ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
$10
per month
ShoutOUT
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
ShoutOUT is a business texting tool to send personalized SMS campaigns, with advanced personalization and segmentation features. Users can send: personalized alerts promotions reminders short links marketing / promotional campaigns customer feedback collection customer updates conversational messaging team communication in any SMEs including the…
I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).
If you are mainly using Instagram influencers to promote your business, ShoutOUT works excellent for that. Most of those influencers aren't very tech-savvy, so giving them a coupon code to track their sales and commission them off of that seems to work well. The mass payout feature is pretty simple to use as well, but I wish that you didn't have to do it on a 1-on-1 basis.
Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.
Not a vast network of affiliates to choose from if you need them to facilitate that side of your business.
Sometimes the tracking by coupon code doesn't seem to work correctly, and the numbers don't match up with what we see on the backend of our Shopify numbers.
Could make it easier to add creatives and deep linking for affiliates.
It works perfectly for what we need it to do. It is very inexpensive, works well, and makes it easy for us to navigate and use. We can easily add new affiliates and create coupons for them to track their sales. For the influencers that are a little more inclined to post product links and go the more traditional affiliate approach, we can certainly provide that option for them and go that route as well. We like the ease and simplicity.
ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.
There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.
We only had to use it once, but they got back to us very quickly and helped us solve the issue that we had. So, ShoutOUT support is batting 1000% in our book, but that is only 1 out of 1 and may not be enough of a sample size to verify that they are as good as we think.
I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.
We used Shareasale and Commission Junction in the, and they are awesome to manage your traditional affiliates that run blogs or email campaigns. We would still be using those if we did more of a traditional approach to influencers. But since we moved over to a more influencer based marketing approach, ShoutOut is fantastic and has made it simpler for us and our affiliates.
For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.
Very positive right off the bat because we dropped our Commission Junction expenses and got most of our bigger affiliates to switch over to keep their sales.
Easy to use and much simpler for our affiliate manager to do her work.
