ManyChat Review [Chatbot & Growth Tools]

Welcome back to Top Dog Apps! Today we are delving into the world of chatbots and writing a review for Manychat. Chatbots have risen in popularity in the past few years, and for good reason. Today we will tell you if Manychat is worth your chatbot time 🙂

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot, funnily enough, is a bot…that chats!! ha ha!! The main ways that chatbots are used are to attach an interactive element to websites or marketing campaigns. Ever seen a pop-up in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, asking if you need help? That’s a chatbot!

These chatbots can run messages through their own platform or using other well know chat platforms such as Facebook messenger.

Why Chatbots?

Over the past few years you may have heard terms such as “conversational marketing” and “chat funnels” banded about. Chatbots have been at the heart of this revolution in marketing. No longer do you have to sell in a one-way manner, now you can have a chatbot to talk with our prospect and pre-sell them in a natural way.

Many businesses and entrepreneurs have exclaimed that chatbots have helped their conversion rates go through the roof when using for marketing.

Other businesses have stated that chatbots have taken the burden off their human support team by answering simple questions and queries without the need for human help.

As time goes by, chatbots are only going to get better and more sophisticated. I believe they are here to stay, and will continue to make a huge impact in the business world!

What about Manychat?

Now that we warmed you up with some chatbot talk, lets get down to brass tacks. Where does Manychat come into all of this?

Manychat has come onto the scene and turned into the ‘cool kid’ of chatbots (in my opinion). All of the hip marketers seem to be using the Manychat platform, and it has quickly grown.

Most courses I have taken that involve chatbots are using the Manychat platform. It has basically turned into the go-to chatbot for online marketers.

What are the Main Features of Manychat?

• Simple drag-and-drop bot building interface. 
• Tailored to sales and marketing.
• Interfaces with other popular tools such as ConvertKit and Hubspot.
• Scalable with your business. The pricing starts off affordable for even the smallest businesses.
• Rich chat experience- engage your customers with a rich chat experience that includes GIFs and product carousels. 

The main use case for Manychat is to use it to connect with your audience on Facebook in a fun and interactive way. Maybe someone visits your Facebook page and sees the chatbot pop up. You can design a dialogue or conversation that will help convert these people into leads.

Manychat will then help you put these leads into lists and make it easy for you contact them with fun and hopefully interesting broadcasts. Think of it as email marketing for Facebook messenger.

Although Manychat have since added more layers to their service, this still remains the core of the business.

How Much is Manychat?

Manychat has a very competitive pricing plan that starts off free, with the price gradually growing with your chatbot business.

The free account allows you to freely build bots with basic features. The pro account for $10 a month then adds some additional functionality such as advanced bot templates and A/B testing.

At this point, the cost goes up depending on the number of subscribers you want to engage with and send messages to from the chatbot. The $10 a month pro account comes with a decent allocation of 500 subscribers. 

This will then go up to $15 for 1000 and $25 a month for 2500 engaged subscribers. 

What Do We Like about Manychat?

Simple to Use

Manychat are masters at simple bot building, and they really revolutionized the chatbot scene by making it quick and easy for anyone to make a bot.

When people talk about no-code applications, Manychat is a big part of that. You build your bots by simply building out a series of flows, a bit like what you may build in an autoresponder email service.

They do offer a basic builder, but I would always recommend you use their flow builder to get the simplest and most intuitive bot builds done.

Add to this a plethora of ready-made bot templates, and you are onto a real winner.

Most people can have their first chatbot up in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days.

This simplicity is a real game changer for chatbot marketing.

Works on Multiple Platforms

Manychat works with platforms such as Facebook Messenger, SMS and Shopify. They originally started solely on Facebook messenger, so it is great to see them branching out.

This means that you can pretty much use your chatbot to message potential customers on whatever platform they frequent often. This is massive, as you often find that different target audiences can be found on different platforms.

The only thing that slightly stands in the way of this is their choice of language for it’s different tools…..more on that later!

Great Onboarding

I have to say I was impressed by the onboarding process Manychat has for new users. When you first sign up they have a detailed questionnaire to make sure they tailor the service to exactly what you need.

Additionally, they show you their “Goal and Strategies” tab on first login, which will include some step-by-step tutorial videos.

Finally, at the start, a tutorial video will pop up for a lot of features when you click on them for the first time.

Not Just a Chatbot

Although Manychat started as a chatbot, it now incorporates so many more tools that you could almost call it a suite.

Most of these new tools are called Growth Tools, and give you more ways to connect with your potential audience. You can set various pops ups and bars on your websites, as well as making a landing page that is hosted by Manychat.

This makes Manychat more of a marketing suite than only a chatbot. They even have a specific tool related to using Maanychat on your Facebook adverts.

Simple to share

Manychat makes it easy to duplicate bots you have already made or share them with someone else that uses this platform. You would be surprised at how many bot builders forget functionality like this.

Community

As Manychat is one of the more popular chatbots, particularly for solopreneurs and the like, there is a big community out there you can use for ideas and tips in your chatbot business. I see this as a big plus for the service, especially if you are still learning how to include these in your business.

What Don’t We Like about Manychat?

Confusing Language

When I first logged into Manychat I looked for terms such as “Create Bot” or “Bot Templates” but couldn’t find them anywhere!

Manychat likes to hide its chatbot functionality in with the other growth tools described above. Some may like this, but personally I would rather they went for more straightforward and obvious language.

It meant that it took me a bit longer at the start to find all of the chatbot functions I needed.

No AI

There are two schools of thought in the bot building world. One likes to use hand crafted conversations, where every twist and turn is mapped out carefully by a human. The other is to train an AI to be able to answer questions by itself.

Manychat seems to be firmly in the human hand crafted camp, as they don’t offer any kind of AI natively on their platform. I can see why they may have gone this route, as AI inteligence is far from ideal at this point in time.

Although, for me personally, I have tried making AI chatbots myself and can see a massive potential in them. The fact that Manychat is ignoring this side of the chatbot world is disappointing to me. 

This doesn’t mean that AI is impossible with Manychat, it just means you have to connect it to a 3rd party AI service such as Dialogflow.

Should You Subscribe to Manychat?

If you want to add conversational marketing to your business, this is a great way to do it. Manychat is a modern and slick tool that you can use to grow your business online in a smart and efficient way.

If you want to check ManyChat out for yourself, click HERE to go over to their official website.

For me personally, I choose other chatbots for their better integration of AI, something that I use frequently in the bots I build. If AI is a big thing for you too, you may also want to steer clear of Manychat.