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Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.
Howdy chatbot fans and welcome back.
In this lecture, we’re going to start talking about drip campaigns in Customers.ai. They are your secret weapon or that’s what I like to call them at least.
It’s another form of marketing automation that you could use bots for.
Similar to chat blasts where you could push out a chatbot flow or multiple chat bot flows through a one-off blast, drip campaigns allows you to automate a series of blasts and messages that will go out through Facebook Messenger to all your contacts or to just a specific audience or audiences.
And you can have multiple drip campaigns to multiple audiences.
This is very similar to email workflows that you guys are probably familiar with.
If you guys have used Constant Contact or MailChimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, any of these marketing automation tools, you’ll know how these workflows are set up with email, where you set up an audience, I want these emails to go out at this interval, so on and so forth.
Drip campaigns work the exact same way in Customers.ai, but you should realize that drip campaigns are so, so important.
You’re spending money, you’re spending your time getting contacts into your database in Customers.ai through all these lead magnets, through your case studies, through your link to Messengers and your blog posts, through your Click-to-Messenger ads, through your sponsored Messenger ads, through all these different channels.
Drip campaigns allows you to really continue to stay in front of your audience in an automated way, where you don’t need to go in and separately build a blast or manually send out a blast every single time.
Just briefly a couple best practices for drip campaigns.
One is you should always include the ability to opt out. So offer that opt-out prompt whenever you send out a drip.
The second thing to understand about drip campaigns is the appropriate temporal sequence in terms of time between each drip and when that first trip should be sent out.
So my recommendation, and this is something that both Customers.ai and we have found to be the most effective, is to sort of think about it as a modified version of the Fibonacci sequence.
So after a member gets added to the audience, that’s going to trigger a drip.
You might want to send something out, let’s say ten minutes afterwards, and I’ll explain to you why we go with ten minutes or even maybe fifteen minutes.
And then you can send out another drip in 25 minutes, 25 to 30 minutes.
The third message will go out 45 minutes or an hour. Another message, two hours later, another message, four hours later.
And then one message a day after that, let’s say 1 day, okay?
Two things to realize about these sequences of time, okay? There is the 24 plus 1 rule, okay?
Within 24 hours, if somebody engaging with your bot or somebody messaging your Facebook page basically opting in to subscription messaging, you have 24 hours to send them unlimited.
This is according to Facebook’s compliance rule.
So you have 24 hours from that time to send them in unlimited amounts of promotional or non-promotional chat blasts or chat messages or messages through Facebook Messenger.
After 24 hours expire, without them engaging with your bot, you have the ability to send them one more promotional message after that 24 hours expires.
But if they engage with any of your drips, it resets that clock.
So every time somebody engages with the bot and they stay opted into subscription messaging.
Obviously, if they engage with your bot and they engage in a way they — where they type stop and they unsubscribe, the chatbot messages from Customers.ai will not go to that subscriber, it’ll go to that contact.
But you do — but if they do engage, they answer a question or they type something back to you, that 24-hour clock we can reset, okay?
So that’s why we recommend this sort of schedule.
Drip campaigns increase the effectiveness of any one of your original lead magnets by continuing to stay in touch with relevant personalized marketing messages to your contacts, to your audiences.
There’s two more quick elements to drip campaigns that you should know.
One is getting approved for subscription messaging. This is a setting within Facebook that if your company will get approved for it. It’s a setting in Facebook, you have to actually send in a request.
I’m going to teach you how to do that in the later lecture. It will erase the 24 plus 1 rule and you’ll have the ability to send out unlimited messages because Facebook approved you for subscription messaging.
The next thing to remember is that drip campaigns will override any current chatbot flow a contact is in. So drip campaigns override other chat bot flows.
So that means — say you’re running a Click-to-Messenger ad campaign, like we launched in the previous section and there’s — it’s a source — it’s the semi complex flow, and it might take a person on average, let’s say, 20 minutes to really make it through that flow.
If the contact is engaged enough that they work on to make it through the flow, it might take them 20 minutes, because not everyone’s going through it right away, you know that. Remember that contest chat flow we set up.
If you send out your first drip before a person engaged or answer the question or completed that form, it will override that flow, and they will not get back into that flow unless I send them back into that flow through one of the drips.
Just keep that in mind as you setup your Click-to-Messenger chat bot flows and as you think about your drip campaign.
So most people are not going to continue engage with once one chat bot flow past 15-20 minutes.
But if you want to be safe, then I would recommend sending out your first drip, let’s say, 30 minutes after the audience — after the member gets added to the audience, right?
So that way you’re just extra safe. So that’s what you need to know about drip campaigns.
Again, the difference between drip campaigns and chap glass is the chat less is more aggressive. You’re trying to really sell.
You’re promoting some sort of sense of urgency like a coupon or a new deal or a new piece of news.
The drip campaigns are more like this is about our business, these are some of the things that we offer, these are our competitive advantages.
