Messenger Sales: A How-to Guide to Sales Messenger [April 2024]

When it comes to sales, Facebook Messenger is the channel preferred by many businesses of all sizes. Are you selling over Facebook Messenger too? Then you’ve come to the right place. This blog post will introduce you to the benefits of using Messenger as a sales channel. We’ll also guide you through key respond.io features that will take your Facebook Messenger sales to the next level.

Facebook Messenger Sales vs Traditional Sales

Despite their popularity in the past, traditional sales channels such as website chat, phone calls and email have major flaws when compared to Facebook Messenger.

Website chat conversations are anonymous, which makes contact identification difficult. Besides, page visitors are untraceable once they leave the website. Phone calls are more personal, although some people find them intrusive and/or annoying.

Email sales have several drawbacks too: Collecting customer information is quite slow, and emails may end up lost between other emails or in the spam folder. Besides, this messaging channel is too formal to establish partner-like relationships with customers.

Furthermore, email users are prone to have scattered conversations. There are multiple reasons why this happens. For instance, a sales agent may forget to cc someone, or a customer may email the business with a different email address.

This image shows how facebook messenger boosts sales with four important benefits — Benefits of Facebook Messenger sales

All traditional messaging channels share the same issue: They lack contact and conversation overview features. This means that sales agents aren’t able to get a holistic view of their customer profiles and their interactions with the business from day one.

With Facebook Messenger, contact profiles and conversations are easily traced in the Facebook Page Inbox or a third-party messaging inbox. Thus, sales agents identify customers and resume conversations anytime to share updates or follow up on them.

Due to its conversational nature, Messenger makes it easy to collect information and build trust. In fact, salespeople can integrate automation like Facebook Page welcome messages or auto-replies into Messenger for a smoother customer journey.

Now that you are familiar with the benefits of Facebook Messenger sales, let’s go through some key information that you should know before using the app as one of your sales channels.

Facebook Messenger Sales: What You Should Know

Before deciding to use Facebook Messenger as your main channel for sales, there are a few things you need to know, such as:

Group messaging
CTA button
Facebook Messenger best practices

Facebook Messenger Sales: Group Messaging

Like any conventional messaging app, Facebook Messenger lets users and Page admins create and join group chats. These group chats have some applications for small companies as an alternative to pricier or more complex team communication tools.

For example, some sales agents create Facebook Messenger group chats with important clients to provide them with personalized assistance. This has several pros: Salespeople can reply quickly, and everyone in the group can stay updated.

This image shows how to use a Messenger group chat for Facebook Messenger sales — Using a Messenger group chat for sales

Replies are visible to the whole group chat and may include media files, which make them a better option than a traditional phone call.

Facebook Messenger Sales: Use the Right CTA Button

Facebook allows you to choose a call-to-action button from a long list, depending on your Facebook Page goals. CTAs such as Call Now or Get Quote are popular for lead generation.

However, Send Message also allows those who are considering a purchase to find out more. After clicking on it, a Messenger chat window will open in the bottom right corner for customers to start a conversation with the business.

This image shows how to use the CTA button on your Facebook page to receive messages and improve your sales messenger — Choose the right CTA button for your Facebook Page

When using this CTA for lead generation purposes, a salesperson must have access to the Facebook Page Inbox to handle inbound messages.

Facebook Messenger Sales: Best Practices

To prevent spamming, Facebook does not allow businesses to send the first message to customers. Luckily, those who are interested in your product are likely to message you first, saving you time and effort from reaching out to them cold.

Once a customer sends the first message, businesses have a 24-hour messaging window to send a reply. After the window expires, businesses can only continue the conversation by sending a message with a Facebook Message Tag.

There are four Message Tags for different use cases: Confirmed Event Update, Post-Purchase Update, Account Update, and Human Agent. The latter is only available for certain platforms like respond.io. We’ll discuss it in a bit.

This image shows three points businesses should keep in mind when using Facebook Messenger sales — Facebook Messenger sales: Three things to keep in mind

We recommend using Message Tags responsibly. Otherwise, Facebook could ban your page for a number of days or even permanently, depending on the gravity of the violation. But don’t fret — we’ll show you how to use these Message Tags correctly.

We have covered all the preliminary information that you should know if you plan to sell over Facebook Messenger. In the next section, we’ll show you how to get some quick wins by using Facebook Messenger and respond.io for sales.

Facebook Messenger Sales: Quick Wins

Now, let’s take a look at how to use respond.io. to enhance your sales process on Facebook Messenger.

Follow Up with Prospects with the Human Agent Tag

Some salespeople work for businesses with longer sales cycles. For example, in low-volume, high-margin businesses, it’s normal for customers to go through many touchpoints and take extra time to consider a purchase.

