How to use Facebook Messenger for Referral Marketing

I don’t see any reason to stop writing about it.

Using Facebook Messenger to run referral marketing campaigns is the #1 marketing tactic I suggest to anyone that want to gather leads for their business.

Why?

Because it works. With the right prize, the right copywriting, it can be a true miracle.

And in case you can allocate some budget to promote the campaign, you might be able to gather 35K leads in 20 days.

One can say that things are not as easy as I might make them sound on the paragraphs above; it’s true, but I give you my word that it’s not that difficult either.

Most of the times, referral marketing campaigns fail to get the traction they deserve because their message gets lost in the endless noise we call the Internet.

Finding the perfect marketing channel can be a tedious task, but as Fetch & Funnels’ founders explained to us: “the second we saw that you could build a subscriber base on Messenger, our first thought was that this is going to be the next biggest marketing channel that exists.”

With extraordinary Open & Click-through rates, Messenger is a less intrusive and inexpensive way to get your message right in the face of your potential customers.

If you’d like to have a more in-depth look at how you can utilize Facebook Messenger to grow your audience, we have a brand-new webinar about it!

The very essence of this article is to help you understand the exact steps required to utilize Facebook Messenger for your referral marketing campaigns.

Enjoy.

Choosing Prizes.

Without the right prize, your messenger referral campaign could become a shipwreck.

The prizes you offer are the core of your campaign; it’s what made The Hustle gather 300K fanatic readers, and boosted Dropbox’s growth by 3900%.

Although I’ve already written an extensive guide on how to choose the right rewards for your referral campaign, I’ll lay down your options really quick:

• Free products.
• Internal currency.
• Discounts.
• Company Swag. Exclusive content.
• Early access.

But there’s a catch; right now, the only option you have to run a referral marketing campaign via Facebook Messenger, is by using Messenger Bot Giveaways by Viral Loops.

That means that whatever your choice about your campaigns prize is, you’ll have to present it in the form of a giveaway.

I’ll give you 2 examples.

Early access to Messenger Bot Giveaways by Viral Loops.

When our product was (almost) ready to launch, we had to start spreading the word about it.

Trying to gather email addresses for a product that would work entirely via Messenger, seemed like a stupid idea.

That’s why we’ve built a pre-launch campaign that followed the giveaway model, by using our own product. We wanted the people to see a demo of how the Messenger flows of the referral campaign could look like, and give to 20 people early access to the product itself.

Users got more entries for getting more of their friends to sign up to our pre-launch, and the more entries one had, the more their chances to get early access were.

Beardclubs’ Free product rampage.

Beardclub is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) retailers for men grooming products. When they decided to give a year’s worth of beard oils, Messenger was the obvious choice.

They asked people to join their referral campaign, and then incentivized them to invite their friends by giving more entries for every successful referral!

I will not get more into the details that made this campaign a huge success, because I’m already preparing a huge case study about it!

The setup.

Here things are really simple; actually, it’s the exact same process with the one I describe in the article about creating a kick-a$$ Facebook contest.

The steps are really simple:

1. Create a Manychat Account.
2. Choose the Facebook page of your choice.
3. Go to your Viral Loops account.
4. Click the “Messenger Giveaways” template.
5. Copy the API token and install the template.
6. Go to your Manychat account and choose in the menu Settings → Installed Templates → Viral Loops Messenger Giveaways and paste the API token in the relevant bot field.
7. Change the default copies of the flow that comes with our template.
8. Go live!

It sounds easy because it is. We’ve also created a video that showcases the steps:

I guess that by now, you’re wondering how you can possibly pick the winners for your referral marketing campaign via Messenger.

Time to get sales-y 😂:
Messenger Bot Giveaways by Viral Loops, picks the winners for you!

Sounds like a telemarketing ad, but it’s not a joke. All you have to do is:

1. Go to your Viral Loops account.
2. Choose your campaign.
3. Scroll down a bit and choose “Pick Winners”
4. BOOM!

If it helps, we have a short tutorial for it:

Promotion and Tracking.

Choosing the right prizes and setting up your campaign- even though is of high importance, is only half of the story.

Without any kind of promotion, any hope for success goes with the wind.

The same applies to tracking. Without proper tracking, you won’t be able to make changes with a positive impact on your campaign.

I’ve covered both subjects extensively here:

• How to create Facebook contests that bring sales.
• How to track your Messenger Giveaway performance.

I won’t get into much detail, but I thought it’s a nice opportunity to present the best promotion tactics, as well as the metrics you should keep your eyes on while running your referral marketing campaign via Messenger.

Promotion.

• Manychat’s “Facebook Comments” growth tool.
• Manychat’s “Messenger Ref URL” growth tool.
• Manychat’s “Facebook Messenger Code” growth tool.

These growth tools are really easy to set up. The only one- out of the three, which can be a bit tricky to set up is the “Facebook Comments” growth tool, but we created a video about it:

Tracking.

When you’re tracking the performance of your campaign inside Manychat, keep your eyes on:

• Open Rate.
• Click-through Rate.
• Participation Rate.

The most important metric when it comes to referral marketing campaigns though is the K-factor.

The K-factor (or Viral Coefficient) is measured by dividing the average number of conversions from invitations received by the average number of invitations sent.

In case your Messenger referral campaign is also hosted on a dedicated landing page, you should always check your Analytics platform for the following metrics:

• The number of New Users.
• Bounce Rate.
• Click-Through Rate.
• Conversion Rate (Visitor to participant).

Before you go.

I will close the article the same way that I started it; Using Facebook Messenger to run referral marketing campaigns is the #1 marketing tactic I suggest to anyone that want to gather leads for their business.

It’s easy to set up, yet effective when it comes to results.

This is not by any means a step-by-step guide, but rather an introduction to the possibilities offered. If you want to learn all the important details, I recommend reading all the blog posts I’m linking to, throughout this article.

If you read from top to bottom, I have to thank you for that; If you skipped directly to this paragraph, stop cheating 😂

Keep being awesome.

Officially Published @ Viral Loops