Building your list is essential to growing your business.
You need to have a list of people whom you could message when you want to, to build a relationship with them, and send traffic to any post when you want to.
You really need to have a list of people and not just depend on Google sending you regular traffic, because one day it may go without any notice.
And people were raving about email lists, which are still important to this day, but there is a new competitor that is grabbing the spotlight.
Facebook Messenger Chatbot is a more interactive platform, that helps you build a more engaged list. It is like having an email list in the old days when the open rates were 90%+, no the usual 10-30% that we see nowadays.
It is like having an email list on steroids. Yes, it can’t replace email lists because you completely own your list, and Facebook own this list, but using it will give you the unfair advantage of building a list a lower cost and get a better response than your email list.
The question now is…
What is A Messenger ChatBot?
We can’t continue this post talking about the new hot trend, without understanding it completely.
According to Hootsuite:
Basically, a chatbot is a piece of automated messaging software that uses AI to converse with people.
Chatbots have been around in some form for decades, and currently they exist on webpages, in apps, on social media—you name it.
A Facebook Messenger bot is a chatbot that lives in Facebook Messenger, meaning it converses with some of the 1.3 billion people who use Facebook Messenger every month.
When you message a company on Facebook and a bot responds immediately giving you various options with various questions to ask, that is a facebook Bot.
And don’t worry, you don’t need a team of developers to build you something like that as you will see in the post. It became easier nowadays, so don’t worry.
How can anyone use ChatBot to increase the business?
Now, that you know what a chatbot is. Now, you are wondering how could you increase your business using chatbots. Although, we mentioned it briefly in the intro, here is a more concrete answer why you need to use it now.
- Reach more of your audience: Would you rather open your email where you get a lot of emails there, or just open your facebook messenger? According to headliner labs, people are 3.5 times more likely to open a facebook message than a marketing email. So if you have 100 people on your email list, and 100 on your messenger list, you’ll 3.5x more people to open your message on your messenger list.
- You could use a bot to engage with your customers and ask them the basic question at the beginning, and then depending on the results, you can know if a customer is a hot lead or not, and then direct them to your sales team, without needing to interact with everyone from the beginning
- You could use it to help people decide which product is best for them, by making them answer various questions, and then give them the best option to them depending on their answers. You could follow up with people in the middle if they drop, so it is better than using the usual survey. People are more likely to complete it this way.
- Engage with your customers over the long term. Since they are more likely to open your message, you could easily build a better relationship with them, and remind them over time that you exist and that you deserve their trust, and make it easy to ask questions that you and your team could answer, which may move the needle and make them finally buy your products.
These are a few reasons why you need to have a list. Depending on your business, there might be more benefits, but I think these are enough to convince you of the importance of Facebook Messenger chatbot, and how you could use them to grow your business.
Now, we came to the fun part…
8 ChatBot Tools
Now, you know what a chatbot is, and why you need to have one and how it can grow your business. But maybe, you are worried that you will need a team of developers who develop the AI to respond to your customers, and you are worried about the technology.
The thing is that it became easier than ever to set up your bot. You could easily create those sequences and make people think that the bot is for real, without much work from you.
In the following part, you are going to discover the top tools that help you do so and the benefits of each one. Let’s dig in the first one.
ManyChat
Manychat is considered the leading chatbot creator. It is used by most of the influencers. And of course, there is a reason for that.
It allows you to easily create a bot with their visual drag and drop builder. So you could easily create your automated messages look the way that you want it to be…
They claim that your first bot will be up and running in just 2 minutes. Insane, right?
Here are other features available in this tool:
- Easily create message automation to send the exact messages you want to send without you doing it for every person
- Easily go in a live chat mode with anyone who is sending you messages. That extra touch of humans + bots will give you an unfair advantage.
- Easily convert people who comment on any post you choose into a bot subscriber
- In the pro version, you can convert people who click on an ad into a bot subscriber
- You could also add people by making them scan a QR code.
- Easily tag subscribers to segment them based on their actions, questions they responded on, where did they optin and so on, to send highly-targeted messages.
- And you can create custom fields to collect the info you want like physical address, email and so on
Pricing:
Their free bot is very generous. The only problem is that you get their branding which is fair if you’ll use their tool without paying money.
After that, the pro version is the same for all users, you pay differently according to the number of subscribers.
For 1k subscribers, you pay $15 a month. For 10k subscribers, you pay $65 a month. For 25k, you pay $145 a month. And you can request more based on your number of subscribers.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel is another leading company which helps the user build their chatbots. It was founded in 2015.
