 My name is Sean. Yeah, my name is Sean. So I run, as John said, so we organise this WordPress Meetup group as well. And I run an agency here in Singapore called Chilebin Web Design, mainly focused on WordPress, but moving a little bit more into the digital marketing space. So that's what this talk is about. We've had some success with clients in this space. So I thought there's a small link to WordPress as in you can, you know, chat something like this on your WordPress site. It also works on Facebook and mobile and things like that. So that's the kind of link between this Messenger bot and Facebook and your WordPress site. So we'll just kind of go in through and essentially who here has kind of had experience of some type of bot or a Messenger bot before? No one? All right. So nobody's used, all right. So you've had, you've used it, okay, there's a few. You use it for your business or as a user? Education. Okay, I'll go through some examples, some numbers, some kind of best use practices and you know that we've had for our clients and some other examples that I found along the way. So it's come to a point, I guess now that like with things like Amazon Alexa, with Siri, with Google Home and these things kind of can't be avoided, right? They're at an experience level that we just kind of have to have to have them. If you don't have one, then you need one essentially. If you don't know what to do with one, then essentially the easiest thing to do is just to get one installed and collect your subscribers. Once you have these subscribers, then you can market to them later. But if you don't have them to talk to in the first place, then you're starting from nowhere. So the easiest thing to do is after this chat or later during the week, kind of follow this, get something set up and look at just kind of the easiest way is just to collect some subscribers. Whether or not you're running a blog or you're running the alcohol delivery service, just get something, get people engaged and then you can work out the plan later down the track. So essentially a bot is anything that's automating a response. You don't really want your users to be typing in human commands. You really want to kind of be leading them down a garden path. Back in the day, you had things like choose your own adventure books. You'd go to page three. You want to follow the rabbit down the whole, turn to page seven if you want to do something else and turn to another page. And essentially that's not choice. Well, it's choice, but you're sort of dictating them where they want to go. So in essence, a Facebook Messenger bot is the same thing from a marketing perspective. Facebook's really pushing it at the moment because they want people to be engaged on that platform. It's easier for them to sell ads to if you're more engaged in that platform, the kind of timeline has fallen away a little bit. People are carrying a Facebook Messenger in their phone all the time. So it's a popular way for that. Been using them for a couple of years, testing bits and pieces for clients as well for ourselves. So I run through some examples, but it has to be used in the right way. You have to remember how people are consuming content. If you're thinking from a desktop point of view, you're always writing something like click here, click here, click here. Whereas that doesn't necessarily work because you'd think most people or 80% of users would be using Messenger on a mobile platform where everything's tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. So you just kind of have to think the easiest way to get these people engaged and kind of lead them through that garden path as well. And yes, I've gone through that. So it's a natural conversation with the humanist edge. And what that sort of means is when you're looking at converting your leads as a marketing, you're looking at engagement, qualification, intimacy and relevancy. So there's some examples of kind of what you can do depending on how far along you want to engage someone. So if they're kind of a cool lead or you don't really know much about them, you can offer them a guide, a quiz or a video. If you know a little bit more about them or they're a bit more engaged, an ebook, a series, a challenge, where you really want to get them to is obviously to be a hot, confirmed lead, so a strategy call, a webinar or a sales page. So that's going to make it easier for you to kind of convert them once they're at that phase. So getting someone from a guide across to a strategy call, there's a few steps in that. But if they're aware of kind of who you are and they're interested and really engaged, then dump them straight into something that's asking for a direct, a direct response. So it's not really taking the human part out of it. But kind of numbers are suggesting that in order to get a sale, you're probably looking about between 20 and 30 customer engagements over that time. So using a bot can really enhance that experience without you having to sort of necessarily go out and keep hammering at someone. Right. This is pretty good open rate. This is kind of our life currently, right? So open rate of 40%, 20% of that unique. So click through rate of 5%, which is pretty good. And yeah, so I mean, that's not too bad on 2000 subscribers. So if you're thinking that went out to, let's say, 10,000 people, right, you'd be looking at 4,000 people that opened it and 200 people clicked through, which isn't too bad for an email. But there's still 80% of those that are left on the table that may have bounced, may not have opened it, just sitting in their junk mail folder. So that's where kind of things like messenger bots will really work through. Because if you're looking at messenger bots, and I'll go through some stats in a minute, the engagement rates are a lot higher. So we've paid good money to get these people into our service. But when effectively not marketing to them anymore, the GDPR thing will probably clear a little bit of this out. Hopefully there's less sperm and that type of thing. But email as a kind of communication method is is sort of on the way out, at least in a promotional marketing point of view. Here's some basic stats on Facebook. I think these were updated in the last F8 conference. 