Background of founders and what’s the journey behind ManyChat
Mike Yan, CEO of ManyChat, started developing a social network with entertainment content called “YouComedy,” similar to Pinterest but for anecdotes
Later on, he saw the potential in creating a simple platform to help people do Telegram broadcasts. That platform turned into what is now transforming the face of modern-day business marketing, sales, and support: ManyChat.
Rejected by Y combinator a few times in 2015 didn’t deter his pursuit from changing the game. He realized that the way marketing channels evolve is based on how human behavior evolves.
His estimate was proven correct as more people adopted messaging apps over the years, and it eventually became the number one way to connect with people.
Today, ManyChat is the #1 Chat Marketing Platform globally, enabling businesses to leverage Instagram DM Automation, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email to build personal connections with customers.
Currently, the platform powers over 1 billion conversations, sending eight billion messages every month.
How manychat is helping different sectors
ManyChat is helping many businesses automate their marketing efforts by implementing Messenger bots and Instagram Automation into their wheelhouse. Specifically, with Instagram, we are seeing how businesses like eCommerce and influencers are able to reduce response time to messages in their inbox because they are able to use our auto responder and send messages directly to a live agent, who will get notified right away on our app.
Example, Frazer Brookes is selling a book. And he found that we were able to help him connect with his followers because of the Story Mention feature. This was a big factor because most of the messages or story mentions go to the request inbox and often get missed. So Story Mentions allows these DMs to go to his main inbox and he is able to connect with his audience.
Because we’re able to help him connect with his followers instantly, he grew from 60,000 to 117,000 followers and improved his engagement by 40%, and drove 200 sales page views in a 30 minute time window.
How can email marketing compared with Chatbot
Email marketing is one to many. Chat marketing is 1-1. It’s a personalized conversation that allows the user to take action instantly, right inside the conversation. We’ve also seen a much higher CTR with chatbot, averaging about 80% open rate and 25% click-thru rate. The average open rate for emails today is around 15% and the CTR is 2.5%.
One other thing to note, with Chat, the conversation is able to collect data meaning you can ask a series of questions tailored to that conversation which will help marketers better target them in the future and offer more aligned items to their preference.
What social media platforms currently supporting
ManyChat is a Facebook Premiere Business Partner. Currently, we integrate with Messenger and Instagram. We are in closed beta for WhatsApp and can not wait to open it up to the general public!
Future plans (if they can share).
We are working on some robust features for Instagram. And of course, WhatsApp. We are in closed beta and can’t wait to open it up to others soon.
