Hey, what’s going on you guys, podcast family? Alex Branning here. Today on this podcast I am talking about Chatbots. Broadcasts are dead. That means that you can no longer send a message to all of your Chatbot subscribers for free. Now, this change takes place on July one, but it’s a big deal. It really … It kind of took the wind out of a lot of people. Those of us that are trying to build big Bot subscriber lists, we really don’t have a reason to go for a massive subscriber list anymore. Chatbots are still an amazing tool. I want to talk about six reasons why I believe chatbots could be the missing piece of your marketing puzzle, even though it’s dead on the broadcast, right?
What the heck is a chat bot? A Chat Bot is a computer program designed to stimulate conversation with human users, specifically over Facebook Messenger, coming soon to Instagram Messenger, by the way. It is an automated sequence that you take the user through without actually having to manually respond to any messages. You dictate the way the conversation flow goes. And then, the Chatbot gives answers, feedback in links based on what the user does.
Now, there’s a lot of people that are on Facebook Messenger right now. There’s one billion people that are using the Facebook Messenger app, which means … Here’s the cool part about Facebook Messenger, when you get a new message, it dings on your phone. You get a notification. Even if it’s a business, you still get the notification. When you send people a message, it comes right to their phone, which is really exciting and honestly why a lot of people really liked the broadcast feature, because it put you right in their phone.
Everyone’s walking around with their phone. As soon as it vibrates, they wanna look at it right? Also, Facebook Messenger has an 80% open rate. We do not like leaving those things unread. People open their Facebook Messages, which is exciting and fun. What can we use the Chatbot for? I’ll dive into that. There’s a lot of tools out there though. My personal favorite if ManyChat. ManyChat has a forever free version, which is great. If you go freemanychat.com. That’s freemanychat.com. You can get a free account, freemanychat.com.
Now, here’s some essentials when you get started with your Chatbot. Here’s a couple of the core components, as you get stared building out your Chatbot. Number one, you have your main menu. The main menu is a simple way to provide your subscribers with always assessable options at the bottom, specifically on a cell phone. If you go to my page, the Alex Branning page, and click, send message, you’re gonna see three options there on the bottom. Right now, it’s contact me, free resources, and enter my giveaway. Those are the three options at the bottom. You can always have access to those.
There’s also a default reply. Default reply is a message that’s sent to your users whenever the bot can’t recognize what the user sent, or what they want, or why they’re there. It’s like, “Hey, hey. What’s up? How can I help out?” That’s mine. It’s an informal greeting, that the bot sends when they’re not in a sequence or chat flow, like for example, when someone just reaches out to your Chatbot, let’s say, after they go through a quiz, and then they login a couple days later, and they wanna ask you a question, or they wanna set up a call. Maybe they’ll send you a message. That default reply is basically what the bot does, when it doesn’t know exactly what to do next.
The welcome message. The welcome message typically says, “Get started,” but you can change that. When they reach out to you for the very first time, for example, for me, it says, “Hi, first name. How can I help you?” That is the welcome message. Last, but not least, the greeting. The greeting text. Those are four components of a Chatbot, that you want to set up before you start sending people through it. Many Chat makes it so easy to get through it. When you set up an account, they literally walk you through step-by-step how to do this. They make it easy. Here’s the greeting text that I’m talking about here, I wanted to include. If you’re watching on IGTV, you can see a screenshot of my Facebook Messenger app, the Chatbot, and you can see the greeting text there.
All right. Let’s go over Chatbot features. You guys, just because broadcasts are dead, doesn’t mean that Chatbots should not be considered. There are five different things that you can use Chatbots for, that I believe could be a great way for you to grow your business. Number one, the Messenger Ref URL. What is this? What the heck is a Messenger Ref URL? Check this out. This creates a link. When people click on the link, they will open up your Messenger and start the flow that you created. All right Alex. That’s cool. What’s a flow?
A flow is a conversation that asks people through a specific series of questions to gather information that you want. I’ll give you an example. A flow could be a short, kind of like an interview to get people set up for a pre-qualifying application for a mortgage loan. You walk ’em through. “Hey. What’s your name? What’s your current address? What’s your phone number? What’s your email?” Et Cetera. We use it for one of our clients, which is a school. We use it to ask the students some basic questions about what they’re looking for. What program are you interested in? How soon are you looking to start? Do you need financial aide, et cetera.
We ask ’em some basic questions, so that we’re gathering enough information, so that we know when we respond back to them, with a human being, or they set up a phone call, that we have more information. We use the Messenger Ref URL for our training, from losttolive.com. When you type in, fromlosttolive.com, you are redirected to a Messenger Ref URL, that we created within ManyChat. And then, you are sent through a training, that teaches you how to go live, what to say when you first get started, how to end your Facebook Live video, et cetera. That fromlosttolive.com is using a Messenger Ref URL. That’s one of the features that we have inside of ManyChat.
