Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, and I do it for an audience of real entrepreneurs. I’ve been talking for a long time about how we are using chat more and more to communicate with our friends, with the people we work with. And some of you might be just tired of hearing me say it, but I’ve got to set it up so that the audience who have never heard me say it understands it. And I say, look, if we’re using chat to communicate with the people we love, with the people we work with, why are we just using email as a way of communicating with people we want to sell to? Why are we relegating them to this ghetto-like experience instead of saying there’s a new world, why don’t we incorporate chat?
And the way that I learned to incorporate chat was using this tool called ManyChat that allows me to reach my audience using Facebook Messenger and lets them respond back to me and lets me do all the stuff that I do via email but via chat, and actually more than the stuff that I do via email. I love it so much. I actually got to invest in the company behind it, in ManyChat. It’s just been a phenomenal investment but also a great way for me to understand what’s coming up.
And when I started talking about ManyChat, it was a lot of, at some point in the future this will be used by big people that you respect. At some point in the future, this will make money for people like you. At some point in the future, this will make money for people who you admire. Get into it now. It will at some point in the future . . . That some point in the future is no longer the future. It’s the now. Yes, it will be more in the future, but it’s happening right now.
And then there are these two people who created a chatbot that a lot of people have been buzzing about because it did $3 million in sales within one hour. So I invited them here to talk about how they did it. But the truth is that’s their claim to fame that gets attention, that gets people to pay, to notice them and to say what, $3 million in an hour of sales? But as DG Gregory who’s listening to us live, we are recording this interview live, as he said, “You know what, I’m actually much more interested in this loyalty bot stuff that they did for smaller businesses.”
And I’m with you. I think it’s exciting to see the big win, but if that’s an outlier and it’s not what most of us are going to be able to do for ourselves or our clients, let’s understand what’s more commonly effective. In fact, let’s do both. And so I brought the two people here who are behind that chat experience to understand how they did both. We’ve got David Sambor. He is coming to us all the way from Bali and Philippe LeCoutre. How did I do with the last name?
Philippe: Perfect.
Andrew: Philippe LeCoutre. You are where in the world?
Philippe: I am in Provence right now. Southeast France.
Andrew: Oh, man. I’d love to be in Provence. And they have got independent freelance gigs where they set up chatbots for their clients, and then together they also have this thing called Messenger Marketing Experts where they train people to do messenger marketing for their clients. This interview where we find out how they built these chatbots, how they generated revenue, how they got people like Tony Robbins as clients is sponsored by two phenomenal companies. The first will host your website right. If you’re creating a digital agency and you want a website, go check out HostGator, great sponsor. And the second, when you’re ready to take your business to the next level and want the top, the best of the best developers, you’ve got to check out the Toptal. But I’ll talk about those later.
First, good to have you here, guys. Thanks for being here.
David: No problem. Nice to be here.
Philippe: Thank you, Andrew. Very excited to be here with guys.
Andrew: Me too. Why don’t we start with this big success that you had? What was the chatbot? Maybe we should have one of you decide that you’re going to tell this story. What’s the chatbot that did over $3 million?
David: It was the launch for a program called the Knowledge Business Blueprint, which was the first time Tony Robbins has actually done an online course for 10 years. And he joined forces with Dean Graziosi and Russell Brunson. So it was, basically a live YouTube event that took place on April the 30th. And we were approached because we’d worked with Dean in the past for his evergreen webinars. We were approached by Dean’s team about two weeks before, rightfully before the actual launch of the live training, which was again, a YouTube Live to put together a Messenger reminder sequence for the event. So what happened was . . .
Andrew: This was a paid event or a free event?
David: No. A free event.
Andrew: A free event. So they were doing this free event. They wanted people who registered to actually show up for the thing and show up rates have been going down. Got it. And I’m assuming they also had an email reminder, right? Anyone who registered gave their email.
David: Right.
Andrew: I saw your eyes pop up, David. Okay, good. And they wanted chat. Why if they have email, why do they also want a Messenger reminder?
David: What they actually did is, I think Russell Brunson was involved with the whole ClickFunnel side of the funnel. So there was an opt-in page, but then there was on the thank you page, there was a button to get reminders in Facebook Messenger. So I think it was around 30%, 35% of people subscribed to reminders in Messenger as well. And we also delivered a mobile wallet event ticket. So similar to what Eventbrite would do for major events.
Andrew: Oh wait, so they had this before you or they didn’t have it before you?
David: No, they didn’t have it.
Andrew: They didn’t have it, but the reason that they wanted, I’m assuming, a Facebook Messenger reminder is it’s more timely. People’s phones will vibrate. They’ll get that alert. They’ll say, “Hey, the thing you registered for with Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Russell Brunson, it’s here. Tap to open.” When they tap, they get to watch it and they wanted that timely thing. There it is. And then also that which I love that you’ve got on your screen for people who don’t see it. It’s of these, it’s just like in the Apple Wallet you could have a credit card, you can also in the Apple Wallet have your ticket to your flight and your ticket to an event. You guys figured out how to do a ticket to just an online free event that way? And people registered for that? I didn’t know that was possible.
Philippe: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew: I should do that. Really? That’s easy?
Philippe: Yeah.
Andrew: What tool did you use to do that?
Philippe: That’s what we teach. Yes. [inaudible 00:06:19] create those event tickets and loyalty programs and we integrate that into ManyChat.
Andrew: What’s the tool that you use to do that?
Philippe: It’s our own software.
Andrew: Oh, you created the software that does it. Got it. And what’s the advantage of having that? Is it also that it does a reminder for people before the event?
Philippe: Yeah. Well, what was very surprising and we did not expect that, is that when people added the event ticket in their wallet is that we got sales from people sharing the wallet, the event ticket from a wallet to another wallet.
Andrew: What do you mean? You could do that? If I get a ticket in my wallet, I could share it with my wife?
Philippe: Yeah.
Andrew: I had no idea.
Philippe: But not only with your wife, but your friends and anybody who is in your . . .
Andrew: Why? There’s a share feature on there? I didn’t even know that.
