270: How To Build A Facebook Messenger Bot That Sells With Natasha Takahashi

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses Now today, I’m thrilled to have Natasha Takahashi on the podcast and Natasha runs the School of Bots and today she’s going to teach us how to create high converting Facebook Messenger Bots or e-commerce stores.

But before we begin, I want to give quick shout out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

I also want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who’s also a sponsor of the show whether you are just getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale Klaviyo offers fast simple and repeatable ways to grow now with Klaviyo you can personalize your marketing build your customer relationships and automate your online sales and it is now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences so want to talk about Klaviyo’s new entrepreneurial growth guide packed with must read blog post case studies and getting started content this guide will help you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth that moving to a new marking problem can be intimidating but Klaviyo helps you get up and going fast with proven technology and countless support researches they can actually check out this free content now over at Klaviyo.com/mywife once again that is Klaviyo.com/mywife now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Natasha Takahashi on the show. Now Natasha is someone who I met at Social Media Marketing world and she is an expert when it comes to Facebook Chat Bots. She is the chief marketing officer and founder of the school bots and she spoken at industry events, like social media marketing world and traffic and conversions now, I’m really happy to have Natasha on the show and with that welcome.

Natasha: Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I’m really excited for us to talk about all sorts of chatbots up today.

Steve: So Natasha, what’s funny about this is we didn’t really talk that much at Social Media Marketing world, but I listened to a couple of the other interviews that you’ve done and I heard in one that you actually dropped out of college to pursue the school of bots and the only reason I’m bringing this up is because you were Asian my parents would have flipped.

Natasha: I’m actually really excited that we are both Asian and that we get to talk about, you know online business and stuff because you’re totally right. I think that in the Asian Community, there’s still such a big stereotype and in terms of you know, starting your own thing, Or like leaving College leaving that traditional route, right? And so I’m really excited that we both kind of have that same angle so we can talk about this because I usually don’t get to really talk about this because people just don’t get it.

Steve: So did they flip or?

Natasha: So, they actually didn’t so funny story behind it is when I decided to leave school, I was enrolled in a like traveling Business program. So I was supposed to graduate with three different business degrees one from USC in Los Angeles and to from a college in Hong Kong and Italy. So I thought that I kind of had the best of you know, the college experience that I could have gotten and at that point I was like, okay if I’m gonna do college I’m just going to do this and then unfortunately experienced kind of disappointed me when I got to USC in the fall and so about Midway through my spring semester, I was like, you know what I’m just going to leave. I like a nun enrolled myself from all the classes. So I did it pretty official. I didn’t just leave I tried to kind of tie up everything.

Steve: This is your freshman year? Or, I’m sorry.

Natasha: Yes. This is my freshman year. Hmm. Yep, so Midway through my freshman year. And then I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell my parents. So I was very confident in my decision because my father actually passed away when I was seven and he was the Asian one in the family. Now, My mom is Mexican and she’s actually still pretty Asian. It was the way she acts that you know, you think of the typical Asian mom, she kind of exhibit some of those features and so I wasn’t quite sure how she was going to react obviously because both my parents are immigrants and so the whole story where my parents came here to give me a better life is definitely very prominent in my family

And so I was trying to figure out the best way to tell her and my stepfather who is also Asian, he’s Japanese and I ended up writing them. I think a five-page letter was probably five to seven pages and the letter pretty much explained all of my thoughts on the college education system how it’s broken how you know entrepreneurs can really thrive in that environment. And also what my plans were moving forward to just kind of share with them. Like hey, I’m not just going to leave and you know, just go Something random. I’m actually going to try to start my own thing, you know figure out I have a plan and a strategy in mind and so I wrote that to them.

I sat them down at our kitchen table in Irvine where I’m from and where I grew up and I was like read this letter don’t say anything back to me until you finish reading it because I think in confrontations like that and I don’t want to call the confrontation but you know conversations like that were you’re trying to share something with your parents at the probably going to be uncomfortable with most of the time you get started talking and then they’ll cut you off or you know, maybe stop you and then you lose your train of thought. So I was like, I put everything into this letter. Please read it and pretty much after they read it they were pretty calm and they were like, okay take a leave of absence and see how it goes.

So I think I’m technically still enrolled in USC system, but I’m long gone. I will not be returning but I will say my student ID has served me very well. Ha ha

Steve: Ha ha, so let me ask you this, so you presented this letter and you didn’t have any business or any income, right?

Natasha: Correct. So I did have some income because at the time pretty much from about junior year of high school on I decided that I wanted to start working with like online businesses and Tech startups. I thought I was going to go very much like the Silicon Valley Tech startup CEO route. So I did actually have some income because I was doing marketing for startup grind which is a global entrepreneurship community. And then I was also an independent contractor for a few other startups doing some marketing and sales for them entirely virtually. So I’d kind of had already a taste of the you know, online entrepreneur lifestyle if you will.

Steve: it’s a, did you already have an idea for doing school bots when you dropped out?

Natasha: So before I dropped out so this was in 2017 it’s when I left USC and the year before Facebook Messenger Bots had come out right in early 2016. So I had been looking at them. I’ve been kind of testing a few things but I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to like deep dive into them and then at the beginning of 2017 I was like What let’s just do it. And so I actually didn’t start school at Bots at that time. I started my chatbot agency with my co-founder and that was my first, you know, step into the entrepreneurship world, but also chat Bots and about a year and a half after that once we had served quite a few clients and had you know, great case studies results Etc and the Bots world. That’s when we started school at bots so that we could just be confident in you know that we were sharing the right information and and the right policies etc.