The second one is our Facebook comments, which is really cool. One of the first reasons why I started to use ManyChat, was because of the Facebook comment growth tool. Here’s how it works. You make a Facebook post. You make it on your Facebook page. You make a Facebook post. You attach the comment growth tool to that Facebook post. When people comment, now your Messenger sends them a quick message. If they respond to that initial greeting, from your Messenger, they are now subscribed to your bot, and you can get them started on a sequence. Let me show with you, how this works.
I just did one of these the other day. I posted a video. In the video, I talked about Chatbots. I said, “If you want a half off voucher for our Chatbot program, comment, bot bonus.” When they commented on that video … It was a Facebook post. When they commented on the video, my ManyChat sent them a message that said, “Hey Alex. I saw your comment on my video. Would you like the half off voucher for my Chatbot course?” When they replied, I entered them into a sequence.
In that sequence, the very first message was, “Hey Chris. Here’s the half off voucher.” It sent them a link, so that they could go and buy my Chatbot course. All of that happened automatically. They commented. My ManyChat tool sent them a greeting. Once they responded to that greeting, I entered them into sequence. Inside of the sequence, they got a message right away, and at the end of the message was a link, so that they could claim their half off voucher and go buy my course. Isn’t that cool? There’s a lot of different ways you can use the Facebook comment growth tool. That’s one example of how I implemented it this past week.
Now, if you’re watching on IGTV, you’ll notice that I still have broadcast listed, because it is a feature that you can use up until July first. I intend to get the most use out of it possible. Broadcast is a message that you can send out to all of your subscribers at once. It’s the equivalent of sending out an email to your entire list. I absolutely love this tool. I’m so sad that it’s leaving. However, one of the other Chatbot features that you have, is a sequence. A sequence is a series of messages you can schedule out, just like you would say, an auto responder with your email.
Now, here’s the way that I’m gonna, kind of cheat the system a little bit, once broadcasts are no longer a thing. July second for example. I will create a sequence that says something like … A sequence will be … Let’s just say, “New podcast, July second.” When users get entered into that sequence, they are sent a message that says, “Hey. I just released a new podcast. You can listen to it on iTunes, Google Play, or my website.” That message will have three buttons that take them to either iTunes, Google Play or my website. I have the sequence.
Now, I can go inside of my ManyChat dashboard, click all of my users and then add them to that sequence. That will then send out a new message to every single person in my Chatbot subscriber list. That’s how I plan to get around the no broadcast rule. Let’s dive into the last two features that we use here at the Branning Group, that I think you should also consider using. By the way, both of these are free, when you’re in ManyChat. They are a part of the free version.
One, your landing page. You can actually direct people to a landing page on ManyChat. You don’t even need a website anymore to collect leads right on Facebook and get them to schedule an appointment with you. It’s absolutely crazy. The different ways that you can use ManyChat, the different features they have. It just boggles my mind. I love the landing page feature, ’cause I can send … By default, it’s basically built, just to be used on a cell phone. It’s a really easy way to take people somewhere where they can learn a little bit more about the offer you’re making and decide whether or not they want in.
The difference between a landing page and a Messenger Ref URL, is when they click on a Messenger Ref, the initial action, takes them into their Facebook Messenger, where they are then guided through. If they click on your link for example, from an email, they click on the link, and it will take them straight into their Facebook Messenger app. They’re like, “Well, wait a minute. Why is it taking me to Messenger?”
If you haven’t done a good job explaining what’s about to happen, some people can get confused. Now, if you take them to a landing page, then it’s very clear of what happens next, ’cause it’s got the big old Facebook Messenger button. It’s like, “All right. Do you wanna get this … Do you wanna start the training? Do you wanna get the PDF?” On the landing page, you can explain, once you click this, this is what’s going to happen. We use the landing page for that.
The last tool I wanna talk to you about, is something that every single person should really, really have on their websites, the customer chat tool. It’s a widget you can install on your existing website, however it is on the bottom right. You can set it up to float a welcome message, as soon as your visitor hovers their cursor near it. It’ll just sit there, and then when they take their cursor over to the bottom right it pops up and says, “Hey Alex. How can we help?” It’s just a really cool tool. I highly recommend it. So user friendly. It gets people to have a conversation with you. I love it.
My personal favorite tool within ManyChat that you can add the any sequence, any broadcast, is the user input. You can actually ask for and save emails. You can set up one of your fields as a user input field inside of your sequence. For example, if I say, “Hey. Where should I send your PDF,” and they enter in with an email, I can save that email, using ManyChat, pop it into Google Sheet, and then from Google Sheet, I can either import that into my CRM, or I can use Zapier to automatically look for new rows and then perform certain actions, based on what’s happening inside of that Google Sheet. I absolutely love the ability to save and collect information and store it on a Google Sheet, ’cause then I have a lot of different ways that I can use that data.
