While email marketing still remains to be one of the most effective and highly converting marketing channels, it is definitely becoming increasingly difficult to get across the various filters and land in a prospect's Inbox.
It is one of the principal reasons that Messenger marketing has gained so much popularity and traction over the last few years.
Your marketing messages land right inside the Messenger Inbox and when done right it gives a lot of value for the time, effort, and money spent.
However, setting up chatbots and thereby your Messenger marketing campaigns are not as straight forward as your normal email marketing campaigns. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that you are using the right tool you are comfortable working with.
ManyChat has been one of the pioneers in Messenger marketing as they were one of the early entrants into the market. However, based on your specific needs and use cases, you might need an alternative tool to ManyChat for more powerful automation capabilities or for a more affordable & easier to use platform.
Here are some of the best alternatives to ManyChat based on the features offered and the pricing. Let's get right into it.
Pricing - starts from $29 per month for 5,000 contacts.
Free plan - Yes, available for up to 100 contacts.
POP is an extremely easy to use and a feature-rich Messenger marketing tool. It has a powerful Inbox that makes it way more easier and effective to use compared to other similar chatbot tools in the market.
Features range from Ad management, Comment to Messenger that connects with prospects who comment on your posts, website widgets, live chat for websites, etc.
POP comes with Zapier integration to connect with your e-Commerce stores and many other third-party applications.
It also has one of the best free plans among all the chatbot tools as the free plan comes with all the features for up to 100 contacts.
POP has templates for various use cases like lead generation, feedback collection, events & meetups, and for different industries like restaurants, e-commerce, recruitment, etc.
One more huge plus in POP is that in addition to Messenger, you can also chat via WhatsApp with your website visitors via the Live chat.
Overall, POP is a fantastic alternative to ManyChat with its extensive array of features, ease of use in setting up the chatbots, an excellent support team, and a powerful Inbox solution to manage all the messages efficiently.
Pricing - starts from $50 per month for up to 1,000 monthly chats.
Free Plan - Not available.
ChatBot is a multi-channel chat tool that is designed by the team from LiveChat which is a really mature SaaS tool.
It comes with many good templates categorized under Marketing, Sales, and Support for various use cases like recruitment, e-commerce, lead generation, etc. that be used as a starting point to build your chatbots.
ChatBot integrates natively with Messenger making it a breeze to connect and build Messenger chatbots. You can use images, cards & carousels, buttons, and quick replies to build a personalized chatbot for each for your visitors.
Buttons and quick replies offer a completely typeless conversation experience that is sure to increase conversions.
ChatBot also has a very intuitive drag & drop visual builder to build complex conversation sequences easily. You can easily train the bot to recognize certain important keywords and verify the customer's input accordingly.
Once you have built the bot with the desired conversations, it is possible to test the chatbot completely before it is published live.
All the unrecognized keyword phrases are stored by the system and provided as suggestions later so that you can build new bot sequences based on these keywords. Also, some of the important contact information entries like email addresses and phone numbers can be automatically validated.
ChatBot also provides you with detailed analytics & reports including data such as the average number of chats, level of engagement, heatmap on the busiest period, etc.
You can also see the topics that were repeated the most in the chat to get an idea of the information most needed by your customers.
If you need a human touch across any part of the chatbot, it's really easy to link with your LiveChat account. As both the products are developed and managed by the same team, they sync and seamlessly work together to provide the best of both worlds, automation with the essential human touch.
Pricing - starts from $29 per month for up to $1,000 of revenue generated.
Free Plan - Not available.
If you are looking for Messenger marketing exclusively for e-commerce, Recart is easily one of the best options.
There are a number of e-commerce sales templates to choose from that come free with Recart. Some of the templates are back to school deals, variable rewards, comments giveaway, gift cards, sponsored message flows, welcome discount ad flow, etc.
You can easily build chatbots for various e-commerce use cases like abandoned cart, shipping & delivery, welcome message, product reviews, broadcasts & promotions, etc.
Recart has native integration with e-commerce specific email marketing tools like Klaviyo, Privy, etc. that lets you build multi-channel outreach sequences.
