6 Reasons Why The Future of Marketing Lies In Messaging Apps
📸 Picture this:
You’re almost out of your favorite lipstick and need to use it tonight for a dinner you’re going to.
(Men, lipstick is the colored product that goes on a woman’s lips 💄)
Instead of having to get dressed up, get in the car, drive to a store, find parking, walk to the store, and browse through hundreds of products to find the one for you…
You pull out your phone and open up a conversation in Facebook Messenger with Sephora (one of the world’s largest makeup brands).
You think to yourself, “I’m looking for a dramatic, gorgeous red.”
And conveniently, this shows up in the conversation:
You click “Try on.”
And this is what happens…
You think to yourself, “Wow, it looks so real…
It feels like I’m AT the store, trying this on.”
“And, look at all these other options!
Let’s check them out…”
You decide that you liked the red lipstick the best.
Conveniently, there’s a “buy now” button on the screen.
You click that, go through checkout, and receive your receipt in Facebook Messenger.
And just like that, in 5 minutes, it’s as if you had the world’s fastest personal concierge take you shopping.
In other words, you just spoke to a chatbot.
Do you agree we all LOVE when we feel appreciated and listened to by the businesses we shop at?
Whether it’s a beauty brand 💄, clothing store 👕, restaurant 🍽️, car dealer 🚗, grocery store 🍏, and the list goes on.
This was a super personalized conversation and fun experience between the chatbot and you.
She (the chatbot) got to know you, what you wanted, and how she could help you get there.
This experience is difficult to get at most businesses.
When you walk into a business these days, employees can be pretty cold or are already helping other customers, which leads to them neglecting you and your experience.
But, what if it wasn’t this way? 💭
What if you could get a personalized experience at every single business you interact with?
Imagine having a personal concierge that gets to know you and your preferences at every business you shop at. ⏰ Better yet, available 24/7.
All you would have to do is open up a conversation with that business in your messaging apps that you already use with friends and family.
And (drumroll…)
That’s what chatbots are enabling.
Reason 1:
Messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger are making it VERY easy for businesses to talk to customers.
Just read these stats from Facebook Messenger:
✅ 1.3+ Billion Monthly Active Users
✅ 2 Billion messages are sent every month between businesses and users
✅ 80–100% Average Open Rates* (email average: 10–20%)
✅ 50–100% Average Click Rates* (email average: 2–4%)
*Based on the 90+ chatbots I’m grateful to have built and consulted.
Some people are even calling them the new email and apps.
As a digital marketer, this is my definition for what chatbots really are:
Chatbots are intimate channels of communication, automation, and revenue for your business.
Reason 2:
There are several, valuable use cases for every industry.
Where exactly do bots fit into a business?
How can you combine them with your other channels?
In my experience, bots can help with every part of a business.
Here are four examples of use cases in different industries.
Example 1: 🏡 Real Estate (industry) lead generation (use case).
You can generate inexpensive leads, and qualify them easier and faster than ever before.
Using a chatbot to complete the first part of a company’s sales process can save a lot of time. ⏰
The bot can generate, qualify, and even nurture the lead before a sales representative talks to the lead. 🙌
Then, that lead information can be sent to your CRM or marketing campaign software.
This isn’t just for real estate — it’s for any business that wants to generate a significant amount of inexpensive leads on a daily basis.
Example 2: 🛍 E-Commerce (industry) cart abandonment (use case).
75.6%* of e-commerce carts are abandoned.
That’s not just e-commerce shops — That number includes travel bookings, finance products, non-profit donations, and more.
Chatbots have already proven to be one of the most effective ways to recover these carts. 🛒
It’s easy to connect a chatbot to most e-commerce softwares (e.g. Shopify). This enables you to not only recover abandoned carts, but also send delivery updates, retarget buyers, segment your audience, and more. 😮
*Source: SaleCycle.
Example 3: 🎓 Online Education (industry) webinar sign-ups and reminders (use case).
For companies that revolve around creating amazing content, you need people to SEE that content in order to make money.
Reminders about webinars, Facebook Lives, video releases, and more can dramatically increase your view count and engagement.
Example 4: 👋 Restaurants and similar storefront businesses (industry) and value exchange (use case).
Surveys inside chatbots are a fantastic way to exchange value between customers and a business.
But that’s just scratching the surface.
A couple other ways you can engage users inside a chatbot for storefront businesses like restaurants and clothing stores are:
✅ Providing the wifi password
✅ Letting users order food/drink
✅ Scavenger hunt
✅ Giving discount codes while waiting in line to checkout
Reason 3:
There are so many advantages for both the business and its customers (that email simply can’t do).
Keep in mind, this is only the start of a very long list…
Some of the advantages for the business:
- 🛍 Users can complete a purchase without ever leaving the app
- 🎯 Retarget your audience on Facebook without paying for Facebook ads
- 🔄 Fully automate lead generation
- 💰 Fully (or almost fully) automate lead and customer conversations
- 🏪 Answer customers instantly, 24/7
- 😍 Personalize messages to increase retention and happiness rates
And the advantages for the customers:
- 👏 Immediate answers to questions
- 💌 Relevant and convenient content retrieval
- 🚫 No spam (protected by Facebook’s policies)
- 🎉 Fun and visual interactions with companies you love
Capturing leads via Facebook Messenger is great.
