With over 70% of shopping enthusiasts exploring Instagram to buy products, business owners are swamped with DMs, comments, stories and mentions. The only way to manage this pool of leads is by using appropriate technology and automation. Thus, introducing Instagram DM (Direct Messaging) automation.
After commercializing the platform by adding business pages and a product tagging feature, Facebook integrated its Messenger API with Instagram in 2021, allowing brands to leverage advanced DM automation for the first time. It gave businesses an opportunity to develop a personal connection with the customers during all stages of the buying process.
With Instagram messaging automation, brands on Instagram can respond instantly to their customer queries and offer a customer experience so good that customers turn into advocates. The commencement of automation has opened floodgates of opportunities for businesses. They can now avail the benefits of enabling conversational commerce, offering continuous customer engagement and providing unstoppable customer support.
In this blog, we would like to draw your attention to the use cases of Instagram messaging automation. Let’s begin with the basics of Instagram messaging automation, and understand how businesses can use the feature.
What is Instagram messaging automation?
Instagram messaging automation is the process of integrating Facebook Messenger API with Instagram so as to interact with users and respond to them round the clock without the involvement of humans. It is a means to deliver exceptional customer experience minus the effort of employees.
Businesses can use automated messaging to convert likes and comments into real revenue. With automated messaging, businesses can welcome and onboard new customers, answer FAQs and respond instantly, economically and intelligently.
Interacting with customers during all stages of their journey is considered a good business practice, and Instagram messaging is a way to do that. Businesses can now meet their customers where they are at their convenience.
Instagram DM automation and the sales funnel
Instagram is a social media platform used by businesses to reach out to their customers during all stages of their sales funnel. With over 1 billion active users, Instagram has a high potential and is being adopted by B2B and B2C organizations, influencers and home-grown brands.
Let us dig deeper into how this platform benefits businesses in pushing customers through their sales funnel.
1. Awareness / Discovery stage
Nurturing and managing leads coming through Instagram can be automated using DM automation. Businesses can automate welcoming customers, sharing the top of the funnel information and collecting the details using Instagram chatbots.
With the automation of Instagram DMs, businesses can make sure to never miss a lead and gather all the relevant information for sales representatives.
2. Consideration stage
During this stage, a chatbot can engage with your customers, understand their requirements and recommend products and services that fulfill their needs.
Business owners get deep market insights that can come in handy at this stage. Chatbots can interact with warm and cold leads personally and push them to the next stage increasing the rate of conversion and providing growth opportunities.
3. Conversion / Decision stage
Businesses can provide a seamless conversational buying experience to their customers at the decision stage. They can automate scheduling appointments, placing orders, tracking orders and paying without any trouble.
With Instagram DM automation, customers can get a truly personalized conversational commerce experience and complete their buyers’ journey simply by having conversations.
4. Support/Retention stage
Instagram messaging automation makes it easy for businesses to be available in times of need for the customers. The Instagram chatbot can respond immediately to the customers solving their issues and answering their questions.
Instagram chatbots can help with detailed insights and granular segmentation of its users. With all this information, brands can foster customer loyalty and retain customers.
9 Popular Instagram messaging automation use cases for businesses
Now that we have seen how automating Instagram messaging helps in pushing customers through the sales funnel, and how businesses can enable exceptional conversational commerce on the channel, let us see some of the business functionalities that can leverage Instagram DM automation.
In this section, we have covered the popular use-cases of Instagram messaging automation for businesses. Businesses can use the technology to automate one or all of the following operations based on requirements.
1. Capturing leads
Capture and nurture your leads with a more natural and human way of interaction. Answer customer queries and remove the obstructions from their buyers’ journey. Using Instagram chatbots helps your business to generate and capture more leads automatically.
It will help you and your customers save a lot of time and energy that goes behind completing a transaction.
2. Recommending products
For new customers, an Instagram chatbot can ask questions from customers and understand their preferences and product choices. It helps businesses get a better understanding so that they can help customers by providing relevant product recommendations.
Businesses can also recommend products based on previous choices for the already existing customers.
3. Supporting customers
Businesses can improve CSAT score, brand loyalty and customer lifetime value by simply using Instagram messaging automation for supporting customers.
It can provide easy access to a communication channel that directly connects customers to businesses and help them get the answers they need immediately. It also provides support and interacts with customers in their regional language without any translator.
4. Collecting feedback
Feedback, review, ratings and testimonials are priceless assets that a business can acquire using Instagram chatbots. It is an easier and frictionless process to interact with a chatbot and share the experience, instead of filling out a form or visiting a page and rating a business.
Businesses can automate collecting feedback after every customer interaction and record them for future reference.
5. Sharing knowledge
Instagram chatbots can be used to educate prospects about your products and turn visitors into customers. An efficiently designed and well-automated chatbot can answer all incoming queries and solve the issues faced by the users.
Businesses can share informative infographics, blogs, videos, whitepapers, podcasts and any other form of content that imparts knowledge and also increases traffic to your website.
6. Automating giveaways and competitions
Instagram giveaway is a time-tested successful strategy for marketing through Instagram. Businesses use giveaways in order to reach out to new customers through the existing customers.
During a giveaway, there is a surge in the number of queries and requests. These all can be easily handled by Instagram messaging automation. Businesses can respond to their customers and solve their queries immediately.
7. Marketing events
With Instagram, businesses can reach out to their target audience through the channel where they are present. The channel can be used to market events and scale up the event registration list.
Instagram DM automation can help in sharing all the relevant information about the upcoming events and encouraging the warm leads to book their slots by sending a DM on Instagram.
8. Enabling bookings and reservations
Businesses can reduce the number of calls coming in for bookings and reservations by automating the process.
By automating the process, businesses can save a lot of time, money and human resources spent on manual bookings and follow-ups.
9. Growing subscriber list
Instagram messaging can be very helpful when it comes to growing your subscriber base or increasing traffic to your website. It can attract customers through interesting stories and captivating content.
With Instagram messaging automation, brands can build a loyal community of customers and make them feel special by providing a one-to-one messaging experience.
Implementation of Instagram messaging automation
Now that we have seen the use-cases of Instagram messaging automation and understood how it can help businesses grow and empower their customer experience, it’s time we understand the requirements of implementing this technology.
1. Create an Instagram business account
Instagram business pages are different than personal pages. They have information such as a contact number, location and product tagging feature. Businesses can establish a proper shop on Instagram using a business account.
If you do not have a business account, create it, because Instagram messaging automation works only for business pages.
2. Link Instagram to Facebook
The messenger API integration is provided by Facebook, therefore, it is very necessary for businesses to connect their Instagram account with their Facebook page.
3. Build your own chatbot
We understand that businesses can best understand the context and conversation flow. Thus, with Yellow.ai low/no-code bot builder, businesses can easily build their own chatbot for Instagram.
You do not require any prior experience in chatbot building or coding in order to begin with your chatbot.
Conclusion
With this blog, we hope we were able to clarify all your uncertainty about Instagram DM automation. Now that you understand the use-cases of Instagram messaging automation, start the process of building your chatbot with Yellow.ai.
If all of this seems too technical or time-consuming, just schedule a demo with our experts and share your requirements with them.
Get running with an Instagram chatbot in no time.
