Episode 94: The Future of Messenger Marketing with ManyChat CEO Mikael Yang

Future of Messenger Marketing with ManyChat CEO Mikael Yang

Learn from the experts and ManyChat CEO, Mikael Yang, what’s in store for Messenger bots and the Messenger marketing strategies you can deploy in your business today, so you can stay human and bring personal value to your customer. Be sure to listen to the last three minutes to get the “most important tip” to succeed with Messenger marketing.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

  • The “ultimate experience” marketers can tap into to better reach their customers.
  • The first step of Messenger Marketing that will get you started, so you don’t miss out on this communication channel.
  • The tactic that will make Messenger bots feel human and improve the conversation with your subscriber.
  • Learn why Mikael believes Messenger as a platform is going to capture 80% of the business-to-customer communication in the near future.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Facebook Messenger Marketing Blueprint
Episode 72: How DigitalMarketer Generated 500% ROI in 3 Days Using Facebook Messenger
Episode 80: Facebook Messenger Ads: Everything You Need to Know
Episode 93: 6 Website Tweaks You Can Use to Skyrocket Your Sales

(NOTE: Ready to use Facebook’s newest “ad” platform to turn one-to-one conversation into sales—even if you don’t have the staff to reply manually? Check out the Facebook Messenger Marketing Blueprint and discover how Facebook Messenger Ads are changing the way businesses communicate with customers. Learn more now.)

 

Episode 94 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):

Keith Krance: Hello and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, episode number 94. We’ve got a great guest with us today. Fresh out of the F8 Conference, Facebook’s Developer Conference, which was in San Jose, we’ve got Mike, the co-founder and CEO of ManyChat. We’ve got Molly, Ralph, and me all on the call again. One of the reasons we’ve got Mike on today, it’s perfect timing because as you guys might know if you listened to the episode last week, where we had Syed talking about Six Website Tweaks You Can Use to Skyrocket Your Sales, epic episode. Molly was not on that episode and the reason why is because she was head-down for two weeks straight, basically, building this amazing product.
  It’s really to help you guys really be able to utilize this whole entire platform. Molly, just really quick, maybe just let them know about this blueprint that you’ve got now that people can get access to.
Molly Pittman: Absolutely. If you visit DigitalMarketer.com/fb-messenger, you will find more information about Facebook Messenger Marketing Blueprint. It’ll only take you about three hours to go through the course, but it’s a documentation of everything that we’ve learned so far talking with Mike and Dan at ManyChat, running our own tests on our different properties, talking to other people that are doing Messenger marketing.
  This episode is going to be more high-level, why Messenger is important and what’s coming in Messenger marketing. If you really want the tactical, “How do I set up ManyChat? How does this fit into my business? How do I send these broadcasts? How do I use it at the top of the funnel?” That course is available right now for only $47.
Ralph Burns: Yeah, and as a prelude to that, if you haven’t listened to Episode 72 and Episode 80 of the podcast, definitely go back to that. It’s a constant evolution and you can actually see the progression of Molly testing a lot of this and us testing it as well. Definitely go back to those two episodes and then that course, man. That is going to be a must-do for everyone in my company, for sure, a labor of love from Molly and I can’t wait to get into it.
Keith Krance: We’ve got Mike, the co-founder and CEO of ManyChat. ManyChat we’ve talked about recently on this podcast as well. It was a huge buzz at the Traffic & Conversion conference and all over the Internet right now. Really excited to get in this with Mike.
Ralph Burns: By the way, when we talked to Mike about getting on the podcast last week at one of the Masterminds that we’re in, I could barely even get a word in edgewise. You were the most popular guy there. I’m psyched you’re here, ’cause obviously, this is a hugely hot topic.
Mikael Yang: Thanks for having me on this podcast, guys.
Molly Pittman: Mike, when I first met you a few months ago and you and Dan, your product manager, you guys came to Traffic & Conversion Summit last-minute, but it was really awesome and we got to sit down and chat a little bit. I think your story’s pretty cool. Could you tell us how you started ManyChat? Did you see a huge opportunity in the market? Just tell us a little bit about where all this came from.
