Today, ecommerce influences up to 56% of all in-store purchases. At the same time, ecommerce seems to have a noteworthy growth rate by nearly 15% annually. As if this wasn’t enough, data compiled by The Enterprise Guide to Global Ecommerce anticipate a 246.15% increase in worldwide ecommerce sales, from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $4.5 trillion in 2021. There are many ecommerce tools and growth tactics that promise exponential growth for your online store but the truth is that very few of them actually help you attain it. In 2016’s F8, Facebook introduced bots on its messaging platform, Facebook Messenger and since then, many businesses of all sizes and across several industries tried to adopt this relatively new technology, in order to get the most out of Facebook Messenger marketing.
Two years later—and after a short pause in Facebook Messenger bot development—the infamous platform counts more than 300,000 active bots. But, how is Facebook Messenger marketing related to ecommerce and why should you, as an online retailer, care about it?
Well, with nearly 1.3 billion active monthly users, Facebook Messenger is an amazing sales tool that, if used properly, can add value to your online business and help you take your marketing to the next level.
Keep in mind that there are more than 20 million active pages using messaging every month. In addition, over 20 Billion messages are exchanged every month between these businesses and their audiences.
All the above stats and numbers indicate, if anything, the importance of Facebook Messenger marketing in modern ecommerce. Do you want to know how Facebook Messenger marketing can help your online store perform better?
Keep reading and you’ll find out!
Facebook Messenger Shopping Cart
As you probably know, getting people to visit your website is difficult. Getting some of your visitors to add items to their carts and become paying customers is even more difficult. Nowadays, it’s important that you are where your customers are.
Having that said, you should help your customers buy your products and services from wherever they might be, whether on your website or any other of your digital properties.
We have to ask ourselves though: What kind of digital properties might an online store have?
Besides your website—which is the main pillar of your overall online success—you may have a business page on various social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.
In most cases, users only see your products and, after visiting your website, buy the products they are most interested in.
This has changed from the moment Facebook Messenger allowed ecommerce businesses to sell throughout a conversation between a business and a Facebook Messenger user. Put simply, you can get people to add items to their cart on Facebook Messenger and buy your products without having to visit your website.
Why is this important?
Because this way you are able to reach your customers and Facebook audience where they are.
As Tracey Wallace from BigCommerce puts it:
Ecommerce sales are growing, but many retailers are struggling to capitalize on their digital sales channels.
As I hope is evident by now, Facebook Messenger Cart can help you reach your customers on an extremely powerful sales channel. It is without a doubt that this can add value to your online business and help you increase sales by using Facebook Messenger marketing as an additional way to generate sales.
This amazing opportunity has proven effective for some of the biggest ecommerce brands and is now adopted by many online retailers from all around the world. So, how do you get your feet wet and get started?
Find a Facebook Messenger Commerce solution that offers Facebook Messenger Cart as a feature and give it a try.
Trust me, you’ll be glad you did!
Facebook Messenger Marketing Webchat Tool
Marketing automation is fast becoming the new must-have for businesses of all sizes and across all industries. In fact, on average, 49% of companies are currently using marketing automation. As we can see from the following graph, “Marketing Automation” is something that interests more and more people from all around the world.
Many business owners may still be wondering about how (and if) marketing automation could help their businesses grow while spending less time on repetitive tasks.
Keep in mind that marketing automation drives a 14.5% rise in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
According to a report from Adobe Social—where 3 million social mentions from 2016 to 2017 were analyzed—marketing automation receives plenty of positive sentiment, with saving time (30%) cited more frequently.
One thing that goes unnoticed by the overwhelming majority of online retailers is to automate certain on-site experiences for their website visitors and give prompt answers to their questions 24/7.
A question that arises is: How can Facebook Messenger marketing help an online store offer a more personalized experience and at the same time automate its customer support?
With Facebook Messenger’s Website Chat (or “Webchat”) plugin, you can now give your store visitors the chance to contact you directly as long as they are logged into their Facebook Messenger account.
Once you install the plugin on your website, you can automate conversations or replies to FAQs and you can pass the conversations to a live agent that is available.
This is an extremely powerful personalization weapon on every retailer’s hands and can make an actual impact on how visitors feel about you and your business.
Facebook Messenger Marketing Segmented Campaigns
As you may have heard, personalization in marketing and customer service becomes more and more important as time passes. According to Accenture, a lack of personalization cost businesses $75 billion last year. In addition, recent Epsilon research indicates that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalized experience.
Amazing, right?
Personalization is fast becoming one of the most important aspects of online success and ecommerce is not an exclusion.
In fact, personalization—along with excellent customer support—will soon take over traditionally significant factors of customer experience such as the price of the product.
Even though most ecommerce businesses know how important personalization is, they are actually doing very few things to achieve it.
An extremely important feature of Facebook Messenger is segmented campaigns. To start off, The Economic Times defines segmentation as: “The division of the marketplace into parts, or segments, which are definable, accessible, actionable, and profitable and have a growth potential.” Segmentation is one of the most powerful concepts in marketing and is widely used by businesses across different industries.
In order to better understand why segmentation is so important, let’s use a practical example of a Shopify store that sells clothes for men and women. Based on user behavior, we could have the following basic segmentation:
- Women Shoes: For female customers who have bought shoes from our store
- Women Clothes: For female customers who have bought clothes from our store
- Women Accessories: For female customers who have bought accessories from our store
- Men Shoes: For male customers who have bought shoes from our store
- Men Clothes: For male customers who have bought clothes from our store
- Men Accessories: For male customers who have bought accessories from our store
Just to be uber clear here, all segments are equally important to us, since every one of these segments includes people who are our customers. That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t treat each segment differently. By sending segmented campaigns on Messenger, we increase the possibility of our campaigns to be seen.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some concrete results to back up our statement? Luckily we have and they come from one of the most important marketers of our time, Neil Patel.