Philippe: Yeah. On the back of the pass, you can have links and that’s what we did. On the back of the pass, we had, you know, before the event, before the live event, we had educational videos to nurture people before the live. And we sent four videos and every time we sent a video, we sent them a message in ManyChat, in the Messenger. But we also sent them a push notification on their lock screen.
Andrew: Holy . . . Wait! A push notification beyond . . . Obviously ManyChat, will send a push notification for chat. Are you saying also via the loyalty card or the ticket card?
Philippe: Yes.
Andrew: You could? Hang on a second. Hang on a second. So I’m doing this thing live. I’ve got to interrupt because I’m fired up now. I had no idea this was possible. So I’m doing this thing live. Obviously, I send people reminders to show up. Email reminders, they kind of ignore. Chat reminders, they click and come in. You’re saying I could also add a ticket to their mobile phone. I’m assuming this is Apple only or is it also on Android?
Philippe: Android as well.
Andrew: Android also. Then they get it on their phone and Apple will allow me to send a push notification to say, “I’m live now.”
Philippe: Yep.
Andrew: Holy . . . I had no . . . Look, Ben’s saying wow too. Ann Marie is saying, “I’m excited.” I get excited about stuff like this all the time. But the fact that other people are excited is also interesting to me. Got it.
Philippe: And that’s even more exciting since Facebook has turned down all the broadcast in Messenger and stuff. So the . . .
Andrew: Wait, so they’re no longer pinging people’s phones. It doesn’t vibrate anymore?
David: What happens, Andrew, you know, like going back to the loyalty side, obviously as you know, Facebook came out with the 24+1 rule, which is now being strictly enforced. So, we do the loyalty program. We start the conversation in Facebook Messenger, but we then deliver a mobile wallet loyalty card such as a Starbucks one. What happens on the back of the card is we can put ref URLs. We can put links. So we send a push from mobile wallet to the lock screen of the phone, and when they click on the link on the back, it’s a ref URL to bring them back into ManyChat to open up the 24+1.
Andrew: And now, okay. So for people who don’t know this, the 24, I see Ann Marie is asking about this. So people don’t know this. Facebook Messenger is so powerful that if you send a message, people are going to open it up instantly and just go see it. Which is why as you’ve heard in the other interviews I’ve done in this series, people are getting over 90% open rates, which is unheard of for email. The problem with that is Facebook doesn’t want you to have that power to just keep sending out messages and have people open up their chat and then get ads from you. And so what they said is, “Hey guys, you can send people messages 24 hours after their last interaction and we’ll give you 1 other opportunity beyond that.”
And that’s kind of constraining for marketers who are used to the email world where you send a message when something urgent is going on and when there’s a sale. And so what David and Philippe have figured out is if we add a card to people’s mobile wallet, that card could bring them back into Messenger, which then opens up that message again and he’s holding it up, Philippe is for people who are watching us live.
Philippe: [inaudible 00:10:33] pass. That’s the . . .
Andrew: I had no idea.
Philippe: And you have here links, URLs to videos from the pass.
Andrew: From the pass. It’s in there, so I didn’t know I could do that. So can I just pay you guys to use your pass creation software for my next event? How does that work?
Philippe: Yep, sure.
Andrew: Where do I go to buy that? Where do I go to sign up for that?
Philippe: I will give you link the link. We can put the link in chat if you want.
Andrew: So the next time that I want to do one of these live events, I could come to you guys and say, “Hey, I want to have people show up. Here’s the time and event. Can you give me a link?” I get the link and when I put it on the confirmation page, after people registered for my live event, they will have a card in their wallet reminding them to show up. Is that right?
Philippe: Correct.
Andrew: That’s fantastic.
Philippe: You can, every time you add a video, for example, every time you upload a video to your blog, for example, they can get a push notification from the pass on their lock screen so that way they won’t miss anything because sometimes people miss your emails or, you know, but they can’t miss a lock screen.
Andrew: No, and I can’t believe this is even freaking possible. Okay. All right. I get it. So this is one of the reasons why Dean Graziosi said, “Hey, I like working with you guys.” What other work did you do for him before this online event?
David: [inaudible 00:11:56] about two years ago that we set up Dean’s evergreen webinar with [EverWeb 00:12:02].
Andrew: Got it. Okay. So you guys set up other digital marketing things for him. When he did this live event, he said, “Let’s just bring these guys on. Let’s bring, bring them on.” And he specifically wanted you to do reminders. Nothing else. Didn’t want to funnel, didn’t want email?
Philippe: Well, initially, it was for the reminder sequence, to “Oh, hey, we are live.” But then it quickly became more of an onboarding thing and a customer service bot where we were . . .
Andrew: But they initially said, “Just handle our chatbot. Guys, we want to do a chatbot reminder. You take that on and do your loyalty card thing. Take that on. And that’s it.” So that’s the first thing that you did. And then they said, “Hey, look, while you’re doing this, can you also make sure that the customer service is handled? Because if people are getting a reminder in chat and then they ask a question, we don’t want them to be ignored.” So it built up beyond that. Okay, get it.
Philippe: Actually, initially, they were not aware of like you, they didn’t know that one [inaudible 00:13:03] exists or could be used for a fun event ticket. So, we kind of convinced them to use that and well, we’re happy we did because the results have been so great. And also, well, it saved the day because maybe you remember but the day we launched Messenger, Facebook did an update Messenger at the very second we launched when we sent the final broadcast saying, “Hey, live.” We sent that to 55,000 people. And Facebook crashed because they were doing an update in Messenger so people could not click on the button to join the Live.
Andrew: But you had the ability to fire off a message on their lock screen and bring them in. Yeah. Ann Marie is saying what a nightmare. I’m completely with you. It stinks when we do anything that’s live and time-sensitive, some random stuff could happen. You use Confusionsoft and suddenly Confusionsoft starts breaking and doesn’t go out or some portion of their list doesn’t get delivered because they have a problem with Hotmail or Gmail or something. Or as you said, Facebook could have an issue with this. I like having multiple points of contact. I get it. Okay. So you saved the day there. Talk about then how that translated into sales. How . . .
