Join the experts and special guest Sean Patrick Simpson, CEO of Soul Space Media, as they discuss the Facebook Messenger ad campaign that produced 11,000 Facebook Messenger subscribers and a 550% ROI for Soul Space Media within a week. Listen as Sean details what they did right and what they’ll do differently in the future, so you can learn how to tap into the opportunity of Facebook Messenger ads.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The question Sean asked in Messenger that generated a 44% Lead Magnet opt-in rate (« he calls it the “perpetual loop lead”).
- The two mistakes that lead to a 33% unsubscribe rate (« and how you can avoid them).
- How DigitalMarketer uses the Facebook Messenger bot to engage and entertain their subscribers, and how you can do the same.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 53: Ryan Levesque Shares 4 Steps to Creating Personalized, Segmented Campaigns for Your Audience
Episode 80: Facebook Messenger Ads: Everything You Need to Know
ManyChat
Chatfuel
The Facebook Messenger Ad Soul Space Media ran (see it in Facebook here):
Episode 89 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Welcome to Episode Number 89 of Perpetual Traffic. We’ve got the crew all back together again, plus one bonus guest, who I think you’re really, really going to love listen to. We’ve got a great case study coming your way. We’ve got Sean coming on today to talk about where he recently did a very short campaign, four, five day flash sale kind of campaign and was using Facebook Messenger ads and getting a 550% ROI in some ridiculously cost per messenger subscriber, kind of a metric we’ll be talking about today as we go and we’ve talked about in the past, and so is Molly. |
| Before we get into it and before we introduce Sean, we haven’t recorded it yet since the event. We’re still catching up, trying to get a breather. The team at DigitalMarketer. How are you guys feeling? | |
| Ralph Burns: | Still tired. |
| Molly Pittman: | (laughs) Getting there. It was great, though. We appreciate that you came out. |
| Ralph Burns: | Amazing event. Just over 4,000 people there. Can’t wait to see everybody at the next one and love to hear any of your feedback from the event and all of our Facebook groups inside DigitalMarketer Engage, any of you that are inside Facebook Ads University. |
| Keith Krance: | Let’s get back into it. Let’s rock and roll. We’ve got a guest, Sean Patrick Simpson. He actually came up and shared a case study at the event, and today he’s going to go even deeper into that case study. I love what they did. Came in, executed fast, Sean listened to the podcast, saw what people are doing here, and then took his specific, unique situation and created something a little bit different for his situation. I love when I see people do that. |
| We’ve known Sean for quite a while. He’s been in our higher level coaching program. He’s been a member of DigitalMarketer Engage and bought tons of their programs. He’s been in our world for almost two years. His businesses has completely blown up. Sean Patrick Simpson and his wife, Sarah Prout, have this amazing brand. Sean, I’m going to let you explain what it is and what you guys have been able to do. Once again, dude, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. | |
| Sean Simpson: | For sure, my pleasure. Sarah and I run a company called Soul Space Media together. I’m the CEO of the company and Sarah’s the Creative Director. At Soul Space, our focus is on personal development and helping people tune into their unlimited possibilities in life. Under Soul Space Media we’ve got our key brand, which is really my wife, Sarah, at sarahprout.com. In there, we’ve got online courses on manifesting and the law of attraction. |
| We just have a lot of fun with it. About a year and half ago we launched this brand, started with $5 a day in Facebook advertising after I went through Molly’s Facebook ads certification program. Next thing we know, we finished up 2016 having spent $508,000 in Facebook ads during the year. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Sean Simpson: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, baby! |
| Molly Pittman: | That is awesome. |
| Ralph Burns: | What I’m talking about. |
| Sean Simpson: | It was wickedly cool. Had that first full year in business did seven figures. |
| Molly Pittman: | It’s been so awesome to watch you and Sarah grow and your brand grow, Sean. I think it really speaks highly to how important execution is, consuming the information and then executing on it. I just wanted to let everyone know, this episode is about Facebook Messenger and Facebook Messenger ads. If you don’t know anything about Facebook Messenger Ads, please go back to Episode 80. It’s going to explain everything you need to know about Messenger and the lingo that we’re going to use. That way you can really follow along in the conversation. |
| Ralph Burns: | This is something that’s so cutting edge, guys. A lot of the account managers inside the agency are asking me, “Hey, do we have an SOP for this yet?” I think this is something we talked about at T&C a little bit, Sean. It’s the Wild West right now. Just take the ideas from Molly and take the ideas from Sean here and form your own way of doing this. I think that’s really the coolest thing about it. It’s like it’s a whole new territory. It’s like a whole new medium to communicate with potential customers and to turn them into not only leads of your brand, but also sales. |
