Getting traction for a new eCommerce store might become a nightmare.

The competition is huge, and buyers are constantly bombarded with ads coming from anywhere; I mean just open your Facebook feed or your Instagram stories.

Lately, in Viral Loops, we have kind of fallen in love with the eCommerce and Retail industry- especially Shopify stores, so when Mastic Spa came up asking for our help we decided to dive head first and build a messenger giveaway with them.

Mastic Spa is a cosmetics brand with natural beauty products with Mastic; a resin produced only in the Southern part of Chios, a beautiful Greek island. It has multiple applications in cosmetology and pharmaceutical.

 

The exclusivity of the raw materials of Mastic Spa’s products was a strong indicator of its potential, and we like things with potential.

If you ask me, that’s the reason we managed to create an amazing experience that resulted in the success you’re about to read about.

Enjoy!

The objectives.

As I told you in the open paragraph Mastic Spa is a new brand, and as every new brand its success comes down to 3 things:

1. Awareness in order to start acquiring leads.
2. Data gathering for correct segmentation and ad targeting.
3. Sales- well, because sales put the oil in the engine (duh!).

Creating awareness for products and businesses is what Viral Loops does, so we knew that we could nail the first point above.

But what about gathering data and making it easy to use for segmentation and targeting?

Or what about sales?

We knew that we had to create a seamless experience both for the people at Mastic Spa and their customers; something that would make everybody’s life easier.

Creating a viral giveaway with a Manychat giveaway seemed like a one-way road.

We knew it would work because we’ve already done it in the recent past for another client, gathering 35K leads in 20 days with a Messenger referral.

This type of campaign allowed us to grab leads, segment users based on their preferences (will explain how further down the article) and demographic, and drive sales directly from inside Facebook Messenger, since the app has more than 1.3 billion monthly active users.

People are used to it.

How we did it.

The first thing that we needed to take care of is the structure of the Manychat giveaway campaign.

What would be the rewards?

Mastic spa has a variety of cosmetic products, so we decided to create bundles of products for the winners depending on the body parts. We created 3 bundles:

• Body.
• Hair.
• Face.

The Messenger giveaway would run for 5 days straight, and every day we would pick a different winner that would receive the bundle of their choice.

After participating in the giveaway users would be prompted to invite their friends- the altruistic approach in the steps of AirBnb worked like a charm, and asked to follow Mastic Spa on Instagram in order to get 10 more entries increasing their chances to win.

If you are around more than 1 day, you know that Instagram is a brand paradise. That’s the reason why pushing people to follow Mastic Spa was crucial for the brand.

Finally, for the people that didn't win anything from the Manychat giveaway campaign, we had a runner up offering them a discount for Mastic Spa’s products.

Driving sales at that point is easier as people are familiar with the brand and the exclusivity of its products, which can really boost their desire to purchase. 

Pre-launch & Launch.

Allowing people to know about your viral giveaway prior to the actual launch, will give you a head start in gathering leads, but most importantly it will make an impact on the opening day of your Messenger referral campaign.

We had 5 days to gather as many entries as possible. Expecting for the campaign to start picking up fast by deploying our efforts the day of the launch would be a juvenile move.

On the time of the actual launch, we needed as many eyeballs on the giveaway as possible.

That’s the reason we decided to start a pre-launch campaign. 

Since the whole giveaway would take place inside Messenger, leveraging Facebook for the pre-launch was the obvious choice. We created a Facebook post announcing there would be a huge giveaway and we asked people to leave a comment answering a question.

Every time a person answered the question, they were added in our pre-launch segment inside Manychat.

Here’s how the post looked like:

This was possible by utilizing Manychat’s Comment growth tool. If you want to learn how to set it up, I’ve made a short tutorial explaining everything you need to know:

The pre-launch proved to be a huge success as we managed to gather 2,405 leads, ready to participate in our viral Messenger giveaway.

So far, so good.

The day of the launch finally arrived, and we had 2 things to do:

1. Gather new leads.
2. Let people from the pre-launch that the giveaway is live.

In order to gather new leads, we created another Facebook post (similar to the one we created for the pre-launch) announcing the Messenger giveaway. Once again, we used Manychat’s Comment growth tool in order to get people inside Messenger.

Here’s what the post looked like:

That resulted in getting another 1,563 additional leads for the giveaway.

The viral giveaway inside Manychat.

As you probably understand, the things I described up to this point have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the Manychat giveaway campaign.

In order for the campaign to work, we used our Messenger Bot Giveaway template. Let’s take a look at how the flows we used, look like inside Manychat’s interface.