Mikael Yang: Actually, we started in 2015, even before Facebook opened another API. We started on the Telegram messenger. It’s a messenger that is popular in certain countries. At that time, they had 65,000,000 monthly active users. They opened up the APIs for developers to build on top of that platform. We were just excited, like, “Hey, now it’s open. Maybe we can build something for this.”
  I tried to build my own simple bot to broadcast messages and it was really hard. It was hard for me. I wanted to do really simple things. I wanted the bot to have a menu. I wanted for it to broadcast one piece of content every day. That was the goal. To do that, it was really hard. I called up my technical co-founder, Anthony, and I told Anthony, “Hey, man, there are 65,000,000 people and nobody can build bots. They need a platform. They need a platform to broadcast content. They need a platform to do all this stuff visually, kind of like what MailChimp best for email. You don’t have to code anything, you just set up email and you send it, like what website builders do for websites. You don’t need to code, you just visually construct it.”
  We started on Telegram, and it just took off. In a month, we had a few hundred bots, but then it just grew organically. Now we power over half a million bots on Telegram. At this point we are mostly focused on Facebook Messenger. Facebook, it’s the same thing because when we were growing virally on Telegram, we applied to 500 startups and at first, they didn’t really get what the bots were. At that point, we had 30,000 bots and we were like, “Yeah, we got 30,000 bots!”
Molly Pittman: They’re like, “What does that mean?”
Mikael Yang: “30,000 what? Are you earning any money?” We were like, “No, we’re going the freemium route. It’s for free but then we’re going to charge.” They’re like, “No, guys, we don’t understand this.” After that, a month has passed and I came back with the numbers and we were growing like 60%. Then they were like, “Okay, I don’t know what this is but it’s growing 60% after a month. Let’s just let them in.” Turns out it’s a big thing. In the six months, Facebook has opened up their platform.
Molly Pittman: Perfect timing.
Ralph Burns: Nice.
Mikael Yang: That increased the possibilities hundreds or even thousandfold because Facebook already has an ecosystem. Telegram was a consumer product, but Facebook has over 65,000,000 businesses using it. There is an ad platform, etc… People are already spending a lot of money with Facebook. We saw the opportunity to build something that would help businesses communicate with customers, do marketing, sales, and support through Facebook Messenger. If a business needs to add Messenger into their communication stack, we want to be the answer.
Molly Pittman: Yeah, that’s great, Mike. You know what’s interesting? If you go to ManyChat.com, the headline reads, “Create a Facebook bot to engage your audience.” I think what you guys did that was really smart is you absolutely entered the conversation that the market was having at the time. Before Facebook opened up the opportunity to run ads in Messenger, the conversation was about bots. I think what you guys did was really smart and I think that now it’s so much more than the bots. You guys are building a software that is Messenger marketing.
  It’s so much more than the bots, but you guys were able to really come in and have the conversation people were already having about the whole bot craze.
Mikael Yang: The word “bot” has got a bad rap because it sounds automated and Messenger Marketing is all in one. It’s automation, it’s human, it’s web use. It’s the Messenger experience. For us, bots are not something automated. We define bots as a business account inside Messenger. That’s how we think about this, is just a business account inside Messenger. A bot can have automation, a bot cannot have automation. It can be just humans responding to people’s requests.
Molly Pittman: Right.
Mikael Yang: For us, it’s just a label, a webpage.
Molly Pittman: I think that’s great for two reasons. Number one, one of the biggest things that I hear is, “Oh, my God, Messenger marketing. This is going to be so annoying for the end user.” That’s a bit frustrating because actually what it’s doing is bots and Messenger marketing are really providing a more seamless experience for the end user. It’s frictionless. They don’t have to leave the platform where they are. If you do customize your bot, you’re giving people exactly what they want.
  You’re selling one-on-one versus selling to many. I think the idea of bots, like you said, has a bad connotation that it means spamming people’s Messenger inboxes. Really, it’s a way to provide a more personalized experience for people that they are requesting and that they are initiating. I think that’s really key for people to understand.
Mikael Yang: That’s one of the most important points. It’s the fact that people are asking us, “Oh, now Messenger is going to get spammed or something?”
Molly Pittman: Right.
Mikael Yang: That’s not the point because that cannot happen. Facebook is really strict about the policies, about the ways that you can start a conversation, and most importantly, a business cannot start a conversation with a customer who has not—
Ralph Burns: Initiated.