| I think this case study here is a great, great way in which Sean really just sort of thought about what he learned and then applied it really specifically and uniquely to his business. That’s the reason why, collectively, we have somewhat of a nickname for him, which is the “Woo Woo Ass-Kicker.” (laughter) All he does is just kick ass all the time, and a little bit of poking fun at the Woo Woo thing. We’ve had a lot of experience in that space and a lot of attraction space. | |
| Keith Krance: | That’s what they call each other jokingly. They come to us. We’re in the Woo Woo space. |
| Ralph Burns: | Absolutely. It’s self-deprecating. If you’re in that space, don’t take offense to it. Anyway, what he does is he learns stuff and then takes action and applies everything he does. It’s amazing. I remember two, three years ago, just responding to questions inside DM Engage with you and that was the start of it all. Now here you are at this point on the podcast with these huge success stories. Congrats to you, man. |
| Keith Krance: | This is important, because if you’re listening to this it’s like one thing to hear theory, but it’s another thing to go out and take action and take advantage of these more resources that you have available to you. Sean, he bought the machine that DigitalMarketer sold. |
| Sean Simpson: | Keith, we bought the machine. We bought Funnel Blueprint. We were in DigitalMarketer Engage. We got the Facebook ads certification. We joined the mastery course. We tried to plug into the matrix as much as we can. I take these videos and watch them at two to three times speed so I could digest as much information as possible, and then apply it as much as possible. |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. He came into our coaching program. He mentioned Navigator. We now have a Navigator Inner Circle program opening up here. That’s where he takes action, becomes part of a group where he can get even more help if he gets to that point. |
| Love it, love it. Let’s get right into it. Tell us about the results first, and then let’s go into some of the details. | |
| Sean Simpson: | Sure. First off, I got to be honest. When I first heard about the Facebook bots and Messenger subscribers, I kind of dismissed it. I think it was because it didn’t really sink in at the magnitude of it. Once it did sink in, I’ve been encouraging people and saying, “Guys, you got to look at this as kind of the dawn of a new age in technology.” Imagine if back in 2003 you had people telling you about the top ways to do email marketing and you dived in and started applying it right away. |
| That would have been a time where people were still opening their emails left and right, having open rates, I don’t know what they were, but probably a lot higher than they are now, two or three times. If you got in at that time with email marketing, you’d be pretty dang stoked now in 2017. I feel like the same goes for Facebook Messenger and the bots, is that we have this conversation about it going around, but the scope of it is so much greater than what many of us have said and discussed. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, Sean. I think we’ve said this before. I don’t think Messenger will replace email. They’re very different modes of communication. I think Messenger is the biggest thing to really come onto the markets since email. The opportunities here are endless because it’s where people are having conversations. |
| Keith Krance: | Guys, that was the buzz. That was the whole buzz of the event. |
| Molly Pittman: | No matter what market you’re in, no matter what you’re doing, your people are using Messenger and Facebook Messenger to talk to their friends and family. We now have the opportunity to tap into this channel and, as brands, use this to communicate with our market. It’s really, really exciting. |
| Sean Simpson: | It’s mind-blowingly exciting. |
| Keith Krance: | Let’s keep getting into some of the specifics of what you did here. |
| Sean Simpson: | Here’s the ad we ran to people. Again, I want you remind you that this was a contest that we ran and the sole intention was to incentivize people to send a message to our Facebook page. I’ll read out the ad so that you can kind of digest this for yourself and recreate it. |
| The headline said, in brackets, “Contest, Law of Attraction Giveaway.” It had a product image of all our products that we were giving away and in the link text we said, “You could win a share of $3,584 in manifesting courses and products. To enter the contest, click ‘Send Message’ and text the word ‘win.'” That was the text around the headline. | |
| The full text for the ad said, “It’s Prosperity Week,” which was an event week we created. You could do this around a holiday, anything. You could create your own event week. “It’s Prosperity Week, and I’m giving away $3,584 in manifesting courses and products to 40 people. Ready to tune into limitless energy of abundance? Click the ‘Send Message’ button and text the word ‘win’ to enter the manifesting contest now. Love, Sarah.” That’s who the ad was from, and then it said, “P.S., The contest is open to anyone. Please note that this contest is not sponsored, endorsed, or administered by or associated with Facebook.” | |
