Businesses used to communicate to customers solely through email, but that communication has grown to other channels, with social media messaging being a key medium. Each month, 20 billion messages are sent between people and businesses—and that number just keeps rising. Facebook and Instagram ads are becoming more and more personalized to the viewer. 

Because of the shift towards personalization, the opportunity for ad placement on messaging apps is huge, and Hawke Media and Octane AI are experts on the craftiest ads and ad techniques. In our latest webinar, Hawke Media’s Senior Social Media Expert Alex Kyle and Octane AI President Ben Karr team up and share their tips for using Octane AI and conversational ads. Here are some of our key takeaways from the webinar that your business can use to drive revenue and increase subscribers on Facebook Messenger, especially small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses that are revenue-focused in Q4. 

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What Are Conversational Ads?

Conversational ads allow you to send follow-up messages to people who click your Facebook ads. Traditional ads are an important piece of the stack, but if you don’t get to follow up with the customer, the customer disappears. 

If you can follow up, you can retarget your customers with different messaging. Retargeting helps keep your customers engaged and moving along on the customer journey, which is your ultimate goal! 

The Tips 

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1. Set up Your Account for Success

In order to run a successful campaign, you must have a Shopify storefront, Facebook Ads account, and a Facebook page. In your Shopify storefront, you must have more than three products within the platform. 

To make your account stand out, it’s also nice to have DPA ad units, 10-15 percent off single-use coupons per customer, product catalog with numerous SKUs, a higher price point, and common client questions and responses. Conversational ads will narrow down products and hone in what the people are looking for in order to personalize the ads for each particular customer. ‍

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2. Opt-In Tools Are Extremely Powerful Revenue Tools

Opt-in tools are great because they’re free subscribers. They’re people who saw an offer and decided to opt-in. If you fire a discount offer on cart pages, it’s an incentive for the customers.

Add to cart pop-ups serve as order updates, and they allow customers to subscribe to your channels and emails. Add to cart checkboxes can be a pretty significant driver of revenue, where when you opt-in with them it sends you a discount or incentive code. An exit intent pop-up creates a pop-up that reminds the customer one last time to check out deals and subscribe before they leave the site.

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3. Utilize Your Chatbots

‍When you click on a Facebook ad, have a chatbot that pops up asking you how you want to proceed with getting more information. You can then segment your customers back into a specific group depending on what they’re looking for—such as offers and promos, information, or tips.

Any button you click makes you a subscriber, and then your customers will receive messages with relevant information—when it’s relevant. You can also give your customers coupons via chatbot to use at the checkout when they click on your ads.

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4. Integrate Customer Service With Your Chatbots

‍Having a chatbot that answers questions about your products on Facebook Messenger is an extremely helpful benefit to have when running conversational ads. If the bot cannot answer a question, then you’ll have a customer service representative from your business on deck to answer it. 

Once you gain more information about your customers, then you can segment that customer into more and more specific lists. They’re now in the messaging funnel, and we can message them with different ads personalized to them.

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5. Sponsored Messages Shouldn't Be a Secret

‍Sponsored messages don’t compete with other products or ads, and they’re typically very small investments with very large returns. A trick to making sponsored messages tick is to really push your subscriber bases.

To learn more about conversational ads on Facebook Messenger, including Alex Kyle’s “Day 0 Launch Guide” (more like your first conversational ad survival guide!) check out the full webinar. Shoutout to Ben Karr and Octane AI for partnering up with us this one! ‍

Related Reads

‍Facebook Messenger Marketing

What to Do Before Launching Digital Ads