What’s a Chat Blast Anyway? Chatbot Marketing Basics [2023 Update]

Today I’m going to tell you about a new marketing tactic that’s going to get you more traffic.

Over the last week, Customers.ai’s generated over 40,000 sessions using this tactic:

If you’ve ever sent an email campaign, or run a PPC campaign, or promoted a blog post, you’ve been in the hot seat for generating targeted traffic.

It’s 2019 and it’s time to add a new tactic to your marketing Swiss Army knife: chatbot marketing with chat blasting in Facebook Messenger using Customers.ai.

What’s chat blasting? Chat blasting is a top-of-funnel lead generation tactic for messaging reach and customer engagement, similar to email blasting, but in chat.

Basically, with a chat blast:

• You send messages to contacts on your list.
• Messages drive traffic to your site or your conversion funnels.
• Messages are sent in the Facebook Messenger chat app with push notifications.
• Messages can be organic (free) or paid (Facebook Ads).

Good chat blasts:

• Tap into psychological principles of persuasion like curiosity, urgency, likability, consistency and social proof.
• Offer visually exciting and conversationally interactive messaging.
• Utilize list segmentation tools and message personalization to increase reader engagement.
• Offer users a clear way to unsubscribe from automatic messaging.

In this guide you’ll learn:

• Who should use chat blasts in their marketing?
• Who can receive chat blasts?
• How to send a chat blast
• What’s an unsubscribe message?
• What’s a promotional chat blast?
• What’s a non-promotional chat blast?
• How to check chat blast reports

This is part 1 of the Chat Blast Master series. See also: all about audiences and list building, advanced engagement tactics, and the chatbot analytics and reporting deep dive.

If you like keeping up with the latest strategies and tactics in digital marketing, sign up for chat updates from Customers.ai, where we always keep the freshest chatbot marketing tactics on your radar.

Who should use chat blasts in their marketing?

If you’re doing internet marketing, you should add chat blasting to your marketing mix.

Chat blasting is a new tactic, but it’s also familiar because you use the same strategies for engagement and list building as you do for content, email, ads and social.

You’re probably doing email marketing today to drive traffic to blog posts and promote deals and offers.

You’ve got an email marketing platform you use to manage your campaigns, to:

• Build your contact lists
• Create the email content
• Send email blasts
• Manage unsubscribes
• Create list segments
• Automate email sequences and 
• Review campaign reporting

You do this for Facebook Messenger campaigns using Customers.ai’s Facebook Messenger marketing platform.

When you send an email blast, you send a message to your email contact list. The average open rate in email is 20% and click-through rate is 4%.

When you publish a Facebook post, you publish content to your Facebook wall which your followers might see in their Facebook News Feed. The average reach is 1% of followers.

When you send a chat blast, you send a message to your contacts in Facebook Messenger. The average open rate in Messenger is 80%. Response rate can reach 20% to 30%.

So who should send chat blasts? Any business or marketing professional looking for engagement, reach and traffic.

Who can receive chat blasts?

A Facebook page can send automated messages through Customers.ai to anyone who first messages the business page.

Like email marketing, you’ll build your list with a variety of tactics and entry points:

Facebook lists a number of entry points that make someone enter a Facebook page’s Messenger contacts, and they all start with someone messaging the page.

That initial contact might be on your Facebook page or post, or via your website chat, or with a checkbox opt-in.

Look for the all about audiences chapter in the Chat Blast Master series. We’ll cover contacts in detail, how to create audiences using system and custom variables, and how to get new contacts.

How to send a chat blast

In order to send a chat blast, you first need to build a chatbot.

Read “How to Build a Chatbot for Facebook Messenger in 5 Minutes” and see how to use the chatbot builder to design the content with images, text, GIFs, and other content widgets.

It’s key that when building chatbots for blasting, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe message in your chatbot. Read more here.

The tutorial “How to Chat Blast Your Facebook Messenger Contacts is a step-by-step guide on how to build your chat page, create the blast and blast it.

