Businesses of all sizes have started to use messenger based sales to reach customers directly on their smartphones and increase conversions for their campaigns. Businesses can even save all their details in notes if they are using an iPhone. Take a look at the colorful notes icon aesthetic for your iPhone that will make your phone homescreen much more attractive. Although using messenger based sales is beneficial for your business, there are common pitfalls that businesses fall into when using messenger based sales. Here are some of the common mistakes made when using messenger based sales.
#1. Not understanding the buyer journey
The first and most important aspect of messenger based sales that your team needs to understand is the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is simply the customer’s path to purchasing a product or service from your business. There are three main stages: awareness, consideration and decision. Your company should be aware of the buyer’s journey that’s specific to the products and services you are selling.
Creating a simple customer journey map can help your team understand your customers better and provide value when they ask questions on messenger. With an understanding of where your customer is at in their buyer journey, you can educate them, warm them up and eventually offer your solution. By guiding the customer through their buyer journey, they’ll develop rapport and trust with your business and will likely purchase from you.
#2. Lack of personalization
The average consumer can tell the difference between an automated reply and a human reply. Many companies just use automated systems as soon as a person contacts their business and this can lead to unsatisfied customers that leave the conversation. With an online business, personalization is even more important. Facebook users are used to human and personal conversations on messenger and they can pick up on automated conversations fairly easily.
You can add personalization to your messenger communications by using their name in conversations along with any details they provide you with. Some companies even use AI writing software to help automate their personalization efforts. This will help guide the customer through your sales pipeline until they talk with a representative from your company. Additionally, the messenger platform is much more informal than email or phone calls. You can include emojis, gifs and other interactions in your replies to add a human touch and gain more trust with your customer.
#3. Late replies
When you’re selling a customer on a traditional platform like email, there’s some leeway in terms of how quickly you need to respond to keep their interest and make a sale. With a mobile platform like messenger, timing is everything. A company simply cannot afford to reply to a customer a day or two later after their inquiry. By that time, the customer has moved on and has likely explored other options. You should aim to reply within 15 minutes of your working hours. In fact, doing this will earn your company a “very responsive” badge from Facebook and that can help you earn more trust with your customers.
In general, you should aim to reply to your customers within an hour or less. This can be difficult if you’re doing it manually, but it can easily be done if you’re using a chatbot or any other automated system. It’s also important to wait until you’re ready to reply to customer inquiries. Facebook allows users to see if you have seen their message and not replying after seeing the message can look unprofessional. It’s best to use an automated system to reply to customer inquiries quickly and then a human sales representative can take over and guide the customer from there.
#4. Using a poor chatbot builder:
One of the best ways to scale your messenger based sales is to use a chabot builder. A chatbot builder allows you to automate a lot of the activities related to messenger based sales without having to code anything. Depending on the chabot builder you use, you can have a variety of CRM integrations and capabilities that allow you to convert more sales. Although most chabot builders are beneficial for companies, using the wrong chatbot builder can harm your company’s interactions with customers on messenger. A poor chatbot builder will give you basic automation capabilities and will not allow you to scale your messenger based sales.
The right chabot builder will be specific to the platform you are using (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) and will provide you with all the tools you need to close and service your customers automatically. Some of the features you should look for in a chatbot builder include different message types, automatic replies, invoicing, personalized messages and more. You should choose the chatbot builder for your company based on the typical needs of your customer.
#5. Lack of cross-team collaboration:
To provide your customer with the best messaging experience, the teams within your company will have to work together. The average customer will come with questions related to their own problem. If someone in marketing cannot figure out a sales question, the customer may end up leaving the conversation. This is why using a tool like amoCRM is crucial because it enables cross-team collaboration to happen directly in the conversation with the customer.
With amoCRM, your entire team can have a unified inbox where all communication is centralized. Any person who’s talking with a customer on messenger can add another team member into the conversation to help meet the customer’s needs. With every team able to help the customer, you can guide a customer from their awareness stage all the way to signing contracts directly on messenger. amoCRM makes it easy to manage all of the ongoing customer conversations directly in one centralized communication platform.
#6. Offering the solution too early:
A big mistake that companies make when using messenger based sales is trying to sell the solution too early in the conversation. When outreaching to clients, it’s vital to listen to their problems. Selling the solution too early can waste all of the previous effort that was used to warm up the client and hear their issue. Additionally, you can lose the trust of the customer if it becomes apparent that you are more interested in getting a sale instead of solving their problem.
You can avoid this by having a better understanding of the buyer’s journey. When a buyer interacts with your messenger based sales rep, it’s vital that you listen and understand where they are in their journey. They can be looking for a solution, defining their problem, considering options, etc. You will not know this unless the customer tells you. Once you have clearly identified where the customer is in their journey, you can continue to warm them up until you make the eventual sale.
#7. Lack of follow-up:
The vast majority of sales and marketing teams are well aware of the importance of following up to close a sale. This is especially true with messenger based sales; it’s well-known that it takes an average of 5 follow-ups to close roughly 80% of sales. Since messenger has much higher open rates and response rates compared to traditional sales platforms like email and phone calls, companies are leaving significant money on the table if they don’t follow up with customers. You can start incorporating follow ups in your messenger sales by manually checking conversations or using your chatbot if it has follow-up features.
There are a variety of follow-up strategies you can incorporate into your process. You should personalize the follow-up as much as possible. If the customer left the conversation at a specific stage, re-engage with them and see if they found the solution they were looking for. Depending on the amount of customers you have, using an automated solution to create automated responses for scenarios like abandoned carts, disengaged conversations and more.