This is something you can’t ignore.
Listen and follow along with Molly’s slides to learn how DigitalMarketer has been using Facebook Messenger Ads, so you can not only stay on the cutting edge, but also come up with a unique strategy to connect with your audience, reach new people, and really stand out in today’s environment.
The companies who figure out Messenger ads and use them in their Customer Journey are going to win.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The two types of Facebook Messenger ads and their specifics so you can set up your own (« Follow along with the slides to set up each ad).
- How to use Messenger to create personalization and overcome objections people may have about buying your product or service.
- The easy, inexpensive tool DigitalMarketer is using to build subscribers (« And has helped generate a 67.08%-89.87% open rate with Facebook Messenger).
- How to take advantage of Messenger even if you’re not buying ads on Facebook.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 72: How DigitalMarketer Generated 500% ROI in 3 Days Using Facebook Messenger
Episode 78: 8 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017: Facebook Messenger Ads, Ad Load, and Brand Personality
ManyChat
Molly’s Slides
Your Digital Marketing Strategy Template (AKA The Customer Value Journey)
Episode 80 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello, and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Episode Number 80. Today, we’re going to be following up on a hot trend inside the Facebook ads platform. Back on Episode 72, Molly talked about DigitalMarketer generating 500% ROI using Facebook Messenger, and in that episode, as well as the entire show in general, we like to try to bring you guys along the journey with us, take you behind the curtain on what we’re doing, and not only what we’re doing in our personal lives but what we are doing in our business, what we’re testing, and Molly talked about some new tests that they were doing with the Facebook Messenger and how great it was working and how the whole face of marketing and a shift is happening, and one of the things that we really, really pride ourselves on the show as well is following up and not just being somebody that’s throwing a bunch of shiny objects at you. |
| Today, Molly’s got a great, great outline of how DigitalMarketer has been using Facebook Messenger over the last 30 days, and I think this is going to really help you not only stay out front and on the cutting edge, which is what we want you to be able to do, but also be able to come up with a unique strategy to be able to connect with your audience and reach new people and really stand out in today’s environment, so I’m excited about this. We’ve had a lot of questions about Facebook Messenger, and I think this is going to help answer a lot of questions that you may have about this, so how are you guys doing? | |
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome. |
| Molly Pittman: | Great. Happy to be here. |
| Ralph Burns: | Psyched to hear what Mol has to say. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Ralph Burns: | She’s like the Facebook ads Messenger pioneer. She really is. |
| Molly Pittman: | Episode 72 did really well. I think anything new is definitely interesting to you guys, to our audience, and we wanted to come back with a really a fleshed-out episode, everything you need to know because Messenger and Messenger ads are a bit confusing, but that’s okay. I think that the companies that figure out how to use Messenger ads to really expedite or optimize their Customer Journey, they’re going to win, but it’s definitely something you can’t ignore moving forward even if you aren’t running Messenger ads, so hopefully you find this episode helpful. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, absolutely, and if this is something you’ve already tried and maybe you’ve tried it and you’re like, it didn’t work for me, it doesn’t work in this industry, or you have to have a high-tech audience or you need to have a younger crowd or an older crowd, or if you have some kind of preconceived notion, what I’d love for you to do for this episode is just to sit back for a sec and be open minded. |
| This reminds me of a lot of things like video ads, for example. A lot of times we would have people come to us and say, “I tried a video ad and it didn’t work,” and it wasn’t because video ads didn’t work. It was because the first one that they put out there didn’t connect the right way. It was too short, it was too long, it was the wrong type of video, whatever it was. Maybe it was the offer itself, the hook around it. | |
| This is how I see Messenger with a lot of people. This is something where you’ve got to sit here and maybe take in what we have, maybe listen to this episode more than once. The time that you think about something like this can change the game, I promise you. We’ve seen it in so many cases, so I’m excited to get into this, Molly. We’ve got a lot of strategies lined up that we’re using Messenger with. | |
| Ralph Burns: | The cool thing about any new technology, any new rollout of Facebook, is that Facebook will tell you how it’s supposed to be used, but we talk about this all the time in the agency, the real breakthroughs are made when you start to innovate and test and try different things. |
| Maybe you take what Molly says here and you do maybe 60% of what she says but you try your own type of thing because your business is different, whether you’re selling products on DigitalMarketer or whether you’re a store that’s selling shoes. It doesn’t matter what it is. This is an opportunity for you to potentially use a new technology and test it out and make it really specific for your market and mold it to your own individuality as well. So, I’m totally psyched to hear what she has to say today, and this is going to be required listening for everyone in the agency, by the way, Mol, so take it away. | |
