372: Why Instagram DM Automation Is Crushing Ecommerce With Mike Yang

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You’re listening to the My Wife Critter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I’m thrilled to have Mike Yang back on the show, and Mike is the founder and CEO of ManyChat. And in this episode, we’re gonna talk about the latest Facebook marketing medium, Instagram DM automation, specifically in the context of running an e-commerce store. We’ll talk about how it works and why this feature is especially important for e-commerce brands. But before we begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

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I also want to thank Clevio, who’s also a sponsor of show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their info,

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And then finally, I want to mention another podcast that I started with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Mike Yang back on the show. And if you don’t remember Mike, he was a guest back on episode 215 where we talked about Facebook Messenger bots. He is the founder of ManyChat, the leading chat marketing software in the world. And it’s actually the chat software that I use for both my store and my blog. Now today what we’re going to do is we’re going to discuss a really cool feature that has just arrived that is going to be very beneficial for e-commerce store owners, Instagram DM automation.

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And this is exciting because a lot of store owners make money from Instagram and most of the automation functions that were available for Facebook Messenger are actually now on Instagram. And with that, welcome to show, Mike, how are you doing today? Hey, Steve, thanks for having me again. So last time you were here, I want to say that Messenger bots were still pretty new, but things have settled down a bit and I don’t feel like the rules have changed as much in the past year, which is like a lifetime for Facebook. But before we actually…

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talk about Instagram, can we just kind of comment briefly on the Messenger bot landscape? Because we kind of, it’s been a while since we had talked about it. I know in the past couple of years, Facebook has imposed a lot of new rules on Messenger and it’s now basically pay to play. So what is your views on just Messenger right now and how have people been using it? Yeah, think Messenger has definitely seen some changes when

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from the first time it was released in 2016. Over the course of these changes, think Facebook has really tried to nail the balance between giving businesses the tools to talk to their customers, but also preserving a good customer experience. Initially, you could do all sorts of things like broadcasting to your entire list without any limitations and that sort of thing.

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I think overall right now, Messenger is in a place where you can definitely get a lot of value out of it if your folks, if your audience is on Messenger and is actively using Facebook. And for some countries, that’s a very significant portion of their customers. For other countries where like Facebook might be, or Facebook Messenger might be less popular than compared to another Facebook owned property, let’s say WhatsApp, right? There could be better avenues

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do automation and to get that those conversion rates for your business. So I would say that you always, as a business, you always have to look at where your audience is and optimize for that channel, right? So we are seeing a lot of great cases for Messenger in countries like US, UK, Australia, Canada, and also countries in the

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Southeast Asia, so countries like Philippines, Vietnam, and others, where Messenger is just very, very popular. Some of our agency partners have grown tremendously over the course of 2020, leveraging because they were able to mix Messenger and let’s say, for example, SMS. know you, Steve, we’ve talked before, started the show, and you’re now big on SMS. think SMS is a great re-engagement channel, which gives you

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independent access to your audience. And that’s why ManyChat has implemented not only Messenger inside the platform, like people know ManyChat as a Messenger marketing platform, but we’ve actually had SMS and email built into the platform since 2019. So we consider ourselves an omnichannel platform that is focused on chat as the way to communicate with customers.

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And we always say that whenever you wherever you start a conversation with your customers, be it on the website, through Messenger or Instagram or anywhere else, make sure to always capture their email, make sure to always capture their phone number, because that’s how you make sure you have independent access to your customer base. You’re not renting your audience, you’re owning it. The thing with many chat, seems like your philosophy has always been to get the opt in.

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through chat and not through SMS, right? Or through Facebook, I should say, primarily the past couple of years. Why not just go all on SMS first instead of having to go with Messenger or some other ways to actually opt in? That’s a great question. So first of all, I would say that we do have, if you’re saying, for example, growing SMS first, customers…

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then we do have options for you to like build a widget for your website where you capture just the SMS. So that’s inside the platform and you actually can do that. But I think that for a lot of people, the chat is where we’re a worldwide focused company, right? We’re not focused just in the US market. US is a big market for us, but it’s not the only one. And if you think around SMS marketing,

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the market where it really shines is US market because of how cheap the SMS are compared to like let’s say SMS in Europe where it could be 10 times costlier. I wasn’t aware of that. Okay. And for example, in the US you’re paying for example, $1 to rent a local phone number so that it just doesn’t come from like a lot of random numbers and people can save it. In a country like

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I don’t remember which one specifically. think it was Germany. The same number would cost you like 40 or $60 a month just to have the number without even sending any SMS messages. I see. So for us, global focus was always key to our success. And we definitely see SMS as being a very important channel, but the way you arrive at them, I think has been crucial to our positioning and to how we think about the space.

