Looking to grow your Facebook Messenger marketing?
Then join the experts and special guest, Robyn Openshaw of GreenSmoothieGirl, as she details how they went from 367 Facebook Messenger subscribers to 37,000. Listen as Robyn shares the tactics, and the past mistakes, of a Facebook Messenger campaign that generated 6,600 new email subscribers and $30,000 in revenue… and how you can apply her strategy.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The Facebook Messenger strategies that generated 3,800 comments on a video post in ONE day… all in organic traffic.
- Include this simple tactic within your Facebook posts to generate 20x to 40x more engagement from your followers.
- Discover Robyn’s five takeaways on Facebook Messenger marketing that you can start applying today.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
ManyChat
See the GreenSmoothieGirl Facebook Contest Video
Vibe by Robyn Openshaw
Episode 80: Facebook Messenger Ads: Everything You Need to Know
Episode 89: [Case Study] How He Generated 11,000 Facebook Messenger Subscribers for 13¢ Apiece
GreenSmoothieGirl ManyChat Report
Episode 125 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello, and welcome to Episode 125 of Perpetual Traffic. We’ve got a great guest today on the show. We’ve got Robyn Openshaw from greensmoothiegirl.com. Robyn has been in this whole world of internet, direct response, social media for quite a while. And it’s pretty cool because she reached out to us and told us her story of the results that she got using a Facebook Messenger campaign. I believe it was originally from listening to one of our recent episodes. Robyn is the author of 15 books, competitive tennis player and skier, and GreenSmoothieGirl is a really, really cool brand, so make sure you go check it out. They basically teach people easy, inexpensive, and delicious ways to eat whole foods. She’s got a campaign that she’s going to be talking about where they literally spent, I believe it was $415, and have generated about $30,000 from that ad spend. Robyn, thanks for coming on and sharing with us your case study. And I’m excited to get into this stuff. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Thanks for having me, Keith. |
| Molly Pittman: | Robyn, I know your story is really cool. We’ve met a few times in person. You’re a DM person. I know you’ve gone through some of our courses, but mostly you have a really, really cool story. So, do you just want to start out telling us how you got into this, and a little bit more about yourself? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | I’m really excited to be here first of all just because the three of you have made such an impact on my business, and really on my life. And just our viability because a few years ago, we were really in decline even though we’d been out on the internet for 10 years. I was just trying to figure it out by a little piece here, and a little piece there, and trying to figure out what had changed on the internet. And plugging into your content has been a total game changer. In fact, we’re such geeks that five of my team and I came to DigitalMarketer’s headquarters this past summer. |
| And we were doing some training with Native Commerce, and we said, “Is Molly Pittman in the building?” And they were walking around, and they’re like, “Oh, she’s really busy, and she’s having lunch or whatever.” And I just sort of begged them. I was like, “So we listen to her all the time. We know her voice, we know her laugh, we learned everything we know from her,” especially about what we’re talking about today, which is our campaign that got us 6,600 new email subscribers, and 37,000 on the new Facebook Messenger platform. And we just wanted to meet you in person. And so, we probably were like star-struck, and geeked out, and probably didn’t say anything when we met you, but- | |
| Molly Pittman: | Definitely not true. You were as wonderful as you are right now. |
| Ralph Burns: | We’ve been witness to that, actually at Traffic & Conversion. It’s really actually kind of funny because Molly handles it so well, but she is like the star. We don’t delude ourselves at all. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | So, I went to very first Traffic & Conversion a couple years ago, and I learned so much, and I had so much that I could hand off to my team. I have 22 employees, and we’re a six-million-dollar business now. I’m a single mom. I became single nine years ago, and I’ve been raising my kids by myself, four of them. And I don’t have a business degree, and my background is as a psychotherapist, which didn’t really prepare me for looking at profit and loss statements, or scaling a team, or any of that. And so, I’ve had to learn by guerilla warfare, and just by learning a little bit here and there. And just to have DigitalMarketer, and Dominate Web Media too, sort of systematizing and professionalizing this new profession. |
