Introduction to ManyChat

Hey, everybody, this is Adam Arkfeld, and in today’s video, I’m gonna give you a very high-level overview of ManyChat. ManyChat is a Facebook Messenger bot builder, automation system, growth tool. Basically, everything related to Facebook Messenger and all of the interactions that happen in there, ManyChat dials into that, and it allows you to grow your subscriber list, which allows you to advertise to those people later, and do a lot of different things in the ManyChat platform. So, for the purposes of this video, I just wanted to give a very high-level overview, so people can get a little bit better feeling for what ManyChat looks like, how it works, and the different options, and just get a feel for how it works.

All right, so, I’m looking at Outdoor Adventure Marketing’s ManyChat dashboard. We just started rolling this out for Outdoor Adventure Marketing, so it’s very early stages. You can see we have 11 subscribers, which are actually just organic people that have subscribed. And on the dashboard here, we have subscribers, unsubscribes, net, you know, new. So, nothing super major. On the left-hand side, you will see that we have a number of different options. We have audience live chat growth tools, broadcasting. I’m gonna go over all these just very quickly.

Now, a lot of different options on the left. All right, so, I’m just gonna go from the top down. So, when I hit Audience, these are all the different people that are in ManyChat’s, our subscriber audience list. So, it means that they started interacting with Outdoor Adventure Marketing in Messenger, and you don’t have to be running anything related to ManyChat for that to happen. If people are just messaging you, they’re automatically gonna become a subscriber. So, we just started this a little bit ago, I think thirteen days ago, and these are just people that are organically connecting with us, and so, they are in our ManyChat system, even though we’re not really interacting with them in any sort of way.

On the right-hand side here, you can see there are a couple of different tags. So, you can tag people, and then organize them, or communicate with them in different ways, and then, you have different widgets which allow you to actually grow your subscriber tools, okay? Then, you have sequences, and this is showing an example, and a little bit of information, like that. So, if I click this person right here, clearly not the main photo I don’t think, but here’s a user tag, an example sequence, they opted in direct, and just shows a little bit of information. You can start a chat, and then, you can do custom fields. So, not only do they have the standard fields that you have with Facebook, that they pull in, but you can do some custom fields if you want to. Here, I’ll just, I’ll do one. So, user field. We’re gonna say hair color, right? And then, I can do text, I can do date, date and time, true or false, and I can then create that if I wanted to. So, when you can update those fields, when people are filling out forms through Messenger, or asking the questions, but, you know, creating a custom field is pretty cool.

All right, so I head back. In this screen, you just have very basic information about the person. You actually can’t do all that much. You can start a chat if you like, and then, you can pull up the chat conversation, and this just allows you to manage the live chats within ManyChat, which is nice, as opposed to using the Facebook Messenger. And it just gives you a little bit different screen for conversations and automation. So, that automatically kicked us to the next section down here, which is live chat. So, you see it here, here’s, like, “Love the ad, “I’ve been watching your videos, got it, hope all is well, “send me your number.” So, people are interested in conversing, and this is a really good way that we can just communicate with them nice and easy, and then also move them into different conversations and chats and so on and so forth. So, the live chat area is really cool, because you can move out of the Facebook platform, and also integrate it within ManyChat, to be communicating with people and moving them into sequences or whatever.

So, I’m not gonna click into those, cause there’s personal information, but I think that this one right here, this is a test one. So, you can see all the conversation. This is someone testing interactions and graphics and things like that. So, that’s the live chat area. Now, if I go over to growth tools, the whole idea behind ManyChat is that you’re growing a subscriber base very similar to growing an email list. You can’t actually message people in Messenger if they have not started communicating with your business, so as a business, that person needs to start a conversation with you through Messenger, and then, you have a lot of options to move them into a sequence, tag them, send out a broadcast message, or whatever, but the very first thing you have to do is get them into your sequence, and there are a few different ways to do that. One of those is running Messenger ads through Facebook ads. So, you can run an ad. It says, “Click to message.” When they click it, it opens a Messenger, and they’ve started communicating with you, and they follow into ManyChat, and they’re available. So, that’s one way to build your subscriber list.