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And you’re right, the majority of phone numbers that people collect through main chats do come from places like Facebook Messenger or now Instagram. So how does what has changed over, I guess, in Europe and the UK? I was a little surprised to see you mention that it works really well over there because all the privacy issues. Yes. What does have been resolved?

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So Facebook has changed the, Facebook has limited certain features back in December, 2020 for European countries. But they’ve rolled back those changes during the first half of 2021 because they were, they just needed to build out like servers that do not sit on US soil as far as I understand. And they just needed to make sure that those

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features that they make available do not contradict any European laws. They just took the time to do that and they rolled back the changes. Oh, OK. So it’s back to normal. So it’s pretty much the same experience now in the US and the EU. Yes. OK. Great. Great. OK. So without another way, let’s talk about what’s exciting. The number one thing that’s exciting right now is the opening up of the Instagram APIs. And I think not a lot of people understand how

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Some people are divided into camps, I would say, when I talk to folks. It’s obvious to them how important Instagram is, or they’re maybe not a huge user and they don’t get it because they haven’t felt it themselves. But Instagram automation, and I’m talking specifically around Instagram DM automation, that’s going to be such a big driver of

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business value for a lot of e-commerce folks, for lot of local businesses, professional services. It’s hard for me to overstate how important that’s going to be. So let me start from the beginning. Back in fall of last year, Facebook has announced that they’re going to be opening up Instagram APIs. That was somewhere around September, October, 2020. They started the beta and now during F8,

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On June 2nd, basically a few weeks ago, they announced that the Instagram API is ready and they’re ready to open it up to more businesses. basically by the end of August this year, it should be open to everybody completely. Right now it’s open to businesses with 10 to 100K followers. So if you have less than 10K or over 100K followers right now, you cannot use it. And in July, there’s going to be

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from 1K to 100K. And in August, they are going to be opening up to everybody on the whole platform. And the way that the thing that’s opening up is the ability to automate your DMs. So as a business, you will be able to automate DMs on Instagram. And the reason this is so exciting and the reason this is so powerful for all of the businesses that are already using Instagram,

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I’ll come back to how many businesses that is, is because you’re going to be able to collect more leads, collect phone numbers and emails, as we’ve talked about, that’s very important, follow up with people, generate more reviews, generate more sales, qualify people and qualify those leads, nurture them and then convert them to actual paying customers all on autopilot. Yeah. So I think that’s

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everything that you’ve experienced with Facebook Messenger is right now coming to Instagram. And not like every feature, if I’m being super, not specific, but detailed, some of the features are getting Instagram is taking their time to support them. the more important thing is that Instagram DM is…

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going to be available to everybody in August and it’s already available to any business account with 10 to a hundred K followers. And the one thing that I think is very, is very important about this is that until up until this point, automating DMs on Instagram was basically against the rules because there was no, there were no APIs to do that. Like if you were to try and do this, you would get banned.

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as a business, you would get banned doing this because it was against the policies of Facebook. And now everybody needs to know because of how long, like since the start of Instagram, people were trying to automate DMs because of how good that works for the business. Now, a lot of businesses got hurt and people are always asking me, is this kind of like, will this get me banned or anything? And I just want to stress this. This is

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an official API coming from Facebook that they’ve announced on F8 on June 2nd this year. So this is 100 % green lighted. And now for the first time in history, you can legitimately automate your DMs on Instagram without the fear of getting banned. yeah, this is like, I can talk to you about like the case studies and like some of the actual results that our beta customers have gotten.