It enables you to create bot automation messages and acquire bot subscribers easily in various ways.
Features:
- You can get started for free for 1k subscribers, with many of the features available in the pro version.
- Remove the branding in the pro version
- Get audience insights via the segments you created
- Easily create targeted custom audiences from your bot subscribers for facebook ads. And you could then create a lookalike
- Easily delete inactive users.
- Add subscribers when they comment on a post or click on send a message in an ad. It is that simple.
- With the premium version, you get a VIP support treatment, with a dedicated account manager
- You can have an expert help you with your bot creation and FB ads set up to get results faster.
Pricing:
As I said, there is a free version with basic features, which you can use until you reach 1k subscribers.
After that, there is a pro version which gives you priority support with all the added features. Pricing starts at $15 for 500 subscribers. For 10k subs you pay $85 a month. For 25k you pay $180 a month
The premium version is created if you want assistance with everything. You just add $300 to the pricing of your pro plan. Which, if you look for on the big picture may be worth it, if you have a big list of subscribers and want assistance to grow your business.
ZoConvert
Zo Convert is one of the players that is growing very fast in this market, and there is a reason why people are loving this tool.
It is one of the bots that is created specifically for Shopify users to help them get the best results from their stores. But don’t be fooled to think it can’t be used, if you don’t have Shopify.
Here are some of the features of this tool:
- Easily recover abandoned carts, and get some of the missed sales that are easy to capture. These people have already added items to the cart, and maybe something happened in life that made them not complete the sale. Sometimes, that message could get you some of these people and solve any problems they faced.
- Add people who click add to cart to optin automatically, and then follow up with them
- Send time-sensitive offers to the Shopify users
- Easily get people from your site or your fans as subscribers.
- Add a customer chat plugin to your page, so they can easily send you messages, and add them to your subscribers’ list.
- Send automated messages according to time zones, audience’s interest, or/and user’s activity. Creating a conversational flow is a breeze
- Get all the features for free till 100 subscribers
Pricing:
Their pricing is very simple similar to the other tools. You get all the features and pay according to your email list.
The slight difference is that you get access to all features until you get 100 subs.
After that for 1k subscribers, you pay $19 a month. For 5k you pay $59 a month. For 20k subscribers, you pay $99 a month.
ActiveChat
Active Chat is another fast-growing company that claims to be the alternative to Chatfuel and Many Chat for many reasons.
They are focused on creating chatbots that help your e-commerce business grab more sales, not just for Shopify stores as Zo Convert but for WooCommerce stores as well. They also want to create customer support chatbots that help you get more questions answered faster, so it cuts your costs and increases your customer satisfaction.
Here are some of the features of this tool:
- Visual chatbot Builder. This is something you will not find on other tools. Easily have a visual look of the sequence that you created based on their answers. It is comparable to the ones you see on Convertkit and Active Campaign.
- You could do extensive math and take decisions based on the calculations automatically.
- Easily add timers and delays to make it sound more natural than other tools
- Increase your e-commerce sales with their great bot technology, to get last cart abandonment, find easily what they need with natural language product search.
- Decrease your customer support costs by answering common queries easily from the chat directly. You could walk the users for doing things and make them more satisfied, without much work from you. Just connect your existing knowledge base, and let it do their magic.
- and much more
Pricing:
The pricing for the plans on active chart is a little bit different. There are 4 plans already available with different features to choose from.
- Free: A single bot with up to 500 MAU (Monthly active users.) Of course, you don’t have any of the advanced features like e-commerce and site tracking. You can’t send broadcasts as well.
- Starter: Costs $19 a month. And gives you 1 bot with up to 1000 MAUs. You can add extra MAUs for $0.02. You can send broadcasts and see conversation history. No Twilio SMS, e-commerce features, and site tracking
- Architect: It costs $49 a month. You get access to all features. You can add extra MAUs for $0.01 per user.
- Agency bot: You get 10 bots, for 50k MAUs each, and access to all features. You can add extra users for $0.005. And it costs $249 monthly. It is a great value if you have multiple businesses and need multiple bots.
Flow Xo
Flow Xo is another great company that provides you with high-quality technology to create bots that help you chat with your customers and increase your sales, and also help you create workflows to lead your customers as you want with various ways to trigger any workflow.
Here are some of the features of this great tool:
- Their welcome mat is so amazing. it helps make your customers think they are in a real conversation with the way they introduce themselves, and how they show the different ways they could help with. And further instructions to get help when they are lost for example, so you show what you could do, and so on.
