The new marketing tool A for the string brings up hundreds of results. This one by is particularly eye catching: simple search on Medium Messenger bots Sami Viitamäki Six ways Messenger Bots deliver value From the title itself, Sami asserts the value of Messenger Bots. In fact, he gives readers different ways they can be helpful (I won’t go into details here as that would be a TL;DR for his article, causing him to lose readers). six There are loads more like this scattered across the vast realms of both and the wider web, and is being promoted like crazy on Facebook. Even picks had several different articles on . Naturally, this called out to me. What was this new trend, this new fad, all about? Why was it suddenly gaining so much popularity when it was never even mentioned before? I needed answers. Medium Bot Academy Pocket Messenger bots But what is a bot? A bot is a new, personalized and immersive experience for users to interact with , landing page (on your own too), or Facebook and Instagram ads. Placing a bot on any of the aforementioned places would allow your (potential) followers to ‘chat with you’ to find out more about what you can offer, rather than reading some long, lengthy, and likely boring, write up. You can even set up your bot to automatically send a message to users when they comment on one of your posts, turning mere visitors to long-lasting followers. your Facebook page blog A bot would allow you to generate leads even while you sleep! Once it’s set up, it works on autopilot. This has to be one of the best passive income methods on the market. But simply reading about it was not enough for me. So I set out to make my own. The first step was to find out A quick five minuet search gave me two ways to go about making my bot. I could either use , or . Playing around with them, I decided to discard ManyChat. It lacked many key functionalities (although their representatives have said they’re working on further integrations) that I deemed essential. But this post is not an anti-ManyChat rant. Onto how I made . how. Chatfuel ManyChat my own bot Check it out ! here First I set up a (which may be turned into a proper, active page if it gets enough likes) for and linked it to this bot. Chat bots cannot be integrated with a personal account, and so this was essential. dummy page Airborne Orange Then I built . I won’t go into details as this isn’t a tutorial, but it was pretty straight forward. The on screen tutorial helped too. The bot asks an opening question to readers and engages with them for a while. Eventually, it asks for permission to send them Messenger broadcasts and then for their email too. the bot But that email isn’t very useful unless it’s integrated with the email client of your choice ( for me). None of the bot builders allow this directly. But I didn’t give up there. Chatfuel allows you to send an email to a desired email address containing the user’s input. I decided to leverage that. MailChimp Next came . I set it up to scan my inbox every five seconds for an email with the subject line (this subject line was predetermined in Chatfuel itself). Once it finds an email matching that criteria, it checks the message body. The body contains nothing but the collected email address. My Zapier automation then adds this email to the . Zapier ‘Your bot collected an email address’ MailChimp list for Airborne Orange Voila! New subscriber obtained :) If you want a look at the bot I made, ! Should you want the Zapier sequence, subscribe below and send me an email with the subject line If you’re already subscribed, you’ll get it in this week’s newsletter :) go right ahead ‘Messenger Bots Bonus’. If you liked the article, give it a heart 💚 so that others can find it! If you loved it, give me a follow and sign up below too! Share it in any case ;)
