Day: June 7, 2019

Email Vs. Facebook Messenger! Which is Better?

Post author By BlackStorm Home Service Marketing
Post date June 7, 2019

Facebook Messenger Stakes its Claim Against Email

When was the last time you had average open rates above 80% and the average click-through rates of nearly 30%. Unless you have been in digital marketing since the very first days in the 90s and early 2000, most of us know that you will be lucky to get a 30% open rate or a click-through rate above 10%. In fact, recent data by Smart Insights reported that email open rates average is at 22.87% while average click-through rates are down to just 3.26%. Meanwhile Facebook Messenger the newest marketing channel boasts average open rates of 84.3% and average click-through rates of 28.3% according to Modern App which analyzed 100,000 message samples.
Facebook Messenger bots are a relatively new channel but could they just displace email as the preferred marketing channel. Email has been around for a long time and many business owners are familiar and comfortable with it as compared to Messenger. Facebook Messenger chat bots only came into the scene in 2016 and it is estimated that there are approximately 900 million people using the platform every month. Meanwhile, email has been around for longer and has a massive 2.7 billion users, which is expected to top 2.9 billion in 2019. Facebook Messenger may never surpass that any time soon. However, the effectiveness of Facebook Messenger when it comes to metrics show that it is the most effective channel at the moment.

What are Facebook Messenger Marketing Bots?

Facebook Messenger bots are a collection of digital messages that can be very effective marketing tools. They are programmed by AI to provide automated responses and answer questions. You can get a programmer to code a bot for you or go to a mobile platform such as Mobile Monkey or Chat Fuel, where you can easily build the bot yourself. With a bot, you get to automatically respond to customer questions to improve conversions and customer service. This can save you a lot of time that you would have had to spent replying to emails or having someone on standby answering client questions.

Advantages of Facebook Messenger over Email

1. Personalization

Messages on Facebook Messenger are highly personalized and conversational, which makes it very likely that your messages are more likely to be opened. On the other hand, while email is still a great channel for marketing, it is less personalized and conversational. Moreover, users receive tons of emails a day and with providers such as Google providing filtering, your emails might be dumped in the promotions tab and never see the light of day.

2. You do not have to Deal with Email Fatigue

Long gone are the days when we used to get only personal emails in our inboxes. In the modern world, we get tons of spam in our inbox and marketing emails are more likely to be ignored than most other emails due to email fatigue.

3. Less Time Spent Building a List

Building a list takes a lot of time that may not even convert that well once you build it. Conversely, there is less friction involved in creating a Facebook Messenger leads list. Moreover, your prospects do not have to opt into email newsletters that you spent hours crafting and optimizing. All they need to do is click and subscribe as compared to email, which requires several steps such as type in email, submit and confirm, which increase the chances of users dropping off.

4. Enjoy More Options and Message Sequences

Just like with an email campaign, you can send message sequences which have as many or more options as compared to email sequences and can be just as long or short. However, the best thing about Messenger sequences is that you do not have to wait a day or two before sending the next sequence as you can send the next message anytime you feel like including immediately.

5. Instant Response

Unlike emails where you have to wait sometimes for several days for the recipient to respond, Messenger responses are instant. Moreover, you can engage in real-time conversations with the leads, which significantly improves the chances of conversions.

6. Retargeting

Facebook Messenger is more effective at retargeting given that unlike email, Facebook has a lot of data about your prospective customers. You get data about how they look, their gender, their occupation, where they went to school and even their income. On the other hand, email hardly offers any information about your prospects which makes sending emails more like shooting in the dark. With so much information on your prospects, you can write highly targeted messages and retarget to a very specific customer that is likely to convert.

7. Opt-in Features

Facebook Messenger has the same opt-in features provided by email lead generation platforms. You get boxes, buttons, slide in and pop-ups just like you would with email. You can even acquire leads when they simply leave a comment on your Facebook page which shows that they are interested in what you have to offer.