- Easily collect info you want with the way you could ask relevant questions and gather the data. Not to mention that you could ask multiple choices questions.
- Make it answer basic questions, without much work from you. And easily be able to transfer the chat to a human.
- Filter leads with the way you ask questions and the answers you receive
- You can get paid directly from your chatbot in no time
Pricing:
You can get started for free with 500 interactions, and 5 bots or active flows.
Then the standard plan starts at $19 per month. It gives you access to all features, 5000 interactions, 15 bots or active flows, 3 months of logs, the ability to download all user data, remove branding and priority support.
If you want to add 5 bots or active flows, you can do so for $10 a month. You could also add 25k interactions for an extra $25 a month.
The interaction is any triggered flow, regardless of the number of messages or actions in response, they don’t count.
Snatchbot
Snatch bot is one of the fast-growing companies. Part of that may be because they only had a free plan for a long time before announcing their pro plan on the end of May last year. And till now, their free plans are one of the most generous ones, so you should consider it if you are on a limited budget.
Here are some of the features of this great product:
- One of the great features is their bot templates and bot directories. Do you have a bank and want to have a bot template that you could modify and get started in no time? Don’t worry. There are multiple others that you could choose from, and modify to suit you and your business
- They have a good NLP that helps them differentiate between entities and intents and be able to perform actions the right way. Over time, it could be the perfect asset to distinguish your business
- There are multiple plugins that you could add to your bot to integrate with multiple software and make it easier to get things done. Plugins like Google Calendar, Calendly, Giphy, Weather Bot, eBay and more
- For the pro version, you could remove their branding and get premium support.
- As I said, you get everything in the free version, which you can’t get in most of the competitors… for unlimited subscribers
Pricing:
As I said, one of the best features of this bot is that you get all of the features albeit the removal of branding and the premium support, which you can get by at the beginning.
Once you have a good performing bot, you can then make the transition to the pro version to remove the branding and get the support when you need to.
The first tier starts at $30 for 10k monthly messages. Then $79 for 25k messages. You could see the slider and move it as you want from inside your account according to your needs.
MFY
MFY is really one of the new players in the market. It was created a few months ago. It is created essentially for bloggers & content creators. If you are not, don’t bother checking it out.
Here are some of the features of MFY:
- Try everything for free till 500 subscribers… no limitations
- Easily add widgets on your website to convert visitors into subscribers, just like email forms. You could add tags as well
- You could then send welcome messages or lead magnets when the user subscribes and assign tags.
- Not to mention that the design mobile responsive
- Since most web creators are on WordPress, they have created a WordPress plugin to integrate with WordPress. It is very fast, load in 200ms, so don’t worry about slowing your site. It is also compatible with Gutenberg, and you can easily add it as a widget, or use the shortcodes. You can use the WordPress tags and categories as tags for the subscriber
- Easily segment subscriber using tags to send personalized messages
- Automated drips are available… content creators can’t live without them. You can easily space messages by time. You could use tag combinations to trigger any sequence. Easily reorder messages with drag and drop.
- Easily segment based on the behavior of the visitor… great for bloggers and content creators. So you could segment them based on referrer, utm tags, and wp categories and tags. Giving you more options to only send targeted messages to your list without annoying them.
- and much more
It is great for content creators, and you can’t go wrong with it.
Pricing:
Their pricing is pretty straightforward. As I said, you get access to all features even on the free plan. Here are their plans:
- Free: From 0 to 500 subscribers, you pay 0.
- Pro: From 500 to 1000 subscribers, you pay $9/mo, or $7 when paid annually
- Influencer: From 1000 to 3000 subscribers, you pay $26 a month or $21/month when paid annually
- Patron: From 3000 too 5000 subscribers, you pay $39 a month or $32 a month when paid annually.
You can get bigger lists by contacting them.
Conclusion
Getting started with a Facebook messenger bot may be the best decision you make. Those who built their email list earlier than the others grew faster than others.
It could be the same with you if you catch this trend while it is still growing.
ManyChat and Chatfuel are the ones who are already established in the market.
Odus is the only bot in the market that works flawlessly with different platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Messenger, Landing Page and Website Widget.
Active Chat and Zo Convert is intended for e-commerce stores. MFY would be the perfect option if you are a blogger or a content creator.
Snatchbot is great if you want to still dig your toes and pay nothing until you get the hang of FB bots. 🙂
Whatever you choose, just get started with FB messenger marketing. And tell us below which option did you go with and why
