How I generated Leads for $ 0.34 with Messenger Chatbot

Background:

Sacred Yoga stands for Yoga mat perfection. With extreme grip, extra long and wide, support of a non-toxic, 100% recyclable, natural rubber, the company attracts mindful buyers and yoga practitioners with their high-end yoga mats.

Their target group is Yogis in search of high-end, high-quality products that enhance the performance of the exercise.

Sacred Yoga is based in Los Angeles and was founded by the entrepreneur Erica Simone.

Check out their website here: https://sacredyogashop.com/

Problem

Sacred Yoga has had a hard time keeping down the costs when they generate new customers. The market is highly competitive and Sacred Yoga is in the segment for consumers who are conscious about their purchasing decisions. Their customers demand high credibility from the brand and strong incentives to make a purchase. The key to success will be to quickly build new relationships with as many customers as possible, to a very low cost.

Using saturated, traditional digital marketing was excluded, as such strategies would require more money and capital. Research says that a customer needs to see a brand at least 8 times before they make a purchase decision. This research was done before the digital revolution, and today we can at least estimate the necessary exposure to twice as many.

With increased costs on Facebook and Instagram (not to mention Adwords) and a more and more saturated audience on these channels, innovation was needed.

I talked to Erica via Zoom and asked the question:

“Erica, what open rate do you have on email today?”

“30% I think …” she replied.

“Are you absolutely sure of that?” (I didn’t want to question her answer, but these numbers would be among the highest in the world)

Erica double checked and returned to me.

“It averages 8% on average … pending between 5–12%.”

The average in all industries is 23%

So I asked the question:

“Erica, what difference would it make for Sacred if you had an open rate of 90%?”

“Well, I had sold 11 times more” (8 * 11 = 90)

– “If you sold 11 times more than you are doing today, every day for the next year … How would your life look like in a year?”

– “Erica looked at me with a tense expression and said: It would be a dream … everything would have changed”

This is exactly what I’m passionate about. Helping my clients build their business. Help them change lives. Both their own life, but also the customers they help.

To succeed with my vulgar claim of a 90% open rate, solutions that were not used before would be required. The key to keep the cost low in marketing has always been innovation. It’s all about using channels that are not yet saturated. If we look back in the history of marketing, we see that every time a new channel pops up, it is the early adopters who always are most successful.

The first national (US) television commercial was broadcasted in 1941 and cost $9. With total cumulative inflation of 1642%, this represents a cost in 2019 of $157. Considering the presumed focus the TV viewer had in 1941 compared to 2019, the company was most likely getting A LOT of value for the money.

What do you think? Was the TV viewers’ focus stronger in the beginning and when there were only a few players who used this medium, or when, in principle, every company worldwide who has the capital to advertise through the television does so?

It is always important to go your own way. It takes courage to stop checking what everyone else is doing and just be a follower. In particular, it is important to understand the history of marketing in order to make smart decisions for the future. Waiting for everyone else to take the first steps before you are doing it means that you are already too late.

We can see the same thing happen with email, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram, etc … The companies that used these platforms early were also the big winners. Check out Amazon, MWMT-Watches, Daniel Wellington, Wish, Fashion Nova, Kylie Jenner, and many others… the results they achieved with a combination of courage, innovation, and smart decisions are pure success stories.

It is usually said that marketers “destroy” everything that can be “destroyed”. Messenger is the next big platform that marketers will “destroy”. You will see more and more advertising, and there will be more and more companies that communicate with their customers through this channel.

When Instagram introduced InstaStories, what do you think was best? Give it an honest chance at as early a stage as possible when users had a hundred percent focus when they consumed the content via the channel, or enter this channel today when the speed of the users’ scrolling / swiping causes the brain not even to take in a twentieth of all information?

With Messenger, you get a room for yourself. We can compare it with a nightclub: Either you can try to talk to your customers on the dance floor… or you bring them to the VIP area. At the VIP area, it is easier to hold a conversation and get to know each other compared to the dance floor.

Inside Messenger, you have your customers’ full attention. You can guide them to engage with your messages and use psychological principles to best explain the benefits of your service or product.

Strategy

The strategy is as follows:

Create a chatbot tailored for e-commerce.
Use a giveaway campaign as a bait to build the messenger list.
Customers entering the chatbot, they engage with the brand through a playful quiz, and we collect their email, Facebook profile, Time zone, Profile picture, and they become subscribers to the messenger list and we can send out valuable content and news via Messenger.
When using Messenger as a channel and using chatbots to send out content, you can count on a90% open rate.

Implementation

The first step was to develop a chatbot for Facebook Messenger. When the chatbot was fully developed I had created a virtual assistant/salesperson for the company. It can now take care of customer support, track orders, help sell the products, etc. This means that Sacred now will save 60–70% of the time spent on customer service as the chatbot will take care of this as well.

For selling products, the possibilities are unlimited and a strategy we were using was to ask new subscribers/leads what feature of a yoga mat they value the most when they buy a new one. This information was used to, later on, direct the customer to a specific flow inside the chatbot that was customized for people who valued the selected feature the most. A chatbot can be completely automated to sending customized messages to your customers on the platform they love the most.

Step two was to generate leads and I chose to generate leads through a Facebook campaign.

Why Generate Leads to Messenger via a Facebook Campaign?

Let’s take a look at 2 examples:

1. A user sees an ad — clicks on the ads — lands on a landing page — then leave the landing page — you have no information about the customer and must pay to appear in their phone/desktop again.

2. A user sees an ad — clicks on the ad — is now a lead and subscriber to your Messenger list (Messenger has almost 100% conversion rate) — Engages with your chatbot and you build relationships at an early stage — you send out messages completely for free to the person in the future.

Which alternative do you consider the best?

We started the ads by setting up a campaign with 2 different ad sets (which we tested in advance) and 4 ads. We used Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) and went live with the campaign. It didn’t take many minutes before we started to see the results. It was clear which of the ad sets and the ads gave the best results so we focused all the investments on these to maximize the return on investment.

The Results

$ 0.34 per lead (Messenger subscriber and email subscriber)

Comparatively, their previous Facebook campaigns have generated customers for $ 132.5 per customer.

The cost that previously generated 1 customer now gave 390 leads. (132.5 / 0.34 = 389.7)

Next Steps

Now it is important to continue building trust with the subscribers, engaging them with the Messenger chatbot and finally converting them to paying customers. Sending out messages on messenger is 100% free (as long as there is no promotional content, then check the 24+1 rule)

The best type of content to send is educating content about the product. Let customers’ share their opinions through surveys, send news and updates, contests, etc. The possibilities for content are just like any other channel unlimited, only your imagination will stand in the way.

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