Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It’s the place where I’ve done over a thousand interviews, but not a single one of them is like the one that you’re about to see here today.
Here’s the thing. I got really passionate about chat bots recently. Actually, it was about a year ago. I invested in a company that happened into chat bots and, man, the founder of the company, Shane Mac, kept showing me the software that they were building, how chat bots are starting to take over chat conversations and I got fired up.
And for those of you who don’t know, chat bots are basically–it’s any software that can interact with a human being over a messaging app. So if you go on Facebook Messenger and you hit one of the weather chat bots and say, “Hey, what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow,” that’s a chat bot that’s responding to you.
A chat bot is also if you ever use Hipmunk on Skype, they have a chat bot there which will allow you to say things like, “I want to fly from Chicago to New York.” The chat bot will say, “What days and will you be flying back?” You text message it back. It says, “Okay, here are the options,” and you can buy it through the chat bot.
The thing that’s exciting for me is that it’s a brand new way of reaching people. Up until now, if someone came to your website and you wanted to bring them back, you might ask them for their email address and you’d have a good shot of bringing them back, but increasingly that’s become harder to do. People are not checking their email. They’re not responding. They’re not clicking.
A few years ago, apps became big. Someone would come to your site and you’d try to get them to install your app as a way of continuing the relationship with them, but we’re finding people don’t install apps nearly as often, and once they do, they often don’t even check them once, which is a startling thing to realize. But everyone checks their messaging apps.
In fact, as I’m talking to you right now, my phone is vibrating, I’m sure it’s my wife who’s sending me messages. There’s no way I’m not going to check it. That’s the power of messaging, and chat bots allow us to reach a large number of people using software. So we can do it all in a customized way. Anyway, that’s why I’m passionate about this.
We actually created a program at Mixergy where we teach this. And if you’re looking at your screen and you see some people whose names you don’t recognize like Kelly, Mary, Derek, they are in the program. They have actually created bots here. Tan Pham is also here. He’s helped lead the course to make sure everyone who’s signed up in the class has an opportunity to create a bot.
And in this community, we kept hearing about this guy, a guy who I knew, Ezra Firestone. I knew him forever. Ezra is the guy who years ago cofounded BOOM by Cindy Joseph. This is organic skincare and cosmetics for women. He made a name for himself by being a master at selling this stuff. But that’s not why we heard about him. We heard about him because he was at a conference, and this guy must have blown the roof off of the freaking conference because he is all anyone talked about.
And specifically what he excited them about was he showed them how chat bots can help grow their businesses. People were like, “Whoa. I never heard of chat bots, never knew it could actually grow. This guy Ezra has actually numbers to show us? Fan-freaking-tastic.” So they were talking about it. I kept asking him to come on here and talk about it. That’s what we are going to do here today.
The reason you see other people on your screen is because I wanted to bring in some of the graduates of our program to ask questions, to make sure that what Ezra is showing us about chat bots actually makes sense for other people and doesn’t just work for these amazing marketers who I think can do anything, like Ezra. Ezra can take anything and make it work well. I want to make sure that it’s actually practical for us, who have some experience with chat bots, and for you the person who’s listening to this podcast.
And if you’re interested in having a bot created or if you’re interested in learning more about this program, by the time this interview is published, I’ll have a new website up. It’s called Bot Academy. You can go there and see what a bot is. You can try out our bot. But I want to take a look at Ezra’s screen, bring him on here. Ezra, thanks so much for doing this.
Ezra: Thanks for having me. Thank you for having me on. I feel pretty good about myself now. It’s a nice intro.
Andrew: Dude, you should feel good. I’ve been trying to get you on Mixergy. For years, literally, you’ve been in our Pipedrive. I’m glad that you’re coming on here today.
Ezra: Yeah. Thanks. And you know what’s cool about this conversation is actually my viewpoint is that it’s not particularly complex what we’re doing with our chat bot. We’ll get to take a look at it, and you can make that decision for yourself, but I think it’s pretty straightforward and I think any business, regardless of what you’re selling, regardless of the industry you’re in, can leverage these three ways to use a chat bot for your brand.
Andrew: Okay. Let’s take a look at your screen and we’ll walk through how you do this. I’ll ask questions. The group will be able to chat in questions to me, and I’ll bring them in via voice as it makes sense to do it, but I want you guys, if you’re listening, Kelly, Derek, Tam, Gustavo to ask–go ahead. What are we looking at here?
Ezra: All right. So this is Facebook Messenger bots leveraging artificial intelligence for profit. How people consume the digital medium has changed and what you can do about that. So my name is Ezra Firestone. I run a company called Smart Marketer. I also run a company called BOOM by Cindy Joseph, BeeFriendly Skincare, Zipify Apps. I’ve got a team of 45 people. We do tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year.
The reason why I’m telling you that is so that you know that I know what I’m talking about. I actually do this stuff. I love it. I’m very passionate about it. What I’m going to be sharing with you today is from my own experience. So what I want to do first–by the way, that’s me. I’m just some dude who happens to be interested in marketing.
Andrew: I dig the hair.
Ezra: What I’d like to do is kind of review the game that we’re playing as business owners. This presentation is geared towards business owners. If you don’t own a business, then this may be less relevant. But it still, I think, will be relevant regardless of what you’re doing because the game that I play in business is relationship, is collective experience, is intimacy, is value.
Let me explain that. My viewpoint is that every brand is simply a group of people that you are building a relationship with around a collective experience they are having, and the goal is to create some intimacy between your brand and that person who is having an experience and add value to their life beyond trying to sell them some stuff. If you’re able to do that effectively–this is Cindy Joseph who’s my business partner in BOOM by Cindy Joseph–then you’re able to have a business.
So our business in this case is geared around the experience of being a woman over 40. And in our society, women are told that their value declines over time, where men are told their value appreciates over time. That’s not really what this is about. The point is that we’re having a conversation about an experience that a group of people are having. We’re adding value to their life through content and also making offers that we think are relevant to them.
So that’s kind of the game that we play as business owners is relationship around collective experience with the goal of creating intimacy and value with the human being. So that is the frame that I’d like you to take as a business owner.
And before we get into how we are leveraging Facebook Messenger bots, I want to talk about the way that people are consuming the digital medium because that fundamentally leads into this conversation that we’re having. So what’s happened over the last several years is that touch base consumption of the digital medium–yes, I do have a rose gold iPhone and this is, I don’t know if you can see the screen here, but I’ve got a picture of my wife with a grumpy face on my screen just so when I look down, I make sure, “Is the decision I’m about to make . . .?”
Andrew: Would she by grumpy? I see it. That’s a grumpy face about you getting on the phone yet again.
Ezra: Yeah. Pretty much.
Andrew: By the way, for anyone who’s listening to the podcast, the audio version, I know that’s the most popular way to consume Mixergy, I’ll describe anything that’s on the screen so you can catch up, but also don’t be afraid to come to Mixergy.com and see the video of this.
Ezra: Yeah. Please watch the video. So touch has taken over. So the way that people used to consume the digital medium is they would sit down and laptop and desktop computers and they’d consume the internet for large periods of time and a couple times throughout the day, but as mobile, mobile based consumption of the internet as we got these mobile phones and got to carry them around with us and touch-based consumption took over, now what’s happening is that people are consuming more often throughout the day but in shorter durations of time.
So they’re consuming on the toilet. They’re consuming in the line at the bank. They’re consuming the digital medium for these little 15 to 30 second to 1-minute segments many, many times throughout the day, which results in more overall consumption.