The participation flow.

This is the first set of messages sent to both the pre-launch participants and the people who started participating after the actual launch of the giveaway.

As you can see in the image below, users were welcomed with a bit of info about the giveaway, followed by asking for their prize preference.

After making their choice users were asked to confirm their participation, and shortly after were prompted to share about the giveaway with their friends.

The reason for putting people to select their preferred prize before confirming their participation was simple; after having a glimpse of the value they could receive, it was almost impossible to abandon their onboarding.

The invite flow.

From the moment a user completed their participation, they automatically entered the invite flow.

As I explained a few paragraphs above, we decided to take an altruistic approach with our invite system. In the past, we used to offer participants more entries for inviting their friends, but that didn’t seem to match with Mastic Spa’s brand.

That’s we kept it really simple.

We asked people to invite their friends in order for their friends to have a chance to win the prizes too. Friends appreciate a kind and altruistic gesture, more than a request based on incentive; and we wanted people to invite their good friends.

Follow on Instagram.

Asking people to follow Mastic Spa’s Instagram account was our 1st re-engagement touch point. Every user that followed the account, got 10 additional entries to the Manychat giveaway campaign increasing their chances to win the prize of their choice.

As you probably know Instagram doesn’t offer an open API, so it’s not possible to actually track which users really followed the account. That’s why we offered the 10 additional entries to anyone that visited the Instagram account by following the link we provided.

The vast majority of people visiting the profile also followed it, but even if people didn’t actually follow the organic reach of the Instagram account would peak quickly resulting in better discovery inside Instagram itself.

Invite a friend.

We needed a 2nd re-engagement touch point, and asking people to invite more of their friends is always a good idea when it comes to referral marketing.

The problem was that we’ve already asked them to do so when they first participated. 

What we needed was an excuse to contact them. 

Our excuse was to inform participants about the current number of their entries.

After providing that information, we were kindly asking them to share the giveaway with their loved ones.

Daily draws & winner announcements.

Picking the daily winner of the Messenger referral campaign is a piece of cake. I’ve made a short tutorial about how you can do it from inside Viral Loops:

After picking the daily winner, Mastic Spa posted the result on Facebook along with a funny GIF.

The runner up for sales.

Apart from the Facebook post announcing the daily winner, we had to make sure that all of the participants were aware of it.

This announcement (via Messenger) gave us the opportunity to broadcast our runner up for bringing actual sales to the brand.

So, we crafted a message that informed participants about the daily winner and asked them if they wanted to receive a surprise from us.

By accepting our surprise gift, they were informed that we offered them 30% discount for their order in Mastic Spa’s store.

The ROI.

Needless to say, the campaign proved to be a huge success. The combination of high-quality products with carefully crafted copywriting and a really small ad spend budget (around $150), brought some amazing results.

Overall, this Manychat giveaway campaign resulted in:

• 4K+ Messenger subscribers.
• 48% of the total participants sending at least one invitation.
• 650 people participating from an invitation.
• ~1,080 Instagram followers.
• A few thousands in sales.

The next steps.

Apart from a quick spike in engagement, leads, and sales, this Messenger viral giveaway offers Mastic Spa an amazing opportunity.

On the one hand, the brand has enough data to retarget the participants with products based on their preferences (like the kind of bundle they wanted to win), and on the other hand, Mastic Spa built a database of users ready to be nurtured through content marketing.

If that wasn’t enough, those users are open to direct sales; something that could turn into great profit for the brand.

Want to build your Manychat giveaway campaign?

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 that you can use to drive direct sales for your brand.

Build your Messenger Referral Marketing Campaign now!

 

Running an agency is difficult. Running a successful one, even more difficult.

That's very true.

What’s also very true is that agencies have on their ranks some of the most efficient marketing minds in the world.

Coming from an agency ourselves, Savvas and I try to keep a close eye on what’s going on in the agency terrain.

Since we launched Messenger Bot Giveaways by Viral Loops we are in a constant search for people that really know how to use Messenger bots.

Every once in a while, we come across a brilliant mind and- surprise, surprise, they either work for or own an agency.

After our insightful interviews with Arri Bagah and Hunter McKinley, we got in touch with the amazing Samir ElKamouny & Matt Lampkin from Fetch & Funnel. We scheduled the interview, and Savvas had an amazing conversation with them.

Here’s what they had to share with us.

 

 

What is Fetch & Funnel?

Fetch & Funnel is an acquisition agency. We specialize in helping e-commerce brands to scale sales and revenue-primarily through social advertising and sales funnels.

We’ve also been designing, testing and integrating Messenger as a channel into our social strategies for almost two years now. 

We found Facebook Messenger to be one of the best ways for a brand to acquire customers, because it's an incredibly powerful way to solve problems throughout your marketing funnel. 

How did you decide to integrate messenger marketing into your clients' strategy?

We still do Facebook advertising the way we were doing it before Messenger, but the second we saw that you could build a subscriber base on Messenger, our first thought was that this is going to be the next biggest marketing channel. 

It was just super obvious, all we had to do was to figure out how to utilize it. 

What are the best practices? 

What are the tactics and strategies that will work? 

Then we just ran from there.  

Combining Email with Messenger Marketing.

Email’s not dead. It’s just another way to market your audience.

You can write a long paragraph in an email, but you can't write a long paragraph in Messenger.

They're two different channels, and two channels are better than one. You can get the same message in front of your audience in more than one place. 

Messenger is a little bit less intrusive, and combining the two is a really, really great way to to get email addresses for a much lower cost.

You can get email address directly in Messenger.

For example,  we found out that the most inexpensive way to gather registrations for a webinar was to ran a Facebook ad to a messenger bot that asks for their email address and it automatically registered them to a webinar. 

Email’s not dead.

It was the lowest cost for webinar registrations, plus we could get people in both email and Messenger channels and then play to the strengths of each.

From an email list to Messenger.

If a client already has an email list, there’s an opportunity to transfer people to Messenger and start to market to them according to the needs of the platform.

It seems like it should be easy to ask people to subscribe to your Messenger list. Just send an email to everyone and ask them to sign up. Right?

The problem with that is there's no incentive, there's no bait and you're also not taking advantage of segmentation. 

If you have a large email list and you're a good email marketer, then you've already done some advanced segmentation. Therefore, you should be segmenting your Messenger list the same way and then adapting your content to the medium. 

Don't send the same message to both prospects and customers. Do customize your messages for each audience and then be sure to add tremendous value that appeals to each audience.

 

When speaking to prospects you should say, “hey, here's a link to get answers to our most frequently asked questions" OR, "Let us help you customize the perfect product for you”. 

Keep it simple when trying to add value. A simple coupon can go a long way.

Adding value, giving some sort of bait to get them to click and subscribe on Messenger, is definitely be the most important thing.

After that, you should segment them as well, which is really easy to do. 

You could be subscribing people to different bots or to a different sequence, and once they're in you can nurture. 

If your email list is not segmented, this is the perfect opportunity to get them into Messenger, and ask a couple qualifying questions and segment your audiences from there. 

We found that on an email list it's pretty common that, unless somebody is a paying customer, you don't have much information about them, to begin with. You don't really know their preferences. You don't know what their interests are. If you sell different products or you offer different services, or have different types of content you're probably not exactly sure how to match up potential customers with the right offers.

You don’t know why they signed up in the first place, and what information or material resonates with them. In Messenger, you can just go and ask them, so that they'll tell you what they're most interested in. At this point you'll able to segment and personalize right, for extremely relevant marketing. 

⚡Note from Savvas:

A lot of people (especially in eCommerce) segment their Messenger list by having a menu inside Messenger, or they have a link somewhere on their website to get product suggestions. It's something like a quiz asking their users some questions in order to suggest them the best products for them.

This is a great way to gather, with two or three questions, data about your subscribers and segment them. 

Asking the right questions to segment your Messenger list.

You need to ask your subscribers questions, and then you can add a tag to each answer they give you. 

I think the more tagging you do, the better. At least up to a certain point. If you've got a thousand tags that you're never going to take advantage of, that sort of doesn't help.

If you do a product recommendation based off of either their preferences or their interests, it's really a hundred times more powerful than just having a follow-up message. 

You can offer a discount on their preferred product, or give info for a new version of that product.

With a simple question about their preferences, you have now segmented that person and by their interest and now you can literally offer them the exact product that they want.

Ask people questions that show your their interests/preferences/tastes.

How often should we broadcast to our Messenger subscribers?

There’s no golden rule in that. It really depends on the brand.

I would say the biggest thing is really keeping an eye on metrics like your Open and Click-Through Rates. 

If you're sending a message every single day and you're not adding that much value, you will immediately see those phenomenal 80% open rates, and 30% click-through rates start to decline. 

That's really a great way to see how if you're (a) messaging too often and (b) not adding value. I'll say it again:

The most important thing is adding value. 

Maybe you're nurturing someone about what your mission is, or why they should be interested in working with you, or about why your products are the best in the market, but that's still sort of salesy. 

So you should add some value to their life by, for example, sending them a blog post that is slightly related to your business, but not trying to sell them. 

If all you're trying to do is sell someone over and over again, that's really where you're going to get the unsubscribes, and a huge decline in Open and Click-Through rates. 

Don't forget to make sure it's easy to unsubscribe.

If you don’t, people will go and mark you as spam, and if that happens too often, Facebook will suspend you from being able to send broadcasts or messages. 

It's super important to make that explicitly clear. 

We find with most of our clients, broadcasting once a week is great. If we're adding value and getting great results we'll increase frequency. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you built sequences and you have a bunch of people in them, make sure that you're not sending a broadcast super-close to when you may have scheduled a sequence to be sent to them. 

Just make sure that you're not imposing on anybody at all. 

It's important to create a schedule for your broadcasts and your publishing- just like you might create a monthly email calendar so that you adapt at the frequency of sending broadcasts based upon the data that comes back. 

A great example of this is one of our clients, they're called the Gadget Flow and they're one of the largest platforms of essentially promoting different products and different gadgets. They don't directly sell them, but they have thousands and thousands of products on websites like Pinterest. 

We quickly built them a large subscriber list, and we started sending broadcasts out. We were sending them very frequently, maybe two or three times a week. 

Then we noticed that the Open rates Click-Through rates were really steadily declining and we couldn't figure out why. 

And so we realized that we weren't speaking to our audience in the correct way. 

What we've done since then is that we completely segmented the current audience and then anybody who joins by asking questions like “Hey, what type of gadgets are you interested in?”, “Is kitchen gadgets?”, “Is it travel gadgets?”

We went and ask them a bunch of different questions about exactly which categories they're interested in. Now we send out a blast every Friday and that is specifically tailored to only tell them about the coolest gadgets in the categories that they specified that theywant to know about. 

That kept the Open the Click-Through Rates extremely consistent. 

Successful Messenger flows for e-Commerce stores. 

Giveaways are extremely powerful if you keep it consistent with your product offering.

They are extremely powerful and you can do some really interesting things woth them, like running a Facebook ad about the giveaway and asking people to enter to win. 

You can definitely have them to do something extra in order to register; e.g. follow you on Instagram, give you their email address etc. Then you can ask them one or two qualifying questions, like which product they're interested in. That way, you’ll be able to segment them. 

After the giveaway is over, maybe a week later, you can tell everybody, “The winner has been announced on our Facebook page. You can go check it out. If you were the winner, you've already been messaged, but because we had so much interest and buzz around this we'd like to pick some runner-ups. Would you like to see if you're a runner-up?”

Now, the secret is everybody's a runner-up. Then you give them a coupon code to the exact item that they said they’re interested in.

This works extremely well, but you can't do it all the time, because otherwise, people are going to catch on if you're not segmenting only to new people. 

Your old list is going to be like hey, “I'm always a runner up. What's up with that?” 

So you can also build some evergreen versions of this; it could be a super similar model where it's not really a giveaway but it's a quiz or a test or whatever you want to do. 

You can gamify it and make it really fun and allow them to win.  

We've done this for some really big brands and it works really really well. 

Everybody loves to play a game, and it's quick and easy to just click the buttons in Messenger. Plus by providing them that coupon code, they feel like they won something.

It definitely works really really well, but again- it’s super important to ask them what they're interested in and then give them a coupon code just on that item, or maybe put together a bundle that includes that item. 

We've had really really great success with that as well. 

This is a great way to increase your average order value, but also give them the thing that they were interested in at a discount. 

You can do this in a lot of different ways. You could do a giveaway for a product launch.

We work a lot with crowdfunding campaigns like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, and you can use this tactic to build a massive list before you launch your crowdfunding campaign. 

Boulding the pre-campaign list building is probably more important than the actual campaign itself because it determines how much success you're going to have when you launch your Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

Giveaways are a great way to build your list, but don’t stop there...give everybody a coupon code or a special offer the minute you launch.

List building and giveaways are also a powerful way to maximize Black Friday. Your competitors are going to spend their advertising dollars in a very short window, it’s uber-competitive.

If you have an internal support team within Facebook, or you work with an agency like us,  where you can tell Facebook “hey I'm planning to spend this much make sure I have enough ad buying space.”, If you don't have that connection or partner manager, you probably won't even be able to spend your budget.

So here's what you can do instead. In the weeks before it gets super competitive, run a giveaway on Viral Loops and build a massive list for cheap. Even if you're losing money, it's totally okay because the second Black Friday happens, just run heavy retargeting and blast your messenger list for free.

That worked extremely well for us this past year. It’s also a lot of fun because the sales come flying in after a well-coordinated Messenger blast. 

It’s also not like your new subscribers aren’t going to hear from you for two or three weeks. Nurture them along the way. It's incredibly powerful if you can ask a consumer what it is that they're actually interested in.

The power of Messenger is that your message gets through. You're not going into the Gmail promotions tab with every other competitor. Your message will be read, and if there's value you'll see fantastic results. 

The power of Messenger is that your message gets through.

And as long as you're able to sort of qualify upfront and determine what users are actually interested in -- to send out the right offer at the right time, you don't have to rely on advertising to get in front of that person to get that sale. 

You could do it for any sort of product launch, any sort of giveaway, promotion, or offer. 

⚡Note from Savvas:

Something that I've seen from one of our clients is that they run a wishlist giveaway. 

So, they say that five people will win their wish list up to $300 each, and they ask people on messenger to add their favorite products, so somehow to create a wish list and if they win they will get these products. 

So everybody that joins the giveaway completes the wish list. 

Basically, they built and segmented their list at the same time. That way they knew what products are for which people and start selling according to the segmentation.

Fetch & Funnel’s favorite chatbot platforms.

We're sort of platform agnostic, so I would say the top three that we use are ChatFuel,  Mobile Monkey and Manychat. 

I think each one of them has some different Pros. 

There are other Bots that can be very tool specific. Like there's a lot of great Shopify cart abandonmet plugins, but again, they solve one specific problem. 

Manychat has a lot of different uses, like website pop-ups, scan codes, comment tools, etc.

Mobile Monkey allows split testing, which is nice because you can set up some conversions inside the platform and track them. It's almost like setting up goals in Google Analytics. You set a goal inside Mobile Monkey and you can track those conversions. 

ChatFuel has a very open JSON API where you can send data back and forth between virtually anything.  It's a great way to run abandoned cart sequences, for example. 

We will run a Facebook ad to “cart abandoners”, get them into a messenger bot, offer them some sort of value to make that purchase, and we can grab their email address associate their Messenger ID and their email. 

We send the data to CRM via Zapier. Then when a purchase is made on the website, we send a broadcast through the API back to ChatFuel.

After this happens we exclude them from the abandoned cart sequence and they automatically get moved over to the customer list.

Another thing that I think is really, really important- that most people overlook, is reporting. 

ChatFuel has pretty decent reporting. Manychat also has decent reporting. But you can get way more advanced by utilizing a tool like Dashbot. With Dashbot you can track what your top messages are, as well as the performance of every step in your bot funnel.

Platform selection comes down what you’re trying to accomplish. We've even got one client using three different platforms.

Testing your campaigns is crucial.

You can't just try one thing and then give up on it if it doesn't really work well.

You really have to test different messages and different outcomes. If you made it sort of long, make it simpler. Do different testing of different bots, because it's just like a website. 

It's just like a funnel. It's just like anything, really in marketing. 

You will eventually find one that will really unlock a high ROI, but it might not be the first one, and it might not be the one that you thought was the clear winner, or the best one, or the most unique one.

For example, we did a huge giveaway with a client. They were giving away three $700 phones.

You would think that everyone's going to sign up for this thing immediately, but it was a phone that no one had ever heard of. 

So we told the client: “hey if you're giving away three of these phones, it would be better if we just gave away one iPad or are two Samsung Galaxy phones or whatever because people will recognize that and be more likely to sign up”.

Even though they were giving these super awesome expensive phones, people din't care what the specs are if they don't really recognize the brand. 

It’s definitely important to test different things.

Don't forget to spread the word.

Something else that we see quite a lot is that people launch their campaigns and then they don't spend time on letting their people know about it. The campaign doesn't perform, and they are left wondering what went wrong, and why their ROI is negative.

They expect to see results based on the fact that they’re paying for it.

You don't really have to “shout” to get people's attention.

Build a unique experience and let people know about it.

You can look at Tony Robbins’ bot, Timothy Sykes’ bot. You can look at Gadget Flows’ bot, or even Product Hunt’s bot, and see that right when you enter it's a unique experience and you get to mess around with it for a few minutes.

It provides value, and It's asking questions. You can’t lose when you create an experience like that. 

You should link your bot with all of your digital assets.

Put it on your website, in your email signatures, on your Instagram account.

Build that subscriber base, because it is never going to be as cheap as it is today to build your Messenger list. And so it's so important to do it as fast as possible because, in two years from now, you're just going to totally regret that you didn't do it.

All your competitors are going to be doing it, and you don't want to be late in the game when you can really be so early right now.