This guide goes into depth on the chat blasting settings.

After you’ve used the chatbot builder to create the content to blast, head to “Chat Blaster” under the “Old features” tools in the Customers.ai platform.

Click the “Create Chat Blast” button to load up your chat blast.

The first thing you’ll select after naming your chat blast is the Channel to send the blast to. 

(More on Facebook Messenger audiences in Customers.ai here.)

Remember the marketing engagement rule of thumb: The more you segment your audience, the higher the engagement and response rate you’ll see.

Next, you’ll pick the dialogue to blast from a drop-down of all your dialogues:

You’ll choose the category or type of blast you’re about to send: promotional message, notification/update:

You may naturally be wondering what’s the difference between these two or how do I know if the message I’m sending is promotional?

The difference is in the intent and language of the message you’re blasting.

What’s a non-promotional chat blast?

A non-promotional chat blast:

• Doesn’t promote a product or service.
• Doesn’t refer to pricing or cost, not even to say something is free.
• Doesn’t offer a deal, discount our coupon.

Some examples of a non-promotional chatbot marketing blast include:

• Sending updates or reminders for an event.
• Helping people manage the productivity of their businesses or related activities.
• Informing people about recent or important events.
• Providing information in categories such as sports, finance, business, real estate, weather, traffic, politics, government, non-profit organizations, religion, celebrities, and entertainment.

What’s a promotional chat blast?

A promotional chat blast is a marketing tactic intended to sell a product or service.  

Facebook gives this example of promotional content in a Messenger blast:

Examples of promotional blasts include:

• Informing people of a sale or discount offer on a product or service
• Introducing a new product, service or offering
• Favorably comparing your product or service to competitors

What message can I send using 1-time Notification tag?

Facebook’s 1-Time Notification feature allows your page to request permission to send users a follow up message after the 24-hour messaging window has ended. Once a user opts in for the 1-time notification, you reserve the right to send them one promotional message within the next 365 days.

Finally, to send the chat blast, you’ll pick when to send it out. 

Setting a future time or time based on the recipient’s time zone is an advanced scheduling feature available in Customers.ai Startup.

So schedule the chat blast to send immediately or pick the time of the chat blast.

See what’s possible with chat blasting. Join Customers.ai’s +50K Facebook Messenger subscribers and sign up for chat blast with tutorials, news and Facebook marketing strategies each week.

What’s an unsubscribe message?

The unsubscribe message for a chat blast is a short description of how a recipient can opt-out of automated messaging.

It should be as simple as including this line of text at the end of your text field or quick question: “Type ‘stop’ to unsubscribe any time.”

Let your contacts know that they control the messaging they receive and that they can turn off messages from the business.

Including the unsubscribe message in your chat blasts will help you maintain high chat blast engagement rates and low block rates.

When someone types “stop” to your bot, then Customers.ai’s unsubscribe process kicks in and that individual can confirm that they want to opt-out.

How to check chat blast reports

Stay tuned for the in-depth look at chat blast reporting metrics to pay attention to in a future article in the Chat Blast Master series, but in the meantime, here are the basics.

From the same Chat Blaster section of Customers.ai, you’ll see statistics from your chat blasts.

Right from here you’ll see how many contacts were sent the blast, and the number of responses received. Click on a specific Chat Blast campaign to view a detailed report.  

The read rate is the open rate — what percent of everyone who was sent the blast read it.

The response rate is like the click-through rate — what percent of everyone who was sent the blast took an action, whether clicking on a button or sending a reply.

We share 9 tips for getting top-tier engagement with your Facebook Messenger chat blasts and you’ll also want to check out an upcoming article in the Chat Blast Master series on using psychological principles of persuasion in your chat blasts.

That’s it for this overview on what the heck is a chat blast and why you’ll be adding them to your marketing mix in 2019. 

What is a Chat Blast: Important Next Steps