As a business owner, you know that it’s crucial to have a social media strategy in place for marketing yourself to your customers. With the meteoric rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, it’s no longer enough to simply have a website to bring new people in. Fortunately, because social media is so ubiquitous, it’s never been easier to get started with it as a marketing tool.

However, in recent years, trends have started to change. Whereas before you could build customer relationships through traditional Facebook channels such as posting and commenting, now there is a new method at your fingertips: Messenger. Since it debuted back in 2011, this app has swelled to include 1.2 billion users, which means that it’s a market ripe for the taking.

Messenger vs. Email

So what does this application have to offer for your business? Well, the first thing to do is understand what it is essentially replacing. Time was, sending email blasts to your subscribers was the best way to market promotions and new ideas, but now that has become too commercialised. The average consumer gets tons of email every day, and many of them have taken to opening new email accounts to avoid it all. There are also intricacies around email content and frequency to consider, in order to prevent being placed on spam lists and ignored by your audiences. Check the Harmful Digital Communications Act for more details on New Zealand legislation around these issues.

Fortunately, Messenger doesn’t have that problem. Because it is tied to a user’s Facebook account, it’s much harder to fake, and the response is much better overall. When comparing the two, we’ve seen that emails have an open rate of about 23%, while Messenger has 84%. Not only that, but the click-through rate (people engaging with your content) is also higher, with a comparison of 3% to 28%.

Obviously, with over a Billion users, those numbers speak to some enormous potential.

How to Market Effectively Through Messenger

Considering that this is a tool like any other in your digital marketing toolbelt, you can use it much in the same way that you do anything else. So, with that in mind, here are some key principles that you should follow to maximise your ROI.

  • Identify your target audience. Be specific and personalized. As an example, don’t go after “women over 40.” Instead, target “women between 40-50 who want to start doing crafts.” If it helps, develop your ideal user persona and build your campaign for that individual.
  • Know what they want. Once you’ve targeted your consumers, then do research and ask them what kinds of things they are interested in. Do they want coupons? Rewards points? Advance access to stuff? Figure out what will have the most impact.
  • Be short and sweet. No one is going to read through a detailed message that requires scrolling. Get to the point right away and provide any links on top so that if they are interested, they can click immediately. Make it as simple and innocuous as possible; otherwise, you can come across as overbearing.

Bottom Line

As messaging apps like Messenger become more prevalent in our society, it will become more and more necessary to adopt marketing strategies that utilise these tools to your advantage. Fortunately, right now most businesses are not hopping on the Messenger bandwagon yet, so now is the perfect time to strike, before the “next big thing” comes around.

Messenger apps in general are the future direction of digital marketing, as the big players (such as Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp etc.) look to monetise their efforts further. Keep an eye on the upcoming formats and best practices relating to messenger advertising and keep visiting our blogs as we keep you up to date with the latest news in the digital arena.