More businesses these days are using Facebook Messenger for their marketing, and they're yielding amazing results.

Messenger for business is no longer just about customer service, which has been made more personalized and streamlined through it. Nowadays, Messenger is being appropriated to both marketing and sales, making the platform a powerful tool for small businesses.

More than half of all consumers prefer engaging with businesses through online chat than over the phone or email. That gives small businesses more ability to engage with customers, which can be taken advantage of for marketing.
Here are some of the best ways you can boost Messenger marketing for your small business:

1. Use Automation for Messenger Marketing

If you're looking to take Messenger Marketing seriously, the first step is to build a chatbot.

There are tools like MobileMonkey that allow you to build Facebook Messenger chatbots within five minutes.
Brands like Lyft, Zalora and Uber are taking advantage of messenger marketing in the early days and are getting incredible results from this strategy.

Facebook messenger chatbots can handle common inquiries from customers for you, giving you more room to breathe. It also allows users to order food, schedule flights, watch movie trailers, search for songs and get recommendations for pretty much anything you can think of!

It can also send content to users who do things like click on CTA buttons, type certain keywords, and so on.
You can set up a Comment Guard to respond automatically when they leave a comment on a certain post on your page.

There are also messaging broadcasts to your contact list to give them the latest updates about your products and services!

Those messages can be targeted, letting you choose options that will let you deliver messages only to those who are actually interested.

The leads generated by this process are then more likely to convert, thus giving you more positive results.

2. Messenger Ads and Click-to-Messenger Ads

Similar to most Facebook ads, you can utilize advertising on Messenger itself to directly market your business on the platform.

That advertisement is a special message that gets sent to your contact list.

Clicking on it can send the user to a landing page or a Messenger conversation with your business.

There are also Click-to-Messenger ads, which are sponsored posts displayed on Facebook, Instagram, and the Messenger home screen.

When they're clicked on, the user gets sent to a Messenger conversation with your business.

Then there are sponsored messages, which are best used for re-engaging with users who've previously engaged with you.

You can use sponsored messages to send reminders and updates to try converting that customer again.

3. Add a Facebook Messenger Customer Chat

Having a Messenger live chat widget in your website lets customers contact you easily.

You can also add a Messenger Sales Channel to your ecommerce site to handle orders.

It lets people view your products within the app, and buying something takes them to your checkout page.

A "buy now" button can also be added to MobileMonkey to serve as a call-to-action for conversion.

It can also automatically respond to customer service questions and show notifications on their orders.

4. Cart Recovery

Abandoned carts are one of the things that ecommerce businesses watch out for.

When customers leave carts without checking out, there's still a chance to convince them to continue.

Personalized messages can be sent to remind them of the abandoned cart, making them think about it again.

It's important to send that cart recovery message as soon as that cart is certainly abandoned.

This makes sure the customer has less time to think about buying from another website.

5. Don’t Treat Messenger Like Email

It's easy to make this mistake since Messenger is a personal messaging platform much like email.

However, the fact that Messenger is a chat platform makes it very different from email.

Email marketing much less about building relationships with customers, but more on outreach, information, and sales.

While Messenger can be used the same way, that would be underestimating the power of the platform.

The receiver of the message is supposed to reply in order to be added to your contact list.

That means you’re more confident of your leads as they have to engage to show their interest.

What follows is building a relationship with that lead in order to convert that person into a paying customer.

That makes Messenger more effective for marketing than email in a lot of ways!

Larry Kim is the CEO & Founder of MobileMonkey, a Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform and free chatbot builder. He's also founder of WordStream, Inc., the leading provider of Google Ads, Facebook Ads and keyword tools used by over a million marketers worldwide. The company employs over three hundred people and manages billions of dollars of ad spend on behalf of tens of thousands of customers. WordStream was acquired by Gannett for $150 million. He's a contributor to CNBC and Inc. Magazine. He received Marketer of the Year awards from Search Engine Land, US Search Awards, and PPC Hero. Reach him on Twitter @larrykim.