How To Do Messaging App Customer Matching With Rocketbots

Mark Zuckerburg had an interesting thing to say about messaging apps, he said, "The Future is Private." He is hinting that the future of social interaction will be on private messaging apps. This article is going to help you open a message app channel of communication between you and your existing customers, using Messaging App Customer Matching.

This article will answer the following questions:

What is Customer Matching
Why Use Customer Matching on Messaging Apps
Why Messaging App Customer Matching is Hard
How To Do Customer Matching With Rocketbots

What is Customer Matching?

Customer Matching is a tool that helps businesses use their customer lists to find their customers as audiences on various platforms. Messaging App Customer Matching means companies can upload their customer lists and contact those customers over messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Viber & more.

Customer Matching for messaging apps is a new twist on the idea of retargeting, also known as re-marketing. Retargeting is primarily used by businesses and marketers in a digital marketing context to keep in touch and maintain brand awareness.

On Facebook, for example, retargeting can be done by uploading a list of customer emails to the Facebook Advertising platform. This will create a Facebook Custom Audience. Then Facebook display ads can be served to existing customers. This is a form of Customer Matching.

Messaging App Customer Matching is very similar to modern day retargeting, in that customer matching is used to find known users or customers as an audience in a 3rd party closed platform. — Modern Day Retargeting

In recent times, retargeting most often when a user visits a website but doesn't make a purchase; retargeting allows businesses to serve them an ad reminding them that they forget to check out with their purchase.

Retargeting works is by utilizing cookies that are downloaded by the user's browser when a user visits a website. The cookies allow businesses to follow up on users through display ads placed on other websites.

Retargeting works because it creates an additional touch point between the customer and the company Messaging App Customer Matching can create this touch point even better. — Why Retargeting Works

Retargeting is popular among online advertisers as it is an effective solution with good ROI. Rather than continuously stuffing new users down the purchase funnel, retargeting allows companies to tactically target users who have gotten stuck in the purchase funnel and push them a little further down.

Messaging App Customer Matching serves a very similar purpose. It allows companies to target known users or customers with content that will push the user further down a pipeline. Fundamentally, Messaging App Customer Matching is better in retargeting in one simple way, it allows you to target the individual rather

Why Use Messaging App Customer Matching

There are several benefits that Messaging App Customer Matching offers over standard retargeting. You can target a specific individual rather than a grouped audience. For the most popular messaging apps, there may be no cost or minimal cost associated with reaching out to that individual. Then, once you've established the connection, you can have a back and forth conversation rather than just flashing an image in their face while they scroll down a website.

Due to these attributes, Messaging App Customer Matching works in several use cases:

The marketing team can use customer matching to let an existing customer know about a new product feature or sale.
The sales team can use customer matching to reach out to a customer and upsell them.
The customer service team can use customer matching to alert a customer of a bug or to send notifications.

The critical attribute to remember is that once you've established a messaging app connection between your business and a customer, you may use this connection over and over. Over this channel, you may chat one on one or share content using mass messaging.

Why Use Messaging App Customer Matching for Marketing

The Marketing team may find it easiest to see and extract the benefits of Messaging App Customer Matching. Marketing teams are already used to sending marketing emails. However, the open rates and click rates of marketing emails have been going down significantly in recent times. Often, marketing emails just go to spam.

Messenger marketing has way higher open rates than email marketing, but often existing customers are hard to acquire on messaging apps, that is why Rocketbots has enable Messaging App Customer Matching. — Messaging apps have better open and click rates.

Moving email marketing over to messaging apps is an obvious choice for several reasons. Firstly, messaging apps open rates are magnitudes higher than email. We've seen open rates on messenger as high as 90%. Secondly, messaging apps only allow rich text and images. Your marketing team will no longer have to fiddle around with email marketing templates. So sending a newsletter will take minutes instead of hours.

Why Use Messaging App Customer Matching for Sales

Salespeople are already using WhatsApp for sales. In many countries that aren't using emails, messaging apps work as the primary tools for sales staff. But what if you could enable your sales team to convert your leads and upsell your existing customers over messaging apps, this wouldn't be difficult to achieve.

Opening the channel that lets salespeople interact with leads over WhatsApp or other messaging apps can be done by sending appointment notifications but it's more difficult with existing customers, that is why we enabled Messaging App Customer Matching. — Booking Appointments Over Messenger

For new leads, it can be relatively easy. Use a messaging app to book an appointment, and your sales staff can use that channel later to follow up after the meeting. However, with existing customers, this can be more difficult to achieve; that is why we enable Messaging App Customer Matching with Rocketbots.