| Molly Pittman: | All right. I made it big time. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, yeah, so Molly, let’s get right into it. Tell us why somebody should be interested in this. |
| Molly Pittman: | First off, guys, before we get into this, I am working off of a slide deck, so if you want to follow along with the slides, head over to digitalmarketer.com/podcast, click on Episode 80, and you can download these slides. We can explain it through audio, but I think visual will definitely help you, but yeah, Keith, back to what you said, why is this important, and like I said in Episode 72, Facebook Messenger is a huge mode of communication for the entire world. |
| Just to start from the beginning, this has only been out for two months, so Facebook Messenger ads were released on November 8th. It feels like a year ago now, but this has only been going on for two months, so like Ralph and Keith said, you could be one of the first people in your market to really pioneer and to use this line of communication to connect with your prospects and to sell your products. | |
| Even people in the digital marketing industry that I’ve been talking to about Facebook Messenger, a few people have said to me, “Well, yeah, of course this is working for DigitalMarketer. Your audience is very technical. They’re early adapters. They’re always on their cell phone. They’re always using technology. This will only work for those types of audiences,” and unfortunately, I just think that’s not true. That would almost be like saying that Facebook ads would only work for a market who’s serving really high-tech people, which of course everyone listening to this podcast knows that’s not true. It’s really not about being high tech. It’s about entering the conversation where your audience is already having their conversations. | |
| Ryan always says enter the conversation that your audience is already having, which is so valuable and very true, and this is along the same lines, but it’s entering the conversation where they’re having the conversation, and if you’re following the slides, on slide four I included a funny little screenshot. That’s my great grandmother. She’s 95, and we were Facebook messaging earlier today, and that’s from her desktop computer. | |
| I promise you, she is not in any way high tech, but she’s using Facebook Messenger because it’s a great way for her to connect with family and friends, or it’s the same reason that people use any sort of social media network, and on slide five on the left you can see a graph, and I had no idea this was the case, but in 2014, if you’re looking at monthly active users, the top four messaging apps surpassed the top four social networking apps in terms of usage, so more people are using messaging apps on a monthly basis than people that are logging into social networks like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. That’s insane. | |
| I had no idea the consumption of these different messaging apps, and that includes Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and two other of the big messaging apps that people are using, and over 1 billion people are using Facebook Messenger, so I think the last time I checked there were around 1.6 billion people on Facebook. Well, as of July 2016, over 1 billion of them are actually using the Messenger side of that platform, so hopefully justifying Facebook Messenger and Facebook Messenger ads won’t be needed in the future, but I do feel like we’re still in a place where we do need to prove why marketers and brands should be using this mode of communication to connect with prospects and customers. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, Facebook, they do a great job of installing this stuff when you have a phone and you install Facebook or you have the Facebook app already on there, and people that are tech savvy, it seems like, are the ones that are pretty good at turning off the notifications, right? |
| Molly Pittman: | Right. |
| Keith Krance: | A lot of times people that aren’t tech savvy- |
| Molly Pittman: | So true. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, they’re getting these automatically. They don’t have to set anything up. They have Facebook, they’re going to see these messages. There’s just no way around it. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, and just to show you how big this is going to be moving forward, Facebook released an article about Messenger and some big stats that stuck out to me were that 56% of people would rather message than call customer service, so this doesn’t mean that Facebook Messenger is replacing email or replacing the phone. Maybe in a few years we’ll re-examine that and it will be the case, but right now it’s a big chunk of the way people want to communicate. |
| More than one in two people say they’re more likely to shop with a business they can message, and 67% expect to message businesses more in the next few years, and then Facebook goes on to show that this isn’t just in the consideration portion of the customer value journey, which I think is very, very important. Consideration would be messaging a page to ask questions about when they’re open or questions about store hours or inventory. | |
| People are also messaging when they’re in the conversion stage. People are buying through Facebook Messenger. People are making appointments through Facebook Messenger. People are having conversations really deep into the sales cycle within Messenger, and it doesn’t just stop after the conversion. People are also providing feedback about the products through Messenger. Companies like Uber are running their referral programs through Facebook Messenger. If you sign up for Uber, they’ll also send you a message with a referral code and link that you can send to friends and family, so Messenger touches all points of the Customer Journey, and I think that’s very, very important to keep in mind as we move through this presentation and figuring out at what points of your Customer Journey you can use Messenger to facilitate a better conversation with your customers and prospects. | |