| We added that because when we were going to upload the ad, we got that little red exclamation mark saying “Your ad may not be approved.” The instructions from Facebook said that you needed to make it clear that this is not sponsored by Facebook. We did that, and then the ad got approved, no problem. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, totally smart. |
| Okay, so, dude, tell me about the results you got and then take us through exactly what you did. | |
| Sean Simpson: | Okay. It was really nuts. After listening to one of the Messenger podcasts that you guys did, I started really sitting with it and going, “Alright, how can we use this in really new and innovative way?” The thing is, we have an upcoming flash sale. The questions I started asking myself is, “How could we get more people engaged and ready for that flash sale? What can we do to get to the eyes and ears of our customers more? What can we do to create a greater impact?” |
| We decided that we would run a contest, that to get people to write into our Facebook Messenger, we would run a contest saying, “Hey, we’re giving away $3,584 in courses and products to 40 people. Click the ‘Send Message’ button and text the word ‘win’ to enter the contest.” We took that as an ad, a big headline saying “Contest,” we’re having a giveaway. | |
| On that ad there was a “Send Message” button. When people clicked that “Send Message” button and texted the word “win”, we had an automatic response. What was great is that every time they did that, like we said before, they became an automatic subscriber. Within the first day, we were getting 13-cent Messenger subscribers. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. |
| Sean Simpson: | Yeah, which I equate to a lead. In Messenger, it was costing us 13 cents to acquire someone who we could then broadcast to through Facebook Messenger at any time. |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. That’s powerful, because like Sean just said, he’s building a list of people that he can now send Facebook messages, too, write in their inbox. Very similar to an email. This is almost like building a pixeled audience that you can retarget ads to of people that have visited your site, but better. Right? It’s almost like an email list, which is incredible. Sean, that was so smart to run this campaign incentivizing them to message to enter to win this contest. |
| Keith Krance: | Just to put a frame real quick on it, we’re talking about yes, it’s kind of like a custom audience, but you can message them directly. What kind of open rates are you getting on your messages? Just real quick before we get into the details? |
| Sean Simpson: | 70+%. |
| Keith Krance: | 70+%. Now you’ve got 13 cents to acquire, which got up a little bit where you can get into, I believe. Now you’re talking about a 70% open rate instead of maybe 25%, which would be considered good in an email broadcast open rate. |
| Sean Simpson: | What made this even crazier was that when we set up the auto response, again, people would click the “Send Message” button on our ad, they would text us and then they would get an auto response from our Messenger account. |
| What we had as a very last-minute idea was that the auto message would say, “Hey, congratulations! You just entered the contest. Here’s what you could win, here’s when we will announce the winners.” Here was the afterthought idea: At the very end of that message, we had the words, “What would you like to do next?” With the technology that we’re using to send these messages, you can create little buttons that can link to your website when they click it, or send them another message. | |
| One of the first buttons that we had when it said, “What would you like to do next?” said, “Take the quiz.” That button led to a Lead Magnet, and here’s where it’s crazy, 44% of the people who messaged us ended up opting in for our Lead Magnet. Now we’ve not only got Messenger subscriber for 13 cents, we’ve got nearly half of those people opting into our email list. It’s what I’d refer to as something like the perpetual loop lead, where you’re getting leads/subscribers in Messenger and leads/subscribers in email. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Sean, I know you’re using ManyChat, that we’ve mentioned in previous episodes, to facilitate the building of the subscriber list and the sending of these messages, and know that they are adding a functionality in the next few weeks to put a form field inside of a message or an auto responder. Imagine what this is going to be like when someone messages your page and you can have them enter their email address right there in the message. You had 40% of people doing it when they had to click the button and go over to another page and then opt in. That number will only increase. It’s incredible because, like you said, this is more than just a Messenger subscriber. You’re also generating leads and I think you made some money off of it, too, right? |
| Sean Simpson: | Yeah, we spent $2,000 in about five to seven days and we ended up making about $11,000 back based on people opting in for the Lead Magnet and purchasing our Tripwire and upsell sequences, or people ending up purchasing from our flash sale. |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. This wasn’t just building the Messenger subscribers, you also generated email leads and you sold some stuff, (laughs) which is exciting. |