1.3 billion users are using Facebook Messenger. Over 20 million of those have Facebook pages with messaging installed. And 11% of the population use Messenger monthly. Out of that, there's 17 billion photos sent. And at the moment, there's over 300,000 chatbots on Messenger. So it's not like we're sort of breaking the ground here. There's a lot of people that are doing some really good things on this platform already. It's still in its infancy, of course. But do you sort of want to jump in or do you want to let your competitors go and do that first? So there's some more stats here. So this kind of excludes WeChat because most of our market is sort of my market specifically is not really using WeChat. I'm not speaking to that market all of them much, but WeChat would be higher than this. So I'm not that worried about that personally. So 51% of people should be expect a business to be available to answer questions 24-7. And there's an anecdote to the friend of mine was telling me he was stuck in Bangladesh after a flight got cancelled. He couldn't get in touch with anyone on the phone. Couldn't get their Twitter feed, tried everything. Ended up getting a hold of someone or through a bot response on their Messenger. So it ended up turning, you know, a bad experience into a good client experience. Eventually they got back to him four days later on email, which is obviously not good because he's left the country already. So people kind of expect few to be available and having some type of bot or FAQ system or whatever it is just means that people can speak to your business and you're not losing that customary experience. People will kind of reach out to you when it's convenient for them, not when it's convenient for you, right? So if your business is nine to six PM, you can't expect people to have a problem in those hours. You need to be available outside of those hours. Like this. So 46% would rather contact a business through messaging rather than email. And 49% would rather contact a business through Messenger rather than a phone. It's why things like FoodPander and GrabFood and UberEats exist. It's existed for a long time where you could call someone up and they would deliver food to you but nobody wants that experience anymore. You can sit on your couch and don't have to interact with anyone and make that happen. So this is obviously moving across into the marketing space as well. But the key to kind of starting anything and we'll go into a little bit more is make sure that it's relevant. For any type of marketing, you make sure you to qualify, engage them, nurture that lead, deliver them to the right end point, segment those people, make sure they get the right message, they understand it and then you can sell to them. So there's an example of that I'll go through in a bit. I don't know where I put this. Yeah, it's later down. Okay, so this is, is that GIF playing? It's not, is it? Anyway, that's an example of a Facebook Messenger bot that should be playing. That's mine. And essentially what that one does is we did it for accounting practice in Western Australia and for, we were targeting small and medium business owners. So it's accounting practice and we wanted to kind of qualify those leads and engage them as well. Then separate them out and kind of market to them after that. So leading to try and get them to make a booking and get in touch with us. So we looked at some lead magnets there. So we used controversial videos, essentially a bunch of videos that said accountants suck and got people engaged in that way to come in for a meeting or book a call. The stats we had for that, so there's a 90% response rate. So that's engagement, so that's readers. So if you look back at the email example before was only 40%. And then 52% of those took action and booked a call. So if we looked at the other one, I think it was 5% or 2% that we looked at that engagement rate. They clicked through right on the email. So we did a 250% revenue increase month to month by just getting this happening for them. And that gift should run through, essentially there's kind of questions here and then it prompts them with a couple of answers. So this one says book a call and this one says book a meeting. So there's questions to say, you know, how long have you been in business? One, two, three, four years. Based on that, we'll tag them and segment those users and then give them information based on that. So a traditional marketing funnel. You can look at a track traffic, capture leads, nurture your prospects, convert sales, delivery. So a Facebook blog can do all these areas. So I was talking to a client recently. They sell kitchen installations. So we're talking to them and kind of asking what do they do once they've done this installation. Once it's complete, do they ask for any photos? Do they ask for any referrals? And essentially nobody was doing anything. Once the kitchen was installed you never heard from them again. So we sort of flipped that to them and said, you know, this could easily be done and it could be automated as well. They say someone comes into your store. There's a little QR code or whatever it is. They take a photo of that seven days after that install. You can ask for a survey. You could ask for a photo. It all comes directly in the spot. Fourteen days later you can ask for a review on Facebook, on Google. And then maybe 30 days later you might ask, you know, do you