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But this is huge news. Okay, so let’s, let me just explain something to the listeners here. I think this Instagram automation is a lot bigger than Messenger because, especially for e-commerce stores, in the context of e-commerce, a lot of people are getting a lot of sales off of Instagram, mainly because of a lot of the built-in e-commerce features, but people seem to like Instagram for shopping. And a lot of the sales are actually made through direct Messenger, or DMs. And in fact, I know with my Messenger account,

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when people ask me about e-commerce, all that transaction, those all occur in the DMs. And the fact now that you can actually automate that, in my opinion actually, is much bigger than Facebook Messenger, where most people were using Messenger as a platform just to communicate with other people and friends, whereas Instagram, it seems like shopping is a lot more mainstream on Instagram. Exactly.

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And what I wanted to also say though, and I was wanting your opinion on this is, you know, it was wide open for Messenger also. And I’ve actually gotten blocked on Messenger a couple of times when I didn’t feel like I was breaking the rules. I imagine something similar will probably eventually happen with IG where, you you might get your, not your account banned, but maybe the ability to DMs banned. There are rules involved, right? I mean, it’s not just like willy nilly DMing anyone that you want whenever you want.

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So you have the rules, but those are very much, they don’t leave a lot of room for interpretation compared to Messenger. And I think this is a good thing. So for example, in Messenger, the number one reason why people were getting blocked or banned was because they misunderstood how message tags work. So in message tags is a way for you to message people beyond 24 hours.

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beyond the last message that the person has sent after 24-hour window. And they have really specific use cases. like Facebook allows you to send, let’s say, an account update or a post-purchase update or a confirmed event update. There are specific use cases what you can send to people on Messenger. And Instagram just doesn’t have message tags. You just cannot message people beyond 24 hours.

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So that is out of the picture, right? And on one hand, you can say like, hey, like this, this provides less ability to message folks on the other. There is no way for you to get banned because you’re using, you’re misusing message tags because there is no message tags right now. I don’t know if they’re going to introduce them or not, but I think this right now creates a safety net for businesses to not worry about those things and just use Instagram DM automation

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in a way that’s easy and easy to understand and easy to comprehend. Right. So basically your tool will not allow someone to message someone past 24 hours. Yes. So you can’t really break the rules as long as you’re using a tool is what you’re saying. Right. Yes. And like, it’s not even us. think, I think it’s on the, even on the messenger, on the, on the Facebook side, the API will not just fire. Like it will say like, Hey, you’re outside the standard messaging window.

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OK, but it’s OK if you pick up the app and still message someone, right? It’s distinguished. Yes, it is distinguished. So I don’t know how familiar with the listeners are. Maybe if you guys aren’t familiar with Messenger, go listen to some of my other Messenger episodes. What I want to do now is kind of talk about some of the differences between the two and what you can do in one and not the other. For sure. So let me just first.

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talk about what you can actually do. Because I think for people who are using Instagram, they’re hearing Instagram DM automation and they’re like, so how does this help my business? Why would I use this? What can this do for me? And I think the key thing is that it can help you grow followers, it can help you grow engagement, it can help you get more leads and qualified leads.

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it could help you get more sales. And it sounds like magic, right? Who wouldn’t want more engagement, more followers, more leads, more sales, et cetera? So what is this all about? So let me give you an example of how DM automation could work for you because there’s a lot of use cases and it’s really flexible. So you have to get to know a few use cases to start then your creative process where you’re like, oh, I can do this for this thing, I do this for that. So one of the most simple campaigns that

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one of our beta customers did is what is called a story mention, opera reply, right? And his name is Fraser Brooks. don’t know. Have you heard about Fraser? No, I have not. So Fraser is an influencer and he has over a hundred K followers on Instagram and people mentioned him in stories all the time. And up until this point, those mentions got basically unnoticed because he gets a lot of notifications and like they just

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there’s nothing that’s happening there. So what he did is he set up a really simple automated reply, which is whenever somebody mentions him in the story, like attacks him in the story, he just says, like there’s a delay of like about a few minutes and it just says, thank you, right? And in a lot of different ways, like thank you, hey, thanks for the mention, thanks for mentioning me, et cetera. And the reason he does multiple different replies, because some people, has like core fans,

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would mention him multiple times during the week. And he didn’t want this to be like, he wanted to invest in like creating like multiple different replies so that people do not get bored with just like the same message firing to them. So what happened is his story engagement went from like where it was, it grew 30 to 40%. Off of automation. Off of just one automation.