You can also use growth tools. Okay, so there are a variety of different growth tools. This is a subscriber modal that pops up, and it allows you to then subscribe. You’ve got a bar on the top, you have an example popup. You have a landing page, and then, when I do New Growth Tool, it shows you all the other ones. So, a slide-in, a modal, a page takeover. You’ve got embeddable widgets that you can put on your website. You have a landing page, a Messenger Ref URL. So, this is used for, if you have a URL that you send in an email, or you send somewhere else, and when they click that, it kicks them over to Facebook, opens up Messenger, and they start engaging right away. So, you could have it in your email signature, “Message me to talk,” and when they click it, it’ll open up Facebook, open up Messenger, and then, they can talk to you. You have JSON, which is what you need for the Facebook ads. You add JSON text, so that it triggers right into ManyChat. Facebook comments. There’s a comment growth tool, where you can run an ad and say, “Hey, comment on this if you want to receive this free offer for a PDF. When they then comment, a Messenger interaction automatically starts, and you message them, and then, it opens a conversation. Facebook Messenger code, customer chat, checkbox, just a few different options. So, there are a lot of different ways to grow your subscriber base, and those are called the growth tools. So, that’s just a quick overview of those.

Now, once you’ve been using the growth tools, so, let’s say you have a modal on your website that pops up, and it says, “Hey, connect with us to learn more about something. “Learn more about our tours coming up in the Fall.” Then, someone subscribes, and now, you have this subscriber list growing. And now, what do you do with that list? You have a few different options. The first one is broadcasting. So, broadcasting is basically like an email. You have a list, and you want to create a broadcast, so I’m just gonna say New Broadcast, and then, I have to choose who I want to be in that broadcast, and also generate the post. So, here, I’m gonna say, you know, “Welcome,” or, “Looking forward to seeing you,” whatever. Yeah, and I do that, and then, you can see up here, that’s the starting step, that’s the top. You can enter your text here for a message. Then, you add buttons. You have text here, image, cards, or basically graphics. You have a list you can add. You can have audio, video, files, user input. You can make it dynamic, you can have delay. So, it sequences out over time. And then, you go next, and then, you actually choose your subscribers. So, you can do a subscription broadcast, a promotion, or a followup. You can add a condition. So, this is basically using tags, or something like that. You can have another condition, like language, timezone, name, blah, blah, blah. So, if you have a bunch of subscribers, and you’re a tour operator in a certain location, you can say, “Hey, what’s their timezone, or their locale?” And then, you can actually target people that are near you, for example. You can schedule when it gets sent out, and then, you can have it send push notifications and things like that. So, that’s what a broadcast is, which is really cool. Broadcasts allow you, they kind of act as email notifications.

Now, Facebook is, they really don’t want you to abuse this. So, up here, you’ll see that subscription broadcast messages can’t contain ads or promotional materials, but can be sent at any time, regardless of the time passed. So, you’re sending a broadcast to people, but they don’t want you promoting or containing ads. You can set a promotional broadcast that lasts 24 hours, or a follow-up broadcast after the end of the 24 hour window. You can send one follow-up, and then after that, you won’t be able to send ads or promotional messages again until they interact with you again. So, essentially, what Facebook is doing is they’re trying to make sure that you’re not just completely hammering your consumer base all the time, because that would be super frustrating. Autoposting, you can connect channels to autopost. I’m not gonna get into that right now, but autoposting is another feature, another way to broadcast. Then, when you get farther down, you start talking about automation and flows. And so, for example, down here, we have a main menu, a default reply, welcome message, keywords, sequences. So, the main menu, for example, if I add a main menu, it says, “Hey, if you’re interested in talking “to Outdoor Adventure Marketing, “you want to talk to us about new business, “being a partner, or something else, “or just contact us right now.” So, then, they might hit the contact button, and it’ll call us, or they might say, “I want to talk about new business, blah, blah, blah.” So, this creates a main menu. So, I’ll just say, “Menu Item One,” done. And then, you can see Menu Item One down here, and so, when someone interacts with Messenger, they then click that, and then, it starts taking them through a variety of different sequences, like a path. You also have the default reply. So, this is basically, when someone connects with you, what do you want it to say, and what do you want it to do? So, the default reply can mean they typically reply in this amount of time. I want to talk to human. It shows your clickthrough rate, so it actually shows how many people got that. So, ours is not enabled, so we would have to enable this.