David: What happened is the event was a, well, it was actually 8:00 a.m. in [inaudible 00:14:34] Pacific time. So the training went on for about an hour and a half and within Zapier we had ClickFunnel purchase triggers, both for the actual main course itself, plus they had a mastermind upsell. What happened is they opened the cart roughly about an hour and a half after the presentation. And we were obviously within Zapier having triggers that were ClickFunnels purchased, ManyChat tag, and then we had a counter that was just basically counting up the amount of sales. So we were both, because Philippe lives in Bali. He’s just back in France for a couple of months. So yeah, we live very close together. So we were here, we watched the training. So we got a counter in ManyChat that was tallying up all of the purchases and all of the upsells.
So, it was about 15 minutes after they opened the cart, I was like [inaudible 00:15:44]. Philippe’s got his calculator out like this, you know.
Andrew: So, we’re getting a little bit of feedback. There we go. It was a little bit of feedback.
David: Pretty much dead on the hour when we’d just gone past 3 million in one hour.
Andrew: And it’s 3 million sales coming in directly from orders that are initiated via the chatbot.
David: Yeah, right.
Andrew: Okay. We’re going to find out how that happened in a moment. I’m going to talk about my first sponsor first. We’re going to find out how that happened and then we’re going to go into the specifics like what was in the chatbot. I also want to find out about some of the smaller clients that you have and then for people who are watching us live, one of the things that I promised was at the end of the interview, we will end the podcast. We’ll see your screen and we’ll see like get more geeky, more specific. Are you guys up for doing that?
David: Sure.
Andrew: Okay, good. All right, so our first sponsor is a company called HostGator. If you are doing anything online, I think a website is incredibly helpful and one of the first things that you want to do is just get a simple website, get it up and running. And I love HostGator because with one click you get WordPress up and running. You guys are learning a lot here today. One of the things that I imagine is there’s someone who’s going to watch, what did we do? We just did an interview with someone who had a service company that created chatbots for restaurants. And at the end of it he said, “You know, someone could run away with this idea and do the same thing. Create chatbots for car washes since no one thinks about car wash owners, but they have a lot of money to spend, you could easily do this like, if you register for my chatbot, I’ll give you two car washes for the price of one type of thing and they could more than make up for it with . . . ” Anyway, these ideas have been flowing through here.
All you need is a website. Go to hostgator.com/mixergy, you get the lowest price possible. Quickly put up a WordPress site saying, this is your digital agency. You are helping car washes. Get clients. Don’t even say that it’s chat that you’re using. Just copy what’s working for him. Copy what’s working for these guys and bring it to another industry. Whatever you want, whatever your idea is, put up a website. You are now a digital agency and go out and promote it to clients and then start your business. It’s super simple to build a website, but it adds a ton of credibility and if you go to hostgator.com/mixergy you’ll get the lowest price that they have available. You’ll one click install at WordPress, they’ll keep it super low and then as you grow they will give you lots of options.
They’re, I don’t think, making much money from people who are just getting started with a website. They are there investing in you by giving you a low price thinking at some point they’re going to want email marketing. Guess what? They bought an email marketing company. At some point you’re going to want this, at some point you’re going to want that. They bought those companies. They just want to introduce you to them when you get big enough and until then take advantage of the low offer, and they are really good at maintaining uptime and in growing with you. Hostgator.com/mixergy super proud that they’ve been getting such great results with my audience, hostgator.com/mixergy.
All right. So technically what happened? People got reminders saying that this event is live. What did they get afterwards in chat that led to sales?
David: What happened is when, so when they landed on the thank you page for [opt-in 00:18:41], again, there was roughly around 35% of clicks on send reminders via Messenger. So that brought them into Facebook Messenger where we then delivered the event ticket. Basically what happened, there was four value videos before the event. So it was a 10 day launch.
Andrew: Okay. So even before the live event, you are sending them links to these videos via Facebook Messenger. And again, just for people who aren’t familiar with Messenger marketing, how it works is their phone would vibrate, they get an alert saying you’ve got a message, they open the message and it links them to a video. Just like if my wife sent me a text message, I get an alert. I tap it and if she sent me a video, I could watch that video. Okay. So you did four of those videos before the event. What else happened?
Philippe: [inaudible 00:19:34].
Andrew: I’m sorry, Philippe, what were you saying?
Philippe: Both in Messenger and Wallet.
Andrew: Got it. Messenger and Wallet. Okay. And then David, then what happened that led to sales? The day of, I’m assuming there’s a reminder?
David: Yeah. So that was the four value videos before the live event, and we then sent out a reminder 24 hours before the event. Now the biggest challenge for us and I’ll let Philippe explain was we actually spoke to Mikael from ManyChat saying we’re a bit concerned that we’re going to be sending out 60,000 reminders in one go. He got back to us and said, “Well, that’s not going to happen because Facebook will rate them at your sending capability. So Philippe had to do a work around. So I’ll let him tell you about that.
Philippe: Basically, the concern as you mentioned is that it was a live event. So we were thinking about anything that could happen that may crash. They use Infusionsoft, they use Zapier, they use ManyChat. Any of those could have crashed at any given time when you handle so many data all at once. So we were obviously very concerned and we investigated with each of those companies, what are your amount of [inaudible 00:21:11] you can support. So we asked Mikael Yan from ManyChat, what, how Facebook is going to handle that. And he came back to us several days before, and he said, “Big problem here because Facebook won’t allow more than between 2000 and 3000 messages per minute, but we had to send 60 at the same second basically.
Andrew: When you go live, yeah.
Philippe: Right. So, and also we found out that Zapier also had limitation in the amount of API calls where we could have, so we had to play with all those informations. And basically what I did is I created a streamline between ManyChat and Zapier. So every time someone was entering the funnel, they were entering in a bucket of reminders. So we had about, we segmented the reminders across 40 minutes before the live event. So . . .
Andrew: So some people were reminded to come in 40 minutes before the event happened and others were a minute before.
Philippe: Correct.
Andrew: Got it. Got it. Couldn’t you just do that based on a first name or something? Like I’ve had to do that in the past where I didn’t want to flood myself with like live chat coming at me. I remember one time I said, I want to send a message to everyone who subscribed to my chat and say, “I’m sitting here at a coffee shop, chat with me.” But I realized if I sent it to everyone, I’d get flooded and I couldn’t deal with it. So what I did was I said right now, everyone whose name starts with A gets a message. And then once I’m done, everyone with B gets a message, once I’m done with them, everyone . . . You couldn’t do something like that and target based on the letter of their name?
