CASE STUDY
How we doubled the worth of Messenger subscribers of our client
Brand Story & Challenges
This client is a pet-products seller in the US and they manage their business from Austria. We already managed their email marketing and had generated 25-30% of their monthly sales from emails.
They were aware of the importance of other back-end sales channels such as Messenger but they needed our help to implement it properly right before the holiday season. They had Messenger marketing setup already and their monthly revenue per one subscriber was $1.77 which was already higher than with emails but we wanted to grow this number.
They were also open to combining Messenger with front-end tools such as Facebook advertising and this helped us achieve great results.
Regarding SMS, the client hadn’t previously implemented an SMS strategy. Some campaigns were sent periodically but there was no strategy nor consistency.
It was also questionable what were the best ways to get subscribers, especially because in some cases we had to decide if we want to collect Messenger or email subscribers with one tool.
Andreas König, eCommerce entrepreneur and consultant
My business partner and I got a referral from a mutual friend with Daniel and his team.
We wanted to increase our revenue using emails because we didn't have time and energy to learn and implement it properly.
The Budai Media team changed the way we think about email flows and campaigns.
When we started Q4, they generated a 6-figure amount using emails and tripled the sales from our website popups.
No hand-holding required, these guys know what they're doing.
Messenger numbers
First three months:
Last month:
All time numbers:
All time numbers:
Before Budai Media
- $1.77 monthly revenue per Messenger subscriber
- Decreased website conversion because of the not optimized subscription channels
- Almost $8,000 monthly revenue from Messenger
- Around 4,500 Messenger subscriber list
After Budai Media
- $3.75 monthly revenue per subscriber
- Increased website conversion rate because of the optimized Messenger subscription channels
- More than $24,000 monthly Messenger revenue
- More than 6,600 Messenger subscribers
- Holiday themed custom flows connected with Facebook advertising
How we helped
I. PASSIVE AUTOMATION SETUP
The passive automation basically generates subscribers from the already existing website traffic. This can be both done in Recart as in SMSBump, which allows you to re-engage with your audience in a multi-channel way.
There are different flows and automated messages to do it such as the Abandoned Cart flow which contains three messages. We changed the timing and the discount ladder fitting well to the emails we sent out at the same time.
There are a few transactional messages such as the Messenger Receipt, Messenger Fulfillment Notification & the SMS order status. These also generated some revenue but their main purpose is to keep the customers updated.
We also integrated Recart with Loox and asked recent customers for reviews. These could be used on the website later.
The big question was how to get Messenger subscribers and what welcome flow to attach to it.
II. GETTING MORE MESSENGER & SMS SUBSCRIBERS EFFICIENTLY
At the time of starting working on the account, 70% of the subscribers came from Add-to-Cart popups which means every time when someone added a product to their cards, a popup was displayed. This was a super irritating experience for the users and as it turned out, it decreased the website conversion as well.
So, we quit on the Add-to-Cart popup and got fewer subscribers but the website CR increased.
We used the 'Discount Widget' which offers a discount below the Add-to-Cart button, and the 'Order page subscription' which gets subscribers once they ordered.
For the first months, we rejected using regular popups to get Messenger subscribers because we wanted to use them to get email subscribers. This was a strategic decision because one Messenger subscriber may generate a higher $/subscriber in one message but email can be used in more ways than Messenger and it generated 25-30% of the monthly revenue of the store. These steps decreased the number of subscribers but increased their quality. But then in 2020, Recart added the amazing feature of an email variant of their best performing pop-up. The pop-up only works for mobile users so we still had an email-focused strategy for desktop users, but now for mobile, we could increase both Recart and email subscribers with the same pop-up. This feature brought more than 60k in extra revenue in less than three months.
Regarding the SMS list, Recart does have an SMS integration that allows you to request for phone-numbers so it is actually possible to build all three lists with just one opt-in tool, but the client’s website was already bringing a healthy amount of SMS subscribers just with their checkout process. We guarantee their checkout subscription feature was compliant with every privacy policy, and decided to not put extra steps in the Recart Welcome Popup Flow. We shared the subscription link in emails to increase the list with the already engaged email users that were it. We keep it simple and efficient.
We also had an idea of how to get more engaged subscribers actively which brings us to the next point.
III. ACTIVE AUTOMATION
Recart came out with the idea of custom flows at the end of 2019 and we started creating them for the holiday season.
The main power of these custom flows:
1. Totally customizable, you can add conditional splits, time delays, and as many messages as you want
2. You can use their trigger link in Sponsored Messages and their ROAS is frequently over 5x
3. You save your ad spend on retargeting because you can send more messages to a new subscriber in your custom flow based on what they did
4. You can generate a link that triggers them, and share the link with a clear CTA across your website.
The Recart team helped us a lot and we set up a Halloween flow, Black Friday flow, Christmas flow together for the holidays.
You can use our Christmas flow with Recart for free: https://recart.com/template-library/christmas-sale-ad
The monthly revenue per subscriber was around $3 for these custom flows and we also gained a lot of new subscribers.
We also used the trigger link of the custom flows in email campaigns, so we got subscribers from the email list of 42.000 people as well.
RESULTS
As our main and immediate result, we increased the Recart monthly revenue per subscriber from $1.77 in October to $3.29 in November and $3.75 in December. This is a 111% increase in less than 2 months. The revenue from Recart tripled from October to December while the number of new subscribers increased only by 47% at the same time. Regarding SMSBump, in just the first month, we increased the subscribers by 318% and achieved an ROI of 295.83%.
With the passive automation forms, we ensured that we monetize the already existing traffic and the SMS & Messenger lists.
We ran ads to our holiday custom flows generating great ROI and offering free retargeting for the client. The revenue increased by 300% from Messenger marketing.
We continued our work with Recart, SMSBump, and with the client to improve on the custom flows and get even higher ROI on them and Messenger subscribers. Nowadays with more than one year of optimizations, we are bringing the client a +3k% ROI in SMS on a monthly basis, and have brought more than 264k extra revenue just with Messenger marketing.