Steve: All right, so a couple questions there.

Natasha: Yeah

Steve: Yeah, pretty young. So how did you get clients? And then how did you meet your co-founder? Also? Was it someone you met at school or?

Natasha: Yeah great questions. So I met my co-founder actually two years before that. We met through a mutual friend and at that time like we obviously were just kind of friends like talking about business. That’s actually what got us to become better friends was like, you know, we had met through a friend that he had gone to college with and so at that time he was just, you know, kind of like in this party frat face right where he was, you know coming out of he had also dropped out after about two years and so because of that, you know, when we talked about business he was like, oh wow, you know, usually I don’t get a chance to talk about this stuff with people around me.

And so we didn’t talk about doing a business together until about two years later because at that time we were talking more and more about it. I was talking about how I wanted to drop out and start an agency and so in discussing that we realized we had very complementary skills. So we are complete opposites in the sense that the way that we talk about things the way that we not necessarily think about things now that we’re very aligned but the way that we approach as well as the fact, you know, he’s a white six foot tall male that is more like a sales background and then I am, you know a small Asian woman right?

Who like we portray ourselves to very different audiences and appeal to all sorts of different types of people together and then individually so it’s been a really interesting Dynamic to just kind of see the audience that we attract and why people like us or by From us but that’s how we met. And then your second question was about?

Steve: First client clerks?

Natasha: First clients. Yes, so it was really freaking tough people say that now obviously because I have some credibility. I had the chance to speak on awesome podcast like this and stages things have changed quite a bit and then people don’t really ask or you know, think about my age too much at least, you know from my observance, but at the beginning because we were actually also traveling so we decided to become digital Nomads at the same time as start our agency. So we hopped over to Asia. Of course. We went over to Hong Kong Japan Thailand Australia and a couple other places over there. And so most of our prospecting happened either like at events that we would go to in those areas as well as a lot of digital prospecting.

So we did a ton of cold email cold Outreach and also because I had started to build up a personal brand before I started my business. I was pretty active on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram there were some people who knew what I was doing especially since I was posting a little bit about it and so they would reach out and say hey, can you you know help us with this or I think I have a client for you. And so some of those conversations eventually turned into paying clients, but the first few Bots we built were free and they ended up to be great case studies.

But it was very tough at the beginning especially because we were trying to Target big companies because we thought we were going to go all in on the beauty Niche without going too deep into this but just saying that at that point where like, okay, we’re going to talk to Revlon and L’Oreal and sexy hair and we got on sales calls with all these companies but we have no idea what we were doing. All right, so it was silly of us to even think that we could have closed them let alone if we had closed them actually deliver because it was going to be some of the first few projects that we had done. So I’m happy with the route that we took in the sense that we then focus on like digital small and midsize businesses and then ended up growing from there. But yeah, I will say it was very tough.

Steve: I really loved your story because there’s always people that email me saying hey, you know, I don’t have any skills. I can’t do anything. How am I going to get my first? Here you are ingratiating yourself into a community and then doing jobs here and just gradually building your portfolio to eventually Land one of your clients. That’s what you got to do today. Right?

Natasha: Yes, exactly is. it’s very true. It’s so interesting to me because I was actually thinking a lot about this the other day is like for you for example, you know, your kids are going to be very familiar with the business model and you know type of lifestyle that you’re able to live and work in but for me when I was growing up, I didn’t know anybody else who had parents who were running online businesses or works for around my business, right?

You know, because I’m thinking also, you know, like companies like yours like we all have employees and contractors as well and those people’s Soul jobs or one of their gigs, you know is to do all this online work and then they have kids and friends and family. So it’s just really interesting to me how that’s shifted and I guess I’m just so interested to see how it’s going to be like five ten years and then when I have my kids as well, you know, what what that perception is going to look like and.

Steve: yeah, I mean So my kids are still going to college and they’re going to finish college. But you know, my whole perspective on education is kind of flipped as a result of my experiences.

Natasha: Yeah.

Steve: I was planning on being an engineer all of my life and then this happened and then I just realize that you know, you know, you can have your time to yourself and you can make a lot more money than than working a full-time job. Yeah, but let’s get to chat Bots. What I was hoping to do today was kind of go into depth on maybe the best way to implement a chatbot on an e-commerce store that sells physical products. There’s also people my audience that sell digital products and membership sites too and what is hoping to get out of you today. Maybe is I know you have a lot of templates and you work with a lot of agencies or people who want to start agencies and that sort of thing and so walk me through what a good chat bot looks like that you’ve implemented for an e-commerce store.

Natasha: Yeah. So what I would say just at the very beginning is that it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and excited about what Chat Bot I can do right and so what we one of the biggest mistakes that we made at the beginning and I see most people make is they come into the chat bot world or are a business that wants to implement a bot and they see all of these potential use cases to implement into the by right. And so then that leads to that may be testing 20 different things and then all of a sudden they have no idea what’s working because they didn’t properly test one by one, you know without overloading their system essentially.

