Creating chatbots can be hard.
Especially when you are just beginning, but even experienced builders can have their share of issues.
Well, we got you covered with this free chatbot starter package built for you inside the Manychat platform!
We will also describe some of the most common mistakes or issues that chatbot builders come across when building out their chatbots.
This way you make sure to not make these same mistakes and take full advantage of the free chatbot starter package we built for you.
Common mistakes
There are quite a lot of common mistakes that are being made by chatbot builders.
Explain who the user is interacting with
The first one is that most do not explain to the person connecting with the business that the messages are being automated.
You would not believe how many people do not catch on that there is a chatbot on the other side of the line.
The best place to mention this is the onboarding flow.
During the first interaction, you can make this very clear so you set the correct expectation of the person connecting with your business.
That is the reason why we included this inside the chatbot starter package as well.
Preventing high blocking rates on your Facebook page
One of the most common reasons pages get banned is because of their blocking percentage. And over 70% of this is caused by people not knowing how to unsubscribe from a chatbot.
The chatbot keeps on talking to them even though they tried to unsubscribe from it. Now Manychat already has system keywords in place for this (stop, unsubscribe) that will trigger the unsubscribe flow.
But be sure to explain to the subscriber how to do this, otherwise, the keywords have no use whatsoever.
A good option to include is having a menu item in your persistent menu that lets them choose to unsubscribe at any time.
It Will then look like this;
This way it is always easy for a person to unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your messages.
We’ve built a detailed unsubscribe flow for you inside the chatbot starter package.
Prevent spamming your subscribers
this might seem obvious but nothing is less true. Since Facebook placed restrictions where you can only send messages to your subscribers inside a 24 hour window of last user interaction we’ve seen a huge increase of messages sent within that time frame.
People get frustrated, try to unsubscribe, and most times without any obvious way to do so they block your chatbot.
In turn, this will increase your page blocking percentage and once you reach a 3% or above rate you risk your page being banned from being able to send messages.
So instead of harassing your subscribers be sure and try to catch their email and or phone number so you can send emails and or SMS instead.
This allows you to do so outside the 24-hour window and ensures you can get the subscriber back into your chatbot at any moment in time by providing a link they can click.
Another way to follow up with a subscriber is to use the OTN.
OTN stands for One Time Notifications and once subscribers opted in for this you can send 1 follow-up message outside that 24-hour window.
You can find more information about this here.
One other way would be to use one of the 3 available Messenger tags that Facebook provides. These tags have specific use cases and you will need to abide by them 100% or else risk a ban as well.
More information about Messenger tags can be found here.
Template Walkthrough
To help you understand and make the most out of the chatbot starter package template we recorded a video for you.
Conclusion
So with the above tips and the template we prepared for you, we hope you will have the best start possible when it comes to building chatbots.
We also prepared an amazing quiz template to add a new level of engagement to your chatbot. You can download that one here.