Philippe: Probably, but the amount of subscribers was [inaudible 00:23:13]. So we had to be, precisely based upon the moment they signed up to streamline the entire thing. Yeah. So, and it went well, except what happened is that Facebook updated Messenger at the very second.
So two things happened, as you know, in ManyChat there is . . . so basically we sent a button, the link was inside a button and the button was saying, “We are live, click here to join.” So people were clicking on the button and the button was not working. And so we got messages from people freaking out, “Hey, I cannot join. I cannot join.” And we then freaked out. What the whatever. And we had to think very quickly because obviously people wanted to join.
So two things saved the day. First, I ran to David’s villa saying, “Send the push. Send the push from the Wallet.” And then I come back to my computer and I switched to default reply in ManyChat where everything someone was saying something, I was sending the raw link so people could join through the raw link.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. I’m with you. Let’s go into, because now we’re getting so geeky that only people who know Messenger marketing are going to get it. Let’s just zoom out for a moment. What happened that closed sales? I’m assuming after the event happened, you triggered a bunch of messages in Facebook Messenger saying, “This thing that Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and all these people talked about is now open and if you want to buy, click here to buy.” Am I right? Is that how you did it?
Philippe: Correct.
Andrew: And you’ve got your own link and you guys were, that’s it. That’s what it was. Was there anything special about the way you worded that?
Philippe: So we had this, it was too geeky. Sorry.
Andrew: [Slava 00:25:15] is agreeing. Yeah, it was too geeky. Slava in the live chat.
Philippe: It was, they could obviously join the live and we opened the cart, send the link to the cart and they were joining, from Messenger. And then we also sent follow-up sequences from Messenger as well for the people that were taking more time than the thinkers. Obviously, during the live event, during the first hour we had those 3 million in sales. Those were the impulse buyer. Another 3.7 million in sales over a timeframe of 10 days.
Andrew: So we’re looking at people who saw it and then said, I’m going to buy it. And what was the price point on this item?
Philippe: Two-K.
Andrew: Two thousand dollars. Okay. All right. Not bad. That’s impressive that so many people were buying it. I’m guessing guys didn’t, weren’t working on commission, right? You were just working on straight up fee for setting it up?
Philippe: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. I get it. But what you did here will work for other people of course, which is send a reminder using Facebook Messenger and the reminder, before the reminder happens, you could warm people up by giving them videos or other content to tell them what’s happening and then remind them when it’s happening on Facebook Messenger and then do a follow up saying, “Hey, this thing that you just came to, it’s now for sale. Click here to buy it if you want it.” That’s a definite repeatable process. God knows we’ve used this too ourselves.
All right, let’s talk now about the other clients that you’ve had. Can you give me an example of a smaller business that you’ve worked with before and some of the loyalty work that you did with them? I know you had a big talk, Philippe, last year about this ManyChat’s Conversations conference.
Philippe: Yeah. Sure.
David: I mean, one of the, I specifically, first got involved with Apple Wallet in 2012 when Apple first introduced it as Passbook at the time. And at that particular time I was living in Thailand and I had a publishing company and a lot of the big brands such as Marriott, Starwood, and obviously Starbucks were using mobile wallet for loyalty for their loyalty programs. And what happened was I thought, wow, Apple very rarely come out with something that isn’t going to obviously sort of, you know, take over that particular industry. So I got involved in that.
And then what happened was, eventually, obviously when Messenger and ManyChat came out and they came out with a Zapier app, I’m like, wow, I’ve just died and gone to heaven because now I can combine Messenger mobile wallet to open up this loyalty communication channel from within Facebook Messenger. So I started implementing that for a lot of my clients. And . . .
Andrew: Give me an example of a client that you did it for so that I have a vision of what you made.
David: Well, I’ve got quite a lot of restaurant clients. One particular restaurant, they first started implementing the mobile wallet loyalty program in early October.
Andrew: Okay. So this is a restaurant and you created one of these, like Apple Wallet cards, loyalty card that did what, what did it offer the diner at a restaurant?
David: Basically, what they did was every month they would send out a push for special offers, whether or not it could be, you know, we’ve got a new spring lunch menu, 10% off.
Andrew: There. Philippe’s showing it on the screen. And so that’s the card that would go into somebody’s wallet from a burger joint.
Philippe: So this is, for example, a stamp card. So every time the restaurant scans that pass here, it will add a stamp on the pass.
Andrew: Got it. And your software creates that stamping process.
David: Correct.
Andrew: But the restaurant needed to have what device in order to do it?
David: Just a phone.
Andrew: Just a phone. As long as they have a phone with your app, they could scan it and give the diner credit on their card. Got it. And so the reason that diners want to have this loyalty card is because if they eat enough, then they get something for free. The reason that restaurants want it is yes, they get the loyalty from the customer who comes back. But also you helped them see that they could ping the customer, am I right and say, we are doing, we are offering this great new what? What was it that they would ping with?
David: Say for example, one of our students, recently a case study was that she switched one of her, again, it was a restaurant, a small restaurant in the UK who was using Facebook Messenger, just as, you know, again, like a chatbot. So she introduced them to using mobile wallet loyalty. And then what happened, was the, I think it was in January, which is their normal slow time of the year, straight after Christmas. So they sent out via mobile wallet, a 50% off discount. So because that went through push notification, she didn’t have to do any Facebook ads. She didn’t have to do any sponsored ads. And that restaurant, that particular month made £77,000 just from people going. So they had the push during January, 50% off, and they would go in and show the voucher, and then obviously redeem that. And they, you know, we have a way of reporting as well. So when somebody scans the QR code, we can then do all of that in Zapier.
Andrew: And then, David at the restaurant, all the diner has to do is they see a sign that says get our loyalty card and you’ll get a free, your ninth burger is free or your fifth cup of coffee’s on us. All they have to do is scan the QR code and then it automatically adds the loyalty card. Am I right?
David: Correct.