Mikael Yang: Who has not initiated it. It’s not like an email where you can get somebody’s email from whatever sources and start blasting out something. In Messenger, you cannot start a conversation without the initiation.
  The second thing is that even if you unsubscribe from somebody’s lists on email, they can re-add your address to another list. In case of Messenger, that’s impossible because if a business in some way annoys you with too much messaging or something, you can just swipe left, hit “Delete Conversation,” and you’re unsubscribed forever.
Keith Krance: Forever.
Mikael Yang: There is no way that business will be able to contact you again through this medium, through Messenger. I think this is the power. If you give the consumers the powers to decide what they want to be subscribed to, and give them a really easy option to unsubscribe, then people can stay in touch with the businesses that they really want to have a conversation with and unsubscribe from the ones that they don’t want to stay in touch with.
  What that does is that it increases the open rates and the CTRs for businesses who use this channel ethically and in a way that benefits the consumer. This is why I think we’ve seen such high engagement rates.
Molly Pittman: Mike, you’re so correct about that. If you go through the course that we talked about earlier, you’ll hear me say 100 times this is not email marketing. This is about having a conversation. People are inside of Messenger to talk to their family and friends. They are not inside of Messenger to receive these messages that are sent to thousands of people. For example, Hipmunk, it’s like a travel service. I was playing around with their Messenger yesterday and I said “Get Started.”
  They responded back and they said, “I’m a super powered Hipmunk who digs through tons of travel options to help you find the best flights and hotels. For fun, let’s plan a getaway. What airport do you usually fly from?” I said Austin. They’re using these messages to extract information from me so that they can create the most relevant sales conversation to sell their product.
  They said, “Looks like you’re planning a getaway from Austin. I’ll hit you back with some great results. This may take a while. Here’s a tip while you wait. Hip Tip: You can ask me to find specific travel plans, like cheap flights to San Diego.” Okay, then they sent me some different flight options from Austin and I didn’t respond. I was just playing around with it.
  Today, they sent what most people would think of as a broadcast. It was a subscription broadcast inside a tool like ManyChat, but instead of saying, “Hey, because you’re a Hipmunk subscriber we want to give you $200 off your next flight,” a very promotional message, they just reengaged me. They said, “Like Houdini, I can give you a great escape from Austin, Texas. What do you think?” They gave me two options, yes or no. Their broadcast, or their follow-up, was just to reengage me in the conversation that they were already having.
  It was very personal and it was very fun. The brands and the companies that are able to facilitate this kind of conversation will win. The people that try to use Messenger as a way to distribute links to their sales page to generate more sales, they’re not going to win because that’s not how this platform is used.
Keith Krance: Mike, the last two days you spent at the Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference. What was the big takeaway? What was the buzz there that everybody was talking about? Love to hear about that. I’m sure our listeners would, too, since you were there.
Mikael Yang: F8 was awesome. Facebook is working on a lot of cool new stuff. They were really excited about augmented reality, AR, virtual reality, and, of course, Messenger bots. In terms of augmented reality, it was really interesting to see how they’ve been able to pull off with just one camera inside everybody’s phone, they’re able to get the actual 3D models. Those effects are going to be inside the camera and that increases the engagement with the Messenger app. If you give people more tools to express themselves in a more fun and engaging ways to their friends, they use them.
  The whole platform becomes more engaging. The images become more alive and the videos become more alive. The way that that connects to Messenger is through video calls. Right now, we already have masks, which are essentially augmented reality because the camera sees your face and overlays a 3D image over your face so you can become a panda or a clown or wear a party hat, etc.., and that’s already available inside Facebook Messenger today.
  The way that that’s going to evolve is that they introduced a way for developers to create their own masks and their own frames for these conversations. I imagine that businesses are going to take advantage of that, creating branded masks and branded frames for everyone to use. I imagine a mask with Ronald McDonald’s face or if you’re a fan of football team, then you can wear a helmet with their logo and talk with your friends over Facebook Messenger video.
  The way that relates to businesses is that communication with customers is going to get more and more engaging. Right now, we have chat. I imagine that soon we will have voice. You’ll be using Facebook Messenger not only to chat with businesses around you, but to call them, and in the future, I imagine in five to seven years, Messenger as a platform is going to capture 80% of the business-to-customer communications volume.
