How to Drive Customer Acquisition Over Messaging Channels

Messaging channels are more than just platforms for customer service interactions, they are places to engage your target audience and find new customers. On Instagram alone, there are over 1bn monthly active users and 90% of them follow a business. The challenge for brands is finding a way to take advantage of this captive audience and convert someone from a follower to a customer with a long lifecycle.

The 3 Benefits of Messaging Channels as a Customer Acquisition tool

1. Ad campaigns on messaging channels average 9% conversion rate 

All marketers are looking for ways to increase engagement, whilst reducing customer acquisition cost and cost per lead in every campaign. Traditionally there’s a drive to send leads to a landing page optimized for conversions or to download an app. The issue with this method is that it increases the number potential drop off points in the sales funnel. Most mobile apps have a conversion rate of 1-2% (from download to purchase), it’s a similar figure for websites- nearly 70% of all carts are abandoned and website conversion rates are just 2.29%.

In comparison, the figures for conversion within Facebook’s advertising infrastructure, on Facebook and Instagram, are incredible. Across all industries, the average is more than 9%. For certain industries, there’s a dip – 7.1% for beauty, 4.11% for clothing, and  3.26% in retail – but a more impressive return than looking at different avenues for acquisition.

2. Click-to-Messenger ads are 31% cheaper and 3x more effective

A good understanding of Facebook’s Ad Manager is the path to better conversion rates. It’s less about speaking to your current followers, more about leaning into the platform’s algorithm designed to track down new customers. Click-to-Messenger (CTM) adverts take leads from the advert straight into a messaging channel. A Christmas campaign run by LEGO achieved 31% cheaper conversion with CTM ads than other conversion-based approaches on Facebook and a 6x return on ad spend.

Messaging channels can be optimized for conversion by creating a bespoke automated flow for the campaign that creates a seamless buyer experience – no website or app download drop-offs. Lego’s campaign saw a 3x higher conversion from CTM vs other types of Facebook  adverts. This is all just the start of the customer journey. By beginning the brand/customer relationship in a messaging channel, it will stay all in one space, with every interaction contained in one app.

3. Engagement is higher throughout the lifecycle

If brands have begun interactions with customers using messaging channels, Facebook Messenger in the case of CTM ads, the chance of successful post-purchase engagement is a lot higher. Many companies do it via email, whose engagement rates sit well below those of messaging apps. Emails average around  14% open rate vs nearly 50% for messaging channels, and click rates offer even worse returns – 2.1% vs  43.15%.

The potential of messaging channels for continuous digital engagement over a customer lifecycle is endless. Every customer-facing department can see the entire history of the relationship and has access to the data that will enable them to hyper-personalize the customer’s experience. Follow-ups, appointment or delivery tracking, messages about items being back in stock all come from the same source, so the customer sees it as a single digital relationship. As effective as segmenting email contacts can be, they will always feel to some degree, like an impersonal mailout to a mass database. Messaging channels and automation allow brands to build much more personal 1:1 relationships with their customers.

The chance to engage customers at every stage of their relationship with a brand is one of the key benefits of adopting messaging channels into your CX strategy. They offer a more cost-effective method of acquiring new customers and engagement levels that traditional channels could only wish for.