Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Jennifer Nelson or you can call me Jenny for short. I'm a marketing automation consultant and all around digital marketing educator. I've been in the marketing and advertising space for just over 15 years now. That means I've been doing this since before the iPhone was invented. While I spent many years working in the corporate world, for large companies and even for some of the world's fastest growing startups. Today, I work as a consultant and educator, helping companies with their automation strategies. I work with clients mostly in the e-mail marketing automation space. However, more recently, conversational chatbots have become another major area of focus. Chatbots have been growing in the world of marketing, and it's what we call conversational marketing. When people visit your website or any of your pages, they want to understand how to navigate your site and what your products or service can do for them. You don't need to be a coder or have any previous development skills in order to build a bot. In fact, you don't even need to have a budget. All of the tools that we're going to use in this class will cost you exactly $0. Your final project for this class will be incorporating a conversational chatbot that collects e-mail addresses from your users, allowing you to build your e-mail list as a bonus. People are using Facebook Messenger from everything to having video calls, playing games, and even sending money. That's why when it comes to connecting with businesses on Facebook Messenger, it's a no- brainer. What you'll particularly love about this class is that you will be building out a conversational chat bot that will actually allow your users to select whether they want marketing promotions from you via Facebook Messenger or e-mail. How's that for putting your customers first? I want you to be as engaged as possible in this class. During the class, feel free to post your questions and share the status of your project, get feedback from the community, and if you liked this class, feel free to leave a review. You can check out my profile to learn more about me and follow me on any of my social channels. I'd love to hear your thoughts and I hope to see your class projects soon.
2. Your Class Project: For your final project, you should upload the screenshot of the three dialogue flows that you created for your chatbot. You should also include the goal that you want to accomplish with this bot. By including your goals, I can help determine if your message is clear and captivating. While the project does have an end goal of getting you to utilize an email collection form within your bot, you don't have to capture email if you don't want to. You can simply build out a bot that continues the conversations and promotions within the bot itself. Regardless of which you choose, your project uploads should include the screenshot of your main menu, your default reply, and your welcome message. You can use the template that I provided you or you can upload any way you choose. It should take you about one hour to complete your project. Most of your time will be spent on planning out your flows. The great thing about chatbots is you don't have to have too much copy. Chatbots that are helpful and that don't try to do too much are the ones that stand out the most. Now one thing I want to note is that the free version of many chat allows you to build an email collection form. However, it does not allow you to publish it. So if you do find that you do want to publish your bot to collect emails, then you will have to upgrade to the pro version of many chat. Now the pro version only costs $10 a month and that covers you for up to 500 subscribers that you collect. So it's not a bad deal considering that you can do so much more with the pro version. I'll leave that up to you. But just so you know, to complete this class, you do not have to upgrade. You can use the free version of completely just fine.
3. Tools You Will Need: There'll be a couple of tools that you will need to build out your Facebook Messenger chatbot. For one, you will need a Facebook business page, this is where your Facebook Messenger conversations will take place. Now don't worry, a user doesn't only have to go to your Facebook business page in order to start a conversation. There'll be plenty of ways to distribute your bot, including on your website, and we'll talk about some of those ways as we go through the course. If you haven't created your Facebook business page you will need to do that, it's free and incredibly easy to set up. You can find instructions by going to the link shown here, it will take you no more than ten minutes to get your page up and ready. Next up, you will need to set up an account with many chat.com, as of now it's free to set up and easy to use. You can upgrade to the pro for $10 a month. You will also have access to the templates that I created for getting started and creating the flows that you need. You can upload them into many chat and use them as a starting step to get your bot up and running.
4. What is Automation?: I feel it's best to talk about marketing automation and what does it actually mean. Automation has become a buzzword in today's industry. Everyone wants to use it, but do we know what it really means and entails? Marketing automation can be found in a number of marketing tools and channels, but out of all the channels that are out there, email marketing is one of the ones that uses it to the fullest degree. When we go to a website, and we sign up to receive 15 percent off, or we sign up to receive a download, and immediately we get an email with that 15 percent coupon or that download that we asked for. That's an example of automation. Our signing up for that lists basically triggered an email to go out that gave the person exactly what they asked for when they gave you their email address. Now, that's one example of automation, but there are so many different ways that automation is being used today. With Chatbots, we want to aim to use marketing automation in a similar and smart way. Marketing automation works effectively when using these three things, triggers, rules, and conditions. ManyChat is going to be the automation tool that we use that empowers our Facebook bot to be automated to a certain degree. In the next few videos, we'll be walking through many chats automation section, which will be one of the main sections that we use throughout this class.
