Email marketing has long been the number one method of growing your community and retaining followers. But with growing concerns over spam, GDRP and rising platform costs, companies need to also consider other channels for growing their retention marketing efforts. In this article, we take a look at why we think Facebook Messenger could be the next to sit on the Retention Marketing Channel Throne.
1. Inexpensive
Let's take down the Elephant in the room first up: cost. Overall, Messenger is cheap to run. Like email, for the average company Messenger is going to be relatively inexpensive to share company photos, videos, messages. Also like email, as you start to send more and more, the only real cost associated would be associated with marketing platforms and advanced technical integration (such as building an automated chatbot or deep Messenger integration with your web apps).
2. The Biggest
It's also worth mentioning that Messenger is the #1 app in the US and Canada with over 1 billion active users. That's a lot of Lemmings. With the frenzied adoption of mobile phones and social media over the last decade, messaging apps (like WhatsApp, Skype etc) are now part of our daily lives. Out of this pack of messaging, Facebook Messenger has managed to take the mantel as one of the fastest growing and feature-packed for your business to adopt. With Facebook continually investing time and money in growing Facebook Messenger, we place our bets on it being the biggest player in this place for the next couple years at least.
3. Reachability
According to Facebook numbers, 98% of the messages sent through Facebook Messenger are read within 3 seconds. Whats more, the open rates on Messenger messages are well over 80%. These are truly awesome numbers when you compare them to typical email open rates of about 12% (well, this is the number I get on emails).
4. High User Engagement
Facebook Messenger boasts that it can produce 4 to 10 times the click-through rate than emails. For what it's worth, in my testing I've never been able to quite hit 10x, but it's safe to say if you are comparing a message sent on Messenger vs email, you can at least expect 4x the engagement from the receivers.
5. Personal Communication
The personal and conversational nature of Messenger provides companies with a unique opportunity to engage with their followers on a much more personal level. This is predominately one of the main reasons conversational marketing seems to the next big thing marketing teams should be investing in.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree? Has the recent privacy issues with Facebook dampened your Messenger spirits? Send us your thoughts.