Molly Pittman: Wow.
Mikael Yang: It’s going to eat from SMS, from email, from mobile, from websites, from phone calls, most of those things are going to get done from Messenger. It sounds really out there, and it sounds like, “Hey, how’s this ever going to be possible?” If you look at China, that what essentially happened, already happened, with WeChat. Two-thirds of the country use WeChat. Every street vendor has a WeChat account and you can pay with a QR code without even opening your wallet. That’s done through WeChat. If you’ve seen that, it wouldn’t be such a crazy though to see how this will also happen in countries where Facebook Messenger is really popular.
  This is why we were so excited about Facebook Messenger and this is why we are right now focused on this platform and building a whole business on top of that. It’s because this is going to be such a big wave that a lot of businesses will need beautiful products that make it easy to use those Facebook’s API. That’s essentially what we are doing.
Molly Pittman: Honestly, I’ve kind of discounted all of this AR stuff, virtual reality stuff, until I watched F8 Live a few days ago. It finally clicked for me, the importance and why this is going to be huge for businesses. It’s back to the analogies that we always use. People go to Disney World for the experience, and then they happen to buy food there. They happen to buy things from the gift shop. People visit your blog for the content and the experience on your website, and then you can then pixel and retarget them or sell them through banners, or maybe they go to your product page.
  Facebook is building the experience that we as businesses get to tap into. This idea of AR is so important because it’s the ultimate experience, especially all of this happening through a single camera. The example that they showed of taking a picture of the wine bottle that was on the table and it recognizing what year the wine was and what brand, and then maybe having the possibility of buying it with a few clicks right there inside of Messenger. Just everything that they showed in terms of having this AR experience with your friends but brands being able to tap into that based off of what’s going on in the room or where you are, location-wise.
  Facebook is building the experience and we, as marketers, get to tap into this. If you’re thinking, “Ah, I don’t care about that crap,” it’s like video games or something, it’s totally not true. Facebook’s just bettering the experience and I think that’s going to be huge for all of us.
Mikael Yang: The technology’s sometime in the future, but the seed needs to be planted at this time so that you’re thinking already in the background and you’re not startled when this thing becomes actually huge.
Molly Pittman: Mike, if you were to tell marketers and business owners that are listening what they can do now to really make sure they’re starting to adapt, because this is something that I believe if you do not start learning about this now and slowly implementing, you will get left behind and it will be sad. This technology is moving very quickly. For someone out there that’s like, “How would I even get started,” what advice would you give them?
Mikael Yang: I would start with just thinking about this from a really simple perspective. Think of your Facebook property, your Facebook page, right now. It has fans. Maybe you don’t have a Facebook page. You should. Messenger is another channel of communication with your audience. It doesn’t connect directly to the fans, so Messenger subscribers and fans are different set of audiences. I want to just make that clear because that questions comes up a lot.
  You grow your own Messenger lists separately. Basically, what I would do is I would set up a bot inside Messenger using a service like ManyChat.
Molly Pittman: Yes.
Keith Krance: Oddly enough.
Mikael Yang: Why not? We are pretty easy to use. You set up a bot on Facebook Messenger and you set up a simple welcome message for people who join it. Then you start to grow your subscriber list.
Molly Pittman: Mike, just for people that are like, “Ooh, this might be a little scary,” the course that we talked about at DigitalMarketer.com/fb-messenger, there’s a whole section on welcome messages and there’s a whole section on how to build your subscriber list. Don’t panic, there are strategies.
Ralph Burns: For super non-techy people, ManyChat is a breeze to use. I am not techy.
Molly Pittman: Yeah, it’s like answering your email.
Ralph Burns: Yeah, exactly. It’s just so intuitive. You guys did such a great job with the platform.
Mikael Yang: Set up a bot. It takes a few minutes if you don’t go into crazy automation. You shouldn’t. Start with simple. Set up a simple welcome message. “Hey, tell us if you have any questions.” That will do it for the first few weeks. You need to start growing your Messenger list. We provide growth tools to do that. A Messenger list, Molly said 1,000 times that Messenger marketing is not like email marketing. There is a concept of a list, your contacts, your subscribers on Messenger.