5. A Few Chatbot Examples: Before we get to building, let's have a look at a few bots from popular companies and sites that we know. Let's look at Spotify. Spotify bot is geared towards getting users to create and share playlist with friends. It's a simple bot that provides users with instructions on how to start a playlist directly from messenger. Whole Foods has had their chatbot around for awhile. What's nice about Whole Foods chatbot is that it gets the user to search for recipes simply by typing in ingredient. It's functional and to the point, it works. Now let's have a look at Sephora chatbot. Now, Sephora bot works really well for E-comm. It helps users to navigate different ways to use their products. Currently, the bot helps users to search for a certain look, then provides a tutorial on how to get that look. All in all, as you can see, chatbots can serve many different purposes. As you explore different chatbots, look for ones that you find the most useful. You'll notice that the best ones are actually the ones that are not strictly about selling you something. Great bots actually help your customers do specific things. Think about your product or service and what was the question someone was asking themselves before they came to your site or page? How can your bot be one step ahead in helping that person to find a solution to what he or she needs? [ MUSIC ]
6. Setup: Facebook Business Page Settings: Once you've set up your ManyChat account, you'll be taken to the dashboard. It should look just like this. We're going to go through some of the navigational items in ManyChat just to get you familiar with it. Before we do go into ManyChat however, I do want to make sure that you have the right settings checked off on your Facebook page. Go on over to your Facebook page, and let's make sure that a few of the settings are checked to where they need to be in the Messenger area Facebook. Now if you haven't created your Facebook page account, make sure you go ahead and do that. The link for that is available in the tools lesson of this class, but if your page is just setup, then we're ready to go to the Settings area. On your Facebook business page, on the top right-hand side you'll see the Settings link. Just click on that, and then go over to where it says Messaging. You can't have a little automation by just using Facebooks' Messenger Settings. However, it's not truly that powerful. So that's why we're using ManyChat. Under General Settings, you can be leave that alone as it is, or you can set it to your personal preference. Also, the second area prompt people to send messages. If someone comes to your Facebook page, your actual Facebook business page, and they opened up that page. If you leave this setting to on your Facebook Messenger window will show up on their page. Basically something that says, "Hey, you want to start a conversation with?" Whatever it is by you leaving that on, the window pops up. Now, it will only pop up if an admin of your page is online or if you are very responsive. The next setting is very important so Response Assistant. This is an instant reply if anyone writes to your page. We want to turn this off. The reason why if it's on, I'll just show you here. If it's on and someone says, "Hey, I have a question." Then your page will automatically send back this instant message. The reason we want to turn this off is because we are going to set it up in many tests, so we don't need to have it set up here. Go ahead and turn that off and show response time. This is set by Facebook, it will show, just leave that as is, it'll just show how often you respond, and then stay responsive when you can't get to your computer or to your phone. This one also we want to turn it off. We want this all to be via ManyChats. Go ahead and turn that off. Show a Messenger Greeting, we're also going to turn this off and then also Appointment Messaging, this is again, if we needed to do that, we can do that in many types, so let's turn that off. Basically all of your settings pretty much should be off with the exception of prompt people to send messages. I'll leave that up to you if you want to leave that on or off.
7. Setup: ManyChat Settings & Navigation: All right, so let's get back over to many chat and look at some of the settings that we're going to display here. Just see if you can get familiar with the ManyChat dashboard. So what we're looking at here is your dashboard. This is a active Dashboard of your total subscribers. Right now what it's showing me is basically my subscriber activity in the last two weeks. You can change this to be whatever you want, less seven days last 30 days up to you. But that's what ManyChat really right now focuses on reporting to you is subscriber activity and then there will be engagement activity when you actually start doing broadcast. Okay, before we walk through this navigation area here and ManyChat, let's go ahead and go to settings. Let's click on that and get some things set up here. So the general section of Manychats. This is the area that we turned off in Facebook. This Greetings Text. So let me just show you here if we see how it looks. If someone comes to your page or the day discover your bot through the Messenger platform. This is what they will see. Basically a page, your hazard logo and then a quick welcome message on who your company is. So changed this to be whatever welcome message you want it to be and then go ahead and save that. The other thing that we want to pay attention to is the live chat area. Live Chat is basically a way that you can have conversations with your subscribers in ManyChat itself. The next section, Growth Tools, we're going to talk about that later in the lesson. There's not really much to do here. One thing else say is where it says authorized websites, just make sure your website is added in there. As you can see here, mine are added in here. So go ahead and add that in there. If you are paying for the ManyChat Pro account, then many chats branding items can be turned off. It can be disabled. If you're using the free account, of course, then you won't have that option. So up to you, what you do there. Next section is Notifications. So for notifications, you can set how often you want many chat to give you subscriber reports. Then these are settings for live chat notifications and how do you want to be notified if there's some notification to Admin, which you would be the admin. So you can do it via e-mail or you can get those notifications via Messenger, you can set that to your preferences. The custom fields area. We're going to discuss that later in this lesson and also just leave this as is for now. Then of course your users, which we're not going to get into here, payments integrations, billing API, nothing really to worry about there. Those are a few setup items to know about. Now let's look through ManyChats navigational area. So we went through the dashboard. The other area where it's going to be important for you is understanding subscriber count. So if you hit audience here, you'll see all of your audience list here. As your audience list grows, you're able to click on it individual audience and understand a little bit more about them. Any tags that they have will appear here as well. This is where the Live Chat window sits. If a conversation starts, you actually see the number of people waving your Live Chat queue here and then all the conversations will be heard here. You'll be able to respond and interact as needed in this Live Chat window. The Growth Tools area, we'll talk about that shortly. But this is where you will be building different types of tools to help promote your bot. The Broadcasting area. This is where you can schedule broadcasts. This is where you can relate it to e-mail, where an e-mail you can send out an individual broadcasts and campaign. This is where you can do it in ManyChats. So once you get new broadcasts, this would set it up for broadcast message to go out to all your subscribers. Then I'm going to skip over automation right now. But let's go over the Flow Section just