| Just a funny little story. I drove by an apartment complex in Austin that I thought looked really cool. I checked out their Facebook page. I noticed that you can message them right from their Facebook page, so it used to be “Get more info,” I think, and now Facebook has “Send email or message,” and my entire interaction with this apartment complex was done through Messenger, so I initially reached out, asked them questions about the property. I then scheduled a tour, went home, realized I wanted to live there, messaged them again, and signed the lease through Facebook Messenger, so my entire journey with this property so far has been done through Messenger, which I think is really, really powerful. | |
| Ralph Burns: | One of the things I think that’s so cool about it is that you control the outcome of the conversation. If you walked in there or you talked to people maybe you’d have a pushy salesperson that would let you leave, or maybe if you called them somebody would be awkward to get off the phone with them, but a Messenger app and Messenger just in general and text messaging I think is probably a lot having to do with the popularity of all of these apps now, because people are so used to being able to just use their thumbs to communicate quickly with somebody, but you control the outcome. |
| You don’t have to respond to a text message or Messenger message if it becomes annoying or somebody becomes too pushy or that guy at the party that Keith always refers to, so you really do control it, and then you ease into the relationship. You’re like, “All right, these guys seem cool. They seem like they’re all right. I think now I’ll stop by,” so you’re easing into it in a very low level of commitment form of communication until ultimately you exchange money and sign leases with them, which I think is totally awesome. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Right, and what would have happened if they didn’t respond to the message? I think they responded within an hour, but what if they wouldn’t have responded or what if they would have responded two days later? I might not be moving into this complex, so even aside from ads, realizing how important it is even if you only have a few hundred likes on your page and you don’t think it’s important to respond to people who are messaging you, it’s almost like not responding to customer support tickets that your company gets. |
| Ralph Burns: | Totally. Absolutely. |
| Molly Pittman: | So aside from advertising, just realizing how big of a channel this is and how present you need to be because if your competitor is willing to be there, they will win. |
| Keith Krance: | Sure. Yep, and this goes along with, back on Episode 78 when we talked about marketing predictions, talking about building a personality around your brand. This is another reason why you want to be doing this, no matter how small you are or how big you are. I remember a couple years ago, and there’s still a lot of people having success with this, where a lot of people were doing that reverse sales funnel where they would use Facebook ads to drive traffic to maybe a video or a webinar and then at the end of that the call to action would be fill out an application, and then they would offer some kind of a high-priced program, mastermind style, and it was a very simple sales funnel and a lot of people were having a lot of success as they built their organic following. |
| They would post a screenshot of a client success story or something and then people would start messaging them and they would literally, people were selling 5000, $8000, $25,000 coaching programs through Messenger. This is not that long ago at all, and people are still doing this right now. Just imagine that scenario but you actually engineering the process to start the conversation using Facebook ads, and there’s so many ways to use this and that’s for a high-ticket, super bottom of the funnel type of product, so this is a unique thing, if you think outside the box a little bit. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Really when it comes to Facebook Messenger ads there are two different types of ads, and this was super confusing for me at first. Just in the past few weeks have I really been able to wrap my head around this, so really, really pay attention to this because it’s so important for you to understand how this is working as of now in January 2017. There are two different types of ads, and I’m going to go through the specifics of both of them. |
| The first is Facebook Messenger ads as a destination, so that’s going to be an ad in your newsfeed that looks just like a regular link ad, but once you click it it’s going to open in a message with that brand or that Facebook page. Whoever’s running that ad, once you click on the ad it’s going to open right in Messenger inside of a conversation with that page, so that’s number one. That’s Facebook Messenger ads as a destination. They open inside of a message for you to start a conversation. | |
| The second type of ad is called sponsored messages, so this is Facebook Messenger as a placement inside of Facebook, and this is a totally different experience. When you’re sending sponsored messages, you’re actually sending messages to people’s Facebook Messenger inbox. It’s an actual message from your brand that’s appearing inside of their inbox like a message from a friend would appear, so again, the first is a destination where you click on the ad and it opens in a blank message with that brand, and the second is actually a sponsored message that appears almost like an email in their inbox, just like they would have received a message from someone else. | |