Answering user questions is helpful, too.
However, there is so much more you can do to fully take advantage of a bot’s capabilities (and it takes such a short amount of time to set up and see results!).
Keep reading to find out how to do that! 👀
Reason 4:
Consumers are engaging significantly more with chatbots than email or apps.
Now that you understand how chatbots can actually help businesses, you might be wondering how they compare to email and applications.
How do they stack up against the channels that everyone uses to get leads, nurture them, and close deals? ⬇
But wait! Before you go throw away your email list and app — I do not recommend replacing your current channels with bots.
Instead, chatbots should be another touchpoint, an addition to your funnels and channels.
Reason 5:
If a gal like me can build bots that bring my clients more than 5-figures in extra revenue each month, you can do it, too.
By this point, you get it. There’s a chatbot wave happening in the marketing world that no one can ignore.
Its power and results are undeniable.
Here’s a little secret (that’s becoming not-so-secret with every passing day):
Hundreds of millions of businesses don’t have a chatbot right now.
These business owners don’t have the time to learn new technology.
They need help setting up this new technology and reaping the benefits.
And who can help them?
You.
These businesses will pay you to build this new technology for them.
In return, you have the superpower to run campaigns that bring them more revenue, automate their customer service, and the list goes on. 💰💰
Are you following so far? Good.
Because this is serious, untapped, unsaturated opportunity right here for entrepreneurs like yourself.
So what skills do you need to have before finding your first, excited client?
🚫 No coding knowledge
✅ Basic digital marketing knowledge/understanding
Copywriting and design are important, too, but guess what?
We’re all conversational design experts.
Why? Because you and I have hundreds of digital conversations every month. We message friends, family, and businesses every day.
We are experts at…
- Feeling out an online conversation,
- Adding just the right amount of emojis,
- Saying the right thing at the right time,
- And the list goes on.
These are the skills you need to build conversational experiences for businesses. And you already practice them on a daily basis ✅
Reason 6:
A marketing agency is the best, first business (in my opinion).
My chatbot agency was my first real business.
Before that, I worked marketing and sales for several years at tech startups in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.
When I decided to start my business, I was torn between starting an agency or building a startup.
As I weighed the pros and cons, I realized that I could grow an agency as fast or as slow as I wanted 📈
If I wanted to make $5,000 a month to live comfortably, I could work with 1–3 clients.
Or, if I wanted to scale this to a multimillion dollar business, I could do that, too.
The other pros I realized (and have proven as I’ve built my agency):
- 👏 EXTREMELY Low Startup Cost. You can literally get started for just $5 to pay for Google Drive. And ta-da! You now have a professional email, CRM (customer relationship manager), document creator, free site builder, and more.
- 💰 Because your expenses are low, almost every penny you make is PROFIT. Your client will pay for all expenses related to your services. All you pay for is your own labor (or if you hire someone) and internal software.
- 😍 An agency is a very flexible business. Like I mentioned, it’s 100% up to you whether you want to grow a huge company or make a comfortable, happy living.
- 👋 It’s very hands-on. You’re getting a ton of experience working with clients, and managing sales and marketing processes. You can’t get experience like this anywhere else.
- ❤️ There’s a lot of support for agency owners. Lots of online and offline agency communities exist where you can meet potential clients and partners.
- 📈 You can easily branch out from your agency into other types of businesses. Many agency owners move on from their agencies to build information products, software, tools, and more awesome things. All of the agency owners I know have successfully done this.
And of course…
There were a lot of doubts that entered my mind when I was going to start my agency (which are probably running through your head right now).
Here are the biggest ones:
💰 I’m worried about the cost to get started.
I know we’ve all heard about people who spent their life savings or took out high-interest loans to start their businesses.
That’s just not the case with an agency. You have full control over your startup costs (which is very unique compared to any other business model).
😅 What about my competition?
There are hundreds of millions of businesses that need to be serviced with bots.
Your competitors simply can’t service all of them. There will always be certain niches of the market that aren’t being fulfilled — especially mid-size and small businesses.
In conclusion, it’s fairly easy to build an agency (I know many agency owners who don’t even have websites and are doing 7–8 figures a year).
Better yet, chatbots are in insane demand now and are the best service to focus on if you’re just starting an agency (or wanting to add more offers to your current agency) 🤖
So, how do you get started?
Running a successful, highly profitable bot agency consists of two main steps:
- 🤖 Learn how to build high-converting chatbots
- 💸 Acquire chatbot clients
If you see the opportunity here (which you’d have to be blind to miss at this point!), I personally want to help you get your chatbot agency up and running.
To get your first $2000 chatbot client.
And to help you grow quickly and reach your monthly revenue goal.
We’re running a 5-Day Build Your Bot Agency Bootcamp, and I want you in it.
If this article was helpful to you, hit that clap button a couple times to show your support! 👏