So, this is how many people got that, and then, their clickthrough rate, how many saw it, and so on and so forth. You have a welcome message. When someone starts interacting with you, you can see it right here. It starts to show you a preview. You have different keywords. So, these are keywords that people can type in to Messenger for a certain action to take place. So, subscribe allows them to subscribe to the bot. They can stop or unsubscribe. You can do different things, like download, if they wanted to download something, or email, if you wanted to get something emailed to you. So, basically, using keywords allows you to then add an action, and add them to a sequence, add them to a flow, or something like that. So, the keywords are basically keywords that the consumer’s typing to do certain actions. Then, we roll into sequences, which starts to get a lot more complicated. But when you create a sequence, we’re gonna do Test Sequence, there’s a test sequence, so basically, it’s like, send an introduction and unsubscribe instructions, send educational message, educational soft sell, and then, educational message.

So, this is basically just giving you a sequence that you can start using right away, which is really cool, because you don’t have to conceptualize it, and it’s very easy to understand. You can add new messages, and continue to build this out at will. All right, so that’s sequences. And then, you also have rules, and this is actually new. I’m actually not that familiar with rules, but it’s obviously, when something happens, you apply it into a tag, or something is initiated. So, I say tag applied. Then, you perform an action. So, clearly, a tag is applied, then, an action takes place. And, I haven’t worked with this section too much, but that’s kind of the general premise of it.

The purpose of this video is just give you kind of high-level. And then, the last section I’m gonna talk about is flows. These are very similar to sequences, and they kind of play in with sequences, where a flow has a number of different components to it. So, for example, in the sequence, you had all of these different steps, right? So, send educational message, send educational soft sell, And then, those steps, each one of those steps, is a flow. So, you can go to the flow builder here, and see this more in action from a visual perspective. Well, here, there’s only one, so, oh, here it is. Sorry, it popped up. So, here, it shows a flow component. So, this is the flow builder. And then, the flow is part of the sequence.

So, you might consider a flow like a building block for a sequence. So, a sequence is high-level, like, “These are the five things I want to do to this consumer “as they’re rolling through their experience “with my business.” And then, at each one of those major steps, there is a flow. And then, you can use a flow builder. So, you can add different things here, where you’re adding different steps. Let me go to the Basic Builder, it’s easier for me. So, if I edit the flow, and then, I want to create a new message, and then, let’s say I want to add an image, and I can upload the image, so it’s like, “Hey, thanks for blah, blah, blah. “Here’s the text.” And then, you add a button, and, you know, here’s something to do in this flow, right? So, the flows are components of sequences, and you build out flows, then you add them to a sequence, and you have all of your automation. That’s just a very high-level overview of what’s happening in, kind of like, this sequence just seems to me like the most, the best place to see everything, because here, this shows the time delay, and what flow is part of the sequence.

So, there’s a lot of different things you can do in this system, and you can be linking people out to your website, linking to your booking page, taking them everywhere, whenever and however you want. So, if you are doing a lot in Facebook, or any Facebook ads, and working in Messenger, ManyChat is a really good tool. The pricing is fairly reasonable. I’m gonna show you the pricing, I think. Ah, I don’t want to put in my credit card number right now. I want to see all, oh, here we go. Learn about Free. Yeah, so, here we go. Pro plans, all right, yeah. So, up to 1000 subscribers is $15 per month. 500 is $10, and then $25, so if you have 5000 subscribers, you’re at $45 per month, which is, you know, starts to become realish money, but it’s not an incredible amount of money. And then, you get up to, 10000 is 65, so it’s incremental after that, 50000, 95.

So, that is an overview of ManyChat. If you have any questions, I hope you’ll comment or shoot me a message. My email’s probably below if you’re watching this on YouTube, or please send a message and just connect with us over Facebook if you’re watching this on Facebook. So, thanks again, my name’s Adam Arkfeld. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I will see you in the next video. Thanks a lot.