| Sean Simpson: | Exactly. |
| Keith Krance: | They sold some stuff. This wasn’t through salespeople, it wasn’t where all those sales needed to be a higher ticket thing. This is automated small-price, low-price products. Just imagine if they had a sales team manning that chat, what the numbers would be. |
| Sean Simpson: | We by no means did this perfectly. We put on the attitude of, “Let’s fail fast with this. Let’s find out what works great and what does not work at all.” We had a lot of successes and a lot of mistakes. I think the biggest thing is that going forward people are going to want to have a dedicated team member in time managing these conversations that come through. |
| In the meantime, if you don’t have the bandwidth for that, in the very least, this technology, you can put up an auto response that says, “Hey, I’m getting all these messages every minute. If you need direct support, email support@mysite.com.” That’s exactly what we did because we got 11,000 Messenger subscribers in about a week. When we would send a broadcast to these people we would be getting 10 to 15 messages per minute. It was blowing up. We were essentially breaking the technology. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. |
| Sean Simpson: | We were breaking the technology there, and we couldn’t manage it so we had to create the auto response. We also kept crashing our site because people would open up the broadcast so quickly and click through to the site so quickly that we had to increase the amount of RAM we had on our site by quadruple the amount to sustain the amount of people going to the site. (laughter) |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. That’s sick. |
| Molly Pittman: | Sean, I think that’s really important and it’s something that people should keep in mind. This is very different than email because when you send an email you don’t expect an immediate response from the person on the other end. When you send something on Messenger, you expect a quicker response. It’s how society works. That’s what we expect. |
| I agree. Number one, I don’t think you can automate the entire sales process. What you did was awesome, right? Generating low-dollar sales. If you’re wanting to push it forward, I do believe there should be humans on the other side at least following up with these people to answer their questions. | |
| Sean Simpson: | Totally agree. |
| Molly Pittman: | Using the bots as a way to welcome people is what they should be used for. Again, people expect an immediate response, so if you can set up a welcome message that says, “Hey, we’re receiving a high volume of messages. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible,” it’s going to give them that instantaneous response that they expected and it’s going to set their expectations. |
| Hey, Sean, can you talk a little bit about the sponsored messages, these broadcasts that you were sending out. What were you saying in them, and how were they maybe different from promotional emails that you would send to your list? | |
| Sean Simpson: | When people opted into our contest, we said that the contest was part of this event week that we were having called “Prosperity Week.” During this week, we were doing seven days of daily blog posts about prosperity and abundance and seven days of Facebook Lives, and a few days of Facebook Live Q&A’s as well. |
| What we started to do is use all that content as massive goodwill to send the people. We would send a message saying, “Hey, here’s today’s blog post, and by the way, I’ll be on at 10 a.m. on Facebook Live and you can go to my page here. I’ll give you a notification before I go on.” Then we would give a notification before we went on Facebook Live, and then a notification afterwards. | |
| As you’re listening to that, I don’t want you to think that’s a great idea, because it wasn’t. It was way too much. We were sending about three messages per day. I can tell you that is not the way to use this system and we didn’t know better. We tried it out, and the thing was, it was too much. | |
| The great news is with this technology is that it dings people’s phones. The bad news is that it dings people’s phones. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Right. (laughs) |
| Keith Krance: | Right. |
| Sean Simpson: | Especially if you have an international audience, too, if you don’t use the setting that says, “Send at 8:00 a.m. based on their time zone” then you’ll be hitting people at midnight in different areas, and a lot of people don’t turn off their phones. |
| Molly Pittman: | Waking them up. (laughter) |
| Sean Simpson: | Exactly. We had a number of people that were ticked off. Even though we got 11,000 leads in about seven days, we had about a third of those people unsubscribe. I would say with absolute certainty, that was due to, number one, not setting up clear expectations at first on what to expect, and number two, sending way too many messages. |
| Keith Krance: | Thank you for doing that testing, by the way, now that we all know that three times a day is too much. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yes! |
| Sean Simpson: | We royally screwed up for you guys. |
