Skip to content

[Guide] How to Grow and Engage Your Facebook Messenger Audience with Entry Points

With over 1.3 billion active users, Messenger is becoming the biggest channel for engaging customers and driving conversions across all stages of the buyer journey. Brands use it to cut through the noise, minimize friction to purchase, and reduce acquisition costs.

But many miss the opportunity to use various online and offline entry points to direct and convert prospects in a Messenger chat conversation. 

Download this guide and discover each online and offline entry point you can use to grow and engage a high intent audience on Messenger. 

The key takeaways:

  • The rise of Messenger for engaging customers
  • The value of growing your audience on Messenger
  • Using paid entry points to grow your audience on Messenger
  • Using organic entry points to grow your Messenger audience 
  • Owned entry points enabling you to grow your audience 
  • Using offline entry points to grow your audience on Messenger

Download the guide

CONTENTS

The Rise of Messenger for Engaging Customers

Businesses know that their customers do everything on their phones, including connecting with brands. That’s why messaging on social channels is quickly becoming a major strategic marketing investment for brands. 

It’s official: customers prefer messaging over emails and phone calls. And 85% agree that interacting with a brand via messaging helps build strong relationships with a business. 

With over 1.3 billion active users, Messenger is becoming the biggest channel for engaging customers and driving conversions across all stages of the buyer journey. Brands use it to cut through the noise, minimize friction to purchase, and reduce acquisition costs.

Marketers have woken up to the sales potential of Messenger. But many miss the opportunity to build long term relationships that get recurring value from these high intent audiences.

Tweet

Key findings from the State of Social Conversational Commerce 2022 report show that messaging is the primary way customers want to communicate with a brand. 

messaging marketing channel stats

The Value of Growing Your Audience on Messenger

The value of building an audience on Messenger is often overlooked. It’s much more than just building better custom audiences for ads. The real value lies in building hyper-specific segments of audiences you can continuously engage and monetize on Messenger. 

How can you do that? 

First, get new prospects into your Messenger bot using the online and offline entry points we have just covered. 

Second, collect and analyze the declared data prospects shared directly with you in chat to identify customer preferences.

Third, use those customer insights to build hyper-specific audiences you can re-engage with recurring notifications about topics they’re interested in. For example, you can send them personalized offers based on their preferences. You can notify them about special discounts. You can hype them up about upcoming shopping events and product announcements.

How to grow your messaging audience on social: 

  1. ACQUIRE & ENGAGE
    Grow your messaging audience via paid ads, organic entry points, owned channels like website and email, and offline channels using QR codes.
  2. AUTOMATE CHAT EXPERIENCE
    After customers engage with entry points, chatbot guides purchase decisions by learning preferences and personalizing customer journeys real-time.
  3. RE-ENGAGE & EXPAND
    Every customer in the messaging app can now be segmented and retargeted personally with push notifications to drive ongoing value.

Growing an Audience on Messenger

Messaging channels, such as Messenger, unlock new opportunities for marketers to connect with their customers. Messenger enables private, one to one conversations. As such, customers are more likely to share their data with businesses in a Messenger chat experience. This data can be turned into valuable insights, allowing businesses to build audiences with hyper-specific segments they can re-engage.

Entry points are various online and offline entrances for customers to start a conversation with a business. Businesses can use these entry points to grow their audience on Messenger by engaging them at different points in the customer journey.

It’s crucial to actively grow your audience with entry points to get the most value from Messenger.

Entry points allow you to get more prospects into your bot and nurture them at every stage of your funnel. And the more high intent audience members you have, the more valuable your audience on Messenger is. The best way to nurture people to become customers is by getting to know them and targeting them with topics that interest them.  

A Messenger bot is a creative way to capture customer insights at a time when data is becoming more and more protected, since you can track every interaction as all insights are at the same place. Using data from conversations, you can get to know your prospects, segment your audience, and optimize your buyer journey. The result is a more personalized experience where customers feel they are receiving more relevant offers. 

You should use all entry points you can to bring people at every stage of your marketing funnel into a direct relationship with your brand so you can later engage and nurture them with recurring notifications.

How to get started with recurring notifications? This checklist shows you how you can launch a recurring notifications engagement strategy in 5 steps.
Get your recurring notifications checklist

Paid Entry Points

Digital ad performance is going down. But what if you could invite prospects seeing your ad to talk to your brand and ask their questions directly in Messenger?

