ManyChat Review: Is This the Best Facebook Messenger Bot?

In today’s marketplace, quick replies are more important than ever.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, affiliate marketer, or do something else online related to customer service, more and more people are starting to expect quick and helpful replies from the businesses they trust most. Put simply, Monday to Friday standard business calling hours aren’t going to cut it for today’s breed of online consumers.

In recent years, live chat has been one of the most popular methods to increase customer service hours, and for good reason. Many people prefer being able to quickly and easily chat with their favorite websites and businesses, and that’s where ManyChat comes in. Claiming to be the easiest way to create a FaceBook messenger chatbot, ManyChat offers business owners and affiliate marketers a powerful software tool that offers in-depth ways to generate leads, answer questions, and keep customers happy.

We dove into the ManyChat software to find out if it delivers on its promises. Here’s what we found.

What is ManyChat?

ManyChat is a lot of things, but at its core, ManyChat is a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

What does this mean?

Well, if you’ve ever contacted a business on FaceBook and received an immediate, automated reply, then you’ve encountered a FaceBook messenger chatbot. It’s essentially a more modern version of the automated email reply; the practice has been around for years.

Having a FaceBook Messenger chatbot is great for a few reasons: first, if you’re an affiliate marketer, it helps keep your audience happy even if you’re not there to respond. Second, the ManyChat bot can be customized and can help to refine your customers’ questions before you even take a look at the chat. What’s more, having an automatic bot may even be able to answer someone’s question, meaning even less manual time that you have to spend replying to your audience.

ManyChat has a number of uses beyond the obvious one of just keeping customers happy. Lead generation and growth tools are both offered, meaning that ManyChat can help you to grow your audience. Overall, the prospect of ManyChat is a promising one for affiliate marketers, and those promising features are what we put to the test for this review.

How Much Does ManyChat Cost?

ManyChat’s pricing is highly variable. There’s a free version (the one we tested) that offers a ton of features, and many marketers may not have to look past that depending on what they want to get out of the chatbot.

However, ManyChat does offer some premium versions for marketers who want to go above and beyond. The pricing scales from $10 all the way up to $145 simply depending on the number of subscribers that you have. In ManyChat’s case, subscribers are people who have messaged you on FaceBook. Essentially, you’re building a massive subscriber base through FaceBook Messenger. All in all, it’s pretty cool.

ManyChat Features

ManyChat has quite a few features, but they’re all focused around a couple of core ones that drive the purpose and function of the software. Here is a look at some of our favorites.

Template Integration Options

ManyChat is compatible with a host of outside templates, some of which can be great for lead generation. If you don’t want to put a lot of time into creating a bot of your own, purchasing a template online is one of the best ways to get a bot that communicates effectively with a lot of your followers.

Another one of the big things not yet mentioned about chatbots is their ability to weed out potential messages from people who don’t really care very much about getting in contact with you; whether it’s spam or just an unruly customer, a chatbot can help you sort through chats to figure out who is actually interested in talking with you.

Widget Creation Tools

As previously mentioned, ManyChat is great for lead generation. One of the biggest lead generation tools incorporated into the software is the array of widget generation tools, allowing you to create customizable banners and headers for your FaceBook page that will direct interested customers to the chatbot that you’ve set up.

In many ways, ManyChat allows you to very specifically structure and direct traffic on your page, meaning you can show your audience exactly what you want them to see and allow them to get into contact with you for all the right reasons. A well-built header coupled with a brilliant chatbot design make for a ton of new subscribers and loyal fans to your brand.

ManyChat’s widget creation tools allow you to make a wide variety of customizations so your lead magnet is just the way you want it. Together with a customized chatbot, ManyChat has created a very powerful FaceBook marketing tool, and it’s one that affiliate marketers should consider.

Automation Customization

One of the core features of ManyChat, automation is crucial to making sure your chatbot is functioning just the way you want it to. The last thing you’d want is a faulty chatbot that ends up looking unprofessional, as that could cost you potential customers.

ManyChat’s complex automation features are more accessible to users with the pro account, but it still offers an impressive selection to those who’d rather not pay for the service. One of the biggest and easiest things to do with this feature is to change the default reply of the chatbot, as the default reply is not the best and you want your chatbot’s initial reply to be personalized and make your audience feel like you put effort into it.

There’s nothing worse than an uncustomized chatbot that looks low-effort and alienates your audience, so customizing the automation and default messaging of your chatbot is key.

Smart Uses for ManyChat

ManyChat’s features create many different use cases for affiliate marketers, and here are a few of our very favorites.

Grow Your Audience

FaceBook marketing is one of the best ways to grow your audience, especially as an affiliate marketer. Getting an audience of people who regularly follow your FaceBook page is crucial, and using ManyChat’s various tools to maximize that is a great way to make sure that you’re not missing out on any opportunities.

Lead generation with ManyChat is easy and effective, and using the software to grow your audience is one of the very best ways to put it into use.

Make a Lasting First Impression

First impressions are crucial, particularly when you’re trying to build an audience online. For affiliate marketers, having a reliable and trustworthy image is one of the biggest things that leads people to click on and purchase products from your affiliate links.

Chatbots, in this case ManyChat, are a great way to create a lasting first impression. Instead of sending you a message and receiving silence as a response (at least for a few hours), they’ll get an instant reply from a chatbot that you’ve customized to make them feel welcome, satisfy their need for contact in awhile, and assure them that they’ll be talking to a real human soon.

More advanced chatbots can even answer some basic questions, so if you set yours up right and know what the most common questions about your brand are, you might be able to set up ManyChat so that you don’t have to spend all day answering the same questions over and over again.

Maintain a Happy Audience

This use ties in with the others previously mentioned, but it’s an important one to be listed all on its own. Creating and maintaining a happy, thriving audience is absolutely essential as an affiliate marketer, and a chatbot like ManyChat can make sure your audience is feeling welcome and at home.

With the myriad of tools at your disposable with this software, you shouldn’t have a problem keeping your audience happy with a chatbot.

Alternatives

When it comes to alternatives, ChatBotand MobileMonkey are the two main FaceBook Messenger chatbot alternatives that affiliate marketers may want to take a look at instead of ManyChat. Depending on which tier of subscription you get, these services can either be more or less expensive than ManyChat; put quite simply, there isn’t a clear standout here when it comes to price.

Is ManyChat Worth the Money?

In short, the answer is yes. However, the answer is yes only if you do an extensive amount of FaceBook marketing or have a sizable FaceBook page. If you don’t have either of these and aren’t planning to expand anytime soon, then you may not need the paid version of ManyChat. However, paid or not, ManyChat is an effective FaceBook Messenger bot that gets the job done and goes above and beyond with extra tools and lead generation options.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Industry competitive price
• Wide variety of features available
• Lead generation options built in
• Integrates seamlessly with Messenger

Cons

• May not be necessary for all marketers
• Can get expensive if you’ve got a big audience