Facebook Messenger for E-Commerce

The Facebook Messenger chatbot is particularly effective for e-commerce and it should definitely be a tool in the marketing arsenal of any online business. Some of its uses are in:

1. Abandoned Cart Recovery

Messenger makes it possible to create a bot that sends a message to a client who added a product to their cart but did not check out, just like you would with email. You can set up Messenger to ask the client if they have any questions about their purchase or if they would like to check out. This can result in up to 11% conversion of abandoned carts as compared to email, which only converts abandoned carts at about 4%.

2. Live Chat

Messenger provides one of the most effective ways to interact with clients. The Messenger live chat bot makes it easy to either respond manually if you are online or let the bot reply if you are offline. Your customers can receive instant responses to any questions they may have, which gives a good customer experience that can significantly drive conversions.

3. Shipping Updates

It is easy to send messages about the shipping status of orders to customers. You can notify clients of when the package is delayed, shipped and delivered. Messenger can be a way of complementing email updates that could get lost.

4. Product Suggestions

Given that you have access to a lot of data about your potential clients, you can help first-time visitors find what they want or make a decision on what to buy if they do not know what they want. You can configure the Messenger bot to ask the client questions about their preferences and finally lead them to a suitable product. This could also give you an SEO boost as more people spend time on your site and improve engagement metrics.

The Bottom Line

Facebook Messenger is currently one of the most effective ways of doing online marketing campaigns. Its metrics have supplanted email with their high average click-through rates and open rates. It also comes with a variety of functions and apps that would benefit businesses and individual users alike. It is yet to suffer from messenger fatigue, which means that high open rates could lead to high conversion rates. For businesses that take advantage of it, there is still a first-mover advantage to be had as most marketers have yet to discover this excellent channel.

Tags advantages of instant messaging over email, chat vs email, email vs instant messaging, facebook messenger conversion rate, messaging app vs email security, messenger marketing vs email marketing, similarities of email and instant messaging

SEO

What If Your Website Could Talk

Post author By BlackStorm Home Service Marketing
Post date June 7, 2019

Have you ever wondered if your website could talk?
And if it did talk what message would it send to your customer?
And when I speak of talking websites I am not referring to the text you have used on the website. There is a lot more to what you communicate through your website than the text. The brand’s message can be communicated in a variety of ways some of which have nothing to do with content.
Back to your website and if it could talk, would it portray your business as an efficient and successful company selling high-quality services and products. Does it portray the company as one that will fulfill the needs of the client or does it tell a story you do not want to be associated with your business?
Every interaction with your website is a huge opportunity to tell the client the right story so that you can convert them down the line or keep them as customers. You need to make sure that any information they need is easy to find on the site, which shows that you care about them. A website that tells a good story will load fast thus showing that you care for the user experience of your clients. Given that mobile has overtaken desktop, a website that loads seamlessly on handheld devices shows that you care about all your customers.
The website is one of the best ways to build credibility, loyalty, and confidence in your brand. A lot of customers judge a business from their website. If your website has a terrible experience, visitors will leave with a negative perception and may never return. In a world where the web is critical in brand building, perception is everything.
While everyone knows that an old fashioned website does not necessarily indicate that a company has terrible products or subpar services, the negative perception cannot be avoided. If you have a dated design, the impression you are giving is that you are a tacky business.
If you have a publicly accessible website, it is always telling a story. Whether your business is a standard brochure site, an e-commerce website or any other online shop, it will always be talking. If it is talking you need it to be speaking in line with your brand’s message and singing your praises.
By sending the right message to the right people, you can improve your business by aligning what your website is saying with the brand.

Marketing

A Blueprint for Increasing Contact Form Conversions

Post author By BlackStorm Home Service Marketing
Post date June 7, 2019

Professional Image of your Home Service Business

A 2015 Formstack study found that when a form has 4 fields, it will convert at a rate of 1%. This means that when you have 10,000 people come to your page, only 100 will fill out the contact form. So the big question is how can you improve the conversion rates on your contact form? How can you increase that conversion rate even if it is only by a few percentage points so that you can get 200 or 300 visitors to convert out of 1000? Well, after some research that included reading up on case studies, statistics, and digging through data, I made an infographic on how to craft the ultimate contact form.
I am making the assumption that you know that we are discussing the contact form on the contact page on your website. There are tons of contact forms in different industries and on many websites but we do not have the time, and it is not practical to discuss them all. The data in the infographic is relevant to companies that offer some kind of service who need to increase the number of quality leads from their contact form.