So for an e-commerce store, it’s going to be a little bit different for each store, right depending on what their overall marketing looks like if they are creating a lot of content and that is essentially serving as a funnel for some of their products right as well as influencer marketing kind of falls under that category as well. Then there are quite a few ways for Bots to help either deliver that content or create experiences out of content that already exists and to give you an example. We were working with a e-commerce store that These like lifestyle lounger products. I think they kind of blew up a few years ago and then have still become a pretty solid product for companies online. And so these things you know, you can take them onto the water you can Lounge on…

Steve: Are these the inflatable things?

Natasha: They are. Okay, yes.

Steve: I guess they’re, yeah.

Natasha: played body, exactly. So those products of course are you know or hinted against like appeal to travel influencers and people who are going to be on the go right who want to take something with them? And so what we did was they have this great blog they had had all these ambassadors across the world create, you know, all of this content for them and put it into like a like a docu-series kind of blog thing where you take them through, you know, two days of your adventures, but no one was reading the blog and no one was really interacting with it and it wasn’t doing a lot for them. So what we did was turn those blog experiences into a three-day drip sequence inside of their Bots, and essentially what the sequence did was take them through the experience of going to Bali going to Iceland going to Mexico these three main countries that we had blog articles for.

Then at the end of it they had a very clear understanding the users of what the inflatable could actually do for them. Right? Because you see a product online. You’re like, how am I going to actually use this for myself? And so when we did that show the images let them kind of Choose Your Own Adventure within it that essentially served as a funnel for us to have one of the highest converting bought funnels and overall any marketing funnel that they’ve ever done. So that was really interesting for me to see because that kind of combined, you know, a company that makes a lot of content with Bot typical e-commerce store that maybe has been working on a blog or has some content but they’re not quite sure what to do with it because oftentimes with blogs, you know, it’s tough to kind of carve out a strategy unless you’re going to be posting very consistently. So that’s one..

Steve: was that company using email. I’m just kind of curious

Natasha: they were yeah, so they were using the email was pretty much the only thing they were doing before and of course Facebook ads as well and they sold on Amazon too so they had their Shopify eCommerce store and then their Amazon Our which honestly with Amazon it was just kind of doing its own thing. So we were just really focused on the Shopify. Yeah. So that’s one way that..

Steve: I’d like to dig a little bit deeper.

Natasha: Yeah, absolutely mine.

Steve: So we’re their email efforts failing?

Natasha: they were a little bit so I will say they weren’t very strong. They’re open and click rates were blow. I’d say like industry average so off the top of my head. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I know that their click rates were in the single digit, right and they’re open rates were somewhere between like 10 to 30 percent sometimes less, right and their emails also weren’t crafted very well in terms of the formatting copy images kind of all that stuff was a little bit lacking like there’s a lot that we could have done to improve which we don’t do it our company so I don’t really focus on that.

Steve:Sure, sure. Of course. But how did they get chatbot subscribers or messenger subscribers? Like what was their primary method?

Natasha: Yeah, so one of the things that we did for them, which I recommend honestly for any e-commerce store is giveaways are really big part of the e-commerce ecosystem. Right? I think that every E Commerce or at some point has done some sort of give away whether it was rumored to be big or they do something monthly or whatever it is. And so for them, what we did was run. They typically do a giveaway or two every month. So for us it was a really easy way to implement the Bot into what they were already doing. They do these joint giveaways with other e-commerce stores kind of the lifestyle category. So, you know, they get hotel stays plane tickets and then we’ll get some other swag and products and things that they kind of bundle up into this giveaway.

So those were the initial subscribers that we got and I think we got about seven thousand subscribers from our first giveaway that we did and then a few weeks later we got I think another 10,000 subscribers from the giveaway and the opt-ins were, you know, on the registration page someone in signs up for the giveaway. We had, you know, your typical checkbox on that Page and then on the confirmation page usually with these giveaways. I think it was Dojo Mojo was a software that we were using and on, you know the backside when someone signs up it’s like you’ve got to do certain things, you know to increase your number of entries in the giveaway. And so messenger was one of those as well, which also helped us get more organic traffic to it.

Steve: So these are group giveaways then right?

Natasha: correct. Yeah. So that was their main kind of way to get new people into the body as well as their brand and kind of get things out

Steve: You know, what’s interesting about this is I actually run a group giveaway service called Gzobrandwin. What’s funny about this is that you know with messenger subscribers if your block rate is too high. There’s like this risk of getting banned, right? And so you’re going to get a lot of subscribers that aren’t really interested in your product or saying just went the right way. So how do you Rectify that?

Natasha: Yeah. Absolutely. This was actually something we faced initially where we realized because they had actually done some chatbot efforts on their own before we started working with them. So they had done one for a giveaway. And then what we realize just as you said, you know not all of these people were very interested in everything that we had to offer. So because of that when these new subscribers came into the chat box, we would take them through some of the lead qualification as well as then ask them what types of messages they wanted to get from us.

And this was really important for us to weed them out. And this is the best practice that we do for any type of bots regardless of you know, what the company does what they sell. Yeah, but this was the best way for us to figure out okay who actually cares about us and who’s just here for the giveaway and we kept the people who weren’t very strong leads on the bot list anyways, but we had them obviously tagged and you know, we are mainly using many chat so many chat makes it very easy to segment out your audience with Fields tags all that good stuff.

