How to Use Facebook Messenger to Sell More E-Commerce Products

When you think about it, Facebook Messenger should be an E-commerce businesses Go-To platform to increase product sales and conversions, find out why.

How to Use Facebook Messenger to Sell More E-Commerce Products

When you take into consideration that Facebook Messenger currently has over 1.3 billion monthly active users and that 2 billion messages are sent back and forth between end users and businesses every monthly. It comes as a no-brainer that this is something that should be used for a marketing advantage. With the big four messaging apps set to surpass the big four social networks, Messenger is a way to cover all your bases. 

It’s an intuitive idea—instead of sending out messages that might never get read or plastering ads in places where the user may never see them, you can engage with your customers or customers-to-be directly. A chatbot can automate a process, gaining most of the benefits of a personal touch with the low-hassle, low-cost benefits of a fire-and-forget marketing campaign—a crucial benefit for small and medium businesses.  

This is just a hint of what a well-deployed messaging strategy can do for your e-commerce sales. For concrete ideas and strategies—read on!

User Experience & Quality Chatbot Templates

Before we sink our teeth into the possibilities there are some pitfalls to consider. Not all messenger stories have happy endings: it has been shown that 47% of users have had a bad live chat experience in the past and 40% don’t trust companies to provide support through chat. Live chat can be slow and needs to be staffed around the clock to be a reliable tool for marketing. Small businesses can’t afford this level of staffing. 

The solution, of course, is to employ a chatbot, but a professional AI-driven solution custom-tailored to the needs of a company can cost a fortune. Luckily, the services a chatbot provides are somewhat predictable. Not everyone needs the same things done the same way, but with a little patience and the proper chatbot templates, a small or medium business can get the right results at affordable prices. 

The use of templates is what allows the mass effective use of chatbots for marketing, providing the power of direct communication through one of the most popular communication platforms in the world to small and medium business for the first time. 

Gathering Data & Better Targeting through Facebook Messenger

Once you have configured your Facebook Messenger chatbot and have started communication with your users, you can start mining this treasure-trove of information for hard data. Nothing said over chat is ever forgotten, the text-only form means that the data is suitable for automatic analysis, and the use of language means that the user can be more expressive—this expression can be a valuable source of information. 

Properly processed, the information can be used to gain insights into your entire customer base learning what, in aggregate, your customers want, how they look for it, how and where they get frustrated and give up, and what makes them click that all-important ‘buy’ button. Once you have this data, it can be used not only to drive strategic decision-making, but also to target Facebook ad campaigns with greater precision and to much greater effect, making each dollar spent advertising go that much further. 

Another use for the data can be to hyper-target marketing data, providing recommendations to users or offering them one-of-a-kind, personalized discounts, coupons, and special offers. A personalized offer provided through a personalized channel may be just what it takes to close a sale, and with the ability of messenger to have a ‘buy now’ button right there in chat, the distance between being offered and accepting grows ever shorter. 

Fun, Games, and Chatbot Marketing

Chatting, as the name suggests, brings with it a casual, relaxed atmosphere. Mails are things your bank sends you, and chats are places for gif reactions and the reckless use of emojis. This can be put to good use as not only can your communication with the user be that little bit informal, but the relaxed atmosphere can facilitate gamification. 

It’s possible to inform the user and entice them to buy through games, quizzes and other forms of gamification and edutainment. A good mood can lead to a purchase and failing that, it is at least the best possible way to get information to the user and even failing that, it’s never a bad idea to associate interaction with your company with a smile in the user’s mind. 

Natural Communication and Beating out Mail

A common failure state for e-commerce is an abandoned shopping cart. For some reason the user comes to your site and finds something they like, they put it in their shopping cart and then never complete a purchase. Failure though it may be, this is also a golden opportunity to close that deal with just a little extra effort. 

It’s common to send out a mail informing the user of an abandoned cart and enticing them to come back and complete the purchase, but mail has a very low opening rate, especially in the first hour, and when it comes to completing a purchase time can be of the essence. Chat messages beat out mail for opening rates in the first hour 70-80% to 5%. This is the kind of advantage a growing business can’t afford to pass up.

What Have We Learned?

Facebook Messenger can be a peerless marketing tool, but it needs to be managed carefully—badly done live chat can be worse than no chat at all, and doing it right isn’t cheap. The way forward for growing budget-conscious e-commerce businesses who want to stay on the cutting edge is the use of AI-driven chatbots which are customized with quality chatbot templates to fit business needs and deployed carefully to maximize the impact on sales and the overall user experience and satisfaction.