1. Place Labels above Fields

When users can see what they need to enter in the respective fields, it makes it easier to fill the form. Users are more likely to make more mistakes in filling the form when the label is inside the field as it will disappear when they start typing. Moreover, they would have to delete what they have written in the field if they want to see the label again.
Another critical tip about labels is to keep them as close to the corresponding field as possible. The law of proximity applies to labels too and if you have the labels too close to previous fields, you significantly increase the probability of errors and mistakes. This has a knock on effect on your conversion rates.

2. The Phone Field Needs to be Labelled “Optional”

A lot of people do not like to give out their phone number for whatever reasons. People become even cagier on a contact form where they know they do not have to talk to you. If you need to get phone numbers, let the field be optional and clearly label it as such next to the field. Our clients at Black Storm have seen conversion rates jump from as low as 42% to 80% just by making this one small change.

3. The Fewer the Fields the Better the Conversions

People have very little patience, particularly on the Internet. if you have a large number of fields, people can feel overwhelmed and intimidated. You do not need to get information such as zip codes, phone numbers, and addresses unless you are going to call them or send them mail. The contact form is there to get you into the room with the client, not to close them. Every extra field added onto the contact form will negatively impact on the conversion rate. One of the best examples of this is Expedia, which removed one field from their contact form and got a 12 million dollar bump in profit.

4. Make the Contact Form for Mobile Responsive

Mobile overtook Desktop in 2014 as the most used device for people to access the internet. In 2015 Google made a change to its algorithm to give mobile-optimized sites a ranking boost in mobile searches. As such, a mobile-friendly contact form will not only easy to use on mobile devices but could also give you a ranking boost in the search engines.

5. Eliminate Captchas

With spam bots getting better, captchas are getting worse and more annoying. A lot of captchas are almost unreadable and most users will abandon your contact form if they cannot figure out what the captcha is. A good alternative to captchas is a honeypot which unlike a captcha, is not meant to be seen by the user. However, the bot will see it and fill it which will cause them to be rejected for filling an invisible field. Honeypots are great for conversions as they do not produce a bad user experience but are effective at fighting bots.

6. Do Not Use a Reset Button

The reset button is silly and will cause you to lose conversions. No one actually hits the reset button so that they can enter all their information again. However, some people may accidentally click on it and delete everything. It can be annoying and unless the user really wants to fill out the form they will likely not want to fill it out again and you will lose the conversion.

7. Rather than “Submit” Label the Button “Send Email”

Send email sounds so friendly and easy as compared to submit which has technical connotations that may intimidate the use.

8. Have Only One Column

Having two columns increases the complexity of your contact form and may result in mistakes and errors that may reduce conversions. Users have been known to miss fields, especially in mobile if they are in the second column because people are used to filling things in one column. Keep it simple with one column to improve conversions.

9. Have More Forms to Increase Conversions

At Black Storm, we did a study and found that 7 out of 15, which is 46% of contact form submissions were filled in on pages other than the contact page. As such, the more contact forms you have on different pages on your website the better the chance at converting clients. This is especially so for big sites with hundreds or thousands of sites where some people may never click to your contact page.

In Conclusion

What makes a great contact form is a matter of subjective opinion and what works really well for one site may not work for yours. However, Statistics never lie and our testing at Black Storm has shown time and again that the content on the page, the position of the form, the color of the form and industry play a significant role in determining the conversion rates. So what should you do? Start with the blueprint on this article and then rigorously do some AB testing to find what works best for your site. Once you have found what converts best, you can adapt it and then maybe then could you claim you have found the perfect contact form.

Don't Go Yet!

Request A Custom Quote For Your Design & SEO.