w/ Natasha Willis, School of Bots
In 2016, Facebook opened up messenger bots. And in 2017, it felt like we hit peak chat bots. We didnt hear about them as much in 2019, but that doesnt mean they ever went away, and now there is a resurgence of chat bots. I love automation and AI, so let's revisit chat bots!
At the very least, you’ll benefit from this talk if you want to use Instagram to get more sales.
At the most, you’ll learn how to 2-10x your sales on Instagram.
Natasha Willis is the co-founder of School of Bots, where she has helped train over 14,000 businesses how to use AI Chat Funnels to grow revenue. Her expertise comes from generating more than $30 million in sales for clients like Foundr, ClickFunnels, and Mindvalley. Natasha has spoken at 160+ events alongside influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk and Richard Branson, and has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and more.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Natasha Willis
Kurt Elster: My friends, do you remember chatbots? Back in 2016, Facebook opened up Messenger bots, like it opened up this huge possibility. We’d seen chatbots prior to then, but they were like live chat widgets used for customer support, and then they said, “Hey, you could just plug these into Messenger,” and quickly, by 2017, it felt like we’d hit peak chatbots. Everything was chatbots. By 2019, we’re not hearing about them anymore. But that doesn’t mean they ever went away. Certainly, they didn’t. And now we’re seeing a resurgence of chatbots, right?
Now, I love automation and AI, and we’re always looking for what can we do to increase our return on ad spend, our ROI, marketing efficiency ratio, whatever you want to call it, but man, I love automation and AI. Let’s revisit chatbots. So, here’s my promise to you today. At the very least you’re gonna benefit if you want to use Instagram to get more sales. Let’s say you’re already on Instagram. This one’s probably worth your time. If you’re curious about chatbots, 100% worth your time. And that’s the minimum. If you’re lucky, if you fit in a particular category, you may 2 to 10x your sales using what you learn here today on Instagram. And of course, if you do, I’d love to hear about it.
And so, I don’t know particularly much about chatbots. I cannot explain this to you. But I have someone who can. I heard her talk at Blue Ribbon Mastermind in Miami. I loved it. And so, we are joined today by Natasha Willis. She’s the co-founder of School of Bots, I love this name, where she’s helped train over 14,000 businesses to use AI chat funnels to grow revenue. Notice she didn’t call them bots, but we’ll get to that. Her expertise comes from generating $30 million in sales for clients like Foundr, ClickFunnels, Mindvalley, and she’s spoken at 160 events alongside folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, Richard Branson, and has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and more. Natasha… Oh my gosh. I forgot to introduce myself.
This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast and I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Natasha, thank you for being here. I appreciate it.
Natasha Willis: Thank you so much for that killer intro. That was amazing. And I think hopefully we’ve got people hooked based on everything you shared, as well, so I’m really excited for us to dive in. I love your energy and how you run things here, so I’m just looking forward to sharing as much as I can with everybody who’s listening.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I appreciate that. Well, before we dive into it, and I really think I touched on it in the bio, but why should we listen to you? Who are you to chatbots? Why are you king of chatbots here?
Natasha Willis: Fair. So, back in 2016 when chatbots start getting used for marketing, because Facebook kind of pioneered this concept. Up until then, you alluded to it in your intro, but chatbots or automated chat experiences primarily lived on websites. You would go to a site, you see a live chat widget, and then you’ve gotta wait in a queue or hopefully hear back from somebody as soon as you can. We’ve got phone kind of chat automation, as well, where you can hit certain numbers and get routed to where you need to go, but they were all pretty terrible experiences and they also didn’t allow for discoverability, meaning actual marketing, finding new people who get to your business and get to speak with you, and so doing this on social media, particularly on Facebook, was where this kind of all started.
So, that was in 2016 when I found out about this, and I watched F8, which is Facebook’s annual developer conference. They announced this and I was like, “Holy crap. This is amazing.” Now, for context, at the time I was one semester into college at the University of Southern California, and I hated it. I had read The 4-Hour Workweek too, so my naïve 18, 19-year-old brain was like, “I should go start a first business and travel and dive into a new industry. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m gonna leave college and start this.”
So, ended up doing that. Within a year, we were able to sign on clients like Matthew Hussey and Mindvalley to build out these messenger bot systems for them. And the thing that we learned along the way was that this wasn’t just about customer support and being reactive, but actually being proactive. Starting conversations with people that then lead to increased revenue, increased conversion rates, increased customer lifetime value, all the things we’ll get into today when it comes to Instagram, which is newer. And over the last five years now, then we’ve been able to send over 20 million messages on behalf of our clients, some of whom you mentioned, and other ones specifically for Instagram that we’ve recently started with, like Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, bossbabe, The Futur, Chris Do, and many others that we’ve been lucky to work with, and test this out for, and scale these systems for.
So, long story short, I would say that I am one of the few people on the planet, to be frank, who has spent so much time on analyzing data in this, testing, and really seeing what works and what converts best. So, just hoping to be able to share that with all of you guys here in terms of what I’m seeing, and specifically for eCom how you guys can be growing your sales with this.
Kurt Elster: And what’s crazy is because it’s such a new thing, like our industry is so young, right? eCommerce itself really, if you’re being generous, has been around 25 years. And so, chatbots in this context have been around six years and you were there the whole time.
Natasha Willis: Yeah. Exactly. It’s kind of crazy.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. When you think about the timeframe, and it’s pretty wild. By definition, you’re one of the most experienced people on the planet with this. When you phrase it like that, it’s wild. One thing that I thought was interesting that I hear, I think about a lot, is you said I was a freshman in college, I read The 4-Hour Workweek, and then you thought, “Why not me?” And so many people did the same thing where like… I was out of college, but mid-20s, zero responsibilities, and luckily through privilege no debt at the time, and so I was able to start a business, and I really didn’t… The risk didn’t even occur to me. And at the time, we were in a recession, so getting a job was not even close to easy. I just think about how sometimes I wonder if I knew more, would I have done it? That advantage to not knowing what you don’t know, sometimes being naïve is a bonus, because you can take risks, because you don’t know they’re risks.