| Keith Krance: | So basically I’m on Facebook right now. You’re just going to scroll down the newsfeed and you’re going to see maybe a couple right column ads, you’re going to see something in the middle that says sponsored. That one, if I see an ad here, it’s an image, maybe it’s a video ad, whatever it is, what you guys are used to seeing every single day, that’s number one. That’s the first option that Molly said, and that is, when somebody clicks on that, that starts the conversation. |
| Number two is I got a message yesterday in my inbox. It was not in my newsfeed, it wasn’t in my right column. It was a message, I got the notification on my phone, I got the notification on the top right of my browser on my computer, and it was from DigitalMarketer, and that showed up in my inbox, so I have to check that and I see above DigitalMarketer there’s a Jason. Below him there’s Steve, so these are messages, so that’s the difference between the two, and how come DigitalMarketer can send me a message and maybe they can’t send you yet? Molly will get into explaining that. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Let’s dive into the first type of message first, so this Facebook Messenger as a destination idea, and if you’re looking at the slides, this is Slide Number 11. It shows you an example, and this was the campaign that we ran that we talked about in Episode 72, so we created an ad with the destination as Facebook Messenger and the ad was pretty simple. It said, “Have a question about how we can double the size of your business? Have a question about DigitalMarketer Lab or any products? Click here to chat.” When they click on the ad it opens in Messenger, so the way that you set one of these ads up or one of these campaigns up is really like any other campaign. (Not a DM Lab Member? Start your trial for just $1). |
| When you’re wanting this ad to be the destination to open right there in Messenger and you’re setting up your campaign, when you’re at the advert level, so that third step, that last step in setting up a campaign, where it says destination, instead of clicking website URL you will simply click Messenger, so this is really you running a normal campaign, but instead of sending traffic to a specific URL you are sending traffic to open inside of a message, so that’s why we’re calling these destination ads. | |
| You’re just changing where the traffic is going, and again, these ads can look like any other ad, so we set up and out earlier this week that’s a video ad. It plays for like 10 seconds and it looks like you’re having a conversation with someone, so we’re really trying to get into this prospect’s head that you can have a live conversation with the DM team if you click on this ad, and the ad reads, “Have questions about DigitalMarketer Lab and how it can help grow your business? Facebook chat with one of our specialists to get your questions answered. We’re happy to help.” | |
| Now we’re running this ad to people who have visited the sales page for our DigitalMarketer Lab product but didn’t buy, so they already know what the product is and there’s a reason that they didn’t buy, so just as live chat is effective on your website, this is effective to re-target and to have these conversations to help this person overcome whatever barriers that they had to purchase. | |
| There’s a reason they didn’t buy and sometimes it can be cleared up with a few simple messages, so that’s why if you’re looking at the ad right now the image says, “Will DM Lab work for my business?” because we know that’s one of the top reasons that people don’t buy the product. They read the sales page and then they think, “Oh, this sounds cool, but I’m not really sure if it can work for my business.” They need a few extra touch points before they’ll actually buy, and before, we would retarget them with an ad that’s like, “Did life get in the way? Take advantage of this deal,” but unless they had already justified in their mind or gone online and researched testimonials, there was nothing there to help them overcome this barrier to purchase until we had this Messenger ad. | |
| People are clicking on this and they’re asking things like, “Is there a contract?” because Digital Marketer Lab is a continuity program. That’s a great question. No, there isn’t a contract. Or there were people that say, “I’m going on vacation for two weeks. Can you set up my account to start when I get back?” Of course we can, so these messages, these conversations, once people are clicking on these ads, it’s not like we’re spending hours with this person. Most people just have quick, simple questions that need to be answered by a human, but the prospect wasn’t willing to reach out via phone or email to customer support because unless you really want to buy, you’re probably not going to do that. | |
| A lot of people that I’ve been talking to about this have told me that they don’t have Messenger as a destination option in Ads Manager for Power Editor yet, and I talked to our partner manager and she said it’s still rolling out across people’s accounts, so if you don’t have this as a destination option yet, don’t worry. There is a workaround that I talked about in Episode 72. If you go to your brand page and you go to the area where you usually post a status update there should be a little image that says, “Get messages.” | |
| If you click on that image, it will pop up a light box that’s going to allow you to create a post, and at the bottom it says, “The send message button opens a new conversation with your page,” so it’s going to post this to your page, which is fine, but what that allows you to do is then boost this post and target whoever you would like. You can go inside of Ads Manager or Power Editor and select this as an existing post when you’re setting up your ad, so just a little workaround there if you don’t have the Messenger option as a destination yet. It’s no problem, and of course they’ll be rolling that out over the next few weeks. | |
