to open marketing emails. One of the reasons for this is that they are simply bombarded with marketing emails, and it’s easy to ignore them all. Email isn’t working to get people’s attention.

On the other hand, Facebook Messenger has a user base of over 1.2 billion users around the world. It clearly offers the potential to reach a huge market. Another important statistic is that 49% of email is read on mobile devices, which might show that people prefer to read while they’re out and about. Facebook Messenger can help to reach people like this by using a push notification that comes straight up on their phone. It could increase open rates across the board. Facebook Messenger’s most valuable trait is the automatic connectivity it brings with it. The Facebook Messenger widget, an easy-to-use customisable messaging window that can be added to websites, syncs directly with your customer’s Facebook profiles. Conversations they start with your Messenger chatbot on your website can be picked up again later via the Messenger app. It also gives your business a direct and personal line of communication with your customers, and makes re-connecting and re-engaging at a later stage much easier.

Messenger Bots vs. Emails

Messenger bots can do many of the things that email has been doing for the last couple of decades. This includes all kinds of communication such as order confirmations and shipping notices, newsletters, upselling, thank you messages, customer service, cart recovery, and lead generation.

But Messenger bots can also do a lot more than email is capable of. If email marketing and chatbots can do the same thing, you might wonder whether there’s any benefit to choosing Messenger bots over email. However, Messenger could help you to fulfil your objectives more effectively.

The primary benefits of using Messenger over email include:

• 98% of people open messages from a chatbot and 44% click through to a website, whereas email open and click-through rates are much lower.
• Using Messenger allows you to create a thread of messages, strung together as part of a conversation history. When you use email, each one will appear as an individual message, even if they’re from the same sender, unless they’re part of the same email chain. The advantage of the chat is that new messages could prompt people to look at older ones. It can also offer a more personal way for users to connect with a brand.
• With email, messages can accidentally go to spam or junk folders, which people rarely look at. They also don’t automatically send push notifications, whereas a Messenger chatbot can do this.
• Messenger shows brand messages among people’s normal contacts, so they might notice them while messaging friends. Email applications often group marketing emails together so that none of them stand out.
• Messenger bots can be used to ask questions and get answers immediately. Email is much slower.
• Messenger will display all of your information in the correct manner on any device, without having to do any setup.

Conclusion

Chatbots are slowly taking over the world of marketing. With much higher marketing campaign open rates, it’s obvious why more and more businesses are choosing to use Messenger and other applications. Messenger chatbots could replace email marketing as the most important way to reach people. Natter.ai are developing specialist Salesbots with their Attracter product that can help to engage customers, boost conversions, remessage potential and lost customers, complete transactions and upsell.

However, it’s also important to remember that there are changes taking place elsewhere too. For example, the EU recently implemented their GDPR framework, which gives people more control over their personal data. This means that brands need to be careful about who they get in touch with and how they do it. It has had an impact on email, and chatbots also have to stick to the rules set out by the GDPR. However, since chatbot open rates are much higher, the impact isn’t so drastic.

More than two billion messages are sent and received between businesses and consumers each month. If brands are able to ensure their content is relevant to the user, they can have great success using this technology. Ensuring relevance to the user also helps brands to stay within the rules of GDPR.

Originally published at Natter.ai.