Andrew: That’s it. And then once they have the loyalty card on their phone, they just have to show it to the person behind the counter and they get their card stamped. That’s the whole process. And I’ve seen this, I’m living in San Francisco. There are restaurants that literally I’ve taken pictures of this and posted it on Twitter. They will have five or six different iPad [inaudible 00:31:57] in the restaurant business.
The one thing that you are doing that I haven’t seen from others is saying yes, it’s a loyalty card and when the customer returns to you, there’s an incentive for them to buy whatever. You’re saying, “We’ll also do push notification, a push that will bring them back in. We don’t have to wait for them to remember to come in. We push,” and that’s the thing that I hadn’t seen from others. By the way, who was it? Someone, John [Cort 00:32:20] who’s watching and listening to us live is saying, what about Android Wallet? Admittedly, I am an iPhone person, so I’m not familiar with Android Wallet. How does it work there? Is it the same thing?
David: Yeah.
Andrew: Same thing. One QR code will automatically detect what device they’re on and send whatever card they need?
David: Correct.
Philippe: Correct. Yeah.
Andrew: Got it. All right. I’m with you. This is amazing stuff so far. All right. And so why didn’t you, you guys were developing this. Why not create it into a software and sell it online? Why were you still doing it as a service?
David: We did. That’s the whole point. We have our Messenger Marketing Experts is . . .
Andrew: But if I go to Messenger Marketing Experts, what I see there is the pitch is your course. I don’t see the software. It feels like this would be a great piece of software to just sell alone.
David: The thing is if we sell it by itself, there’s obviously a learning curve because it’s quite complex on how to set up in conjunction, because the thing is, Andrew, what we do is all of the loyalty is also incorporated into Facebook Messenger. So whenever somebody scans a QR code, that would be a ref URL, that would be bring them into Messenger. We then detect whether or not they’re on an iPhone or an Android, send them the card in. So they’d click a button in Facebook Messenger, then automatically adds that to their wallet app either on an iPhone or Android. So we then use Apple Wallet and Messenger in conjunction with each other.
Andrew: No, I get all that. What I’m wondering is why are you making the software only available to your students? Why not say we’re creating loyaltypass.com? Every restaurant and coffee shop should be using this. And if you use it, you get it all for free, but you pay for push notifications, right? It doesn’t cost you much to maintain that. Why aren’t you doing something like that?
David: We, I mean, we could do, but we just, we’re focused . . .
Philippe: So far we’ve kept it for our students and membership so they can offer that service to the clients. So yeah, that’s, [inaudible 00:34:30].
Andrew: All right. I want to get into now, we’ve talked a lot about loyalty cards. I want to get into how Messenger fits into this and how this whole ManyChat experience fits into this. Let me take a moment, Slava had the same question I did. I’m glad that you guys brought it. I’m glad that you guys liked the question, and I’m still curious why didn’t you guys create that software? But I’ll talk about my second sponsor.
My second sponsor is a company called Toptal. Well, how would you guys feel if somebody heard this and said, you know what, I just want to create a website where anyone can create their own loyalty card, but my developers are too busy. They’re doing other stuff. I’m going to go to Toptal. I’ll hire a developer who’s created any kind of loyalty card software for Apple, for Google and just like allow them to quickly create a loyalty card. So they, I mean they create the software, they build a website for you. If somebody went to Toptal and hired someone to do it, then we put up a website and say, “Here, this software is now available for free, but your thousandth view, you’ve got to start paying.” Something like that. Would you be bothered if somebody went to Toptal with that idea?
Maybe you would, maybe you would.
David: Sorry [inaudible 00:35:30].
Andrew: Would you be bothered if somebody took the loyalty card idea and then went to Toptal and then hired a developer to create it as a standalone software, as a SaaS company?
David: There are existing SaaS companies, but they’re very, very expensive.
Andrew: Right. I feel like somebody, I actually see one that’s totally free for creating a loyalty card, but it stinks because it doesn’t pick up on the part that you guys are brilliant at, which is follow-up messages. All it does is it creates a card for an event and it’s free. And they say, “Well, we’ll do it on the donation purpose, on the donation basis. Give us $8.99 a month if you care enough about it.” I’m not giving you $8.99. You’re not doing much, but your idea is great. Would you feel bothered if somebody . . . ?
You know what, I’m going to say this. Any ideas that you guys have, if your team, if you’re listening to me in my audience and your team is too busy to implement them or you just want someone who has expertise in something instead of trying to figure it out for yourself, you go to Toptal, you get the best of the best developers. Challenge them. Say, “Look, here’s my challenge. I want to,” I don’t know, “create a reminder Facebook Messenger bot that anybody can use but after they have 100 people who get reminders, they have to pay. That’s my new SaaS company. That’s my new thought product,” whatever it is.
You go to Toptal and you don’t say, “I need a developer.” You say, “I need a developer who worked with this technology before, who built a product like this before, who can accept some of my quirks.” You give them whatever your quirks are. Every company has quirks. Like for us it’s we’re all check based, task-based project. Anything that you do, it’s got to be in a task. I don’t need the chat in Slack. We don’t do any of that and then if you do something, you better create a checklist for the next person who has to do it again. It’s my little quirk. Great. Whatever your quirks are, you tell it to them and Toptal will find a developer who’s done this for you before, who’s done it for other people before, who you can hire and get started with quickly.
I’m talking too fast. This is just like where it’s counting in people’s heads. I’ll slow it down. And we’ll work with your quirks. I’m going to just close it out by saying and because it’s created by Mixergy fans, you get, long-time Mixergy fans. They were at my first live event, first big live event that I did at South by Southwest. You get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours in addition to a no risk trial period. All you have to do is be one of many people who listened to me and went to toptal.com/mixergy. Remember 80 hours of developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours in addition to a no risk trial period of up to 2 weeks. So it’s top as in top of your head, tal as in talent, T-O-P-T-A-L.com/mixergy.
Okay. What’s the connection then to chat? So far we’ve seen this loyalty product. How does chat marketing fit in with this?
David: Well, obviously, as you know, the open and the click-through rates in Messenger are astonishing. So what happened is everything that we do within Facebook Messenger is hooked up to the mobile wallet software via API. So it’s a very seamless integration. So it’s almost sort of like every time somebody clicks on a get my event ticket as was for Tony Robbins or get my loyalty card, that’s hooked up to our [inaudible 00:38:38], so the, when somebody then gets their mobile wallet, we have all of that information in Messenger as well. So we know who’s installed their card, who hasn’t installed their . . .
