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Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 131 of the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today’s show, we’re getting an introduction to Messenger marketing from Mikael from ManyChat. So sit back, relax. Remember, a bot cannot make good notes for you, so you need to do this yourself and enjoy the show. This podcast is brought to you by the agency trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the agency reset roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We also have lots of noble straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners. And we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com. Welcome to a conversation with me, your host, Lee. And today, we have Mikael Yang. How are you today, mate?
Mikael Yang:
I’m doing great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re gonna be talking about bots, and Mikael is from ManyChat. Do you mind just giving our wonderful audience a bit of an introduction, mate, into who you are, what you’re all about, and what ManyChat is?
Mikael Yang:
Sure. So I’m the CEO and cofounder of ManyChat. And we founded ManyChat in 2015 when we were trying to solve the problem of messengers being a great way to communicate with each other directly as consumers, but businesses not being able to do that at scale and to interact with their customers through this new channel of communication. And the thing that we saw is that more and more people were starting to use this new channel of communications. Like, actually, it’s over 2,000,000,000 people right now that use messengers, and messengers have bypassed social networks in terms of, like, their monthly active users. But businesses are still not there and still not using this channel. And so we asked ourselves why we found out that it’s actually really hard for a business to use messengers as their channel of communication with their customers. So we decided to build a platform for that, and that’s how ManyChat was born.
Mikael Yang:
And now we serve over 200 1,000 business pages on Facebook that are connected to ManyChat. We have over 80,000,000 subscribers on those pages, and we have presence in over 100 countries around the world.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s incredible. How many years ago was that that you launched?
Mikael Yang:
We launched on Facebook Messenger in 2,000 16, just a month after the platform has launched.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Amazing. And then could you just describe how ManyChat works? And then we’ll kind of go and do a deep dive into bots and why the hell we should even be interested in them because it’s definitely a conversation a lot of agencies have been having together in our in our community.
Mikael Yang:
Yes. For for for I I think agencies were having this, these conversations about bots and Facebook Messenger for a good reason. But if I were to describe how ManyChat works, I would say that you have your Facebook page. And typically, like, all businesses now understand why they should have a social media presence and why they should post regular updates and keep their audience informed about what’s going on. But for a lot of businesses, it was still not that that big of a channel. Like, unless you have a a really great story to tell that you’ve entered a big audience, social media is a great way to connect, but, like, how do you take it from there? And how do you build an individual relationship, a meaningful relationship with, each of your customers? And that was not yet solved through social media. And that’s where messengers actually excel, and that’s where ManyChat helps businesses to do that. The way it works is that you connect your Facebook page to ManyChat, and you basically manage your Messenger automation and live chat and, other things through ManyChat so that you’re able to do marketing automation, sales automation, support through Facebook Messenger at scale.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now it’s a big burning question, and this is something that a lot of people have said. But what actually is a bot? I think there’s a lot of predefined or stereotypical views that a bot is simply just a a slightly clever autoresponder, but I’m gonna guess you’re telling me that that’s wrong. Could you describe in a bit more detail kind of what a bot is in absolute simple terms for anyone like myself who is really early doors trying to understand what everybody’s talking about?
Mikael Yang:
Yeah. For sure. I think it’s it’s really important to set the concepts from the start of the conversation. So when we talk about bots, and we talk about a really specific type of bots, and those are messenger bots. Like, some people call Alexis and Google Homes, like, the voice bots. And we’ve had, like, conversational bots since 19 seventies, 19 eighties. So it’s when we talk about bots on Messenger, we are talking about basically business accounts on Messenger that has some kind of automation to help business do more personalized and more engaging and relevant marketing support sales to with their customers through this channel. But when we talk about bots in our sense of the word, we also talk about the manual side of it.
Mikael Yang:
So a bot itself would be the automation. So we would say that a bot is just a set of rules of how your Messenger account behaves automatically based on certain conditions. Say, for example, a person made a purchase. What do you need to say to them? After that, what do you say in the next 2 days? For example, do some cross sells or maybe product recommendations that are complementary to the purchase. And there is also the manual component, which is handled, manually, like, by your support people or by salespeople, etcetera. The confusion is, do you call the bot the whole account and, like, not basically combining the automated processes and the manual responses? Or do you call the bot only the automated part? Because it’s it’s essentially in the end, it’s one thread. It’s one communication line with your customers and your business. But some of it is automated.