| I mean, I always say that we’re 10 years old on the internet, but that’s like 70 dog years. And so, I feel like we’re like the great grandma. But I wasn’t leading out. I was kind of floundering, and trying to regain our dominance on the internet helping people be healthier. And we have a really generalist site, which I wouldn’t recommend anybody start a wellness and nutrition generalist site. You’ve got to be super niche these days. But we really 3X’d our business the year after we discovered DigitalMarketer, and we signed up for everything. We went all in. I got the eight certifications- | |
| Molly Pittman: | I feel like you go all in in anything you do. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | That is accurate. But I’ll tell you, having somebody who just shows me the way. I mean, what Ryan Deiss put up on the stage at Traffic & Conversion this last March here in 2017, where he showed the flowchart of what it is to run a digital business, it’s no joke. People think that if they’re a doctor and they want to get online, they think that they’re going to go online, and all of a sudden 100 dollar bills are going to start shooting out of their computer tower, and it’s just it’s not like that. |
| We heard your podcast episode. Very brave of you to go out there when you’re one of the first ones to start using the new Messenger platform. And I think it was like first of February, and I’m a religious listener of this podcast, and I listen to it while I work out, and then I tell whichever members of my team need to hear it to go listen to it, and then tell me the most important points they got from it, and to tell the rest of the team. So, we’re always sharing your content in our takeaways. | |
| But you went out there after you had only sent four messages yourself, and you told us your gains, and what you had learned. Then we bought the, I think, $37 course, and I assigned my social media manager who gets tons of credit for what we’re talking about today. Her name is Zoey, and she lives there in Austin, and she’s completely amazing. And she took my vision after listening to that, and we collaborated, and we crushed it. We did a little video that is less than 60 seconds long, and built 37,000 followers on … And I’m getting a little ahead of myself here on messenger. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, subscribers. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Subscribers. Yeah. I don’t even … But just to put a fine point on what you have really done for us, I have learned from you how to use social media better, I have learned how to use video better, I have learned how to build our email list through, like you say, perpetual traffic. And when we started listening to your content you guys, we weren’t buying any traffic on Facebook. And now we buy 15,000 leads a month. And their quality leads, and we have ROI of 125 to 200% within days of our buying that traffic. And we would have had no idea how to do that. I didn’t know how anybody was making any money on Facebook. |
| We’re doing so much better on organic traffic, we’re doing so much better at all the ways that you bring people in. We had a list of 80,000 when we started listening to your podcast and plugging into DigitalMarketer HQ, and I took a systems person and made her a COMO by putting her through the eight certifications. And we went for 80,000 to our list is now 450,000, and we’re a six-million-dollar annual business. | |
| Molly Pittman: | That’s crazy. Congratulations first off. Anyone that has success only does so through execution, so DM and Dominate Web Media, and any information or courses, learning is only half of it. You have to do it. Right? And you have to do it even if you’re having trouble applying it to your business. This does take some creativity. It’s marketing. But just to dive more into this ManyChat strategy. So ManyChat, M-A-N-Y-C-H-A-T, is a Facebook Messenger marketing tool. It starts at about $10 a month. You can go to their website at manychat.com to check it out. |
| And this is the tool that Robyn, and DigitalMarketer uses to facilitate Messenger marketing. So back in November, at the beginning of November 2016, Facebook rolled out the ability to buy ads through the Facebook Messenger platform. So, ads in your newsfeed that you click on that then open in Messenger, and also ads broadcast that you actually see in your inbox like a message from a friend. A Facebook friend. | |
| So once Facebook rolled out Messenger ads to the platform, it really introduced the need for a tool like ManyChat, which is going to facilitate a lot of what we talk about today. So just to catch anybody up, if you’re feeling left behind, or you’re not sure what the buzz is around Facebook Messenger marketing, that’s the backstory. So back to you Robyn, can you tell us a little bit about this first campaign, because I remember this is when you first reached out. And you were really, really excited, and you guys had used this video, and I think you used ManyChat’s comment to message growth tool. Can you tell us more about that specific campaign? | |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Yeah. So, we were celebrating our tenth anniversary this summer, and we were learning about … Thank you. We were learning about it from you. It seemed like the perfect way to build out a new platform because eventually, Facebook with probably charge us to build on that platform, and to send promotional messages. But right now, it’s just a great way to reach people through another means. And we thought, “Let’s do a giveaway. Let’s do a contest. And let’s use it to really celebrate our tenth anniversary.” So, what we did … And it was super crazy because I do lots of video, and we have really used video to explode our brand the last two years partly due to what we’ve learned from you. And the more you do a video, the better you get at it. I used to be like if you go look at, my employees call it retro Robyn on YouTube, I’m just awful. |
