The Future of Business Communication: Messenger Marketing and Chatbots in 2024

Chatbots and auto funnels are considered the next best thing to the internet. Those who use messenger marketing in business already know about their advantages, opportunities and crazy potential.

Technology is everything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Alan Kay

Messenger marketing is the promotion of business through fast messaging services. The ecosystem is being formed at the junction of the introduction of messenger tools – newsletters and chatbots.

Messenger marketing provides quick and convenient communication between a brand and users. This is important because in current realities, reaction speed plays a key role. Find information about a product or service, get a discount, arrange delivery, make an appointment with a specialist, book a hotel room or buy a ticket to an event – these are just the main features of instant messengers that customers can use.

Thanks to automation and the ability to work around the clock, chatbots and auto funnels have become effective tools for improving customer service and optimizing business processes. These tools must meet, or better yet exceed, audience expectations. And we know how to do it.

In the Long Term, There Is Nothing More Effective Than Messenger Marketing

Chatbots and newsletters are among the top business tools because their audience is huge, personal messages always have a high read rate and most processes can be automated. The most important thing that affects the effectiveness of messenger marketing over the long term is the cumulative effect. Therefore, for business in the long term, there is nothing more effective than messenger marketing.

The audience coverage of newsletters is 5–10 times higher than in communities, and CTR reaches 10–15%. More than a third of Internet users refuse calls in favor of correspondence, including with brands.

Nowadays, the demand for messenger marketing among business clients is growing for several reasons:

• The popularity of instant messengers: they have become an integral part of people’s daily lives; they are actively used for communication, searching for information and making purchases. It is important for businesses to be where their potential customers are.
• Communication efficiency: Businesses see messengers as an opportunity to improve communication with customers, quickly respond to requests, provide personalized service and increase user satisfaction.
• Competitive advantage: Using messenger marketing helps companies stand out from competitors, improve interaction with audiences and increase sales conversion.
• Technological capabilities: the development of technologies in the field of messenger marketing allows businesses to use various tools to manage advertising campaigns, analyze results and optimize processes.

The conclusions are clear: brands that actively develop messenger marketing in 2024 have a greater chance of success compared to those that do not work in this direction. The numbers don’t lie.

What Business Problems Are Solved Using Messenger Marketing?

Messenger marketing is suitable for 90% of companies. In B2C it is advisable to use it in almost 100% of cases.

With B2B things are different. The target audience is limited, the cost of the product is high, the transaction cycle is long, and the client’s path does not always go through messengers. Messenger marketing in B2B can work if users receive a ready-made commercial offer directly in the chatbot.

Messenger marketing allows you to solve both brand and performance problems at once:

• attract a new audience, warm them up and retain them;
• increase brand awareness;
• involve the audience in communication through chatbots and gamification;
• increase customer loyalty through personalization;
• create demand for brand products;
• sell through mailing lists and booster mechanics of bots;
• accompany offline events: for prompt notification of participants and communication on the topic of the event;
• diversify the system of product distribution channels – present the brand in different messengers.

When developing your strategy, focus on your goals and clearly define the tasks needed to achieve them. And to solve problems, use messenger marketing tools – chat bots, mailings and gamification.

Trends 2024 in Chatbots and Newsletters

Take a look at research-based statistics that provide valuable insight into messaging marketing industry trends. Businesses now need to use this data to successfully implement virtual assistants:

• It is predicted that in 2024, 75–90% of requests will be processed by bots.
• The largest industries benefiting from messenger marketing are real estate, travel, education, healthcare, and finance.
• Chatbots and newsletters can save up to 50% on customer support costs.

The messenger marketing ecosystem is rapidly expanding, and if you want to get tangible results, follow the trends. The key trends of the current year are brand performance, gamification, communication automation, ai-driven customer interaction, Web App, digitization and results analytics.

Brand Performance: A Symbiosis of Branding and Performance

Brandformance is a relatively new direction in Internet marketing. Its essence lies in the symbiosis of performance and image promotion, when it is important not just to talk about the product and sell it head-on, but to build a strong emotional connection between the brand and the audience, which directly affects lead generation.

The complementarity of two key areas in advertising – performance and branding – became the starting point in the birth of brand performance. It combines the strengths of the two approaches and addresses the challenges of each.

We are confident that branding is the most effective way of promotion in 2024. This is a long game, but it is justified: step by step, an army of fans is built around the brand, who buy again and again and recommend the brand to others. Brand performance works at all stages of the funnel – from first touch to purchase, and is especially effective for products with a long decision-making cycle.

Gamification and neural networks – the revolution in instant messengers has not happened yet, but give it time.

Observing the habits of social media audiences, two conclusions emerge.

• The first conclusion is that people want brands that can attract them with personalized messages and instant answers to questions. How to achieve this? Using chatbots.

Millennials and Gen Z expect a lot from brands, and delays are unforgivable. Response time should be minimal, otherwise the audience will go looking for a more responsive company. Chatbots solve this problem; they communicate with users online 24/7.

