Have you checked out ShopMessage Smart Pop-ups yet? What are you waiting for? Our new Smart Pop-ups are built to help you quickly grow your Messenger subscriber list and we’re already seeing an average of 8% opt-in rates. That’s more than double a standard email opt-in!
Example Strategy: ShopMessage Promotion on Arrival
That said, you’ll need to think about alternative ways to build your Messenger subscriber list. Luckily, we just launched some really cool new tools to help you quickly grow your Messenger subscriber list. We can objectively say that they are WAY more effective and feature-rich than anything out in the market.
💬 Smarter pop-ups for smarter marketers
We’ve taken a proven opt-in method and brought it to the next level. Now, you can grow your list without hassling existing contacts. Our pop-ups only appear to users who are already logged into Facebook and have not already opted in. We also auto-detect other pop-ups so we never interfere with your existing email capture promotions.
Not only are they smart, they’re beautiful. Thanks to a talented design team, we offer hundreds of customizable templates so promotions are always “on brand”. We also let you choose exactly when to display your promotion with the option to immediately send a follow-up Message!
💥 Email is declining while Messenger is exploding
ShopMessage clients have seen ~81% open-rates and 34% click-thru rates. Take a moment to compare that to your current email open and click rates. Convinced yet?
Brands must choose the right growth marketing strategy when they are getting started with Facebook Messenger Marketing.
A question we get a lot is how a Messenger marketing strategy fits into the picture when email modals are already involved.
The goal is to avoid creating a conflicting, confusing experience for your customers. Messenger opt-in growth plugins and email capture modals appear and behave similarly. The last thing you want is getting poor performance from both channels by using them in tandem poorly.
When considering the right Messenger Marketing strategy, there are three to keep in mind:
Customers don’t want to be annoyed while browsing.
You want to maximize your Messenger opt-ins.
Understanding The Steps of Your Customer’s Journey
To choose the right messenger marketing strategy to grow your brand, you need to take a look at the various points in your customer’s journey with your brand. Some common events include:
Discovering your brand
Landing on your website
Browsing your site
Adding an item to their cart
Completing their purchase
Becoming a happy customer.
ShopMessage’s team has identified the most common scenarios that a merchant would want to offer their visitors a promotion. The best part is a merchant can use more than one!
If you understand the scope of possible customer engagement points, you can identify where your existing email capture strategies fit into the larger puzzle.
You’ll be able to spot the gaps where you are not engaging with your customers. These are the opportunities where you’ll want to deploy your Messenger growth plugins.
What to Consider When Choosing a Messenger Marketing Strategy
First, you’ll need to determine whether there are any existing modals on your site that you need to take into account.
What to Do If You Have No Email Modals
If you don’t have an existing email capture modal, then this choice is easy. Display your promotional plugin upon arrival with a slight delay.
We also recommend using the exit intent and post-purchase promo strategies for good measure.
In general, you want to maximize your opportunities to capture opt-ins by using multiple strategies that hit the visitor at various steps in their customer journey.
What to Do If You Already Use Email Modals
If you already have email capture modals, they will likely display upon arrival and/or when exit intent is displayed.
The alternative is to find a new step in the journey to prompt your visitors.
Along the customer journey, a majority of brands that are using email capture modals have them deploy upon arrival, or when the visitor has displayed exit intent.
Choose the Persistent Offer strategy if you want your growth plugin to coexist with an email modal.
This subtle pill keeps your opt-in promotion visible, without competing with the arrival or exit-intent modals for attention.
The Post-Purchase Promotion is unique because it displays to visitors that have already converted into paying customers.
Use this time to celebrate your customers and encourage them to turn into repeat buyers.
You can balance your email and messenger plugin displays by targeting your visitors at different sections of their customer journey.
Use Multiple Strategies To Grow Your Messenger Marketing Contact List
Every customer is unique, and every store experience is unique, which is why we’ve put together multiple Growth Plugin strategies to make sure there’s a tool in there for every situation.
Each messenger marketing strategy determines a set of rules governing the behavior of your Growth Plugin and will pre-populate a certain set of messaging into your preset that is appropriate for the timing of your promotion.
Across all of our strategies, you will have the ability to customize every aspect of your Growth Plugin, including:
overlay type e.g. modals, flyouts, and full-page takeovers
background image
messaging
typography
colors e.g. buttons, text
discount
your own logo
The Arrival Promo
Maximize your impressions by presenting all eligible visitors an offer moments upon arriving at your store. You can set this to display immediately upon arrival.
An arrival greeting is a great way to guide your visitors’ first impressions of your site. We recommend adding a few seconds of delay, so your promotion benefits from the added surprise/delight of popping-up.
A promotion that displays immediately, or very shortly after, a visitor arrives on your site.
The Purchase-Intent Promo
Use this strategy to strike a balance between your customer’s ability to browse the site and maximizing your opt-in rate. Purchase-Intent is defined as viewing the page for X-seconds, scrolling down Y% of the page, or adding an item to their cart. You can customize the timing and page scroll percentage delays based on your typical customer’s behavior.
