Maybe true in a cheesy joke. But, as a marketing specialist, you are always on the lookout for efficient and powerful ways to communicate with your customers and prospects. If a channel offered you guaranteed opportunity to knock on a million doors at once, with 90% of those doors opening up for you, wouldn’t you want to lap it up?
A new kid on the digital marketing block, messenger marketing offers you those million doors and more. While messengers have existed as a medium of personal communication for over two decades, today, they are emerging into highly effective platforms to drive your business marketing strategies.
The success of messenger marketing is due to two key factors:
- High adoption rates and reach of mobile messaging
- Saturation of other marketing media channels, such as emails and SMS. (Limited control on message senders and increasing vulnerability to spam has led to overloaded inboxes and a drop in open, read and click-through rates).
Read on to know more about the factors that favour messenger marketing, and how you can maximize their potential for your business marketing plans.
Why is Messenger Marketing So Promising?
Messenger marketing is all about leveraging mobile chat platforms to connect with existing and potential customers. While apps, such as Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp or Slack were originally designed as peer-to-peer communication channels, each of them has created features or functionalities for businesses to engage with their customers and prospects.
Here are some of the reasons why messenger marketing may be a promising avenue for your business to consider.
Popularity and Adoption Rates:
- A 2018 report on Global Mobile Market shows that there are approximately 3.3 billion active smart phone users across the globe, and this number will reach over 3.8 billion by 2021.
- As of April 2019, the number of worldwide active monthly users was 1.6 billion on WhatsApp, 1.3 billion on Facebook Messenger and 1.1 billion on WeChat (Messaging app most popular in China), followed by many other apps, such as QQ Mobile, Skype, Snapchat and more.
- In the recently held 2019 F8 conference, Facebook announced that over 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses each month. They also mentioned that around 40 million active businesses are currently connecting with a global audience through Messenger.
Given the superior adoption rates of smart phones and the growing popularity of messaging apps, there is no doubt that messenger marketing can successfully expand your business outreach. When used correctly, messenger marketing will open up infinite doors of communication and engagement with your audience, helping you drive leads, sales and customer service.
Consumer’s Turf, Consumer’s Terms:
With substantial and elaborate controls, all messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Skype allow consumers to decide ‘who’ can communicate with them. Although most of these apps have enabled business-to-consumer communication features, the actual engagement takes place only when the consumer opts-in, or allows relevant permissions through the app. Since consumers streamline their experiences and direct the level of personalization, the communication takes place on their turf and terms. Essentially, that translates into better click-through rates, greater retention and higher brand adoption.
Interactive and Engaging:
In the battle for eyeballs on digital content, nothing works better than short, conversational messages. Messenger marketing replaces the long-form email newsletters with crisp, and on-point communication. Moreover, you can use several interactive features to engage the customer through offers, preferences or queries, and seek or provide instant and specific responses. Overall, the speed, simplicity and convenience of messenger marketing is unparalleled, for the user, as well as for the marketer.
Leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI):
By leveraging AI–enabled chat bots, you can create an entirely unique user experience for your customers or prospects. Apps, such as Facebook Messenger, Skype and Kik allow you to choose or build your own chat bots, which means you can create deeply personalized conversations with every customer.
In fact, a well-designed chat bot can do the work of several resources combined:
- Program your bot to simulate conversations, ask questions, gather feedback, segment users and send out message blasts.
- Add other tasks and functionalities, such as scheduling appointments, making reservations or purchases, tracking order status, or providing 24/7 customer service.
- Leverage the bot to drive traffic to your traditional marketing channels, and direct the customer to a real human being, if and when required.
Explore and Exploit the True Potential of Messenger Marketing
From driving brand awareness and acquiring new leads, to supporting transactions and servicing customers, messenger marketing enables innovative business marketing strategies at lightning speed for a fraction of your marketing budget. Explore and exploit the true potential of this medium for highly-effective, low-cost, and future-ready business marketing strategies.
Learn how to:
- Seek user permissions for messenger marketing by incorporating opt-in links in your traditional marketing channels
- Profile and tag user preferences to streamline targeted promotions
- Leverage AI-enabled chat bots to enhance the quality and speed of communication
- Run campaigns and conversations to engage your existing and potential customers
Your experts at WSI eStrategies in Ottawa can help you maximize the reach, impact and advantages of messenger marketing. Contact us to learn more about this emerging frontier and leverage its power to amplify your business marketing outreach.