So I want to give you some statistics that are going to frame this conversation. So 33% of people who show interest on a mobile advertisements convert on a desktop. 67% of your consumers–and there were just some flames on the screen, by the way–67% of your consumers start shopping on one device and continue on another device. More than 60% of adults in the United States have two devices, and a quarter of those people have three devices and people are moving to bigger devices to make purchase decisions. And a quick aside–
Andrew: Wait, to make purchase decisions or to make purchases?
Ezra: To make purchases, yeah.
Andrew: It seems like what you told me–sorry to interrupt your flow, tell me if this is too much–but it seems based on what you told me before we started, you were noticing that people will start on their mobile phones, start researching, but when it’s time to really make that purchase, they go to their desktops.
Ezra: These statistics are directly from Facebook. I’m the number three spender in ecommerce using the Facebook self-serve ad platform. I spent a couple days with them talking about how we’re leveraging Facebook for direct response, and these statistics that I’m giving you are coming directly from PDFs that I got that I’m not actually allowed to share the PDFs from Facebook with their data.
So, basically, what we did that’s helped us a lot–just as a quick aside on the advertising front, if you’re on a budget and you want to cut your costs per acquisition on Facebook advertising down by at least 30%, what you do is you mimic user behavior. What I mean by that is we know that people need more than one touchpoint to achieve a conversion at this point. Nine times out of ten, you’re going to need to engagement someone once and then retarget them to engage them again with your brand.
So what you do is you run your first advertisement on a mobile phone because that’s where people are starting, and then you run your second advertisement, your third, fourth touchpoint on desktop and laptop computers because we know that 67% of consumers are moving from one device to another to make purchases, and we know that people are moving to big devices to actually complete the purchase.
So you can mimic that user behavior and see a significant cut in cost per acquisition. It might be a little technical. It might be a little high level. But if you’re spending under, let’s say, $1,000 a day on advertising, that is a great strategy to use. Once you’re spending more than $1,000 a day, you’re going to need to open up and obviously retarget on every device, etc.
Andrew: Okay. Makes sense.
Ezra: Does that answer your question?
Andrew: Yeah, it does. That’s my experience too. I kept looking up stand and sit desks, you know the kind that you can automatically raise and lower, for days on my phone. I finally waited to sit at the office here yesterday and buy it before–on a computer.
Ezra: Did you buy the–which one did you buy? I just recently got one.
Andrew: What is called . . .? It will come to me in a second.
Ezra: You don’t have to tell me.
Andrew: Which one did you get?
Ezra: I’ll keep going here.
Andrew: UPLIFT. UPLIFT Desk, that’s the one that I got with really nice wood.
Ezra: The mobile world that we live in comes with fragmentation, which is where we begin our conversation today. The average user has 194+ channels they consume from–Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, iTunes, Google. There are all these different channels that people are consuming from on their mobile devices.
Facebook and Instagram account for more time spent on mobile than the next ten channels or next ten platforms combined. I’m almost done with my statistics portion of this conversation. One in five minutes that are spent on a mobile device in the United States are spent on Facebook or Instagram. That’s really where we want to focus.
So the question is: What does that mean for you as a business owner? Well, what it means is that we need multiple touchpoints in order to get someone to actually purchase from us most of the time. So there’s this customer journey. There’s when they’re a prospect, then there’s when they’re a subscriber, then there’s when they’re a customer. So it’s before they know about you, while they’re getting to know you and after they know about you. So there are these three phases.
The big idea here is that you’re going to need multiple touchpoints across multiple channels before you get a conversion event. I’m going to actually break down my sales funnel for you. It’s going to be very visual. So I do recommend that you pop on to Mixergy.com and check this out. But the goal here is that we communicate with people differently based on how they’ve interacted with us, right?
So we want to communicate with people based on their level of consumption or engagement with our brand. I’m going to make this tangible for you in a moment here. We want to do this on every available communication platform. So your business is, in my opinion, a group of people in multiple communication mediums. That’s all your business is, is a group of people and multiple communication mediums that you are trying to communicate with them on based on whatever you’ve got to communicate, whatever your brand is talking about.
At first, it was only email. When I thought of like ten years ago my brand, that meant my email list. That’s what it was to me. That’s what my brand was. That’s what my community was. Then in about, I would say 2011, maybe 2012, pixeled lists came along. So you had the ability to drop a pixel on someone’s computer and retarget them based on what pages they visited. That was another way that someone could join your community. These are really still the big two–emails and ads. Those are the big two communication channels. My screen flashed–the big two communication channels that we have as business owners.
But now in 2017, we’ve got a few new channels. We now have desktop push notifications. We now have Facebook Messenger lists. We now have mobile push notifications. So, quickly to touch on the two that this presentation isn’t about–desktop push notifications, we use a service called PushCrew.com. This gives us the ability to, when someone visits our website on a desktop or laptop computer, push a notification to them that says, “Would you like to sign up to be notified on your desktop when we have new content?”
So if they say yes, we’re able to push a notification to them. This is maybe five percent of our community will actually do this, but we want to take advantage of every available channel that–
Andrew: Five percent will say, “Yes, send me a desktop notification?”
Ezra: That’s correct.
Andrew: And PushCrew is completely free. I talked to the founder. Thankfully he knew and was a fan of Mixergy, so he told me they’re planning on keeping it free forever. That’s a stats business. That’s what their business model is, understanding the stats of websites online. You’re saying five percent will actually accept a push notification?
Ezra: What we’re seeing is that around five percent are accepting our push notification, and we’ve got maybe 12,000 to 15,000 subscribers on BOOM and 2,000 subscribers on Smart Marketer. And what’s interesting is that like the technology that you’re leveraging is also dictated by your user base.
So, with BOOM, our user base is like 45+, 55+, so they’re less technological savvy. So they’re less–we’re getting less engagement on PushCrew than we are for Smart Marketer, which is geared towards people who are internet nerds like me, so they’re totally game to do PushCrew. The technology you leverage is going to be dictated by the community you’re serving.
However, we’ll just move on now to mobile push notifications. What we think is a good idea is to create a mobile app that iframes your website and then run ads to all of your buyers and email all of your buyers to incentivize them to download this mobile app. That way–this is kind of what it might look like. It’s what ours looks like. Basically, this way, when we have an email communication, when we have a sale, when we have a blog post, we email people, we PushCrew them, we run ads to folks on our pixeled list.
We do a push notification on our mobile app to the 30% of our buyers who download that and we do a Facebook Messenger broadcast, which is what this is about because my view point is that the next big channel, separate from email, separate from ads, is Messenger. I really strongly believe that.
Andrew: And this is the heart of what we’re getting at. The way that you reach people via Messenger is a chat bot.
Ezra: Yes. Absolutely. That’s what we’re about to get into is actually how to leverage this. I like to do context, like let’s get into the room.
Andrew: Yes. I like that you do context and that you also have specific numbers, which people will see in a bit.
Ezra: Yeah. We’re going to get into actually specific numbers. My viewpoint is the next big communication channel, I think Andrew’s viewpoint is Messenger. That is the channel that is growing extremely rapidly. In fact, messaging apps are now bigger than social networks. You might talk about this in your course–the top four messaging apps are bigger than the top four social networks.
So, quickly–what is a chat bot? Well, if you can see the screen, it’s not near this creepy. Every time I see this image, I think, “I really need to get a new image for this.” I’ve only done this presentation once before at a live event. I haven’t had a chance to change it. Basically, it’s a computer software program that’s developed to simulate intelligent conversation with a human being through written or spoken text. They are going to be everywhere. They message, you reply back.