so you know what this is. The Flow Section is where all of your flows are stored. So flows are basically your sequential messaging or it could be one message, but these are where all your messages sit. One thing I'll say about many chat and just basically creating flows in general, you want to have a really good organizational system. One reason is that with Manychat, you may find yourself using flows repeatedly where you can maybe have a flow for your welcome sequence. That would be the same flow for you welcome sequence for people who sign up on your website. You want to keep them organized as much as you can. Keep folders categorized with different flows. So you might have different ways for people to unsubscribe. You can have your different unsubscribed messages and flows within this folder. Same thing goes for a welcome message. You can have your different welcome messages stored within this folder. The next section is the Automation Section. This is the section that we're going to spend the most time on. This is the section that we're going to use to build out the elements for your class project. Very quickly let me take you through all of the elements in here. So the main menu, this is the menu that someone sees is when they come to interact with your chat bot. The main menu appears, if they're on their mobile device, appears at the bottom of the message area. If they're on their desktop or if it's collapsed and it appears just like a regular menu, hamburger menu would appear so someone can click on that little icon and then this area would appear. It would show. The default reply, this is where we're going to put that message that we turned off in Facebook. If someone types "hello" a default reply can go out. So we're going to work on this together. The welcome message as well, we're going to work on together. This is just the welcome that someone gets the minute they subscribe or get started with your bot. Keywords, we're not going to go into in this lesson. But so you know, there are certain keywords that are automatically set up for you when you just start your ManyChat account and that is the start or subscribe keyword. Basically anytime someone's types and start, it will start your welcome sequence or someone hit subscribe same thing it'll start at the entire subscription welcome sequence. The stop or unsubscribe. These are again default settings of Manychat. If someone types in any of those, they will be unsubscribed for you, from your bot. Keywords can trigger either an action or a message and a flow. Then Sequences. Just to talk a little bit about that again, we won't be doing this in this 101, but this is where you can build your sequences and sequential messaging. If you're familiar with e-mail, you may remember that there's a lot of flows and drip e-mail sequences. That's exactly what this would be in Manychat. Then rules, again, a little bit more of an advanced feature which we won't talk about in this class. But so you know, you can create rules to trigger certain actions or events should someone do something or should someone qualify or meet a certain condition. So those are the most important areas of ManyChat that you should know about. In the next lesson, we're going to go into the chat bot planning guide and start planning out your bot.
8. Preparation: Your Planning Guide: In your chatbot planning guide, you're going to find a few pages in there that will help you to set up the different sections that we're going to need in your Facebook Messenger chatbot. The guide is easy to use. You'll see that you can fill out pages five through seven, with the dialogue flows that you'll need for your bot. The three flows that we're going to build for your class project are the main menu, the default reply, and the welcome message. Inside the welcome message is where will have your e-mail capture form. For your main menu, it's the area that people will see no matter when and where they're coming from to your chatbot. You want it to contain items that will help the person navigate as they need to, but that will also help you achieve some goals. Typically, having your website in the main menu is useful, especially if someone is only visiting your chatbot from your Facebook pages or from the Messenger app itself, then being able to link to your website is helpful. Now obviously if they're coming to your website and interacting with your bot. That way, the visit website link will be less valuable to them. You can also think about things like for mine, I have a book of consultation, so someone can easily just book calls easily from the chatbot. What I will say is that you can look at your website, and look at some of the navigational elements on your website in your menu section, and maybe there are some things that you can pull out from there. Now if you're using the free version of many chat, you will only have an option to use two menu items. If you have the pro version, then you can have three menu items. Also know that there are sub menus. Each menu item has up to five sub menus that can go under it. The default reply is as simple as it sounds. It's simply the reply that you want people to get once they come to your site and start a chat with you. Someone comes to your bot says, "Hello, I have a question." You want the default reply to go out, letting them know that you'll get back to them within, for example 24 hours. Make your default reply short and simple, and you have an option to put a button underneath your default reply. If you want to direct someone to another page in the meanwhile while they wait for a response, then go ahead and use those buttons. Those are optional. Now the welcome message is where we're going to spend the most time thinking about what we want to have there and planning for it. Think of the welcome message as the first level of conversation that someone has with your chatbot. If they click Get Started to start chatting with your chatbot, whether it's from your website or from your Facebook page itself, you want a message to go out to them, welcoming them and thanking them for starting a chat with you. As much as possible, make your welcome message clear, concise, and let the person know what are the next steps. You should have a goal for your welcome message. You should, then echo can be a couple of things. In our case, for this class project, one of the goals that we're going to use is to collect an e-mail address so we can hopefully follow up with that person later. That does not have to be the goal that you have. You can choose something else. E-mail is just a very common goal that many people have, so it's something that I'm going to show for this class, but you can have other goals for your welcome message. It could again someone can book a call with you. It could be to look at your pricing page. As you can see in my example, where I have free e-mail course, that's my recapture copy. I have a free e-mail course that goes out through my mail service provider. someone clicks that free e-mail course button, the bot's going to ask what's your e-mail address, and they'll give me their e-mail address and then I can add them to my list. That's my method for e-mail capture. We're going to build something like that in this class, and that will be a part of your class project. You do want to make sure that copy is enticing. It can of course simply say sign up for my lists or sign up or subscribe. But you want to think about that because sometimes having a simple subscribe now or sign up for my list is not enough. People don't know why you want their e-mail address, so give them a reason to, whether it's through a lead magnet, a free e-mail course, you're going to give them something in return like a download or what people download, whatever that is. Plan out your goal, think about what your welcome message will be. Use these examples that I have here in the chatbot planning guide to plan out your bot. Again, keep it simple and once you fill this out, we'll be able to move on to the next steps of actually putting it in to the chatbot flows within many chat.