| Molly Pittman: | Again, I think this is a testament to how this is different from email. This is much more personal. You are in someone’s Facebook inbox. You’re not in their email inbox. Being very aware of how often you should send. Honestly, I think once a week is a good starting point right now, unless you have a serious relationship built with these subscribers already. |
| Or, I think you’ll see a lot of unsubscribes. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, this is immediate communication technology here. |
| Sean Simpson: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | It’s like a text message, but probably even more powerful. |
| Molly Pittman: | Oh, totally. |
| Keith Krance: | You know? It’s equated probably to that, which in text message marketing came out we were all sort of excited about it. This obviously ties into a paid platform, so just keep that in mind. 3X per day, probably too many messages, but take the long view on this because you’re building an asset that is not your own because it’s inside another system, but take the long view on it. |
| These are people that you’re going to be able to communicate with in the future, so don’t do it all at once as soon as you listen to this podcast. | |
| Sean Simpson: | One possible way around doing it only once a week would be that in one of the first messages, you could have the question of, “Hey, would you like to get three days of my best of the best content sent to you?” |
| Molly Pittman: | Right, and tag them. |
| Sean Simpson: | Exactly, and what everyone should know is that if they click the Yes button, you can create actions based on what they click. You can tag the people and you can add them to a sequence. Just as we have email auto responders, you can have Messenger auto responders, which is, I’m surprised we haven’t mentioned that because it’s a big point. Yes, we can send messenger broadcasts and yes, we can also have Messenger sequences or auto-responders. Ask them that question: “Would you like to get my best content over the next three days? Click ‘Yes’ to get it, click ‘No’ if you don’t.” |
| This technology, it’s a great way of sending these broadcasts but what we found is that we did it way too much. We also made the mistake of not setting up the expectations. When people texted the word “win” to enter our contest, we told them what they could win and when the winners would be announced, but we didn’t list or write anywhere in that auto response that, “Hey, you’re now part of a subscription” or “You’re now part of a broadcast.” | |
| Molly Pittman: | Right. Yeah, I think that’s important. The broadcasts that we have been sending to our subscriber list, most of them had been promotional. I’ve made sure to write them in a shorter, more friendly manner than we would on email because it is a different medium. Someone’s expecting a short little message from their friends. I’ve also been referring to them as subscribers. I will say, “Because you are a DM subscriber, we invite you to do X, Y, and Z,” whatever the goal of the message is. I think that helps them understand that they are subscribed to this Messenger list. |
| It’s also good because they can unsubscribe, if they would like. They realize, “This is not something I’m forced into, I can type unsubscribe and I will be taken off of this list.” | |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. I think that’s such a fantastic way of setting the expectations, is using that key word. We have an association with what that word means, “subscriber.” To say that to set the expectations is fantastic. |
| The other thing that I love that you’re doing is keeping these messages short. One of the presentations that Ryan Deiss did at T&C, he talked about one of the most successful email campaigns you guys did, and that was with the nine-word email. When he said that, I thought, “That’s exactly what we need to be trying to accomplish with the Messenger broadcast, is maybe try these much shorter, couple-sentence messages at least up front.” The thing is, remember, for those who haven’t dived into this technology yet, when you send a message, you can create buttons that people click. Those buttons can either open a website or send another message from yourself. | |
| You might say, “Hey, so-and-so, are you interested in finding out more about my Facebook ads certification training?” Then you’d have a button that says “Yes” and a button that says “No.” If they click “Yes,” you can say, “That’s great! Check out this link. We’re running 80% off on it.” | |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. |
| Keith Krance: | But if they select “No,” then you can say, “Hey, no worries. I’m curious, what would you like to do next?” You could have a link to you Lead Magnet, you could have a link that says “Explore The Shop,” and you could have a link that says “Visit The Blog.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. I think as engaging as you can make the experience, the better. Again, they’re wanting to talk to someone. If you can use the bot as a way to entertain them or push them in one direction while you’re waiting for humans to follow up, I think that’s very smart. At T&C I talked about this little bot that Russ Henneberry, our Editorial Director, created. We ran an ad to people who had visited the Traffic & Conversion Summit website and we said, “Hey, click here and ask our bot if you should attend T&C.” |