This trend of auto-conversing bots inside of messaging apps is called the conversational economy and it’s rising right now. It’s growing. So, basically, the future of how you communicate, how you shop, how you book travel, how you use services is all in chat bots. Facebook has opened their API. You can book Ubers in there.
You can do–I live in New York. So there’s a lot of activity in the Facebook Messenger bot in our city because all of these services that New Yorkers use, like delivery services and things like that are all now having API connection to Facebook Messenger. It’s only getting more and more sort of aggressive. Soon what’s going to happen is you’re going to walk into a café and they’re going to Facebook Messenger you the Wi-Fi code. It’s coming. It’s kind of exciting.
Andrew: You’re saying today you can actually order food to your house using a Messenger chat window.
Ezra: Today you can do that. Yes.
Andrew: And it’s all a bot. It’s not a human being sitting on chat saying, “Hey, someone just bought.”
Ezra: I think there’s a connection to a human if you need it.
Andrew: They tend to have a connection to a human if you need it, but for the most part, it’s a bot. I didn’t realize that was that pervasive in New York.
Ezra: Dude, every app is getting into Facebook Messenger because Facebook is smart. Facebook did what Apple was unwilling to do, which was open their API, right?
Andrew: Yeah.
Ezra: Now Facebook is winning this race.
Andrew: Frankly, when we talk about chat bots, they exist on lots of other platforms, including, as I said, Microsoft’s Skype app. It’s on there. Skype has been pushing it aggressively for me, anyway. But other than Facebook Messenger, which has opened it up, and Slack, which from the beginning seemed to court chat bots, the others just aren’t big enough players. The reason we focus on Facebook Messenger is they now have–actually, I’ll let you talk–1.2 billion users and growing and Facebook supports it and Facebook encourages it.
Ezra: Yeah. Imagine real quick what would have happened if Apple five years ago opened up their iMessage API.
Andrew: Right.
Ezra: Like Facebook Messenger would be so far behind. But they didn’t want to do that.
Andrew: I still see them doing it in the near future. If not this next version of iOS, it’s got to be the one after that.
Ezra: Don’t you think they would have to play this game at this point?
Andrew: Sorry? Go ahead.
Ezra: The top three ways to leverage Facebook Messenger automation and chat bots for every brand–now, this is by no means the best ways. This is by no means the only ways. These are by no means the only ways. These are how we’re doing it and have found it to be effective for us and have gotten it to be our number 16 revenue channel in the last 30 days when you look at revenue that’s coming in from a channel perspective from our brand that I’m about to show you. In the last 30 days, this is already number 16, and we basically just started with this.
So the first place I would recommend leveraging chat bot technology is with what I call bottom of funnel events. And in our case, this is someone who visited the shopping cart but did not buy. So it’s basically all the way at the end of our sales funnel when someone is super interested, interested enough to add a product to the shopping cart and then abandon. We’re now using what is called messenger bot retargeting ads. We’ve seen a 30% reduction in cost per acquisition. I’m going to show you exactly how to set this up, exactly how we’re using it and what that actually means.
So our sales funnel looks like this. This is quite complex for those of you who are not familiar with sales funnels. I’m going to just run you through it really quickly. For those of you were listening, this part of it is very visual. So I’ll try my best to explain it. So we start with a native video advertisement on Facebook, which is designed to get someone to engage content and consume content from our brand without ever leaving the social network, without ever leaving the social medium, which we believe to be the best top of funnel conversion asset.
Real quick, the reason we believe that–so, my viewpoint is that your brand–I’ve got a lot of viewpoints, if you haven’t figured that out yet, I’m very opinionated. But my viewpoint is that your brand is simply a collection of conversion assets working in concert with one another to achieve a conversion event. Those conversion assets include sales pages, emails, customer testimonials, videos. There are all kinds of different conversion assets.
If we know, if we’ve established that 67% of people are going to start a purchase decision on one device and finish it on another, if we’ve established that 33% of people who show interest on a mobile advertisement are going to convert on a desktop, we’ve established that people are moving to bigger devices to make purchase decisions, then it makes sense to figure out if we know that most of our sales are coming from the second and third touchpoint and beyond to figure out what’s the best initial touchpoint, what’s the best top of funnel conversion asset?
In our viewpoint, it is a video because it gives people the ability to engage with you and consume content on your brand without ever leaving the social environment. It allows you to track who has consumed that video and follow up with them, which is what we do. So, we run a video ad on Facebook to people who look like our customers. We then follow up with folks who have consumed 50%, 75%, 95% of that ad and not yet purchased. We then are sending our traffic.
All of our sales funnels are very long. The reason why our sales funnels are very long that they don’t go advertisement sales page is because if we know that people need multiple touchpoints before they’re willing to convert, which we have established based on data from Facebook and other data sources, then it makes sense to have your sales funnel have multiple steps so that you can retarget people based at every step.
So what we do is we amplify a video that leads to an article, a pre-sell engagement page that’s designed to engage someone in a conversation about a topic that they’re interested in that is related to a problem that they have or an experience they’re having that alludes to a solution. I’ll say that again because I said it kind of fast and that solution is your product.
So the article that we send people to–I’ll give you a specific example. I sell software. So I amplify a case study article about how that software helps you grow your Shopify business and then that’s a case study about a business owner that alludes to a solution, which is my software. For my makeup brand, I amplify a piece of content that’s “Five Makeup Tips for Women Over 40.” So it’s a piece of content that’s about an experience that someone is having that alludes to a solution, which is my makeup line for women over 40. So I like to stick multiple steps into my sales funnel.
Now, I’m going to show you a sales funnel that doesn’t have so many steps. I’m saying this stuff a bunch of times for the folks who are listening. So video advertisement, tracking people who consume 50%, 75%, 95% of that video, retargeting them, sending them to our article page. If you click through to the video, you go to the article page, if you just make it further, if you just land on the article and then bail, we retarget you with more content because you haven’t showed interest in our products yet.
However, if you click through to our offer sequence, which in our case is a category page on an ecommerce store, we will retarget you with an ad if you bail out of the funnel at that point. If you make it to a product offer page, we’re using dynamic advertising. If you make it to the shopping cart, we used to use dynamic product advertising, but now we’re doing something different. We’re about to show that.
I just want to get even deeper here. Then there’s our checkout sequence where we’ve got upsells and things like that. Check this out. We then run an advertisement that’s called bot x and not y. So you remember that I said awareness, retargeting, loyalty–before, during, after. So, we think of our brand in these pillars of awareness, which is new people who don’t know about us yet, retargeting, which are people who have engaged with us at any step of our sales funnel and then loyalty.
Loyalty doesn’t get a lot of love in our community. Everyone talks about traffic and conversion. They don’t talk about repeat business. My viewpoint is that repeat business is really how you build a brand. Half of my business in all of my brands come from people who bought from me in the past. This is just one strategy that we leverage.
So, basically, what we do is we run a video advertisement to people who bought our top product but not our second product. So, they bought are most popular, but not our second most popular or they bought or second most popular and not our third most popular. We’re creating dynamic segments of people in our CRM who fit these criteria.
We are sending those dynamic segments to Facebook, which is creating audiences of people who have done–bought one product and not the other, then we run an advertisement to them saying, “Hey, would you be interested in this other product?” We probably spend like $3,000 a month on these types of ads and make about $45,000. So, we don’t spend a lot, but the ROI on the bought x but not y advertising is insane.