9. Building: The Main Menu: Now it's time to start building out your chatbot. In many chat, open up the automation section in the navigation menu, and then go to main menu. This is where we're going to enter in the items that we planned for, in our chatbot planning guide. In order to edit the main menu, you want to go to the top right hand side, click on ''Edit menu'', and then enter in the copy that you planned out in your guide. Mine not changing here, but I'm going to put visit website, once you do that, it asks you what do you want to happen when this button is pressed on the bot? I want it to go to a website, I'm going to click ''Open website'' and I'm going to put in my web address. Same thing for my second option, which I want people to book a consultation and I send them directly to the link to book time on my calendar. If you are using the Pro version, you have an opportunity to create a third menu item, and in my case it's going to be the pricing page so I enter that in and then done. That's really simple, that's all you have to do with your main menu.
10. Building: The Default Reply: Next up, we're going to go ahead and putting the copy for our default reply. Same thing, we're going to go ahead and hit edit. Something to note about the default reply, you can make it so that way the default reply goes out only once per 24 hours when someone chats with your bot. Let's say at five o'clock pm, they write, "I have a question". The automatic message will go out. Then, you write them back, and two hours later, they write to you again saying they have another question. The default reply won't go out in that case if you have it set to once per 24 hours. However, if you want it to go out every time someone chats, every time someone writes you, then it will go out no matter how many times they wrote you in a day. If you want to think about why you would leave it to one or the other, it could become very annoying if someone's writing different lines and maybe they don't write their whole sentence in the complete message bubble, but they write, "I have a question. Can you answer it? Can we talk tomorrow?". That default reply will go out each and every time. You want to think about, what do you think is best for you? In terms of my default reply, "Hi, thanks for your message". It's all good here. You can also add a button to your default reply. In my case, I want people to go to my pricing page. Now with your buttons, you can have your customers do many different things. It doesn't only have to link to a website. You can have your button be a starting point for another message step, and if someone typed that button, "Who's Jenny?", it sends them a message. The message here, so I'm going to go ahead and name this. I can type in my message here that responds to "Who's Jenny?". The other thing to know is that you can preview, so I can send a preview to myself to test this out. I encourage you to keep on previewing as you build out your bot. When you send a preview, it goes directly to your Messenger app on your phone or on your desktop, you'll be able to see what the message looks like. Once I'm done with that, I can hit publish. Now everyone who responds to my page, we'll get this default reply.
11. Building: The Welcome Message: Next up is the welcome message. This is where I'm going to plug in my welcome to people who are just starting a conversation with my bot. Now for my welcome message, I have my pricing. I'm going to actually start a message and I'm going to have the bot respond with the message that I want so that way that person can understand how my pricing works. Instead of going to my website, this response actually comes to them. It is a pretty lengthy response, I wouldn't advise you to do lengthy responses like this in your chat bots, but in this case, where someone's asking for my pricing, it gives me that opportunity. You can break up your messages, so I don't have to put this whole copy here. I can certainly go ahead and break it up into multiple text messages, almost how people text, they text in bits in a sense. They don't send one long message. That's also something that you can do. If you want to delete the buttons, if you made a mistake or you want to move them like I did, then you just click on that button and down here, the delete button allows you to delete any of the buttons that you created. I'll delete all of those, and there we go. Now I'm satisfied with this, so I can send myself a preview. Another thing to just look at is, explore all of these little buttons down here. There's lots of different things that you can do with these buttons. You can send images, you can have a little slide show, you can have an audio recording or a video recording, you can attach a file, you can also even put a delay. Let me show you what the delay looks like. Delays are nice because naturally when we're all typing, we don't really type back to back and fast like that. Putting the delay makes the bot a little bit more human. This checkmark right here, so show typing during delay, you can go ahead and do that so that way, it looks like the three dots that you normally see when someone's typing a message. That's another nice little feature gives it a little bit more of a human quality. Now that we've put in the content that we want for our welcome message, there's one more step that I want you to do for the completion of your class project. That is to have your bot collect e-mails. As we all know, having e-mail addresses are golden and they allow you to do more and communicate more with your prospects. You may be asking, well, if I'm collecting subscribers on Facebook Messenger and I can talk to them that way, well, why do I even need to still talk to them via e-mail? My argument always is be able to communicate with your customers in as many different ways as possible, in the way that they prefer to be communicated with. Give them options. In this example, we are going to ask them how they would like to stay in touch with us. In your welcome message, I want one of your buttons to be some lead capture copy. In my case, if they want to receive a free e-mail course, they can click on this button and they'll be directed to the flow to get them onto the free e-mail course. If you have a download that you're giving your prospects, whatever it is, it could just simply be subscribe, and for your class project, I'll be totally fine if you just put the copy of subscribe here. That's totally fine. You can do that if you wanted to, but I do encourage you to be a little creative on what you want to have there. One thing to note is that many chat or a Facebook Messenger in general only