Steve: You walk me through that entire sequence of qualification?

Natasha: Totally. So when people first came into the chat bot because they there were a couple different entry points. So one someone could enter because they wanted to go to the giveaway and then we’d send them to the giveaway page. But after that when someone comes into the bot to either increase the number of entries they have or we know that they’ve entered the giveaway then we would obviously send the robot message saying, you know graduation is your entered and then from there what we would do is pretty much ask them a couple questions about their interests what you know, they thought of these loungers right if they had used one before and a couple things just about their experience overall in like Persona is the best way to kind of put it and then from there if they kind of answered you can kind of think it fit like a quiz right from the back end even though we’re positioning it like that so that you know, there’s maybe three at that point different kind of end scenarios that someone could hit.

So the first one would be that clearly they weren’t really interested in what we were offering they were very interested in maybe like a competitor’s, you know product inside of the giveaway the group giveaway, but they weren’t ultimately super interested in our product. Okay, that’s fine. Thanks for entering the giveaway a that’s pretty much the end of it. Right? And then at that point though, we also asked them if they would want to get any messages from us in the future about a few different topics. So we had our blog article content we had events because they would go to all these different events and kind of sponsor and have their products there. And then the last one was discounts which then just as a side note would mainly be sponsored messages right that we would then send if we ever had anything happening.

Steve: Yeah..

Natasha: So that was the first and scenario the second and scenario would be someone who seemed interested. Maybe we asked them why they sign up for the giveaway and they said, you know, I thought that your product is really cool. But I’m also, you know equally interested in other stuff that was happening in the giveaway. And then at that point then we would ask them a few questions about the product as well as ask them what types of messages they wanted to get from us and also then lead them into that sequence that I mentioned that three-day sequence where we took them through we called it waking up in a new country every day.

So pretty much that 3-day thing where we had Iceland Ali Mexico, you know in an experience inside of the pot so we would then lead them into that and that would also take Them through our bot onboarding. So there’s quite a few steps happening here

Steve: Yeah.

Natasha: But all of this again kind of creates this full system that you want for the user experience inside of the bot.

Steve: This is one of the huge advantages of chat Bots over email like in chat Bots. If you can make this all really interactive with email..

Natasha: right.

Steve: People aren’t opening at a high rate and then you can actually I guess you can have them click on links in an email and tag them that way but it’s just doesn’t work as well as messenger.

Natasha: Yeah, totally end. One of the biggest differences to that actually one of my clients brought up yesterday cuz I wasn’t meeting with them they were like, so what makes the conversions higher in a bot then email right? Like what are some of those factors and I think the biggest thing is that you get more highly qualified leads because people have to interact with you in order to get the content that they want right there has to be a back and forth happening in order for them to get you know, for example, a free pdf guide or a free mini course or in this case, you know, the free three-day sequence that we were taking people through.

So people have to have that conversation with you in order for it to happen and For obviously, there’s more touch points in and you feel a little bit more intimate with the company Etc. And I think that makes a huge difference compared to the fact that email is still very much a one-way Street where people might click some people May respond, but typically emails don’t encourage a response right? very much like a read and be done with it as opposed to interact.

Steve: Is it important to clean up your messenger list from time to time?

Natasha: I totally think it is and this is something that we do then our subscription system actually. So this is something that we’ve created for each of our clients, which I kind of hinted at where we ask and make sure that we’re only sending relevant messages to people who care about certain topics and that’s going to look different for every company but the examples I gave earlier events discounts and the new content that accompanies pushing out, right and those are pretty typical topics that people might send updates about via email for example, so inside of messenger, what we do is if someone has not engaged within a certain amount of time, but we’ve been sending them messages.

So usually that’s 60 to 90 days for us as well as within the subscription system. If someone wishes to unsubscribe, then we make sure to tag them as soon as they come into that flow, even if they don’t confirm their unsubscription and then we keep track of those people for the next 90 days as well because if someone at all hinted that they want to unsubscribe entirely from the bot not just from certain topics, but you know from all messages to stop them then we also want to weed them out. Even if there may be still opening the messages, but they’re not clicking on them, but they’ve hinted at it at all. So that’s usually how we automate being able to weed out people who maybe just aren’t interested to keep the list healthy and continue to have you know, good open and click rates overall.

Steve: Okay. And is there an easy way to bulk unsubscribe?

Natasha: there is inside of many chat, but at the same time what happens is many chat lets you do two things. So you can either see your audience tab. So all the people on your list that are subscribed or you can turn on the ability to see people who have unsubscribed or deleted the conversation from their inbox, which is interesting as well. However, you can’t filter by it. So what happens is you say, you’ve got a list of only a few thousand people you still gotta like go through manually and pretty much checkmark anyone who would want to see the data on so because of that what we do is add that tag that I mentioned when someone wants to unsubscribe because then that allows us to filter them through in the audience Tab and then if we need any data on them, or if we need to do some sort of bulk action, that’s why we add tags to pretty much every single interaction any time someone clicks a button says something clicks on a quick reply to kind of bring in somebody verbage as well. That’s the way that we’re able to really make sure that that we’re serving the audience that were able to complete any actions fill in any missing data that we need to at any time.

Steve: Are these included on the templates that you sell in your site?