Mikael Yang:
Some of it is manual. So we prefer to call the bots, the automated parts, and the whole thing, the whole thread, a messenger experience. I don’t know. That that was maybe not the easiest explanation. So let me try to clarify that with just, like, one one simple sentence.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
See if you could do the Twitter version.
Mikael Yang:
Let’s let’s do the 140 characters version. So I would say a bot on Messenger is the automated part of the interaction on Messenger. So when you have when you talk to a brand on Messenger and the person and the page responds to you in an automated fashion, that would we we would call a bot interaction.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So for example, I could have created a bot for my page and Yeah. Depending on different types of questions, for example, I could serve different types of links or responses. Or if there’s some form of integration with my shopping cart, if I know this person has purchased a particular service from me, say it’s a web build, I could have a trigger at the end of a project that so many weeks after or so many days after whatever, I could be saying, hey. Are you interested in a maintenance package, like that?
Mikael Yang:
Exactly. Exactly. You would when when you were referring to this as a, like, more sophisticated version of auto responders, I would say that that’s a good good place to start. Like, if you’re thinking about this from a marketing perspective, that would be a good place to start. That will give you a really a jump start understanding of what you wanna do with this and how you wanna leverage this for your business and for your clients’ businesses. Because when we started talking about Messenger marketing, the first thing we said to clients is not like this is a huge, like, new thing with, like this is how it’s really different from all the other forms. We would just say, hey, guys. You already do email marketing, but you get, like, worse and worse results every month.
Mikael Yang:
The open rates are going down. The CTRs are going down. This is a new channel. It’s much more personal. It’s much more private. It’s much more engaging. You have you can embed rich media inside of it, gives buttons, pictures, links to web views that open inside the context. It doesn’t like, you don’t you don’t leave the Messenger to go to a website and to to go read an article.
Mikael Yang:
You stay inside the conversation. You have a built in commerce engine so you can have payments right inside Messenger without them leaving the experience. All of that makes this really powerful. But, like, we would be really pouring a lot of information. We would try to say all of that. So instead, we we would just say, hey, guys. You’ve got email marketing. This is messenger marketing.
Mikael Yang:
This is think of it at first as email marketing that has 4 x open rates. The average open rates are, like, 80, 90%, and it’s, like, 10 x CTRs. We got CTRs on the broadcast 10%, 20%, 30%. We’ve got people, like, some content, like record labels, who have CTRs of 56% on some of their broadcasts. That’s insane by email standards. And, like, when we talk about CTRs of 56 percent, people are asking us, like, are those open rates, like, they did just, like, mistaken the number, and we see now those are actually the number. Like, if you send a 100 messages, you can get 56 clicks. If you the audience is right and the content is right, etcetera.
Mikael Yang:
And this is not like a some outlier that’s, like, in one campaign out of a million. Like, I see CTRs of 20, 30%, like, almost every day when I talk to the customers. So and if you think about it that way, then you start to okay. I I get it. So this is a channel of communication with my customers. This is how I should be using it. I should leverage for the same things I used to leverage email. And then you start discovering then that this channel is actually has its own has its own physics.
Mikael Yang:
And it’s shorter. It’s faster. It’s more interactive. It’s much more personal. It’s much more informal. Like, there is certain things that are very different about this channel. But to get to those differences, you have to start with, like, some level of understanding. And I think, comparing messenger marketing to email marketing in in this, like, like, first shallow ways is actually a good thing.
Mikael Yang:
It will get people to start doing this, and they will discover the depth that they actually can go into because messenger marketing is so much deeper than email marketing. Email marketing is really it’s great way to communicate. It has served us as a as a as a market, as a community. A it did a really good job. We ourselves use email marketing and, like, when we are doing broadcasts about, like, updates, etcetera. We also do Messenger broadcast, but, like, email is still there. But I think the future is in messengers. And the reason I say that is because businesses don’t decide what the future is gonna be.