allows you to have up to a certain amount of characters. What I want the person to do is free e-mail course, and I'm going to send them a message. I'm going to start a new flow. The only way I can do that is by sending a message. Once I created the send a new message, so I'm going to ask them, how would they like to receive? The first option that they can choose is Facebook Messenger. Just so you know if that is the way that you are, if you do have some free course like in this case, then you would have to create a sequence and put your, let's say it's a five-day course, you would put those courses into the sequence here. We won't be going over sequences in this class, but stay tuned for more advanced classes where we will go over sequences. The other thing that I advise you to do, you don't have to do, it's not mandatory and definitely not mandatory for the class project, but if someone selects that they want to hear from you via Facebook Messenger, the course, I'll tag them like that and I'd add a tag that says, and boom, my tag is created. The next one we're going to want to do is e-mail collections. You're going to type an e-mail and in order to get their e-mail, we actually have to start another message flow. When they select e-mail, I'm going to send a message and let's just hit Done. The other thing just before I forget is if they say that they want e-mail, let's go ahead and add that tag, and now that's created. That message that I had just created is now here, and I'm going to call it collection. That way I know this is the message that's asking the person for their e-mail. I'm going to say, awesome, you will receive the course via e-mail. But first, tell me your e-mail address. One thing I'm going to do here is first tell me your e-mail address going to actually make that a part of a new message, a new element here. In order to get e-mail from the person, we have to select this option down here that says User Input. This is where I'm going to ask my question, but first tell me your e-mail address. Then here, I'm going to tell ManyChat that I'm collecting the e-mail address here. You can leave all of this as is, and then save the responses to a custom field. In my case, I already have e-mail address created. If you guys have not created e-mail address or it doesn't appear for you, then you just go ahead and type e-mail address and then you would select this plus New Customer Field. But that's only if you don't have it there. In my case I do, so I'm just going to select e-mail address and then that's it there. I'm going to send a preview to myself, and you want to test that out. Something to note, and I've mentioned before, but if you have the pro version, you will be able to publish the e-mail collection button. However, if you are still using the free version, then you'll be able to create this, however, you will not be able to publish it. Just make a note of that. If you're not sure if you want to commit to using ManyChat, then just go with the free version and just take up this e-mail tool. Still submit your idea for your class project to just show us how you thought about your welcome message. If you just want to keep up subscribers via Facebook Messenger, that's totally fine too. Next up, we will look at how to promote your bot using the grove tools and how to connect your chat bot to your website.
12. Promoting: Connecting Your Bot to Your Website: Now that you have your welcome message created, it's time to connect that welcome message to the starting step when a user first joins you on Facebook Messenger. To do that, we're going to have to connect it to a growth tool. I introduced the growth tools earlier to you, but we didn't go over what they exactly were. Growth tools are very interesting and fun to use within many chat. They allow you to promote and grow your bot subscribers. We won't go through all of the widget types, but we will talk about one of them that will be super helpful for growing your subscribers via your website. Click on the Customer Check growth tool. A Customer Chat growth widget can be connected to your website. All you need to do is set it up using the JavaScript code that you'll get within this Setup section. You'll have to connect it to the back-end of your site. If you're using Squarespace, WordPress, you just have to connect it as you do any other JavaScript tags that you connect. The first thing I'm going to do is name my widget. I'm going to call this my Website Customer Chat. I'm going to Save it. Now note that it's not active yet, so I'm not ready to do that yet, and then what I have to do here is, where it says Opt-In Message, usually default to the default Opt-In Message that many chat puts in there for you. We want to replace it with the welcome message that we recently created. I'm going to hit Replace, and down here, so this is all of the flows. We looked at the Flow section earlier in this lesson. But now we're going to actually use one of the flows. Anytime you create a message in many chat, it gets stored into a flow. Again, you want to have folders that organize it for you, however, with the main flows that we just created, the welcome message default reply and main menu content, they already gets that into its own section. So no reason to have folders for those. I'm going to select Welcome Message, I'm going to go ahead and click on it, and then if we look at this, this is exactly the welcome message that we created earlier. I'm going to hit Select This Flow. Now anytime someone sees the Customer Chat icon on my site and they select it, they will get this first message that says Welcome. The next thing that we need to do is add the subscriber to a welcome sequence. We haven't created this just yet. I'm going to show you the steps to create this welcome sequence. All this means is that, once someone signs up for your bot, we want to get them in a sequence. This just basically allows you to welcome them, get used to hearing from you. I would advise that your welcome sequence be about three messages long, in E-mail usually they're about 3-7 messages long and you can spread them out, they don't have to go out every single day. This way, people will get to understanding what it is that you do and how you can help. We will go through that in the next step. For now, leave this blank because we can't connect it to anything, I'm going to hit Save and we're going to come back to this tool in a second. To create this welcome sequence that we need to add here, we need to go back over to the Automation section, go down to Sequences, create New Sequence, and let's call it Welcome Sequence. Let's hit Create, and then let's go ahead and create