Natasha Willis: Exactly. I actually have had this conversation a lot in the last year with mentors and people who are much older than me and very experienced who are like, “Yeah, if I was going back today but the same person, I would not have done what I did which then made me $100 million or more.” Right? Just because you were able to take those risks by just not knowing what you didn’t know. I didn’t even think failure would really be an option. I was just like, “Well, if this doesn’t work out I’ll just go do something else.” And luckily it did, but not to say that it’s been pain free or easy by any means.
Kurt Elster: Oh, of course. Yeah. No, you still have all those struggles along the way, but by then you’ve got the momentum and you’ve started, so you’re like, “All right, it’s either forward, pivot, or quit.” So, back to chatbots. Certainly, chatbots aren’t for everybody. Or maybe they are, but in your experience, who is this right and wrong for?
Natasha Willis: Yes. And I think this is important because oftentimes there’s so much noise online, and for newer business owners or people who are maybe even just considering starting an eCommerce store, or starting their first business, they see all these different marketing methods and things they can be doing, and I think oftentimes they get caught up and kind of forget about the basics, and the fundamentals, so ultimately I would recommend that if you were just starting your business and you don’t quite yet know what’s actually gonna consistently sell, you don’t have consistent sales, and more importantly you just haven’t built out your marketing method and system. Like, you don’t have emails going, you’re not posting content consistently, you’re not running paid traffic, whatever that looks like for your business model, then I wouldn’t explore this until you have that baseline.
Now, if you are there where you’re like, “Yeah, we’ve got consistent sales coming in each month.” Whatever amount that looks like doesn’t really matter just as long as it’s a little bit more predictable than you just starting out green, then this can work with you because the thing is that once you implement this, you can think about these experiences that we’re gonna talk about that happen inside of Instagram DM kind of like you have all these different landing pages, different emails sequences. It's the same thing except they’re all these chat funnels. And so, they can speak seamlessly to each other on the backend. If you’ve got let’s say 10 different free shipping offers on landing pages, and discount codes, and all these things, they can all be represented as their own AI chat funnel.
So, I think once you’ve established that, then it’s much easier to say, “Hey, this has worked for us so far. Very bare bones. Ads to landing page, whatever. Just to the store. So, now let’s try to replicate that funnel inside of a chatbot.” And that, to me, is the best place that you can start. Because again, there’s so much noise, and it can get a little bit complex as you dive deeper and deeper into doing this in chat, so being able to start with a simple use case like that, knowing that it’ll likely convert and work for you because it already has, I believe is the best place you can start.
Kurt Elster: So, look for what do we have working now. Is it relatively straightforward? And then, okay, start with that one simple one so we can dip our toe in the water and try this, but it sounds like a big advantage. You don’t necessarily have to go super convoluted and complex. When you’re dealing with something that’s essentially a decision tree and a fancy, especially for someone like me, who likes to fiddle with toys, it’s very easy to, especially your first time out, really overcomplicate it, then not know where you went wrong, get frustrated, and go, “Well, that didn’t work.” And really it’s like, “Well, because you tried to do way too much out of the gate,” right?
So, what I’m hearing is like lean on past experience and then run before you can walk.
Natasha Willis: Exactly. Beautifully said. And oftentimes, again, with all the tech tools that are available at our disposal now, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in here are all the possibilities. Where do I start? And so, really my goal, which you alluded to at the beginning, is just give people a starting point here in terms of how you can test this out, and it begins by identifying what is a proven sales process, or customer journey, or funnel, if you will, that has already worked for you that we could try to duplicate into, like you said, a decision tree kind of chat funnel that allows people to convert ideally at a higher rate than your current process.
Kurt Elster: And so, it’d be like… So, if I’m on Shopify, a lot of people are on Klaviyo, does nice automation workflows with email or SMS. If I know there’s one that performs really well, like I’ve got a welcome series, all right, can I condense that? Can I make that work would be what I’m looking for.
Natasha Willis: Yes, and to maybe even back up further, it’d be like, “Well, what happens when people come to your website? Do you have a typical discount code popup? Or a spin the wheel? Or something like that that immediately shows up for new buyers, new customers, or even recurring ones?” And so, if we’re looking at that new customer journey, then being able to take somebody, which we’ll go through this whole process, so I don’t want to jump the gun too much, but for example, one of the ways you can use this on the organic side, which I recommend you do even if organic is not where you’re getting most of your leads. It’s still helpful to have this set up. You’d be surprised how many leads will come in where somebody can comment on your Instagram post and then they can receive an automated message from you that says something like, “Hey, sounds like you’re interested in X product. Would you like a 10% off discount code? I can share that with you right now.” And then there will be a button that kind of leads them into that conversation where they can say, “Yes, I want that,” and now in that conversation back and forth, this whole thing is automated, but it allows somebody to share their email with you just like they would on a popup on your website, and then you say, “Perfect. Here’s the discount code.” And then link them to your website. And that’s how they can begin their purchase journey.
And the benefit to that, then, is obviously now you get them onto your Klaviyo list, and you can send them email sequences and things there, as well. So, that’s just one simple use case to start out with that I would recommend people think about first instead of something more like a welcome series, just because this ties it to a sale and people can see, “Okay, that’s how I can actually generate ROI from this.”
Kurt Elster: So, what’s interesting is you said hey, straight out the gate, don’t overcomplicate it. And I said, “You’re right.” And then my first… When I tried to like, “All right, I’m gonna think through this and apply it,” I immediately overcomplicated it.