| Molly Pittman: | Retro Robyn. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | If we ever send anything out that’s like one of my old YouTube videos, my team, just to avoid being super embarrassed, they say, “This is retro Robyn. Just warning you.” I just was bad at it. |
| Molly Pittman: | She’s come a long way. |
| Keith Krance: | Was it that you just didn’t have the practice, or were you trying to follow all the specific quote on quote formulas, and so you were just always so worried about what to say and all that? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Oh, I didn’t even know what the crap a formula would be. I just was bad on camera. I didn’t smile, I didn’t animate, I didn’t realize how much energy you lose between you and the camera lens, and then between the camera lens and the viewer. And so now, if somebody comes over and they’re watching me on camera, they’re just like, “Man, you’re like cheesy.” And I’m like, “But yeah. But when you actually see the video, people like it.” Cheese it up. You almost can’t be too cheesy. Which brings me to this video that I did. It was just under 60 seconds, and I’ll run through for you because we want this to be super valuable for anybody listening. |
| So, I want to tell you the specific things that we as a team got together and said, “Why was this such a big win?” Because here’s the super crazy thing about it. Before I tell you what I think we did right with this video that got us such massive results, I should mention that we posted it on our Facebook page. And the GreenSmoothieGirl’s Facebook page has like 152,000 people on it right now. So, we have about 150,000 followers. So, there’s a lot of people who are way bigger than we are, there’s plenty of people who are smaller. But we posted it on our page, and we got 3,800 comments in 24 hours, and we didn’t boost it. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. And Robyn, just to back this up a little bit, so ManyChat has a growth tool inside of their platform called comment-to-message. And what happens if you use the growth tool and you sync ManyChat with your Facebook page is that anytime someone comments on a post that you’ve used this growth tool, you’ve synced this growth tool with, anytime someone comments on a post, and you can make it a specific keyword that they comment, it then opens a message inside of Facebook Messenger where you as the marketer can build different sequences, you can ask them questions, you can tag them, you can do a bunch of really cool stuff. So, I just wanted to make sure people knew exactly what this was. So, they put out this contest, and you have 3,800 comments. That’s insane. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Yeah. So that’s exactly … I’m glad you gave that backstory because by setting it up that way, when someone comments, you now have yourself a new subscriber. And we started out with like 367 subscribers in Messenger. Once we learned about it from you, we were like, “Oh, okay. 367 people have messaged us trying to reach us.” Like that’s how some people are using customer support these days is they’ll message the Facebook page. And we had just opened that up to even receive comments. |
| Molly Pittman: | Receive messages. Yeah. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Yeah. And so, we finally caught the vision that we should be allowing people to reach us sort of for customer support reasons shortly before then. And then we heard your original podcast episode on it, and then another one where a marketer talked about his big campaign, which further inspired us. So, we decided to do this comment-to-message thing where anybody who comments is now a new subscriber. And I think the reason I led with this statistic that 3,800 people commented in one day, is that it highlights the fact that we all were so upset a couple years ago when Facebook seemed to really just be throttling us, and we’re like, “Gosh, I built this huge platform on Facebook, I’ve spent so much time and money to do this, and now I can’t really reach my fans.” Well, a lot of us then reached the conclusion of, “Well, we can’t reach our fans unless we throw a bunch of money at it.” |
| And I’m telling you, we spent zero dollars, and we got 3,800 comments. And you might say, “Well, that’s because you were giving away a Blendtec.” Well I’ll tell you, the owner of Blendtec live across the street from me, and we’ve done so many promotions over the years together. And we had still never seen anything like this. And so, kind of going through the perfect storm of why I think this hit so big is important. Because it’s not just that we were giving Blendtecs away. It’s more than that because our audience knows that we give Blendtecs away. | |
