Click to Message Ads: 4 Best Practices to Maximize Leads

Are your click to message ads getting the results you want? While they’re an effective way to capture leads, it’s essential to optimize them to bring in the most quality conversations and keep prospects engaged.

Accurately targeting and engaging your audience, discovering what resonates with them and having a plan to manage inquiries efficiently will help you reach your goals. Remember that your first attempt at click to message ads may not have the desired effects.

It’s a process of experimentation to understand which tactics work best for your business and implement best practices. We’ll share what we’ve learned from our customers and our own experience to take out some of the guesswork for you.

4 Proven Strategies for Optimizing Click to Message Ads

Optimizing your ads takes time so you can understand what works and what doesn’t. Every business’s needs and goals will be slightly different. Implementing these best practices helps.

1. Use Targeting to Maximize High-Quality Leads

Ensure your target audience matches the profile of the customers you aim to reach. It might seem obvious, but we’ve seen many cases where businesses lack clear objectives for their ads. Those with a large budget may target everyone and see what sticks, but it’s not efficient in the long run.

Targeting an audience that’s too broad results in low-quality leads and wasted ad spend. Determine your ideal target audience and direct your ads to the correct category. Campaign and creative-level goals in Meta also affect the types of leads you’ll get.

Growth Manager Loh Yi Xuan recommends setting your campaign on Meta to “maximize conversions” rather than “maximize conversations.”

screenshot showing how to set up click to message ads to maximize conversions — Set your click to message ads to maximize conversions.

With our own click to message ads, changing the setting to “maximize conversions” resulted in higher quality leads and more sales qualified leads.

2. Give Prospects a Reason to Chat with You

To capture leads, it’s not enough to simply add a chat button to an ad for your product. The images, the copy and the CTA must drive prospects to start a conversation. For example, ask people to inquire about limited time promotions or choosing the right package or plan.

Lai Zong You, Growth Manager for respond.io, highlights the importance of keeping the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire and action) present when personalizing click to message ads. He also mentions how critical it is to catch the leads’ attention during the first three seconds of a video ad to drastically increase the chances of capturing them.

Intrigue viewers with an image or caption that gets to the heart of their problem or tugs at their emotions. Get leads into a chat through captivating, original campaigns inviting them to interact. Use a persona, leverage trends or even gamify your ads.

3. Reply Promptly from a Single Inbox

When prospects click into an ad to chat, they expect a prompt reply. If they don’t get it, they lose interest and the opportunity may pass.

Many businesses are running campaigns on several channels, so messages may be overlooked if agents need to check every channel manually. Using an omnichannel inbox with a conversation management platform like respond.io ensures your agents will never miss a message.

illustration showing how click to message ads go to one inbox from any channel — Run click to message ads on all Meta channels and get replies in a single inbox so you won’t miss a message.

Automatically assign leads to available agents as soon as they come in. If leads message you outside of working hours, you can also automate the conversation to answer common questions and manage expectations as to when an agent will be in touch.

4. Adapt from Experience

We recommend an omnichannel approach, but you’ll likely find certain channels perform better than others. With Meta’s click to message ads, you can choose where to send audiences and determine which way prospects prefer to contact you.

Monitor the performance of your click to message ads regularly. Pay attention to the number of interactions, conversion rates, and customer feedback to continuously refine your approach. Meta Ads Reporting can help you with this.

For example, one of our customers in the healthcare industry runs click to message ad campaigns for WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. They’ve found that for their region, click to WhatsApp ads are the most effective in getting quality leads.

Their main goal is to get people to ask questions about their services and book an appointment. They’ve seen success with that through clear CTAs and adjusting their creatives to optimize for what resonates with their audience.

Create Click to Message Ads that Convert with Respond.io

With continuous optimization, you can consistently capture quality leads into conversations and set them on the path to conversion. A conversation management platform like respond.io enables you to automate click to message ads so you get leads into a single inbox and reply instantly.

And respond.io not only integrates with Facebook and Instagram click to message ads, but also with TikTok Messaging Ads. Take advantage of the opportunities every channel offers to capture high quality leads, measure where they’re engaging and convert them faster.

See what respond.io can do for your business today with a free trial or contact us for a customized demo.