Email is Dead. Welcome to Messenger Marketing.

Messenger marketing via chatbots represents a new paradigm in customer communication where true 1-1 conversations can occur to both improve customer experiences and provide advertisers with a wealth of highly personalised data. Mikael Yang, CEO/Co-founder of one of the world’s hottest marketing companies, ManyChat, will give clear examples of the best uses of messenger marketing as well as the 10x results over email that he regularly sees.

Interview with Mikael Yang | Co-founder & CEO, ManyChat

Interview Transcript

Eric:

For this event we decided to do our first live podcast. And so, I’d like to invite to the stage, Mike Yang the CEO of ManyChat, which is one of the most exciting marketing companies in the world today. Let’s give a hand for Mike.

Mike:

Hey guys.

What is ManyChat

Eric:

So first Mike, tell me what is ManyChat?

Mike:

ManyChat is a messenger marketing platform. What we do is we help businesses market, sell, and support through Facebook Messenger. And the reason to do that is you get 80% open rates and often over 10%, 20% CTRs.

Eric:

So let’s back up for a second here. Let’s talk about messenger marketing and what it means in the whole marketing ecosystem at that point. Describe that a little bit.

Messenger Marketing

Mike:

So Messenger is a very popular app used by over a billion people every month. It’s a new communication channel. And a year ago, Facebook opened up the API for third-party developers to basically integrate with it and to build what is called chatbots or bots. The way you use them is kind of like the same as any other communication channel. You gather a list of your subscribers, you broadcast interactive content, and you convert people into sales.

Eric:

So you have a very provocative of this thing here. It’s very good. Did you guys know this? Email is dead. I don’t know if you’ve received any iStack emails but apparently, it’s dead. Tell us why.

Email is NOT dead

Mike:

So yeah, the title is provocative and it’s meant to be. We believe that email, obviously, is not dead, it’s gonna stick around for a while. But Messenger, if you look at how you communicate with your friends, now it’s all Messenger. Even at work, at Slack, it’s gonna be the same in the next 3, 4, 5 years. 80% of the business to customer communication is gonna be on Messenger or any messenger, like not only Facebook Messenger. Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, etc. And basically, the number, the ratio will be like, right now, email is a dominant channel for communication. And at 5 years, it’s gonna be like 10%. So basically as good as dead. So we have a quick demo if anyone wants to actually feel what a messenger marketing is, that’s how it feels. You can go to maychat.com/awe and you need to press the “open messenger app” button. And you’ll get the actual automation and you’ll see what you can build. It’s much easier to actually feel it, to see it for yourself than to actually describe it. Like, “Hey it’s a new thing you all should use it, etc.”

Eric:

Let’s just talk a little bit about the structure of what ManyChat brings to the table when it comes to messenger marketing. I guess it’s not really an accessible technology if you’d have to build on the Messenger API or something if we didn’t use your product?

Messenger API

Mike:

Yeah so the alternative to using a platform like ours, is to like hire developers and to integrate with the APIs yourself, which is kind of like trying to build MailChimp from scratch if you want to set broadcast email. Of course, you can do it but like why would you? Why not pay like $10 to MailChimp and like broadcasts email? So we’re doing the same that MailChimp has done for email. ManyChat is doing for Messenger. We help you like gather subscribers, broadcast interactive content, do a live chat. I have a few slides like what’s a bot.

What is a Bot?

People say it’s an application delivered through a conversational interface. That’s not what we are talking about. We define a bot as a just a business account inside a messaging app because like you can have live chat. A bot can be not automated, frankly. But like 1-800-FLOWERS doing e-commerce through messenger. All the messenger apps have opened up their APIs. Whatsapp is gonna be also opening up soon. Messaging apps are interactive. The most used apps on the App Store. I just want to go through this really quickly because I want to show you the actual examples.

ManyChat Broadcast Stats

So our platform, over 20,000 businesses are using us. Over 20 million messages are sent, growing rapidly. Open rates as I’ve said, email typical open rates 20% and CTR is 1-3%. Messenger, 80% open rate, 10-30% CTR. So it’s like 10x of what you would get an email and here are some examples. So this is a broadcast that we did ourselves inside messenger about the product update that we did. So typically we sent over 3,000 messages, got 83% open rate and 13% click-through rate. So it’s a freaking product update like you shouldn’t get 13% CTR.