Now, let’s take it another level deep because we decided and we talked about the idea of reengaging people based on behavior. So, if someone watches 50% of this video but doesn’t buy, we retarget them with an ad that says, “Hey, are you sure that you’re not interested in this product?” Now, think about how many levels deep we are here. We’ve gone through the awareness phase. We’ve gone through the retargeting phase. We’ve created a customer.
We’ve advertised video to them about a product we think they might be interested in. They’ve consumed 50% or more of that video and not purchased. We then retargeted them again in the loyalty pillar with an image ad because people need multiple touchpoints before they’re willing to make a conversion event even in the loyalty pillar. So, this is just breaking down our sales funnel for you. Then we are always amplifying content to our subscribers and buyers. So this is just sort of a side conversation about multi-touchpoint, multi-step sales funnels.
Now, this is how we do things. We used to do the dynamic product advertising for people who visited our shopping cart but didn’t buy, which is simply like, “Hey, you looked at this product but you didn’t buy it. Here it is again.” That’s all it is.
So what we switched to doing was running an advertisement that said–we are a big fan of incentivizing people to take action with small discounts. Some people argue against discounts, I’m not one of those people. I use discounts and deadlines consistently across all my brands. In this case, we run an ad that says, “Hey, send us a message to get 10% off.”
Let me show you how we set this up, and then I’m going to show you the actual ad and show you the statistics on this ad. The first thing is you create a Facebook advertising campaign with the objective of traffic. So Facebook is setup in these three settings. It’s campaigns, ad sets and ads. On the campaign level, you set the objective.
On the ad set level, you set the targeting and placement and on the ad level, you put the actual ad creative. So, in this case, the objective for our campaign is the objective of traffic. It’s not conversions. It’s not event responses. It’s not any other–it’s not page likes. It’s traffic. That is the objective you need. The reason you need that objective is if you want to have a Facebook Messenger pop up when someone clicks on your ad, you need to set that objective.
So you set the objective of traffic. It’s very important that in the ad set level–so we’ve now moved from our campaign level where we’ve set the objective of traffic to our ad set level, where we’re going to set where this advertisement is actually going to show to people. So, on the ad set level, we want to set the placement of Facebook feeds. We want to uncheck every other placement because the only placement that this particular advertisement is allowed is in the Facebook feeds.
So, if you want to retarget people on all these other platforms who visited your cart and didn’t buy, you would setup another campaign and you would setup in that ad set all the placements that weren’t Facebook feeds and you’d set up your normal retargeting advertisement for people who visited your shopping cart and didn’t buy and you could target them separately. However, we’re finding that 90% of the volume we’re getting in this ad set is on Facebook feeds anyway. So it’s not really an issue.
Another sort of aside–actually, I’ll remember it and I’ll tell you guys later, but I have a little advertising trick for you I’ll tell you after I’m done with this. I don’t want to get too far off-topic.
So you set Facebook feeds. Then in the ad set level as well, you set the destination where you want someone to go to be called website or Messenger and then obviously on the ad level, we’re actually going to set it to Messenger. In the ad set level, the default destination is website or Messenger. You just leave that alone. You set your budget, how much you want to spend. That’s going to be dictated by the size of your audience. In our case, we’re spending $75 a day on this particular advertising.
Then in the ad set level as well, you set the group of people that you want to see this ad, which in our case is people who visited our shopping cart but did not buy in the last 60 days. I have a free Facebook training that will show you how to set up audiences and stuff, but basically Facebook gives you the ability to build groups of people based on URL events. So people who visited /cart, you can build an audience of them.
So you set that, who you want this to show to, which is the bottom of funnel event, which for you maybe is someone who made it all the way to book a call with you but then didn’t actually do it or someone who made it to the webinar replay page, but not to the shopping cart. I don’t know what the bottom of your sales funnel is. Whatever sort of the last two or three steps of your engagement cycle before someone purchases from you is when you’re going to use this strategy, which I haven’t even showed you yet. I’m about to show you.
So set your optimization and delivery on the ad set level for link clicks and just leave everything standard. So now we’re into the ad level, which is where the actual communication gets setup. So we’ve set up our campaign for traffic. We’ve set up our ad set to run on Facebook feeds, to target people who visited our cart and didn’t buy. Now we’re moving into setting up our advertisement.
So, when we’re creating our ad, we want to say an ad with an image or a video–and you can upload your image, whatever image you want to show. Then what we want to do is say Facebook Messenger rather than a website URL–a traditional advertisement on Facebook that’s geared to generate traffic would link to a website URL. In this case, the destination is Facebook Messenger text.
And then they give you the option to put some structured JSON, which is essentially the content that is going to pop up when someone sees your advertisement on Facebook. I will just read what we have in here, just so for those of you that are listening, you can hear what people are going to read when they see the ad.
Andrew: And the way it works is if I understand you right, someone’s going to see this ad that you just showed us how to design with the image. As soon as they press a button, then they get this text you’re about to read us via Facebook Messenger sent to them. Am I right?
Ezra: That is correct. I’m going to show you–the idea that it reduces conversion rate by 30% boggles my mind. Check out the amount of steps that happen. So, this is the advertisement that pops up. It’s like, “Hey . . .”
Andrew: Let’s read that, what you were about to read and I interrupted you.
Ezra: It’s right here, actually.
Andrew: Okay. Great.
Ezra: This is the advertisement. It’s in the ad text as well and it pops up in Facebook Messenger. It says, “Hey, limited time discount on BOOM products. Reply to this message with the word “coupon” to get 10% off BOOM products,” and then there’s a link to our store, “Or ask us any questions you have and we will ping you back with a response.”
When they click this ad, which by the way, these Facebook Messenger ads, the call to action on them says, “Send message.” So, when they click that, it pops up a Facebook Messenger box right on their screen that first it pops up a light box actually that says, “Hey, this brand will respond to you in Messenger.” As soon as they close that light box, the Messenger pops up and it says the exact same thing that the ad said, “Hey, limited time discount. Reply to this message with the word coupon,” yadda, yadda.
Andrew: Okay. And this is a bot–hang on, on the screen. I want to make sure I understand why you’re doing this. Why do you have the ad on Facebook say exactly the same thing as the Facebook Messenger text and why would have the ad on Facebook say something like, “Reply to this message when there isn’t a place to this.” I would think people would comment and reply with the word “coupon.”
Ezra: Here’s the thing about setting this up. We just saw this technology was available and set it up as soon as it was. We didn’t think as much about it. Could we do this a little better? Could we change the ad text? Could we modify it? Sure. But it was working so well that we just left it alone.
Andrew: I see. So this is just you guys experimenting and you know what? It worked. I got it. I see. I thought maybe there was some technology here–
Ezra: It literally cut our conversions in half and man, we do so much volume every day that if we have a win that’s this big, we just don’t mess with it. We literally are like, “Oh my god, let’s see what happens.” So now it’s been running like this for 30 or 45 days and it’s just crushing it. So we’re just like, “Well, we could test another ad, but we’re also pretty busy. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do.” We just kind of left it.
Andrew: Again, for anyone who’s listening–
Ezra: Could this be smarter form a messaging perspective? Probably.
Andrew: The pop up would come up the same way it would pop up if your friend or your mom would text you on Facebook Messenger, that little bubble that comes up or the little screen that comes up in the bottom right corner on Facebook or if they have Facebook Messenger on their phones, which most people do, then their phone will vibrate.
Ezra: Yes.
Andrew: That’s what it looks like. They type in the word coupon. . .
