Messenger

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Benefits of Messenger

For businesses, the main benefits of Messenger are:

• It allows one-to-one or group private messaging between people.*
• It allows one-to-one communication between customers and businesses.*
• People can communicate via text, video, photo, and emojis.
• They can transact with customers.

*Note: Pages cannot initiate communication with users on Facebook Messenger. This is to protect users from potentially being spammed by businesses, and provides a better user experience.

There are three elements that are generally consistent across messaging apps - they are Instant, expressive, and convergent.

Instant

The mobile phone has, over the last five years, shifted from being a secondary device to the primary device that most people use to interact online, conduct business, and stay in contact with their friends. With this shift, more traditional forms of communication – such as email and phone calls – are no longer the only immediate means of connecting with friends, family, and businesses. Messaging allows people to stay in touch with those that matter most to them without requiring the traditional structure of an email or the duration of a phone call.

Expressive

Messaging allows for the sharing of content beyond just text. Messaging apps offer any number of ways to communicate: pictures, video, sound, emojis, and stickers. This environment, because it is actively connected to the internet, also allows for the easy sharing of content such as app download links, videos, web links, and more.

Convergent

Messaging apps have evolved to fit the behavior of their users: features such as peer-to-peer payments, access to transportation, and more, have emerged as messaging apps become critical to everyday life. Instead of using distinct apps for each of these behaviors, more and more people are moving to Messaging apps to coordinate activities.

The following features of Messenger can help you deliver on your marketing objectives:

• Send and receive API that takes full advantage of the instant, expressive, and convergent nature of messaging.
• Native images allow you to take advantage of the expressive nature of messaging.
• Structured messages are combinations of images, native GIFs and videos, title, subtitle, and call-to-action buttons. These templates allow you to replicate common types of messages to your customers.
• Carousels feature multiple message bubbles contained within a single message that a user can thumb through.
• It enables businesses to receive the following signals from customers: text responses, and URLs triggered by a customer tapping on a CTA or ‘Quick Reply’ button.
• Record and program automated actions based on user activity within a thread. For example, a restaurant reservation service could enable an automated action when a customer tapped on the custom CTA‘Cancel Reservation’ – this would trigger an action that both cancelled the reservation and sent a confirmation to the customer in the thread.

Managing Your Messages

1. Have a plan in place to be responsive to incoming messages

Depending on how many messages you anticipate, assign a person or a team of people to take the lead with monitoring and responding to messages. Bear in mind that if you are running adverts with the ‘Send Message’ CTA, you may receive quite a few messages from people.

2. Set a response time to set expectations

Response times let people know when they can expect a response from your business. They show up in the ‘About’ section of your Page and in the chat window, when someone messages your Page. Page Admins can choose to show that they respond either ‘within minutes’, ‘within an hour’, ‘within hours,’ or ‘within a day’. Set a response time for your Page that is accurate. This will set expectations with people who are sending you messages and establish response time guidelines for the people on your team who are in charge of responding to messages.

3. Set a welcome greeting

Messenger greetings are customizable notes from your business that appear in a new message thread before messages are sent. You can use this text to greet people, set a friendly tone, and set expectations before someone messages you the first time. You can use a greeting to proactively provide a link to FAQs or other information. Set and edit your greeting in your Page's Message Settings.

4. Use Instant Replies to greet customers and set expectations

When you have messaging enabled for your Page, you have the option of turning on Instant Replies to send an automated reply to anyone who messages your Page. This feature can be used to greet customers and thank them for contacting you before you're able to respond personally and manage expectations about when they'll hear back.

5. Limit saved replies to frequently asked questions

The Save Replies feature helps Page Admins respond quickly to high volumes of messages asking similar questions. Use them to respond to frequently asked questions, such as your business hours and the details of your return policy. For one-off questions from people, send a personal reply.

Instant Replies is an auto-response feature on Facebook Messenger for messages sent to a Facebook Page from a customer. It helps improve customer experience and reduces pressure on customer service teams.

Messenger Greeting. Automatically welcome people to your Page with a customized message. There are a variety of personalization options when creating your greeting, including:

• Person's first name
• Person's surname
• Person's full name
• Your website URL
• Your phone number
• Your address

Instant Replies. Create an automatic response that people receive when they message your Page to let them know that you'll respond soon.

Away Messages. Create a message to let people know that they've reached you outside of your business hours and that you will respond soon. This is important for keeping up your responsiveness rating whenever you're away.

To set up Instant Replies and Away Messages, go to the ‘Messaging’ setting of your Page Settings. From there, follow the on-screen directions to set up your Response Assistant. You can also set up a Messenger greeting for new customers, and follow up messages for customers who have used the service.

Account Linking Feature. This feature in Messenger has a secure protocol for businesses to connect their customers’ accounts with Messenger accounts, enabling a deeper and more personal experience. People have to opt in to this experience.

Bot Menu. The bot ‘menu’ or ‘settings’ option makes it easier to access with the launch of a persistent menu. This eliminates the need for people to remember text commands and provides a great way to restart the flow. The menu can be accessed by an icon in the message composer.

Quick Replies. Quick replies offer a more guided experience for people as they interact with your bot, which helps set expectations for what the bot can do. They allow for simple state management for developers — no need to manage button taps from ten messages ago — and make chat history cleaner, by only showing the selected responses.

One great example of this in practice is from KLM. The airline added Messenger as a new entry point for customers to ask questions and receive flight information, including boarding passes, resulting in 40% more customer interactions.

Messenger has an entire ecosystem of Platform Development Providers that provide bots for the platform. These bots can help you achieve business objectives such as raising awareness, gaining customers, enabling transactions, and providing a service. They provide out-of-the-box bot solutions for you in Messenger.