have two or three friends that might be interested in something like this and ask for direct referrals? And all that's basically automated once it's set up. So right, the development process. So to get started you obviously need to know the purpose of the bot, what you're sort of offering, who you're offering it to. Then you can look at designing the logic, testing it, and then promoting it. So we kind of go through a bit of a process and there's a there's a tool called draw.io which we use to kind of map all this out. And I don't use it as much anymore. I can go through and build the bot. But my team really likes to kind of map everything out so you can see all the user flow of where everything is. So at the top left you get a welcome message and then you know, hey, this is who you are and that can be targeted depends if they've come from advertising, if they've come from an email campaign, where they are, there's a default answer. So by the time you sort of make this flow it builds out, there's a lot more interests and things in there, but we sort of plan all this out so that we have a complete flow and we can build this directly into the system. So I recommend that you plan first. And then the next one says okay, so how do we want to segment our list? So you know if they click one of those options, okay, are you advanced or are you beginner? If they are advanced and they get that tag and they obviously go through the next flow, if they're a beginner then we give them that information as well and so on and so forth. So you're building this information about your customer and you kind of have all that information in the back end. If you do want to target an advanced mail, for example, you have that information later down the track to segment them, whether or not it's through Facebook advertising or if it's through this direct platform as well through email. So as with anything in marketing, planning takes the longest. If you do it wrong you'll get problems. So this is the kind of complete flow and I know you can't really see it but if you sort of look at that flow there's a few different options that you have for a simple basic bot which is asking them seven or eight questions but you can see the wealth of information that we're actually getting from them and all they're doing is clicking your yes or no button or advanced beginner and then we have all that information on them. So to kind of plan this out, we use draw.io, it's just a flow charting software and once we have this we obviously get it all approved and separate it all out, break it all down and go from there. So it's not a complicated process, essentially what you're trying to do is replicate a human interaction just in an automated form. So you want to make sure that you can get as much information out of them as possible and put them into your CRM system. If you don't have a CRM system then most of the tools will capture that information for you but if you have a CRM your mutters will use it and double down on your data. So one example that's my QR code for my personal messenger. So essentially like you've seen QR codes before, this is just the Facebook messenger one and it's unique to each user. So if you took a photo of that now you could message me later. But you can customize it with your brand logo which is taken from Facebook. You could print these out, you could put them up on the front of your store, you could put them on your boxes when you're delivering products. It's just an easy way for people to get in touch with you and you can customize this to make a specific action. So let's say you had a couple of different bots which had a couple of different options in terms of where you present them down the path. You know you may have a review bot, you may have a welcome bot. You can just use these to get them directly into the funnel. Right how are they made? It's probably where most people wanted to get this but I needed to cover the marketing stuff first because without that there's no point in just going in and doing it all well like I did my first few ones. So chat fuel in many chat are probably the most popular ones there. There's heaps of them but many chat and chat fuel are probably the easiest to use. I like chat fuel but it just moved from a freemium model to it's still kind of freemium but they now add a little message. As soon as you start using it says I think this is a bot from chat fuel for XYZ company and then it says thank you. So the paid platform you're looking in about between 10 and 50 bucks for up to about 10,000 users. So if you're looking at doing it properly then that cost is negligible because you'll make that back pretty easily. And so this is a login once you get into chat fuel and these are essentially all built already. And a couple of examples there. Generally then there's like a Facebook group one up there, GDPR privacy policy. So if you've updated your privacy policy you could you know throw someone through that. There's a gym membership one there that you have to pay $150 for that one but it kind of goes through the whole flow. So there's plenty of examples there or you can just start and build your own or you can take one of these and tweak it. You know if you've got a Shopify site for example you can migrate that in and people can browse through your products and buy directly on that. So this is kind of the default agency bot one. So as you come to this you can see that okay there's a welcome message and that's the so this one up here is the message that they come up with now which runs on a fuel version. So the first thing that people will see is that message which previously they didn't have it was kind of hidden as you get further along but the upgrade to pro is definitely worth it. So as you come down there's a whole bunch of template creations that you can use and