• The second conclusion is that people go where it’s interesting. Neural networks and gamification help attract them. In 2022, the Internet explodes with the news – OpenAI releases the ChatGPT online service, after a couple of months it gains more than 100 million users. Global corporations are picking up the trend and developing their own projects based on the GPT model. Technology has enormous potential for implementation in various areas of our lives.

Gamification—game mechanics within instant messengers—helps create emotional contact with the audience and make them memorable. The cost of such contact is several times lower than individual applications.

But so far we see one thing: few marketing companies use artificial intelligence-based chatbots to improve user experience, and in vain. We are confident that the future of personalized digital marketing looks like a combination of human sociability and artificial intelligence. And we need to use this now.

Automation of Communications: Convenient Interaction Between the Audience and the Brand

Messengers in the digitalization chain provide constant advertising touches with the audience, provide close contact with the audience in a format convenient for them. Solving business problems within the framework of messenger marketing is not a simple sequence of linear actions leading the client to a sale, but a complex and more effective process of satisfying customer requests.

One of the trends in messenger marketing is the creation of a system of convenient interaction using chatbots, automatic chains of letters and trigger messages. This way, it is possible to solve a number of problems – optimize the client’s journey, find a solution to their problem and focus on the main thing.

• For example, a chatbot can answer common questions or transfer to a manager if it doesn’t find a solution. And trigger messages will remind the client about signing up for a service or a forgotten cart

Web App: An Alternative to Mobile Applications

Web-up is an interactive version of the application that works through instant messengers. Anything can be inside a web-ap: a website page, a loyalty system, a banking application or even a game.

This is how brands improve user experience and simplify interactions. The advantage is that there is no need to install separate applications or leave the messenger.

Analytics and Metrics in Messenger Marketing: Main Indicators and Their Impact on Efficiency

Messenger marketing allows you to reduce the final cost per lead thanks to interactive interactions and integration of selling elements into the funnel. Chatbots and auto funnels must be profitable, so it is important to track conversions at all stages – from logging in to completing the target action.

The purpose of messenger marketing analysis is to evaluate the results obtained, correlate them with the set KPIs, remove broken links and scale successful ones. Sources of data for analysis – internal analytics of mailing services, statistics of the telegram channel, advertising account.

Developing a Brand Strategy: Where to Start and How to Scale

It will no longer be possible to hold the attention of the audience with discounts and promotions alone – there are more offers on the market, price ceases to be the decisive factor for consumers. Brands need to look for new approaches to stand out from others and make their audience fall in love with them. Therefore, the implementation of a brand performance strategy is more relevant than ever.

The brand performance model is built from three parts:

• preliminary analytics – allows you to understand how to differentiate yourself from competitors and what the audience needs;
• communications strategy – creates demand;
• performance strategy – satisfies demand.

When preliminary analytics have been carried out and the reference points are clear, you can begin to develop auto funnels and chat bots.

It is important to integrate messenger marketing into an SMM strategy; without it, effective promotion in 2024 is difficult to imagine.

Stages of Funnel Design

We design car funnels in three stages:

• Modeling – preliminary visualization of the funnel logic.
• Prototyping is a detailed development of the funnel taking into account the user path.
• Technical content – introduction of technical features.

The construction of funnels is based on a universal structure that involves bringing the audience from the first touch to the motivated stage and making a purchase.

Stages of Chatbot Design

The chatbot scheme is assembled based on the requirements and the user path from start to target action.

We implement the task in four stages:

• Digitize business requirements – First, you need to understand the key challenges of the business in order to offer an effective solution to them.
• Formation of the primary functionality of the bot – based on the requirements, we assemble a functional diagram of the bot, determine the user path and target user actions.
• Defining a dialog structure template – creating a communication environment between the bot and the client. We study the user path and non-standard behavior patterns.
• Creation of integration solutions – we create an integration scheme with external platforms for creating, storing and processing data on clients and their actions in the bot.

A simple chatbot is a flowchart with menus, buttons and messages, where each user request has a specific response option. Complex chatbots include different scenarios of user behavior. You are given the right to choose, the ability to navigate through different sections, return to the menu, request other information or contact the manager.

What to Do After Developing a Strategy

When all the previous stages are completed, the fun begins.

• We launch traffic – we attract users through targeted advertising and seeding in thematic channels and with bloggers.
• We track indicators – based on the results of the day, week and month, we conduct analytics on the funnel, calculate target indicators and payback.
• We optimize and scale – based on the analyzed indicators, we develop optimization tactics and gradually increase budgets to achieve business results.

The Main Results of This Article

The material turned out to be voluminous and, we hope, useful for you. Let’s summarize:

• a key tool for the SMM strategy in 2024 is messenger marketing;
• build a system of goals in your strategy, and then use messenger marketing to achieve them;
• study trends and learn from the experience of other companies;
• in messengers – introduce new approaches, gamification and web applications (Web App);
• digitize the results.

If you need help developing an effective messenger marketing strategy, contact WGG agency.