Paid entry points include click to Messenger ads on social, search and display that direct prospects into a one to one chat experience with a business on Messenger. 

53% of people have seen a click to Messenger ad and 61% made a purchase after clicking the ad.* 

The main benefit is that click to Messenger ads can be easily scaled and get you a massive reach on different platforms, enabling you to drive significant new traffic into your chatbot.

That’s why paid entry points are mostly used at the first stage of the marketing funnel to acquire new customers. Once these prospects click on the ad and opt in, you can start nurturing them with recurring notifications. 

* Findings from the State of  Social Conversational Commerce 2022 Report. 

chart about click to messenger ad

Organic Entry Points

Organic entry points are free entry points to target prospects who are already searching for your products, or following your brand on social. As they might already have an intent to buy from you, it’s a great opportunity to help them move further down your funnel. 

Social Pages. Using a Messenger entry point (e.g., ‘Send Message’ button) on social pages is a free and efficient organic entry point, allowing you to send prospects into a one to one conversation with your brand via one click. 

Private Replies. You can trigger Messenger conversations from Facebook post comments and Facebook/Instagram live comments. Once a prospect comments on a post or live event, you can answer their questions in a one to one chat conversation. 

Instagram Stories. You can insert a link sticker into your Instagram Stories and invite prospects to start a conversation with your brand in Messenger. You can later send them offers based on their preferences and answer any questions in real-time with an automated chat experience. 

Download the guide at the top of the page to get access to an illustration for each entry point. 

Live shopping. With live shopping, you can  instantly interact with viewers and send them from Instagram to a Messenger chat experience. You can also save your videos so customers can continue shopping even if they missed the live broadcast. 

As soon as a customer leaves a comment during your live event, your brand automatically sends them a message on Messenger. Now that the brand has opened this DM channel with the customer, you can use it to funnel the customer into other commerce journeys that they have (or re-engage them later on).

Owned Entry Points

Owned entry points are the perfect opportunity to convert prospects who are already in their ‘ready to buy’ moments. And if customers don’t convert for the first time, they can be re-engaged and nurtured even after they leave your website.

Click to Chat URLs.  Embed a Messenger entry point into any URL and display it on landing pages, newsletters, email signatures and so on, to provide customers with the information they need in high intent moments. 

Send to Messenger Plugin.  Using this entry point, you can enable consumers to opt-in to receive messages from your business on Messenger. It’s a great way to convert website visitors into subscribers and frequent buyers.

Checkbox Plugin. You can display a checkbox on landing pages, like a checkout page, that enables users to opt-in to receive messages from the business in Messenger. This allows you to build a relationship with prospects in high intent moments and follow up if they abandoned their cart. 

Website Chat Plugin. Use website chat plugins on relevant landing pages, such as your homepage, to provide customers with helpful information in high intent moments.

We’re illustrating each entry point with a real-time example in the PDF version of the guide. Get the PDF at the top of the page!
Still with us? You must be really determined to level up your messaging strategy. Read our ungated report to stay up to date with the latest messaging trends.
Get your free Social Conversational Commerce Report

Offline Entry Points

Offline entry points allow businesses to invite customers from offline channels to directly chat with them on Messenger. Offline entry points can be placed on out-of-home advertising, such as product packaging, receipts, billboards, subway signs and more. 

A QR code printed on product packaging, receipts, or other offline advertising makes it easier for people to connect with your business even when they are offline. Customers can simply scan your code to start a conversation with your business in Messenger. 

By displaying QR codes on out-of-home advertising, such as billboards and subway signs, you can benefit from a massive reach and exposure. This is the perfect opportunity to turn a traditionally non-active entry point (such as billboards) into an active entry point. 

The main benefit of QR codes is that they are super convenient and easy to use. Customers can easily scan the code to connect without having to enter a long product number into their device. And as we all know, a good customer experience drives purchase decisions. 

grow your audience qr code

Launch Strategy

Follow these best practices to grow your Messenger audience faster with entry points.

✅ Map the entry points on this impact/effort matrix. Things to keep in mind are the creative needed and teams involved.

✅ Go after quick wins and low hanging fruit first.

✅ Involve relevant teams at your company as early as possible to avoid delays.

✅ Personalize conversation flows based on the entry points to engage customers more and maximize performance.

✅ Monitor which entry points have biggest impact on audience growth and double down on high performers.

Want to get the most out of your Facebook Messenger channel?

Talk to a conversational marketing expert at Spectrm for free to review your use case.