our first message. They already got the first message welcoming them to the site, and then what I can do is a few minutes later, let's say about 10 minutes later, I do want to limit it to when it goes out just between the hours of eight and around 10 O'clock, Save that. When I create a reply, I can add the person's first name by just selecting this little icon here and then selecting first name. If I need a fallback, so let's say their name is not in Facebook, I can put hi there. Instead of it saying hi blink, it can say hi there. There we go, simple welcome step. I'm going to publish that, turn that on, and then I'm going to add a second message, and that one is going to be a second step welcome message. Then I would just connect my blog post that is there, and then there we go. I can publish that, I can of course send a preview to myself. Now I'm ready to go back to the growth tool, go back to that website customer chat growth tool I created. Where it says Sequence, I'm going to connect the welcome sequence and then I'm going to Save it, hit Next. Here's where it's going to give you the instructions on how to customize it and connect it to your website. If you have certain color codes that you need it to be, you can easily change that so that way the icon appears to your brand colors in the collapsed form and be expanded form. There is a certain message that the user will see. You can customize that here and you can have it differently for people who are logged in and people who are logged out. You can also set whether you just want it to appear on mobile and desktop or desktop only or mobile only, and then you can appear how you want it to be seen. It can show only the bubble, which would mean that it's only showing this icon when someone first sees it. When someone comes to your site, if you want the chat window to open up automatically, it would be this once they come there so that probably prompts more messages to come through and then so forth. You can set the settings however you need, once you do that, just hit Save. You can of course Preview here how it looks in its collapsed state, hit Save. You're can set it active now, but it won't show up on your site until right here where it says Install JavaScript code. We have our websites connected, that's totally fine, it's going to point to its authorize on my websites. We're fine there, click Next, and then here's the code. You're going to want to copy this code and paste it into the head section of your website. Again, depending on what type of website CMS you're using; Squarespace, WordPress, there's different instructions on how to get that in and where do you have to place that code. I have a blog post for WordPress specifically, I'll post that in the community section so you guys can have a look at that. But there's tons of resources online if you have different types of website or if you have a developer, that developer can do it for you, you just have to send them this code. I'm going to hit Finish, then once I set that up on my website, my chat icon will appear in my website. Anytime they hit Chat Now they will be taken directly to my welcome message that we created here. There you have it. That's how you start having conversations with your subscribers via Facebook Messenger directly from your website. Next up we'll look at how you can download the CSV file of all the E-mail addresses that you just collected.
13. Exporting Your Collected Email Addresses: Now that you're collecting email addresses, it's time to export them. To do that, it's actually very easy. All you have to do is go over to so once your chat bot is live, and right now we have it in our welcome message. Once this is live and people are going to it and actually giving you their e-mail addresses, we will be able to see that report here. We'll see the click the report once it's live. Once people start clicking on it in order to actually go to the point of where they give their e-mail, click through this, go one more step. Then here, now we'll of course see the click-through right on this. Click on that again, just so we can get to the actual response area where they gave you their e-mail address. Then down here, you'll see a purple box colored in. If you have responses, click on that and that will take us basically to what looks like a CSV file right here with the person's name and e-mail address. To export that very simple. Just go on over to your right over here. Click on export, CSV, and then once it's successful, hit download. Then you'll get the file there. Then all you'll have to do is take that file and upload it to whatever mail service provider you're using. I will note that there are ways that you can connect your many chat account. You can connect it through Zapier and have a go directly to your e-mail provider, say such as Mail Chimp or anything like that. We're not going to go through that in this course just because everyone has different providers and there are different instructions for that. But we could do a more advanced class for that if needed. If you have a lot of activity, you're definitely going to want to make sure that you use Zapier or just make sure it's connected. To date currently, many chat does have a direct integration with HubSpot and ConvertKit. For the sake of anyone who does have any of those two mail providers. I'll show you where that sits. Let's leave this section now that you know how to get the CSV export and go over to settings and go to integration. I encourage you to check the integrations tab periodically because many chat makes updates to a system as often as it can, of course, and I'm sure they're getting more integrations coming up very soon. Right now HubSpot is integrated. All you have to do is just hit Connect and then you have to follow the steps to make sure that your specific account with HubSpot is integrated with many chat. Then that way e-mails will go over. Or if you're using ConvertKit, again, it'll be very easy to do if you have those. I expect more direct integrations are going to come very soon. But for now, if your mail servers provider is not listed here, then I wouldn't use Zapier. The website link is just here so you can see it. Zapier is a good source for that. If not, then you can just do it manually, which is not the end of the world. It's just another extra step and probably not as fast because you're going have to do it on your time as opposed to having it all be automated. Next up we're going to talk about monitoring your bot for people engagement and behavior and understanding next steps as you start to see how your customers and prospects are interacting with your chat bot.