| Ralph Burns: | And that’s what you referred to in Episode 72 before they actually had this inside Ads Manager, so we encourage you to go back to 72 if you don’t see it quite yet, but I think there’s two really important points here that you brought out as far as how to make a destination ad work. It’s people who hit your sales page. If they’re hitting your sales page they’re thinking about buying, but the people who didn’t buy, so that would be a website custom audience, so that’s highly targeted, warm audiences. |
| Second thing is, you guys addressed this right in your ad, it’s the biggest objection that you know people have before they buy, so if you know those two things, the sales page where you send your traffic and know how to set up a website custom audience for people who haven’t bought and you know the biggest objection that stands in the way of your sale, this is probably a really good option for you, and if you have people that can man Messenger for you, even better. Super good stuff. | |
| Molly Pittman: | That’s just the first use case that I can think of. Retargeting down the funnel, helping to overcome barriers to entry to buying your products, but I do know that these ads can work to cold traffic, which is really cool, but it has to be done right, and just to give you an example of this, if you want to use these destination ads to target people at the top of the funnel, you really have to make sure that your ad is prompting a relevant question that really sets up a sales conversation, so let me give you an example. |
| I met a guy a few weeks ago and he owns a home improvement company, so they do everything from plumbing to electricity to painting, landscaping, pretty much anything that needs to be done with your home, they can do it. They’re the people that come fix stuff and improve your home, and he was asking me how I thought that he could use this, and I said, “Run a campaign in your local area that says, ‘What’s the number one thing you would like to improve about your home today?'” so he had someone on dispatch manning Messenger, and people were clicking and they would say, “I’d like to repaint my house,” or, “I’m having issues with my plumbing,” or, “I’d like to upgrade my landscaping.” | |
| They were telling this person the number one thing that they want improved with their home. Well, that made it very easy for the person manning the chat to have a sales conversation. They could say, “Okay, cool. We paint homes. Here are our rates. We could get you in next Tuesday. How does that sound?” and it’s working for him because in his ad he’s setting up the ideal sales conversation, so no matter who you’re targeting, if you’re targeting people that have never heard of you before, if you’re targeting people really far down your Customer Journey, make sure that your ad is really setting up the ideal sales conversation because if your ad says, “What’s your favorite color?” you’re going to get a bunch of messages that are totally unrelated to your product or service. | |
| Something else that we’re testing with another product is we’re actually listing out five of our most frequently asked questions about that product in the ad, so if they want they can click on the ad and simply copy and paste one of the questions, and even if they don’t want to copy and paste, they probably have a question that’s similar to one of those five questions, so it’s just prompting the person, giving them an idea of what they can ask, so I really can’t emphasize how important the actual ad copy is for these destination ads, because you really have to set up the ideal sales conversation. | |
| Just to give you a little summary of these destination ads. Again, these are ads that you click on in the newsfeed, they look just like a normal ad, and they open inside of a message with that brand, so what’s cool is you can, as a brand, when you’re setting up the ads, you can go ahead and preset some text that you want to appear once they open that message so it’s not just a blank screen, so there’s some personalization that you can do, but it’s really opening in a fresh, new conversation between this prospect or customer and your brand. | |
| You can target anyone with these destination ads, so that’s a really important thing to remember. You can use interest targeting, behavior targeting. You can use custom audiences to retarget. Any targeting that you would use for other campaigns, you can use for this ad type, which is really, really cool. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, the way I see it, Molly, is compare this first type to a traditional Facebook ad and compare the second type that Molly is going to get into now to your email list, so you’re using Facebook ads to build your email list so you can send emails to your subscribers. You’re using Facebook Messenger destination ads to- |
| Molly Pittman: | Start those conversations. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, and people might be listening to the beginning of this thinking, “Well, I don’t want to spam a bunch of people and send a bunch of people messages.” That’s not what you’re doing. If you go to digitalmarketer.com/podcast, Episode Number 80, download this presentation, you’re going to see that the call to action button on these ads that Molly is talking about is “Send message.” We’re asking you, the user, the advertiser, or if you’re the advertiser in this case, you’re asking your end user, your target audience, to send you a message, so they’re initiating that message conversation, you’re not. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, absolutely. The user initiates all of these messages, which Facebook has done a great job of making sure that this doesn’t turn into a spam fest, so really think of these destination ads as more top of the funnel, and not necessarily top of the funnel in terms of how we talk about cold traffic or content marketing, but in the realm of Facebook Messenger, these destination ads are top of funnel. They’re the way that you reach out and start these conversations, so you can target anyone. |