Natasha Willis: Yes. So, a real time case study, right? Because already you, in your brain, though, know all the things that you’re doing, so you’re like, “We could use this for this, this, this, XYZ,” but yeah, just keeping it super simple. A discount code I think is the easiest way, or maybe a bonus that they’re gonna get if they spend X amount, and to get that they need to go into the DMs and learn about it before they go to your site, so the offer on the frontend, ultimately, if you’re listening and you have an offer that’s worked for you, then I would just go with that, whatever that actually looks like for you. Even if it’s not one of those two examples.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so we touched on not necessarily a misconception, but like a common mistake, going too complex to start. Are there… Give me some of those other common mistakes or maybe misconceptions.
Natasha Willis: Yeah. I think there’s two that we can go to and one of them’s a little more high level. So, to start tactically, what I often see people do is they will use a trigger, like a comment on a post, and then they just send one auto responder right after that that doesn’t really start a conversation. Instead, it’s just, “Cool. Here’s the link. Go buy something from me.” And that’s not how a conversation works. If you were speaking with a friend and they were like, “Hey, you should totally check out this product,” you’re gonna feel like you want to reply to them and then maybe there’s a little bit of that back and forth. Just one of many examples. If you think about how you typically speak with colleagues, with friends, with whoever online, on all the messaging apps, so you want to treat it the same way, like someone would expect to be speaking to a friend, so instead of just saying, “Hey, here’s the link. Go buy.” Instead, it’s like, “Hey, sounds like you’re interested in this. Is that right?”
And then now you can actually guide them through a conversation, even if it’s only a couple of steps, like, “Yes.” Okay, cool. Here’s the link. At least that makes it a conversation instead of just treating this like you would with an email, because with email people aren’t expecting to feel like they should reply. They know they probably aren’t gonna get a personalized response, or a quick response from you, so they’re just gonna skim the email and it’s much more like a one-way street where they click something if they’re interested, or they click out if it’s not interesting enough. And so, this is very much a two-way street, and I think that’s so important to keep in mind as you go into this with literally anything that you’re gonna build out. So, that’s the first thing. Does that make sense?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. This lines up with my experience with chatbots, would be like you see a post that’s like, “Hey we just put together this PDF report and if you want it, we’ll send it to you. Just gotta comment below, “I want that.” And then you comment, and you just get a link to the PDF. So, it makes it very transactional, and really replicates like I opted in in a form, and then I got an email with a link. And you’re saying, “Hey, that just isn’t the nature of DMs.” Within that format, within that context, it’s not gonna have the effect you want, and so you have to make it conversational.
And my wife jokes, she said, “I have to teach you how to be human.” So, when someone talks, and she does talking hand motion, and goes, “Then you talk in kind,” and talking hand motion with the other hand. Like, “Oh, that’s the thing I’ve been missing.” Well, I guess is the same. True of our early chatbot users.
Natasha Willis: Yes. Exactly. That’s a perfect little visual for people to think about. So, that would be the biggest mistake I see people do, and then in terms of misconception, to touch on that as well, I think the biggest misconception, or just like doubt, limiting belief, whatever you want to call it that I see business owners have is, “Well, hey. Do people really want to interact with me in this way? I’m a little bit afraid to put too much automation out there because what if people feel like it’s generic? It’s not personalized? It’s a bad experience?”
Kurt Elster: It’s spammy. That’s the one I hear. “Oh, is it spammy?” It’s like similar resistance to SMS.
Natasha Willis: Yeah. Exactly. And to be fair, most companies are doing SMS, in my opinion, pretty wrong, because like you said, it’s very transactional to where it’s like, “All right, I’m just gonna get a bunch of salesy messages. It doesn’t feel personalized.” If you can tell that it’s a company that’s texting you instead of a friend when you just look at the text and not even who the text is from, then you’re probably doing SMS wrong. Just a little note on that.
But when it comes to how to think about this, I think there’s a bit of a mindset shift whether you’re like, “I’m all for automation,” et cetera, but this is something new. So, to kind of open your mind to the idea of something that I love that the CMO of Amazon Prime Video and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago, and that part of the business is like $187 billion valued at, but it’s a media company, and they run marketing campaigns in lots of different countries, different languages, et cetera, so I think it applies to any company, regardless of what you do, and what she said was that one of the biggest things we’re betting on right now is that in the future, in order to sustain growth and actually flourish as a company, you will have to equally combine human creativity and input with automation and AI. And I think that’s a really nice, understandable way to think about it, because AI, as of right now, is only as good as a human input that actually goes into it. If you guys have used tools like Jasper.ai, previously called Jarvis, like this copywriting tool, it’s a great platform. But at the end of the day, also, it can only be as aligned with your brand as you want it to be if you give it good stuff that then it can spit out something that’s related to that.
And I think that this human creativity element will always be so important, and yet, if you think about our businesses today, most people are so strapped for time and are having to do all these repetitive tasks, or create all these new things all the time that instead automation and AI will be able to help with more consistently in the future, so it allows you to free up your mind space and also your time to be more creative, and therefore feed AI and automation even better ideas that will continue to help you grow your business. And this is the same thing. We’re really just in the infancy of this space when it comes to automation and AI, but if you think about that vision for the future and how it actually helps you, it helps your audience, helps your business grow, then understanding how this can benefit you and still be in brand voice alignment, you can make sure it’s a good experience, all of that really comes down to you just executing properly and knowing what to do in the conversation, which is my goal to share with you guys today, instead of approaching it like what we just described where it’s very transactional and just one message.
Because people, once again, are strapped for time. Maybe not using automation and AI as much as they could be in their business.
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow. I love this approach, this strategy, this vision, this way of looking at AI tools and how they apply to our business. It’s fantastic. Because certainly, everyone has thought to themselves, “If only I could clone myself. I have so much to do. So little time. Can there just be more mes?” That’s the way you should approach AI tools. If there’s a process that you do repetitively, can you… Obviously, like you’re doing it. It’s in your voice. Can you then make an AI tool to leverage what you’re doing? And that’s how you go to one-to-many communication in a totally authentic and scalable way. That is the magic of this.
And you said… You got to name drop the CMO of Prime Video, which is like the coolest thing ever. I was very jealous of that.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: That’s super cool. But that approach, it works equally well for a small, bootstrapped business as it does for enterprise, and I think that’s… There’s kind of a democratization that occurs with these AI tools. Because they’re accessible, they’re easy to use, and they’re coming fast.
Natasha Willis: Yes. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: So, I’ve just been thinking a lot about AI tools. All right, exciting stuff on the horizon.
Natasha Willis: Yeah. If I can add one thing, because it just made me think about, I love how you said this essentially like cloning yourself. To think about AI automation tools in that way I think really hits home and probably helps people better understand this, and to go a step further, when it comes to actually implementing this, it quite frankly allows you to do that because in the DMs, even if you’re an eCommerce store and maybe you’re like, “Hey, we’re not really a personality brand, or really use our faces too much in our marketing,” but humans want to talk to humans, so the benefit of the DMs instead of a landing page, or email, or whatever, is you can send things like selfie videos, and images, and voice notes, and these have converted really well for us because again, it’s native to the channel, and quite frankly, you are cloning yourself across millions of conversations that can all happen at the same time with all of your leads at once.
So, it’s a really incredible way to connect with people at a deeper level than has ever been possible. Even though they’re interacting with your likeness, not necessarily you in real time manually, it still is real time for them and it’s good enough to where it gets the result that you want, and people are happy with the experience. There’s no negative aspect of it when you do it that way. So, just wanted to throw that in there, that that’s just one of the many ways that this actually plays out on this channel.
Kurt Elster: I could record a portrait selfie video and then I can have a DM, Instagram DM funnel that just sends that out automatically?
Natasha Willis: Correct. And so, for example, if we go back to somebody commenting on your post, and they get an automated message from you, the first automated message, and this is based on how Instagram rules work right now, you can’t have any media in the first one. But as soon as somebody says, “Yes, I want it,” now you’re freed up to use whatever media you want. So, let’s say somebody says, “Yes.” Right after that, they get a video from you and you’re like, “Hey, it’s Kurt. I own this store XYZ. I’m super stoked for you to get something from us. This means a lot to us. We’re a family business.” Whatever you kind of want to throw in there to introduce yourself to people. And they’re like, “Wow, this is amazing. I immediately feel a connection to this business. I want to support them.” And then now you’re like, “So, just click the button below and you can check out our products. We’ve got a 10% off discount for you. Really hope you like them. Let us know if we can help with anything.”
And immediately now you feel like you’ve talked to them, even though you haven’t actually spoken with a human, but it feels that way in the conversation. So, that’s just one way that it can be used.
Kurt Elster: You know, I think you did hear from a human. It was just the way we prompted when we deliver the message, that was the part we automated.
Natasha Willis: Yes.
Kurt Elster: But the message itself, that’s still totally legitimate. It’s not like we deep faked our way to success here. Though I’m sure in two years you’ll be back, and we’ll be talking about these deep fake selfie videos that are all the rage.
Natasha Willis: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Next level.
Kurt Elster: Well, a mantra on this show from the beginning has been people buy from people, not brands. Like it’s just much easier to sell as a person than it is as a disembodied logo.
Natasha Willis: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And so, I really like that, and that gives you a big advantage over email. I can’t embed video in email. I can link to it. I can’t embed it in SMS. I can link to it. This one, I can get it into the message, which is very cool, and that’s kind of the native format of these social apps now.
Natasha Willis: Right.
Kurt Elster: You touched on there are rules to how we can play in Meta’s sandbox with these automations. You said the first is no media until they reply?
Natasha Willis: Correct. And this gets a little bit into the nuances of what will likely continue to evolve over time, but to get into some of the logistics, it’s different for each of the opt-in points, and we can totally go into all of these. There’s over eight different ways that we can cover in terms of how you can start a conversation proactively with people automatically. So, if somebody’s commenting from a post, in the first message they get Meta is keeping it super simple, where you can just put text in and then buttons. And after somebody engages with that, then they can get a video, audio, image, or just text back from you.
Now, on the other hand, if somebody replies to your story, you say, “Hey, we’ve got a Black Friday sale going on. Just comment or reply Black Friday to this…” Oh my gosh. Sorry. Let’s back up. So, somebody sees your story and you’re like, “Hey, reply back Black Friday and I’ll send you the link to the sale.” And then they reply Black Friday, you can actually send media directly to them right after that. So, you could have another selfie video, or text, voice note, whatever you want. So, there’s just very small nuances that, to be honest, probably don’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things as we’re talking about it, because really I just want people to understand what’s possible in the main conversation, but if we’re talking about those little logistics, like some of the opt-in points will allow you to send media immediately, some of them won’t, but then you can send it as soon as somebody opts in, quote unquote, and starts that conversation.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That seems totally fair on both sides, right? Keeps people from getting spammed and keeps our quality of our recipients high, right? Now, we’ve been talking about Instagram and Meta. Does this work on Facebook Messenger? Or is this purely Instagram DMs?
Natasha Willis: Yeah, so it started with Facebook Messenger in 2016, and then as of, and to go one step further, as well, in 2020 it opened up on WhatsApp for those of you who are international and maybe talk to clients or customers there, and then on Instagram it opened up publicly last June, so in June of 2021.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so relatively recent thing. Surely, you have stats on this. What’s the opportunity here? How many DMs are flying around a day on Instagram?
Natasha Willis: Yeah, so on Instagram, every week one billion people are messaging businesses, and every day it’s 140 billion messages that are being sent to businesses. And this was shared in 2021. Now, with automation, I’d imagine it’s probably a lot higher. I just don’t know the most recent number, since they like to share numbers like every two, three years, but even that alone should be a wake-up call to be like, “Okay. Oh my gosh. I know we get DMs. We’ve been ignoring them. Or I wish more people would send us DMs.” So, whatever side of the fence you’re on, depending on just what you’re doing with content and all that on Instagram, this opens up the floodgates for you.
Kurt Elster: And we’ve been using chatbot, funnel, automation, interchangeably. What’s the standard term here? How should we be referring to these things?
Natasha Willis: Yeah. Well, like you mentioned earlier, it’s still so new that I think the industry hasn’t quite found the wording that is going to really stick let’s say over the next 20 years. So, chatbot was where things started, and Facebook would call it Messenger bots, chatbots, but on Instagram the challenge has been that people associate the word bots with the annoying bots that you see in the comments, the unsolicited DMs you’re probably all getting all the time about, “Hey, buy this NFT project,” or crypto, or real estate. Whatever it might be. All these make money online schemes that run these bots, and send, and just flood everyone’s inboxes and comment sections.
So, I don’t want people to think that this is what this is, because that is obviously not allowed by Instagram, whereas everything we’re talking about is approved, encouraged, and in fact was created by Instagram for businesses to have more valuable interactions. So, in terms of wording, what Meta themselves are using, they’re calling it DM automation. And I think that’s a good and easy way to think about it. What we’ve done over the years, though, is created what we call our AI chat funnel system, because I think that’s the best way to think about it, is you’re taking these sales processes that most people recognize as funnels and turning that into a chat experience while leveraging AI to do that and boost sales, et cetera.
So, that’s what we call them, our AI chat funnels on any of these platforms, but at the end of the day they’re chatbots. Chatbots would refer to the whole thing, so a lot of different types of funnels can be run in a chatbot, and then DM automation, just referring to the feature itself on Instagram.
Kurt Elster: All right. We’ve done a lot of establishing here. A lot of background. I’m intrigued and I know I’m supposed to keep it simple, but I want to walk through some of your fancy funnels. Walk me through some good examples here. I know you have them.
Natasha Willis: Yeah, absolutely. So, I would love to maybe first, if you’re cool with it, just to give people an idea of kind of how this works, and then I can lead that into one of the case studies I want to share, or just the eight ways that you can start a conversation on Instagram so people can understand how somebody actually enters the funnel.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’m ready.
Natasha Willis: Cool. So, I’ll kind of fly through these, but essentially somebody can comment on a live, they can comment on a post or a reel, they can direct message you but actually see prompts in there, maybe some of you guys have seen that because Instagram sometimes will add them automatically for you, but you can have any kind of prompt you want to show up there, so that’s helpful for leading people to a certain offer or answering FAQs. Then we’ve got feed and story ads, so when people click on an ad, instead of going to your landing page it would open up a window that says, “Hey, message us.” There’s a little prompt and then people can start the conversation from there. Then we’ve story mentions, so anytime somebody tags you guys in a story, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, my product just got here. It’s amazing, et cetera. Thanks so much.” So, you can start an automated conversation from that. And then in your bio is great, prime real estate as well to have a DM me this certain word to get this offer. That’s a great place to put that there. And then story replies, as well.
So, those are gonna be the eight ways that somebody can actually dive into the funnel, which I’m about to describe from one of our case studies. Any questions on that?
Kurt Elster: That sounds like every possible way to interact with someone on Instagram is a conceivable trigger.
Natasha Willis: Exactly. And that was most likely their intention, was just like how do we make this as easy as possible for businesses depending on what type of content you like to put out. If you like to do lives, if you primarily post on the feed, reels, all of it, stories, they just wanted to make it really easy to proactively start those conversations based on engagements from people.
Kurt Elster: Story mentions. That’s the one that surprised me. That’d be kind of… I assume that I could say like, “Well, only if this trigger occurs with these filters, then I’m gonna respond with X.”
Natasha Willis: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. You can get pretty specific when it comes to what you can trigger. Some of the triggers are a little bit more simple, but then others, you could say like, “If somebody messages me the word promotion and they also have the word book in their message, and they also have the word support in their message, then I’m gonna send this.” So, there’s a lot of if this, then that kind of logic right now, where it’s not 100% AI on Instagram. On Messenger and the others, it is, but on Instagram you can do some of that conditional logic, if you will, so then that way you aim to give people the most contextual response possible. Because obviously the waters can get a little bit muddy with certain phrases, like refund. You know, like, “What’s your refund policy,” versus, “I’m super pissed. I want a refund right now.” You’re gonna want to respond to things like that in different contexts.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, just to clarify for people what you’re saying, a lot of what we call AI is really conditional logic. If this happens, then do this. And based on your description, it sounds like we could do overlapping conditional logic, so it could be like, “If message contains X word and Y word, but not this word, then send this.”
Natasha Willis: Yes. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And then technically, that’s not actually AI, but it is more than enough to be dangerous.
Natasha Willis: Yes. That’s fair. And that’s the situation with Instagram right now, and like I mentioned with Messenger, and WhatsApp, and even SMS, true AI exists, where it’s actually using natural language processing and all that good stuff to detect what somebody is saying, and then it’s training itself so it’s ultimately also machine learning, because it’s starting to get better and better over time, whereas like you alluded to, the if this, then that conditional logic kind of stuff doesn’t improve on its own, and so it does require a little bit of that human hand.
But to be frank, really doesn’t make a difference right now with where the industry is at. We get just as amazing results with conditional logic as we do with AI as of right now.
Kurt Elster: And with the fancy AI version, can it do sentiment analysis where it goes, “I think this is a negative message?”
Natasha Willis: Yes. Exactly. So, there’s so much to it that it can detect, which is ultimately where everything is going, but Instagram is so new, and I think Meta did a really good job rolling it out where they’re slowly adding on features, so they don’t overload their servers and team also, as well. So, there are some of those limits right now, but over time, you, at least starting to test something out, literally, as soon as you finish listening to this podcast and go try to create something yourself, this will allow you to be ready to implement things like true AI on the platform when they become available, instead of that being yet another new thing you’re having to understand and learn.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Good point. And smart to roll it out in phases for a number of reasons. And so, all right, my starting conditions and triggers are just about any way you can interact on Instagram, and my logic limitation is if, then, else, which is fine. What’s next?
Natasha Willis: Cool. So, we can dive into, to kind of go back to your question then, now that I think we’ve set the stage a little bit, just in terms of understanding how you can trigger these funnels. So, I can share a couple of case studies, and the first one that I personally love is my favorite, just because it really highlights the difference between sending someone to a chat instead of to a landing page, is one of the biggest challenges… Some of the biggest challenges with landing pages are A, you’re not getting guaranteed communication with somebody. They come to your landing page, majority of people don’t opt in, and then you’re optimizing but you’re only optimizing to capture minority of traffic. And so, the benefit when somebody does one of these eight things on Instagram is you immediately get a guaranteed communication channel that you can send follow-up messages on, even if they didn’t yet say, “Yes, here’s my email to get this offer,” or, “Yes, I want this offer.” You can at least figure out how you can best serve them, so that’s one of the benefits.
And so, what we were able to do with Foundr, for example, who have millions of followers on Instagram, is they have a best-performing webinar, like most companies do, and their landing page for that, 23% conversion rate on average month to month. And so, we were able to take that same process of actually capturing an email for the webinar, and better yet, also nurturing the lead, which I’ll get to in a moment, and we were able to take the registration rate of people from that 23% to 70% inside of the chat, so that allows us, A, to capture a lot more leads on the frontend, B, a lot of those leads come from organic content who maybe didn’t engage before, but now that you’re inviting them to engage in this new way, they’re incentivized to comment on your stuff, or engage with your stories, et cetera.
And then on the backend, this made over $60,000 in new revenue in the first 30 days of it being implemented because we’re also nurturing people through that whole conversation. It’s not just transactional like a landing page, but we’re actually getting a chance to get to know people, get real time feedback from them, find out about their goals, and challenges, and these kinds of things, so by the time they get to the webinar, also they’re a lot more nurtured than somebody would be if they just got emails, for example.
Kurt Elster: Incredible. I got nothing to add to that. It’s fantastic.
Natasha Willis: Awesome. Yeah. It’s pretty mind blowing because like I mentioned, we’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and Messenger, we’ve gotten incredible results there, but with Instagram it happens so fast, and the amount of conversations that we can just start, which obviously then leads to a lot more leads, is just insane. The people wanting to actually engage in this way was super surprising to me. Not necessarily like new, but just knowing like, “Wow, the scale of this is kind of insane.”
So, another example I’ll share is for Mindvalley, for example, we were able to increase, just by doing this on stories. We didn’t even do this on posts, I think, at the time, because this was actually in the beta, as well, of this being available. So, we were like, “Let’s just test something out and kind of see how it goes.” And we were able to increase leads for them, for their free offers, by 800%, by doing this instead of doing story links or sending people to the link in bio. So, that was a huge just overall lead gen increase for them, where again, people want to engage. They want to know more about your stuff before they actually go over to the landing page or give you their email or whatever. And so, this allowed the avenue for that.
Kurt Elster: So, it sounds like the fact that a lot of this happens in app, which is really the struggle in eCommerce if you’re with those social channels, is well, how do I get them… Yeah, I’m interacting them with the app, and I can stay top of mind and build a relationship that way, but how do I get them out of the app and onto my website, right? They gotta make a purchase.
Natasha Willis: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And it sounds like this really helps bridge that divide and lower the barrier to entry to having that relationship.
Natasha Willis: Yep. Exactly. And to be fair, as well, with Instagram shop rolling out, and we haven’t talked too much about tech stack and how to do this, but you can integrate Shopify with your chatbot platform of choice, and then that allows you to also do things like abandoned cart messages, or even just knowing if somebody from the DMs actually then bought on your store, and then eventually as Instagram shop gets better with these automatic integrations, people will be able to do their entire purchase inside of the DMs automatically. They can already manually do it, but automatically actually being able to present that stuff to them is still kind of in the works, so that’s coming very soon, as well.
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say. I imagine that’s like right around the corner.
Natasha Willis: Yep. Right around the corner. And speaking of stuff that’s right around the corner, one of the features that just recently dropped, which we knew was coming because they announced it in May of 2022, but they like to take their time, like we said, kind of slowly rolling things out, doing betas, and then eventually publicly releasing, is now you can create a DM subscriber list. And you can actually have multiple types of lists, just like you have different email segments. So, for example, if you were gonna do a Black Friday sale and you want to use a waitlist as a strategy, then you could in the weeks before Black Friday say, “Hey, comment, reply to these stories,” for example, the word VIP to get first dibs on our Black Friday sale. And then when Black Friday rolls around, you can send outbound messages to that list, so people would get an Instagram DM from you, and you’re kind of broadcasting out to them just like you would broadcast out to your email list, or maybe some of you who have SMS lists, as well. And the open rates on this are like 80%-plus and click rates usually for us are 60% and above. As long as, again, everything’s framed as a conversation, right? So, you’re able to make it not feel so transactional like those annoying SMSs you’ll get where you’re like, “That’s a company. Not a friend.”
But actually, being able to start that conversation, answer questions, check in on them, provide just a little bit of that humanization of it, and then take them to the sale. That’s a huge unlock, I think, especially for eCommerce, and even… You know, we can go further into all the different use cases, like increasing customer lifetime value by being able to send Instagram DMs to people who are on a subscription with you so they can manage their subscription, or so you can upsell them into a subscription, and then other lists, as well, where if you do product launches each month, if you’ve got a newsletter, all that stuff now can be sent to these DM lists that you start to create on Instagram.
Kurt Elster: All right, now I’m thinking through it. It’s like, “Hey, welcome. Thanks for your purchase. What do you want to know about? Can we inform you about everything, sales, or new product launches?” And then it’s like A, B, C, and choose your own adventure, they pick, and now they’re segmented to that list?
Natasha Willis: Yes. That’s definitely one way that you could do it. Really, the possibilities are endless. Whatever makes the most sense for your brand, what you guys typically communicate with customers about, or what you wish you would do more of, this just makes it really easy to have people segment and kind of choose those types of categories or topics that they want to hear about from you.
Kurt Elster: I want to overcomplicate it so badly on my first time out the gate. Like my wife has a Disney World planning blog, and we run it on Shopify, and a lot of info products, and I’m just like my head is spinning with the stuff she could do, because a lot of her audience is on Instagram. And when she goes to the parks and does stories, engagement’s insane. And so, having… This just really could work out very well for anyone who’s got that high engagement audience on Instagram already. It’s like the wheels should be turning.
Natasha Willis: Yeah, and to be fair as well, for those of you who are like, “Well, I’ve got 1,000 followers,” or, “We’ve got 5,000, 10,000,” whatever. We’ve seen some pretty insane results as well. We’ve helped over 5,000 people create their first DM funnel or AI chat funnel with very simple, like a two-step story sequence, so just saying some kind of engagement on the first story, and then the second story saying, “Hey, reply back with this word,” and then taking them through a very simple, just email capture, but conversationally in the DMs, and we’ve had people make $25,000 in a day for their eCommerce store simply by doing that on really small accounts, and $3,000, $500. I mean, just at the end of the day, it just opens up this new channel to create more conversations and I think that there’s almost no way to argue with the fact that if you were having more conversations with people who are looking at your stuff on social media, you would make more sales.
Kurt Elster: What else? All right, let’s do it this way. I’m an eCommerce store. I have 15, 20,000 followers on Instagram. I’m posting to it. I’m doing my stories daily. And I’m setting up like one flow. What am I doing?
Natasha Willis: Yep. So, to actually go back to the example I just shared, the easiest way to get people in, because 50% of conversations on Instagram from people to businesses are started on stories, 40% from posts, and 10% from the actual profile where it says message us. Stories makes complete sense because the main call to action on a story literally is send message. Fill it in, send something back. So, makes sense that it's set up that way right now, the way they’re seeing the stats, so what you can do is set up a simple two-step story sequence. Now, Instagram says that story sequences, meaning stories that all kind of tie together, of three or more stories get the most engagement. And it makes sense because people are kind of following along a little storyline now.
And so, if you just start with two, though, we have found this can be just as effective, where the first story has some kind of pain point question or, “Hey, did you know XYZ?” So, to your point about, “Hey, I’m an eCommerce store, 15K 20K followers,” let’s say that you are a clean beauty brand, and a lot of people don’t know that there’s toxic ingredients in their beauty products. So, your first story could say something like, “Hey, did you know that your mascara has tar, or XYZ ingredients,” or whatever. And you have a poll and that says yes and I’m curious. Or for this one, actually, for example, it would be something like, “Oh my gosh. I didn’t know that.” Or something kind of conversational.
The alternative to this would be something like, “Hey, are you struggling to sleep better at night?” And let’s say you’re a mouth tape company or something crazy, right? And so, then the poll could say something like, “Yes,” or like, “I’m curious.” We never have a no option in the poll, so that’s just a key tactic there. Because if somebody’s not interested, they’ll just scroll away. But this allows pretty much everybody to engage with that first story.
Now, in the second story, this is where you’ll say, “Great.” Introduce a little bit about what you want to lead people to next, so if this is gonna be some kind of discount code they can get, or if you’re wanting to just get people’s emails, or sign them up for something that’s coming up. Let’s say you’re doing a webinar for your eCommerce store. Whatever that is, on the second story share a little bit of that context and then have the CTA. You can choose whatever word you want. There’s a lot of logistic and small things around the words, but just use something simple that’s specific to your business.
All right, so if I’m the clean beauty brand, then maybe I say, “Just reply back to this story mascara and we’ll share more with you as well as a discount code to get your first bottle of our mascara.” So, that’s the first part of the traffic.
Then, somebody comes into the DMs, and like we talked about earlier, you don’t want to right off the bat be like, “Cool, here’s a link to buy. Hope you go buy it.” Instead, we’re gonna start the conversation. We’re gonna say, “Hey, it sounds like you’re interested in learning more about how your beauty products could contain some toxic ingredients. We’d love to help educate you and help you get some new clean beauty products into your cabinet,” whatever. And then click here to learn more about that? Yes. And so, then there’s a button that would say yes. They can click into that. And now in the next message, you can either keep it super simple and be like, “Cool. Here’s the discount code. Here’s the link to our site. There’s a lot of details on that page. Let us know if we can help with anything else.” Or you could take it a step further and actually have a couple of back-and-forth messages that educate them about, for example, clean beauty in this case, and then at the end capture their email.
You can send that email to Klaviyo, so you could start the abandoned cart sequence as needed. And then give them the link to go and check out the product page on your Shopify store. So, there’s a couple ways you could approach it, but those are gonna be just two simple, very, very simple paths, and the way that you actually implement all of this on your Instagram account is you can use a software called Manychat, it’s M-A-N-Y-C-H-A-T. And this is our favorite platform we’ve used for years for all of our clients. It’s the best one I’ve personally found because it gives you all the marketing analytics for every single part of the conversation.
So, you can create all these automations in there, hook up your Instagram account super easily, and then start to see what’s working, and like we said, start simple, and then you can start to make it more and more complex as you build stuff out based on the data.
Kurt Elster: This is such a great funnel for an eCom brand, for a Shopify store, because you’re right, that first… A lot of the engagement happens in stories. Stories just inherently lead themselves to direct messages. And so, I love stories as the format, and you lead with agitate the pain or pique their curiosity, one of the two. But either way, it’s the people that it does not apply to, they’re just gonna skip it, right? That’s the other default behavior in an Instagram story, is swipe. And so, you’re not gonna… This is in no way spamming. You’re not hassling people with this because either they’re interested or they’re not. And the not interested people know who they are. It’s like it’s self-selection. The people who you do have their interest raise their hand by interacting with it, and then okay, now we’re gonna go into the pitch.
The short version is easy. I like the longer version too, and we always hear, “Well, people don’t read.” Well, when you break it down in these little conversational snippets, they certainly do read. That makes life much easier. And then like we’re trying to get their email so we can pass that to Klaviyo. This is incredibly clever. I could see where this would be very successful. And then combine it with the fact that so few brands are doing this, right? Relative to the number on Instagram, how many have sequences like this implemented? How many have this kind of funnel? I would say currently very few. There’s a big opportunity here.
Natasha Willis: Yeah. Absolutely. You’re able to play on a couple of things here, like take advantage of this arbitrage, right? Because as business owners, as marketers, our goal is to see where’s the attention going and then how can we essentially take advantage of that arbitrage of attention? And in this case, you’re playing on the novelty of this, so a lot of people are gonna message in because they’re just curious, like, “What’s gonna happen? I haven’t seen this before.” Or maybe I have, but I’m still curious. And then the other aspect of it is you are ultimately doing a couple of things. This is all permission-based, so the user has committed to replying to that story. Then they commit again to actually engaging with the conversation. And so, you’ve got all these touch points lined up that play on that psychology, and you also are making things as human and as intimate as you possibly can in a sales process other than actually jumping on the phone and talking to somebody, which you can’t possibly do as you scale this.
So, this is the second best thing you can do, where you can actually take them through a real time conversation. They don’t have to wait for you for hours, or days, or weeks to get back to them. And instead, you can speed up that sales process and ultimately help them just make a decision. Maybe your product’s not right for them, but at least they know that in five minutes instead of in weeks after they hear back from your email support team.
So, lots of different things here, but I think those are the most important to highlight to just understand how powerful this is, and like you said, huge advantage because it is new, and those who can jump on this early now are going to be able to learn how this works, get some data, really serve your audience and customers in the best way, and then as more and more new features, and channels, and all these things open up, it’s ultimately all the same thing. It’s just conversational psychology, just messaging, so you’ll be able to take what you learn on Instagram DM and apply this to new features on the platform, as well as new messaging platforms that will show up in a couple of years as things continue to evolve.
Kurt Elster: And the tool you like for this is Manychat.
Natasha Willis: Correct.
Kurt Elster: Okay. What about you? What do you do? How can I learn more about you?
Natasha Willis: Yeah. Well, ultimately we’ve got everything and a lot of education on our site at SchoolOfBots.co, and I think, quite frankly, if you were just to take everything we talked about here and implement it, I would love too, like Kurt said, let us know. Let both of us know how it goes because I would love to hear at least how you’re experimenting and if you need any support. And what I also want to encourage you guys to do to see an actual demo live would be if you go to Instagram, my handle is @NatashaTWillis, you can DM me just the word Kurt for this podcast. I will know that you came from this so I can support you and already have some context, and more importantly, I can at least help kind of take you through the demo, you can see what it looks like, and then I can point you to a free resource that’s helpful for you. Maybe it’s a video, maybe there’s some slides, or some kind of template that I can share with you that will help you get things started with this.
Kurt Elster: And we go to your Instagram and your handle one more time is?
Natasha Willis: NatashaTWillis.
Kurt Elster: And I will link to that in the show notes.
Natasha Willis: Sweet.
Kurt Elster: Tap or swipe up on the show art. Very informative and exciting. I have new toys and funnels and strategies to play with. Always a good day. Keeps me busy.
Natasha Willis: Yes. I love it. Thank you so much for having me, Kurt. This was a blast. I have to say, this is probably my favorite podcast that I’ve done. You are an amazing host. I’m really not just trying to hype you up. I’ve been on quite a few podcasts talking about this with huge marketing leaders and I love the way that you just take the conversation through, really break it down, your analogies, everything, so hats off to you for just being an amazing host.
Kurt Elster: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Because when I started, I had no idea what I was doing, and 400 episodes later I’m like, “I’m finally figuring it out.”
Natasha Willis: Yeah. I don’t suck at this anymore.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s like right around episode 300 I was like, “Maybe I’m good at this.” All right. Natasha, I have chatbots to go create and I gotta go follow you on Instagram. All this info is in the show notes. It was School of Bots, NatashaTWillis on Instagram, Manychat is your favorite tool. Please check all that stuff out. Let us know how it goes. Natasha, thank you so much.
Natasha Willis: Thank you for having me Kurt, and thanks, everybody, for listening.