Imagine a platform where tens of thousands of potential vehicle buyers in your primary market area chat daily with their friends, colleagues and family; and where dealerships have yet to claim their stake. Yes, still virgin to car dealers!
Now, what if I told you this platform is more popular than social media, more powerful than email marketing, and offering a fun two-way conversation between users and your dealership like when you use text messages on your mobile phone to message your contacts.
Intrigued? Great! Mr Dealer, meet Messenger Marketing; you guys are going to be a great fit together!
My only warning is this: make sure you are the first to market on the Messenger platform or don’t waste your time. Just throw the towel now.
OK, you're probably reading this and saying to yourself: “Oh no, not another advertising platform I need to learn about, get acquainted with, make a few attempts at failing ads, and lose money getting minimal results; here we go again!”
I know the feeling. It seems like every day I fire-up my computer there’s a barrage of new critical tools, media, tactics or strategies I need to have on my radar and tackle immediately or the world as I know it will come to an end. It’s overwhelming, to say the least.
But today, what I have to share with you is so important for the future of your dealership’s communications, that I need you to forget about overwhelm, and let me take you by the hand and walk you slowly through how messaging apps can revolutionise the way your dealership generate leads.
I also want to show you how to get started with Messenger Marketing without getting frustrated with complex technobabble because nothing can help you acquire new customers and sell cars faster; even if you don’t have a technology bone in you.
Are you in for the ride? Excellent! But remember, you need to be first, or this knowledge is all for nothing.
A Future Ruled By Robots – But Not The Ones in Terminator!
It’s hard to talk about messaging apps and Messenger Marketing without talking about bots and chatbots, and my first few attempts at educating dealers on the subject created a lot of confusion. I understand. The second you say “chat” most dealers think of the chat tool on their Website.
Now although chatbots could be used to automate the conversation with the visitors on your Website, the chat tool on your Website has nothing to do with Messenger Marketing.
Messenger is the Facebook app users are forced to use while on Facebook to send personal messages to friends and family. If you want all your followers to see a message, you post an update to your public profile; if you want to send a one-on-one message to somebody in particular, or a small group of friends, you use Messenger.
If you haven’t used Messenger yet, think of the app as the texting tool you use on your phone to send an SMS to a friend or colleague. Messenger also works on all devices (mobile and desktop), and you can even use it to connect with people internationally while on vacations or for business or personal purposes. You can also use it to send text messages, photos, videos, and even start a video chat.
As of early 2018, 1.3 billion people were using Messenger around the world. It’s said that by 2022 messaging bots will be so sophisticated, that they will replace Websites as the first point of contact of a prospect with a business. They will even replace the almighty email as the preferred way to communicate with customers.
You might be thinking this is far-fetched, but the trend is already well ingrained in peoples habits today. Just look at how you talk to your closest friends, family members and colleagues when using technology. You probably rarely use email because messaging apps and SMS are much faster, and the interaction is way more fun and easy.
Still, need a bit of convincing? Listen to this: Business Insider reported that there are now more people using Messaging apps than people using social media. Think about it: if marketing is identifying where potential prospects are, going there, and offering them a solution to their problem; then it would be a strategical error not to be on Messenger where vehicle shoppers are and love to be!
Makes sense?
A More Natural Two-Way-Street Conversation With Prospects
When someone reads one of your emails; you’re pitching, and he or she is reading. When someone watches one of your videos; you’re pitching, and he or she is watching and listening. It’s a one-way conversation, and it’s unnatural compared to how we normally communicate throughout the day with other humans.
Messenger chatbots provide a much more fun and natural way to engage with prospects in a natural back and forth where you’re asking questions, and they are replying with answers just like in a normal conversation.
Well built chatbot will even allow the prospect to decide what they want to learn from your dealership and allow you to powerfully segment prospects to provide them, during the chat or in the future, with the most relevant information to their wants and needs.
The Difference Between Email, SMS and Messenger Marketing
Other than the actual way you communicate, the biggest difference between email, SMS and Messenger Marketing is with open rates and response rates. Open rates hover around 20% for Email, 98% for SMS and 100% for Messenger. But more importantly, response rates average around 6% for Email, 45% for SMS and a monumental 90% for Messenger Marketing.
Ding, ding, ding: we got a winner by massive knockout!
If you’re going to take the time to create content or an offer, wouldn’t you want 100% of your customers and prospects to open your communications and 90% of them to respond? Well, yeah!
Regarding building your subscriber strategy though, it’s very much the same. I remember more than a decade ago when I got into email marketing that the strategy was to turn Website visitors into email subscribers. As you know, it costs a fortune in resources, time and efforts to get somebody on your Website, but once you have them opt-in to your email list, it cost you close to nothing to be in their inbox.
Unfortunately, the inbox is getting crowded.
Facebook had us execute a similar strategy with your Facebook dealership page and “likes.” As you know, it costs an arm and a leg to get somebody to visit your business page from ads, but once they “like” your page and start following you, you’re supposed to have your dealership’s updates in their newsfeed.
Unfortunately, with the changes in Facebook’s algorithm, if you don’t boost your post, (aka pay Facebook more money!), your updates will be seen by only 17% of your followers. So like with email and the crowded inbox, the free ride again is fast eroding.