When it comes to e-commerce platforms, Recart has a native app in Shopify and if your store is built with WordPress & WooCommerce, there is a WordPress plugin as well.
Recart is quite unique when it comes to the pricing structure as well. Rather than being based on the number of subscribers or contacts, the pricing tiers are based on the extra revenue generated from messenger marketing.
That's really a good approach because, for an extra revenue of $1,000 dollars, you are going to pay $29 per month with no limits on the number of subscribers or the features offered.
Pricing - starts from $9 per month for 500 contacts.
Free Plan - Not available.
SegMateApp is another feature-rich chatbot building platform built exclusively for Facebook Messenger marketing.
It has a visual drag & drop builder to easily build the chatbots from scratch. There are many elements for choose from including audio, video, card, files, list, gallery, image, text, etc. You can simply drag and drop any of these available elements in the canvas and build the bot according to your preferences.
After the main structure of the bot is built, you can include Quick Reply buttons with multiple options to choose from for the visitors.
You can also build your subscribers list by the Post Engagement feature where you can encourage someone to comment specific keywords on your posts which will direct them to a messenger conversation.
It is also possible to use a few more tools like checkboxes, messenger codes, etc. to build your list. Cast Engage is another impressive feature where you can re-engage your subscribers with bots planned for specific dates and sequences.
You can also collect custom user inputs like email and phone number to use the bot for lead generation.
The pricing is also quite competitive as it costs only $14 per month for up to 1,000 contacts and $25 per month for up to 2,500 contacts. You can connect an unlimited number of pages which is a good value.
Zapier integration is available to connect your bot to other third-party apps.
One more plus with SegMate is along with the chatbot builder, they also provide a tool called ConvertMate which is essentially a popup builder to build your email list. This comes along with the SegMate subscription at no additional cost.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month for 500 users per month.
Free Plan - Yes, available for up to 100 users.
ActiveChat is another multi-channel chat platform that consists of live chat, chatbots, and a conversational AI tool.
When it comes to chatbots, you can connect via your website chat widget, Facebook Messenger, SMS, e-mail, Telegram, and WhatsApp, which covers the majorly used conversation & messaging platforms irrespective of the region your business is based at.
ActiveChat has a visual builder as well that makes building complex conversations and sequences easier. You can easily set up buttons, quick replies, and keyword-specific sequences.
It integrates with WooCommerce, Shopify, and Zapier as well to connect with thousands of other third-party apps.
Pricing - starts from €30 per month for unlimited chats.
Free Plan - Yes, available for up to 100 chats per month.
Landbot is a chatbot tool that can be used for conversations both on your website, Facebook Messenger, and on WhatsApp.
You can build highly personalized conversation sequences in Landbot based on specific conditional logic like the availability of a specific variable, equals to or falls within a specific range, etc.
There are many useful chatbot templates for various use cases basic & advanced lead generation, lead qualification, customer feedback, general survey, basic & advanced support, product recommendation, product launch, job application, vacation request, etc. Templates are also available for WhatsApp as well.
Pricing - starts from $29 per month for 1,000 contacts.
Free Plan - Yes, available for up to 100 contacts.
Respond.io is another multi-channel chat and messaging platform with a wide array of features.
It lets you build a communication channel in Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram, LINE, Viber, WeChat, etc. Your website visitors can choose their preferred channel to start a conversation.
The real strength lies in its powerful integrations. You can connect with Twilio, MessageBird, and Vonage for SMS and WhatsApp API.
When it comes to chatbots, Respond.io integrates with Dialogflow, Chatbase, IBM Watson, and Rasa. This allows you to build incredibly powerful and customizable chatbots for varied types of use cases.
Conclusion
To wrap up, although ManyChat is one of the best when it comes to Messenger Marketing the above-mentioned options are some of the best alternatives that offer a better feature set or ease of use in many cases.
You can choose any of the above based on your specific use case and budget. Both POP and Respond.io have a pretty generous free plan if you want a free alternative to ManyChat to start with Messenger Marketing for your business.