CRM’s New Frontier: Messenger
Facebook Messenger is on the verge of hitting the 1 billion user mark, sitting at 800 million users today, and the social network is ready to make some money. It plans to start monetizing those users soon by allowing businesses to serve ads to users who previously contacted them through Messenger.
Facebook hasn’t been quiet about how much it believes brands should be leveraging Messenger, particularly for customer service. It recently started showing how fast businesses reply to fans who message them, and it’s made “Contact Us” and “Click to Message” calls-to-action on both Facebook Pages and ads. It’s doing everything it can to give brands the tools and incentives to turn to Messenger for day-to-day customer interactions, and it’s about to take a turn in that direction even harder.
Adding Reach to Relationships
The goal of Messenger ads won’t be to reach as many people as possible but to capitalize on the relationships that brands do have, similar to traditional CRM. These ads will be a way to keep an already engaged audience interested with information on upcoming sales, promotions, product launches and so on. These are customers who have already reached out to the brand for one reason or another, and hopefully, those interactions ended amicably.
The challenge will be whether or not users are open to this kind of intrusion. Messenger is akin to text messaging, which makes it an intimate medium users turn to for their closes friends. For that reason, this isn’t going to be something advertisers can or should use at will. The cost is going to be premium, and the targeting and messaging will need to be as well. The messages will need to be just as valuable to the users as the ad is to the advertiser, otherwise, advertisers can expect the ads to do more harm than good.
Social’s Getting Personal Again
Messenger’s move is just another sign of the growing reliance on messaging apps over social networks by users. Reaching mobile users means tapping into messaging platforms, and the brands that succeed will take a light touch—one that reaches out infrequently but when it does, it adds value. These ads will appear to users who have previously reached out, but unlike CRM, they have not signed up.
All of this shows how personal social is getting once again. It started with a promise of having one-on-one relationships with consumers and the advent of paid social shifted that. That will never go away, but the emphasis of messaging platforms is bringing a touch of that one-on-one communication back.