A promotion that displays when a visitor exhibits purchase intent. This can be defined by time spent on a page, the percentage of the page scrolled, or adding an item to their cart.
The Exit-Intent Promo
Wait to display your promotion until your customer appears to be navigating away from your store. Catching them on their way out could mean the difference between an abandoned cart and closing the sale.
A promotion that displays when a visitor appears to be navigating away from your site.
The Persistent Promo
This is a subtle, yet visible way to build your Contact list that doesn’t take up a lot of space. This hybrid promotion will render as a pill in the bottom corner of your page until your customer engages with it, or an Intent rule is triggered. When this happens, the pill will expand into a modal, a flyout, or a full page takeover depending on what design you chose.
A subtle, yet persistently accessible pill in the bottom corner of your site that visitors can engage with at will. A great way for your growth plugin to co-exist with an email capture modal that may already be in place.
The Post-Purchase Promo
This strategy is different because it targets the customer after they have completed their purchase. Use this to ensure opt-in collection by celebrating your customer with an offer they can save for their next visit.
Promoting at this stage lays the foundation for building a repeat customer while they are still feeling the joy of their purchase. Strike while the iron’s hot!
A promotion that displays after a visitor has completed a purchase. A great way to celebrate your customers and re-engage them for repeat purchasing.
Bottom Line
The customer journey is complex. There are many steps where a visitor can decide they love you or don’t care. You can engage visitors to your site with a well-timed modal overlay to build a connection with your brand’s customer.
Already using email modals? No problem. ShopMessage is designed with Smart Logic to work around existing modals and maintain a positive experience for your customers.
ShopMessage’s Growth Plugins can be powerful tools in your messenger marketing strategy. Conversational brands that engage their customers at the right time in their customer journey will be the ones that win the future of digital marketing.
The modern shopper is conditioned by 2-day delivery standards and on-demand streaming entertainment. Customers expect the world to move fast at their fingertips.
Reading emails is a chore, and direct mail goes straight to the shredder.
One of the challenges that marketers have is keeping up where consumers are—Facebook Messenger.
Enter Messenger.
This is where people are migrating. More than 1.3 billion people are actively checking their Facebook Messenger inboxes every month. Mark Zuckerburg himself reported at Facebook for Developers’ F8 Conference that over 20 billion monthly messages were sent between people and businesses as of 2019, which is 2.5 times more YoY (as compared to Q2 2018).
Zuckerburg went on to say that Messenger now “has a higher daily message volume than SMS had globally at its peak.”
We dug up that back in 2016, Facebook had been processing more than 60 billion messages per day.
Throw that on top of Zuckerburg’s announcement that Facebook would be merging the infrastructures of Messenger, WhatsApp & Instagram, and you’re looking at more than 2.6 billion monthly users!
People are Already on Facebook Messenger and they are Engaged!
We’re not saying that email doesn’t work… we’re just saying that Messenger Marketing is 10x more effective. Let’s do the math.
As of last year, Mailchimp reports an average 15% open-rate & 2% click-thru rate. Messenger Marketing typically sees around 81% open-rates. 34% click-thru rates are common too. This is great for your abandoned cart messages! More on that later.
Insane engagement like this might make sense if you consider that only about 1 in 3 businesses are communicating with their customers on the Messenger platform. It’s just not that crowded… yet.
There’s no telling how long you can expect engagement like this to last. The last time you’d have seen that kind of engagement email was back in the 90s before the channel got saturated and segmented.
Gary Vaynerchuk reflects on the high engagement rates email once had.
The beauty of the Messenger channel is that your customers are already in a conversational mindset when they enter the channel. Customers are ready to engage with you if you can offer something interesting. After all, no one likes to chat with a bore.
Take your typical Abandoned Cart scenario. A customer is browsing your store, adds a few things to their cart and then they get a text that Fyre fest tickets just went on sale, which causes them to switch tabs, leaving your items to sit in cart limbo forever.
Money doesn’t just have to float out there, you can get yours back.
But what if you could automatically slide a direct message into that customer’s inbox with a gentle reminder (you can even include a discount!) that links back to your page?
Now your customer can pick up where they left off! Your reminder message will be the first thing they see after they message their friends about their tickets.
Your conversational message opens up an interactive channel for your customers to re-engage with your brand, and lays the foundation for a longterm relationship.
We’re getting to a greater average LTV just by kicking off a casual conversation, at scale.
Don’t leave money on the table. Recover revenue through Facebook Messenger with ShopMessage.
You don’t want to leave money on the table. Getting insanely high engagement rates with your abandoned cart messages is an easy way to make sure you’re recovering more of your revenue this year.
Getting Started with Messenger Marketing Is Easy
Conversational marketing is leading the way in 2019. This strategy delivers all day, every day, 24/7, and generates profits for you, even after you clock out to go home.
You don’t want to look back on 2019 a year or two from now and realize that you’ve fallen behind the competition by using outdated techniques to try and win customers. Luckily, we have a guide to help you get started!
Messenger marketing is the future of marketing and it’s happening right now. They say a rising tide lifts all boats, so make sure you’re situated to catch this wave.