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Just one simple flow. Hey, when somebody mentions me in a story, send them a message. Thank you for mentioning me, right? Like that’s considered an interaction. Just a mention is considered an interaction. it’s, it’s, considered, there is a trigger in the API that allows you to start a conversation with somebody who mentioned you in the story. Okay. Yes. Within 24 hours. Probably like that’s, that’s, that’s the question because like it would be, uh, the thing is that

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whenever you are mentioned, that creates an opportunity for you to follow up, like to start a conversation with that person. So, Okay. That’s cool. And that’s a very simple campaign, right? Like it doesn’t like it, like it will literally take you to set up like one minute, but you’re getting this very tangible results of like 30 to 40 % more engagement than stories. Now what he did next is, is, is he said he set up a keyword for he has a

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Summit, online summit that he was running. So he set up a keyword saying, like, if somebody mentioned summit, send them the link to the summit, right? And it would be like an automated reply to the website. So by the way, this like, this is actually a great way for people who do not have even 10k followers, once the Instagram DM automation is released to everybody, to have links and to send links if you’re not, if you don’t have the access to the scroll up feature, right? If you don’t have the 10k followers.

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So this was another thing. And when he did that story, he got over 200 visits in just half an hour. So what he did was he posted this story saying, DM me Summit to get the link to our new event. And he got everybody to just go there and message and start that conversation. Now, the cool thing about that is he can now, not only did he get the

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people visiting the website, he actually opened the 24-hour window. So now after people DM him Summit and got the link to the Summit, he can actually follow up with them and say, by the way, are you interested in coming? And you can have the quick replies there. So the quick replies are the ability for you as a business to present your customers with a few options that they can just tap like buttons instead of typing in.

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So it makes simpler for the customers to interact with your automation and can follow up and you can ask them for, if they’re interested in signing up, you can actually do the whole signup process without them having to leave the Instagram DMs. You can say, Hey, are you interested in coming? They say, yes. You can say, all right, great. What’s your email? Right. And then you can pass that email to your webinars software without having to leave the DMs.

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in at any point. So this is super and then you can also take that email and pass it to your ESP. So you can do both things at once. And now you’re growing your email list. Right. This sounds better than the standard swipe up feature because typically you can only send them to a website. Now you can send them to something that’s automated where you can gather a whole bunch more information, right? Exactly. And you have 24 hours to do that. So think about following up with them next morning, which is still within 24 hours.

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Now you’re building a relationship. And this is, this is just one example, right? I can give you another one, a physical business. It’s a gym in Costa Rica, which due to COVID had to, had every, every customer needed to schedule their visit to the gym. They couldn’t just come in. They needed to like go to that calendar link and schedule their visit because the capacity was limited right to 50%. And

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what they did was they posted a story on Instagram saying, hey, DMS appointment, right? Select your location because they’re located in three different cities. And then we’ll send you the Academy link and you’ll be able to come and have your fitness session. they grew. the results have like, they grew their Instagram appointments, appointments coming from Instagram, nine X.

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Right? It went from like where it was like, I remember only the, the, the incredible increase. Like it was nine X basically growth, but the coolest thing. people would say like, well, maybe like it was, it was just a very slow base, like to start with, like, listen to this 40 % of their total bookings now came from Instagram. Instagram became the dominant channel for them to get their bookings.

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were initially wasn’t right. And this was due to the fact that if you think about like hiring the AC to do that, like you have to have like a lot of people 24 seven to reply to folks and still it’s going to, they will have to wait. So right now it’s instantaneous and it’s 24 seven and like many just starts at 15, like $10 a month. So, so it doesn’t cost you a fortune to have this automation and to provide that customer.

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experience where people can just get an instant response, go sign up and follow up with them. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP.

26:22
So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Counsel provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry,

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You name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. Let me just comment why I like Instagram automation better than Messenger automation. So I think a couple of years ago, I can’t remember exactly when, Messenger became pay to play.

