Why you should use Messenger bots with live events

Live video streaming is a fun, engaging way to connect with your subscribers and grow your audience. You can share your story and allow others to connect and engage with you in real time. But Messenger bots allow you to create a personalized “choose your own adventure” experience. You can also leverage bots to provide people with relevant and helpful information on a platform where open rates are extremely high, often resulting in greater reach. By combining the power of Messenger bots with live video or webinars, you can benefit in three ways.

Increase registrations and attendance

One of the challenges with both Facebook Live and webinars is getting users to register and show up. People might even forget that they registered for your live event. Messenger bots can act as a helpful assistant for your subscribers to remind them to join your live event at the right time. Message reminders outperform email reminders because:

• People tend to read a text message within the first 3 minutes.
• Open rates for messages are 2-3 times higher in comparison to email.

Even though Messenger bots are a great tool to send broadcasts and reminder messages, you can also use bots as a listening and research tool to learn more about your subscribers’ current pain points and struggles. By asking questions before a live event, you’ll be able to customize your presentation to directly address your audience’s pain points, which might result in higher conversion rates. You can also use Messenger bots to deliver a fill-in-the-blank worksheet or other helpful resources before the live event to encourage and convince users to attend. When you provide people with valuable information that solves a problem, they’re more likely to trust you and become fans of your business and brand. After the live event, you can use Messenger bots to send the replay link along with a thank-you bonus gift (e.g., PDF, how-to guide, etc.). You could even send a promotional offer to people who are identified as warm leads. (Just read over the Messenger Platform Policy to make sure you’re not breaking any rules).

Reminder sequences

If you’re interested in leveraging Messenger bots to help promote your webinar or live video and increase engagement, you’ll need to set up three separate message flows:

• Registration message: Share details about the webinar or Facebook live, and get users to sign up.
• Reminder message: Remind users to attend the live event.
• Follow-up message: Send helpful resources (e.g. replay link) after the event, along with any next steps.

The high number of visitors using the chatbot can be explained by the fact that visitors still have questions that the website itself does not answer or does not answer quickly enough. In that case, the chatbot acts as a super navigation assistant. It answers questions like “ When does the event take place ?“ or “Is Google exhibiting”, and apparently the website visitors find it easier to ask than to search. On the back end side, a website crawler was developed that indexes all links dealing with the most asked questions, and the chatbot was given the ability to answer with a small description and a link to the relevant page. The chatbot seems to be quite complementary to the website itself because the website remains the unique information source.

Facebook Messenger

Event chatbots are quite similar to event Apps that are facing low penetration rate issues. If you do not advertise, no one will ever use it. However, if you do advertise, event chatbots have one great advantage compared to mobiles apps: In order to use them, you do not need to download anything from the store, but just a click on a Messenger link that opens in the Messenger App that you already have on your phone.

• Notify visitors by email about the existence and purpose of the chatbot
• Use the chatbot as a notification tool during the event
• Send welcome SMS when visitors arrive in order to introduce the chatbot
• Display Advertizing such as in the public transit

Chatbots before and during the event

People start using the event chatbot at least 8 days before the event. It means that the chatbot not only is part of the event experience strategy but also can play an important role in the visitor acquisition strategy. Chatbots often offer a level 1 support, and when they do not understand, they forward the question to a real human. Before the show, the volume of questions asked is not sufficient enough to dedicate resources to it. However, during the show it might be a good idea to have a team on the back office chat who can answer the complex questions. You might think that the primary aim of a chatbot is to automate the answers and that Event Managers do not want to have human resources on the back office. However, the chatbot is already automating a very large number of answers, and the residual questions will be handled in the future thanks to training ( both language and answer training). Moreover, you should think that Event Managers are used to having hosts welcoming guests at the welcome desk. Having online hosts dealing with unanswered questions within the chatbot is the exact same function.

Why do visitors use the event chatbot?

There are two main features in our event chatbot: Registration and Helpdesk. Registration consists of rolling out the questions from the registration form into a conversation. The experience can convert more than 60% of users, which is much better than web forms. You can expect up to 15% registration through this new channel if you add it to your website.