| So, since I know the owner of Blendtec really, really well, he’s like my son’s Sunday School teacher, and we sort of helped put each other on the map on the internet 10 years ago. He’s always happy to give me blenders, he knows I won’t ask unless I know it will serve his brand well. That was easy, but we didn’t even give our own product away. We were actually giving away a third company’s product. We knew that our audience likes Blendtec’s, we know that it’s strong brand fit. But they weren’t even a sponsor. They weren’t giving us any money, but I had like four blenders in my warehouse, and I asked them to give me another eight. So, we gave away 12, and we gave away one a week as we celebrated our tenth anniversary through the summer. | |
| But this one minute video was kind of funny because I do a lot of video, and a lot of times I’ll teleprompt it, or I’ll practice it, or I’ll do two or three takes. This was a one take video, and I had sat down with my videographer, and I had been inspired by somebody else’s video ad. I sat him down when he got there, and I said, “I want quick cuts, I want high energy music, I want different filters, I want words on the screen so that the words on the screen mean nobody has to have the sound on to get it, and I want to you to cut away to relevant images.” So, when I said, “We’re 10 years old. That’s like 70 dog years,” he cuts away to a puppy. Like who doesn’t love a puppy, right? | |
| And so, I said, “I want you to take this. We’re just going to go in my kitchen, and we’re just going goof around. And I want you to just punch this baby up.” And he went in and out of filters, and he made it kind of fun and cool. He actually made it way cooler and funner than I actually am. And so, I think that the whole thing was a win because it was less than 60 seconds, it started with a silly, eye-catching kind of a thing. I actually was dancing with the blender. I was dancing with my Blendtec. It’s a true story. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Amazing. |
| Ralph Burns: | I love that, by the way. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | And I didn’t necessarily plan it, but I was just in the kitchen, and we were just goofing around doing different things. And so, it kind of interrupted the feed with video. You have to just sort of get over yourself, and you have to do it for the art, you have to have super high energy, and you almost can’t be too cheesy on camera. If you get over yourself, and it’s not about you, and you’re just celebrating the fact that you’re whatever, 10 years old, or that you’re giving away these blenders or whatever. I think that helped. I instantly started talking about the giveaway to grab attention, and to make it be about what’s in it for them. And then I also immediately told people how to enter. The comment-to-message thing is just a wonder. It’s a thing of beauty because it’s so easy. They don’t have to go anywhere, they just comment. |
| Molly Pittman: | It’s so frictionless for the end user. They don’t have to click over to a landing page, they just comment on a post. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | So, we have him cut away to photos. And in that 60 seconds, I show some fun things that you do with the blender to be healthier, because that’s what we’re all about. And so, kind of cutting away to stock images of me making a green smoothie, you’re seeing some spinach, and some kale, you’re seeing a cute doggie. And it was short, and it was to the point. And people see it, they see that it’s 60 seconds long, and they know that they’re not in for commitment. And I think that the giveaway item being something that everyone easily recognizes and everyone wants was helpful. And I both started and ended with a call to action. The call to action being enter to win. And you cannot ask people to share as a condition of the contest. That’s against Facebook’s rules. But you can language it so that it’s optional or whatever. |
| Molly Pittman: | And it’s not only that the blender is something that people want, but it’s also helps to qualify your market, right? You’re GreenSmoothieGirl, so anyone that might want to make smoothies would need a blender. This is a huge mistake I see people make with contests. They give away an iPad, or a laptop, and it’s like, “Come on guys. Give away something that your market would actually want.” And sewing.com we gave away a sewing machine. |
| Ralph Burns: | Imagine that. |
| Molly Pittman: | It’s just a great way to make sure you’re collecting quality leads, and not people that are looking for free laptops and stuff like that. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Exactly right. And maybe everybody wants an iPad, but is someone who opts in to get an iPad actually going to buy your stuff? |