Mikael Yang:
It’s not because, like, something is easier to use or something is more convenient for the businesses, it doesn’t matter. The business’ voice in this doesn’t matter. The decision is made by the consumer. Whatever the consumer chooses to use as their main channel of communication, as their platform of choice where they will spend their attention, where they will spend their time, that’s the platform that businesses are gonna be will have to use. And right now and for the next, I don’t know, 5, 10 years, it’s gonna be messengers. And businesses will have to transform their marketing and their thinking to adopt this new channel. And ManyChat is here to help them do that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
To understand this or understand messenger marketing, there’s 3 things that I’ve got so far that I’m trying to use as a framework for understanding what either either it does or what I can do with it. First one would be, obviously, like you said, a way of looking at it is like an advanced autoresponder. So it’s going to be something that will help reply to specific questions. It’s like a first port of call, an instant way of communication that you can use via your page to help people out without relying on humans. So there is that kind of aspect to it. There’s also the broadcast aspect to it as well. So something that replaces email marketing and becomes much more effective. As you said, you’ve you’ve given some statistics to compare Messenger marketing versus email marketing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And, I mean, 30 to 50% is pretty incredible, but that’s another another way of looking at this. And then, finally, from what I can understand as well, a third way of looking at this would be is that you could use this platform to do continued customer service with your clients who are already onboarded with you and or even do continued upsells to them as well. Would that be a right understanding that there are kind of those are the 3 main areas, or is there anything else that I might be missing that we could also use Messenger marketing for?
Mikael Yang:
Sure. So I think those are definitely one of the 3 main areas where you can use Messenger marketing and, like, how you can use it. I would say that if you think about the life cycle of your customers, attracting leads, nurturing leads, converting leads into actual customers, delivering, like, having that commerce aspect, like, having that actual transaction happen, and then delivering value, and then supporting your customers and then reengaging your customers and both new offers, new products, and doing that. Like, all that life cycle for certain types of businesses is for businesses that are working with either consumers or SMBs that are, like, talking to the one person that is making the decision, that whole life cycle can be handled through Messenger. That’s basically the the vision that we have. And we are we are actually see people doing that. Like, we see people using Facebook ads to get leads into Messenger without, like, using them, without using landing pages. Facebook has specific ads that direct people from the, news feeds into Messenger.
Mikael Yang:
The reason to do that is that the conversion rates are much higher because when the person clicks on the ads, they become a subscriber on Messenger. Now they can decide to close that conversation if they don’t wanna continue it, and that’s the beauty of Messenger is that it’s not like email. If the customer decides to close the conversation, your business is no longer available to message that customer. So customer has control, and that’s, I think, is a really good thing for the ecosystem. So but the conversion from the news feed to the conversation is higher because it’s one click. If you go from the news feed to a landing page that you need to read, now you have to enter your email. Now you have to click send. Now you have to get your email into your email app.
Mikael Yang:
You already closed the application. You come back later. You got 50 more emails. You find like, this is it’s a terrible experience. Like, it’s they they there is no conversation. There is, like, there is little very little relationship building. There is no interactivity. So what businesses what savvy businesses do is they get the ad.
Mikael Yang:
They direct people to the to Messenger. That creates an instant lead that bypasses the visitor stage. You don’t have a person visiting the landing page without giving you the opportunity to talk to them. You have the ads. The person goes into Messenger. You have a conversation, and either it works out and you have a match and, like, your business can actually help that customer, or it’s it’s not a match and the customer plays the conversation and goes. And if it is a match, then you have this channel where you can have everything. You can you can follow-up with the person.
