Messenger Chatbots have become a popular alternative to email follow up. Mainly because of the faster, easier and reliable source of delivering your message to the subscribers.
On the other hand, email marketing is still the biggest and most significant way of following up on your prospects and customers.
More than half the world’s population (over 4.2 billion people) were active email users globally in 2022. By the end of 2026, that figure is projected to go over 4.7 billion. 55 percent of consumers say email is their preferred digital channel for business communication.
There is no denying that email follow up is highly effective and does impact greatly on your sales and conversion, but…
Chatbots aren’t any less!
Facebook Messenger has more than 300,000 active chatbots – taking care of your online business to the next level.
Learn how this real estate business generated $500K worth leads using a Messenger chatbot.
Now you can streamline your entire sales and marketing processes with the help of chatbots.
Got an angry customer’s problem solved? Collect feedback from chatbots for retention.
Want to upsell your existing customers who love your product/service? Let your chatbot provide them updates of all the latest features, collections, offers and discounts.
Want to promote your newly launched product? Go ahead and let your subscribers know.
Chatbot vs. Email Follow up – Who Takes the Cake?
There are certain parameters to judge whether email follow up is a better option or a messenger chatbot can take the lead.
Or maybe both are equally useful, let’s compare both in terms of their functionality and see who is the winner!.
Cart Abandonment – Messenger Chatbot
Many customers oftentimes abandon shopping carts while making a purchase on your website.
It could be because of any possible reason other than not being interested in your product or not willing to purchase at the moment.
Whatever the reason might be it’s important for you to set up a reminder for them to complete their purchase and in order to do so, a more personalized and smarter way would be to use a Messenger chatbot.
Ask your website visitors to subscribe to your messenger bot this could be in exchange for a discount code, some special access (or anything that would intrigue them enough to subscribe to your messenger chatbot), etc.
Once they’re subscribed to your messenger bot, even if they left before completing a purchase you can setup reminders for these customers.
So why not just email follow up?
Because, if the customer had simply forgotten a chatbot can remind that there’s an email ready with their cart details and they can simply complete the purchase through it.
Aaaand… if there was an issue completing the order, your chatbot will gather data from that particular customer and you can help them out personally. This will also come in handy making purchase processes smoother.
On the flip side, you can send follow up emails to customers but the chances of them going straight to their spam/promotion folders can be a risk of either getting ignored or taking too long that the customer loses their interest.
However, you can use chatbots to redirect your customers to that specific email follow up. This will ensure a better response rate and of course, faster conversion.
Open rate & click rate – Messenger Chatbot
Now this one is very interesting and thought-provoking.
Usually, a messenger chatbot would follow up on a message sent by users who interacted with it themselves or liked the page at the very beginning.
Thus, the messages chatbots send have a 70-80% open rate and a 15-60% click rate.
Compared to email follow up, these statistics are pretty shocking, no?
Wondering why?
Well, email open rate across most industries on average is below 25% and only 4% click-through rate.
The main reason why there’s such a drastic difference between the two is, chatbots have so much data available. It can improve the user experience more and more as they converse, because of machine learning.
There are bots available out there, completely indistinguishable from that of a human support agent – unless the business wants to be transparent about it, customers can’t tell a difference.
No Spam, User-initiated contact – Chatbot
The difference between email follow up and messenger chatbot open and click-rate is affected by the direct user actions.
This includes liking and following the page, commenting on the posts, installing the application of that business and of course, initiating conversation in messenger themselves.
So when a user chatbot is assigned to take follow-ups on these users, there is a higher chance of them opening the message and even clicking on any given CTAs.
On the other hand, emails are rarely scheduled and just distributed when and where needed from a business point-of-view.
Well, have you ever wondered why so many emails go ineffective and right into the spam folders?
There is a very subtle difference between a spammy and user-requested content within an email follow up if you compare them side by side and there is no sure way of not ending up in the spam folders.
However, if you want to make sure your emails aren’t ignored as often, chatbots can be of help, as we discussed above.
Enough with pitting chatbots against email follow up – we understand both these mediums are useful and important in their own ways, but let’s discuss…
How Chatbot Follow-ups on prospects?
Botsify offers the auto-sequence feature for those who like to keep users in loop.
- Got a customer who could upgrade to your pro-plan? Setup auto-sequences to upsell them.
- Want to follow up on an abandoned cart? Ensure purchases by setting up a reminder.
- Want to encourage a prospect in taking their next step to subscribe to your platform? Auto-sequence is the answer.
But, how?
The auto-sequence feature can be used before, after and in the middle of any ongoing conversation with users.
For instance if a user says hello to your messenger chatbot and leaves, you can setup a follow-up message for them which can be anything from a text, a carousel, an image, a URL, video – you get the point.
Similarly, you can setup up reminders for form completion too – this allows you to generate more qualified leads without looking needy. Simply trigger a bot response for people who haven’t given their complete information while interacting with your chatbot.
Most importantly, you can schedule a message for people who haven’t responded to you in a while.
Like for examples send a followup consisting of your current packages/discounts etc to never lose a potential prospect anymore.
There are so many other ways you can setup these auto-sequence messages and followup through your messenger chatbot – forget emails, start building your messenger subscriber lists to make sure faster conversions and better response rates every time!
Messenger chatbot follow up is the new cool as it ensures a two-way communication – unlike emails, what you are telling your prospects, may never get a response.
Chatbots are a better way of direct dialogue with prospects and customers.
Whether they are looking for a quick resolution and support from your bot or responding to your promotional content – your chatbot users intentionally and willingly interact with your bot.
But this doesn’t entirely replace email – in fact, they can go hand in hand to improving your overall conversion rates and sales.
What do you think?
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