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In order to reach your audience, actually had to pay for an ad, set up the ad. It’s actually, oftentimes I’ve been too lazy to do it just because it takes a while to just set up that ad. With Instagram, with Stories, you can reach your audience constantly for free and get them on the to reengage. So it’s almost like Messenger back in the good old days when you could just broadcast to everyone. Exactly. The Stories and the posts,

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This is the coolest thing. They are the re-engagement. You don’t need the 24 hour rule and the message tags to reach your audience. Instagram’s organic reach is already at 20 to 40%, depending on the content and everything else. But it’s multiple times higher. What’s organic reach for a Facebook page? Is this like 1%, 2%, 3 %? On Instagram, you’re getting 30 % with stories and with your posts.

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So you use stories, posts, lives and everything else to re-engage folks and you use DM automation to close them at scale automatically and instantly. And then you also use DM automation to follow up with them to nurture those relationships, to gather information, to qualify. And then if you want to, or if you need to, you can always use ManyChats live chat feature to take over the conversation.

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and continue it by hand, just manually. Yeah, so let me just highlight some use case scenarios for people listening, just in case they don’t quite understand the power of this. Typically in Instagram, the way you make a sale in physical products land is you might have a post with clickable links to your products and whatnot, or you might do a story where you have to do a swipe up. Now, you can just take people, because sometimes people might have questions about your products, or they might need to communicate with you in a certain way.

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Now you can actually just take them to a bot that will answer a lot more of their questions. You can actually get their information so you can reach out to them later. And all this is completely automated. It like adds another dimension to Instagram or social. It’s like what Facebook Messenger used to be for my business. Like back in the day when you could send out free broadcasts, man, it was incredible. And Instagram is just like this now because you can reach your existing audience so easily.

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Right now reels have really high reach and then also stories and the combination of those two means that you don’t really have to pay to play anymore.

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Unless something changes. love that. I love, I love how you put it. It adds a new dimension to Instagram because I believe like that’s exactly how I think about this. It used to be very much like you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, living in this one too many dimension where it’s like posts or stories or reels. It’s like, it’s a one too many type of communication. And then DMs were always kind of like the bottleneck thing, right?

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because you had to do it manually and small businesses do not have the budget to hire a bunch of like VAs and like to, like really reply instantly or if somebody writes at night or whatever it is. And the bigger guys are spending a fortune of the, if they actually need to do that. So now it’s like, unlock the power of your DMS, right? Use your reach to get to start that conversation.

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Use your posts, use your stories, your reels, lives to start the conversation and then use the conversation to close the sale. All right. Let’s talk about what you can do. Because you mentioned it’s a subset of what you can do in Messenger. there’s a couple of things you already mentioned already. You can you said you can have buttons that are like, I guess, can replies.

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Yeah, the quick replies, like basically you send them, for example, let me give you an example how it works. You can send a message saying, what does it, imagine you’re a marketing agency and you want to qualify the person who is talking to you and you want to ask about their marketing budget. You can say, hey, what’s your marketing budget? And underneath that message, there’s going to be a set of buttons which would say like, hey, it’s less than a thousand dollars. It’s 1000 to $5,000 a month.

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or it’s let’s say about $5,000 a month. And people do not need to type anything. They can just click one of those buttons and then the conversation will continue according to what they’ve chosen.

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That’s one thing that you can do on Instagram. And then you also mentioned the ability to gather emails and phone numbers, which can automatically be sent to your ESP, right? Yes. Yes. That’s the, that’s the menu chat feature, which is called user input. Basically you can say, Hey, I want to ask a person for their email. Right. And when they tell them, tell me their email, I went then to either, you can send them it to your favorite ESP or

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anywhere to your CRM or actually my favorite way to do it would be to actually use the main chats built in email feature because you can actually capture their email and you can then email them instantly something while also using their Instagram first name. How do you like that? Right. That’s the power of integration where you can use their Instagram information in your email marketing campaigns.

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I’m trying to think what are the things I do with Messenger. So is there a keyword automation? Like if they type in a word, you can Yes. Yes, you could do keyword automation. You can do follow-ups within the 24 hours. You could do the user input. You could do all the integrations and obviously all the things that you are able to do in terms of the flow builder. So conditional logic, delays.