EmojiHealth Stats

So another example, I love this one. These guys are doing like content about health for teenagers. And they sent 14 broadcasts in a week. So 2 broadcasts a day. So they’ve sent over 20,000 messages, 84% open rate. And the most important part, 14 broadcasts, one week and they get 10% CTR on each broadcast.

Eric:

That’s incredible. So talk a little bit about the nitty gritty, like when you say broadcast, when do you have the ability to message people? Is it if they’ve liked your page, you can message them or do they currently have to be on the page?

Mike:

That’s a great question. A lot of people ask like “how can I message all the people who like my page?” You cannot. That’s not possible. That’s not how the API works. What you can do is you can message people who have messaged you or somehow interacted with your page on Messenger. And there are several ways to do that.

How to grow your subscribers?

How to grow your subscribers, basically it would employ the same strategies that you would do for building an email list, like a lead magnet or having something of value that the person has to reach out to you on Messenger to actually get it.

Eric:

So you literally put an ad saying, “Hey message us if you want this amazing content.”

Mike:

If you don’t have an audience already, you can use ads. If you already have a following, you can, for example, link to your Messenger page on your social media. If you have a website you can do like opt-in widgets. The same as email. Like you can have an opt-in widget that says, “Hey do you want to get like seven free guitar lessons?”

One Button

And instead of entering the email, there is one button. Like, “Get the free lessons” You press the button, conversation starts, automatically. It’s one button. You don’t have to enter anything. So they press a button, the conversation starts, now you can message that person. When that person replies to that conversation, you get their info. The first name, last name, user profile, picture, gender, language etc. So lots of it.

Eric:

And then, so you’ve opened this conversation, you have the ability either to engage them in an automated fashion through some sort of script that you’ve sort of written with a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” kind of mentality or you can also have manual at that point. Can you also have the ability to chat manually?

Mike:

It’s both of those. So it depends on the business. So if you have, for example, I’m gonna get to that example and say how you can actually use manual chat to get more sales through Messenger.

Revealed Recordings Stats

So last example, revealed recordings. They do like 30-second previews. It’s like one of the biggest EDM music labels in the UK. So they use ManyChat to broadcast to their audience like 30-second sneak previews of the upcoming singles like every week. So they did 3 broadcasts in 3 weeks. So not quite like Emoji Health, not like two times a day, one time a week. They’ve sent 18,000 messages. The open rates, the fans love it. The open rates are 88%. But guess like how many people actually clicked to listen to the 30-second preview on Soundcloud?

Eric:

13%?

Mike:

It’s 56%.

Eric:

Wow.

Mike:

I had to recheck that data because I didn’t believe that, like that was the engagement but it is. Because we know exactly when the person clicked because we hash the link. So it goes through us. So yeah, it’s content. So if people love your content you can get crazy engagement on Messenger.

Where is the Money? DigitalMarketer

If we’re talking about the money, actually like DigitalMarketer was one of the first to embrace our platform and talk heavily about it on their own conference. They did so because they ran a small test. They spent $700 on Facebook ads and they directed that traffic to a conversation where they sold their like lab HQ subscription. In like, I think, in 4 days, they’ve made like $3,500 in sales in 3 days. So they got that like 500% ROI. They just went crazy about it. So they’re now using us really, really, heavily.

Where is the Money? Frank Kern

Another one is Frank Kern. He sold, I think, his mastermind. He spent $3,000 on ads. There was an optimisation problem, I would do it. Like he directed the traffic not to the conversation itself but to a landing page, where you had to actually convert into a conversation but still he got over $10,000 in sales but it took him like 13 days.

Eric:

iStackTraining soon to have a bot on the Facebook page. You can check us out there because we’re definitely gonna be implementing this.

Where is the Money? Sean Patrick Simpson

Mike:

The one guy, the messenger alchemist, is Sean Patrick Simpson. He was selling his training course and he spent $2,000 on Facebook ads and made $10,000 in 4 days. He talked about his case like he got that case right at the conference. So he started running the ads like a few days before the conference and he got like this crazy result. So DigitalMarketer even pulled him up and said like, “You’ve got to talk about these results” And he did and we shared his story.