Ezra: Now, a user types it in. This thing pops up for them. If they respond with the word “coupon,” which by the way for us, about five percent of people think coupon is the actual coupon code. So they go to our store and enter “coupon” as the coupon code. We went ahead and created a coupon called “coupon” for the five percent of people that are not tech-savvy to use.
Andrew: I see. Yeah.
Ezra: So when they–
Andrew: The actual code is the word “Cindy.”
Ezra: Yeah. So, basically, what happens is they type in “coupon” as a reply and this is now the chat bot at work. The chat bot says, “Congratulations, you’ve successfully accessed our special discount code. Enter code ‘Cindy’ at checkout to get 10% BOOM products but hurry, this code expires in 24 hours.” There’s a call to action button that says, “Shop the BOOM store.”
Then underneath that, we’ve built out some dynamic content also in the Messenger app, so also the chat bot pops up this code, pops up a call to action button and then it pops up a carousel that shows off our different products and this is just a carousel of our products that you can scroll through, right? Then it shows off the products and it says, “Use your coupon code to get 10% off at checkout.”
Andrew: And all this within the chat window?
Ezra: All within the chat window.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ezra: Check this out. We’re about to get crazier with the chat window in a second. To do this, we’re using a tool called ManyChat, which I think you guys are familiar with. ManyChat has this thing called keywords. What you can do is you can add what’s called a keyword under their automation tab, you can add what’s called a keyword. In our case, as you can see, the keyword is called coupon. Basically we have a keyword that says, “Message contains coupon.”
ManyChat is connected to your Facebook Messenger, so it’s tracking if someone puts in the word coupon. Then you get to say–this is what that looks like. You get to say when someone types this in, they give you a WYSIWYG drag and drop editor for creating content that’s going to display inside the Messenger when someone types that in. We just simply built out a little flow in here that was like, “Here’s congratulations, here’s a little bit about our product.” We’re about to add a couple videos in there because we’re seeing people are actually consuming these videos in Messenger as I’m about to show you.
So what we can see is when I pulled this screenshot, this message had been sent to 974 people. It had been delivered to 970 of them. So a 99.6% delivery rate–I don’t know who those other 4 people were that didn’t get delivered to. 943 people actually opened it, meaning 943 people looked at the message, actually looked at it. That’s 96.8% of people who received this message, looked at it. I’ve never seen a message open rate on any channel of communication anywhere near this high, not the least of which a channel of communication that is happening between my brand and my consumer at the very bottom of my sales funnel, right? It’s insane.
Then check this out–536 women, because this brand is for women, clicked on it, 55% of people. It’s probably double these numbers now. It’s been running for a couple of weeks since the screenshot was taken. 55% of people who got this message actually clicked it.
Andrew: Sorry. I just want to underline this. I know there are people who are not looking at the screen and don’t see this. That’s totally fine. What you need to understand is 96.8% of the people who got this message opened it. Consider what you’re getting with email. What is it, 20?
Ezra: 20 if you’re lucky.
Andrew: If you’re really good, 25% to 30%. Click rate over 50%–he’s got 55% click rate. This is unreal.
Ezra: Now, keep in mind, this is a small segment of my subscriber base. I’m going to show you some statistics that are going to a larger segment of my subscriber base that aren’t this crazy, but this particular segment of my subscriber base are some of my most interested people.
Andrew: Yeah. Why do you keep emphasizing that this is bottom of the funnel. Tam also emphasized that in the chat. I’m wondering why that is so significant that you said it a couple of times and Tam has now repeated it.
Ezra: Yeah. Thank you, Tam, for repeating it. You are so happy, Tam. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone as constantly as happy as you are. It’s like really nice. On my screen right now, I see my slides. I also see your face, I don’t know why. I only see your face.
Andrew: I know. I only see Tam’s face too. It’s good.
Ezra: He’s cheesing super hard.
Andrew: You should see the Google doc that Tam put together with everything we need to see online about bots. This guy is fired up about them.
Ezra: Yeah. It’s cool.
Andrew: Why is bottom of the funnel so interesting?
Ezra: Here’s why–if a user replies back, you want to be able to respond. You obviously want your chat bot to respond, which it’s doing, but if users start really engaging, then you want to have someone there to communicate with them. If you’re a business of any size at the top of the funnel, that’s not going to be sort of possible, at least for my brand. Like we have live chat only at certain hours because we just can’t manage the volume. We’ve got 15 support reps between phone, which is a huge channel for us, and email.
We don’t have the ability to leverage this technology at the top of our funnel. It would create too much–we would not be responding to people, the ones who did want our actual attention. And I think that if you’re going to take the time and energy to actually respond to someone and you’ve got limited resource, which in our case we do, you want to do your best people first. So the people at the bottom of the funnel are your most engaged. So those are the ones that you want to have the most–
Andrew: I see. They’re the most valuable, which is why you’re so–why the percentage is so significant.
Ezra: That’s correct. I’m going to show you some percentages that aren’t quite as significant here in just a moment for people higher up in our sales funnel. Now, one thing to point out is ManyChat gives you the ability to tag users who have opened but not clicked. So you can tag all the people who opened, tag all the people who clicked. I don’t know if it’s in there yet if you’re actually able to then segment that and broadcast to the non-clickers.
Andrew: Yes. You can absolutely do it. Actually, I think it is fairly easy. You can actually do it.
Ezra: Okay. Then basically we’ve now started doing broadcast in ManyChat. I’m going to show you how we’re doing it in just a moment, but what we’re going to start doing is these 400 people, let’s say 395 people or whatever who opened but didn’t click would then get tagged and broadcasted. The reason I point that out is that concept of remailing unopens, remailing non-clickers is a concept that people are familiar with from the email marketing world.
Think of this as email marketing 2.0. Replicate what you’re doing with email on this communication channel. That’s what it is. It’s a communication channel. Check this out. You can see here that when these statistics were pulled, we had 88 purchases. By the way, each purchase for us is worth $80 to $90. So, that’s like $10,000 in revenue here or whatever it is. The Facebook revenue data is always off.
But $5.86 a purchase–we were paying $10 to get people who visited our cart and didn’t buy to purchase from us with the dynamic product ads. Now we’re paying $5.86 and it’s even dropped since then. Even with all these steps, even with our clunky ad message, even with all that, this is still performing significantly better than someone visits the shopping cart, doesn’t buy.
We show them an ad that sends them back to our website. This is performing way better than that. This is like we show them an ad that says, “Reply to this message.” They then click the message. They don’t actually reply. You know what I mean? You may consider it clunky, but it is working.
Andrew: By the way, as you’re saying this, I’m looking at the chat. Mary Kathryn Johnson says that she does this with people who don’t click on a webinar. So, she’s targeting people who are not clicking on her webinars. And Kelly Garrett, who creates bots like this for her clients says that’s the way she explains it, email marketing 2.0. I feel like the word bot can be scary to newbies. So, using a phrase like email marketing 2.0 makes it a lot more approachable.
Ezra: Totally. So that’s the first way I recommend, the number one way to use it. The second way to use chat bots is automation at the onset. So, basically, now what you can do–this is brand new. We’re literally just testing this right now. I don’t have slides. It came out maybe a couple weeks ago. You can have someone comment on a post on Facebook and have someone initiate a chat bot, initiate a Facebook message.
You also have people who are Facebook Messaging your brand. You have people who are getting in touch with you through this channel, using it for support. We are encouraging people, which I’m about to show you, to use this channel. So you can use automation at the onset, which is a chat bot message for people who reach out to you via the Facebook Messenger channel.
Here’s what that looks like for us. When someone messages us on Facebook, we say, “Hey, I’m the BOOM chat bot. Message me to get immediate responses to your questions about our Pro Age products, Cindy’s blog videos, and all the best information about our brand. You can ask me things like what does BOOM sell, who is Cindy Joseph or you can just click get started.”
Then we’ve got two menus. We’ve got customer support, which will then, if you click on this, it will take you to our email, it will take you to our phone number. If you click get started–this is what it looks like, by the way, pops up, “Hey, we want to engage with you.”
Andrew: And it always knows the right name because the user doesn’t have to type it in. It’s Facebook that knows the person’s name and is entering it in, which is a world of difference from email, where when I sign up to someone’s mailing list, I always use the name Adam. I never give the name Andrew because I want to know where are they sticking the name I typed in, in a form and when do they actually know me and they’re sending me a personal note. Here’s there’s none of that. It’s Ezra because Facebook knows you’re Ezra and the marketer then gets access to your name.
Ezra: That’s hilarious. I’ll know if you sign up as Adam Warner to my lists. So, basically what happens is under automation again in ManyChat, you click on welcome message, which is this little button here. They then give you the ability to build out what’s called a main menu, through this thing, and you can setup these communications. So, we have, “Who is Cindy?” which then goes to a communication I’m about to show you. “Do you want to watch a makeup demo? What kinds of questions can you ask me? Do you want to visit our store?” And then also, “Go to customer support.”
So here’s what those messages might look like. If you say, “Who is Cindy?” it pops up an image, it tells you a little bit and it’s got a call to action. If you pop up, “I want to watch a makeup demo, then it gives you a couple options for makeup demo. If you say, “What can you ask me?”
It pops up a message that tells you the kinds of things you can ask us or you can ask our chat bot and then we’ve got statistics on this, like who’s clicking what buttons, how are they working? And like 38% of people are trying to get to support, but the other 40% or 62% are engaging with content in our chat bot, engaging with video content, engaging with makeup demos, watching a video about us.
So this welcome message, this automation at the onset that gives the user the ability to engage with content related to your brand is something you can setup in five minutes and would be beneficial to you, as you can see from our statistics here. Check this out. This is our revenue in the last 30 days. You can see that our average order value is about $70.
Andrew: Wait, this is your revenue in the last 30 days?
Ezra: 30 days, yeah. We do about $1.5 million on this brand.
Andrew: Good lord. Okay.
Ezra: It’s a big brand. I’ve been at it since 2010. We get credit for being an overnight success, but we were not. We’ve been doing this for a long time.
Andrew: By the way, when I said at the top of the interview I’ve been trying to get you on Mixergy for a long time. It’s this business. I knew you were a great marketer and I know you also have a great software company, but it’s this business that for some reason caught my attention. After this, you and I are going to record a one on one session where we just talk about your business and how you built it up.
Ezra: I’m excited about that, yeah.
Andrew: So, basically, when you look at our–thank you for the platform, by the way–when you look at the revenue from our brand–and I’ve got it all blocked out–but in the last 30 days, we’ve done $1.4 million in revenue and the number 16 revenue channel, which is not a huge portion of our revenue, but is the number 16 revenue channel in the past 30 days.
And we literally just started using it is Facebook Messenger automation and my viewpoint is that very likely within the next 12 to 18 months, this will be top 5, this channel for us. We’ll see. We’ll get to come back and take a look at it. So, bottom of funnel, dynamic engagement, automation at the onset.
Second is broadcasting to your community, broadcasting to your customers and community through Facebook Messenger, getting people to sign up for the channel, then broadcasting to them. So, here, Andrew, are the stats for everyone that we got to sign up for our Facebook Messenger channel when we sent a broadcast to them.
I want to break down exactly how we did this. You can see that when sent this broadcast, which was our first broadcast ever sent, we had 6,200 people on our Facebook Messenger list. It was delivered to 92% of them. It was opened by 80% of people, 4,900 folks opened it and 2,600, almost 2,700 clicked it, so a 43% click rate. This is literally four times the open rate of our emails and I mean, ten times the click rate.
Andrew: Which is dramatic. The reason I think you can do higher than 43, I feel like the reason it’s 43 is you’re asking a very specific thing that not everybody needs but the people who need it are going to want it and click it. It’s, “Hi (first name), can I tell you the eight things I do every day for soft and healthy skin.” If it’s not something that people care about right now, there’s no urgency about it. It’s just a message. They could ignore it completely or you also created a, “No, not right now button for them to respond with.”
Ezra: Check this out. So, we’ve since done some more aggressive communication here and seen better percentages, but I wanted to show this because this is on one that’s just like, “Hey, can we talk.” There’s nothing special about this communication. It’s just, “Hey, can we send you an article right now.” 19% of people said no, right? By the way, these 19% of people that said no, look at this. We then said, “Okay, feel free to message us. Would you like to join our club?” 60 of those people said, “Yes, I would like to join your club.”
Andrew: Yeah.
Ezra: Five percent of the people who said no actually said yes, right? And here’s another communication that we made to some of our folks, which was, “Flash sale, 10% off of our BOOM Cotton for the next 24 hours only. Click the button below by midnight on March 10th to claim the special deal.” And again, 80% opened. In this case, only 7% clicked. But the 7% who clicked, most of those people bought.
So just some other ideas of ways you can leverage this. You can do flash sales. So we’re sending–any time we have a communication, by the way, if we have a flash sale, a blog post like the one I just showed you, if we’ve got any kind of communication, we’re Facebook Messengering people with it. We’re emailing them. We’re running ads about it. We’re doing a PushCrew and we’re doing a mobile push notification–five channels of communication between our brand and our consumers.
Andrew: What about the idea that now someone could be getting the same message two, three different places?
Ezra: I hope they get it five times.
Andrew: You’re okay with that?
Ezra: I actively desire that. Here’s why. People are so inundated with content. Look, man, I got like 250 emails today, no joke. Before this, I was going through my email creating filters like, “I want to have that go to Unroll.me. I want that to go to Unroll.me.” I was getting rid of stuff out of my inbox I don’t want to see. People are so inundated, they’re going to forget about you with the 194+ channels that they’re consuming from on a daily basis in this mobile world that we live in that I want to be present on every channel I can possibly be present on.
Which brings me to my advertising tip that I was going to give you that I mentioned earlier in the presentation, which is most brands have what I call awareness advertising from one channel only. They run all their awareness ads on Facebook. They run all their awareness ads on LinkedIn. They run all their awareness ads on Instagram or 95% of the new people that are going into their funnel are going into their funnel from one channel because that’s the channel they figured out how to be profitable on from an acquisition standpoint, right?
What you should be doing then is–that’s the awareness pillar–the retargeting pillar, where you’re reengaging people based on how they’ve consumed your sales funnel or how they’ve engaged with you, should be Omnichannel. You should be retargeting on YouTube, retargeting on Google Display Network, retargeting on Pinterest, retargeting on Twitter, retargeting on Instagram. So our business, 95% of our front end traffic comes in via Facebook but then we have Omnichannel retargeting and it’s all profitable, basically.
Andrew: What about this–Gustavo in the comments is saying, “What about unsubscribe rates? Do you have people that are getting annoyed and then deleting the bot?” We know if you get too many unsubscribes, Facebook bans you. They basically will shut you down.