| Molly Pittman: | Exactly. And that was the goal here, right? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | If you care about a Blendtec, it’s pretty likely that you’ll also care about putting healthy stuff into that Blendtec to feed your family better. Which that’s our tribe. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | I still can’t believe the founder of Blendtec lives across the street from you. It’s just crazy. |
| Ralph Burns: | It’s like the juicing neighborhood right there. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Side note, he was one of the biggest YouTube stars of all time. 500 million views with his Will it Blend campaign. So, we kind of went with that a little. |
| Molly Pittman: | Oh, yeah. I remember that. |
| Ralph Burns: | Sure. |
| Molly Pittman: | Awesome. |
| Ralph Burns: | My kids still watch those videos. |
| Keith Krance: | That was like the start. I mean, he probably inspired so many of these millennials to go out and build their platform on YouTube. I remember being at dinner at just different events and stuff, and telling people how one good video can change your life, and change your business. Now, it doesn’t have to be like Will it Blend, but there’s so many examples of like Will it Blend — one video. Or Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Beard Club. |
| Molly Pittman: | Robyn, one more question. So, what happened after they commented? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | I mean, we have learned some interesting lessons, some hard lessons. We’ve learned what our audience does and doesn’t like, which may not apply to you if you’re listening to this. But we had learned, thanks to you, that you don’t want to be sending people anything promotional unless you’ve engaged with them in the last day, in the last 24 hours. And I was really frustrated by that for a while. And I was like, “Well, what’s the point of this whole platform if I can’t send anything promotional?” But if you get creative, you can ask a specific question, and then they can opt in, which also helps you segment, because we segment in Facebook Messenger just like we segment in Infusionsoft now. |
| So, a week ago I launched my book Vibe, which we find out in a couple days if I hit the New York rimes list, but we really wanted to use our Messenger platform because we now have 37,000 people on it, and it’s brought us $30,000 in revenues in the last six months since we launched it. And we don’t treat it like we do our email list. We will sell very directly to our email list, but we don’t think that’s a good use of the Messenger platform. But we asked a question. We asked something to the effect of are you interesting in my new book that just came out Vibe? And no link to buy it or anything like that, but about 100 people messaged us back and said, “Yeah, where can I buy it?” And they get a link to buy, and they’re all going to purchase. | |
| Molly Pittman: | And you see what’s different and powerful about that. You’re not just sending a general broadcast out to your entire Messenger list. “Hey, my new book just released. Go buy here.” You’re starting with a question, right? It’s really conversational. So, “Hey, are you interested in learning more about green smoothies?” “Yeah. I would love to.” “Okay, awesome. Here are some free recipes you can download.” Setting up an actual bot sequence verse just using Messenger like email where you’re broadcasting out all these promotional messages, that’s what the platform was built for. It was built for two-way conversation, and I think you’re going to see more and more of this as the years go by. |
| Way less of marketing messages that are one to many, right? Way more of marketing conversations that feel a lot like one-on-one conversations. That’s what people are looking for. They’re looking for solutions and conversations that are customized to them. That’s really, really important. So, I mean, you can look at the open rates, and the click through rates of Messenger, and you can compare those to email. And you’ll say, “Oh my goodness. Messenger is so much more engaging, right? The open rates are a lot higher. The click through rates are a lot higher.” Well, of course they are. The platform is very new. There aren’t many marketers that are using it, right? | |
| But it frustrates me when people compare email to Messenger because it’s like, “Whoa guys. I think that Messenger is a similar platform, but it’s also very, very, very different.” And I love that you guys aren’t just trying to blast people with promotional messages because eventually, Facebook’s going to monitor that more closely. And eventually, that just won’t be allowed. So, it’s those that choose to be creative and come up with ways to engage with their audience, segments of their audience. Like you said, you can segment these people, which is incredible. But also, what are questions that you can ask? What’s a little bot that you could build that still achieves the same desired end result? Them buying this thing, them opting in for this thing, the going to this thing, but it’s not a direct promotional message. So, I think that’s a huge shift that people need to understand, and something that you guys have figured out Robyn. | |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Yeah. And one of the things that I love about what we’ve done here with your help on the Facebook Messenger platform using ManyChat is that as a business owner, I’m a huge fan of their being side benefits, or indirect additional benefits to any specific promotional campaign that we have. And getting to engage with our audience in a new way, and to have more creativity, more fun, more inspiration for our audience has been huge. Getting 6,600 of them to opt in for one of our Lead Magnets has been huge because we make a lot of money with our email list. That’s where we make our money. It’s just a bonus that we’ve made $30,000 directly from this campaign we ran six months ago, and ongoing. |