Natasha: So we do include the subscription system as well as unsubscribe and then the tagging and whatnot. Honestly. That’s tough. Just is unique for each company. So we do have some like specific tags and Fields that we include in every single template that we build. But ultimately when we’re doing client work those tags are going to look very different depending on what campaigns were running, you know what their offers are what their email system looks like as well, but we want to track to but we do our best to kind of provide the foundation of what we typically builds for a client inside of the templates that we sell.

Steve: If you saw an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show. Now back to the show.

So this Ecommerce client that we were just talking about are they now prioritizing messenger over email

Natasha: t\They are so it’s interesting to kind of see the differences between companies that have done email really well and then get into Bots and then companies that have struggled on email but you know are still getting conversions and opens and stuff in their email, but then bring in a bot and to be a hundred percent honest. I prefer at this point to work with companies that have done really well with email really well with Facebook ads and pretty much they have at least a few core, you know marketing funnels that work really well for them. So that one it makes it a lot easier for us to implement the bot right? Because we know kind of exactly where we want to start they know their pain points very clearly and we can tell exactly you know, how the boss could play a role.

But at the same time it’s very cool to see how a messenger brought could revolutionize a business and kind of transform what their audience interaction looks like how people care about their product as well because that One of the biggest things that we noticed was because they started to then be able to interact with their audience on messenger much better than they had ever done email that we saw a lot more loyal audience members and you know customers and I think for e-commerce that’s one of the hardest parts is a lot of e-commerce stores do it really well, you know on Instagram they build their audience kind of their crowd there, but if you’re not producing content regularly or, you know even have like a go-to place for your audience to kind of talk to each other and form a community essentially then I see a lot of e-commerce stores struggling with pretty much, you know, getting their product out there and getting people to to buy it and be proud of it, right simply because there’s not that community.

So I think a messenger brought does that really well, especially for a companies that don’t really have another outlet for a community

Steve: So I was actually ready to go all in on Bots and prioritize that over email and then I actually got banned for short period actually had to reach out to some of my buddies in Facebook to get me back in and that’s that really scared me. Have you had any of those experiences?

Natasha: Yeah at this point for our clients we have not but I have talked to quite a few people and as well as consulted for companies that got their Bot band and I think we have a very clear understanding now of kind of what causes that right because there’s two main factors inside of the messenger Experience One, Someone can totally block your Bot right? Then just turn off the messages. It’s just a quick little, you know tap of the button inside of the conversation. But they can also rate the messenger experience and if there’s too many bad ratings and that can also cause you know a temporary ban or a penalty or you know a message from Facebook. All right.

So those are really the only two metrics that you have to you know, see if your body is doing well or not essentially and the biggest That I think helps that situation that we have seen especially for one of the companies we work with I will not name them but they had a 50% block rate on their Bots crazy crazy. And so we were brought in to obviously reduce that very heavily and also figure out like why that was happening what they had done because they’ve been running their own bought for about two years prior to us coming in. So so they had been you know in the bus space pretty much since the beginning running their bought for their company which produces info products. They just had no idea what they were doing in regards to the policies and kind of all that stuff. So the biggest solution that we found for them as well as any other companies that then were able to you know, get their bought back on the platform never got banned again is allowing people to subscribe to specific types of messages and also creating an onboarding within the bot that makes it very clear, you know, as to when people are going to get messages from you.

How often and what those messages are going to be about those are the two most important solutions that I think contribute to because overall the Users are making you know, they’re calling the shots. Right? So if too many users, you know block you then obviously Facebook steps in but if you can just keep that relationship really transparent from the beginning between the user and the page aka the bot then honestly there shouldn’t be any issues with blocking or Banning the Bot.

Steve: Okay, Okay, and oh one of the questions just about the giveaways that we were just talking about.

Natasha: Yes.

Steve: In a group giveaway environments. Like how does it work in terms of who gets the messenger sub or are they just different tabs for it?

Natasha: Yeah, that’s a great question. So honestly, I don’t know how they initially negotiated that with their group because I know that the other companies obviously had opt-ins and stuff on there. And at this point I have seen like after we did that initial one and you know, we obviously shared a little bit about the results and whatnot in the following group giveaways. I did see that some other people added Messengers well, but I believe for them in their agreement. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but from my understanding they all kind of get equal share and so because of that they could all add, you know an email list the messenger list and if they needed people to do other things like I can’t remember off the top of my head but..

Steve: But I was just kind of curious.

Natasha: Yeah. No, that’s a great question though. And I think it’s it’s tougher when you have like maybe two or three companies, but I think they were like five or six companies in these group giveaways.

Steve: So in terms of sending out messages to your message subscribers, do you have any specific strategies that you use in the past in regards to that?

Natasha: Yeah, so just in terms of maybe like content or like what and..

Steve: the frequency that you send actually also.

Natasha: Yeah. So typically the rule of thumb that I’ve kind of put in place for this is you want to message your list at least once a month to make sure that people don’t forget about you. And also I don’t know if you saw that businesses tab that popped up for like two days ago messenger.

Steve: Yeah I got so scared. Okay, everyone freaked out.

