ManyChat is a popular platform that enables users to build Facebook Messenger chatbots for various purposes like sales, marketing, and support. This chatbot creation tool is easy to use, and users do not need coding skills. It comes with a visual flow builder that helps users to structure and organize conversations. One of the main power of ManyChat is that they save businesses time and money while providing more convenience to customers.
ManyChat offers features such as Instagram Automation, Facebook Comments, and Custom Fields that help to streamline user preferences and simplify advertising and promotion. In this article, we will discuss the history and evolution of chatbots, the power of ManyChat, and the benefits of using ManyChat for businesses.
What is ManyChat?
ManyChat is a tool that allows you to create Facebook Messenger bots for sales, marketing, and support. You can use it to build entire bots in the Flow Builder image, allowing you to develop different ways to drive people to your Messenger bot.
ManyChat is a service that allows you to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger. You can use these chatbots for various purposes like marketing and customer service.
The main selling point of the platform is its ease of use. ManyChat says you can use it to set up a chatbot in about two minutes. And there’s no coding involved; you don’t need to be an expert to do it. At the most advanced level, you can use ManyChat to fully customize your Messenger marketing. Also, you can integrate it with many CRMs. This allows for more targeted distribution.
Why were chatbots created?
Digitalization has transformed society into a “mobile” crowd. As messaging apps grow in popularity, chatbots play an increasingly important role in this mobile-driven transformation. Intelligent chatbots, often interfaced with mobile apps, are changing how businesses interact with customers.
Chatbots allow businesses to connect with customers in a personal way without the expense of a human representative. For example, many customer questions or queries are common and easy to answer, so the company has created FAQs and troubleshooting guides.
Chatbots offer a personal alternative to FAQs or written directions and can even brainstorm issues. They can also delegate customer questions to humans if they’re too complex for a chatbot to solve. Chatbots are popular because they save businesses time and money and provide more convenience to customers.
How chatbots have evolved
Chatbots can be traced back to Alan Turing’s vision of intelligent machines in the 1950s. Artificial intelligence is the basis of chatbots, which have since evolved to include highly intelligent supercomputers like IBM Watson.
The ancestor of chatbots is the phone tree, which takes users through an often tedious and frustrating journey to find their phone, choosing option after option to get through an automated customer service model. Technological advancements and the increasing sophistication of AI, ML, and NLP have evolved into this pop-up live-screen conversation. The evolutionary journey continues.
With today’s digital assistants, businesses can leverage artificial intelligence to provide more accessible, more efficient interactions between businesses and consumers directly from consumers’ digital devices.
Features of ManyChat
Power of ManyChat serves the same purpose: to streamline your preferences and simplify advertising and promotion. It will also attract your customers and make them aware of your new products.
1. Visual Flow Builder
The visual action builder on the dashboard is the foundation of everything you do with ManyChat. Call it the brain of ManyChat, if you will. As the name suggests, Process Builder displays bots, making organizing and structuring conversations easy. These interactions are your chatbot’s response or response to guest comments or messages in whatever channel you want your chatbot to post.
2. Growth Tool
Growth Tools is a feature designed to attract new subscribers and increase sales by increasing traffic to your chatbot. You can define multiple overlays, widgets, and popups in the Developer Tools section. Encourage engagement and help engage your subscribers through Messenger.
3. ManyChat: Instagram Automation
Instagram automation power of ManyChat helps marketers and influencers streamline their Instagram marketing efforts with automated Instagram chats. It also allows users to interact in real-time with users on this popular social media platform. ManyChat CRM collects valuable customer data. Instagram Automation will enable you to:
- Edit and customize dialogue boxes in Flow Builder.
- Text responses to messages and questions sent by Instagram users
- React and reply to add comments.
- Reactions and business automation for all conversational stories on Instagram
- Instagram Ads
- Default button to start a conversation with new customers or followers
- Visit ManyChat CRM for more chats.
4. ManyChat: Facebook Comments
Facebook’s comment tool is another popular tool for marketers. Setting up and getting subscribers with paid and organic posts is easy. The answer will activate the chatbot and add them to the list of Messenger users. If you have any basic questions or needs, you can also access them through the automated lead generation bot process or live chat follow-up.
Every marketer wants to maximize the reach of every post published on the platform. Facebook’s feedback tool is a great option for customer support or sales.
5. ManyChat: Custom Fields
You can use custom fields to store snippets of data that your support team can reuse in future interactions. Additionally, you can switch to other software that integrates with email service providers and apps like Zapier. There are three types of custom fields:
- User: Each subscriber has a unique user location.
- Bot Field: Chatbot field values are the same for all subscribers so that all subscribers can use the bot site.
- System fields: Most values are filled in automatically, except for the email and phone fields.
Benefits of ManyChat
1. Simple Integration with Facebook
Given ManyChat’s focus on Facebook, it would be devastating if the integration was challenging.
Fortunately, this is one of the areas where the platform excels.
Integration is as easy as clicking a button to verify your Facebook page from within the platform. From there, you’ll go through a few steps to give him access to your Messenger page and activity. You can add other pages if needed.
The platform will then send a sample message to your Messenger account page. This shows you what ManyChat does. You can even set it to start immediately.
Finally, ManyChat provides a simple link to the bot that created it. You can share this link in your marketing materials to encourage people to use the bot.
Everything is simple, and ManyChat does a great job walking you through the process. Of course, if you’re unsure, an automation agency can help you. We can also help you integrate ManyChat into your CRM. Just submit an assignment and let us know if you need help.
2. Multiple Membership Tiers
One of the best power of ManyChat is that it’s free to use at a basic level. The platform offers free and professional tiers.
The free tier obviously has many limitations. For example, limit the number of tags and custom fields you can create. Also, you can only play specific broadcast sequences. However, getting used to it without investing in it is rewarding.
