Is Messenger The New Landing Page?

I’m sure most of us are familiar with the usual digital marketing funnel

You find an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram with a captivating copy and proceed to jump onto a Landing Page, riddled with even more attention grabbing information to compel you to leave your email and contact.

For the next 7 days or beyond, you’ll continue receiving e-mails trying to persuade you to take a key action like a phone call , consultation or join a webinar

Even till this very day, that method still continues to work

Though there’s a few problem with this plan…

#1 Cost Of Marketing Is Going Up With Lesser Returns

It’s no magic that this is happening since we’re seeing more and more businesses making the transition online. Even more are slowly educating themselves on getting involved with pay-per-click ads or paid ads

This pushes the price that you’d usually pay to bring your ads to the audiences’ eyeballs

What does this mean?

You’re already spending increasingly more at the very start of the funnel. The price is expected to increase as more users familiarize themselves with the tools. It will jump even further as established brands with deep pockets ‘dump’ their marketing budgets originally reserved for conventional or print marketing

E-mail marketing, robo-dials or telemarketing, print marketing are not performing as they were intended to as open rates continue to decline on average

# 2 Customers Don’t Enjoy Jumping Through Hoops

Most marketing funnels are designed to guide users through multiple platforms and touchpoints with hopes that the optimum user experience offered by them improves conversion rate

The only limitation for having multiple touch-point are drop outs

We are getting bombarded with numerous distractions every minute, its no surprise that our customers doesn’t complete their journey on our funnel

That then means you have to spend extra dollars to broadcast reminders from your different touch-points to remind them to complete their buyer journey

That may seem rational if the earnings per customers is able to justify such expenses

Otherwise, without a much more elaborate earnings plan, it might just eat into your margins

Furthermore, despite most users are now making their purchase decisions or consuming content via mobile, Landing Pages and Email sequences are still not fully optimized and may appear clunky in the phones

Such appearance may lower the customer’s confidence to follow through with your brand.

Social Media platforms prefer to retain their users to continue engaging with their platform rather than them exiting to move to another platform. Going against that logic may sometimes not allow you to achieve desired results.

# 3 Mobile User Experience Is Dominating

It’s probably common knowledge now that most users are relying on mobile phones for all their online interactions

Of the 11 hours spent in front of screens by U.S. adults per day, 1/3 or 3 hours and 9 minutes of it is spent on a mobile or tablet (MarketWatch).

And they can’t keep their eyes off them…

94% of respondents in a Facebook survey (of one million people) have a smartphone on hand while watching TV, and viewers focus on the TV screen just 53% of the time (Facebook, 2018)

With these in mind, you wouldn’t want any forms of disruptions for your mobile users’ experience

How does this translate into Messenger solving these issues?

#1 – Build Trust & Not a List

There isn’t any other known marketing platform that encourages a conversation

Most methods are usually transactional. You offer me value, and I offer you my information.

The transaction may have happened, but it does not necessarily mean that they are much ‘warmer’ or trust you much more than before

You’ll still have to make additional follow ups or guide them through multiple touch-points before you are able to qualify them and/or gain their trust

Messenger allows you to develop interactive chat sequences that provides prompts or replies based on the customers’ responses

This allows the customer to have conversation first, building a rapport and helping them understand how your product/services might be relevant to them

This is in contrast to immediately asking for their personal contact details or pushing a sales to them immediately

Messenger allows you to have a list of users who are genuinely interested in your products/services through an interactive conversation instead of a list scrapped from users being pushed to share information in return for freebies

#2 – Reduces Friction Between Applications

We earlier discussed about customers moving through apps and platforms to fulfill their purchase journey

Messenger have been aggressively developing capabilities to allow seamless conversation and transaction to happen within a single place

Lesser confusion for the customer, lesser exposure to dropouts and technical faults and doesn’t go against the social media platforms’ preference of having their users leave their app

#3 – Automation With A Touch Of Personal Presence

Yes, many might contend that having a automated chat sequence means the customer will be talking to a robot and that’s nothing better than an email or landing page

The distinction is the conversational of how the message is being communicated

The user has control to how much information gets fed to them through prompts and replies

They can exit the conversation anytime if they don’t feel that the content makes sense or relatable to them

A conversation feels different than having information pushed to you

Imagine walking up to a shoes store to check out their latest collection

Which sounds better, the staff providing you a pamphlet with all the possible information that you could possbily need to know to make your purchase decision

The staff invites you in, asks some preliminary questions like the type of sports you play, the intensity, your budget, your previous shoe type

I believe the 2nd option is much more welcoming and builds trust

And no, the automation doesn’t have to fully guide the customer through the conversation as I believe there’s certain nuances that an automation might miss

Hence, its actually meant to warm them up to feel ready and clear to be able to share about their needs and how they wish to be assisted

This saves effort and time for both customer and business owners

I believe that the conventional model still works and personally am also involved in developing similar models. As they saying goes, “If it ain’t broken, why fix it?”

What I’m sharing is not about fixing, but to revisit the purpose of marketing

Its none other than to communicate the value of what you have to offer

And if there’s a way that we can do so with a personal touch and less friction, I feel that’s something to consider

Likewise, for those of you who are exploring new ways of how you can engage your customers differently, feel free to share your queries with me. I’ll be more than happy to chat. 🙂