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actions, sending out the messages, pictures, videos, audio, that sort of stuff. The generic template is coming to Instagram. So a generic template is basically a picture, like it’s like a card. It looks like a picture, a title, description, and a few buttons, like a card that you can send to your folks, which is another way to display a product. For example, you can have a card which has a

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picture of the product, name of the product, description, and then the button to buy it. Nice. So what, can you send like a receipt? Can you do transactional stuff right now? It depends on how you like want to display it, right? If you want to, for example, send that receipt as a text message or as a picture, you can certainly do that. But it would depend on the specific use case and like what platform you’re using and how you want to actually implement it.

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So this might be… I would say, let me just say this, the overall focus, and then I think this is going to make more sense. E-commerce is very important for Instagram. As you’ve noted earlier in this interview, E-commerce is a very much one of the top industries who are using Instagram and the ones that Facebook’s really counting on to…

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continue growing their Instagram ad revenue. So they’re investing heavily in Instagram shops and they’re going to be releasing more features for DM automation specifically for e-commerce. So look out for that. I was just going to ask you this in terms of ads, does that mean that you can, I guess you can already do this, but can you, are there click to messenger ads for Instagram? Yeah. Click to IGD. It’s not IGD. Click to.

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DMs, right? Click to IG messaging. Yes, there are. And the way it works is it’s a bit different actually from the way that the Facebook ads work because the ad displays options for starting conversation and then you can send one of them and it will start the conversation. So it’s a bit different, but it works in a similar fashion where the ad will lead to a conversation. Okay. And then you can do all the same things after that, right? Yes.

35:48
Yes. What features are missing right now that are coming online later? We don’t know, by the way, if they’re going to be coming online or not. But the ones that are missing, for example, is the gallery. You remember you could have a gallery that’s scrolling to the horizontal link. That’s one of the things that’s missing on IG right now. Another thing is message tags, as I mentioned. OTNs are not there.

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for those of you Messenger geeks who know what a one-time notification is. So those would be the ones. Let me ask you this. one of the features that I loved with, I don’t know if this is exclusive to Messenger now, it probably is actually, is the ability to communicate with outside apps. So for example, if I wanted to give out a coupon code, a special coupon code, a unique one, a dynamic one, I could start a message and then it would just.

36:44
ping my server or whatever, get the coupon code and return it. Is all that stuff still in place for? Yes, you could do that. Okay. Because it’s basically our technology. So it’s your technology. All we need from Instagram is the ability to send a text message and then it’s up to us to formulate the contents of the text message. So yes, it’s completely available and you can send and distribute special coupons, one-time coupons to your customers. Like one of the, let me tell you another about another

37:13
thing that one of our customers did, which was a very exciting thing. They actually did a giveaway, like it’s an e-commerce brand, Roma, and they did a giveaway, right? And how do you usually do a giveaway, right? You just post a, you post a post, right? You publish a post saying like, Hey, tag your friends for a chance to win. I think they did a shopping spree, right? For like thousands of dollars in their store. So for a chance to win the shopping spree and.

37:43
when they commented and tagged their friends, they got a message. Like it’s a Commons Broke Tool thing. So they got a message saying, hey, thanks for leaving a comment. You’re now part of the sweepstakes. You now have one entry ticket for the sweepstakes. If you want to get five more, what’s your email? Join our newsletter.

38:13
So people leave their email. They got over two and a half thousand emails like this. Then they asked, great, now you have six entry tickets. If you want to have five more, mention us in your stories. And they use the story mention trigger to actually see which people actually mentioned them in their stories.

38:40
And that way they got over 4,000 story mentions. That’s sweet. was just thinking to myself, like I used to run these messenger giveaways where it was completely on autopilot. I would announce a winner within 22 hours and people would just enter and spread the word. This could be expanded to exactly what you just talked about where you can actually make it viral by giving people more entries and just having many chat or whatever platform keep track of the number of entries and the odds of winning.

39:11
Yeah. And then I was thinking just now, just thinking outside the box, I had this loyalty program written for Facebook Messenger. It’d probably be better to move that over to Instagram, assuming all the backend technology is still all there. I mean, yeah, it’s just so much better. I actually like the fact that you can’t shoot yourself in the foot with Instagram. Yeah, because I know for me, I got actually caught up. I had to read your blog very carefully to figure out exactly why I got blocked.