The professional edition removes all these limitations and also offers many tools. For example, you can use the Pro version to process payments in Messenger. Also, when you upgrade to Pro, all ManyChat branding disappears.
Interestingly, the price of the Pro package varies depending on the number of subscribers. This is very useful for people with few subscribers who want access to pro features. You don’t have to pay the same price as someone with thousands of subscribers.
3. A Wide Range of Messaging Options
When you use the power of ManyChat, you don’t just have one set of messages. The platform allows you to export different types of tables.
You have legal notifications like text and picture notifications. These features are almost identical to the messages you send to your Facebook friends.
ManyChat also allows you to create cards that combine images and text. Alternatively, you can collect collections of these cards in your gallery and send them through your bot.
ManyChat also allows you to attach files to messages. This is useful if you have a PDF file that you want to use as a lead magnet. It can also help send tutorials to people who experience bug issues.
This flexibility means you can add variety to any campaign you create with ManyChat. It also provides more general automated customer service.
Likewise, an automation agency can help you create broadcasts that utilize each of these types of messages.
4. A Simple User Interface
ManyChat prides itself on its simplicity.
It uses an icon-heavy user interface that clarifies precisely what you need to do. The platform also offers Basic and Flow Builder. Both allow you to create a basic conversation flow that your bot will follow when chatting with someone. Naturally, the primary builder is a bit more manual. Flow Builder offers more flexibility.
Everything is clear and self-explanatory, so you don’t have to waste a lot of time dealing with the tutorial. ManyChat also does an excellent job of explaining what each function does.
5. An Array of Growth Tools
ManyChat also offers a few developer tools, most of which are only available to professional subscribers.
These tools include the Facebook comments tool. Available to all users, it allows you to convert post commenters into bot subscribers. This is a great way to reach people who engage with your posts but don’t message you.
Facebook advertising tools do the same for people who click on ads you send them. You can also use the Messenger Code tool to create a scannable image for users to sign up for your bot.
Any of these tools can help you generate leads using ManyChat.
Additionally, the platform provides analytics for every developer tool you use. It will show you crucial metrics like:
- Impressions
- Opt-ins
- Conversion rates
You can integrate your other Facebook marketing activities with the ManyChat bot.
6. Live Chat
Sometimes your chatbot can’t answer a question posted by someone. Fortunately, ManyChat solves this problem with a better live chat feature.
Clicking on the platform’s live chat tab will reveal a list of people who have asked questions that bots can’t answer. From there, here’s a simple click-to-chat example.
You can even use this information to build more functionality into your bot.
Again, everything is straightforward, which is the main power of ManyChat.
ManyChat Pros and Cons
Before jumping both feet into this chatbot solution, let’s outline the pros and cons of ManyChat::
ManyChat Pros
- Offers many features that help create live chat functionality and capable bots.
- Chatbots that support different channels, from Facebook Messenger to email and SMS.
- Offers A/B comparisons.
- Bot performance reports such as the number of messages sent, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates daily, weekly and monthly.
- Easy to use
- Seamless integration with Facebook Messenger
- Simple installation process
ManyChat Cons
- Flow Builder is poorly constructed and not user-friendly.
- Responses generated by the chatbot are not very helpful due to some errors and delays.
- Analytics tools are not powerful enough to provide insight into business issues related to chatbots.
- It can be expensive if there are many people.
- Poor technical support service
ManyChat Pricing
ManyChat offers 3 pricing options for businesses:
- Free plan: Free (limited to 1000 contacts)
- Professional Plan: Starts at $10/month and goes up to $435/month.
- Business plan: You need to consult the ManyChat sales team.
For a business plan, sellers must contact the ManyChat team for customized features and services that suit their needs. Plus, you can access all ManyChat features in the Pro plan.
The cost of the Pro plan varies depending on the size of your contact list.
Free Plan
Note: This program is only available for the last 1000 contacts.
Then you should upgrade to the Pro plan to get more leads. Critical features of ManyChat Free are:
- Set up unlimited chatbot channels.
- Segment your company’s target audience using 10 customer tags.
- Create automatic message reception queues
- Multiple event templates by industry
- Support advanced developer tools to acquire new customers through website widgets, referral URLs, customer reviews, QR codes, landing pages, and Facebook reviews.
Available channels to reach referral target: Facebook Messenger
Apart from the above issues, users can also email the ManyChat support team for any problem (24/7 support).
Pro Plan
For this plan, in addition to all the features listed in the free program, other premium features that can only be added to the Pro version are:
- Unlimited tags for audience segmentation and automatic message drip configuration
- Monitor and measure chatbot performance with MiniChat’s built-in analytics tools.
- Support for 2 advanced development tools to encourage communication between new users and companies: Checkbox and Click Ads Messenger
- Seamless integration with the tools you already use.
- ManyChat brand campaign
The Pro version removes all the free plan’s limitations and offers several advanced tools. But as the number of chatbot subscribers increases, so does the cost of the Pro plan.
Also, ManyChat Pro does not offer a free trial. In return, they offer a no-questions-asked refund within the first month (within 30 days) of activation.
Conclusion
ManyChat is a popular platform that enables businesses to build chatbots for various purposes, such as sales, marketing, and support. The venue is easy to use, and users do not need coding skills. The power of ManyChat is Instagram Automation, Facebook Comments, and Custom Fields that help streamline user preferences and simplify advertising and promotion. Chatbots save businesses time and money while providing more convenience to customers.
The history and evolution of chatbots show that they have become an essential tool for businesses in today’s mobile-driven society. ManyChat offers several benefits, including simple integration with Facebook, increased customer engagement, and the ability to automate customer service. Overall, ManyChat is an effective tool to help businesses improve customer engagement and increase sales.
