You NEED to be on Facebook Messenger.
In the next 5 years, Facebook Messenger will be the biggest platform for reaching your audience, regardless of your industry.
I recently spent $396 on a single Facebook ad that earned me 2,584 Facebook Messenger subscribers (and counting!). Here's the ad...
I was BLOWN AWAY by the response, especially since this was my FIRST attempt at building my Facebook Messenger list for my business (The Vegan Gym).
After it's wild success, I'm calling this type of Facebook Messenger ad an "Easy Opt-in."
My whole goal was to get people to sign up for a workshop that I was hosting to get people interested in my online fitness coaching program.
I used ManyChat to create my Facebook Messenger "funnel" off of this ad. Anyone who commented "Protein" in the comment section of this post would almost instantly receive a direct message to their Facebook inbox that looked like this...
I asked them to reply "Yes" for 2 reasons:
- I don't want to spam anyone. If they don't respond yes, then they won't receive any more messages from me.
- ManyChat only adds someone to your Facebook Messenger list when they message you.
Once they respond yes, I sent them the recipe PDF download, but I also tried to "upsell" them into more content (specifically my workshop).
Notice how I am engaging these people in a conversation. I received quite a few messages like, "Woah, that was a fast response!" and "I really appreciate all of your help!"
I didn't come across as "salesy" at all. I was trying to give them as much value as possible that was tailored to their specific fitness goal.
Since this guy replied with "Shred fat," I then invited him to join my Fat-Shredding Workshop, a series of 4 videos that pitched my online fitness coaching program.
And then, of course, I asked for referrals!
So here are the results of this ad (I launched it with $100 to begin with and then added $296 in ad spend):
This engagement is AWESOME, but the metric that I ultimately cared about was the number of sign-ups for my workshop.
Well, with this ad, I signed up 421 people with $396 in ad spend. That's a cost of $0.94 per sign up.
And by signed up, I mean that they gave me their email address!
I also tried a short video ad for the workshop. Here's what that looked like:
If you are curious, you can watch the video ad here.
From this video ad, 45 people signed up from $66 in ad spend. That's a cost of $1.46 per sign up.
So my "Easy Opt-in" ad cost per sign up was about 50% less than my video ad cost per sign up.
Plus, I got way more engagement on the post. More importantly, I also signed up a few hundred people to another list for another product that I am launching this summer.
So the Easy Opt-in ad was a clear winner!
Keep in mind that you have to be authentic with people. This is not email marketing. You have to build a relationship. As more and more businesses adopt Messenger, and if you want to succeed over the next few years, you are going to have to be clever about how you engage with your audience. You need the genuine will to build long-term relationships with people.
If you're not thinking about building a long-term customer, you'll have some success because it's early for Facebook Messenger, but over time you will fail. If you're not following that customer journey all the way to the end, then you'll spend a lot of money on acquisition and have a high churn through rate.