After using Facebook Messenger marketing for one of his campaigns, Neil Patel got an 88% open rate and 56% click-through rate. If you run an online business for a while and have sent email campaigns, you’ll know that these numbers are hard—if not impossible—to reach.
This is why Facebook Messenger segmentation is so important and this is why you should start using it for your online business.
Let’s move on to the next one!
Facebook Messenger Marketing Automated Replies
There is something magical about statistics and numbers. It is like they give a whole new meaning to a piece of content or to an article like this one.
So, let’s take a look at some statistics:
- According to Hubspot, 55% of consumers are interested in interacting with a business using messaging apps to solve a problem.
- Again, according to Hubspot, 57% of consumers are interested in chatbots for their instantaneity.
- 48% of consumers would rather connect with a company via live chat than any other means of contact.
What does that show us?
That most consumers do not care if they have a conversation with an actual human being or if they are lead to a conversation of automated messages and replies, as long as they are treated the way they want to be treated and they get the help they need.
This gets us to the fourth way in which Facebook Messenger marketing can help your online store grow.
Automated Replies on Facebook Messages
Every time a user sends you a message on Facebook Messenger—provided that you have set up a sequence of automated messages and replies—they receive instant replies based on the sequence that you’ve set up.
Note that these replies are given in real-time, meaning that users—your potential customers—are receiving help or guidance at the time they need it most.
Odds are that if your Facebook page gets a lot of traction, you spend a lot of time answering all the different questions that your current and prospective customers have. This can change with Facebook Messenger, which gives you the ability to automate replies and offer a better overall experience to your audience.
A smart move would be to automate replies on some of your FAQs so that you don’t have to spend time answering the same things over and over again. There are different ways to go here but the safest and most effective in terms of money and time saving is to choose a software that requires no coding or technical know-how.
Automated Replies on Facebook Post Comments
Another cool way that Facebook Messenger can help you grow your online business is by sending automated replies to all the Facebook users who post a comment on your Facebook posts.
Let me take a wild guess: When you publish a new post with a product of your online store, you often get comments regarding the availability of this particular product, the colors or the sizes that the product is available in and its price.
As you can imagine, as the number of comments you receive grows, so does the need for automating this procedure. Manual handling requires time and money so it is not recommended. So, how can you beat this?
By using a software that allows you to automate replies on Facebook comments in a cost-effective way.
Facebook Messenger Cart Recovery
I saved the best for last.
Cart abandonment is one of the most common problems among online retailers. Nowadays, almost 7 out of 10 shopping carts are abandoned. This means that nearly 70% of your store visitors abandon their carts before making a purchase.
There are 3 ways you can reclaim lost revenue from your abandoned shopping carts:
- Cart recovery through email
- Cart recovery through Facebook Ads
- Cart recovery through Facebook Messenger marketing
The first way, even though effective for many years, has one major drawback: You have to ask for the visitor’s email before sending them an email.
Assuming that you are selling to Europe, and in order to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, you’ll have to clearly inform your store visitors about the reasons you are asking for their email address.
Now, just consider how many of these visitors would actually agree to receive an email that reminds them to finish the checkout process—meaning, a cart abandonment email. Probably not many. Thus, as you can understand, sending a cart abandonment email will be much more difficult than it used to be.
The second way allows you to show online ads to people who have visited your online store.
Again, even though an effective strategy, before using it you have to keep in mind that in order to use it properly:
- You need a healthy number of abandoned carts
- You need to secure enough advertising budget for Facebook Retargeting Ads
This brings us to the third way—a rather unexploited one‚ which is cart recovery through Facebook Messenger marketing.
Now, you can recover your abandoned carts through Facebook Messenger by sending an automated message to your store visitors and asking them to finish what they’ve started.
In order for the message to reach your visitor’s Facebook Messenger account, you first have to install the Facebook Messenger checkbox to your website, as displayed below:
Some other things to consider include the total number of messages you will send throughout your Facebook Messenger marketing sequence, the copy that you are going to use, and the discount you are going to offer so that you get people to purchase the products in their carts.
All in all, cart recovery through Facebook Messenger marketing is an extremely effective way to help you convert more cart abandoners into paying customers.
Conclusion
Ecommerce is changing. We can see a transition from traditional ecommerce and sales channels to modern ways of reaching your customers and communicating your messages with them. Those who see this change as an opportunity will be the ones that will benefit the most out of this transition.
It is of the utmost importance that you understand that not every channel is a sales channel you should use and that not every channel is an effective sales channel for all types of businesses. But, Facebook Messenger marketing seems to be an extremely powerful sales channel that is here to stay.
Let’s summarize the ways that Facebook Messenger marketing can help your business:
- Use the Facebook Messenger Cart to reach your potential customers where they are online
- Use the Webchat Tool to automate conversations on your website and respond instantly 24/7
- Send segmented campaigns and personalize your content for long-term relationships with your customers
- Send automated replies on Facebook messages and post comments and stop losing time from replying manually to each of your messages and comments
- Recover your abandoned shopping carts through Facebook Messenger marketing and reclaim lost revenue from your abandoned shopping carts
Facebook Messenger is a great channel for every online retailer, regardless of the niche you are into. Use it wisely, systemize your efforts, and results will eventually come.