How to Boost Your CTR with a Chatbot & Facebook Messenger

Published in

Chatbots Life

6 min readNov 6, 2017

The Problem

Our email inboxes are getting more and more cluttered. As marketers and business owners, we’ve been trying technique after technique in order to optimize for higher open rates and ultimately higher conversions. It seems that it’s getting harder to do as time goes on and inboxes get more and more full.

What if you could bypass the email inbox all together and reach your target audience in a much more personable and actionable way? We can with the help of a chatbot and Facebook Messenger.

The Tool

I’ve been testing a few strategies over the past few months in order to come up with a new way to capture potential customers and deliver quality content through a chatbot and Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is becoming more and more popular as an everyday means of communication. It boasts 1.2 billion active users, that’s double the size of Instagram and the same as WhatsApp.

We can harness the power and connectivity of Facebook Messenger to create interactive chatbots through ManyChat. ManyChat allows you to create various campaigns to first capture users onto a list and then allows you to broadcast to that list with an easy to use drag & drop builder. I’m only going to highlight the one strategy I used to build my list. There are many other features that they offer that you can leverage for your audience as you see fit.

Building a List With Your Chatbot

ManyChat gives you a myriad of options to choose from when it comes to building your chatbot. I’m going to give you a brief rundown of each one, and then walk you through the one I chose and how it was implemented.

Overlay Widgets

These are what you would expect. Overlays that you can add to your site to prompt a user to opt into your Facebook Messenger list. These can be especially powerful on blog posts, or other forms of content where you could offer a content upgrade or something of that nature to sweeten the deal for your potential customer. As you can see, ManyChat gives you a wide range of different options for overlays. A bar, slide-in, modal, or a page takeover. If overlays aren’t really your style, you can always use the embeddable widgets to embed a button or a box right on your page.

Facebook Post Comments

The one I’ve had the best results with thus far is the Facebook Comments widget. This one has been huge for developing a list quickly and effectively. The premise is simple, you create a Facebook post and if anyone comments on it your chatbot automatically sent a message via Facebook Messenger with a chance to opt-in to the list.

I have a Star Wars product Facebook page that I created a few years back in order to highlight cool Star Wars products from around the web. I’ve dabbled with affiliate sales with it, and have had some moderate success. Recently, I’ve been using it as my testing ground for new marketing strategies like this one.

So, I created a giveaway post that prompted users to like, comment, or share the post to be entered into the contest and gave it a nice healthy boost with a target audience in mind. I also offered the giveaway list to my existing email list of ~1000 people.

When a user goes to comment on the post, they’re prompted with an opportunity for additional entries if they opt-in to the messenger list.

The interaction goes as follows:

The Results

The results for this post were pretty staggering! 100% of people who commented opened the message and 84.2% of those people opted in. This gave us 351 net subscribers right off the bat. I also had an additional 92 people from our existing e-mail list opt-in as well.

Other List Growth Tools

ManyChat also gives you a few other tools to choose from that I’ve found to be quite powerful to grow your list.

A dedicated landing page if you’re trying to get something up quick and on the fly.
A simple messenger referral URL that you can link as plain text to any button/email/tweet, whatever your heart desires.
If you’re a pro user you can even embed JSON into your Facebook Ad’s to prompt users to opt-in for your messenger list directly from a Facebook Ad click.

Sending Broadcasts

Now that I developed a semi-sizable list to broadcast to it was time to send out a message. This is where the chatbot becomes quite powerful. I decided on just highlighting a product including a short message, the picture, and a link. I used a custom branded bit.ly link to track clicks instead of their native click tracking.

As you can see, the results are quite impressive! 97.2% opened the message and according to bit.ly 119 people clicked on the link. That’s an unheard of 31.7% CTR!

Conclusion: Coupling a Chatbot with Facebook Messenger is the Way to Go

I’m really intrigued with this method and want to keep testing it with different industries, but think this could be the future of building lists via social. I wouldn’t want to discard e-mail lists altogether, but supplement them with a chatbot + Facebook Messenger list to increase awareness and conversions. At the end of the day, it’s really hard to argue with a 97% open rate and 31.7% CTR.

What do you think? Do you think this a viable way to build a list going forward? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter.