Sick of running Messenger contests that only attract time-wasters and tire-kickers?
Kerry Fitzgibbon of Kerry Fitzgibbon Digital has developed a proven contest strategy using Manychat and Recurring Notifications (RNs) to drive more sales – even before the competition winner is announced!
Here’s a deep dive into this strategy, and the results it achieved.
Overview
Kerry Fitzgibbon is an Australian-based coach, agency owner, and founder of international sportswear brand, Marathon Girl.
As a Facebook Preferred Partner, Kerry has specialized in Facebook marketing for 13 years. She helps business owners build long-term, sustainable, and scalable income streams using Meta Technologies.
She discovered Manychat in 2016.
- $28,000 in sales
- 250% return on ad spend (ROAS)
- 17,300 leads costing just 64 cents per lead
Challenge
Kerry has had great success running contests using Manychat, but she encountered a problem – once people have entered the competition, you could only message them once for free within the 24-hour window, or once outside of that window using One-Time Notifications.
The alternative was using paid broadcasts (also known as sponsored messages), but she also found the results were so varied that it wasn’t a reliable option.
“It’s very finicky. Sometimes the paid broadcast would go out to everyone, other times it would just sit there, $0 spent, and you wouldn’t be able to reach your list,” says Kerry. “So this was super frustrating for us.”
Goal
Kerry’s contest strategy works for both established and new businesses, both online and physical stores. She’s used it for clients in a range of industries, including professional services, physical products, informational products, MLMs, to name a few.
Using Recurring Notifications with a contest, Kerry has helped clients sell products at different price points, including $50 items through to $5,000 retreats, on Messenger.
“In fact, we were really shocked that we were able to sell a $5,000 service product using Recurring Notifications,” she adds. “Reopening that 24-hour window to send them messages has been an invaluable tool for us.”
Recurring Notifications allow businesses to re-engage their customers after 24 hours of last interaction, with prior permission, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, using Manychat’s broadcasting tool.
The Recurring Notification is broken down into 3 communication windows:
- Daily over 6 month period after opt-in (one message per calendar day)
- Weekly over 9 month period after opt-in (once every calendar week)
- Monthly over 12 month period after opt-in (once every calendar month)
It’s a game-changer for interacting with your subscribers – for free – after the initial 24 hours has passed. Plus, you can use more than one type of Recurring Notification in your flows.
The strategy
Kerry runs a contest to build her list and then sends out messages to encourage her subscribers to attend her webinars. From there, she upsells participants to her $1,000 product, The Social Media Profits Program.
In the past, Kerry used email, SMS, and paid broadcasts to re-engage her subscribers, but they had varying – and inconsistent – levels of success.
So she added Recurring Notifications into the mix at the end of the funnel.
“This increases webinar turn-up rate,” explains Kerry. “In fact, our turn-up rates from people who opt-in through Messenger and opt-in for Recurring Notifications, are up to 80% to 90% on a free webinar. We’re just making way more money from building our lists.”
Because subscribers have opted into Recurring Notifications, she can continue to message them either daily or weekly, depending on what they’ve opted in for, and promote more events – all for free.
First, Kerry runs a Clicks-to-Messenger ad detailing the prize – a highly desirable product or service and targeting her ideal client, which opens up the Manychat flow.
In the flow, Kerry collects names, emails, and phone numbers to build three lists with that.
“This gives us omnichannel presence, so we can communicate with people in the way that they’re used to communicating and whichever channel that they prefer to communicate in,” she adds. “That gives us a lot of leverage.”
Kerry also includes a call to action in her flows that encourages the audience to either book a call or purchase a product before the winner of the contest is announced.
“Typically with this type of strategy, people hold out and say, ‘I’m just going to wait to see if I win.’ But we incentivize our leads to buy something now or call us before the end of the contest. Of course, if they end up winning, we will credit back what they’ve spent already.”
Kerry offers discount codes or something that’s highly incentivized to get them to do that and adds Recurring Notifications at the end to notify leads of new products and drives more sales that way.
Kerry used this exact contest strategy for Cheese Therapy, a cheese subscription box company, who found their ads were getting more expensive, and their emails and SMS open rates were dwindling.
Kerry ran a Clicks-to-Messenger ad, where one lucky person could win a 12-month cheese subscription box.
More than 20,000 people clicked on the ad, and they captured more than 17,750 email addresses.
As a reward for entering the competition, Kerry offered them a 20% off coupon for a therapy box, which expired before the contest end date, with 56% of leads clicking through to purchase.
After that, she sent a follow-up message after people entered the contest. This message asks them to like the Facebook page and follow on Instagram for extra entries.
Next, a second message is sent that asks if they want to be notified when the winner is announced, using Recurring Notifications.
Similarly, another Recurring Notification opt-in asks leads if they want to become a VIP and receive weekly messages.
“That’s just one way that we do that so we would be able to follow up and get even more sales from here,” says Kerry.
The results
Kerry ran the Cheese Therapy ad for 20 days, which generated 17,300 leads that submitted their complete contact details (email address and phone number), costing just 64 cents per lead.
With the 20% discount coupon, they made $28,000 in sales, resulting in a 250% return on ad spend (ROAS).
Subsequently, using Recurring Notifications, the company made an additional $32,000, and has generated more sales since.
“In fact, the client fired their expensive advertising agency and this is one of their main strategies to supercharge sales with Recurring Notifications,” adds Kerry.
Key takeaways
To get the most out of Recurring Notifications and turbocharge your sales like Cheese Therapy, Kerry’s strategy incorporates these three elements:
- Incentivize your audience to purchase before the contest winner is announced. This way, you can boost sales before the grand prize is drawn.
- Use Recurring Notifications in more than one way. You can use them for opting your leads into winner announcements and encouraging them to become a VIP subscriber to opt into weekly offers.
- Don’t neglect your email and SMS lists! Make sure you gather customers’ email addresses and SMS numbers to communicate with them across many touchpoints.
Using Recurring Notifications with Manychat, businesses can supercharge contests and attract more leads and sales in as little as 20 days.