Ezra: We have not had a–we don’t send that much stuff, by the way. We might be sending one email a week and remailing unopens once a week. So, we’re not super aggressive with the amount of content we’re sending, but when we are pushing a communication, we’re doing it on every available channel we possibly can and we’re seeing zero negative side effects.
Andrew: The helps me because we’ve been thinking about how do we not say the same thing in two different ways, how do we keep track of it. You’re saying don’t even bother with that.
Ezra: I advocate for saying the same thing across all channels as much as possible. Here’s why. This is why I established upfront–relationship, collective experience, intimacy, value. That’s what I’m doing really above all else. I am adding value to people’s lives through content. I am building relationship and intimacy with people. Everything I do is content first. I amplify video. I amplify articles. I amplify content that I truly believe to be beneficial and valuable to people.
Then they can subscribe to me in one of five ways. They can visit my website. They can join my Facebook Messenger. They can join my email, become a Facebook fan, download my mobile app, be a PushCrew. There are many ways they can subscribe to me. Once they subscribe to me, I’m still, in addition to making offers that I believe they would be interested in, adding value to their life through content, i.e. the Facebook message that went out that said, “Hey, can I send you an article on skincare tips, yes or no?”
So my whole sort of brand persona is around value first and that is why I’m able to do it this way. If you’re just trying to push crap on people, then I don’t want you to know this stuff. I want you to be cool to your community or not use this technology to your advantage.
Andrew: Okay.
Ezra: That’s how I feel.
Andrew: We do get to see unsubscribe rates so we can gauge how our messages are being received. So, yes, we can send a message that says, “Do you want to hear this, yes or no?” In addition to seeing how many people click no, we can also see how many people unsubscribed as a result of that message and then adjust based on that.
Ezra: Final thing here.
Andrew: Kelly is saying the same thing, “So glad to hear him talk about the same message across platforms, even the most engaged people probably won’t get all the messages. This keeps things simple.”
Ezra: They won’t.
Andrew: Here’s another question from Mary Kathryn Johnson.
Ezra: Two more slides, dude. Can I finish them or do you want me to do the questions first?
Andrew: Go ahead and then we’ll come back to that question.
Ezra: Just to wrap things up here. Another thing you can do and that we’re doing is we’re emailing our community, asking them to Facebook message us. We’re leveraging one channel to populate another. You can see here we’ve got emails that go out that are like, “Hey, send us a Facebook message that reads sweetheart and we’ll reply back with a coupon code for you.” You click that button and it takes you to m.me/ourbrand so you can Facebook message us.
Andrew: I didn’t think of. That’s a good one. Why do you do that? Why do you have them open up the chat and respond as opposed to sending them a link that auto-populates the message from you?
Ezra: Because we don’t know how to do that.
Andrew: Interesting.
Ezra: I didn’t know you could send a link that auto-populates.
Andrew: It’s so cool. You can send–as soon as they click a link, the message comes up in their Facebook Messenger that says, “Hey, thanks for finding me here.”
Ezra: They can click a link in an email that populates a message?
Andrew: Yeah, that populates a message from–
Ezra: One argument I would have from my strategy here is number one, I just didn’t know you could do that, first of all. Let’s just establish that. Number two, commitment and consistency–I want someone to take an action before they get my special juice–that sounded weird–my special deal.
Andrew: I get it.
Ezra: In this case, we’re saying, “Facebook message us with this sweetheart,” which by the way we then had to put into our ManyChat. We had to put into our ManyChat keywords sweatshirt. People can’t spell.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s the benefit of having the click that pre-populates and then the button is they press a button that says sweetheart. I get it. You know what’s encouraging, actually, that you don’t know that. I feel like when I see your numbers–and you showed me some more before this whole thing started–I said, “This guy knows every freaking thing. No wonder he’s doing well.” It’s good to see–
Ezra: This is my point. What we’re doing with Messenger bots is so rudimentary, dude. It’s so basic. It’s just like whatever they tell you you can do when you sign up for ManyChat pretty much, but filtered through our experience and filtered through our brand. We’re also direct response advertisers so we kind of get it, we have good copy and things like that.
I think really messaging matters. If you’ve got a good message, amplify it anywhere that you can. This is just some statistics related to that particular message you can see. 60% of the people who got–it says, “Hey, thanks for trying to access or discount code.” Now it’s showing you we’ve switched it because the code is gone. I don’t know why I have that statistic in here.
One thing to make note of is that native integrations are coming. So Shopify has a native integration that will send them your–we’re using this–send users the order receipt, the tracking information. People then respond to that saying, “I’m super excited.” So, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be able to push order-specific data and customer-specific data between your CRM and your shopping cart and Facebook Messenger. If you’re using Infusionsoft, if you’re using SamCart, whatever you’re using, these integrations are coming and that’s kind of cool.
And then I think this was from the previous presentation–emailing people who buy once. We’ve figured out that anyone who purchases from us once, one in ten out of those people we can get to purchase again immediately. We can convert 10% of people to immediate second buyer by simply saying, “Here is a three-day coupon code for a product you didn’t yet purchase. It expires in three days.” We email them again and say, “It’s expiring.” The same as our bought x but not y advertisement–same concept, different channel. We’re running ads to people who bought x but not y. We’re emailing people who bought x but not why.
That is the full presentation that I had about Facebook Messenger bots. My name is Ezra Firestone. You can go to SmartMarketer.com/video-ads-training. Again, SmartMarketer.com/video-ads-training.
Andrew: What do we get there at SmartMarketer.com/video-ads-training?
Ezra: What do I have there?
Andrew: Yeah, what kind of videos do you have there?
Ezra: It’s a three-part Facebook video advertising training that breaks down in great detail the sales funnel that I showed to you today. It’s three 15-minute videos that lead to a course offering that we have on how we run Facebook video ads in our business. But those three videos, that 45 minutes of content in those three videos will change the way that you look at advertising.
Andrew: I just like your style. You really understand where people are and it starts off clearly, simply and it just keeps growing and growing and growing in depth. All right. I have some questions here from people who are listening in. I’ll tell anyone who’s listening to us and not with us live that anything that Ezra just showed and I mean anything that he showed with Facebook Messenger can be done by any one of the people who’s on this call.
If you guys are out there and you want to turn on your mic or your camera and ask a question for yourself, go for it. I’d love it also if you told the Mixergy audience how they could connect with you. So, if there’s a way to connect with you, hire your team, hire your company to build whatever Ezra built for whoever’s listening to us, let us know. This is the future and it’s really exciting.
Mary Kathryn Johsnon you asked a question that I didn’t get to ask before. Do you want to jump in, unmute yourself and ask it or do you want me to ask it? While she unmutes herself or anyone else unmutes and brings themselves up on video–I’d urge you guys to do it–oh, she’s not here now. We just missed it. Tam, how about you ask her question? There you go, Tam.
Tam: Okay. Hi. I think Mary is here.
Andrew: Oh, she is here. There she is. I’m going to unmute you, Mary.
Mary: Got it. Thank you. My question was really about bringing people in to Messenger from email. If they choose to be in Messenger, Ezra, are you going to keep them there or are you going to continue communicating with them via email?
Ezra: We’re going to do both. When we have a communication, we’re doing it across all channels. We’re Facebook Messengering. We’re PushCrewing. We’re mobile push notificationing. We’re running ads on Facebook. We’re emailing. We’re leveraging every available communication medium we have as a brand to communicate whatever the communication happens to be, which in our case basically we send out content or offers. That’s pretty much all we send.
Mary: But if they are telling you that they prefer Messenger and they don’t necessarily open email very much, do you anticipate keeping your messages in the platform they are choosing?