| But that’s not really why we stared it. It’s a great way to accomplish some other objectives. For instance, last week when I launched the book, we weren’t just there to say, “Hey, are you interesting in the book Vibe?” Which we knew better than to say, “Hey, you want to buy this book? Here’s a link.” We asked them a question. “Are you more interested in weight loss, or eating healthier, or raising your vibration?” And so, we now have a segment of those 37,000 people that we know when we go to do our detox in December, which is our biggest annual promotion. It’s a seven-figure big winner for us where we invite affiliates in and all that. We now know who’s interested in that. | |
| And so, come December, that segment will get our Lead Magnet. “Come watch this video of MasterClass.” So, we’re doing things for the long-game. We always try to run our business with the long-game in mind. And I’ve really tried to empower my team to experiment. Zoey, our social media manager, is empowered to play with the Facebook Messenger platform, and she knows, my team knows, that if they make mistakes, then they must be doing their job. So, it’s not that we don’t care that they lose us a bunch of subscribers when they send the wrong thing, but sometimes we learn by trial and error. And one thing that we’ve learned by trial and error is that our audience responds really well to things that are inspiring or fun. | |
| Molly Pittman: | The email list is the lever that you pull to make the money, but what feeds the email list, right? And that’s what people forget, and especially with ManyChat’s new integration with Zapier, which I’m going to talk about in the next episode. You can now sync ManyChat with most CRMs. So, imagine running an ad, maybe you’re offering some sort of Lead Magnet, maybe you guys are offering smoothie recipes, right? It looks like a normal ad, you click on it, it opens in Messenger, and you say, “Great. We’d love to send you those recipes. Can you give me your first and last name?” They do. “Okay, awesome. How about your email address? Okay, great.” Ask any other questions, email them those recipes, or deliver them in Messenger, and then set up a follow-up sequence to sell whatever you wanted. |
| But the beauty of that is that now that there’s this Zapier integration, you’re still generating that email lead, right? So that email lead is pushed to your CRM, your email service provider. You’re still generating the email lead, you’re just using Messenger as a mode of communication to cold traffic to build that awareness of your brand, to build that email list so that you can pull the lever to more people to make more money. So just to put that into context and make sure people are aware that Messenger marketing especially is changing fast. ManyChat also just released a huge update. They released something called Flow Builder that looks like a CRM, and allow you to build bots, and actually visually see the bot in the logic that you’re building. It’s not something that you learn once and you understand, this industry is changing every minute. So back to the Zapier integration, it’s huge because it’s also allowing people to build their email list, which is like Robyn said, is a huge revenue play for most businesses. | |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Yeah. And giving people a really great leads magnet, and we have many of them, really builds loyalty. And then, and this is what we learned from DigitalMarketer, I’m embarrassed to tell you that two years ago, I didn’t know the word Lead Magnet, and I had on my site, “Do you want to sign up for our newsletter?” And we learned what a Lead Magnet is from DigitalMarketer, and the $30,000 has been primarily in the trip wire, which is another word we didn’t have in our vocabulary probably because DigitalMarketer made it up. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Ralph Burns: | They did. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | we have lots of different Lead Magnets that people opt in for, and then they get an immediate upsell into, gosh I think it’s like $16, and we call it the Genius Guides, and they get like 10 cool little resources they can put in their wallet so when they go to the grocery store, they have a little wallet card. I mean, I know it’s so old-school, but our audience is 35 to 65-year-old women. But they’ve got a little laminated wallet card so they can look at what all the GMO ingredients are so they know what to avoid at the grocery store. And that’s primarily where we made the $30,000. I mean, that’s not our endgame, right? Our endgame is that they come do one of our core offers or profit maximizers. |
