Conversations 2019 Meet the Speakers: Matt Leitz (Recap)

Whether you want to learn the ins and outs of building a unique Messenger flow or discover how to build a bot to work for your business and help you earn well over six figures, Matt Leitz, Founder and CEO of BotBuilders.com, is your Messenger Marketing expert to gain knowledge from.

In case you missed our latest Meet the Speaker featuring Matt Leitz, it’s OK. We have the whole thing for you right here, plus some actionable tips you can apply immediately, as well as show notes.

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How to You First Get Into ManyChat and Bots?

Matt Leitz: Our company at the time, Clever Investor, is the company that when we said that we hit the Inc. 5000 list three times. That’s actually the company. Ironically our marketing department who sometimes I refer to as the kids, because they’re all younger. They approached me I think three times and said, “Yo Matt, we gotta get one of these chatbot things.” And three times I said, “No I don’t think so.”

We started training, software, coaching to anybody who wants to invest in real estate. So whether they wanted to be a landlord and rent houses out to make cashflow or flip houses, we’re one of the leaders in the space.

So, we made a good portion of our business and our success through Facebook. We were spending a couple million dollars a year on ads and everything was just kind of pumping along. And when they approached me, to me I initially shot it down because I had this sort of feeling about … My response was, “We’re a customer support company, we’ve made our reputation by taking care of people and I don’t want to try to replace people with robots.” So my misconception of the whole thing was that it was just trying to stop the conversation. Now fast forward, I recognize what I have seen as a well-designed bot, will filter out a lot of the conversations. Because sometimes people just want to get info, they just want to go on their way.

But when it does is it creates more of the conversations that you do want. So what we found is that we’ve made a lot of money, right? And more importantly, helped a lot of people and empowered a lot of people through the live chat on the ManyChat. So it’s like our bot is sort of setting them up and then when they have the interest.

How Do You Use Messenger Marketing to Build a Brand?

ML: When we look at Messenger Marketing, it’s going through this sort of cycle of like it started out and it was like all the hype and it was just, “Oh my God, you know, this is the future business and email is going to die, and all this kind of stuff.” And then the hype kind of wore off when the reality of it is, most bots just weren’t delivering a great experience. And it’s not because we didn’t have a great platform, it’s just, I tried to think back, and maybe this is showing my age a little bit, but when the World Wide Web was the new thing, you think about what a website was then compared to what a website is today.

It’s really no wonder that people kind of has this sort of experience. And then the other challenge being of course that when you get into ManyChat, it’s a powerful tool. But if you don’t know how to use that tool, so you got to hit that point. I don’t know if you know, it’s kind of those things maybe people don’t talk about, but that initial hype and excitement sort of wear off and then the reality set in and it’s sort of like, “Okay cool. We have to deliver a better quality experience.”

I think it was partially our ignorance of the whole thing that made us so good at building bots. Because when we came in … Well here’s what changed the game. So I’m no stranger as I admitted to you. I don’t do social media.

I don’t even like computers. Right. But what I discovered I had a really good brain for was marketing automation. So figuring out just kind of sequences and ways and using conditional logic to create a customized experience for people.

How Can Someone Really Sink Into Messenger Marketing?

Now, you got to think about what is Messenger Marketing. Now it’s one thing if it becomes your business, like if your business is Messenger Marketing, then okay, you need to have a certain brain. But to me, it’s like if you’re a company and that’s why it’s so awesome that ManyChat created this experts thing where you can go and find somebody.

It you’re going to go deep in it, then I do think that there’s a certain brain, but that doesn’t mean I really do believe that anybody can get the benefits of Messenger Marketing, even if you don’t have that sort of like, “Oh cool, I get this and this and this and this and this. It doesn’t really matter.” And actually, that’s why BotBuilders exist. Because once we started getting into this, we’ve got thousands of hours on Bot building.

When a company like ManyChat approaches us about building their bot, we don’t start from scratch. We start with this, we call it BotBuilders core, right? With these core sets of logic and functionality that we then build on top of. So, for us, as we can just build template add-ons like, “Oh cool, you’re in coaching or e-commerce or whatever.” And just sort of bolt the thing on so that ultimately at the end of the day, somebody who maybe doesn’t have the brain or doesn’t want to do it, can save thousands of hours of work and have a world-class bot in a matter of a couple hours instead of a couple of years.

I don’t want people to get discouraged, but at the same time, if you’re going to make it your thing, and then, of course, you need to have like a … You’re going to be passionate about those things that you have a natural inclination and you’re sort of good at. We’re logged in. I went from like, “We don’t want a bot, forget a bot.” And just serendipity happened that the week that I finally logged into ManyChat was the week that Conditional Logic opened up. And I saw that and I was just like, “Okay, so this means not only that we have the ability to create a customized experience for people, integrated with our email marketing,” which I’d love to talk about here in a minute if possible, but that it’s like, “I’m one of the first people to use this.”

I was like, “Boom, let’s go. I’m all in it.” And I actually, at the time I had acquired boardgames.com because I had this passion for board games.

And it ended up being that that’s actually the very first reason that I opened ManyChat to be honest because I needed a competitive advantage. And as soon as we got in there I was like, “Wow, okay, board games will be there for another thousand years, a bot is my new thing. We’re going all-in on this thing.” And we literally were just like building bot flows until three in the morning, every single night. So it’s just become this real, real passion.

What’s Your Favorite Thing About Using ManyChat?

ML: And to be able to work with a company where the CEO cares that much about a product that he’s going to listen to some random dude at a conference. And he was to get a notebook and was taking notes and I’m like, “Okay, ManyChat is going places, and this is the train that we need to attach to. And we fall in for sure. So, really what we wanted to do was kind of make it so that people could see. ManyChat’s biggest strength from a new user perspective is the ease of use, right.

You can drag boxes around, click things. You don’t need any code. But what Mike explained to me, is we want to keep it the easiest to use but we also want to make sure that it’s the most powerful and I really believe that they’ve achieved that because I still … We’ve over the last year and a half probably thrown out 20 recommendations for features and they’ve literally made every single one and at this point, I can’t even imagine anything that you can not do with ManyChat.

What’s One Concept Every Flow Should Have in Their Bot?

ML: To give a very basic example, and this is like a takeaway from anybody that’s out there, one of the things that we always do in this very simple concept is every flow that we ever build we use this principle of versioning, we call it, right?

It’s really simple. You just use tags and you use conditional logic.

When I teach people I go, this is the most complicated thing about ManyChat, conditional logic. And they’re like okay, okay. And they get scared. And then I go okay, you hit this plus and then you hit conditional logic and a box shows up. And that box says, yes or no. And basically, you can add any condition you want to it. The most common being, do they have a particular tag, right? If they have this tag yes, then send them this message. If they don’t have this tag, then send them that message.

Can You Give an Example of Conditional Logic and Tagging?

ML: To give you an example of how this version and concept works with conditional logic and tagging. For ManyChat a big thing was really improving customer support because ManyChat has rockstar customer support but it’s like with any business you can only handle so many channels and their preferred channel is to use a ticket system.

But the challenge was, is that a lot of people would go to Facebook Messenger, send a message in and they wouldn’t … It was this thing where they weren’t getting the most ideal experience because they prefer to use a ticket system. What we did is we stepped back and we said okay, how do you help people? And there was a number of ways but three primary ways. Number one was a knowledge base, which is self-help. It’s hey, I want an answer. I’ll just go get it really quick. That’s the best way in most situations to get out.

Ultimately, just to get back to this concept of versioning and creating intelligent bots. The first time you go into the support flow, it says hey we have these three options. Right? And examples it but the second time you go back, it doesn’t explain it. It just gives you options.

Can You Discuss More Conditions?

ML: All you have to do to achieve this kind of functionality, is when somebody comes into a flow you put a condition. And that condition says, do they have the tag of visited support flow or whatever tag you want. And if the answers no, then it adds the tag visited support flow and then goes into the spiel.

But if they come back a second time since you added the tag after the condition. The second time, it’s going to say have they visited the support flow and it says. And then it just takes them to here, your options.

And it’s now you’ve educated your people. And obviously the flow went a lot deeper than that but what we found is that it was something over 90% of people got their issue handled without even having to submit a hello ticket.

It’s just, that’s what bots are for ultimately. We talked about it. Getting people what they want faster but then in situations where they want to connect with somebody, boom there you go.

I’m going to talk about this at the Conversations Conferences. This is going to be my primary focal point because really, what it comes down to is there’s this ROI threshold right here

About Our Facebook Live Meet the Speakers Series

Each week Molly Mahoney hosts a LIVE interview with one of our Conversations 2019 speakers to give you the opportunity to meet them and learn their secrets to successful messenger marketing. It’s a way to ask questions that you might not be able to ask at the conference and discover more about what will be discussed at Conversations 2019.

Here are the details.

When: Thursday, 9 am PDT.

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The contents of this blog were independently prepared and are for informational purposes only. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ManyChat or any other party. Individual results may vary.