5 Ways Facebook Messenger Marketing can Grow Your Shopify Store

Facebook Messenger marketing has blown up over the past couple of years and it seems like it’s all anyone ever talks about these days.

Since their launch in April 2016 (not really all that long ago), people have been scrambling to work out how to use the Messenger platform to grow their businesses.

Now, as the dust is settling and many users boast of 200k+ subscribers, it’s become clear that Facebook Messenger is a force not be reckoned with.

  • 60-90% open rates
  • 10-30% click-through rates

These are some of the stats that are thrown around these days and you better believe them.

In comparison to 10-25% open rates from emails that have a 1 or 2% click-through rate (if you’re lucky), it’s hard to deny that Facebook Messenger is a great new means to grow your business.

Oh yeah, I forget to mention… there are over 900 million people on Facebook Messenger making it one of the most widely adopted chat applications in the world.

And, let’s not forget that Facebook also owns WhatsApp AND Instagram, which also has its own chat feature. It’s highly possible that messenger marketing, in-chat shopping, and chatbots could be brought to these platforms in the future. Instagram shopping and Whatsapp’s new business accounts are both great indications of this.

So learning how to make the most of Facebook Messenger now, could open you up to the 2.5 billion people across all of Facebook’s network. That’s a lot of people huh?

And, the good news is, you’re not too late to the party.

In fact, even if you’re reading this years after this post was published, you’re still probably not too late to the party.

Facebook Messenger is in its infancy, but chatbots are mere fetuses waiting to grow and develop as they evolve the world around us.

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s jump straight into 10 ways you grow your Shopify store with Facebook Messenger Marketing!

#1. Add the Messenger sales channel

Now, this may sound kinda obvious, but it’s definitely not one to overlook. Shopify makes it so damn easy to sell things that you’ll have an unfair advantage just by being one of the 600,000 stores that use their platform.

So, it’s important to make the most of all their available features, and the Messenger sales channel is no exception.

Doing so will add a menu to Messenger when people open a new chat with your store.

If people click on the Shop now button, they’ll be shown a slider with all of your products so that they can shop directly from the Messenger app.

 

Talk about frictionless shopping!

Customers will also be able to receive order updates straight through the Messenger app, keeping everything in one place for a seamless experience.

The best thing about this is that you don’t have to do ANYTHING. Just connect your Facebook page and Shopify already takes care of the rest.

Time to implement: 20 seconds.
Growth: Epic.

PRO TIP: After you add the Messenger sales channel, make sure to keep the Message Us Button switched off. We’re going to be discussing a much better way to do this next in #2.

Can’t connect your Facebook page with your Shopify store?

I had some trouble trying to connect one of my Shopify stores with the correct Facebook account, so if you can’t see your page available from the drop-down, here are some things you can try:

  1. Make sure you’re an admin on the page (you don’t have to own it, you just have to be an admin).
  2. Make sure your Facebook page is using the Shopping template.
  3. Make sure your Facebook page is published.

Still can’t see it in the drop down?

Head to this page and type Shopify in the search bar.

Click on Messenger by Shopify and make sure you’ve got it activated on your account.

 

Then, in the popup, scroll down to pages and make sure that the page that you’re trying to connect is checked.

 

If this still doesn’t fix it, contact Shopify support… they’re awesome and super fast.

#2. Add Live Chat with Manychat

Remember I said not to use the native Shopify Message Us button for Messenger? Here’s why…

Manychat is an amazing [free] tool that does it much better for the following reasons:

  1. When a user clicks on Shopify’s Message Us button it opens Facebook Messenger in a new tab. Since we want people to stay on our store and purchase things from us, this doesn’t make the most sense. Manychat, on the other hand, allows users to type in their questions directly from your store in a little, unintrusive popup chat.
  2. When a user begins a conversation through your Manychat widget, they’ll automatically be added to your subscriber list, meaning you can send them updates and promotions in the future. Building your subscriber list has never been easier.
  3. You don’t need it just yet, but if you want to get fancy in the future, Manychat has all the tools you need to build amazing chatbots that can engage users, sell products and automate customer support.

