How to drive traffic to your Facebook Messenger chatbot?
This question pops up at almost every conversation we have with our new customers or brands who wish to try out messaging marketing. As the Messenger platform is getting a more integral part of the sales and marketing funnel, it’s important to learn your options that could be used to drive traffic. (Fortunately they are well documented on the Facebook developer site, but it looks like it’s still not easy to find, otherwise we wouldn’t get so many questions about them..). We have also added a couple small remarks based on the performance of each tool from our experience.
1. Messenger as an Ad destination
This option is getting more and more popular, but still mostly uncharted territory for many brands. Basically you can re-direct the audience of your paid ads directly to your Page’s messenger chat (and use your chatbot for the conversations, as we have described in one of our previous articles).
2. Sponsored messages
It’s basically very simple, as the name of the option suggests: you can send out a broadcasted message to people who have an open chat with your Page (ie. initiated a conversation earlier and did not delete the conversation since then) as an advertisement. It will receive the label “Sponsored”. Sponsored messages are an exception from the 24+1 broadcasting rule that Messenger has, this can be an effective way to re-engage your users who were silent for a long time.
3. Customer chat plugin
This plugin is a great tool to drive traffic from your website or landing page directly to Messenger. As it requires no programming to deploy, it can be done in an effort of just a few minutes. The chat window in the plugin will act as your normal Messenger experience, including your bot. We have shared a couple small tricks about how to set up this plugin in a previous article.
4. Sharing options
There are three different options to share your Messenger experience. If used effectively, this could provide great organic results for your campaign.
- In-conversation sharing means that your users can share content that was communicated to them directly in Messenger
- Webview sharing takes advantage of the integrated webview of Messenger, where users can share websites or other related content (we love to use webviews, by the way! they are providing one of the best user experience)
- External sharing is an option to share directly from a mobile app or an external service, using deep linking directly into the conversations
5. Discover tab in Messenger
We had very little success with this option as it takes some unknown formula about getting displayed in the Discovery tab. You have to sign up your Page in the Settings tab for Messenger Discovery and it typically takes a long review period. As it takes very little effort, you could go for it (the whole setup process is about 10 minutes), but do not expect big results from this one in it’s current form.
6. M.me links
Very popular and sounds like a nobrainer, you should always promote your Messenger experience and messaging marketing efforts with the m.me link of your Page. The format of the link is very simple http://m.me/<PAGE_NAME>, where PAGE_NAME is the handle of the Facebook page the bot is linked to. Not much to add here, use the link! :)
7. Messenger codes
Messenger codes, similarly to QR codes could be printed or displayed in ads, fliers, stickers and other materials. And, of course, you can expect the same results as from QR codes…
8. Send to Messenger plugin
This plugin places a button to your website (or shopping cart, for example), where users can opt-in or sign up to your Messenger experience. The button could be customized in many ways: change it’s appearance, color, but most importantly the CTA it communicates. When a user pushes the button, it triggers an authentication event with your website, thus you need to include the Facebook for Javascript SDK in your page. Another important thing is you have to whitelist your domain under your Page’s Settings, otherwise it won’t work.
9. Message us plugin
Basically a more simple version of the Send to Messenger plugin, this button initiates a conversation between your Page and your user. In other words, it simply re-directs the user to your Messenger, without authentication etc.. Since it’s a simple re-direct, your user won’t be opted in or signed up, unless they start a conversation.
10. Checkbox plugin
This is one of the trickiest and best performing plugins Messenger has to offer and especially popular amongst e-commerce companies. The plugin places a checkbox to your forms or shopping cart on your website and users who click on them are opted-in for further updates, such as status updates of an order. One of the differences between the Send plugin and this one is when your user clicks on the checkbox, it won’t open the Messenger, but it will opt-in the user. It’s important to note, that clear communication and an active opt-in is required in countries with applicable law, such as the GDPR when you are using this checkbox to distribute promotional content. The default state of the checkbox is always “unchecked” and Facebook is currently in the process of updating their policies around this. The best part of the checkbox plugin is that it mostly can drive automated traffic, which is perfect to handle with your bot.
It’s not hard to reach the point where you can be comfortable to drive traffic, using these options (assuming you have a good working Messenger experience). The next step is to further tweak your solution to focus on quality traffic, one that your brand will appreciate the most. Do you have other methods that work great? Would love to hear about them! Also, what are you options on Viber? We will cover that in our next article.
Originally published at Fanbot.
