In a world where pay to play is increasing, organic growth of your chatbot increases conversion and shreds ROI. I’ve implemented one or several of the following tips with my customers and seen their user engagement explode.  

Hack #1: Convert real-world conversations to subscribers.

This sounds straight forward but it isn’t natural to ask someone to join you on Messenger. It also requires action from someone, they need to go away and find you on Facebook. You need to get buy-in and make it easy. A real estate agent I worked with would get people through his open homes to message him later that day. He would do this by first finding out their impressions of that open home. If it wasn’t for them, he would tell them he could recommend specific homes for them based on their tastes and had a chatbot set up to filter all properties down to only those that matched their criteria (like a number of bedrooms). To make it easy for people to find him, he had his Facebook Business Page details on his business card and clear links with the same message repeated in his follow up emails.  

Hack #2: Have people share their bot experience with friends

It’s an easy one this one. For a long time, we’d been building a ‘feedback’ flow into our bots – especially in the unsubscribe flow. It wasn’t getting heaps of people to respond, but those that did gave really valuable insights. It only became natural that we added a similar feature towards the end of our chatbot. By extension, this grew to ask a user to recommend their friends to our page and we gave them a special keyword to make it really easy.  Combined with lead scoring, we knew who our promoters would be and we tracked the number of times we delivered that keyword and the number of times it was used – we were achieving a ratio of nearly 82%!  

Hack #3: Share special keywords

A good number of businesses now make great use of Groups on Facebook. They use these Groups to engage a community of followers that share an interest in something that business provides. One really good example is a company making portable pizza ovens – they have a group that shares pictures, recipes and cooking techniques in a group. The maker of that pizza oven would engage users with personalised recipes delivered by their chatbot. Every so often that same company would release a special keyword to their Group and ask their community for feedback, ideas and comments. In doing it this way, they continued to engage existing users, captured new subscribers and had the opportunity to drive product sales because their customers felt valued and that they were getting something extra from being aligned with that business and community  

Hack #4: Use Manychats Growth Tools

This takes a bit more technical know-how but is always powerful when implemented well. If you’re not already familiar, Manychat have Growth Tools that connect to your website and enable embedding of your chatbot right into your own website. This means visitors to your page can start a chat with you immediately with very low friction. Depending on the set up of your growth tool too, you can make this as obvious as a slap in the face, or as subtle as a gentle nudge towards a chat or by encouraging questions.  Either way, you put people right into your welcome flow and convert them to subscribers with minimal fuss.  

Hack #5: Still about the Growth Tools

This one is hooked up to Facebook and if not done properly can almost be a bit too sneaky, hampering the trust you want your chatbot to convey. With Growth Tools, you can have anyone that shares or comments on a post of yours from Facebook get subscribed to your bot. But because this is almost zero friction, I’m a huge believer in the need to be clear in your Facebook post that engagement with you here will also put people into your chatbot funnel.  

Hack #6: Package your products with a hat tip to your bot

In hack #1 I talked about a real estate agent who grew subscribers from his real-world open home attendees, this one is similar but for those that sell a product. If you make a sale and think that’s where your job stops – you’re WRONG. Buyer’s remorse is a real thing and positive reinforcement of someone’s decision is a must! If you’re not already connected to your customer on Facebook, this is a great way to support their decision to be your customer and turn them into an evangelist. One example of where I really helped a company lift repeat business was by including a thank you card in their product box and shipping packaging. By doing so, we included details about the online Facebook Community where they could read or write reviews about the product they just purchased and let them know if they wanted to purchase something again, we could help them choose what was just right. We did this by creating a number of flows that reinforced their decision and in asking them what they liked about their original purchase, recommended products that were similar in tastes, but different enough keep desire high. So there you have it, six ways to grow subscribers and not pay a cent for a single one. If you have any success with these, or ideas of your own that have worked really well, leave your feedback in the comments below!