Add 14.6% in new Shopify sales in 7 weeks using Instagram DM Automation

This fitness Shopify brand added 14.6% in extra sales in the first seven weeks by just using Facebook and Instagram automation.

In this blog, I'll break down the strategy my team and I deployed for them to help them give people so much value upfront that they felt compelled to buy from them, and how 20% of them purchased immediately. 

All through their Instagram DMs.

I’ll also show you how, over the following six months, we optimized their Instagram DM system to a 43% purchase rate and used a post-purchase DM automation campaign to get 22% of buyers to purchase the client’s subscription.

If we haven’t met, I’m Liz, and since 2019 I’ve been running a DFY chatbot agency, on a mission to change how online brands monetize their Instagram and Facebook channels, one conversation at a time.

On this blog I share strategies that help my clients make money with DM automation.

Use Instagram Direct Messages to Gain More Sales: The Right Way

This fitness e-commerce brand had 45k Instagram followers and 18k Facebook followers.

Plus, they had great products and a subscription they regularly showcased on their Instagram posts.

Our main goal was to drive sales through their Instagram DMs and capture people on their email, SMS, and DM lists.

They were one of the e-commerce brands we got into META’s closed Instagram beta program. They were allowed to build DM lists and then send out future free promotional push notifications, all META-compliant.

Believe me, that's an Instagram marketing strategy game-changer.

We wanted to leverage their existing follower base and use automated direct messages to sell to people who weren’t following them yet. I’ll break down exactly how we did that.

How to Grow Your Business by Leveraging Your Instagram Account  

Step 1: If you’ve read Alex Hormozi’s latest book, $100M Leads, he talks about giving people so much value upfront that they feel compelled to buy from you.

The best strategy we found to deploy for this fitness brand was to build a calorie calculator inside of their DMs and then use Instagram automated messages to get it in front of their audience.

In this example, when people replied to this story, an automated message started a conversation.

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Step 2: The challenge was capturing email at a high rate, getting people to opt in for SMS, AND selling to them all in the time span of a 2-minute automated DM conversation. 

In a scenario like this, besides leading with value, which in this case was calculating their personalized calories based on their goal (fat loss, muscle gain, etc.), we had to have two very good reasons for these people to give us their email and phone number BEFORE we presented any sort of offer. 

We asked them to give us their email so we could email them their calories.

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At the end of the conversation, an email auto-reply was sent that complemented the conversations they had in the DMs.

Whatever chat people have with you, whether it’s inside Instagram DMs or Facebook Messenger, all that data and everything they do inside the chat flows to your email service provider.

Now, you’re in front of these people via two channels: DMs and email.

This increases the speed of our client's sales treadmill as if it were the London Marathon.

Moving forward, we continued providing value, and in the end, the reason why they should give the phone number was so they could claim a personalized fat loss plan.

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We also made them opt in for SMS before giving them the plan.

Since we'd now moved them to SMS, we were delivering a personalized expiring coupon via SMS and sending them to shop for their specific goal, in this case, fat loss.

Step 3: We pushed Instagram users to the DMs by having their team model our internal guidelines and put up our recommended content type.

This sent automatic DMs every time people replied to specific Instagram stories, commented on specific feed posts, tapped a button on their website, OR commented on their paid ads.

This is how we captured non-followers in their DMs.

Customers lift weights, and we lift sales, all through DM automation.

Step 4: Once the automated Instagram messages concluded the conversation, our system waited in the backend for an order from that user.

If the order didn’t come, it started new conversations over the following four weeks to answer frequently asked questions.

This helped us understand why some users hadn’t bought and helped them progress faster to checkout.

Step 5: Post-purchase.

When someone enters your DM ecosystem, your chatbot will not only lead them to an initial purchase, BUT it will continue to assist and nurture post-purchase as well.

For example, 30 days post-purchase it starts a new DM automation to check in to see how people are enjoying their products.

Sixty days after purchase, it attempts to get those Instagram users to buy the subscription using the data it had collected 30 days earlier, whether people were enjoying their order or not.

Finally, 90 days later, it only re-engages people who HAVE NOT yet purchased the subscription.

The Final Numbers?

92.7% of everyone who engaged with our DM automation gave us email addresses.

90.05% gave us their phone number as well.

20.43% purchase rate in the first four weeks of launch.

After optimizing the chat system based on how people engaged, how they bought, what made them buy, or WHY they didn’t buy, we took it to a 43% purchase rate.

Finally, the post-purchase Instagram DM campaign got 22.83% of people who had purchased the subscription to get it within 90 days of the purchase.

Why did this work so well for them?

Firstly, they had seen more and more brands monetize their socials like this, and they wanted to do the same. 

Secondly, like other businesses, they tried to do it themselves using Manychat, but you can’t do what I just walked you through JUST using Manychat, so they hired us and let us do everything for them.

And thirdly, they were open to changing their content structure and executed all our strategies.

They put up the content we told them to, and now they have a chat system that continues to start automated DM conversations with everyone who engages with their socials, website, or paid ads.

If you liked this blog, check out this video here, where I break down how we used DM automation to drive $139k in extra sales in the first 30 days for this beauty brand. Then, follow for more content on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

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