39:39
But was just annoying. It seems like the chances of getting blocked are less because they are providing the safeguards. Yeah, there’s no message for Instagram. So just make sure that you’re like, you not doing anything illegal? Right. Like the other way you could get like, if you’re like, I don’t know, guns when you’re not supposed to or something. Right. That’s the other thing. But other than that, like

40:08
there is no message stacks and that was the primary reason for people to like misuse something. So on Instagram, there are those guardrails so you can be safe. Let’s switch gears just a little bit. I know that I’ve gotten burned every single year by Facebook in some way. Like they always give you something really good. Like in the beginning it was pages and I was getting tons of traffic off pages and then they nerfed the reach. Then groups were all the rage. So I started a group and then they nerfed that reach also.

40:37
And then there was Messenger, which was incredible for me like five years ago when I first got on it. And right now this Instagram sounds really good also. Like it reminds me of the good old days. So what are, and I know it’s hard to predict the future, but what are some ways that you feel like Facebook can charge for this? mean, are they going to be making their money off of the ads? Yeah, I think so. I think the ad business is the primary one that they’re driving.

41:07
And by the way, do you know how much Instagram is contributing to the overall Facebook revenue? I have no idea. Take a guess. I imagine it’s low. Is it low? Yeah, it could be. Okay, 25%. I don’t know. You’re actually pretty close. 36%. Okay. Instagram is already a third of all Facebook ad revenue. Right?

41:37
And the coolest thing is that Facebook has grown from 2019 to 2020, it has grown from 70 billion in ad revenue to 84 billion in ad revenue, the total Facebook. So they’ve 14 % or $14 billion, so 20%. So they’ve added $14 billion over the course of 2020. Now, did you know that Instagram drove

42:06
10 out of those $14 billion in growth.

42:12
Instagram is single-handedly responsible for 70 % of Facebook ad revenue growth. It’s the thing that’s right now driving the whole company forward. And by 2023, Instagram is going to grow from 36 % of Facebook’s total ad revenue to over 50%.

42:39
And Instagram is going to be the major source of ad revenue for Facebook. And that’s going to be a historic moment because at that point, Facebook’s main app is going to be making less money than the platform that they bought for a billion dollars, which is now becoming their main business. Here’s what scares me, Mike. Here’s what scares me. Like I’m going to jump on this bandwagon.

43:07
And right now stories and reels are, they get excellent reach. But then what do have to pay to start reaching more people on stories? Right. So I would say this, right? You, you know how this like, this is exactly the moment that you have to jump in. Yeah, right. You’ll get like three to four good years. Exactly. And that’s what you should care about because in the end, Facebook’s monetization engine

43:36
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I was actually expecting Instagram’s organic reach to decrease already, but it’s still good. People are still getting very healthy amounts of reach to their folks. And I think one of the reasons why that’s happening is because it’s harder to post on Instagram. So you get more quality content. Compare how much

44:05
posts you get on Facebook versus Instagram. On Facebook to post, you can just post an emoji. That’s it. It could be a post. You can just repost stuff really simply without adding any content to it. So there is a lot of new posts happening that are low value. On Instagram, every post takes time and preparation to actually make. You have to have a photo, you have to write the caption.

44:34
You have to like, it’s, it, is less like the, the, the quality of the posts is just higher. Would you agree with that? The quality of posts? definitely agree. It’s, it’s a lot more curated for sure. So I think that’s one of the key pieces because people spend the same amount of time on Facebook and on Instagram, just in terms of average number of minutes on Instagram, it’s 28 minutes on Facebook. It’s, think it’s around like 31. So like basically half an hour a day for at the average monthly user.

45:04
Some of people spend less, some of people spend hours. The average is about 30 minutes a day. So there is a lot of like, there is the same amount of attention, but because the posts are, there’s, there’s much less posts. That’s why you get much higher organic reach. Does this make sense? Like you have the same amount of attention, but the number of posts is less. So that’s why you get that. So.

45:33
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and if this is going to go away or not. History shows us that at some point, all good things come to become less and less lucrative, even something as great as email marketing, which still works, right? But still every year, more competition, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s why you’ve gotten on TikTok so early, right? Because right now is the best time.

