Why Facebook Chatbots Are The Perfect Growth Hack For Direct To Consumer Brands

June 2, 2020

Facebook chatbots are changing the game for direct to consumer brands. Learn how brands can leverage chatbot ai to scale & increase ROI.

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Facebook Chatbots are changing the game for direct to consumer (D2C) brands. When you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s inevitable that people will want to learn more, especially since they’re dealing with the manufacturer instead of a retailer. It’s also essential that you provide a personalized, instant and effortless customer experience from the first touchpoint. Chatbots guide shopping experiences and answer any potential customer questions so that you can grow your business and educate consumers about your brand and products.

What are Facebook Messenger Bots?

A Facebook Messenger chatbot is a bot that lives within Facebook Messenger. Although Facebook bots have been around for a while, they’re starting to become more mainstream as D2C brands look to have better conversations with consumers and generate more customer insights. Sheryl Sandberg even announced Click to Messenger ads were Facebook’s fastest growing ad format in their Q4 2019 earnings call.

Bots help automate one to conversations with customers on Facebook Messenger at scale. This includes being able to personalize shopping experiences, dynamically recommend products in chat based on responses, and provide helpful answers to customer questions in their moment of highest intent. Great Facebook Messenger bots enable marketers to leverage all of the insights gathered in chat to continuously optimize their conversion funnel and can even be used to automate re-engagement messages in Messenger to increase conversion rates.

How Facebook Messenger Bots Work

When many people hear the term “messenger bot”, they think of a chatbot that appears on a company’s homepage, ready to answer questions. These reactive, customer service-centric chatbots require customers to come to you. Instead, the conversational marketing chatbots powered by Spectrm integrate with Facebook Messenger to meet potential customers where they already are. Facebook Messenger bots can be triggered directly on an ad click and can guide shopping experiences.

Using a Facebook Messenger bot is a growth hacking strategy as it allows you to have sales and marketing automation in place. People want answers now, not when you finally log in to respond. Starting a customer relationship as soon as a person shows interest is critical – and the bots work by always being on. It allows you to hook people in by providing them with the information they seek and the recommendations that drive their interest even further. It can turn the curiosity from an ad into a transaction due to the interaction with the bot.

The “Get Started” feature inside of the Facebook Messenger bot can also immediately engage your customers and drive them down a conversational marketing funnel. It can help consumers identify what products are best – and that includes links that drive them right to your brand’s products. It’s almost as if it’s a personal shopper, allowing people to know what they need without having to conduct extensive research.

When it comes to direct to consumer advertising, social messaging has become a valuable tool because it provides people with further insight into your products. Because of the instant communication, it can establish trust and value so that people are more inclined to move forward with a purchase – and when your conversion rates improve, it’s easy to see the value behind investing in the conversational AI that should go hand in hand with the Facebook chatbot that you have deployed.

With Spectrm, D2C brands are also able to optimize their conversational marketing using detailed performance analytics, collect customer preferences, and automate re-engagement by personalizing drip campaigns that show on your customer’s phone lock-screen.

How D2C Brands are Benefiting from Bots

As a D2C brand, you have to cut through the noise produced by retailers. You have a product that you want to offer directly. It can save consumers money or offer them something unique. But, they don’t know who you are. Among people surveyed who message businesses on Facebook, the majority say being able to message a business helps them feel more confident about the brand. Conversational marketing and sophisticated chatbots help direct to consumer brands build trust at scale.

It takes creativity and a better understanding of your audience.

It’s important to use technology to your advantage. By employing various D2C customer acquisition strategies using AI, you can move at a faster pace, keeping up with the demands of social media. Conversational AI can help you identify customer intents and respond intelligently at scale. It enables you to offer the kind of amazing customer experience every D2C brand strives to offer their customers. Being instantly helpful with relevant responses used to be limited to one to one human interactions. Bots powered by AI can increasingly achieve a lot of this work. They also enable you to own and leverage valuable customer data that results from one to one conversations at scale.

Most of the questions people have on social media are in the pre-purchase phase. With a Facebook chatbot, you’re able to give your D2C brand the edge needed to identify intent and respond immediately – and that can be the competitive edge that will drive your success.

The benefits you can expect with a bot include:

Leveraging social media to proactively engage customers where they spend their time.
Using conversational marketing to move them through your funnel quickly.
Enhancing the customer experience by having a highly personal one to one conversation.

A chatbot allows you to augment the customer experience. You can give customers what they are looking for 24/7 by combining artificial intelligence to understand your customers with scripted responses to guide them to purchase. It ensures that you’re always there to respond while also establishing a relationship with consumers. It also enables you to proactively engage them on their favorite messaging apps.

Case Studies of Brands Succeeding with Bots

There are already plenty of case studies that have benefited from the Facebook growth hacking tool. Consumers are used to buying from retailers. With D2C, you’re asking them to buy directly from you – and people want to know the why. There are bots being used that help to address these pain points – and some companies have been very successful as a result.

Happy Socks, a company dedicated to offering fun socks to consumers, has used Spectrm to create a fun gift finder. Holiday sales have been given a facelift through every major holiday. Using the Facebook chatbot and Spectrm, Happy Socks has been able to guide customers more effectively through the product catalog to serve as a personalized shopper and enhance the overall customer experience, resulting in a 3X ROAS compared to other holiday campaigns.

Even enterprise-level companies who are not traditionally D2C are leveraging D2C marketing tactics on social media. Telekom, the largest telecommunications provider in Europe, built a conversational contract finder bot on Facebook Messenger that provided millennials with contracts tailored to their personal needs. The company saw a 9x conversion lift in a key growth demographic using Spectrm.

There are plenty of other case studies to show how D2C brands are benefiting from Spectrm, too.

Take Advantage of Guided Shopping Opportunities

The reality is that chatbots and AI can be applied to most business transactions, such as helping direct to consumer brands market to individuals. Facebook and Instagram have become one of the biggest influencers for products. Product recommendations appear within a person’s feed. As such, it’s not going to take much for people to click on an ad that they’re interested in. By embracing the Facebook chat messenger tool, you can engage people who have expressed interest in your brand at their moment of highest intent.

Guided shopping drives people to what they really want. Conversational insight allows you to learn more about what consumers want. Get to know who the consumer is with a few insightful questions. Let them respond. Then, wow them by showing off some of what’s in your brand’s catalog as recommendations to them. Make it easier for them to click by sending them direct links to the products. This will drive transactions and open a new channel for retargeting them directly if they drop off.

People in today’s society want easy transactions. They also want personalization. D2C brands have been growing at significant rates – and it’s because they have learned to harness the power of Facebook advertising along with chatbots and conversational AI. You can have better conversations with consumers using AI – and when you have the right conversational marketing platform, it can drive the results you are after.

Are you ready to take your direct to consumer Facebook marketing to the next level? Book a demo to see our conversational marketing platform in action.