Why Use Messaging App Customer Matching for Support

Let's say you have an urgent issue for which you need to alert your customers immediately. The traditional channel for this would be SMS. SMS has extremely high deliverability rates and reasonably high open rates. The issue with SMS is that it can get expensive.

If you have a business that must routinely notify customers of issues, SMS costs can add up. In many cases, this can be resolved with messaging apps. Although some messaging apps do have costs for broadcast messaging, the vast majority don't. Those that do - have cheaper rates than SMS.

Why Messaging App Customer Matching Is Hard

Messaging app companies are trying to avoid the issue that email marketing has created, too much spam on the platform. That is why most messaging apps require the customer to send the first message to the business as an opt-in.

Although Facebook has released a Customer Matching API that allows a business to upload a customer list with emails and phone numbers and allows them to message these users first, this feature is only available to large corporations that are located in the United States.

The first message, opt-in is a crucial tenet across all messaging apps. Even when messaging app companies allow the business to send the first message, when using the Facebook Comment Autoresponder tool, for example, the user must respond to this message first before they are available for additional conversation.

The reality is, messaging apps are closed platforms. So we must observe the terms of service set out by the companies who own the platforms. Messaging app companies want users to send the first message, that is why businesses have to get creative.

How To Do Customer Matching With Rocketbots?

The idea of Messaging App Customer Matching on Rocketbots is relatively simple. We use a channel that everybody can be reached on - SMS - to send them a quick message and let them know that they can message us on their preferred messaging app.

To Do Customer Matching On Rocketbots, here's what you'll need:

A Customer List with Mobile Phone Numbers
Rocketbots Account
A Twilio SMS account, connected to Rocketbots

You will also need to connect the messaging app of your choice you want to match customers:

For Facebook Customer Matching, connect a Facebook Page
For WhatsApp Customer Matching, connect WhatsApp
For WeChat Customer Matching, connect a WeChat WeChat Official Account
For LINE Customer Matching, connect a LINE Official Account
For Viber Customer Matching, connect a Viber Bot
For Telegram Customer Matching, connect a Telegram Bot

Step 1: Import Contacts to Twilio SMS Channel

First, you'll need to import your customers as SMS contacts. It's crucial that you are using mobile phone numbers or else the SMS message will fail.

To Import Twilio SMS contacts navigate to Settings > Channel Settings > Twilio SMS > upload icon.

The first step to messaging app customer matching on Rocketbots in uploading your customer list. — Twilio SMS Upload Icon

Then, upload a CSV file containing the contact information. There is a downloadable sample CSV for your reference which includes a first name, last name & phone number.

Once you've uploaded your customer list you will get a notification, now it is time to go to the next step of messaging app customer matching — Upload Has Started

Step 2: Create Messaging App Business Account Links

Before you can send your customers links that they can use to message your messaging app business account for the first time, you'll need to create the links.

To obtain a channel link in Rocketbots navigate to Settings > Channel > Scan Code Icon.

To do messaging app customer matching you'll need to use messaging app links that enable your customers to send you a message easily. — Channel Scan Code Icon

Once obtained these links will take your customer directly to the place where they can send you the first message. The trouble is that these links tend to be quite long, which is not mobile-friendly. The best approach is to shorten the links with a service like bitly.com.

When doing messaging app customer matching you'll want to shorten the links you send on so they look nicer in SMS format. — Link Shortening On Bit.ly

Bit.ly will also provide you the added benefit of enabling you to track the click rates of your links. Once you have your but links ready, it's time to send the broadcast.

Step 3: Send A Broadcast To Your Customers

Now that you have your links ready, it's time to format and send a broadcast that will let your customers know, that you can now be reached over messaging app.

To create a broadcast navigate to Broadcast > Add Broadcast.

One part of messaging app customer matching is sending a broadcast with messaging app links to the customer. — Sample Messaging App Customer Matching Broadcast

When creating the broadcast, make sure that you select the Twilio SMS channel that you connected. Target the broadcast to all the contacts in this channel and then format your message. If you're going to send a message with several messaging app channels like us, we recommend you use several content boxes.

This is what a messaging app customer matching sms message could look like. — Messaging App Customer Matching SMS

Once you've sent your broadcast your customer will receive an SMS that looks something like the above — making it easy for them to send you a message directly to their messaging app of choice.