Mikael Yang:
You can say, hey. Did you have a chance to look at this? Should I should I reach out to you in a week, etcetera? That’s an actual conversation when you you can be helpful to the person that was in search of something that that that that reacted to your ad. So I would say that we like that the auto responder part, that the customer support part, and then the broadcasting part are all very important, but I would look at it at a in in a holistic way. How I can build a relationship with my customers in this new channel? And that goes from attracting customers to nurturing like, attracting leads to nurturing leads to having the actual transactions for to reengagement into support.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. So I think one of the things that I’m understanding from this then is it it removes some many of the blockers to conversations with people. Imagining that if I’m gonna broadcast an email message to everybody, then I’m just simply shouting to a list, and and they are receiving something. But I can’t actually have a conversation with that person. I can’t engage with that person. I might not even be serving them information that that person’s even interested in. So they might be using a service called SaneBox that I use that automatically puts that broadcast anyway in a subfolder and they may never even read it, which I’m afraid I’m one of those people who rarely reads my emails now. So we’re removing blockers to conversations with Messenger marketing and we’re also expediting the process because somebody may have landed on my page or may have responded to my ad and therefore subscribed.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I can now ask them a question. I can either physically myself converse with that person and take them to the next level or take them through a conversation, understand whether or not I can help them or whether there is anything that they, you know, they could purchase offers, etcetera, that would be of benefit to them. And as well, I can also kick in any particular automations as well with regards to conversations on specific subjects. So if somebody is asking, hey, what support packages do you guys have? Then that can trigger going back to the autoresponder again, that can even trigger that. So there’s kind of 2 2 channels there that we could be utilizing. There’s the automation for the basic questions, and there’s also being able to very quickly have conversations. So we’re removing the blockers using technology. And I’m just writing my notes here.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve got attract, nurture, sell, and support. Sounds good. Yeah. I’m glad that yeah. No. That that sounds good. A n s s. I don’t think I can create an acronym with that one.
Mikael Yang:
Attract, nurture, sell, support. Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yep. Okay. That that sounds pretty good. I could write
Mikael Yang:
I would I would say there is there is another part with reengage after support and, like, to, like, delight. So
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s good. Reengage. Yeah. I’ve written that one down as well. That sounds good because that would be great. That’d be great for the show notes. Now a lot of us are agencies, so we’re a design agency, social media, marketing, etcetera. How could an agency be using a bot? Could you give us a couple of examples of how an agency could use a bot or messenger marketing as we’re talking about here to the value of our clients, to help our clients out with?
Mikael Yang:
So yeah. And that that’s a great question. I I would say that there are 2 ways to use a messenger bot for agencies. First of all, it’s a great way to get clients. By using this, you explore the platform yourself and you explore the the this this channel yourself. You get to experience the power of Messenger and how are the open rates and the CTRs and the engagement rates and the power of having conversations with your leads that can quickly very quickly lead to a an actual call that can lead to an actual, like, agreement and, to new clients. So just from a marketing standpoint, it’s a like, we we’ve I’ve seen a lot of agencies having tremendous success because, like, in Messenger, for example, one of the things that I love about Messenger is that there is a thing called the call button. Like that, actually, you can have a button inside the broadcast or inside your automation that when the person presses it, it’s it actually calls.
Mikael Yang:
It it adds as a call button that can call any number. For example, you can say, by the way, like, you can have an ad that is a lead magnet, for example, 5 mistakes that businesses make when they’re setting up their Facebook campaign. And you deliver that lead magnet through Messenger, so it starts a conversation. Now after you’ve sent that, you can ask, like, in 30 seconds, you can say, by the way, if you enjoyed, like, that PDF, give us a call for a free 15 minute consultation. You can do that right now, and there’s a call button. So the person is on their phone. They press the button. They press the ad to get the lead magnet.
Mikael Yang:
They get lead magnet. They see the, option to have a call with the agency right now. They click it and instantly they they call and they have a conversation with you. That’s like a really simple use of Messenger, but that just shows you the logic and how, like, those steps go together. And now after that happens, you can actually like, after that message, you can have marketing automation. For example, you have 24 hours to talk to that person and say, like, either they’ve called you or not, and you can have a person sitting inside, for example, a system like ManyChat and see, okay. We’ve got a call from this person. We we didn’t get a call from these 3 people that have clicked on the ads.
Mikael Yang:
We can put them in a marketing automation asking them if they need any anything or, like, what is their number one challenge that they face right now with the marketing? Or they can qualify the leads by asking them what’s their budget monthly budget with the marketing and how big their team is and how big their, business is and see and qualify people based on those engagement rates. If somebody’s not interested, they’re just not gonna click on anything. You shouldn’t bother them. Like, if the person is not responsive, like, don’t, like, beat on a dead horse. Like, it’s it’s you’re gonna be spamming the person and the person is gonna be at at some point, the person is gonna delete the bot and, like, it’s or even worse, like, they’re gonna report it or block it. You you don’t need that. Like, you you should be really mindful of because this is really a really private and invasive channel of communication. Your business sits right next to the person’s friends.