| The T&C hashtag triggered a logic sequence inside of Messenger, and so it would say, “Do you like sunny San Diego? Yes or no?” “Do you like rubbing shoulders with industry leaders? Yes or no?” “Do you like marketing?” It was basically taking them through this silly logic sequence that had a ton of personality, it had funny memes in the sequence. It was totally there to entertain. | |
| At the end, it would say, “You should go to T&C” or “No, you shouldn’t go to T&C.” There was a link over to buy tickets. The goal of that bot was not to sell tickets, really. The goal of that was just to engage and interact with these people, and then one of our sales reps would come back in and say, “Have you purchased tickets? Would you like to purchase a ticket?” When they say “Yes, I would like two tickets,” the salesperson could say, “Okay, should I charge that to the AmEx ending in 4444?” | |
| We were actually selling right inside of Messenger, but it was because first people went through this engaging little logic sequence that Russ set up in ManyChat. It took him a few hours, and he was just goofing around. | |
| Sean Simpson: | This is such an awesome tool, especially for your warm audience. I also think there’s going to be some really fantastic ways to play with this to engage a cold audience, to give ’em a smile. |
| Molly Pittman: | Oh, totally. |
| Sean Simpson: | You can look at this system as a choose-your-own-adventure opportunity. You could even create something where you say, “Hey, let’s play a game called ‘Choose Your Own Digital Marketing Adventure!'” (laughs) |
| Molly Pittman: | Right. |
| Sean Simpson: | Take them through a path with the sole intention of putting a smile on these people and giving them a great feeling of who you are as a company so that when you are ready to sell them or get them on their email list, or that very last message you send them says, “Hey, what would you like to do next?” You have those buttons to your Lead Magnet or blog, etc., they’re ready and eager to see what else you have to share. |
| Molly Pittman: | Oh, absolutely. If you go back to Episode 53 with Ryan Levesque, he talks a lot about using quizzes as a way to segment your audience and for lead generation and to sell your product. I believe you can use a very similar method with Facebook Messenger and not have to send them over to a web page at all. Using some sort of bot, asking questions to segment your audience so that you do know the right Lead Magnet to offer them, so that you do know the right product to offer them, so that you do know how to follow up in a sales conversation. |
| Really, the possibilities are endless. | |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly, Molly. We touched on that in the Facebook Ads University webinar that we did yesterday with Sean. He hosted the webinar, too, he’s been busy the last week with us. We talked about that a little bit as well. Sometimes, depending on your situation, maybe you’re doing a quiz funnel like the ask formula style and you want to have somebody get on a consultation. You could go right to booking an appointment. |
| We’re going to do something like we start that quiz in Facebook, and then they have to answer a couple more off, or maybe they get taken directly to the sales page option or the webinar. Sometimes you could start it and finish it off, or you start it and then have them click to opt in or to answer one or two more. | |
| There’s a lot of different ways you can do this. There’s no one way right now. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, one of the things I think that is cool, too, is like we were doing it similar to how Molly is doing it, but a couple of our customers are doing this, is that first off, they identify. I think that’s a big takeaway, is that it’s okay to identify that this is a bot. There’s limitations to how long that conversation can go. At a certain point, a human does interact and then actually says, “Hey” … They’ve written this into a lot of their responses, “Hey, the bot asked me” or whatever-the-customer’s-name-bot, “asked me to get in contact with you to schedule an appointment.” Sending right to appointment core or schedule once, or whatever it happens to be. |
| We’re seeing that, too. The point is that there’s so many different ways to do it. Don’t try to be tricky about it and pretend that the bot is a real person because we’ve seen that really go the other way and people getting ticked off and unsubscribing. | |
| Molly Pittman: | People will feel tricked. Our even says, “I’m the DigitalMarketer bot. Tell Katie good things about me, who’s our Social Media Manager, so I don’t get fired.” (laughter) |
| Keith Krance: | Love it. |
| Ralph Burns: | That is hysterical. |
| Molly Pittman: | Something goofy and silly that humanizes the bot, but also is very forthcoming. “Hey, I’m not a real person, but talk to me.” |
| Sean Simpson: | For sure, and I also want to say, every time we say “bot” I want people to think beyond “bot,” as well. We were talking before this podcast, before we started the podcast, that it’s referring to this technology as just a bot is kind of like referring to Infusionsoft or AWeber or any email marketing automation system as an email chat system. |
| It’s just not. Those systems do so much more than that. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. |