  Basically, you’re converting your existing audience from your newsletter, from your blog visitors, from your social media, into Messenger subscribers. You can do that by spreading your Messenger bot link or through directing them to a landing page where there is a “Send to Messenger” button, which gets them into the bot. Also, there are some interesting, more creative ways to grow that, like the common growth tool.
Molly Pittman: Which can be used to cold traffic, too. If you don’t have an existing audience, there are strategies to run ads to people who don’t know about your brand.
Mikael Yang: You grow your list, and basically you can start to then engage with those people and if you’re selling something and you just need some more leads to do more sales, you can automate lead nurturing through ManyChat or you can just use direct to Facebook ads directly into the bot. One of the examples Frank Kern did is he qualified the lead through a series of questions and just yesterday we released a new update that now allows on any action inside the bot to notify the admin of the bot.
Molly Pittman: Yes.
Mikael Yang: For example, if the lead is qualified, and he heads a few certain answers that you know that you need to talk to this person, you can get an instant notification on email or through Messenger from us saying, “Hey, you got to talk to this person right now because he is right now looking at his phone. He just pressed the “Yes, I have a business” and “Over 50 employees.”
Molly Pittman: Yeah.
Ralph Burns: Oh, man.
Mikael Yang: Then you can come in and say, “Oh, great. This is Molly and I wanted to talk to you about what we have to offer to your business.” It becomes this, as I’ve said, hybrid between the automation and human touch where you can get inside the conversation just in time to convert and to work with objections and to actually make a sale.
Molly Pittman: Mike, a little bit more on that feature, which is awesome, by the way. Everyone in their business has some sort of qualification. Even if you’re selling a pair of shoes, you know the questions that you can ask that, if answered one way, that sale is probably going to happen. We know that for our DigitalMarketer HQ program, if we ask someone, “Are you looking to build a marketing team or do you already have a marketing team that you need trained?” We know that that’s a huge qualification for us. It’s a much easier sale for us to say, “Okay, buy this training to train the team you already have” than “Buy this training for people that don’t exist yet.”
  In our follow-up, when people say that they’re looking to train their team, which is two thumbs up for us, it’s now notifying our admins, which a few people on our sales team are notified, and they know, “Okay, lead is hot. Must get in here now.” That’s a great feature and just a great explanation of … It’s a simple strategy, right, guys? Sending an ad to a landing page where you generate lead, and then maybe they take the next offer, maybe they don’t. You follow-up with an email autoresponder. You can directly replicate that inside of messenger, even if you don’t have humans on the other side. I think what Mike said in terms of getting started is so important, right?
  Your Messenger subscriber list is going to be just as important as your pixeled audience inside of Facebook. It’s going to be just as important as your email list. Just like everyone teaches and freaks out about building a big email list, you should try to build a big Messenger subscriber list at breakeven. Building your list, but also setting up autoresponders that are similar to email but more personal than that to get people to buy a product.
Ralph Burns: To get them to buy it at that zero-moment of truth, which, by the way, thanks for engineering that feature. I just messaged Frank about it, so I ought to make sure the sales guys are on it. That was really the challenge that we had when we first started. Where is that point of intersection where we should get a person in there, especially when you’ve got hundreds of messages?
  The point is that you guys are constantly improving this platform to make it even better and to monetize it better. The first step is to build the list.
Keith Krance: I want to piggyback. What Ralph said there is so important because if anybody has any background experience like in old-school, traditional sales, like if you’re working for a car dealership or selling stereos or something like that, retail, the cardinal rule they know, when somebody leaves that lot or somebody leaves that store, they’re not coming back. It doesn’t matter how much desire they expressed while they were there, they know that if they leave, they’re gone forever.
  Think about that when you’re setting this stuff up if you do have a sales team. Set this automation up and make sure you have somebody in there that can get to them right away. I think that’s the key. If you’re able to respond within a very quick period of time, and I’m talking about within a couple minutes compared to within 30 minutes, would be a game changer.
