4 Ways These Brands Are Driving Big Results Using Bots for Messenger Big Brands are innovating their marketing using chatbots with Facebook Messenger.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The possibilities available to brands that have built a unique messaging experience with bots are breathtaking in terms of results. Big brands have leveraged launches, contests, and much more using bots, and the possibilities have yet to be tapped. Businesses that truly want to see results are jumping at the chance to add Messenger-powered bots into their marketing and sales strategies.
Anand Chandrasekaran, Head of Messenger Partnerships at Facebook, is privy to the largest and most successful campaigns launched on Messenger, which has over 1.2 billion monthly users and over 100,000 developers building bots and AI-powered conversational experiences. Chandrasekaran was kind enough to share with me, the lessons you can take away from the most successful brand campaigns that have been launched.
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What are the things you can learn from big brands for driving results with Messenger bots?
I would say we see four major use cases that big brands are using for Messenger: brand awareness, acquiring customers, enabling transactions and customer care and service.
For brand awareness, game developer Activision crafted a brand awareness campaign in advance of the launch of one of their most popular titles, Call of Duty. In the first 24 hours of launching a bot for Messenger in the voice of one of the Call of Duty core characters, they saw about 6 million messages sent back and forth to actually retrieve an unlock code for the trailer that they released. Similarly, Absolut Vodka used Messenger to extend a campaign they were conducting in other channels to help drive people to try their latest products by providing an offer to get a free drink at a nearby bar. They saw 2X increase in conversion on Messenger, as opposed to other channels, which makes sense because people are out and about, and Messenger is great platform as they have it on their phones.
For acquiring customers, Sephora is great example. They had a makeover bot where you could get an appointment for a makeover at their store. Over the holiday season, they saw an 11% conversion lift on Messenger, as opposed to other channels. This is an area that is great both for the online conversion and getting people to their stores.
Similarly Messenger can help to close transactions and upsell. For example, Tommy Hilfiger developed an experience where they used a bot for Messenger to help people buy fashion straight off the runway from Fashion Week in NYC, and saw an 87% return rate in people coming back again to the Messenger experience. And SnapTravel, which only conducts business via Messenger and SMS, has over $1M in revenue just from their bot for Messenger. In the food service business, Subway has just launched the ability to pre-order and pay for a sandwich right in Messenger. You are able to order it and pick it up at any store near you.
Finally we really like what T-Mobile has done. People who purchase a phone can activate it and buy accessories on Messenger. It might be hard to figure out what accessories are available for your phone elsewhere, but on Messenger, the right accessories can be recommended to you, and T-Mobile then has the opportunity to upsell both the plan and the accessories. For customer care, we are seeing traction across a bunch of verticals. Globe Telecom in the Philippines has seen calls to their hotline reduced by 50 percent and employee productivity grow about 3.5X. Similarly, Rogers Wireless, which has employed bots for customer care, has seen its CSAT increase by 65 percent.
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Are you are seeing Messenger-only businesses and Messenger-only entrepreneurs emerging?
Yes. What we are seeing is that they start off on all platform, but what they find is that they are differentially gaining users on Messenger. At some point, some of them make a decision to double down on Messenger. Bot developer Swelly is a great example of this. They started off with a website, an app and a Messenger bot. It has now, from our understanding, paused development on all other platforms, and is exclusively developing for Messenger. I believe they very recently hit their goal for active users on the platform and they continue to grow. We love that developers can go from reaching zero people to millions in a very reasonable amount of time, just on Messenger.