Natasha: Yeah

Steve: you have to everyone was freaking out right and they’re like, oh my gosh, it’s changing and then people are like, yeah, it’s a great thing because now you can you know, categorize your business messages and then people were also upset of course and the interesting thought that this brought up for me, which also kind of helps solidify. What I’m about to share is that these business tabs that you clicked into you couldn’t see bot messages that were older than a month inside of that Tab. And so that was really interesting to me because I was like, oh my So these messages still like in my inbox and they were when I search for them, but the business is tab specifically only held messages that had been there for shorter than a month.

So if you had had any sort of interaction with a page within the last month it was in there at the top of the chat box. I’m inside a messenger. But all the other businesses were all the way down kind of mixed up, you know in Lost in your in your messenger inbox. And so that helped solidify the fact that yes, you do want at least interact with your audience once a month. If you are not producing really any new content or have anything really to share with your subscribers. Maybe you just have like a few paid products or one core product right that that you kind of cell and if someone’s not a recurring customer or if they haven’t bought from you, then you might not really have anything to share with them and update them with.

And so sending them a message at least once a month is going to be best for those types of companies and just across the board. But if you have any sort of new content, you’re creating like a podcast blog articles videos even You know combined kind of efforts with influencers since we’re talking a little bit about e-commerce then messaging your list at least once a week. I would say is the happy medium because this allows you to be in their inbox without annoying them that also lets you if you create a lot of content like daily content, then you can give your users two options. You can either send the messages every day or every other day which gets a little bit too much in our experience or you can send them kind of a digest every week that is kind of like a email newsletter except making that interactive is really key there.

Because otherwise then it does feel just like a blast out and people don’t really care but if you can create an experience at least a few back and forth interactions about that content, then that’s what is really winning.

Steve: Can you give me an example though? because I’ve always thought that like, I’m on a whole bunch of people’s chatbot lists and like when I have to click and interact just to get to the content that actually annoys me a little bit like I just want to read the content. So what is your approach?

Natasha: Totally get that. So for us what will actually do with so the best thing that I’ve seen which is a little bit more time consuming but I think it’s worth it for for companies that can do it or at least take the time to for us or you know for them if they’re doing it internally is to actually break down that content into a bot experience. So that means if you’ve got a podcast then putting some audio inside of the bot. If you have a video then breaking down that video into many videos and putting them inside of the Bots and then if it’s a Blog article then breaking down that content or a PDF breaking it down into multiple bot messages that are usually maybe 5 to 7 interactions long is usually what we see.

And so this way it’s not like hey click here to answer this question Okay, click. Ok, now go and view, you know this new blog article, right? Because I think that’s what you’re talking about is like you don’t like, you know, what’s coming after that button, right? And so for us for example is social media examiner, since we were both at Social Media Marketing world that did not work well for them and we had a hard time actually figuring out how to deliver. Their content because they create so much every single day that it was I think looking back at it now because we decided to stop sending their content in their body because it just wasn’t bringing in Roi looking back at it.

What I would have done is take the most popular piece of content from that week or something that I performed really well, you know, as soon as it came out and turn that into a bot experience instead because then most of the time if that’s their highest performing piece of content for the week most of their audiences going to be interested in it because they put out content on so many different topics that then it also becomes tedious to be like, okay. This person doesn’t want to get content on Facebook ads or Instagram ads, but they do care about messenger and YouTube for example, right? It’s so with companies like that. It’s really tough.

If you’re more Niche where you just have a couple core topics that you talk about I’d say three to five Max then that’s where the strategy can really be implemented right where it can actually be an experience. You can take the time to do that and you don’t have to worry about Doing that every single day for your Bot subscribers.

Steve: I guess ultimately the goal with a content creator is to just get people reading the content, right? So how did you know it wasn’t working with it just because people weren’t clicking on it or opening it.

Natasha: So for them, we had quite a few different metrics and things that we were looking at so because social media examiner doesn’t amazing job with like analyzing literally everything mainly through Google analytics and drip to see exactly how long people are reading their content, you know, where they coming from. They have a pretty tedious and detailed process of Automation and whatnot. So for us, what we were really looking at is the difference between the deliverability as well as the interaction so mainly open and click rates between the box versus email since they were very similar messages being sent out except they were little bit different in the bots in the bot. They were pretty much every day there was a piece of content being dropped of course was for people to a certain extent and then we turned it into every other A which was fine, but the problem also with it was exactly that experience that you mentioned earlier like you just want to see the content.

Well, we tried that as well as having people click on a button that shared a little bit about what the article was about and then they could either unsubscribe from there or click into it and then they would go to the article right after that and while it was interesting we found some pretty interesting data like for mobile, for example, people were reading or staying on the page four times longer than they were when they came in from email from desktop or mobile. So that was pretty fascinating. But after I’d say about three or four months of us sending out the message has obviously open and click rates declined very steadily because people knew what was coming it was too much and I think honestly for them ultimately they just have way too many pieces of content that we could send inside of the Bots and they didn’t really want to prioritize in a one topic.

Over the ten different topics that they talk about. So I just don’t think that a bot is a good delivery. Mechanism for a company like that. We’re obviously a website is just going to present everything in a much clearer way. You can quickly skim through and kind of find what you want to what you want to read about.

Steve: interesting. Yeah. I’m just kind of curious like so in order to be sending out that frequently you have to have a really good in flow of new Subs because at least for me, I don’t interact with a lot of people who run Bots or share these statistics, but my unsubscribe rate is easily like at least one percent every time I send something out right? I don’t think that high?