| Molly Pittman: | So, Robyn, day-to-day now aside from this campaign, what are you guys doing with Messenger? Is this a part of your overall marketing strategy? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | It is, and it’s so fun to have a diversification of where we’re getting traffic because it’s not fun to build your house in Australia, right? It’s not fun to be dependent on Facebook. And all of our traffic is coming from Facebook, or all of our traffic is coming from organic search. I mean, we’d all love to have more of that. But we have more diversification, so it makes me feel safer in my business. And so, we have a lot of fun every time we’re talking about an upcoming promotion asking ourselves, “What’s the best way to use the Facebook Messenger platform?” For instance, I take a bunch of my readers to Switzerland with me every year. We’ve done it eight years in a row. At GreenSmoothieGirl, we tend to do the same thing every month. Every month our promotion is the same thing that we did last year. |
| So, I take people to this amazing clinic of biological medicine in Switzerland where we have a one week liver detox. So, I was just talking to my team today like, “What should we do with the Messenger platform?” And Zoey and I were kicking around ideas like, “Let’s show a little video slideshow of all the pretty pictures, and all the treatments you get there, and all the gorgeous wildflowers there at the clinic, and just invite them into a webinar about it.” Or whatever makes sense. Cool pictures, and sending people free stuff, and engaging with them, but not too often. We’ve learned that one or two times a week our audience does not want to hear from us that much. I mean, single women will appreciate this metaphor, but it’s like when you give a guy your phone number, and then he sends you eight texts a day with four pictures of his bike ride. And you’re like, “Dude, I just met you. You’re all right.” | |
| Molly Pittman: | If it was a dog, it would be okay. If you were sending pictures of your dog, but not your bike ride. |
| Keith Krance: | I have a question regarding that and something you said earlier just to clear up in case there’s any confusion on this. So, you mentioned earlier that you don’t want to send anything promotional unless they have engaged within at least the last day. Now, were you referring to your existing Messenger subscribers type of thing, or … So, like if you do a new promotion, you’ll basically start that with some kind of a question? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | It’s a Facebook terms of service, and when we started out, and this is just to show anyone listening that at first you’re a noob, right? And you don’t know what to do with it. Our first little method of seeing if our audience would engage with us was sending a cute puppy picture. And I didn’t really like that. When my team was doing that, I was like, “That’s kind of random.” It definitely gets people to click, but I didn’t really love it. And so now I think we’re getting a little bit more sophisticated about how we engage with people. We’ll ask them a question, and just think of questions that you like being asked, and that you almost can’t not answer. |
| And if you want a great laboratory for what gets people to engage, here’s a little secret I probably shouldn’t say out loud, but my personal page, which got maxed at 5,000 several years ago, I literally use it just to see what people engage with. Because it’s changed a lot. I feel like every year how people are engaging, and part of that is just Facebook’s metrics. But I say stuff, or I’ll ask a question on my Facebook page, and I’m literally getting 20X to 40X more responses on my personal page, which I consider just a place to experiment. I don’t experiment on the GreenSmoothieGirl page so much. But people want to be asked a question, they want to be asked their opinion, they want to know that you care about what they think. And it’s having a conversation with people instead of just saying stuff. | |
| Molly Pittman: | And they want to see marketing messages that are personalized to them. And that’s why Facebook is the dominant ad platform, and I think will always be the dominant ad platform is because they have the data points to know the ads that we want to see based off of who we are, and what we like, and what we do. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | And that really comes back to a point I started to make, and I think I didn’t finish is that the reason we got comments on an unboosted post isn’t just that we were giving away a Blendtec, it’s also the fact that Facebook is so ninja now that they know what people are responding to, and as people started to like it, and as people started to comment, they just threw down the floodgates, and they showed it to a lot of people. They had to have because we only have 150,000 people on our page, and 3,800 of them commented, and tons of them shared to other people. It’s because Facebook is that smart that they know what people like, and they don’t want to show us stuff we don’t like, and they want to show us stuff we do like. And so, you actually, if you just start paying very close attention to what is getting play on Facebook and do more of that, you’re going to win. And your Facebook page is going to grow. |