Best Time To Get On A New Channel

Right now it’s the best time to get on a new channel this. In 6 months, in the year, it’s gonna be everyone. The prices are gonna rise. It’s always the same, like with any marketing channel.

Eric:

How is it the same in a way? Because aren’t they sort of your audience in a way? Is it just because Facebook is gonna limit the number of messages that people can receive? So, therefore, there’ll be some scarcity there?

Mike:

Yes, it is your audience. And you can say like on Instagram it’s your audience, and like on Twitter it’s your audience. But the more people subscribe to other pages, the more messages they receive, the less attention you get. So I guess that the more people use any channel, the less effective it becomes. It’s like a rule. So we can talk about what are the mechanisms of that, but I think right now, we are using ourselves, the way that ManyChat bot right now works, when you subscribe, we subscribe you to a 20-minute delay and then we send you another follow-up message.

Facebook Policy, Compliance Rules

Because Facebook policies are really important to us. We work with the Facebook engineering team very closely and help them test all the APIs that they are putting out because we are one of the biggest platforms on it. The compliance rules are pretty simple. You have 24 hours after a user interaction to send whatever you like. Anything that is legal. After 24 hours, you can send only content that the person subscribed to. So they define the content like productivity, news, and there was the 3rd one like calendar invites or something like this. So you cannot send like ads and promotions after 24 hours. But the way you interact, like I think it’s a very reasonable rule because you don’t want people to be spammed to death and that channel will just stop working.

Messenger Marketing

So the way that you do actual messenger marketing is you subscribe people to actual content like, blogging, blog posts that you put out, YouTube videos that might interest them. And when they interact with that, open the link, send you a message. There’s 24 hours when you can start the automation to actually do the sale that you like.

Eric:

And then you can get them back again with another piece of content and re-open that way.

Mike:

Yeah, that’s basically how you do it. We were the first ones to actually implement the drip campaigns inside Facebook Messenger.

Frank Kern’s Clever Strategy

You asked about live chat and so Frank Kern, on the previous slides. What he did is, I think it’s pretty clever because he ran the ads to Facebook Messenger, to a landing page that led to Facebook Messenger. He used automation to pre-qualify the leads. So he asked 3 questions on every incoming lead, “Hey do you have a business? Yes or no.” Two replies. If the person clicked yes, he says like, “Cool, do you want more sales or do you want more leads?” You press one of those. And then the 3rd question is like, “What’s your like monthly budget?” and when you get to that question, you have a qualified lead that’s right now looking at your Messenger that just pressed the button that they have over $5,000 in the budget. You can configure ManyChat to send you a notification every time you have a qualified lead coming in. So basically, you just set this up and then you open your phone. You get notifications when you get new leads that are qualified. And you can just start chatting with them because we also have live chat. So you can start, “Hey John…”

Eric:

Because they qualified at the $5,000.

Get An Automated Lead From a Facebook Ad

Mike:

Yeah, they’re qualified, they answered the 3 questions. Now you can come in, human takeover, it’s not the bots. It’s you actually typing in and saying, “Hey do you want to have a 15-minute call about your digital marketing challenges?” And they can reply to you, “Oh is this a bot?” Like, “No, it’s actually me, do you want to have a call right now for 15 minutes and we are gonna see like if it’s good for you or not?” And they’re like, “Okay, what’s your number?” They type it in the number and you just call them in. That’s it. You just got an automated lead from a Facebook ad that’s qualified right into your phone at the perfect time to reach out to them.

Eric:

Amazing. So I want to connect this just a little bit more with our audience. So this conference has a lot of e-commerce people. There is a lot of, sort of, media arbitrage out there who are just doing buying on different traffic sources and running it directly to offers. Who in our audience is this something that, you know, obviously, I’m gonna apply this on iStackTraining. I think it’s a no-brainer. It’s gonna be anyone running education or these kinds of things where you have your own page like, who else in our audience? I have a few examples here. So talk about how it could be used for e-commerce for instance, for someone who’s built out a store.