Mikael Yang: Your sales team, by Facebook policies, has only 24 hours to actually use Messenger as a channel to actually promote or talk to the person about anything that he didn’t subscribe for. Basically, I wanted to, in 30 seconds, explain how the Facebook policies work. Basically, whenever a person interacts with a bot, sends a message, clicks the button, a 24-hour window opens up for the bot to send any promotions or for the sales team to get in and to actually start exploring what this person wants. After the 24-hour window, you can only broadcast content that people subscribed for. That content cannot be ads or deals because nobody wants to get more deals or ads unsolicited inside Messenger, which is a really invasive channel.
  Like what you were doing with content marketing on your blog, you should think about broadcasting inside Messenger as, if the person has interacted with the bot in the last 24 hours, that’s obviously a sign that the person is interested in the services of the bot. It’s like a person walking into a store. If the person is inside the store, the staff can go up to him, talk to him, maybe help find something, etc., but if the person is just walking on the street, imagine being harassed by somebody from some random store trying to get you inside and sell you something.
Keith Krance: Like those guys do at the malls. Once in a while you’ll see the guys coming out of the Mr. Egg stores and trying to grab you from the middle of the mall, bring you in the store.
Ralph Burns: You take a quick left.
Mikael Yang: Basically, you want to talk to people when they have interacted with the bot. That’s the first 24 hours are really important. After that, you should subscribe the person. You should get an explicit opt-in from them for any updates that you’re going to send them. Those updates should be about the content, should be from your blog updates or the news or, for example, if they’ve signed up for a webinar you can send them a notification about, “Hey, webinar is starting in 24 hours. Hey, webinar is starting in half an hour. It started. Here is link.” Those are productivity updates that are considered calendar reminders.
  It can be not promotional, it can be fun. It can be a quiz. It can be something else. After the 24 hours, only the content that the person has explicitly subscribed to and that content shouldn’t be promotional.
Molly Pittman: Right. I used an example from Derek Halpern in the course. What Derek’s done, when he is using Messenger, he will run an ad and get someone to comment to message and start talking to them about sales pages, for example, and this sales page course that he’s releasing. Instead of messaging again a few days later and saying, “Hey, by the way, this course is still available, you should get it,” very promotionally, which would be bad, Derek’s sending messages like, “Hey, have you heard about this? Would you like to hear about this?” and giving lots of menu options that are very conversational and allow people to pick their own adventure.
  It’s content that they had subscribed to. Eventually it leads to a sale if they’re interested, but he’s not shoving it down their throat. A really good example of, again, back to “How do we make this really conversational for people?”
Mikael Yang: After they engage with that content, every time they watch a video, every time they start to experience those interactive messages like saying, “Oh, yeah, I want to learn about the welcome message, etc., etc.,” each one of those interactions refreshes the 24-hour window. I think this is a very important strategy to keep in mind, that you want to keep people engaged by providing them with really valuable content. Then when they interact, it’s an opportunity for you to actually do something about that.
Keith Krance: It’s about being cool and not all weird and sales-y, really.
Molly Pittman: Shocking!
Keith Krance: It’s shocking. That’s how we interact as human beings. This is just an extension of that. What Derek does so well is always giving them an out to unsubscribe, too.
Molly Pittman: Always be funny. Ours says, “If you ever want to unsubscribe, it will make us really sad, but feel free to comment STOP.”
  Mike, one more question. Do you feel like there will be this industry that builds, not necessarily an industry, but a need for agencies and people who build bots for others, and not from the tech side? You guys have that covered in three minutes. More so from the copywriting side and the logic side. When we set up our sequences, we get a whiteboard, I get the copywriter, I get our editorial director, and we figure out “How would this work inside of an actual conversation and what’s the logic?” Do you think that’s something that people will need?
Mikael Yang: Yeah, I think so. It’s quite different from the other copies and the other interactions that people are designing.
Molly Pittman: Yeah.
Mikael Yang: It’s much shorter, it’s much more interactive. If you’re writing a blog post or an email, people are going short-form or long-form. Inside Messenger, everything is short-form but everything is also interactive. You can have a really long interaction. You have to take that into account. I think yes. Businesses will want this. Agencies do what businesses need and businesses need customer communication. That’s going to be done through Messenger. Agencies need to be the first ones to actually explore this. Actually, it’s a really great idea to explore this just for themselves.
Molly Pittman: Yeah.
Mikael Yang: The channel is really, really good for it, at least right now. Every marketing channel is the most efficient when nobody else is using it.
