Love in the time of bots…? You betcha.

In April 2018, I joined dating expert Matthew Hussey’s marketing team as a copywriter. I had been stalking the brand for about 18 months and wanted to write for a business that helped women achieve the love life they truly desired. 💖

(Matthew is the New York Times bestselling author of Get The Guy, and the resident love expert on The Today Show.)

Around the same time, I started to become interested in Messenger marketing and bots, and I’d just started building them. I was fascinated with stats like this:

  • Email open rates are as low as 5%-18% and the click-through rates are 0.2–2.1%. On Messenger apps, the open rates are 80% + and click-through rates are 30–60%.
  • 45.8% of consumers would rather communicate with a business through a messaging app than email.
  • Facebook Messenger Marketing gets 10–80x better engagement than email and the Facebook News Feed.
Top 4 Bot Tutorials

1. Best chatbot platforms to build a chatbot

2. Build simple ChatBot in Python with RASA — Part 1

3. Build a simple ChatBot in Python with RASA — Part 2

4. How I developed my own ‘learning’ chatbot in Python

So with Matthew being in the relationships coaching program space with about 3 million Facebook fans, I thought this was a great opportunity to use a Messenger bot to coincide with his appearance on Australian reality TV show, “The Single Wives”. (And learn while hitting the ground running!)

The Messenger bot was built in fewer than 7 days, had a few rounds of approval, so needless to say, I missed some things I would have liked to include. But with such a short time frame, and many moving parts, it was going to be a challenge to get everything perfect.

So, I built the bot, we lovingly named him MattBot and sent him out into the world.

Here are the top 3 things I learned when you jump head-first into creating a bot in 7 days (and what you need to consider the next time you create one for your clients or your business):
1. Know exactly why people come to your bot.

I didn’t know exactly what people would want when they came into the bot, as I was busy building the bot for the Australian TV premiere and including all of that content, so I didn’t pay as much attention to the Welcome Message as I should have.

When MattBot was live, we discovered that when it comes to their love lives, people LOVE to type in questions and ask for advice. Since MattBot didn’t have the capacity to give advice, I had to give him the keywords for “problem”, “advice”, “help” etc and direct people to purchase one of our paid programs to get access to the real-life Matthew. Rule #1: Make sure you have keywords!

After a while, we discovered that people come to the bot for 3 main things:

  1. Advice
  2. More information on programs
  3. Customer service

Knowing EXACTLY why people are coming into your bot and what they are likely to what from it, whether it be more information or help, is crucial. It’s best to tell your users some keywords in the Welcome Message to help them navigate the bot.

2. Quizzes and gamification work wonders.

For “The Single Wives” TV show, I decided to create a couple of dating quizzes that would then have a free download of one of Matthew’s optin guides at the end.

I thought they would do OK, and our audience would enjoy getting some new content and have fun testing their dating knowledge. But in reality, they outperformed any other broadcast we did during the 6 weeks of the show’s run.

Check out the stats below for one of the quizzes:

To create a quiz that your audience will love, it’s best to know your data. What’s your email open rate? What content performs well in emails? See if you can turn that into a quiz. If you already have a bot and people tire of what the bot is sending them, see what you can do to make it exciting ﹘ think of what will excite your audience.

For example, during a product launch, these quizzes can be used to tie into a launch using a 5 Day Challenge.

3. Explain your Messenger bot to your team or clients using video walkthroughs.

It’s fair to say most people don’t understand bots, so it’s best not to use the word “bot” when talking to potential clients (in case people think of ticket bots that scoop up all the Britney Spears concert tickets before you get a chance). Use the words “Messenger marketing” (and “bot” sparingly) when talking about bots and the benefits they bring.

I also realised that the team I was working with didn’t understand how bots worked. So, I created a video walkthrough so they could learn the functionality and see how things come together. I used Wistia, Loom, and Screen Record for iPhone to create these videos, which was a big help so we were all on the same page.

Now you know the top 3 things I learned when building a bot for a public figure, and what you can use to help you when building your Messenger bots.

And based on what I learned and what I have shared with you in this article, I have since revised the strategy and the bright, shiny new bot ﹘ named MattBot 2.0 ﹘ is currently pending approval with the head of marketing.

Want to know more about how Messenger Marketing can help your business?

> Click here to get the Essential Messenger Marketing Guide delivered to you via Facebook Messenger (what else?). 😉

Not sure you can tackle a bot build on your own?

> Drop me a line via my Facebook Messenger bot (hit the “Work with me” button) and let me help you out.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !