Why Josh prioritized Messenger subscribers over email on his new product launches:

Josh: We had an e-mail list of around 5000 people and whenever we sent any e-mails… we didn’t get any responses. I’d say something like, “Hey! Respond back with X (or whatever it may be) and I noticed I’d get more responses on Facebook if I just post on there.

There’s something seriously wrong with e-mail. Like why don’t people respond? It  hurt me because you have like all these “experts” saying build your list, and I thought, that’s what I’m doing! I’m not getting any results.

I put so much effort into growing my list because I thought it would help me. It was obvious that it was a waste of time. I jumped into Messenger when I created a giveaway in my group and I got 200 people subscribed. I sent out a broadcast and I saw I had a 96 percent open rate and a 60 percent click through rate.

I was mind blown because my emails were receiving around a 33 percent open rate. And maybe like 4 percent click and I was really upset at about that. Why am I even wasting time with email?

I chose to quadruple down on messenger. I took focus off of my e-mail list and then ramp up your my messenger list which is way easier than e-mail us.

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Responding to thousands of messages via Messenger:

Josh: My team responds around 90 percent of all messages and I respond to around 10 percent. We have to be very wary because we do have leads come in through messenger that say, “Hey, we’re interested in working with you.”

It’ll be hard because they’re not necessarily vetted when they reply. You do have to like look into their LinkedIn profile. Sometimes, you get on the phone with people who can’t afford your services. But at the same time, they’re still leads coming in, and a lot of them are valuable.

Growing his subscriber list to 12,000+ subscribers:

Josh: We figured out a way to grow our list every single month and a lot of it comes out without blog posts. Putting these messenger buttons led to very low subscriber growth for us. What worked for us was releasing books on Product Hunt because the people that visit there already know about Messenger. There are already early adopters.

5,000 subscribers came from our first book got us and 7,000 came from our second book. We released both as e-books.

I think we could hit 25,000 pretty quickly and that’s super exciting. The reason I did this because I was talking to my friend Aaron who runs the best content marketing agencies in Australia and I told him about our success. Now we want to go do something on Kickstarter and he was like, “Don’t be an idiot. If it works, double down.”

Thank you Josh Fechter for sharing your secrets! Experience his chatbot and get his free marketing guides below.

You can see more practical use cases with Facebook chatbots here.

You can subscribe to Bot Academy’s chatbot below to learn more about how you can get started with Facebook Messenger!