How to use Messenger Bots to boost bookings 🚀

What is a chatbot and how can it help me? These are the questions that I get all the time in my inbox. I've been waiting for Facebook to roll out their latest changes and this video that I'm going to show you is how you can still make a chatbot work for your hospitality business. So for everybody who has seen my videos in the past, you will know that I Recommend using chatfuel C-H-A-T-F-U-E-L.com for your chatbots. There's a few other providers, many chat being one. But Chatfuel is good because it's free and it is very simple to sell. Now I'm not going to show you how to sign up to chatfuel because that's pretty self explanatory. What I want to do is I want to show you how once you've got set up, how you can make your chatbot work best for you. So as you can see, this is my dashboard. I'm using the granary, which is our family business, as the example here. So what you've got is you've got welcome message and default answer. Those are the two main options that you are presented with in the ultimate section. So my first recommendation is to strip back everything that they give you here and just have something as simple as hi, welcome to the grainy chat bot. Add a little bit of personalization. So our main farm dog is called Lolli. A lot of people recognize it and it's a nice little identifier for people, our brand, so to speak. So we call it the Lollipop. How can we help? So that will be when somebody sends you a message or somebody gets started on Facebook chat. This will be the first thing. So it looks nice and personalized the way that we make it personalized. You can see this tag here. So to get this all you need to do, and I'll show you an example is look on your keyboard to the top right, you'll see just above the brackets you can just put in these little fancy brackets. And when you do that, Chatfuel gives you all of these options. Now what I recommend is you just do first name because then what Facebook will do is it will pull in the user's first name because obviously the user is logged into Facebook and Facebook knows that user's first mate. So it adds a little bit of personalization. And then, and then all that we do here is I've just got these typing options here. This is totally up to you. If you have them or if you don't, it's got no massive benefit. Apart from it just looks like that. It looks like you're about to say something or you're just typing something. If at any point you want something, you just tap it in and it brings it in. If you want to take it away, you click on these three little buttons here and you click delete. You have got the other options to put in more text gallery. To be honest with chatfuel, you get loads of options of what to put in here, but I just like to keep it really simple. Again, it looks sort of like it's a human chatting to you, but obviously we know this is going to be automated. One of the main ways that a chatbot will help you moving forward, it will be a big time saver. Now what do I mean by a time saver? You know and I know the majority of the questions that we get coming in on our Facebook page, it's I would say 80% of the questions are the same one. So what you can do with this chat fuel is you come to this brain looking icon where it says set up AI. What I've done is I have put in some of the most common questions that we get in our inbox. So for example, do you provide parking? Do you have any availability? Can I book a room? And instead of me having to be always on the Facebook business page, when somebody types in, can I book a room? Then the bot automatically replies with a preset message that I put in. So for example, sure thing, please call or click or click here. So we want them to go to the website because I know if they go to our website they'll go to the booking engine and they're more likely to book. But the phone number is there as well. But you could personalize it and you could also as well randomize the text. So first message would be that, but if the next person comes on then it would be. So then it randomizes. So again so it looks where it is more of a human touch. And again, do you provide parking? Yes, free parking is on site. Do you have any availability? Again, so it's sending them to these places. I mean some of the other ones are we pet friendly. So if it was a new one, you just click on add AI rule and it would be do you accept pets? We have four pet friendly rooms to choose from every time that gets put in, then we can send them back. So a time saving tool, definitely. Everybody that may have known of chatbots in the past, you will have also realized about the Re Engage section. The reengage section was fantastic tool where you could just message out people en masse in one go. I mean if you look at these open rates, 89%, 92%, 93%. It is a fantastic, fantastic, it was a fantastic tool. Obviously Facebook got aware of how fantastic tool it was and now you have to spend money on Facebook ads if you want to send a message out. So I'm not going to cover it in this because I believe that spending for chatbot messages is not beneficial. There may be some people watching this who are doing it now and have got great results. If so, please share with me. But for my training I like to show free tips, free advice where you don't have to spend a lot of additional spends. Of course if you are paying for your chatbot messages, please do reach out, please do share with me your results and if it is encouraging enough, then I would always as well update this in the future. But I want to show you one more thing, the Grow tab. So this is a tool that I've been using is this is a little hack that I've been using and having some really good success with it with Granary and with Boostly. So this little section of the Growth tab is called Acquire users from comments. Now if I click on add rule you'll see that it gives me a few options. So number one, you're going to give it a name would put in website and you can apply the rule to all page posts or a specific post. Now we're going to do it to a specific post because if you do it on all paid posts, if anybody comments then they're going to get this message every single time, which we don't want because it can get a little spammy. So you're going to click on there. All right, how bot will reply. So to all comments are only comments that match keywords. So if a keyword was going to be say lolly for example, then that's when the bot would kick in. But I'm going to do it to all comments and again you can test, test this and see what works best for you. So all that you need to do, come into your, into your Facebook business page and I'm going to come in here and it's got to be on your Facebook business page. This won't work on your personal, it won't work in a group. All that you're going to do is you're going to and get people to engage. So you're going to ask pretty generic questions. For example, it could be who would like a list of our favorite things to do in the local area? You may have a blog post on your website. We are talking about some of our favorite things to do. You could redirect people to there. You may have a special offer that's coming up. It may be that you want to direct people to a new room that you've updated or a new cottage. Or if you want people to check out the reviews or you want someone sign up to your email list. These are the sort of potential things that you could do in this section. Because what you want somebody to do is you want somebody to comment on this post, you want somebody to engage. So you're going to be asking a question. So it would be something along the lines of let's have a quick look. Just for this example. Let me just. This is a pretty old blog, but who would like to see a list of our favorite things to do? Leave a message, leave a comment below. So here what you could do is you could put leave a GIF below if you want to do something like that. Or if people were to start to comment, then you basically want them to edge towards commenting. But you can't say the word leave a comment because then Facebook algorithms will snap that up. So it could just be leave a GIF or it could be leaving an emoji, or it could just be type the word hashtag Scarborough below. And again, you can sort of get creative with what you're going to put in here. So I'm going to post that. Now the reason why I want to post it is because we're going to get the link and I'm going to put it into here. So all you do is you click on the timestamp where it says just now or the timestamp is on there and up to where the question mark is. You're going to copy that, come into here and you're going to put it on there. So as you can see a specific post, enter all comments. So basically when they do that, you're going to send them a message and just say and again, hey, first name, thanks for the interest. Here you go. And then they just get that and again with that link or with that thing that you're going to put in there, it could be anything that goes in. So you could put a link to a sign up page, it could be a link to another post, it could be a link to your YouTube or somewhere else. So this is how it goes in action. So I'm going to flip from the granary to me. So I've done the comment. Pay attention to my inbox up here. So I've done the comment. Now what would happen is that will go from five to six. So my personal inbox now it says here, thanks for your interest. Here you go. And it sent me the link. So the direct link that is in there, it's gone in. Okay. So that's how it works in action. And you'll be able to see it working in action because on your Facebook business page it will say see response. So that's how you know that it's worked. And again, you've got the ability now and it's a real powerful tool that's to be able to, like I say, redirect them to your email signups or take them to your website page, or you could even so go along the lines of putting in a voucher on your website and directing people to that if you've got a really good, engaged audience. So that is how I would be personally looking to use chatbots with those two techniques, the automate, the AI and the grow. Everything else right now is not needed. I definitely wouldn't be upgrading because it's not needed. You've got those two simple tools which, which are really, really effective. All right, let me know how you get on and if you've got any further questions, you all know, but you can just comment below and ask away. But I hope you've enjoyed this video and let me know once you've got your chat boy.