How Can ManyChat Be Used For E-commerce

Mike:

Yes, so I think for e-commerce it’s a great channel because you can actually work. There are different types of e-commerce, if it’s a high ticket sale, you can actually work with a person and work with their objections before they make the sale and like that increases conversions heavily. If you want to automate everything, then you can actually also work with the objections of the person but automatically. So you would send them more materials about the product but they have to subscribe to it. So if they want to learn about your magic gadget or something or the area that you’re selling in, you can subscribe to them, you can drip them and that’s now your audience. And they are gonna buy from you much more likely than anything else. So I would use it.

Direct Shopify Integration

We are working on a direct Shopify integration at this point. So you would be able to, if it’s inside 24 hours, you would be able to do cart abandonment automation right inside Messenger. So you would get a message, “Hey did you want to still buy that item or not etc.” There’s the delivery option, shipments, updates, Shopify already does them. But their platform is not directed at marketers, it’s more about like, “Hey send messages to people who bought shipment orders etc.” We think it’s a great way to engage with them again. So you would send a shipment update and if the person interacts and you can start the new automation to maybe possibly upsell, cross-sell, etc. because the 24-hour window is still open.

Eric:

And imagine something with lead gen could be quite interesting too. I know there’s some solar lead generators in the audience and lots of people doing other kinds of lead gen. One thing that I’m interested in, in that example, where you can potentially really have a qualifying conversation, where you answer a series of questions. There’s a lot of lonely people out there, they love chatting, generally. Where does the rubber meet the road? Like, do the sales happen on Messenger? Can the sales happen on Messenger or is it generally at this point best designed to warm up a lead and then send it through to an actual website where purchases happen?

Where Do Sales Happen

Mike:

Yeah, people in the West think that Messenger is some kind of like a toy. In Asia, people buy houses on Messenger. People buy cars on WeChat. That’s the world that we are going directly into. And that’s the world that Facebook wants us to live in because they want the Messenger to be the one-stop, the solution to communication between customers, like C2C and B2C. So yes, definitely you can have sales on Messenger. I think it’s the same as mobile sales. Mobile sales are growing. Everybody’s getting comfortable with them. Now, you can actually talk to the person before the sale and if the person says, “Okay, send me the payment link.” You send them the payment link. They just go inside, they pay for it on a separate, the web page opens inside Messenger itself so you don’t even leave for Safari.

Messenger Payments

And Messenger has its own Messenger Payments platform. So if you’re selling anything physical in the US, you will be able to actually integrate with that platform. You will be able to send the invoice inside Messenger. And the person, if he has his credit card attached to Messenger just puts a thumb and the transaction is done. He doesn’t leave the Messenger at all. Messenger is heavily pushing people to add their credit cards and debit cards to their accounts through like peer-to-peer transactions. Right now, in the US, you can send money to your friends on Messenger just by typing like, “Hey, I want to send $5” and like it’s done. So when Messenger has more people with their credit cards and like Messenger Payments is gonna be the thing. You’re gonna be paying for things from Messenger with your thumb.

Eric:

Interesting. So you know if I’m gonna tell my mom about this technology, she’s gonna be like, “Those bots are so annoying.” Not just my mom, probably a lot of people would say that. A lot of people would say, “Oh I don’t want this thing knocking at me and telling me that it wants to chat with me” But let’s talk about a little bit of the mind switch that happens with messenger marketing and maybe why that’s not the right perspective to have.

Forget Chatbots

Mike:

Yeah, personally I hate the word bot. I think the whole industry went into a very incorrect direction with like bots and AI and NLP. I love those areas, I think we’re gonna incorporate a lot of those things in the future but at this point what the audience, the marketer needs to know is, forget bots, forget chatbots. It’s not about this. Messenger is a new channel of communication. It’s 10x more engaging than anything out there. If you want to be like ahead of the curve, if you want to engage with the audience, if your audience uses Facebook Messenger that’s another thing. Somebody may be from countries where Facebook Messenger is not that popular. You shouldn’t use it obviously. But Facebook Messenger is the number one messaging app in the US, in Canada, in Italy and in a lot of countries and in Thailand, in Indonesia. So mostly North America. Europe is like half Whatsapp, half Messenger. Southeast Asia is all Messenger. This is the new channel of communication. And you should learn how to use it, how to actually engage with people through it because email is not gonna be an option in the future.