Fortunately, Messenger comes to the rescue.
Facebook Actually Wants And Encourages Your Dealership To Create Messenger Chatbots
Unlike many strategies that might go against Facebook goals and desires to
build value for their users, Messenger chatbots have Facebook blessings. Facebook’s Messenger team even featured the Kia Stinger Messenger app at the F8 Conference in California, last May, showing how vehicle shoppers could customise and get up close and personal with the new model.
Using this blessing from Facebook, you can start turning visitors to your Facebook dealership's page into Messenger subscribers for free; and you can do it now for pennies if you want to scale up the strategy using Facebook Messenger
ads to build your conquest list.
Yes, I said it. It’s time to build a conquest list.
The Best Time To Build Your Email List Was in 2003, The Best Time To Build Your Messenger Subscriber List is Now!
Most dealers I talk to are getting warier of sending email and SMS broadcasts to their existing customer list. I understand. You don’t want to annoy customers that are the bread and butter of your service and parts department and irritate them to the point where they won’t even consider buying their next vehicle from you.
But what’s the solution? Do you need to spend money tirelessly each month to put your dealership’s offers in front of prospective buyers? Please no! You can simply learn how to turn prospects and potential customers into subscribers to your Messenger list, and you’ll be able to send them offers for free each month if they engage with your messages.
Right now, top marketers are turning a 400% ROI on Messenger Marketing. Your dealership could use this new automotive marketing opportunity to build a list of thousands of Messenger subscribers for peanuts and use this list to explode the sales and profits of all your dealership’s departments for years to come.
But remember, you got to be first!
The opportunity is huge and affordable because very few companies are tapping into the Messenger platform. Give it a year, and it might be crowded like the inbox, diluted like Facebook “likes” or expensive like search ads on Adwords.
If you act fast and benefit from the first mover's advantage, you’ll be sitting on a Messenger subscriber list of thousands while your competitors will be fighting for leftovers, at a price that probably won’t make sense anymore.
Can you see how being the first on Messenger could be a game-changer for your dealership?
The Winning Messenger Marketing Formula
It’s easy to figure out the winning marketing formula to be successful with Messenger because the people using it are not from another planet, they are the same human beings you find on other media, with the same desires and fears, only on a different platform.
Remember, only the medium changes.
A winning strategy I’ve been using for over a decade now here at Turbo Marketing to build massively successful automotive marketing campaigns for our dealers is this 4-Step Formula; and it works perfectly for Messenger Marketing:
Tell them clearly what’s it in for them.
Tell them why they should believe your claim.
Clearly explain what you want them to do next
Give them a good reason to act now on your call for action.
That’s it!
But don’t get fooled thinking you can skip one of the steps. These work together, and the formula will fail if you forget to include one of them.
If you don’t clearly tell prospects what’s in it for them; they won’t care.
If you excite them with your bold promise but fail to provide proof to support your claim; they won’t believe you and won’t act on your call for action.
If you get them excited about your promise and provide proof to your claim but don’t tell them what to do next; they will be confused by the next steps and won’t take action.
And finally, if you catch their attention with your “what’s in it for them” statement, provide validation, and tell them precisely what to do next, but you don’t provide a strong reason to act now (aka urgency), the prospect will procrastinate and will probably forget about your offer within a few hours.
That’s why it’s important to keep all four steps of the formula intact to keep your Messenger Marketing investment as cost-efficient as possible while enjoying the lightning growth you can achieve.
The Next Step: How to Make it All Come Together
In this spirit of helping you be the first out of the gates gathering Messenger subscribers for pennies, generating leads, selling cars and growing the sales and profits of your dealership; I decided to go a bit differently about the Messenger chatbot opportunity then my usual M.O.
Usually, I would try to learn everything I can about the subject and create in-house the team of coders that would provide our dealers with the solution. But in this case, since time is of the utmost importance for your dealership, I went a different way. I first identified the worlds foremost teaching institution on Messenger chatbots and asked them to put me in contact with their best graduates.
The results were fast and stunning! Creating a strategic partnership between Turbo’s automotive marketing thinktank with the “best of the best” regarding Messenger chatbot turned out to be a winning combination.
Within a few weeks, we were able to turn our most powerful automotive conquest marketing campaign, Quest For Trades, into a chatbot turning Facebook users into driving customers for our dealers. Imagine turning 2% of Facebook ads impressions into clicks, 72% of clicks into Messenger subscribers and 20% of subscribers into quality trade-in leads for your dealership!
That’s crazy!
If you want to be the first to tap into the Messenger virgin automotive conquest lands and apply my Messenger Marketing 4-Step Formula to sell more vehicles to people outside of your database, without having to learn new technology and without wasting any money trying to figure things out through trial and error; I have great news for you.
I want to provide you prefered-access to our done-for-you turnkey Quest For Trades Messenger chatbot and give you over $500 in bonuses to make sure you crush it on Messenger, building your subscriber conquest list and selling cars like hotcakes!
Ready to be the first dealership in your town on Messenger? Just click here to learn more.
You could be generating your first Messenger sale in the next 24 hours!
Sean Cassy is the Digital Marketing Specialist and Co-Owner of Turbo Marketing Solutions. You can contact him by email here or reach him by phone every weekday at Turbo Marketing’s head office