| They’re available in the newsfeed on mobile and desktop, so you can’t run these on Instagram or right-hand side, and when you’re setting up your campaign, of course the first thing Facebook is going to ask you to do is to select or objective, so these destinations will work for two objectives thus far, so the send people to a destination on or off Facebook objective, also known as website clicks, also known as traffic, depending on what it says inside of your ad account, or the page post engagement, also known as boosted post, objective, so you can use either of these objectives when setting up this ad type. | |
| If you use any of the other objectives, this destination is not going to be available for you. You can target anyone. It’s available in the newsfeed. Use those two objectives and really think about these destination ads as your way of reaching out to start these conversations. | |
| Now let’s talk about the second ad type here with Messenger ads and these are called sponsored messages, so like Keith explained earlier, these are the ones that appear in your inbox from different Facebook pages that you’ve interacted with in the past. Now these are set at the ad set level, so if you go to edit placements, when you’re setting up your ad set, placement is a whole category. If you click the edit placement button you will notice that the last platform there on the list now is Messenger. Once you click that it’s going to remove all of the other placements, which makes sense, and this is going to be the placement that you used to actually distribute messages to people’s inboxes. | |
| Now a few things to keep in mind with these sponsored messages. Number one, you can only target people who have previously message your page. This is really, really important because if we were able to send messages to people’s inboxes that had never interacted with us before, that would definitely not be a good user experience for Facebook users. You would have hundreds of messages in your inbox from Facebook pages every day, so this is what’s really great and what’s going to really keep marketers from ruining this for everyone, is that you can only target people who have previously message to your page with these sponsored messages. | |
| The objective, so back to when you’re setting up your campaign, the two objectives that you can use when setting up this ad type is send people to a destination on or off Facebook, like the last one, like the destination ads, or increase conversions, so you can also set up a website conversion campaign and use Messenger as your placement. | |
| The third thing to keep in mind about these. These messages that you send out can contain only one link and one photo. Number four. Facebook will charge advertisers for their sponsored messages any time the ad appears, and number four, you might be thinking, how am I paying for these? With the destination ads you’re basically paying per click, so you would be paying for a click over to your website. Now you’re paying a click for someone to open a message. Well, with these sponsored messages it gets a little bit more complicated, and I started thinking, well, how are they going to charge people? | |
| Facebook says, “Facebook will charge advertisers for their sponsored messages any time the ad appears on a Messenger user’s screen in their inbox. Brands will have to pay for the ad impression even if the person on the other end never opens the sponsored message,” so you’re paying for these messages to be delivered, whether this person opens the message or not, and as your subscriber list grows, this could get pretty expensive. That would be like paying per email that you send through your ESP. That would be very, very expensive. | |
| Luckily, you can pay a monthly fee to most email service providers and send however many emails you would like. Well, Facebook is basically saying they’re going to charge per message sent, so we found a better, easier, and cheaper way around this, and this really transitions into something I talked about in Episode 72. It’s a service called ManyChat, manychat.com, and when you go to the website it says “Create a Facebook bot to engage your audience.” | |
| Number one, yes, ManyChat does have a bot feature, but it’s just a feature. It’s not the only cool part of this software. Yes, it’s a bot, but you don’t have to use that feature. The coolest part about ManyChat is that it’s going to allow you to send these sponsored messages—they call them broadcast—without paying per message. We pay $10 a month. | |
| The service is $10 a month, and you can send pretty much as many broadcasts as you would like to people who have messaged your page. So, if you’re sending these sponsored messages, definitely do them through ManyChat because you can pay $10 a month and send as many broadcasts as you want instead of paying per message. There are also cool features like setting up follow-up sequences and adding a bot to automate the sales process. There’s a ton to this software, but in my opinion the best part of this software is that for $10 a month you can broadcast out to as many people as you would like. | |
| If you’re looking at the slides, and even if you’re not, imagine logging into the dashboard of ManyChat, and it’s connected to your different Facebook pages and you can see the total number of subscribers that you have built, so this is like an email list, this is like a pixeled audience. This is the amount of people who have messaged your page since you’ve installed ManyChat, so it doesn’t matter if they’re reaching out to your page for a customer service issue, if they have a question, if they’ve come from a destination ad, they are now a subscriber inside of ManyChat and you can send out broadcasts. | |