Natasha: that’s actually fair. I would say that that’s not bad and especially if you’re it depends on what you’re sending out to because we do have I guess different standards and it’s kind of different for every industry, but they’re you know a certain good unsubscribe rate and bad one for you know, for example, if you’re sending out a follow-up message about something promotional or if you are sending out a piece of content or something about a free webinar coming up, you know, and kind of those things so I would say 1% like across the board on average for any of your messages is a pretty good percentage and it’s usually going to be higher than email too

Steve: yeah, that’s what I was saying. It’s tremendously higher than email. And so what is like the best way people have for like bringing new Subs in it seems like you have to go all in on it?

Natasha: it. I’d say going all-in is not the best way to do it initially, but your goal should be to will be able to implement messenger like at every point in your funnel like at the end of you know, implementing all of this right, but again, it also depends on what’s going to work best for you for example on websites. So this also goes back to social media examiner because they have so many crazy analytics and it like really detailed information. Right?

Steve: Mike is hilarious righgt?

Natasha: Yes. He is very detailed and I know they just hired a marketing manager so luckily some of this work will be passed on but he was you have he was doing a lot of this stuff, you know himself for years pretty much the social media examiner was created. And so what we noticed with the Opt-ins for example, which I had seen quite a bit with my clients before but we don’t necessarily use websites as our number one source of traffic or messenger Bots and that was quickly confirmed as well with him, especially because we are able to segment in Split test things like so detailed, right? So what happens on mobile for example with the messenger opt-in so that means the buttons as well as the checkbox and even the customer chat, you know that lives in the bottom right corner of the site any widgets that you add if you’re using something like many chat, you know, they have a bunch of different website widgets that pretty much just use the messenger Button as well.

Any of those options on mobile are usually not a great experience because if someone does use Facebook on their phone, they’re going to be using it on the Facebook app, right? Why would you go subscribe user? And so the problem is that messenger requires you to be logged in to Facebook on the browser that you are opting in from and because people were already logged into Facebook on their app when they see that they have to log in on their browser that turned off a lot of People then we quickly saw that in the numbers where we were actually getting I think less than or about 50% of the opt-ins through Messenger than they usually sought with email. And as soon as we turned off the bot there they were back to normal.

So it was really interesting to see that that really threw off people and I think it also depends on the audience. I’ll say that this has been different for each client, but it’s about 70% of our clients end up seeing a similar result with that because a lot of their web traffic is mobile, but the messenger opt-in doesn’t provide the best experience there. So that was just kind of something I wanted to share because in terms of traffic points people think about their website, right and kind of what messenger can do their desktop is great with the messenger opt-ins because obviously people are logged into their Facebook their but with mobile, it’s just not so in terms of other entry points, I’d say that Facebook ads and running page posts with the comments as ads are probably the fastest way to get more and more subscribers, especially if you’re, you know adding the bot to it.

System marketing funnel that you typically do as like add to landing page maybe to opt in to either, you know, webinar lead magnet whatever it is, maybe with an upsell right just as an example. So that’s probably the best way honestly to get subscribers really fast and scale and grow but at the same time there’s a lot of creative ways, you know, such as giveaways or like joint kind of collaborations or sending people from other platforms as well. So like what we’ll do is test out a messenger opt-in in as many places as we can and compare head-to-head with email. So I mentioned websites, of course, you’ll want to do that within your email newsletter Footers, for example or email signature footer as well as within your emails kind of making it clear to people. Hey, if you click on this, you know, they’re going to get sent to Messenger as well as on confirmation Pages for webinars countdown Pages for webinars again.

But pretty much anywhere where someone might interact with your company, it’s always interesting to just test it and see and if it performs better than email keep it and if it doesn’t, you know, then keep the For now, but our people into messenger at some other point, you know within their customer lifecycle.

Steve: So Natasha, I know you just recently went to f8, which is Facebook’s industry conference. Last did you gleam any insights on where messenger is going in the future?

Natasha: Yeah, they shared quite a few really interesting things and actually have my list. I should have brought it up, right?

Steve: It’d okay, just highlight the main points. But yeah

Natasha: So off the top my head some of the main things that they shared specifically for Messenger is one interoperability is the word they used for it, which pretty much means that announcement that they made earlier this year where they’re going to be integrating what’s up Instagram and messenger is still happening and they’re making it a priority. So that’s really big because even though they didn’t say here’s what’s going to happen for Bots when we do that. It’s implied that Bots would also take on this ability because how they explain it is a messenger user can now not need to have an Instagram or Whatsapp account, but they could Message Instagram and WhatsApp users and so thinking of that from the but perspective while you apply that same, you know, kind of concept and now Bots can talk to users across three different channels, which are two of the highest monthly active user messaging Platforms in the world, right?

So that that gives you an instant audience of like three or four billion people, right? Yeah, and it also allows for more International conversations to happen as well because obviously messenger and WhatsApp or both almost equally huge WhatsApp has I think like point one or two more billion monthly active users but combining those two like anywhere where Messengers not being used WhatsApp is usually the head and then vice versa like in the US for example, what’s up? It’s not the biggest but everyone’s on messenger and then if you go to like Mexico, for example, people are on WhatsApp and not as much messenger, but either one they’re both owned by Facebook and they’re both going to be a part of that interoperability Circle. So that was a huge announcement because they’re just kind of confirming that This is a serious thing. We’re going to make this happen soon.

