Botsftw (Bots for the Win) | Chatbots, Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Marketing

Botsftw (Bots for the Win) | Chatbots, Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Marketing

By Patrick ShanahanBusiness
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Botsftw (Bots for the Win) | Chatbots, Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Marketing episodes

  • FB Live and Bots; It’s raining emails
    How to combine Facebook Live Broadcasts, FOMO, and Bots to capture email like its going out of style
    Episode Summary
    • Don’t do live broadcasts?
    • The ROI of FB live broadcasts
    • FOMO in live broadcasts
    • Sample copy of the tactic and putting it all together
    • Why I love Bots
    • Email Open Rates
    • Sum it all up and two important questions
    • Show Notes

      All notes are in bot going forward. You can access those here.

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      22 min
    • Facebook reach is dead? Nope. Not with bots & a plan
      The attentions game, Facebook reach, and how to leverage messenger bots to siphon off more it
      Episode Summary
      • A deck on marketing I really liked
      • Genesis of the episode
      • The attention / platform wars are raging.  How do we win
      • Contrarian thinking and the plan
      • The tactical of this technique in detail
      • What to do when they get into the bot
      • Sum it all up and some FU
      • Show Notes

        All notes are in bot going forward. You can access those here.

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        34 min
      • How to track your marketing efforts in your bot
        How to combine growth tools, tags, a folder, and flows into a clean and clear data picture. Visualize what’s working… quickly.

        It’s always nice having the data.Better still when its easy to visualize it and easy to access it.No exporting files, waiting for the zip to show up in your email, not going into excel or sheets, cleaning up the columns and the like.Just a quick look and you have a very good read on how your latest marketing campaign is performing in your bot. 

        A Marketing Campaign

        For our example we are going to sending traffic from a range of sources to a flow in our bot which features Squirely Dan here.

        (Squirely Dan, despite his name, likes his marketing data clean)In terms of traffic sources we are going to leverage the following

        • An email to our email subscribers
        • A messenger broadcast to our FB messenger subscribers
        • A FB post
        • A link in the IG profile
        • A link in our IG stories (let’s assume we can link out)
        • In bot sharing
        • Three friends are gonna share links to the campaign as well
        • Same technique can and does apply to any additional sources you might have at your disposal.

          Growth Tools

          That is a whole lot of traffic sources.  So we are gonna need a whole lot of growth tools.In our case we are gonna have (what Manychat calls them anyway) a few different messenger ref urls and a FB comment growth tool.So we create them all and name them all properly. This part is easy enough.Naming conventions are up to you but allow me to suggest the following.Squirely Dan = [SD] + source + type = (Url)

          • [SD] Email Link (Url)
          • [SD] Insta Profile (Url)
          • [SD] Insta Story (Url)
          • How you do it is up to you but something unique to the campaign will make sure filtration is nice and easy. (the [SD] in this case)

            The Freeway, The On-ramps, and now the Toll Booth.

            I am fond on the analogy that your bot is the freeway, the growth tools are the on-ramps, all of the ways you get people on to your freeway/bot.If we stick with this analogy, then our next step is we are gonna add a toll booth to properly track all of our traffic sources.

            Old SystemAll growth tools would dump their subscribers into our main flow.New SystemAll growth tools dump their subscribers into the toll booth and then into our main flow.

            The toll will be paid in this case with a tag and clean data (Has anybody got a dime?).

            In our case lets assume the following…Freeway / Main Bot Flow = “Attentions Paid Main Flow”On-ramp / Growth Tool = “[SD] Insta Profile (Url)”Toll Booth / New Flow = “IG profile (Start)”So the growth tool “[SD] IG Profile (Url)” is now going to dump our traffic into our new toll booth flow “IG profile (Start)” which will tag our user and then dump them into our main bot flow “Attentions Paid Main Flow.”

            That is our growth tool to toll booth step.

            In our toll booth we apply our tag and send em to main flow.  Easy enough

            Folder View

            Two things.  