14. Monitoring Subscriber Behavior: Once your bots up and running, you're going to want to start monitoring it. It's going to be very important, especially in the beginning stages, to understand how your users are interacting with your bot and to see how they're responding to your messages. There are a couple of ways that you can monitor the interactions with your bot from your customers and prospects. For one, you can go over to the live chat area and any conversations that are currently live will show up here under the open section, but conversations that don't make it to the live chat, they're not in the current dialogue, they just go automatically to done. This is where you will see current conversations that maybe are like older that you didn't get to. You can go there. If you wanted to reply or have conversations with anyone because they did ask something and maybe you didn't get to it, you can't do that here. That's one way you can do is monitor a live chat. I actually, if you have a large volume, some of my customers have large volumes. Sometimes I do find it easier in real-time to actually just monitor conversations from the actual Facebook page inbox itself. On your Facebook page, on the main page, if you go over to the inbox section, you will see all of your messages that are taking place here. That's where you can see it a little bit more in real time. Real-time in many chat as well too, but it's a little different, a little bit of a different view. It's really your preference how you want to do it. That's one. The other thing that you're going to want to do as your flows start running is look at your engagement rates and what I mean by engagement rates, I mean clicks that are actually happening on your different sections. You might see that hey, more people are clicking on book consultation, no one's clicking on pricing. That tells me that people are not really ready for my pricing once they're on my main menu. May be I want to try another link out there and see if that gets more engagement. Monitor engagement as needed to see what's working and what's not. Same thing with your default reply. See what people are clicking here. When you're in any of your flows in your messages, you will see the breakdown of how many people the reply was sent to who actually didn't get delivered to, which meant that it means that it reached their actual Facebook Messenger inbox, who opened it? Who clicked? Engagement rates are pretty high on standard right now for Facebook Messenger, just because it is a very new tool, people are not oversaturated with it yet. There's not really been a tone of abuse by marketers with it. You can easily opt out. People can easily just hit stop or unsubscribed to opt out. I think it's getting a really good engagement if people want to hear from you or not. Let's look into the welcome message also just to understand that. Once this is running again, you'll want to see which links are getting the most clicks and then clicking through to understand who's actually staying in touch via Facebook Messenger or via email. Again, remember to monitor your email collection to see if that's even getting attraction. You may find that more people are saying they want Facebook Messenger and that's totally fine and maybe email is not even an option, you may find it 50-50. So just start making judgments based on the activity that people are doing and see what's best for your users. Something else that you'll want to look out for is for requests to unsubscribe from your bot. Even though someone can simply type unsubscribe or stop. Not everyone knows that yet and not everyone does it correctly. If we look into the automation section and go to keywords, you'll see that by default many tech gives the stop or unsubscribe keyword. If someone types any of those, they will get a message that confirms that they want to unsubscribe from this bot. However, one thing that you should know is that if they type in stop with an exclamation point or if they say stop, please, that won't trigger the bot to unsubscribe them as it stands right now. Something that you may want to do, and I tend to do it just because is I put in the keywords of stop with an exclamation point. Stop! Please and then why not even stop! Please! With an exclamation point, unsubscribed please, unsubscribe please. We do have to put those in and any kind of other variations of you noticed people are typing to your bot, start putting those keywords into this so that way many chat can detect them and then unsubscribe them. That is a downfall. The bots not totally smart yet. At least the bot as it stands right now, the way it's built, not totally AI driven, but it's partially there. We just need to help the bar a bit more when it comes to human interaction. The other thing to know is that if you monitor and you see someone is typing, please unsubscribe me or if they say, I don't want to get messages from you anymore, things like that that are totally not going to trigger the unsubscribe flow, then you can do it yourself. You can just go over to the audience and then look for that person's name. Let's just give you the example. If you are in your inbox, you saw someone here wrote in, I don't want to receive messages from you anymore. That's a good enough notes to say, okay, you need to unsubscribe them manually. I would take their name, just copy their name, and then go over to my main chat account, do a search for their name, find that person, and then click on their profile, and then these little three dots up here, we can use that to manually unsubscribe them. You can also delete a user completely from your bot if you need to, if they say there's GDPR compliant rules out there let's say if you, if someone asks for their data to be removed completely, you can remove them completely. You have a little bit of control on what you can do to help protect anyone from receiving messages from you that they don't want or if they don't want you to have that data. Know that's an option for you. Next up, we're going to go through some common pitfalls and mistakes that happen with Facebook Messenger and chat bot building and ways to grow your chat bot going forward in the future.