messages so you set up your message subscriptions and set up customer support and lead gen and the users can just funnel into each of those and if you started on something like this you could just click on each of them and kind of build it out that way. But one of the biggest successes we've had is through competition bots it really lends itself really well to engage people this way so we've had a lot of success with this but the most important thing I guess for that is to make it relevant to users so to give them something they want. So don't give away an iPad unless you're Apple because everyone's an iPad but it doesn't relate to your business at all. So where's the relevance for that? Somebody may want an iPad but they're not engaged with your content whatsoever so it doesn't help you. If you're running like a martial arts business you could give away a year's worth of tuition because they have to come in into your place and they have to be engaged that way and then there's more chances to upsell onto other services. If you're a finance company you may want to migrate them across to zero tidy up their books at the end of the year and pay for their zero subscription or something like that. If you're a marketing company like myself we may want to offer a Facebook ad campaign three design funnels a paid subscription to the funnel building software maybe even throw in like a night at a hotel so that people are like relaxed enough to think about their marketing you know for something like if you have a small product or a service let's say it's a hundred dollars service it's a low barrier product so you can say you know while they're engaged and waiting for this competition first prize to be drawn you could do something like okay if two days later you could send them a message okay while you're waiting for the grand prize we have this other thing give them a 75 percent offer or something like that so therefore you're kind of selling you're getting two things two things for one it will help your business grow um so essentially the main point of it is that you're not going to sell an SEO service to someone that doesn't know the value about SEO one thing about that is you know you get these people that are kind of competition people and they just enter in everything that can be good or bad it really depends in the virality of your uh of your bot or competition so if you had something like you needed to share it x amount of times you could have people you know if they shared it and they shared it to a thousand people obviously that's a good thing because it builds in that type of traffic so most of the competitions that you see are really boring they're like like this page tag your friends leave a comment below and when you get to that and you see that in facebook itself it just looks like a stream of people's names which is just terrible i mean there's no engagement whatsoever they haven't bought bought into your product um so one thing that we do a little bit later in this is that we still do that but we do that through the bot so if you see the facebook post it's like you know it's all very marketing speak and then connect with the bot and then we kind of say go back to the post and comment all your friends and it's kind of facebook sees it as a bit of a less barrier to get that happen so you know something like hey notice you entered the comp would you like an extra entry to the draw invite your friends you know get an entry doesn't see it as is so spammy and then the last thing is um have a tangible plan what to do with the leads so you've spent all this money you've got all the people into your platform now how do you monetize it so you need a secondary offer as well so a first prize would be great and then for all those people that missed out that's still on your list you still want to engage them you still want them to be you know to be doing something so for a hair salon the main prize we did was like a blow dry for a week for a year secondary prize um so that went out to two thousand subscribers um had five thousand comments for a hundred and eighty dollars worth of ads so to get so the two thousand subscribers for 180 bucks is is pretty good no money had been made yet I like to make money that's why I'm in this business um so we needed to work out a way to kind of engage those people so we sent out a message saying you know sorry you didn't win the first prize charlie from melbourne won the first prize um but we do have a runners-up prize would you like to be interested in it and generally a response is yes or no responses yes okay cool um essentially we have a runners-up prize you're interested cool as a runners-up prize in the next 14 days make a booking through this link and they tap the link you get 50 dollars off your hair cut package and a free spay tan so for them the cost of that so hair cut package was about 250 300 dollars they were making about 180 dollars to 200 dollars just on offering those and the first two hours they had 220 appointments and since then they've just been too busy to kind of communicate back with us which is a good thing so give them something they want make sure it's viral or build in some gamification and have a plan what to do with them once they're uh once they're engaged and i have questions but my bot will only answer question a or question b oh and finally the link you can have this to your WordPress website grab the code on the Facebook page and you can chuck it in your WordPress website really easily and embed it and that's it so that's me Sean from Trilibund cool questions guess not there was a lot that i went through there there's a lot of marketing stuff so i'll chuck up these slides as well on the meetup group afterwards so you can you can grab all that and if you are a little bit shy um you can actually yeah catch me later yeah