| Sean Simpson: | They manage our subscribers, they manage subscriptions, they manage payments, they manage automations, and billing. It’s so much. We’re at the infancy of this bot technology where the bot is one piece. I was talking to the creators of ManyChat, and they were even saying, too, “We’re not sure the best way of positioning this.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Sean Simpson: | “Bot” seems to have taken off, and yet we feel it so much more. Is it Messenger automation system? Is it Messenger subscriptions? |
| Molly Pittman: | I think it’s Messenger marketing. |
| Sean Simpson: | I’m so glad you said that, Molly, because that’s one of the key… We were brainstorming different ways to position it for their company. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Sean Simpson: | I was trying to help them out based on what we’ve seen. |
| Molly Pittman: | Totally. |
| Sean Simpson: | We all kept coming back to Messenger marketing. |
| Molly Pittman: | If you go to their homepage, it says “Create a bot.” I think they were really smart when this software launched six or so months ago. They were smart to start there because six months ago, people weren’t talking about Messenger marketing because Facebook hadn’t released the ability to run ads in Messenger. |
| I think they were smart to enter the conversation with bots because it’s what people were talking about. It’s the functionality of their software that was actually being discussed. I told them the same thing at T&C. “Hey guys, this is Messenger Marketing. There’s so much more to this than just the bot aspect. How about the ability to send these sponsored messages?” That’s my favorite part. | |
| Sean Simpson: | What happens when Facebook introduces the functionality to take payments for your products? We all know that’s coming, right? |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, absolutely. |
| Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Sean. | |
| Sean Simpson: | My pleasure. |
| Molly Pittman: | More to come on the Messenger front. |
| Keith Krance: | I have a feeling we’ll probably be doing a few more episodes about Facebook Messenger in the coming months as it evolves. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. (laughs) |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, this is awesome. |
| Sean Simpson: | Last year you guys were talking about how, I think this time last year, saying the Pixel, the Facebook Pixel is the new thing and by this time next year, we’re going to be really talking about that. I think that’s where we’re at with Messenger, too. |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. |
| Sean Simpson: | By this time next year, it’s the thing where we’ve gotten plates and automations and sequences and so on. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah. The Pixel thing is so 2015. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, come on! (laughter) I think this, like you said, this is the total Wild, Wild West. There really isn’t anything like it. I think we’re still in the discovery phase, but if you are a DigitalMarketer Lab Member (Not a DM Lab Member? Try it for just a $1), we’re working on a Messenger execution plan to at least explain how you can use it based off the knowledge we have now and as more people use the platform, I think we’ll all gather case studies and report back here on Perpetual Traffic. |
| Ralph Burns: | Oh yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | Absolutely will. Absolutely. Sean, this has been amazing. Once again, hit the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 89, and we’ll have the Show Notes there, we’ll have the images of his ad, and any other thing that we referenced there, as well. |
| Really quick I want to touch on is Chatfuel is another company that I’ve heard does a great service, as well. Similar to ManyChat. I’m not sure which one is better in this situation. It sounds like ManyChat is really kind of going after that marketing industry to create a solution specifically for marketers. I’m not sure. I’m not going to make any judgments on this on this podcast, just letting you know. | |
| If there’s any other last tips or advice or things that you want to share, one more thing, let us know if there is. | |
| Sean Simpson: | I think the key takeaway is just experiment with this, have fun. Don’t treat it like email where you can send email blasts all the time, and just have fun. Experiment with it and know that these are real people that you’re communicating, and that this is the start of a conversation that you can automate partially and then respond to accordingly for those that need in-depth responses. |
| Keith Krance: | Yep, love it. |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. Thanks again, Sean. |
| Ralph Burns: | Thanks guys, thank you, Sean. |
| Sean Simpson: | My pleasure. |
| Ralph Burns: | Talk to y’all soon. Good stuff. |
| Sean Simpson: | See ya. |
| Ralph Burns: | See ya. |
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(NOTE: Ready to use Facebook’s newest “ad” platform to turn one-to-one conversation into sales—even if you don’t have the staff to reply manually? Check out the Facebook Messenger Marketing Blueprint and discover how Facebook Messenger Ads are changing the way businesses communicate with customers. Learn more now.)
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