            1. This is an important organizational step
            2. Post campaign, where the magic happens
            3. So make sure you create a folder, title it, and place all of the campaign flows — the toll booths and the main flow — into this folder

              Then post campaign, you pull up the folder, and with a quick glance you can see exactly how the campaign went, who did the heavy lifting, who should get all of the credit, what to double down on etc.

              Sum it all up

              It sounds like allot of extra steps and it sorta is.  But the value of the data, to be able to attribute things accurately makes it completely worth it.Once you get the hang of it its really pretty quick and as long as you use the folder then things stay organized and clean.Moreover, if later you feel like diving into an cohort analysis.  Was once source better than the other in terms of sales or LTV or whatever, you have clean and tagged data just waiting for you.

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              11 min
            4. Bots and Buyer Personas
              Combining messenger, slack, survey data, and visualization to take buyer personas to the next level. How to learn more about your customers
              Episode Summary
              • Why I love Bots
              • The context under which this system has been created
              • Some additional details on the messenger to slack integration and the importance of the images and their sizes
              • Some detail on the survey data that goes into the bot
              • Bots and buyer personas. Buyer personas loosely defined.
              • Stitch it all together into a new system
              • Potential future applications
              • Show Notes

                All notes are in bot going forward. You can access those here.

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                23 min
              • Bots and Buyer Personas
                What are the fundamentals of bot building, answer both; Why bots, why now and why Facebook Messenger and why its worth going all in on messenger if you can and bots in general if you can't
                The fundamentals of bot building

                Work on bringing subscribers into your bot
                Put them all through your survey
                Setup a wall in your bot, none shall pass without going through the survey
                Capture the email address
                Get the bad fits for your business out of everything
                Go all in on the good leads and focus all of your attention on them

                Show Notes
                10 Ways to Get People Into Your BotYou shall not pass video of the dude of the skateboard - this guy is a legend in my bookMy original manifesto on Why bots, why now, why Facebook Messenger
                Messenger Bots vs Bots in General
                The fundamentals of bot building apply equally to both.The sheer profundity of getting cold traffic into your bot, getting their FB profile data, getting their email address, and then getting to know them via their survey responses.... all in their first visit is just plain crazy.What an amazing and stark contrast to how long its taken to get that level of detail without leveraging bots in your marketing stack.
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                23 min
              • How to Use Slack as a Bot Dashboard
                How to integrate Manychat, either Zapier/Integromat, to pull Manychat data into slack and use slack as a dashboard to speed up your bot work

                Slack is allot of things.Yes it’s “supposed” to be for in company/team communication.Everybody likes to talk about the obvious things. (including fixing a logo problem only they thought was a problem). What Slack does not get enough credit for though is how amazing it can be as a marketing dashboard or in this case a bot dashboard.Slack is amazing as a bot dashboard.Sorta crazy the amount of data you can pipe into slack.  You combine that with slack’s desktop and especially mobile app and the notifications options those apps offer and you are rocking.

                How to integrate Manychat and Zapier and Slack

                The integration part is on you. Google it if needs be.Once you do here are a few of the fields you want to make sure get passed into Slack from Manychat. This is Zapier but its similar in Integromat(all the same fields on offer anyway)

                I like to port in the following fields (gonna use exact names here so you have it for reference)

                • User First Name
                • User Last Name
                • User Live Chat Url
                • User Last Growth Tool Type
                • User Last Growth Tool Name
                • User Profile Pic
                • Port those in and you are left with an output that looks just like below (I deleted the first name on this one.)

                  You can of course edit what additional data you want to send to Slack.  There are a ton of additional fields and some of that additional data might make sense in your business or niche.

                  Use Cases

                  Make sure you get the Slack desktop app and the phone app.Set your notifications preferences to taste.Always have a solid read on what is going down in your bot.  Good times.