Eric:

And already, it has diminishing returns right. One question I had about Facebook was how does Messenger integrate actually with Facebook Ads? How can interactions within Facebook Messenger actually come to inform you outside of Messenger, your Facebook advertising? Can you drive them into a place and set the pixel to record that they’ve had a conversation?

Connect Facebook Ads With Messenger

Mike:

Yes, so the way you connect Facebook ads with Messenger is, first of all, there is an actual destination. Messenger is an ad destination, right now, at this point. So there is a new type of ad which is not actually new. It’s been around almost for a year but like not a lot of people know about this because nobody knows how to use it properly and that’s like the opportunity. It’s called the click to Messenger ad and basically what it does is, it creates an ad when you click it, a conversation starts. That’s it. The person doesn’t leave that like for a landing page. You click it, the conversation starts. That’s it. And, you can automate that conversation. So you can actually set up, there are 5 different ads, 5 different offers that lead to 5 different automation and it’s gonna be the same page chatting with those people and it’s going to be the same list. But everything that applies to email applies to this thing. So you can tag those people, you can segment those people, you can put them into flows.

Eric:

Interesting. So what’s Facebook’s general stance in your experience right now with messenger marketing? You know, we heard the last panel with Maria. There’s always an interesting relationship between what’s happening with CPA advertisers, for instance. Is messenger, obviously Facebook wants people to get into messenger marketing. Is it a good time for that reason because it’s fresh?

Facebook Is Very Welcoming

Mike:

Yes, so right now, yes, Facebook always wants people to start using new channels because it’s where the revenue comes from. So they are at this point, very welcoming to all people coming onto the Messenger platform and starting to use it and starting to get results. Of course, in the future, Facebook is the platform they need to make money. They will make part of it more paid. So instead of like getting 500% ROI, you will start getting 150% ROI but yeah. At this point, Facebook is very welcoming. I would expect it to start changing gradually as more people start to embrace the platform. But at this point, it’s just more welcoming that everyone would expect.

Eric:

Yeah, so everyone out there. I wanted to talk quickly about your company and the growth of your company. How many people are you now?

Mike:

We are right now over 15 people.

Eric:

And you’ve grown probably pretty quickly, I imagine.

Mike:

Yes.

Eric:

That’s pretty exciting. And then the use has just skyrocketed, you’re saying. It’s been like a pretty wild ride?

Mike:

Yeah, so basically a year ago, we had zero companies using us because we launched on the, our product launch which we considered the official one, was on 26th of May. So a little bit over a year ago, we just launched. Now it’s over 20,000 businesses.

Eric:

Amazing and you’ve got DigitalMarketer.

Mike:

Yeah, DigitalMarketer.

Eric:

They just love it. You’ve got Mixergy as well right.

First Paid Client: Mixergy

Mike:

Mixergy, Andrew Warner’s building a Bot Academy. He was our first paid client. So he reached out to us in July last year and he was really ahead of the curve. I don’t know why bots excited him so much but he was our first paid client. He’s now doing Bot Academy, teaching other people how to build bots, Facebook bots for their clients. And yeah, really implementing and really successful. I just got a broadcast from him.

Eric:

Nice. So if people want to learn more, say they wanted to do, I don’t know, like a bot workshop, a Messenger workshop. They wanted to build their first one. Where would you recommend they do this?

Mike:

This is a setup question. Eric invited me to join him for a workshop tomorrow to help build a bot in 1 hour. I’m gonna be joining him. Anyone who wants to actually experience what messenger marketing is, how can you build a bot yourself using a platform, visual drag-and-drop platform without coding like ManyChat, welcome to join us tomorrow. Yeah, would be really excited to see everyone.

Eric:

Tickets are still available.

Mike:

What?

Eric:

Tickets are still available iStackTraining.com/live

Mike:

Yeah.

Eric:

Thank you so much for coming by. Today is really interesting conversation. I urge everyone to go out there, and maybe show that link one more time of where people can go and just start kind of playing around here.

ManyChat.com

Mike:

Sure, it’s manychat.com/awe. It will lead you to the page where you have to press the “Open in Messenger” and you will be able to actually experience our bots and the specific interaction that we’ve built for AWE. It’s a small one but it’s specific to you. So yeah. Everyone is welcome to join it.

Eric:

Nice, yeah it’s super exciting when a new medium appears. And so thanks, everyone. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you soon.