Ezra: No. I anticipate if someone is signed up to my email list, I’m going to email them. If they also happen to be on Facebook, I’m going to Facebook message them. My viewpoint is people are inundated with incoming messaging and they very easily forget that you communicated with them because their Facebook Messenger gets populated. Their email gets populated. They’ve seen a million other ads.
I’ve yet to run into–by the way, our brand is pretty big. We have 300,000 women that subscribe to our–300,000 buyers. We have a large community. We’re running ads very aggressively and we’re amplifying our communication and our content and our viewpoints as aggressively as we can. We’re not alienating or pissing people off. If you’re doing good stuff. If you’re Andrew Warner with Mixergy and you’re amplifying your content and out to help people and make them offers, you’re not going to upset people.
Andrew: Mary, what’s a with where someone can contact you if they want you to build a bot for them?
Mary: Thank you. It’s MessengerFunnels.com. I appreciate it.
Ezra: That’s a good–
Andrew: It is, right?
Ezra: Good one.
Mary: And if you can’t tell, Ezra, I’m on your list.
Ezra: Are you on the BOOM list?
Mary: You betcha.
Ezra: Cool. I can’t see you for some reason.
Mary: No, I’ve been on your list.
Ezra: How did you find BOOM?
Mary: You know, I probably saw something on Facebook, to be honest. It was probably at least six to eight months ago and was just so fascinated by Cindy. She just has an amazing presence and the product was so flipping simple. That’s it. It’s awesome. You’re doing a great job.
Ezra: Thank you.
Andrew: Cool, Mary. Kelly, I see you turned your camera on.
Kelly: Yeah. I guess my question is similar to Mary’s in that yes, sending out messages via the channel they sign up for is great, but have you tried inviting people to subscribe across platforms? So, like on LinkedIn, if my audience is primarily on LinkedIn first, does it make sense to invite them to check out my bot on Facebook, or do you think that’s too confusing?
Ezra: I don’t think it’s too confusing and I would incentivize them. So, when I’m attempting to get people to consume a new medium, I incentivize them, “Hey, download my mobile app for your chance to win a $100 gift card.” “Send me a Facebook message to get a 15% discount.” So I’m doing a very direct incentivization.
By the way, one strategy we’ve leveraged on the incentivizing conversation that has worked unbelievably well to generate these conversion assets that we think of our brand in terms of is any time someone buys from us, on day 16, we send an email out that says, “Hey, we’ll give you a $10 gift certificate to our store if you send us a selfie video of yourself holding our product talking about why you like it. Shoot it. Send it to us at this email. We’ll give you a gift certificate.”
We get tons of these selfie videos of people talking about why they like our brand that we use on our product offer pages, we use in our emails, we use as ad units. They’re a conversion asset that we’re incentivizing people to give to our brand by giving them a gift card that we then leverage across all communication channels to reengage other people.
Everyone knows you think you’re cool. Of course you think you’re cool, but someone else thinks you’re cool, that’s an interesting piece of content. I think you should be incentivizing people to take the actions you want them to take to achieve a greater action to result rate so you’ll get more people doing what you want them to do if you give them a reason to do it.
Andrew: Kelly, what’s your URL?
Kelly: That’s great. It’s Ekcetera.com spelled funny, though, E-K-C-E-T-E-R-A.
Andrew: And you’ve got a great bot up there too. Gustavo is in a place where he doesn’t have good–well, it’s a little bit noisy. I’m going to ask a question on his behalf. Ezra, what about this–you are committing to Facebook. Facebook has been known to be erratic. You’re now building a connection to your customers on Facebook and they could at some point just decide to take away everything that you’ve built on there and say, “Sorry, you can’t reach them unless you pay us.” What do you think about that?
Ezra: It may happen, right? It used to be you got a whole bunch of organic reach. Now you don’t get organic reach anymore. You’ve got to pay for that reach. I think it would be smart of them to force us to pay for it. I think it would be in their best interest to force us to pay for this channel. You’ve got to pay for email. You’ve got to pay for an email service provider.
I think that the idea that you would be angry at a technology company because they’re charging you for their service is ludicrous. It’s like–would you not charge for the service? You would charge for it. I think you should be grateful and appreciative for the opportunities you have right now. Should the landscape change, which by the way it will, you should face the inevitable with joy. It’s going to happen. You might as well just be cool with it.
Andrew: From the very beginning of this, I’ve been told they’re going to charge for subscription messages and I can’t believe we’ve gotten away with for a full year sending all the messages we want without having to pay anything. By the time someone else comes around to compete with you, Ezra, they’re going to have to start from scratch and they’re going to have to pay for each interaction when you’ve already built the connection and you didn’t have to pay for that.
I’m going to give Gustavo’s website. His site is in Spanish. I like the way he’s onboarding people to his bot. You can see it in English or Spanish. It will make sense. It’s ENIGMarketers.com.
Final question, Ezra–you have talked about–actually, Tam, do you have a question?
Tam: Yeah, I have a really quick question.
Andrew: Yeah, please.
Tam: Do you have an active default response? So, if someone messages you, do you have a default response like, “Hey, this is a bot. I can’t respond?” Or do you turn that feature off and have someone manage the live chat?
Ezra: We have that welcome message.
Tam: Yeah. So, say for example I’m a user and I type in, “Hi, Ezra, how’s your day going?”
Ezra: They’ll get that, “I’m the BOOM Chat Bot,” thing that I showed you, that menu.
Tam: Oh, the carousel menu, got it.
Ezra: No, the one that was like, “I’m the BOOM Chat Bot. Do you want to get to customer service or do you want to know other stuff about the brand?”
Andrew: I see. That’s an automated response that anyone gets when they send a message at the bottom.
Ezra: I think it might have been paused last week because there were issues between ManyChat and Shopify fighting for control over the bot. So I think we may be trying to sort that out. Right now there might be nothing. But we definitely had that thing and it was working well until we realized there were some issues going on with who got control of the first response.
Andrew: Yeah. I think in the future, the different bot platforms are going to have to learn how to work together. You should be able to connect Shopify to your chat experience and ManyChat as a marketing channel and maybe someone else for something else, maybe for customer service. Maybe you add Zendesk. It’s all coming in.
Tam is reminding me I should tell people that if they’re fascinated by this like Tam and I are. Tam I think must–Tam, you were up at 6:30 this morning talking about this with the team?
Tam: Yeah.
Andrew: The guy is obsessed and it’s worth it because it’s just so fascinating. Our site that we are now putting together is BotAcademy.com. I’m so fascinated by this. I’m so amazed by the results. You guys can see BotAcademy.com. You can see what we’re building or you will by the time this is up.
Ezra, thanks so much for doing this.
Ezra: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it, man. This stuff is fun. I like talking about it and hopefully some of that stuff is useful and you can go and put it to use in your business.
Andrew: Let’s give you the last word. What’s the URL for anyone who wants to follow up?
Ezra: You can go to SmartMarketer.com, which is my marketing blog. Then if you want my video ads training, it’s just SmartMarketer.com/video-ads-training. Perhaps we ought to change that URL. It’s a bit long.
Andrew: How about if I do–if anyone forgets it, go to Mixergy.com/Ezra and we’ll create a redirect to anything that Ezra has up.
Ezra: That’s nice, Mixergy.com/Ezra. That sounds more official.
Andrew: Mixergy.com/Ezra. Ezra, thank you so much.
Ezra: Thanks.
Andrew: Cool.
