Did you know that eCommerce revenue now accounts for 10.7% of retail sales in The States? Or that half of that can be accredited to Amazon alone, who have now surpassed Walmart as the world's largest retailer?
Naturally, businesses are surging in and popping up in the eCommerce space to get their piece of the pie. The pie is big, and still growing, but there is also an ever growing number of knives and forks trying to cut a slice. Are you using the right cutlery?
When it comes to marketing utensils in eCommerce, there is a large set to choose from. From the ever reliable email marketing suites, conversion optimisation tools, plugins to improve shopping experience like a single page checkout or some fancy cart abandonment follow up email system. And all are excellent, but none seem quite as effective for eCommerce as Facebook Messenger marketing.
Facebook undeniably has the biggest audience on the planet, knows a scary amount about each one of them, and has instant access to them. So how do you take advantage of this?
You’re probably already aware that you can program a Facebook Messenger bot to converse with your prospects and customers for you, and we’ll get back to that, but did you know (before reading the subheading) that you can actually introduce a shopping cart into their inbox? Yea! Mad I know.
Why should you care? Well if you’ve any experience in social media marketing then you know that it’s a lot easier to get people to engage with facebook posts and messenger apps than it is to get them to leave the site/app for your external website, and even if they do, the slow transition speed increases bounce rates drastically.
Keeping the shopping experience seamless in your communications with them is one way to overcome all this. By keeping the sales process in a Messenger conversation you are going to them, not expecting them to come to you. Having another sales channel is never a bad idea either.
You’ve probably seen it on a site somewhere and wondered how they have Facebook Messenger built into their pages, and how you can too!
Facebook Messenger Website Chat is a tool you can embed on your website (usually with a plugin) that allows people to talk to you directly using Facebook Messenger without ever leaving your site.
From here you can have your automations converse with the customer or even kick it into manual and talk directly to your site visitors, live, on your site!
Now that is exceptional customer service!
Quite possibly the best thing about marketing on Facebook is the amount of data they have on their users and how they let you target using this data. Well it turns out that this power is accessible to Messenger marketing as well.
By segmenting campaign audiences by their demographics or their behavior on site you can deliver a message that better relates to them and in turn is more effective.
The key advantage of this? You can expect open rates over 70% and click through rates north of 50%. Unheard of in email marketing, the previous king of value-for-money remarketing channels!!
So we’ve talked about automating your messages a lot, but what do we mean by this? Simple really, you program the bot to respond to different questions with specific answers. Can you think of a certain question that you just find yourself answering over and over? Such a waste of your time. Why not automate a bot to do it?
By having a bot answer your visitor’s questions in real time, you are more likely to convert them while they are in a trigger pulling mood. If they have to wait several hours for you to respond, then don’t expect them to take action like they would have if you had replied instantly. Bots never sleep or skip a beat. They make excellent staff!
This doesn’t just work for Messenger though. You can also use this technology to reply to common questions in your post comments. It can take time to respond to all the comments on a post, especially if you're paying to promote it, and as some of the questions will be repeated it makes sense to have a bot that can answer common questions quickly. Also handy for tackling common objections that people express in the comments.
I have no doubt that your analytics show a fair few of your visitors bounce after adding to cart, abandoning the cart at the checkout and bouncing. So how do you recover these retreaters and bring them back to buy?
What about with email? Email is good and effective but has one massive downfall. You actually not only need to collect their email address, but also get permission to send them the emails!
Paid advertising? Not bad, but you will need to make sure that your audience sizes are big enough to target so you need a good amount of traffic to start with. And of course, you’re going to have to pay for paid advertising. Though good value for money, not the best, as we’ll see.
Have you guessed what we suggest yet? No, not that, I was actually going to say Facebook Messenger! You can actually track facebook users who add to cart but don’t checkout and follow them up on messenger.
You will need to play around with timing, the amount of messages you will send and your copy but, after a bit of experimenting and split-testing, you should be able to achieve return rates surpassing that of both email and paid advertising!
Will You Make Messenger Part of Your Marketing?
I would hope so! I am fairly confident that every eCommerce store owner on the planet could benefit from spending the time to set up at least one of the Messenger marketing methods mentioned above. So which one piques your interest and how will you use it in your store? Let us know in the comments!
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