| Another cool thing about ManyChat is that you can do more than just one link and more than just one image like Facebook has specified inside of their platform, so you can send a text broadcast, you can add an image, you can add a gallery of images, you can create a list. There are a few different ways to customize these broadcasts that you’re sending out, just like email broadcasts that you would send out. You can also schedule them to go out at certain times. You can send them to certain segments of your ManyChat subscriber list. You can select the time zone. | |
| You can select the notification setting, so you can either send a regular push notification that will make a sound and display a phone push notification, again, if you were to receive a message from a friend via Facebook, or you can specify that you don’t want it to make a sound or you don’t want it to show a push notification and you just want the message to be there the next time they log into Facebook or into Messenger, so ManyChat has a lot of customization options available here for this broadcast, but again, the coolest aspects in my part are being able to send all these broadcasts for $10 a month and being able to customize these messages a little bit more than just one link or one image per message. | |
| Just to give you an idea of how these sponsored messages have worked for us. Again, this is very, very new. We’ve only sent four so far, but every single broadcast other than the one we sent yesterday, which people are still opening, has over an 80% open rate. That’s insane. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Compare that with email. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, these open rates, the first one was 89%, second 86, third 86. The one I sent yesterday, 19 hours ago, is already at a 67% open rate. Again, this is still a small audience of around 800 people, but damn, that’s a really good consumption rate, and not only consumption rate. You’re sending messages to a place where people can immediately respond. Of course they can respond via email when you’re sending an email broadcast, but it’s a little bit less personal. Yeah, these broadcasts not only send people over to a URL to buy or a blog post to read or an image for them to look at, it’s also really easy for the person to respond to you within this communication channel, so yeah, holy crap, serious consumption rates here, and I think if you really do a good job of building this subscriber list, these sponsored messages will continue to get really high open rates. |
| Just to give you two examples of sponsored messages that we’ve sent so far. We sent one last month. It was the day before we were going to increase the price of tickets to our traffic and conversion summit event, and the message was pretty simple. It was much shorter than an email. You want to keep in mind that you’re sending someone a Facebook message here, so the message said, “Tickets to our eighth annual Traffic & Conversion Summit increase in price tonight at midnight. Grab yours while they’re still 50% off, and because you’re a DM subscriber, use the code ‘CarpeDM’ at checkout for an extra $300 off.” | |
| I wanted to add that in because I wanted them to keep opening these messages. I want to make sure they feel special because they are a subscriber to our sponsored message list, and then I went into, “Feel free to reply back to this message with any questions about Traffic & Conversion Summit. Visit trafficandconversionsummit.com to learn more for more information, and I added in a cool little image so that it would be visually appealing. I sent one yesterday that said, “Hey there.” | |
| We probably wouldn’t say “Hey there” in an email, but in a message you would. “Because you’re a valued DM subscriber,” again, making them feel important, “we want to extend an invitation for you to join our 15,000 member community of digital marketers. The process is simple. Click the button below. Follow the two-step invitation process and we’ll reach back out to you in a few days. Talk soon, DM.” | |
| Keith Krance: | Now remember, a few minutes ago in this episode I talked about the two different types of Facebook Messenger ads that Molly has been talking about. The first one is that newsfeed ad that you might see in the newsfeed or right column ad that we’ve all been seeing for the last five, six, seven years, and then the second one is the message I got yesterday from DigitalMarketer, which is the one that Molly just read, and the reason I can see that is because I have already messaged DigitalMarketer in the past, either just organically, like I reached out to them, or I clicked on one of their Messenger ads. In my case, it was. I clicked on one of their Messenger ads I saw in the newsfeed a few weeks ago and so now I’m on that Messenger list and they can direct message me. |
| Molly Pittman: | Saying that and talking about those two broadcasts that we sent out, I just want to make sure that you don’t run off to ManyChat and start sending a ton of messages to your subscriber list because they can unsubscribe. Just like email, they can unsubscribe, so I think moving forward we’re all going to need to create communication strategies for Messenger just like we have for email, so just a few ways you can do that is to sit down and think about, “Okay, maybe I can send out pieces of new content or items of interest to my subscriber base that they can consume and enjoy.” Of course you can send out new product updates or new product releases or, hey, there’s this flash sale or this deal, more transactional and promotional messages, but make sure you’re also incorporating free pieces of content and different valuable items that your market can consume so it’s not all me, me, me. |
