Message your customers: it really is worth it 📱💬

Messaging apps are becoming even more popular than some social media sites. What does that mean? Businesses may have a huge opportunity to contact customers more directly and generate quality leads.

People increasingly see these apps as their preferred way to contact brands, and the statistics are promising for marketers. Facebook IQ, which collects data and studies market behaviour, conducted a worldwide survey and found that 56% of people prefer messaging a business to calling it; 61% do not mind receiving messages from brands; more than 50% say they are more likely to buy from businesses they can message; and 63% say their messaging with brands is increasing.

Why are these services overtaking others? According to a Business Insider study, these apps offer figures on audience size, retention and usage, as well as user demographics, making them particularly attractive to businesses and marketing professionals. With more and more people on social media, combining the data available across the four most-used apps opens up even more possibilities. These apps also reach younger, harder-to-reach audiences, making them essential.

The trend reflected in this research keeps growing, and now is the time to make messaging marketing a key part of your overall strategy.

Use your email marketing experience as a guide

We could even say that messaging marketing is email marketing with muscle. While the traditional approach of sending emails and analysing open and click-through rates continues to decline, messaging keeps growing steadily. The figures speak for themselves: email open rates are around 19% and click-through rates 2%; with messaging apps, those figures rise to 80% and 30% respectively.

With what looks like a mass migration of customers from email to messaging, businesses need to adopt this strategy quickly. Fortunately, almost all digital marketers have years of email experience. This is great news because they do not need to learn new skills to reach their target audience: they simply need to extend their efforts to generate engagement through this new channel.

In other words, you can use these new services in the same way as email campaigns. It is as simple as building a list by attracting new leads, nurturing them, giving them relevant content, answering questions and converting those leads into paying customers.

You can also create chatbots to manage these communication channels, even without any coding or programming experience.

Build closer relationships with your customers

Messaging marketing has many advantages over email marketing. First, email follows a one-to-many approach, whereas messaging works one-to-one, with more interaction, personalisation and conversation. With a good chatbot, you can personalise messages based on the customer's clicks as they move through the different stages.

Although a chatbot can start a conversation and, in many cases, handle it from beginning to end, your business can also assign a live agent to help the customer. This means you can both send content directly to your followers and offer them customised content.

That is added value for your brand.

Combine advertising and messaging to generate sales

Rather than letting your business get lost in the long parade of adverts in your customers' feeds, make it stand out by getting ahead of the competition and interacting directly with potential customers.

You can do this with message ads, and here is how they work.

Your advert appears on the home screen of your audience's messaging app. As soon as someone clicks the advert, they are sent to a destination you choose, whether that is your website or a new conversation. If Facebook's figures are anything to go by, the impressive return on this new type of campaign really is growing. According to analysts, conversations between good-quality chatbots and engaged audiences are achieving an average 85% response rate. With bots that are not optimised, conversion does not exceed 40%.

For a clearer idea of how powerful this approach is, consider this example. A company decided to use Facebook's click to Messenger advertising option to reach its target audience, generate leads and then sales. When someone clicked the advert for more information, they automatically entered a chat and began talking to a bot, with the option of speaking to a real agent live.

In three months, the company reached more than 100,000 people and converted 50 leads into sales per month. This is not unusual: when HubSpot adopted a similar approach to generate new contacts, it reduced its cost per lead by 477%, with only a marginal reduction in lead quality.

In short, you should adopt a messaging marketing strategy for your business, given that Facebook Messenger is well positioned to become the world's most-used marketing channel (meaning Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin will not be far behind). For businesses that really want to take off, the investment will be worthwhile.