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                  7 min
                • The Fundamentals of Bot Building
                  What are the fundamentals of bot building, answer both; Why bots, why now and why Facebook Messenger and why its worth going all in on messenger if you can and bots in general if you can’t

                  The fundamentals of bot building

                  • Work on bringing subscribers into your bot
                  • Put them all through your survey
                  • Setup a wall in your bot, none shall pass without going through the survey
                  • Capture the email address
                  • Get the bad fits for your business out of everything
                  • Go all in on the good leads and focus all of your attention on them
                  • Show Notes

                    10 Ways to Get People Into Your BotYou shall not pass video of the dude of the skateboard – this guy is a legend in my bookMy original manifesto on Why bots, why now, why Facebook Messenger

                    Messenger Bots vs Bots in General

                    The fundamentals of bot building apply equally to both.The sheer profundity of getting cold traffic into your bot, getting their FB profile data, getting their email address, and then getting to know them via their survey responses…. all in their first visit is just plain crazy.What an amazing and stark contrast to how long its taken to get that level of detail without leveraging bots in your marketing stack.

                    Episodes Referenced

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                    19 min
                  • Content Marketing with Bots
                    How to combine bots + content marketing, a simple playbook you can use to both acquire new messenger subscribers and continue the conversation with your existing subscribers

                    Show Notes

                    Only one link this time. Problem is you are gonna have to get into my bot to get it.

                    https://m.me/Botsftw?ref=w4653122

                    Enjoying the show

                    Pull out messenger on your phone, search for bots for the win, and come say hi in Messenger.

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                    14 min
                  • How to Stay Up To Date With Manychat Features
                    How to stay up to date with ManyChat Features, 3 Steps to avoid the fomo and save time, and a bonus on buggy behaviorLots of ways to win in SaaS although most would say its getting way way harder.Why?Competition is getting fierce.  Before you might of been duking it out with just a few of em.Think Coke vs Pepsi or Bud vs Coors vs Miller.In SaaS those days are long gone.Now instead of one or two competitors you are up against like 50.Want to win in those conditions and you better have a solid strategy in place to differentiate yourself.ManyChat FeaturesPart of ManyChat's strategy is to out iterate the competition.By the time they their competitors have copied their latest feature they are already 3 additional features down the line.Got Features?Take a gander at that furious feature update paceNow the last thing you want to worry about is allowing this blistering feature update pace to create FOMO in your mind and pull your focus from your bot building.So this Bot Hack will sort this for you.3 Steps to Avoid Fomo and Stay Up To DateBookmark the ManyChat ChangelogBookmark the ManyChat BlogJoin and bookmark the ManyChat Facebook GroupNow lets talk about how we (well, me at least) combines the 3 steps.Put all three links in a folder, save the folder on your browser bar, open it weekly, perform a quick scan.If something piques your interest you jump into the FB group and hit the announcements, and read through the comments for some color commentary. I detail how I like to go about this in the video above.Do that and you will avoid the FOMO, feel like you are always up to date and ahead of the curve, and you can stay focused on your bot building and messenger conversations.Buggy Behavior BonusThis could of been its own Bot Hack but figured I would include it.In addition to the changelog page ManyChat also has a status page.Also helpful to bookmark.  I have relied on this twice in the last week.What does everybody else do?They run right into the FB group and post about how something is not working.What do you do?You hit the status page, contemplate what it means and potentially turn your ads off, or stop a growth tool, or whatever.Never Miss a HackSubscribe
                    9 min
                  • Need Some Attentions? Send a Wuphf
                    How to think about attention in 2019, how to get it, and how bots fit in.

                    Show Notes

                    Top 5 Bot Building Lessons from 2018One-two Punch ComboBot Hack #5 – Youtube & MessengerOriginal Wuphf video from the office

                    Enjoying the show

                    2019 is gonna be gonna be a big year. The best year. Very possible you might miss that if you are not in my bot. To get into my bot you can subscribe right here

                    Or switch over to messenger and search for Bots for the Win.

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                    16 min

                  About Botsftw (Bots for the Win) | Chatbots, Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Marketing

                  From the publisher's feed

                  Bots, Facebook Messenger, Messenger Marketing, Conversational Marketing, buzzwords & cold beers. Why bots, why now, and why Facebook Messenger.