List Building

How to Build a Super Responsive List Using a Chatbot

Here’s how to build a profitable messenger bot for your business so you can build a large customer list with a high open rate.

What’s your open rate on your emails? Odds are it’s not nearly as high as you would like, right?

Just suppose you could get open rates of 50%, 75% and even higher? Could you make some serious money?

With a messenger bot, open rates like these are entirely possible.

And of course with higher open rates comes higher conversions, too.

That’s why this might just be one of the best alternatives to a traditional email list.

Having a messenger bot is much more interactive than email, and people tend to trust a Facebook page more than a traditional marketing email, too.

Using this system, it’s possible to generate thousands of dollars even with a small list because the quality of the leads is higher and the messages get opened.

Obviously, you still want to build your email list, too, since that’s even more income for you. But for now, let’s just talk about getting your messenger bot set up and running.

The first thing you need is a messenger platform. Choose any service you like, but for this example I’m going to use ManyChat https://manychat.com/ because it’s free for up to 500 subscribers and a pro account is only ten bucks a month.

The second thing you need is a Facebook page. If you don’t have one yet, just log into your personal Facebook account and then click the link in the top right hand corner and go to manage pages. Click on create a page and follow the prompts to create your business page.

Inside ManyChat, connect your Facebook and then you’re good to go.

To build your first messenger bot, go to new growth tools and you’ll see all kinds of options like buttons and bars you can create for your website. You’ll also see ‘reference links’ which is a URL you can use in an email or on your site for people to opt in.

You can start out with just a basic messenger URL where people can opt into your messenger bot and get access to you and your business.

You can even create Facebook ads that are connected to a messenger bot so people can directly connect with your business straight from a Facebook ad.

Click on messenger ref link and ManyChat is going to populate a template for you. It will say something like, “Welcome Your Name thank you for subscribing, the next posts will be coming soon” and so forth.

Obviously, you want to tailor this to your business, so go to edit and edit the message.

Change “Welcome” to “Hey” and use, “There” as the fallback in place of a missing name. If you have their name, then it will say, Hey Mary, and if you don’t have their name it will say “Hey there.” Otherwise you could end up with “Welcome there,” which just sounds funny.

Then you might write, “Thank you for reaching out. How may I help you? Ask your question down below.”

You want people to engage with your messenger bot because the only way that they’re going to be opted into your list, is if they actually reply to your first message. That’s why we need them to reply, which is why we say to ask their question down below.

We also want to include an unsubscribe button. Having the button is much cleaner than having a message that says, “P.S. If you want to subscribe, press stop.” It’s much cleaner to have a nice little button so if they do want to unsubscribe they can just click it and be on their merry way.

Now type in ‘unsubscribe’, and then start another flow: ‘Action’, ‘unsubscribe from bot’, and that’s going to unsubscribe them. You’ll see right there in ManyChat how it’s going to look in their Facebook Messenger.

Remember it’s important for your subscribers to have a way to unsubscribe, so that you don’t get reported for spam.

You can create messages that say you’re away from your computer or away from your desk and you will be back shortly. If they get this message then they know you’re going to reach out to them.

You can preview your messages to check and see if they look alright. Just send it to yourself on your Facebook account. Don’t worry, no one but you will see it.

Open messenger and you can see exactly what this bot looks like and then you can go ahead and publish the bot by going to growth tool 14, pressing publish and grabbing the link under setup.

When you send this link to anyone – for example, you send it out in an email or you put it on your website, then when someone clicks that they’re gonna get the welcome message that you created.

Now there’s another thing you can do: When someone opts into your bot and they click the link and send you a message or question, you can enter them into a sequence.

This is where we can get a little bit more technical and add additional value to your customers by giving them updates. For example, maybe these are updates to different products that we want to sell to them or just add value.

To connect the sequence and save it, go to automation, go to sequences, go to new sequence and if you like type in test sequence to see how it works.

Create your messages and set up the time when they will be sent, such as in two hours or in two days, adjusting the time frame for what you’re doing. This is like an email autoresponder, only in chat. This kind of messenger bot can highly engage people with huge open rates.

Send them additional messages with content or links to your products.

Inside of ManyChat you’ll see that it’s generally self-explanatory, but the point is to get people to opt in, and then to engage them and get them clicking on your links.

You’ll find that services such as ManyChat have templates for nearly everything, so all you have to do is customize them.

Remind your subscriber who you are while they’re getting messages from you, and then deliver valuable information to them. Create your messages in broadcast or the growth tool and then publish.

Now when someone comes to your growth tool link, they opt-in and ask their question, they’ve also opted into your messenger.

Where this gets really powerful is running Facebook Ads to your messenger bot, driving traffic on demand. If you don’t know how to run Facebook ads, just find a course and connect your messenger bot to the ads you run.

It’s entirely possible to generate thousands of new messenger bot subscribers this way.

Send out messages frequently, and watch your open rates. You’re going to be astonished at how high they are. Then go ahead and promote your first product using this method and see what happens.

I think you’re going to be extremely pleased.