The future of Messenger Marketing

Imagine you are a landlord and your letting agent has just placed a new tenant in your BTL property.

After all contracts have been signed, you look at your phone and see a notification from Facebook Messenger. You check it, and see that the agent has sent you an automated message asking, on a 1-5 scale, how did you found their service.

When someone needs to contact you they may not go to your website, they may well use Facebook!

If you respond with a 1-3, the chatbot automatically asks you if anything was wrong and what they can do to improve. If you respond with a 4-5, the chatbot automatically thanks you and gives you a link to leave a review online.

Doesn’t that sound quicker, easier, and more convenient for everyone involved? And of course, the letting agent is able to store the data from this conversation in a central system and use it to provide better service.

The best thing is that you’ll be able to set up chatbots that automatically send a message based on the last interaction the person had with your company – whether it was watching a video, booking a viewing, requesting a valuation on your website… you name it.

When someone needs to contact you, they won’t necessarily go to your website – they’ll send you a Facebook message. Messenger will become your single point of interaction with customers, the one place where they can easily reach you anytime they have a question, need help, or simply want to book an appointment.

OTHER PLATFORMS

If you want to do Messenger Marketing at present, you’re pretty much limited to using Facebook Messenger as your platform – but not for long.

• WhatsApp has opened their API, in private beta, with plans to open publicly in 2019.
• iMessage is following Business Chat.
• Android Messages – Google is making Rich Communications Services (RCS) the protocol that will replace SMS;
• Messenger is quickly becoming a mainstream channel for businesses;
• Messenger Marketing is still relatively new. It isn’t yet a common mainstream channel of business communication and marketing and this applies to the property market – yet.
• Messenger Marketing is an ideal platform for conversation. People already use it and trust it so it’s got some great benefits for agents who want to keep in touch with their customers.

It’s incredibly versatile – an alternative to a mobile app, live chat to a property portal, so it won’t be long before Messenger can become an alternative to an entire website!

Soon businesses will start sending customers directly to Messenger for communication, because that’s where the customer data will be stored. And because Messenger makes it so easy to follow up with the people who have chatted with you, it will help improve closing rates and provide better customer service.

FOR EXAMPLE

An agent adds a Messenger widget to their website, so visitors may start a Messenger conversation right there (without visiting Messenger.)

A buyer asks a question about a property but leaves the site without booking a viewing. But he/she has now been added to the agent’s Messenger list, so the agency can send follow-up messages to tell them more about that property and similar properties.

A week later, that buyer opens one of those messages, inside the Messenger app. They decide to book a viewing for three of those properties after all.

So, they book the viewings there, inside Messenger, without having to go back to the website at all. How easy was that? How much more natural that process was for everyone involved?

Messenger Marketing has huge potential and the future is about creating conversations, or even experiences, overtake email marketing as the predominant sales, marketing, and support channel for agents. Messenger has a 4x higher open rate. The average open rate for an email is 20 per cent according to MailChimp. Messenger, though, has 70-90 per cent open rates and it has an 8x-12x higher click-through rate. On average on 2.4 per cent of your email recipients will click on your link within the email.

You need to send a lot of emails just to get few people to visit your blog – but not on Messenger where the clickthrough rates are 20-30 per cent. That’s a strong signal that people don’t just open these messages – they read and interact with them.

Make no mistake: Facebook Messenger Marketing is going to be a huge marketing channel for everyone, including the property sector.

Everyone can benefit from integrating Facebook Messenger into their marketing strategy, given how Messenger Marketing is growing, the sooner the better.

Got a question? Want to improve your marketing campaign? [highlight]Book your free agency consultation[/highlight] with Nelly.