| I also think we’re really going to have to watch the frequency on these sponsored messages versus email. People are used to getting a lot of email. They’re used to deleting them. People aren’t used to getting messages from brands, even if they’ve interacted with them before, so yeah, over the past two months we’ve only sent four. I’m not saying that’s the right amount. We’re still testing, but keep in mind that you should have a strategy like you have for your email list, but it shouldn’t totally mimic your email list. It would be way too much. You would get unsubscribed and blocked pretty quickly, I would say, because it is so intimate. | |
| Again, guys, just to reiterate, there are two different types of ads. There are the destination ads that are more top of the funnel, you can target anyone, they look like a newsfeed ad, when you click on them they open as a message with that page, and then you have the sponsored messages that appear in people’s Messenger inboxes like a message from a friend, and you can either send those by setting Messenger as the placement for that campaign, but you’re going to pay per message you send. If you use a tool like ManyChat, and there are other tools like it out on the market, you can broadcast to all of your subscribers for as little as $10 a month. | |
| I just wanted to wrap up a little bit by talking about how to take advantage of Messenger even if you’re not buying ads because like I said at the beginning, every brand needs to recognize and make sure Messenger is a part of their marketing strategy whether they’re ready to run destination or placement ads. If you’re not ready to invest the money or you’re just don’t have the strategy down yet, you can still take advantage of Messenger and start building that subscriber list, and there are a few ways to do that. | |
| Number one, install ManyChat. If you have a brand page, even if it’s only one per week, you probably have inbound messages. Go ahead and install ManyChat so that you can build that subscriber base. It’s like putting a Facebook pixel on your website. Go ahead, install ManyChat so that you can take advantage of that. Number two, think of inbound messages as a selling opportunity, so when someone messages your page, even if they’re asking for login information, fulfill the request and then continue the conversation to see if there’s an opportunity to cross sell or up sell that person. | |
| Number three is to use your ManyChat link to drive conversations, so ManyChat gives you a unique link that you can put in emails or you can put on your website that when someone clicks it opens a Facebook message. Definitely click through these slides to read an email where we used Messenger to actually sell tickets to our event in an email. Number four is to integrate Facebook Messenger with your tech stack, so whatever software you’re using for your CRM, for your customer service, if you have a sales team, go ahead and integrate it with Facebook Messenger if that integration is available. | |
| The benefits are huge. It will allow you to organize messages inside your account a lot better. It will allow you, for example, if you’re using Shopify, to send your customers’ order confirmation and shipping notifications through Facebook Messenger, so really analyze what technology am I using and to do any of these integrate with Facebook Messenger. It will make the Customer Journey a lot more seamless with this mode of communication, so definitely hop over to digitalmarketer.com/podcast for more details on other ways you can use Messenger if you’re not buying ads, but I hope you guys found this helpful and that you start testing some of these strategies. | |
| Keith Krance: | Good stuff, Molly, good stuff. |
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome stuff here, Mol. |
| Keith Krance: | This is game changing. Like we said, think about it. You don’t necessarily have to do exactly what everybody else is doing. Take some time to think about it and try a few strategies, and don’t worry if you don’t hit a home run right out of the gates. Now once again, go to digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode Number 80, and if this podcast has been helpful for you, leave a review in iTunes. The other day I was reading a thread in a forum and people were asking about, do you guys know of good podcast that gives tactical education and not just interviews and stuff like that, and I’m thinking, oh my goodness, this is exactly what we do. |
| We get a lot of messages, text messages, Facebook messages, each other, from our customers and students and you guys listening, people giving a ton of specific results that they’re getting from implementing what they learned from this podcast, so if this has helped you at all, I know it’s not super easy to leave a comment or a review, but we’d love to hear your review. Go to iTunes, leave us a review. If it’s results-oriented, yeah, let people know because it helps us get this podcast out. We spend a lot of time every single week preparing to give you all of this great free information and we’d love to hear about your results, and it helps us get the message out more, so we’d appreciate that. Other than that, Molly, awesome stuff. Can’t wait to talk soon. | |
| Next week we’ve got Laura Roeder coming on, the founder and creator of meetedgar.com, which is an amazing social media tool that is growing at a super rapid pace right now, and she’s going to come on and talk about her customer acquisition process and how they’ve acquired their customers and how they’ve been able to grow so fast a little bit unconventionally, doing things different than everybody out there suggests, so I highly suggest you get on Episode Number 81. We will see you next week. Talk to you, Molly, talk to you Ralph, soon. Can’t wait to talk to you again soon, and bye-bye. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Thanks, guys. |
| Ralph Burns: | See you. |
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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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