Therefore, the 24-hour messaging window may not be enough for some salespeople to close a deal. Luckily, Facebook is testing a Human Agent tag with a few messaging platforms to extend the 24-hour messaging window to seven days.

This image shows the Human Agent tag in action. This Facebook feature is only available to few messaging platforms like respond.io — Using the Human Agent Tag on respond.io for customer follow-up

Respond.io is one of those platforms. With the Human Agent tag, respond.io users circumvent a major messaging limitation, giving their agents extra time to close Facebook Messenger sales.

Grow Your List of Contacts with Facebook Private Replies

A Facebook Private Reply is an automated private message sent automatically from your Facebook Page to any Facebook user who comments on one of your Facebook Page Posts.

Sales agents could use this feature to collect leads from a promotional Facebook post, for example. When interested customers leave a comment on the post, a private reply asking for further details is triggered.

This image shows the Facebook private reply feature that you can use on your Facebook page posts using respond.io — Funneling leads to your inbox with Facebook Private Replies

Customers become respond.io Contacts after replying to your Facebook Private Reply. Once that happens, a sales agent can continue the lead nurturing process from respond.io.

Automate Any Task with Workflows

Workflows are respond.io’s flagship feature. It is highly customizable automation that saves users time and resources and can be used for Facebook Messenger sales.

For instance, companies can create their own chat routing and agent assignment logic. The possibilities are endless! Workflows can also be manually triggered using the Shortcut button in the Messages Module.

This image shows a sales qualification workflow you can create with respond.io — An example of a lead qualification Workflow built with respond.io

Here are three ways in which sales agents can use the Shortcut Button:

Generate sales deals in a CRM such as Hubspot or Salesforce
Qualify contacts on customer success platforms such as Vitally, based on the particulars provided like website, company size or number of employees
Calculate the price quotation for a custom plan during a consultation with a client

Funnel Inbound Leads to Your Inbox

Use Chat links and QR codes to redirect customers to chat with your business on Facebook Messenger. Chat links can be embedded anywhere in your website, wile QR codes can be printed and displayed in physical locations.

Similarly, respond.io’s website chat widget serves the purpose of inviting page visitors to start Messenger conversations with you. If the visitor has any conversation history on your Facebook Page, it will show on the widget.

Because the conversation takes place in Facebook Messenger, salespeople are able to keep on chatting with leads even after they leave your website.

This image shows all the lead generation options respond.io businesses can find in the plarform to drive more messenger sales — Businesses can use different methods to funnel leads to their inbox

If you want to offer your customers alternative ways to contact you, know that respond.io’s website chat widget is omnichannel, allowing you to add other channels to the header.

Get a Holistic View of Your Contacts with Contact Merge

Even if your business uses Facebook Messenger as its primary customer communication tool, you are likely to receive customer messages through other messaging channels.

The result: You will end up with siloed conversations across different channels. Addressing the same customer on multiple profiles is a waste of time and resources, and salespeople could be at risk of spamming customers inadvertently.

This video shows how to merge contacts in the respond.io Contacts Module — How to merge Contacts with respond.io

With Contact Merge, you can consolidate the Channels, Messages, Events and Comments associated with two or more duplicate Contacts in a single profile. This will benefit your sales team(s), as they will get an accurate overview of their Contacts.

Mobile App for Agents on the Go

Respond.io’s mobile app allows sales agents to keep in touch with their accounts when they are not sitting at their desks. The app has all the features available on the desktop, such as Dashboard, Contacts and Messaging.

This image shows shows the respond.io app, which is a convenient tool for salespeople who need to reply to important notifications on the go — Don’t miss any notification with the respond.io app

To get the respond.io app, download it from Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store for iOS.

These are some of the things that your sales team(s) can do by connecting Facebook Messenger to respond.io. In the next section, you’ll find a success story that tells how a company is effectively using Facebook Messenger for sales.

Case Study: How Araya Is Doing Facebook Messenger Sales

Araya is a Thailand-based company offering intimate care products for women. It was already using Facebook Messenger for customer communication but wanted to give its customers a great shopping experience with conversational sales.

Araya allocated roughly 90% of its ad budget to campaigns on Facebook Messenger. When customers responded to an ad, the sales team provided 1:1 assistance and shared their product knowledge over Messenger with the help of a business solution provider.

This image shows how Araya gives customers consultations via Facebook Messenger — How Araya does Facebook Messenger sales

This method proved to be very effective in tracking customer behavior, allowing Araya to improve its Facebook Messenger sales process day by day. The result: Araya experienced a 3X increase in return on ad spend on Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger isn’t just a massively popular messaging app. It comes with a number of features for sales teams. When connected to respond.io, sales agents are able to collect and nurture leads efficiently while delivering a great customer experience.