Andrew: Oh, because with the wallet you don’t get the name of the person who installed the card?
David: We know exactly who’s installed it, who does . . .
Andrew: Does Wallet give you that data?
David: No. ManyChat because . . .
Andrew: Only in ManyChat. Wallet is more anonymous, but because of [inaudible 00:39:06]. Is that right?
David: We know on both [inaudible 00:39:09].
Andrew: You know on both. Got it. And so now you, what you’re doing with ManyChat is this is getting maybe a little confusing for people. You’re using Facebook, you’re using Messenger to reach people via . . . you’re using ManyChat to reach people via Facebook Messenger. So their phones get those alerts and they open it up and they get a message in Messenger. You’re using that as one way of reaching people and the loyalty card is another and the combination means you’ve got two ways to reach people and two powerful ways because people are more likely to open them. Got it. Okay. And are you also doing email marketing?
David: Sorry?
Andrew: Are you also doing email marketing for people? Are you targeting them via email, messenger and loyalty card? You are.
David: It’s a multi-channel, yeah, SMS, email, voice, yeah.
Andrew: And it’s all largely for local businesses?
David: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Andrew: So the interaction is I, as a patron of a, my favorite coffee shop or burger joint, I might see that they’re going to offer me my 10th, let’s say, burger for free. All I have to do is hit the QR code. I hit the QR code, the QR code opens up what, chat, Facebook Messenger or loyalty card?
David: Messenger.
Andrew: Facebook Messenger, opens up Facebook Messenger. Facebook Messenger says, is it okay for me to give you the loyalty card here and stay connected with you in the future? I say, yes. I get the loyalty card, which opens up the wallet. The wallet says, here’s your card. It’s now in there forever. And now when you guys want to reach me, you could reach me via Facebook Messenger or via my lock screen from the wallet.
David: Or email.
Andrew: Or email because you’ll also ask me for email within Facebook Messenger. That’s the whole thing.
David: I’m sorry. Yeah. It’s a true omni-channel approach. And you know, one of the things that, you know, mobile wallet is very powerful because of the push notifications, but it’s just one communication channel. Obviously, as you know, Messenger’s super powerful for the open and the click-through rates. And so we leverage all of it, but we obviously we leverage it in a way the, you know, what’s going to get them to take action. So, you know, obviously initially, Messenger is the perfect way because we know that the open rates are 80%, 90% clickthrough rates are crazy, which means we can get them to install the either the event ticket, their membership card, a Groupon style offer. There’s many different things that you can do with mobile wallet. Once we give you . . .
Philippe: Just to give you an example, for Tony Robbin’s launch, we had about 75% install rate of the event ticket in Wallet, which is very high.
Andrew: Seventy-five percent?
Philippe: Install rate. Yeah.
Andrew: That means one out of four people who via Facebook Messenger were given the card, tapped it, and then added it to their Google Wallet or Apple Wallet.
Philippe: Seventy-five percent. That’s huge.
Andrew: That’s huge. What’s a typical installation rate?
David: Around the same. Around 75%.
Andrew: So usually, it’s 75%. That makes sense, right? If somebody is going into Messenger to get the thing, they’re going to tap and open the thing. Do you guys do any follow up? If they don’t open up the card, do you come back and you do a day later and you say, “Hey, you didn’t add the card, you’ll need it for the event.” Got it.
Philippe: Yeah, because we detect if the pass has been installed on the phone and if it’s not, then we follow up with them. “Hey, it sounds like you have not installed the pass on your phone. Here’s the button again.”
Andrew: Wow. All right. That makes a lot of sense. I dig it. I like this whole thing. All right. How are you getting clients for this? How are you finding local businesses to, that would install this when you were doing it yourselves? What is it?
Philippe: From Bali? Well, we deal with local businesses remotely, so we have clients in the U.S. and France in . . .
Andrew: Yeah. What’s your sales process? Are you buying ads that lead to a webinar where you teach this and then the local businesses sign it up? Or is it something else?
David: We do multiple things. We do discovery calls where yes, we do Facebook ads targeting businesses and we also reach out to them on Facebook Messenger. We reach out to them by email. We do cold calling as well, depending which one we want, which type of business we want to . . .
Andrew: You don’t have one process that works better than the others? Or do you? What’s the one that works the best right now?
David: We have a discovery call. So . . .
Andrew: How do you get people to take the discovery call?
David: Either through LinkedIn, Outreach, email.
Andrew: So, you’ll go to LinkedIn, find local businesses. You’ll copy and paste your offer to them and then ask them if they want to do a discovery call?
David: We actually send them to a video, which is an explainer on how Messenger and mobile wallet work in conjunction with each other.
Andrew: And it’s called Outreach?
David: Yeah. Because I’ve been doing mobile wallet since 2012, I actually get a lot of referrals. So, you know, businesses will approach me on LinkedIn saying, “Hey, Dave, I want you to implement your . . . ” but it’s a mixed for me. So it’s a mixture between online and offline. So, I mean right now we can’t divulge the name obviously, but we are working with somebody similar to Tony Robbins, came from that particular client. So we do get a lot of referrals as well. So people come to us and say, “Can you do something similar to what you did for the Tony Robbins?” But yeah, but I mean, we’re, so for me it’s sort of a mixture of 50/50 between referrals, people contacting me either direct via email or LinkedIn, wanting to implement Messenger, you know, Messenger chatbot and loyalty. And obviously, online, you know, webinars and live events such as what you do.
Andrew: Let me see if I understand this. When you’re doing cold outreach, you do it on LinkedIn. You’ll do a search to find local businesses that meet your criteria and you’ll just hit the InMail message and you’ll send them an InMail message, linking them to your offer. Doesn’t that come across as spam and get you blocked by LinkedIn?
David: We have some software, clients, it’s a Clients Finder. So, I make the contact with them first, and then I’ll reach out to them either email and then take that to LinkedIn.
