35K leads in 20 days with a Messenger referral – Case Study

This exact flow, combined with Viral Loops’ technology for referral marketing bots, could be your best friend for running giveaways.

All you have to really do is:

• Use your token.
• Change the number of participations for each new entry & successful referrals.
• Insert some keywords that trigger possible automated flows (e.g. show the number of participations the user has).
• Craft a compelling copy that will communicate the value of your giveaway!

That’s it. Not joking!

Viral Loops for Messenger is live on Product Hunt!

Now, back again to the case study!

We had the tool (referral bot), and we had the flow. 

It was about time to find the ways that people would be able to discover and participate in the giveaway.

Obviously, the first thing we needed was a landing page that converts.

We included the main call-to-action above the fold and added a counter to communicate the sense of urgency.

Below the fold, we included as much info as possible about the rules and prizes of the giveaway.

By clicking the call-to-action, users were asked to give permission to be subscribed to the Referral bot, and thus, participate.

Since Facebook is the “father” of Messenger, we had to go hard with it.

We scheduled posts that spread the word about the campaign, including all the details in the copy, and the URL that people could use to have a chance to win. We did the same with Instagram posts and boosted them with ads to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Paid advertising offers a good initial boost, but we also need a great deal of organic reach in order to reduce the CPC of the campaigns.

We managed to do so by taking advantage of Manychat’s Comment to Message Growth Tool, as you’ll see in the screenshot below.

Important Note: 
Facebook Posts linked to this Growth tool should not prompt people to leave a comment with a specific keyword. It should open up a conversation (as viewed in Yava’s post above). In a different case, Facebook will probably give a low-quality score to your post, which would bring a significant drop in its reach.

A widget/popup was also added on the company’s website, aiming to inform mobile or desktop visitors about the giveaway and prompt them to subscribe to Messenger and enter the giveaway.

In order to reach existing customers/subscribers, we used newsletter & SMS campaigns.

Since the company is the biggest gym chain in the area, we knew that we had to also leverage the people that hit the gym to exercise. For that reason, there were banners in each gym with a Messenger scan code (another Manychat Growth Tool) that also included a clear direction on how people can use it to participate in the giveaway.

The Giveaway bot performed excellently!

About 8K people subscribed using the scan code from the banners.

At this point, I have to tell you that before the actual giveaway begun, there was a short pre-launch period (8 days).

This was also implemented using the same referral marketing bot.

We decided to give a head start to the existing gym members, website visitors or social media followers; this also allowed us to test the potential demand for the giveaway.

For the pre-launch period, we used a Facebook post with Manychat’s Comment Growth Tool, asking people to leave a comment with their favorite travel destination.

Important Note: 
Facebook Posts linked to this Growth tool should not prompt people to leave a comment with a specific keyword. It should open up a conversation (as viewed in Yava’s post above). In a different case, Facebook will probably give a low-quality score to your post, which would bring a significant drop in its reach.

Whoever left a comment under the post received a message to their Messenger through the referral bot, asking for their permission to subscribe them to the pre-launch. The same applied also for people that came from the widget on the website, or the banners located in the gyms around the country.

As soon as the giveaway launched, those users received the following message:

Let’s have a look at how the flow looked like for people who got into the giveaway after the official launch. 

Initial Message:

Successful Participation Message:

The last card is what we named “personal invitation”, which prompts the user to share about the giveaway after they subscribed.

The rules of the giveaway were very simple:

By entering, users got ONE entry for the daily raffle– since we could give 20 free trips, we decided to have 1 winner every day for 20 days.

In order to obtain more entries, the users should share about the giveaway with their friends/network. Every time a friend of theirs subscribed for the giveaway, the referrer gained 10 extra entries.

The flow we’ve built did all the referral tracking, and the subscribers could go back to Messenger at any time and find out how many entries they have, simply by typing “Entries”.

The fact that even if a user didn’t win the one day, (s)he could keep the entries gathered, allowed us to follow them up via our referral marketing bot in order to help them boost their referrals. 2 days after entering the giveaway (by using a smart delay), users received the following message:

A similar message was sent after another 2 days (again with a smart delay).

Now that I gave you the small details about the campaign, let’s see some numbers. 

During a time frame of 20 days:

• We gathered 34819 Messenger subscribers in total.
• 1208 out of the total, subscribed during the pre-launch with the referral bot.
• 31515 out of total participate in the giveaway, with a conversion rate (from a subscriber to a participant) of 90% 
• 1232 total unsubscribes.
• 15383 participants came from a referral.

 The last piece of data shows us that 48.8% of participants came to the giveaway from a referral.

After the campaign ended we were really happy with the results. Our experience has shown that the performance of every campaign relies on luck, only by a small percentage.

We knew that we did something right with our Referral bot, and we wanted to document it!

It all came down to 5 things:

1. It took people only 2 clicks to share about the giveaway. Hence the 48.8% of referral participants.
2. There were enticing & recurring rewards. Participant saw that there were daily winners, and that kept them trying to win.
3. We leveraged all the available channels and mediums. Banners, social media, newsletters, etc.
4. The messaging was engaging and fun. We kept receiving replies with people telling us how funny the gifs that we used were.
5. Even though the messaging was short, it was to the point. It didn’t leave people wondering about the details, without getting too much into them.

Are you serious?

Did you read the title of this post? ????

I’m joking.

The explanation is simple. Messenger as a platform has better engagement (open rate, CTR, etc.) than any other platform right now, and people are really used to using it. It’s easy for them.

And the most important; their friends are used to receive content from them.

In addition to that, your brand/company can really start a more human conversation with its audience.

Now if you’re not very interested in the human side of these things, I have one last card in my sleeve:

You can download your Messenger subscribers’ psids directly from Manychat & and use them to build audiences for your ads. Just be gentle with that, ok?

We got your back, partner!

Viral Loops for Messenger is now available for you to run your giveaway via Facebook Messenger!

We can help you set up your campaign and start collecting leads!

Build your Messenger Referral Marketing Campaign now!