After the pre-checked checkbox era, the revenue of most ecommerce stores from Messenger chatbot marketing dropped to 5-10% of the previous numbers.
New platforms such as Messenger tend to work very well but the most difficult question is currently how to get subscribers. When Facebook enforced businesses to ask website visitors to check a checkbox first to subscribe to Messenger, it killed the subscription rate and the revenue of most businesses.
On the left side, you can see the pre-checked checkbox which was available before April 2019 and on the right side, you can see the unchecked checkbox.
While many marketers say email is dead, actually Messenger marketing died when this happened. This was in 2018. Since then, Messenger chatbot companies have worked hard to find ways to get more subscribers.
Budai Media worked with Recart found new ways to get more Messenger subscribers and monetize the website traffic and subscribers better.
Client Overview and 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 during the holiday season.
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.
Our Blueprint to Success
First of all, we wanted to go through the automations of Recart and find the best ways how to monetize the already existing Messenger list and the incoming subscribers from the website. We'll call it passive automation in this article because this website traffic and the list already existed before.
Secondly, we wanted to double-check how to get more quality Messenger subscribers without having fewer email subscribers.
Thirdly, we wanted to create holiday-themed custom flows for the holiday season. We contacted the Recart team for help and we closely worked together on this. We'll call it active automation because we needed to generate extra traffic to the custom flows with Facebook ads and emails.
How We Helped
The positive side of Recart that it is easy to set up if you're not a Messenger marketing expert.
Recart has many templates for messages and automated flows and it's a plug and play system.
However, if you want to use its full power, it needs more of your time and learning and you'll usually need an expert team.
I. PASSIVE AUTOMATION SETUP
The passive automation basically generates subscribers from the already existing website traffic.
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 and Messenger Fulfillment Notification. 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. Read further to learn more about it.
Recart has several ways for passive automation
II. GETTING MORE MESSENGER SUBSCRIBERS EFFICIENTLY
Recart offers many ways to get Messenger subscribers (these are called 'Conversation Starters'), the question is which ones are the perfect fit for your business.
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.
The Add-to-Cart popup we turned off because it ruined the user experience even if it converted great.
We also 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.
So, 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.
These steps decreased the number of subscribers but increased their quality. We also had an idea of how to get more 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 ad spend on retargeting because you can send more messages to a new subscriber in your custom flow based on what they did
The Recart team helped us a lot and we set up a Halloween flow, Black Friday flow, Christmas flow together for the holidays.
A part of our Black Friday flow. We used conditional split here based on their purchase interest. You can see how it performed in the bottom. Use our Christmas flow with REcart for free: https://recart.com/template-library/christmas-sale-ad
As you can see, 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 result, we increased the monthly revenue per subscribers 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.
With the passive automation forms, we ensured that we monetize the already existing traffic and Messenger list while we turned off the different popups which ruined the user experience of the website.
We ran ads to our holiday custom flows generating great ROI and offering free retargeting for the client.
How we improved the monthly revenue and monthly revenue/subscriber rate from October to December. The revenue increased by 300% while the number of subscribers grew only by 47%.
We continue our work with Recart and with the client to improve on the custom flows and get even higher ROI on them and Messenger subscribers.
If you want to get similar results but you don't want to learn the ins and outs of Messenger and email marketing, click this link and let's see if we are a good fit to work together: https://danielbudai.typeform.com/to/jTIN4o
WHAT OUR CLIENT SAID: "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.
If you're looking for a talented, highly motivated and self-sufficient team who is committed to your success, look no further than Budai Media." - Andreas König