They didn’t give a deadline for it. But I know that that’s going to be coming and then they also mentioned a messenger desktop app that is going to drop this fall. And that’s really interesting because I’m curious to see kind of what that will look like for the bot opt-ins for example and see if that brings in, you know higher conversions or faster kind of conversions from places like ads and in other places where people can opt in, you know from within or outside of Facebook and that’s also a competitor to iMessage now as well, which is interesting to see so those two were pretty big.

Steve: Are they going to fix the mobile problem where you have to actually opt-in from a website?

Natasha: they didn’t mention it. So I wish they had and at the same time because obviously messenger runs off of you having a Facebook profile or phone number. I don’t know if they would even ever be able to fix that. I’m sure they’ll figure out some sort of solution, but I guess the easy fix would be to send people directly to like the Facebook app to opt-in kind of like what happens with mobile apps right where you like try to login with Facebook when you download a iPhone app, for example, and the taking Facebook App you say OK continue as you know my profile and then you jump back to the app.

So that’s one way I see it happening, but I don’t know if they have control over this because some of the other things that kind of came up for example was you know, you can’t buy and this goes a little bit off topic but at the same time contributes to this, for example, you can’t buy digital products inside of Facebook Messenger and as a business, you can’t sell them and the reason is because of Google and Apple’s app policies that they have. So it’s not a Facebook thing. It’s the fact that the device that you’re on doesn’t allow that to happen via the app.

Steve: Yeah. I had heard that some point you would be able to buy physical products on the platform. Is that still the case or?

Natasha: Yeah, I don’t know if they didn’t mention anything about that going away. But right now you can do that, you know with the buy button or sending people to a checkout page. You just have to get pre-approved but from my knowledge, I don’t think they’re going to get rid of it. But I don’t know what their stats and stuff on that look like because you know, if you think about it, it’s not the most convenient way, especially for an e-commerce store right already kind of build up your site. There’s Integrations and stuff like shop message for example is a platform that helps you do that. But yeah using that buy button and having to build that whole system yourself is in my opinion a very slow way to do it.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah for sure. I’m actually using shot message right now for myself,

Natasha: Oh nice.

Steve: I’m actually working quite well

Natasha: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, he was at f8 as well.

Steve: Oh yeah, yeah Arjun?

Natasha: He is awesome.

Steve: Yeah, so Natasha, we’ve been chatting for quite a while. I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell everyone where to find you and you know what you sell and what your business is all about.

Natasha: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you. This has been awesome and I’m really glad we got to dive into a bunch of stuff that honestly I usually don’t get a chance to talk about because most of Podcast I’m honor more like General marketing and people aren’t super familiar with Bots. And so it’s refreshing to be able to like deep dive into all this stuff. So thank you for asking great questions.

For me what I am working on right now and how you guys can reach me. So feel free to connect with me across all of my socials. I do my best to check that and I’m pretty good at getting to inbox zero every day. So if you guys want to shoot me an email, it’s just natasha@schoolofbots.co not com. and then on Instagram Facebook and Linkedin, it’s just Natashaz_official and in terms of what we do at school bots. We at this point in help quite a few different audiences. So as you mentioned in the beginning Steve, our main objective is to just teach marketers and entrepreneurs how to use messenger marketing and how to build chatbots as well as sell them.

So we have a main program that we do this through called the chappa agency accelerator and it’s best for either beginning entrepreneurs or agencies that are existing that want to add chatbots, you know to their services and so we run that main program as a core part, you know of our overall company, but at this point we also offer Consulting we still do full service agency work for companies like Mind valley Matthew Hussey social media examiner all sorts of different kind of companies in mainly the info product space right now, but we take on anyone and we have a by agency Network where we can service pretty much any Niche within that network with through our partner agencies.

And then we also sell our messenger templates as you mentioned messengertemplates.com is where you guys can check those out if you want to kind of fast track through all those best practices and things that we talked about on today’s podcast and I think I pretty much everything we’ve got a ton of free content so you don’t have to buy anything from us you can we do.

Steve: Have you launched the channel?

Natasha: Yes, we launched it about two months ago now so we do three videos a week on their on it’s a lot of work. I will say I’m like, ah, I told Michael Bedros like we should only do one or two videos a week. He’s like, no we gotta do three. So right now we’re doing three maybe will increase but we have all sorts of different chatbot tutorials chatbot sales tips and strategies agency stuff on there, and we have our Facebook group as well. So if you guys want to grab free stuff from us, those are the two best places.

Steve: Well, hey Natasha, thanks a lot for coming the show. It was great. I learned a lot and we did get a lot deeper than I have in the past with my other chatbot

Natasha: awesome

Steve: So thanks a lot.

Natasha: I’m glad to hear that. Yeah. I hope it’s super helpful for your listeners and thanks for listening to my episode guys

Steve: All right. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now right now messenger marketing is actually performing much better for me than email and I plan on expanding this platform going forward for more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode270. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence it post purchase flow win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit and sectarian tools and make it super simple as well and I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied to your Ecommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free. So head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s privy.com/steve. Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store headed over to mywifequitjob.com and sign up for my free 6 day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com