46:02
That was a secret, Mike. I don’t want people to see my dance videos yet. Everybody go to Steve’s TikTok. But anyway, like the secret to marketing, one of the secrets to marketing is to be on that technology edge is to be the first to invest in learning the new platforms and new like strategies because you can get the best results.

46:31
once everybody is doing it and like it’s a safe bet, then you’re kind of like missed the best results. Yeah. Right. So I think right now, even if you’re skeptical of like what’s going to happen to Instagram, like, and DM automation in let’s say, three, four years, like, do it for the first two, three good years, because people are people like

46:58
There were so many people who just started their business because they were able to reach people through messenger and get those 80 % open rates and 20 % CTRs. Like I’ve heard, heard already like a lot of these stories, right? So you don’t have to like sign a contract in, uh, in blood that you’re going to be doing like Instagram for the rest of your life. Use the platforms that work for your business right now, invest in learning how they work.

47:29
leverage them to the max, grow your independent lists, phone numbers and emails. they’re always going to be the next big platform, etc. And you should definitely explore and take advantage of the ones that actually do establish themselves. again, I don’t see how… If you think about just the size of Instagram, there’s 50 million businesses who are using Instagram.

47:59
right around the world. And the number is growing, like the amount of money they’re spending on Instagram is growing like crazy because the channel works, right? Instagram’s revenue is growing 50 % year over year. And that’s when they’ve already reached tens of billions of dollars in revenue. And that’s why they’re going to overtake Facebook’s main revenue by like in 2023. So I would say that

48:28
just use it while it’s the good days, right? While you’re getting the reach and everything else, this is the time that you should be using this. This is the time that you should be leveraging this and getting all the best results before all the other marketers and business owners are using it. Because again, once it’s become something that everybody’s doing, all the metrics are gonna start just becoming more average and more average. And yeah, the secret

48:58
that you have right now is that we’ve been talking about messenger marketing for years now. now like with this Instagram DM automation opened up literally two weeks ago, like June 2nd. Right. So this is the time, like this is the year to do this because I when it just comes to marketing, everything that you said, I agree with, but the staples that will always be around in my opinion are email,

49:28
and SMS. So whatever you use to gather those, those are like the foundation for your business. I’m a little less skeptical about this IG messenger because there’s competition now. Like TikTok is around the corner and that’s probably why Reels is getting so much reach. That’s probably why stories reach will maintain because they have to compete with other social media platforms now. And as long as there’s healthy competition, things will probably be different than they have been in the past.

49:57
Agreed. So, hey Mike, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. Love it. Thanks for having me, Steve. And where can people find more about all this cool stuff that we’ve been talking about? For sure. If you go to manychat.com, manychat.com, you will be able to start your account for Instagram DM automation.

50:23
If you already have 10 to 100K followers, you’ll be able to start right away. If you don’t, you can still go and do a test account. Instagram, this is one of the things that we haven’t mentioned is that you can still do a test account by registering a new Instagram account that starts with test underscore and whatever name. Next, you can find this out on our blog, how to do this. But basically you can start testing Instagram DM automation today, even if you don’t have the followers.

50:52
just to get your hands on the Flow Builder and understand how it works. So by the time when your main account can actually do this, you’ll be able to just get going right away without having to spend a week learning all the cool stuff. One last thing that I wanted to mention is that we’re doing an Instagram Summit. That’s the first ever Instagram Automation Summit where we’re going to be talking about how you can use DM automation

51:20
what the future holds for this and all the cool new features. It’s happening July 15th to 16th. So if you want to take a part in that, and if you’re like a savvy marketer who is always on the edge or who wants to be the thought beater, this is the place to be. So go to igsummit.com, I G S U M M I T summit.com. That’s it. All the plugs that have Steve. Okay. I was like, when’s this guy going to finish?

51:50
plugs. Well hey, thanks a lot Mike for coming on the show. Appreciate it man. Thanks man. Alright, bye bye.

51:59
Hope you enjoyed that episode and were inspired to give Instagram DM automation a try. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 372. And once again, I want to thank Clabio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

52:25
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLABIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for eCommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dve. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

52:53
head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.