Andrew: What do you mean? How do you make the, what’s the software? How do you find them? Let’s walk through how you get business to business clients.
David: We have a software called Clients Finder which is . . .
Andrew: Clients Finder. Okay. What is it? What’s the URL on that? What’s the company name? Client Finder.
David: It’s basically software that, again, we [inaudible 00:46:17].
Andrew: Oh, you created yourself?
David: Right.
Philippe: So it’s clientsfinder.messengermarketingexperts.com.
Andrew: Okay. And then how does it work? What is it, how does it find, messenger marketing? Okay, I’ll, I’m going to type this all in. How does it work? Where is it finding these clients?
David: So basically it’s, it, you know, you would type in restaurants Chicago, restaurants London, and it’s collected that data from multiple different sources. So, it’ll give us the business name, telephone, email, their Facebook profile, their LinkedIn link.
Andrew: Okay. I’ve seen software like that. All right. So then you guys have your own version of that and then will you reach out to them via LinkedIn?
David: Firstly, most of the time, either a call. And then I follow up via email or follow up via LinkedIn. It depends, obviously, if I can find out who the owner is. So it’s a cold outreach a lot of the time. It’s actually getting on a call first to find out who I need to talk with. But I do a lot of research, so you know, what, how many . . . are they active on Facebook, you know, how many likes they have. Do they have the Facebook tracking code on their website? So, you know, I do a bit of homework first before I reach out to individual businesses. So, yeah, that’s one way that we get clients.
Andrew: David is asking for the link to this thing here. Let me put it, I put it in the chat. I’ll put it in the chat for you guys, but you know what? I went to the URL. There’s nothing there except like a login screen for their students. You’re basically creating tools just for your students at this point.
David: Yes. Yeah. For now. Yeah.
Andrew: Why aren’t you turning this into software as a service?
Philippe: Because I probably [inaudible 00:48:12], but for now we keep it for students.
Andrew: Okay.
Philippe: I see John has a question about beacons.
Andrew: Can you describe what beacons are for people that don’t know it and then, let’s see how you’re using it?
Philippe: Beacons are those all little devices, physical devices that allow you to send messages to the customer’s phone when they approach the beacon. So basically the beacon can send a push notification on the phone when you are, it’s a proximity . . .
Andrew: Yeah. You know what, the dream of that has always been, you walk into The Gap, The Gap sends you a push notification via the beacon because they happen to have it at the door saying, “We’re offering 10% off tee shirts, go to the back of the store and get the tee shirts.” Right. But I’ve never once seen any of that. Have you, has that ever worked?
Philippe: What happens is that when someone has installed the pass on the phone, the pass will act as a beacon. So what we can do is we can detect where the customer is located anywhere in the world. And we define a radius and it could be from 1 meter to 100 meters. So when they, to a location that has been set. So for example, if I’m this burger restaurant and I detect that my customer is in a radius of 100 meters around me, I can send them a push saying, “Hey, you’re very close come in and you will get a free French fries,” for example.
Andrew: You know what? So I think for most of us, well, that’s really cool and I could understand that anyone who has a store would want to set this up. I could understand even for myself. If I’m at a conference, how many people have added one of my cards? Right? Imagine like you add a card to show up at one of my webinars, one of my live interviews, if I’m at a freaking conference, so anyone who’s 100 meters at this conference, I want to send them an alert saying, “Come, let’s have a drink. Let’s talk. Let’s do a meetup. Let’s whatever.” Right? If you want to, if you have any questions, if you want to work with me, whatever it is, I could totally see that working. Or imagine if I’m not at the conference, I could still target all of my customers who happen to be at the conference and say, “I’m not there to drink with you, but like, here’s a picture of me with a drink. You might want to meet up yourselves at the coffee shop right there,” and then have it connected. I see that David is smiling and Philippe is once again going to his phone to show something. What are you showing?
Philippe: This is my business card on Wallet.
Andrew: Okay, so let me see if I can scan that actually. Before you do anything else, let me see what happens if I just bring up my phone to it. Can I even? Wait. It’s detecting it. It’s just a, there. Okay. It’s so great that with the camera now on the iPhone, anytime it sees a QR code it just automatically says, “Hey, do you want to go to this webpage?” Okay, so that’s your card. It’s on the wallet?
Philippe: Yeah. And on the back of the pass, on the back of my card, you have my phones, you have my website. So I have everything about how you can reach out to me.
Andrew: Wait. It says Safari can’t download it. I want to . . . Let me try it again. Let’s download the pass.
Philippe: And then what happens is that you can send, you are in conferences, you can send push notifications to all people that have downloaded your business card in Wallet. So that’s another use.
Andrew: So I . . . What you’re saying is, look, instead of walking around a conference telling people type in the stuff, just say, “Look, hold your camera up to my card and you’ll get it.” And then they get it in the card and now they have it there forever. For some reason it’s not working for me. Oh, pass did not load. Let me see. Show preview. Okay, got it. And then add to wallet.
So the one thing I’ve got to, you see me getting really excited about your stuff. I’ve got to say that there’s, the one issue that I’ve got with your stuff is I think you could use a really beautiful designer that, for example, I just lost David for a little bit. He smiled. Then he lost his smile. He was like, “Oh man, I didn’t realize Andrew was going to be this much of a dork.” I could see that’s painful, but I’m on a black page with blue text on it saying, “If you didn’t see the pass, here’s how to add it.” But I can’t even see the text. What do you think of that?
Oh no, I lost them, guys. I didn’t lose them like technically. I lost them emotionally. We were doing great. But I can see, does that hurt? Is that like, is that painful for you to hear from me? You can be honest with me.
David: What? You mean on the actual download you’ve got the blue [inaudible 00:52:56]?
Andrew: No, that I feel like your design work could use a . . . is not doing justice to the clever marketing that you’ve got, that design-wise, it’s not showing it off. Like, I’m looking at the two of you. You’re very stylish men. Right. You clearly have like a sensibility and I don’t feel like your stuff is leading up to that because look, this is what it looks like on my screen because it didn’t load up the pass. It’s black background with blue text, stuff like that where there is like, there isn’t that type of obsession. Am I wrong about that? Yeah. I feel like you guys don’t agree with me. I shouldn’t . . . I see the pain in your eyes. It’s not even like my place to tell you that.
