Bot maker ManyChat wants to replace email newsletters

ManyChat announced the creation of a paid premium plan for its marketing and engagement bot maker today.

CEO Mikael Yang made the announcement onstage at MobileBeat, a two-day gathering of startups and thought leaders in artificial intelligence and chatbots. Created by VentureBeat, MobileBeat takes places at The Village in San Francisco July 12-13.

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ManyChat Pro can send automated messages and use tags for marketing campaigns. It also lets users reach out to more specific audience segments based on engagement levels or other metrics. The service costs $10 a month per every 500 Facebook fans.

Creatives, businesses, and those trying to build a fanbase are the largest use case scenario Yang saw play out on ManyChat, where more than 170,000 Telegram bots have been made since the company was created about a year ago.

ManyChat is not driven by natural language processing but instead relies on buttons and flow charts, and is designed for people with no prior knowledge of code. About a month ago ManyChat was made available on Facebook Messenger, where roughly 2,000 bots have been created so far.

Yang wants people who make ManyChat bots to be able to target their most loyal or engaged users.

Fans who respond in a minute or less, for example, can be invited to a private concert, solicited to share with their favorite horror movie author a picture of a time they overcame a fear, or asked to canvas a neighborhood for a politician.

Update 5:50 p.m. PT: ManyChat later clarified that “we’re doing pulse surveys, we’re doing educational courses and we’re doing tags and segmenting so you can provide that content to specific groups of people, and that’s all fine, but if you want to do deals or ads that is not allowed.”

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