Facebook Messenger Sequences: The New Email Autoresponder

Transcript:

Hi guys, it’s Ben Heath here from Lead Guru and in this video I’m going to talk about Facebook Messenger Sequences.

Some of you may not know this but just like with an email auto responder you can have a sequence. Which is basically a set of messages that are sent to people automatically once they join your Facebook Messenger subscriber list.

So just to take it back a step, if you’re hearing the word Facebook Messenger subscriber list and going what on the Earth is that?

Then check out another video that I’ve created that explains how Facebook Messenger ads work and how you can get people on your Facebook Messenger subscriber list.

The link to that video will be in the description of this video.

So click on that, check that out and then come back and watch this one.

As I was saying, you can create a sequence of messages to be sent to someone once they join your Facebook Messenger subscriber list. In a very similar way that you can with an auto responder with email.

Many, many, many companies use this and if you have an email list you probably have an auto responder in sequence. Trying to generate a sale or get them to know a bit about you and a bit about your brand and generate a lead or whatever it is.

You can do the same on Messenger.

So obviously we’ve been experimenting with this quite a lot.

Now the first thing I will say where we’ve made a mistake is what we did is we took our auto responder series on email and we basically just popped that straight into our Messenger sequence and ran that as an experiment to see how that would perform.

That auto responder sequence has done very, very well on email, we figured it would do quite well here.

Well, it’s done okay, but there’s also been some quite strong negatives.

At the moment, email is very, very different to Facebook Messenger. Lots of people receive a lot of emails.

They’re used to being sold to via email where people receive from eCommerce companies and all that sort of stuff.

They’re used to being sold to via email.

It’s not as jarring when a company is trying to convince them to buy something via email.

At the moment with Messenger, it definitely is.

We’ve had a number of people respond saying leave me alone, stop, all that sort of stuff. Because at the moment with Messenger what they’re used to is they’re used and communicating basically with friends and family.

That’s about it at this stage.

Friends and family are never gonna try and sell them on places so they don’t see Facebook Messenger as a place where it’s appropriate to try and push a sale too hard.

One of the things I would really recommend with your Facebook Messenger sequences is that you’re basically less salesy.

I’m sure that’s not a word but I know you know what I’m talking about if I write that up here.

Less salesy. So that’s the first thing that we’ve learned.

We’ve had some push back with using our email auto responder ’cause that was quite salesy, we were really trying to encourage them to take an action we know is gonna help them out.

With Messenger that hasn’t worked so well.

Another thing is you need to restrict the send time.

So I’m gonna pop that up there as well.

So restrict send time.

I’ll explain what that means.

If you’ve played around with email auto responders, you’ll know that typical way of doing it is once someone subscribes, you send them an email the day after and then maybe the day after and then maybe the day after to get them to take a certain action or maybe you want them to watch some content, something like that.

You can set up sequences in the exact same way.

The issue is with email if someone’s up late on a Saturday night and they say join your email list at midnight, then they get an email at midnight on Monday or Tuesday night.

That’s not really an issue, they probably won’t notice it or pick it up, they’ll pick it up in the morning when they get to work or when they first wake up and check their email, whatever.

With Messenger at broadcast or even sequences that message is going to notify them on their phone so it’s often going to make a bit of a noise, it’s going to pop up, it’s far more jarring which is fantastic for us advertisers ’cause it’s less difficult to ignore, but it means you have to be really careful with it.

If someone stayed up late on a Saturday night and joined your Messenger subscriber list at midnight you have like a three day message sequence, those messages will automatically be sent at midnight.

You don’t want that, people do not want to receive messages at midnight on a Monday night or Tuesday night Or vice versa, if they were up early on a Friday morning at say six am and they saw your ad then and joined your Messenger subscriber list then, they definitely don’t want your three day sequence to hit them at six am on a Sunday morning.

A lot of people have got their phone by their bed, they don’t turn it off, they don’t put it on flight safe mode or anything like that.

It buzzes them and that’s very annoying.

Those are two adjustments you have to make from your email auto responders to your Facebook Messenger sequences is to be less salesy and to restrict the send time, that’s really important.

One other thing I wanna quickly mention about these is we’ve had a few questions about how do you even set these up?

What’s the technology behind it? So we use a company called Many Chat which is absolutely fantastic.

Their interface is great, the software, no affiliation at all just so you guys know.

The software’s fantastic. It’s super easy, the interface is really useful.

So if you take a look at it, you’ll find it very obvious and straight forward what you need to do.

I think you can even use it for free, but a pro plan starts at $10 a month. I mean absolutely nothing. Definitely grow your Facebook Messenger subscriber list.

That’s really important, I’ve been creating lots of videos about this recently because it’s absolutely massive.

Make sure you’re less salesy with your sequences and make sure you restrict your send time and of course use Many Chat.

So if you found this video useful, please share it.

I would really, really appreciate that. The share is all important, makes me keep coming back and producing more videos.

If you’ve got any questions, pop a comment down below and I will talk to you soon, bye bye.