15. Common Mistakes & Pitfalls: There are some common pitfalls that you can make when building your first Chat Bot. You're going to want to learn as you go and start to really monitor your Bot to understand what you should and shouldn't do moving forward based on your customer and prospect activity. We all have different types of customers and they all have different types of behaviors. Listen to your audience, see how they interact with your Bot, and then make changes from there. I'm going to give you the more common and standard pitfalls that you should avoid based on overall general observance. Let's go over mistake number 1: transparency. Transparency is super important. You want to let your customers know that this is a Bot that they're communicating with and not an actual live human being, at least not yet. There can be ways for your subscriber to ask to speak to your human and you should enable that. You can simply do that by setting up a key word that triggers a notification to you. You could also upfront the minute someone subscribes to your bot. Maybe in that welcome message, put a little note at the bottom saying, "Just know, this is a bot, however, you can speak to a human anytime." Or let them know, 'I monitor my messages once a day and I respond to any messages that the Bot can't handle.' Mistake number 2 is negligence. With ChatBot it's not a set it and forget its automation strategy. You shouldn't just set up your Bot and never look at it again and never monitor it again. You should monitor behavior, monitor how your customers are interacting with it, see if there's any frustrations, and if there are, change and tweak some things. You can also implement little surveys and ask, how did this help you? How do you like the Bot? How did you like this experience. Conversing with this bot? See what your customers say. People tend to be very honest when it comes to quick surveys, especially ones that are implemented through Bots. Mistake number three: it's too complex. Keep it simple. This entire lesson was geared towards making you a simple, easy and effective ChatBot. We don't want to make our Bot too complex for the most part, when people interact with your customer chat tool on your website, they actually are expecting to speak to human right away. Keep that in mind. Think of the automated phone. You call up your airline and it says press one to go here, press two to go here. now press four. You don't want that experience implemented in your Bot. You want it to be as light and simple as possible. You want to remember that your Bot is not human, you're the humans. You should always be the one standing behind and actually ready to answer questions that actually do need a human to attend to. The next mistake that's pretty common is spamming. Just because we have this tool and we have a tool such as [inaudible] chat that can do broadcasts and do automation. We don't want to spam. We don't want to use this Bot for constant messages and going out to your subscribers phones just like the way email became. We don't want that experience. Try to avoid using the broadcasts way too much and too frequently and use sequences more. Those tend to be a little bit more in bits and pieces of information. They can be digested easier than you trying to send out promo blast every time. Don't abuse it, don't spam. Again, do surveys. Ask your customers how they want to hear from you so that way you have more of an indication. Also by adding in that email feature where you ask the person do they want to receive promotions via Facebook Messenger or email. That's going to give them a little bit more choice. They may tell you that they only want to receive promotions via email, which in that case you won't send them broadcasts. You will exclude them from any broadcast campaigns. Use the 95 percent rule where 95 percent of your messages should be informative and educational and the other five percent can be left for selling. Mistaken number 5: there is no exit for your user. Sometimes people do start a chat with you, they're now subscribed to your Bot and now they can be subscribed to messaging. However, you don't want to make it hard for them to unsubscribe or get out of this whole broadcasting sequence that they're now part of. Sometimes people don't understand what they're signing up for when they do accept to start chatting with your Bot. Make it clear and easy on how to unsubscribe. I would say every few messages, always have a little second text that says, "To unsubscribe press star or unsubscribe it anytime." Maybe include a button at the end of each menu item. Actually, in your menu you can use that third menu button to be an unsubscribe button. That way people can get out of your Bot. With Facebook Messenger compared to any other chat tools, it tends to be a little bit more on the, I would say, creep factor for lack of better words because Facebook has a lot of user data and you know exactly what the person's name is and who they are when they're chatting with you on Facebook Messenger as opposed to any other chat tools that are implemented by some of the other software programs. That opens itself up to more privacy risks. You want to make sure you're respecting your users request to unsubscribe. That's why I also said monitor your inbox because sometimes people think there are adults. They say, "Hey, please take me off this Bot." They think that's doing the job to unsubscribe them, but it's not. It's not triggering the right flow that needs to get that person unsubscribed. Be sure to take those common mistakes and pitfalls and implement them in the right way. You're not ignoring your subscribers and you're growing your ChatBot in the most efficient and effective way and in a way that helps you reach your goals, but also helps your customers get to the place that they want to get with your brand.
16. Final Thoughts: We all can learn how to build a chatbot. I'm really glad that Facebook Messenger is one of the tools that is becoming more effective and very easy for pretty much anyone to use. Small businesses and large businesses really have no reason why they shouldn't be on Facebook Messenger using chatbots. I'm glad that I finally learned how to build one myself and saw that it wasn't too much different from email. It is a nice little optional to add to my bucket. Now it's your turn. Go ahead and apply any of the tips and tricks that you learned today and start building your chatbot. Thank you for taking the time today to take this course and learn about chatbots and learn how to build one yourself. As you can see, it's not that difficult to do. As while it may look intimidating, it's something that anyone can do as long as they have a free Facebook account and a free version of Manychat that they can use.
Jennifer Nelson, Your Email & SMS Marketing Instructor