Best of all, Manychat is free to get started with, so there’s really no reason not to start using it.

1. Head over to Manychat and set up a free account. You’ll have to connect your Facebook page in order to do this, so make sure you’ve got your page set up and ready to go.

2. In the left sidebar menu, click on Growth Tools. Then, in the top right of the screen, select New Growth Tool. You’ll see a new set of options appear. From these options select Customer Chat.

3. Head to the setup tab. From here you can set up your welcome message and configure display settings. Once you’ve done all of that, scroll back to the top and click on the Install Javascript button.

 

4. Copy the script provided and head over to your Shopify backend. Click on Online Store > Themes and then from the actions drop-down, select Edit Code.

If you’re not familiar with code, don’t panic. It’s super simple. Just take a couple of deep breaths and everything will be alright.

5. In the new sidebar on the left, click on the theme.liquid file. Now… according to the instructions on Manychat, we have to add our code above the closing </head> tag. Let’s look for that. It should be fairly near the top.

 

If you’ve got a {{ content_for_header }} tag like the example above then we’re going to paste the code we copied from Manychat earlier above that. Otherwise, just paste it directly above the </head> tag.

Your code should look something like this now:

6. Click save in the top right corner of the screen and you should be ready to go! Head to your website to take a look at your new Messenger Chat button!

Can’t see it on your website?

Head back to Manychat, click on the growth tool widget you’ve just created and make sure it’s set to active in the top right of the screen.

 

 

#3. Abandoned Cart

Abandoned cart emails have become a common part of almost any ecommerce business these days.

The Baymard Institute took a collection of 40 studies that each assessed the average ecommerce shopping cart abandonment rate and calculated the average across all of these studies.

The result was an astonishing average abandonment rate of 68.89%.

SIXTY-EIGHT POINT EIGHT NINE PERCENT!

… nearly 70% of all people that add stuff to their shopping cart disappear with no explanation.

When you understand just how big this is, it seems clear that you’ve got to do something to try and recover some of these lost sales

Interestingly, the Baymard Institute also ran a poll in 2017 to find out why people were abandoning their carts:

The graph you can see above is something to take very seriously because these are all problems you can (and should) fix very quickly.

But, if you look at the small print at the top of the image, you’ll see that it says “Answers normalized without the ‘I was just browsing’ option.”

In fact, 58.6% of everyone who completed the poll selected the “I was just browsing / not ready to buy” option.

So, nearly 60% of people who abandon carts are essentially some of the best leads you could possibly imagine!

  • They’ve passed through your funnel.
  • They’ve gotten to know your brand.
  • They’ve even shown you exactly what products they would buy if they had to select from all of the products in your store.

BUT, and here’s the real kicker… the other 41.4% of cart abandonments have begun the checkout process, and this means that they’ve already inputted their email address.

Could this be any easier!? It’s a marketers dream. ‘Audience targeting on steroids.’

So, what do we do about it?

We create an abandoned cart campaign.

Klaviyo, still my favourite ecommerce email marketing tool, ran a study on all their users and found that abandoned cart emails can recover between 0.5% and 15% of lost sales, with an average of around 5%. That’s a huge amount of revenue!

Shopify realized the importance of cart abandonment emails years ago when they decided to include them as a built-in, off-the-shelf feature of any Shopify store.

But if you’re only using email for cart abandonment then quite frankly, you’re not doing enough!

Why not use email, Messenger and Facebook retargeting ads?!

“But Charlie, how can I do this? It sounds so complicated”, you say.

Let’s take a look and see…

1. Alright, first up… you’re gonna want to get yourself a handy little Shopify app called Octane AI.

There are many Facebook Messenger apps available for Shopify but after analysing all their features, Octane AI really stood out from the crowd for the following reasons:

  • They’ve got a bunch of features, including cart abandonment, popups, FAQs and follow up automation.
  • They integrate with Klaviyo, allowing you to sync lists and segments.