Molly Pittman: Right.
Mikael Yang: Right now, nobody’s using Messenger marketing. That’s because it’s just hard to understand what’s going on for some people.
Molly Pittman: Totally.
Mikael Yang: The results that people are using it are getting are just insane. You yourself published an article about getting 300-
Molly Pittman: Yeah, 500% ROI from our first test.
Mikael Yang: 500% ROI. That’s insane. In any other channel, if you tried to … That’s not a single case. We’ve heard from people. 200% ROI, 300% ROI. This is going to go on until the channel becomes really popular, which will happen much faster than everybody thinks it will. That’s the really interesting thing. Everything in the world is speeding up and also channel adoption is speeding up, also. It took companies 10 years to adopt social media.
Molly Pittman: Yeah.
Mikael Yang: It took companies 15 years to adopt email, 10 years to adopt social media, and I think it will take two, three years for everyone to adopt Messenger. It’s going to be really fast.
Molly Pittman: Social media was the gateway drug. This is just an extension. I think whether it’s you as a business owner, you as a marketing professional, whether you hire an agency, whether you tell your team, someone for your business needs to figure out how to do this conversational copywriting and logic. It’s actually really fun and easy to do, but it’s something to think about.
  One more thing, Mike, that’s super cool and back to the idea of having conversations, you guys just added a feature where you can actually pause your responses. Again, making this bot feel really human, you can go into ManyChat and set up your responses, but say that you want it to wait 10 second to send it, or whatever amount of time it would actually take a human to actually respond. You feel like you’re not just being bombarded with these bot messages. It’s like if I was chatting a friend on Messenger.
Keith Krance: It’s artificial intelligence. It’s what it is. It’s just the beginning. This is awesome stuff. I don’t even know where to begin. Hopefully you’ve been taking notes. Once again, like always, you can go to DigitalMarketer.com/podcast for the Show Notes. This is episode number 94. Mike, you know, you’ve brought a ton of value. If you have anything else that you’d want to add on where people can learn more about you or your company.
Mikael Yang: I think with any other marketing channel, Messenger, it’s really important to just stay human, to think from your customer’s perspective, and to make sure that you’re actually bringing value before you ask for anything else. I think Messenger gives us this opportunity to make the conversation personal and intimate again when it was not so with email and not so with social media, where it’s just much more of a one to many and not personal.
  The level of personalization that goes into email is like, “Do you have the first name of the person?” For Messenger, I think that’s not the way that we want this to work. You want to keep the conversation really relevant. That’s why we are going to introduce more integration soon, which will allow to trigger messages based on actions and other systems, which will allow to make the conversation really, really personal with the customer, and more relevant.
  If you are not yet into this whole bot thing, keep this in mind and you should start doing this as soon as possible. I’m not saying to promote ManyChat, you can use any other service. It’s just because the marketing channels are going to get saturated and the more marketers are doing this, the harder it will get to get the attention, and the costlier it will get to just communicate with your customers. Right now, is the best time to do this. The channel is already working.
  Think about this from your customer’s- I think that’s the most important tip. What conversations would you like to have with your own business? How would you like to learn about its services? If you do that, everything else will fall in place.
Keith Krance: That’s what really resonated with me, when you talked at War Room last week, was that you weren’t up there talking about this amazing new technology that you can have this trick to be able to blow up your business. Yes, the opportunity is there, but you were so much more about, “Dude, create a conversation that you would like to have if you were the customer.” You weren’t up there trying to really talk about all these different ways to hack open rates and click-through rates and stuff like that. I really appreciated that. I think that’s going to give you and your company a very long staying power in the market. Good stuff. Guys, that was epic.
Molly Pittman: Yeah, thanks so much, Mike.
Ralph Burns: Awesome, Mike.
Mikael Yang: Thank you.
Keith Krance: Once again, you can hit DigitalMarketer.com/fb-messenger for the blueprint that Molly talked about throughout the episode. We will talk to you guys next week.

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(NOTE: Ready to use Facebook’s newest “ad” platform to turn one-to-one conversation into sales—even if you don’t have the staff to reply manually? Check out the Facebook Messenger Marketing Blueprint and discover how Facebook Messenger Ads are changing the way businesses communicate with customers. Learn more now.)