Mikael Yang:
So as we say, like, the golden rule of marketing is, like, do marketing that you would wanna experience yourself. So if, like, in in a 2 or 3 conversation, the person is not, like it’s not about, like, them not having time. They actually read the messages, but do not respond, do not click. Like, maybe that’s not the right fit. Like, and you should move on and, like, find people who are actually interested. But that’s, like, the first way agencies using the Messenger marketing themselves. And the second thing is, actually, there is a whole new industry starting up of Messenger marketing agencies. And we are actually at the forefront of it because we’ve built the tool for Messenger marketing and a lot of agencies because it it takes time to understand how Messenger works, what are the differences between the old way of marketing and the new way of marketing.
Mikael Yang:
And once people invest that time and learn it and they get results, they start to people start asking them questions, like, can you do it for me, etcetera. And we had, like, several people come up to me and say, like, we we have over 200,000 pages, but, like, I I only get to talk to, like, a few 100 of them. And some of the people, like, told me, like, on the conferences or over a messenger, hey. I’ve quit my job. Like, I I already have 10 clients, 15 clients, and they are paying me $1,000 a month retainer because I’m managing their bot for them, and they’re getting amazing results. Like, thank you. And we are actually gonna be putting we’ve put a whole course about this. So if you go to course.manychat.com, and we can like, if you would put it in the show notes, I think, the audience would appreciate it.
Mikael Yang:
It’s a free course. It’s a 10:10 hour plus course from the best messenger marketing experts that we’ve put together. We don’t make any money of it because we sell software. So we are more than happy to share this information, how messenger marketing works, what are the best case like, what are the best practices, the case studies, etcetera. And if if anybody is interested in learning about this, I would suggest taking the course. It’s 10 plus hours, but it’s worth it because you will be the number one Messenger marketing expert for the next year or 2 in your community, and you’ll be able to make, like, our our people report it. Like, one of the person I talked to who has an agency, like, said that the her close rate is, like, 80%. When she she pitches Messenger marketing and, like, creating bot for businesses, like, her close rate is, like, 80%.
Mikael Yang:
So it’s it’s just I I think it’s by our and we understand why this is happening. Right? Because if you have the whole world moving into messengers, then and, like, over 2,000,000,000 people using them and no business is using them, there is this huge gap. Like, millions of businesses around the world and 99% of the businesses are SMBs. They will not be able to do this themselves because it’s too hard to, like it’s not like email where where you have a list and you just do broadcast. Like, you have to set up automation. You have to think about how this works. You have to make this meaningful for the customer. And agencies are the only one, like, independent consultants and agencies are the only ones who actually spend the time, to spend the 10 hours, like, get that get that experience to go and be successful and implement that inside any business.
Mikael Yang:
So yeah, I think there there is a huge thing. And I think it’s really important that if if agencies want to grow and to jump on the growing trends, I think they they shouldn’t just I’m not saying like they should do this. Just see see it for yourself. Try it for yourself for like, start with a free plan and see the results for yourself, for your own agency. And if you have a if you have results, then you can go to your clients and say, like, hey. We’ve got this new thing. It’s amazing, and we can do this for you, etcetera, etcetera.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. So to recap, that is set up your own and get practicing. See if you can generate leads, see if you can convert people, and also see if you can look after existing customers through this sort of platform. And then finally, see if you can sell a managed Messenger marketing services. Try saying that 3 times fast, but see if you can then sell those sorts of services to your clients, enabling them to benefit from what you’ve been able to learn for your agency. So, Mikael, thank you so much for your time. Folks, if you wanna find out more information about what Mikael and his company do, then you find that out on manychat.com. And remember that course, course.manychat.com.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Thanks, and have a fantastic day.
Mikael Yang:
Thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that wraps up today’s show. If you have got some insight into Messenger marketing or any type of social media automation or conversation, then we would love to hear from you over at the WP Innovator Facebook group. That’s a free community that we launched over 2 years ago full of WordPress enthusiasts, agency owners, online marketers alike. You can find that over on wpinnovator.com/group. We will see you there or we will see you on next week’s show.