| Keith Krance: | Yes. Now please don’t be that guy that asks the random questions just so he can show Facebook that he’s got an engaged personal profile. Because you see those once in a while, right? They’re hacking it, right? But they’re asking random stupid questions that have nothing to do with their brand. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Then you end up with 150,000 followers who have nothing to do with your brand, and then you’re going to run really expensive ads. |
| Molly Pittman: | Exactly. But no, you’re totally right. Whenever we use the comment growth tool DigitalMarketer, especially in ads, the relevance score is always super high because Facebook sees, “Wow. There are 500 comments on this in an hour. That must mean that people are really interested. There’s some virality behind this. We should show it to more people.” Okay, Robyn, this has been so awesome. So just to wrap things up, what would be your top takeaways? If you were talking to someone that was just getting started with Messenger, what would you tell them? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Well, I would say that contests work really well. And combining a contest particularly with the comment-to-message feature using Facebook Messenger and ManyChat, it gets people excited, and it gets them a lot more open to receiving messages from you. One thing we did is we left it open so that we said, “Every week we will tell you in your Facebook Messenger if you’re the winner.” And so that sort of left it open that they wanted to hear from us. Another tip that we have to share with you based on our experience the last six months is the share one fun message with no sales intent about half the time. |
| Another thing is to track all of your links that are sent. We use UTMs on all our links in ManyChat so that we can track sales, and leads, and clicks. Another tip is don’t send too often your previous case study that you did. I think in February, I know that he said the same thing. And so, we were kind of watching for where that pain point is. We were sending one or two times a week that didn’t really vibe with our audience. And so now we send once or twice a month. And then another tip I would have for anyone who wants to do a Facebook Messenger campaign is get creative, and have fun with it. That is what people expect from this platform. They expect to engage with their friends, so be their friend. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, it must be entertaining. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much, Robyn. You are now a Messenger expert. |
| Ralph Burns: | Certified. Well, I guess certified again. |
| Molly Pittman: | Certified state. |
| Keith Krance: | Real quick, this has been unbelievable, Robyn. This has been so awesome. I’ve been taking tons of notes, so we’ve got some contests that we’re going to be doing for our book and stuff too. So, we’re going to implement some of this stuff. I can’t wait. But speaking of the word “vibe,” you mentioned about vibing with your audience, and I think I believe that’s the name of your book. It could be a great book for anybody listening to this podcast too. So, what’s the best way to reach out to you for anything health and fitness related, or you book, or anything like that? |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Well, my book Vibe is on Amazon. And we hit number one Amazon best-seller last week. And you can find me on Green Smoothie Girl on Facebook, that’s three separate words, or greensmoothiegirl.com. |
| Molly Pittman: | Awesome, Robyn. Thank you so much. |
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome. |
| Keith Krance: | And by the way, if you want to check out the video, the giveaway video that she talked about, we’ll have the URL to the Blendtec giveaway video that she did in the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast, and this is Episode 125. And Robyn also offered to share all the notes with all the numbers and the strategy for her internal team document, to share that and make it available for you to listen to it. I thought that was pretty cool. So that’ll also be at the Show Notes. |
| Molly Pittman: | Digitalmarketer.com/podcast. |
| Keith Krance: | Awesome. |
| Molly Pittman: | Robyn, you are the best. |
| Robyn Openshaw: | Oh, no. You guys are the best. Thank you so very much. I had a lot of fun. |
| Ralph Burns: | Robyn, thanks. This has been great. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | Hopefully you enjoyed, you the listener, and we will talk to you on the next one. |
| Molly Pittman: | Bye, bye. |
| Ralph Burns: | See you. |
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