Are you looking to improve your customer interactions on Messenger? Are you advertising on Facebook and have one of the outcomes as “get more messages”?

In this blog, you’ll find five ways we’re creatively using Facebook Messenger for business

Many customers prefer a Messenger chat to a phone call or an email. Why? It’s become normal, it’s quickly accessible, fits with people multi-tasking and is instantly responsive (if it’s done properly).

#1: Answer FAQs with Automated Responses

A recent study found almost 80% of customer questions were resolved without human intervention using chatbots. This increased retention, customer satisfaction and helped reduced costs, especially in customer service.

Businesses must be mindful though, nearly 50% of internet users said the greatest challenge with chatbots though was unhelpful answers. Measuring UX (user experience) is the best means to ensure a successful customer journey

The goal should be to impress users, capturing their attention and to build trust in your business. You can do this by setting up automated responses directly in Facebook itself. Simply navigate your Facebook business page, click inbox and on the left-hand side, click automated responses.

You’ll see there are a good number of options here, from an away message to business hours or contact information. Using the ‘add personalisation’ feature means you can customise your response with the user’s name

A couple of other rules to follow

– Keep the point of contact simple; send only essential info and avoid multiple messages

– Let people know they’re not talking to you but rather they’re talking to a bot

– Double-check all your links and preview your messages before making them active

#2: Use Reminders for Customers who Book Appointments with your Page

Facebook lets users set up their page so customers or prospects can book appointments without leaving the platform. This is especially great for consultative sorts of appointments.

If you set up this feature, Messenger integrates with your appointments and enables automatic follow up messages to people at a certain time before their appointment. This helps retention, minimising lost bookings and keeps users engaged with your services

To set this up, make your CTA button just beneath your cover photo the “book now” button. On the next screen, click appointments. After clicking next, click start setup to set the days and times you want to be regularly offering appointments in your calendar.

After you’ve done this, head back to your automated responses section and be sure to enable reminders and follow up messages

#3 Encourage Organic Messenger Conversations

Business pages can’t initiate Messenger conversations with people via Facebook. But they can certainly encourage customers to start a conversation with them. We’ve got another blog article exactly on this topic, but for this post, adding the ‘send message’ CTA button to Facebook posts is the trick.

This is a great way to drive conversions, offer irresistible content and let users know they can send a message to request it. This is commonly called a lead magnet.

To add a send message CTA button start a new post from your page and click ‘get messages’ – you need an image for these types of posts and once you’re all done your post will include the CTA to make it super easy for a prospect to get in touch.

#4 Retarget Your Messenger Users

Did you know you can create a custom audience to retarget everyone who has messaged your page? Running ads will help stay in front of those who have gone beyond just liking your page. Consider a testimonial post as an effective way to get further consideration from those who have already engaged with you.

To set up this retargeting, use Facebooks custom audience feature to reconnect with ‘people who sent a message to your page’. Want to supercharge this? If you had a specific action in your Messenger, say, a question with three different answers – you can target users based on their specific answer.

In Summary

Remember, Facebook employs rules for your interactions with their users. Rules such as the 24+1 rule. This means you’ve really only got 1 true shot at engaging potential clients, so your first conversation and the organic means of creating that need to inspire these users to come back for more.

Have you had another method that has worked well for you? Leave your ideas in the comments below