Manychat Musings

By Sameer Shah

What is Manychat? If you don’t know, don’t feel badly. I had no idea until a couple of weeks ago. But once I caught a glimpse…I got very intrigued.

My journey into the world of Manychat and chatbots in general began in early September when I noticed several people from around the world talking about attending the Manychat conference in a mastermind group. Lucky for me, the conference was to be held here in Austin the weekend of September 22nd, and several of these folks were going to be in town. So I went to a pre-conference happy hour to find out more.

I figured out pretty quickly that Manychat is a third party chatbot software that allows marketers to directly target people’s Facebook messenger. You can create a chat flow so that if the user you’re targeting responds, you can walk her or him through a series of dialog steps. If they show interest, you can ask for their email address in one of the steps. You can also create chatbot flows to trigger on other actions, for example when someone comments on a Facebook ad you’re running. I found that to have some pretty impressive potential…you can see a cool demo in this video (the comment chat part begins at around 5:00).

Manychat, and other chatbot systems, are sort of like email marketing, but their edge is the speed and instantaneous nature of messenger conversations (versus the often slower cadence of email). A general automated email flow would send one email, wait for a response, then send another maybe a few days later. Manychat interactions generally happen pretty fast, within a few minutes while you have the user’s attention. All that said the initial performance data that I have looked at is a bit mixed; in some tests chatbots perform better but the difference isn’t staggering. In other tests, like this one, chatbots did pretty well generating initial leads but were harder to convert and therefore more expensive. So…while the jury is still out, Manychat/chatbots are a bit of a hot topic in the digital marketing world right now…which brings me back to the conference in Austin.

While I didn’t attend the conference, I was invited me to an afterparty on Sunday night where I could meet speakers and attendees. I made my way to a beautiful AirBnB in East Austin with a third story terrace featuring a fantastic view of the Austin skyline (sort of an unnecessary detail but the view was pretty amazing, email me for a picture or two). As I hoped, I got the chance to talk to lots of folks and learned a great deal more about the technology. I also got an opportunity to meet Cat Howell, which felt oddly like meeting a celebrity (if you don’t know Cat she’s written the book on Facebook advertising, run her own agency, and designed THE online academy teaching Facebook advertising, which I completed earlier this year).

From these conversations and my own initial diligence I have gleaned the following:

• Chatbot technology is working and it’s likely here to stay
• It will almost assuredly extend to other messaging platforms like WhatsApp (this integration is already in the works)
• Manychat can augment a wide variety of FB ad campaigns, and standalone in certain use cases
• I need to learn more and start to incorporate chatbots into my overall ad strategies

I’m still gathering info, and I’ll provide more insights as I get further along. Hopefully I’ll have some of my own stats to share in the not too distant future…I already have one place where I think I can test Manychat.

p.s. What did Facebook pay for WhatsApp in 2014? Something like $20B and it seemed ridiculous?