Now, since Klaviyo allows you to sync lists and segments with Facebook audiences we’ve just put ourselves in an incredibly powerful situation.

By using all three of these platforms to set up our abandoned cart campaign, we can now send product-specific reminder messages through Messenger, email, Facebook and Instagram.

 

#4. Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are the marketing strategy that works time and time again.

Why? Because people love free stuff.

Here’s how they work:

You understand that not everyone buys something the first time they visit your website, so you offer users something of value in order to collect their information so that you can continue to nurture them as a lead before closing a sale. This lead magnet could be a discount, an ebook, an email course, a guide, etc..

Up until 2016, you would offer this lead magnet in exchange for someone’s email address – with the excuse that you need it in order to send it to them.

But, since the dawn of Facebook Messenger, things just got a lot easier. You see, instead of asking people to enter their details (this has always been a massive friction point in trying to collect leads), now we can just display a simple little button that asks them if they want us to send the lead magnet to their Messenger account.

Take a look at the following image from our 24-Hour Growth landing page:

 

Look how much stuff is going on in the email signup area! It’s clearly going to cause some friction.

Now look just below it at the Send to Messenger button. How beautifully simple does that look?

And, the great news is, as soon as someone clicks on the button they’re instantly subscribed to your Messenger list.

Collecting leads just got crazy easy!

So, what are some of the best ways to set up lead magnets on your Shopify store?

Let’s take a look at a couple:

1. Since we’ve already set up a Manychat account in #2, we might as well start here. Manychat has a bunch of free widgets that you can use to offer lead magnets. Popups on blog posts, slide-ins, and bars at the top or bottom of the page work great. Try throwing in some buttons half way through a blog post for lead magnets relevant to the content if you really want to increase that signup rate.

2. If you’ve set up an Octane AI account in #3 then you can also use their popup feature to offer lead magnets on your site.

2. Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with lead magnets for ecommerce stores. It just depends on the niche you’re in. That’s why offering discounts is another great way to get people subscribed. For this job, there’s really no better tool than Wheelio. Check out the video below to learn more about it.

 

#5. Order Confirmations

It may seem difficult to understand where I’m going with this one. But the fact of the matter is, order confirmation emails have the highest open rates of all emails sent from ecommerce companies.

When you understand this, it’s hard to deny that these emails are incredible marketing opportunities for ecommerce stores.

A transactional email report from Experian has clearly highlighted the huge difference in open rates between transactional emails and bulk emails.

 

114%!

That’s right, people actually tend to open these emails more than once!

So, if email normally gets average open rates of 10-25% and Facebook Messenger normally gets average open rates of 60-90%, what open rates do you think you can get for an order confirmation notification on Messenger, if email gets 114% open rates for the same message?

I don’t have the numbers, but 150-200% open rates wouldn’t be surprising!

So, what are you going to do with some of the highest open rates known to mankind?

 

 

Here are some ideas for you:

  • Get feedback – Learn more about the shopping experience from customers who have literally just gone through it.
  • Get them to follow you on social media – With all those endorphins flowing around your new customer’s brain they’re in clicking mode, making it a great opportunity to grow your social media following.
  • Cross-sells / Upsells – Why not take it one step further and try to increase your AOV by offer an upsell or cross sell. Since you already know what products they like, it should be easy for you to offer them something else that might tickle their fancy.

Here’s how you can set this up:

1. Head over to the Messenger sales channel in your Shopify backend and scroll down to Auto Message Templates.

2. Select the Order Confirmation message. From here you can edit the message that is sent immediately after someone places an order with you.

Pro Tip: If you’re going to ask your user a question, why not set up a sequence in Many Chat so that you can continue the conversation automatically after they reply. It could be as simple as a message thanking them for their feedback or as complicated as a long sequence to try and upset other products and services.

 

Alright, that should be enough to get you going. Get out there and start testing.

Got any other great ways to use Facebook Messenger to grow your ecommerce store? Share them with us in the comments below!

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