All right, what did we miss? I feel like I learned a lot from you guys. Here’s what I picked up out of this. Number one, I could actually create a loyalty card for anything, even my business card. Number two, when I do that, I get to have, I get to send people notifications for live events and notifications for other things like offers that come up and then as a bonus maybe or maybe not, I’ll be able to use this when I’m at a conference and want to bring people out. So that’s the number one.
Number two, I realized one of the limitations of Facebook Messenger marketing. If I have a lot of people showing up to a live event at the same time, I’m going to have a problem getting all of them to show up unless I stagger my messages and really be prepared to start sending them out 40 minutes, half hour before the event. That’s really important for all of us to know.
Did I miss anything else? What’s another thing? Number, oh, here’s another one, number whatever I’m up to. We got to copy of what you guys did for Tony Robbins, which is when there’s an event, send a few warmup messages before the event, remind people after the event and then finally close the sale after the event. They’ve come in for something for free. They might want the next step up. This is an opportunity to do it. And then the final thing I learned is not everyone wants to hear your opinion about their design, Andrew. You could totally lose people when you say that. I’m looking at Philippe. He’s still not loving me again. All right. Did I miss anything? Is there something else?
Philippe: The reason why we were glazing over, we were not sure what you were talking about. Was it the design of the pass or the design of the page? Because the design of the pass, we are limited to Apple restriction. It’s . . .
Andrew: No, the pass design is nice. I even like how there’s like a small picture of you on the card that I have in my wallet for you.
David: That’s Apple restricted.
Andrew: That’s really nicely done. All right. And then I’ve been seen Ben asking several times, Ben, I intentionally ignored your question because it didn’t seem that interesting to me, but the fact that you’ve asked it several times means that there’s some burning need for this. And I get it. Maybe Ben’s looking for a partnership. So Ben is asking, how did the two of you come to become partners?
David: Basically, Philippe was running ManyChat campaigns for five star hotels in France. And I think Philippe, you attended one of my webinars for the mobile wallet software, right?
Philippe: Yeah. So what happened is I was running a campaign in Messenger for a five star hotel very successfully. They had 511% ROI on their campaign, combining lead ads, sending to ManyChat. And then, I saw David’s webinar on the wallet and I was like, I was already using wallet with another company from China, but a very expensive one. And I was not very happy with what they were doing. And when I saw what David was doing with wallet, I was like, oh my God, maybe we could integrate that in Messenger.
So I reached out to him. He gave me access to his software, we implemented this, we combined that as a loyalty program for the hotel. And then we, you know, it was like an alchemy between the two of us because we were so excited about doing that, having that type of results for me was huge. And for David was just the validation of the concept. And then, we found out that we have quite similar story, background. We, David was a DJ. I was a music producer. And so we found out that we had lots of things in common and one of the biggest thing we had in common was to, the love of teaching other people succeed in building what we do. So, and that’s, and the rest is history.
David: Yeah.
Andrew: Well, David, Philippe, I’d love to see your software. I get that I can go to your site. Is there, how do I get to see the software that made the two of you decide to work together? How do I try this loyalty stuff to see if I could use it for my next event?
David: We can hook it up for you.
Andrew: All right. I just follow up with you with a message and then you’ll hook it up. What do I need to do? Do I, can I use the software myself or do I give you the event details?
David: We’ll set it up. You just give us all the details and we’ll set it up for you.
Andrew: And then if I want to send a push notification afterwards, does that mean I have to come to you to send it? Because I don’t want to bug you guys.
David: No, we can do it all in Zapier.
Andrew: Oh, within Zapier. You’ll hook me up with in Zapier and then I just zap it over to it?
David: We automate the whole process.
Andrew: You guys blew my freaking mind. You got something here. You got to go big. All right. Everyone who is listening, we’re going to, you’re going to be at the ManyChat’s conference, right?
David: Yes.
Andrew: Yeah, we’ve got to meet up at ManyChat’s conference and talk in person. Let me see if I could give anyone who doesn’t, I will find a way in our chat here to give anyone who wants it my, I’ve got a discount code to come to this thing. If you guys want to come, if you’re listening, you’ve got to come out with us and have a drink. I’ll help you meet Philippe and David in person. I want to meet you if you’re there, in person and yes, I . . . Christian is saying, “I’ll buy you a drink.” Yeah, I’ll do the same thing.
I want to find a way to have a drink with every fricking person who is at that conference. But last year I overdid it. Last year, I got, I have a suite, my team always will get me a suite. Last year, I invited everyone to my suite and I saw the speakers came in. They felt so overwhelmed. They came up, they said, “Hey Andrew, it’s good to see you. We haven’t seen you in months.” Oh, too many people, got to go and they all like one at a time left. It was too much.
Philippe: That’s exactly what happened to me. I came to your suite . . .
Andrew: You were there?
Philippe: I was there and I was like, oh my God, there’s too many people. And I have this throat thing and I could not speak. It was too loud and I was, okay, get out.
Andrew: It was too big. We talked, I think, for like a second, We said hi and then that was it. It was too, too, too much. I was personally overwhelmed and I love seeing people. You cannot flood me with too many people. That flooded me with too many people. So I got to find a better way to do it.
David: Right.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I’m going to put a link here for anyone who wants to come to the conference. Come. Let’s do it. I’m actually almost suffocating thinking about it. And then what we’re going to do for everyone who is here live, discount code. All right, anyone who’s here live, we’re going to do a screen sharing and just take a look at some of the stuff that they do with Facebook Messenger.
But I’ll close out the podcast by saying thank you all for listening and thank you to the two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first, if you want anything coded up, listen to the excitement that we all have for the product that David and Philippe created. Anytime you have an idea but you don’t have the bandwidth to do it, the expertise to do it, the team to do it, go to Toptal and hire the best of the best, people who’ve done it before and they will do it for you. That’s top as in top of your head, tal as in talent, T-O-P-T-A-L.com/mixergy and you’ll get a big, big reward for using it from me instead of finding it directly. And then finally, HostGator, a great place to host a website, hostgator.com/mixergy. All right, I’m going to hit stop and then let’s take a look at the screen.