For example, for the school, what happens is, when they start filling out the questionnaire, for what program they’re interested in, and when they’re looking to start, we save all that information in a Google Sheet, using the standard ManyChat feature. And then, I have a zap setup on Zapier, that looks for new rows inside of that Google Sheet. When it sees a new row, it emails out the admissions team, so that they know what’s going on. It adds that new lead inside of their CRM, and it adds that new lead to a custom Facebook audience. ManyChat adds it to the Google Sheet, and then we used Zapier to do a whole bunch of other cool things, so that my client can use that data and add ’em to their mailing list. Really cool stuff. I highly recommend using it.
Now, what you can do with a Chatbot. Let’s go over seven different use cases, to end it out. Number one, 24/7 customer service. When you add the customer chat widget to your website, you now have an employee answering questions, 24/7 all the time. I love it. I use it myself. You can see it on my website. Number two, event registrations. Check this out. When you have an event coming up, you can send people to a landing page, and then on that landing page, have them register for your next event.
Now, once they’re subscribed to that sequence … Once they interact with your bot, you can add them to a sequence, now you know, “Hey. This person registered for the event on Saturday.” You can send them reminders as it gets closer. Isn’t that awesome? I love using ManyChat as a way to get event registrations like, webinars, live events, et cetera.
Number three, you can use ManyChat as a great way for training or tutorials. For example, we have our, From Lost To Live, that helps people walk through how to go live on Facebook. We also are in the process of creating training on how to help people get setup using Clickfunnels, and making sure that their giveaway funnel’s dialed in. There’s a lot of different ways. It’s all about taking people through a sequence of events.
Number four. You can use it to collect contact information, just like I showed you. For our client, that’s gathering information from perspective students. They go from a Facebook ad, they click on the link. It takes them to a Messenger Ref URL, where we ask them some questions about what they’re looking to do for the semester. It collected their name, their email, phone number, what program they’re interested in, and when they’re getting started. It’s amazing. Does it all within Facebook. They don’t ever have to leave the Facebook app on their phone. We make the process easy by using buttons and such. It’s great.
You can actually collect payment. This is number five. You can sell a product or service. We use ManyChat to actually grab credit card information and deliver digital products over Facebook. Yeah. It’s just mind boggling stuff you can do. I’m not gonna dive into that right now, because we don’t have enough time, but you can actually collect payment on Facebook Messenger. It’s wild.
All right. Number six. You can create a quiz. You can create a quiz to collect some more information. We use this. We offered … We had a promotion, excuse me, where we were going to give people a marketing idea for their business. We created a short quiz, where we collected information about them, their business, their goals, their marketing budget, et cetera. And then, we manually emailed them ideas on things that they could take action on.
It was a great way for us to connect to our audience, learn a little bit more about the people that are following us. We were able to provide immense value. We were able to close a couple of deals out of it. It worked really well for us. We’ll be kicking that off again coming up here in the summer. That was a fun way for us to use ManyChat, to gather some information. It was fun for our users to go through it. It got ’em thinking about some stuff.
Follow up with abandoned carts. This is a very creative way to use ManyChat. Let walk through an example. You can set up your shopping cart, so that people, when they submit to add an item to their cart, you can add a little checkbox tool, which I didn’t talk about in this podcast episode, but you can use a checkbox tool, so that they’ll subscribe to your Messenger. Now, you can send Messenger, here’s what they added to their cart, and save that information. Then, you can also tell the Messenger bot, “Hey. They bought this item.”
Now, if they have not bought the item, you can follow up with them the next day and say, “Hey. You added the widget to your shopping cart, but you didn’t check out. Did you have any questions about it? Can I help you with anything?” You can bring them back to the shopping cart. By incorporating the checkbox tool, within ManyChat, you can follow up with people, who have started the process of checking out, but did not finish.
Now, I do have an offer for you, which I’d love to work with you on. Check this out. I have an advanced Chatbot training, that walks you through all this stuff. It’s a digital course, that you get lifetime access to my advance Chatbot training. You get video training, so you get some over-the-shoulder tutorials, showing you how to utilize the ManyChat features. There are copy and paste templates inside of the course, you can download directly into your ManyChat account.
We have some list building strategies, steps you can take to build your Chatbot subscriber list, and attract new people into your audience. You get a 30 minute call, with one of my coaches, so that we can set up some specific advice for your Chatbot and share with you, what you can do. We also have a two hour workshop that we’ll be doing, where we’re gonna create bots together, and then, another bonus, we’re gonna share with you our giveaway template which was, by far our most popular training that we have done. I’m sorry, not our most popular training, our most popular campaign that we’ve done, was our giveaway. It worked so good to set us up with a lot of appointments. We were able to close a lot of business from that. You get all of that.
Go to alexbranning.com/bot. It’s all for only 97 dollars you guys. Alexbranning.com/bot. We are doing a major blowout sale on our Chatbot training. Alexbranning.com/B-O-T/bot. You get it all you guys. It’s an amazing deal. I want you guys to start using Chatbots. I really believe in them. I think that they’re going to be a great tool for you. Even though broadcasts themselves are being phased out, we have a way around that. I hope that this podcast showed you there’s a lot of other tools that you can use for Chatbots, so that you can implement them into your business and use them to start growing. You guys are awesome and amazing. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. Have a great day.
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