The Secret Weapon of eCommerce in 2020, Facebook Messenger Chatbots

It’s bloody 2020 next month 😱 From what I can gather (in the tech world), there’s a lot of very strange yet wonderful things to look forward to in the new year.

Apart from flying cars and photorealistic VR…there’s a sleeping giant about to fundamentally change the way we as consumers interact with our favourite online merchants.

Ha ha.. you guessed it. Facebook Messenger Chatbots 🤖

If you work in E-Commerce and haven’t heard of Facebook Messenger Chatbots, then strap in because this article is literally for you. But seriously. If you haven’t, then what I’m about to tell you is going to change your perception of what’s possible in this space 😉

Let’s dive into how product personalisation, audience segmentation, digital personas, customer care automation, and untapped engagement are revolutionising how e-commerce brands communicate with their customers.

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🎁 Personalise products and offers at scale

For brands with multiple products and product ranges, bots have an incredible ability to personalise product offerings based on the customer’s preference.

How? 🤔

Pretty simple.

The bot asks the user several questions to create a profile and then serves a product recommendation based on their inputs. This is exactly what we built for Maybelline 👇

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A significant pain point in the cosmetics industry is the inability to efficiently provide product and shade recommendations online. Typically, the call-to-action (CTA) would be getting a customer in-store for a 15-minute consultation. Obviously, this hurts Maybelline’s ability to scale their e-commerce marketing since the CTA isn’t to purchase but to come in for a consultation — a huge point of friction. The solution? A digital product recommendation quiz that intuitively guided users to their perfect shade of brow product.

The campaign was the first of its kind for the L’Oreal group in Australia and turned out (luckily) to be a massive success 🥳. Close to 10k users interacted with the bot in under eight weeks, with 96% of all users receiving their product recommendation and 59% clicking through to the product purchase page.

An incredible result and a direct testament of how Messenger is an unbelievably underutilised channel for marketing and online commerce 😉 

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🔎 Segment your audience

The great thing about product and offer personalisation is that it generates excellent (and somewhat revealing 😅) data on your customers. You can start to build a profile on who they are, what they want, and why they want it. It all comes down to what questions you ask. 

For example, during the product recommendation process, the Maybelline bot was able to uncover insights into why customers hadn’t used eyebrow products before. The type of data you can collect is only limited by the creativity of your questions.

Additionally, via our platform, you can tag users throughout their conversational journey based on their interactions with the bot 🤖 

This enables further audience segmentation around preference and demographic-based data. We can then leverage the datasets created from tagging users for hyper-targeted Facebook ad audiences and lookalike campaigns 👀

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🎤 Establish a voice and personality for your brand

Something that we believe we do better than other chatbot agencies is accurately capturing the brand’s voice within the copy and tonality of the chatbot.

There is a real opportunity to build long-term affinity with your brand through the use of creative writing, bespoke graphics, GIFs, and video content. There’s really no platform quite like Messenger that allows for such creative freedom — the possibilities are endless.

We wanted to communicate Apero’s brand, a boutique fashion label, as fun, relatable and on-trend. Its personality was brought to life with a sprinkle of humour, a dash of cheek, and colloquial lingo that would suggest to the user that the brand truly understands its customers. Examples below 👇😄

Message m.me/aperolabel for more examples 😜

Our bots represent the perfect marriage of functional design and tone of voice— the love child of which is a lasting impression on your customers and one that they will share with their friends 💌

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🛎 Automate up to 60% of your incoming customer service enquiries

Responding to repetitive queries is firstly downright boring and secondly, it is ridiculously unfulfilling. It is a common pain point across e-commerce brands and no sane person wants to get home from work and explain to their significant other (again for the 57th time) that their day involved answering questions such as:

• When will my order arrive?
• When will X item be back in stock?
• How much is shipping?
  

Asking your social media manager to copy and paste response templates to these queries is a waste of resources, time, and talent. On average, our customer service chatbots automate up to 80% of these interactions and free up team member(s) to focus on more revenue and value-generating activities (i.e. the fun stuff). Such tasks could include writing blog posts, creating social content, or designing advertising campaigns.

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At bot•hello, we utilise our Smart Quick Reply™ system if the chatbot is unsure of the exact answer. Instead of returning a 1-to-1 response, the bot presents users options ranked by the probability that the answer is most relevant to the question (leveraging our NLP engine).

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🙋‍♀️ Reach your customers on the platform they’re most active

Lastly, Messenger is a great way to get in front of your customers. With the deterioration of organic reach, paid advertising is the go-to route for many e-commerce brands. The greatest thing about Facebook Messenger is that you can leverage it as a channel for existing customer outreach. We’ve personally experienced up to 93% open rates with any direct communications sent out through Messenger. 

It truly is magic 🔮

Related: 5 Reasons Why Your Chatbot Needs to Be on Facebook Messenger

🔌 Getting started and integrating

So, you’ve made it this far — clearly you’re ready to mobilise an army of cute, personable and loveable chatbots. What’s next? Weaponising your obedient and loyal digital troops for world domination. The strategies for edging out your competitors are endless with many more tactical integrations for e-commerce such as abandoned cart reminders, Facebook pixels, In-Messenger purchases, and order tracking. 

However, you should only implement these types of features after measuring and iterating on the data collected from a bot that first solves high-priority business pain points.

It’s an exciting time in the conversational space, and there’s really no better opportunity to be investing in these technologies than now 🚀