New Channels For Better Open Rates | Get Fact Up #82

Hey Everyone, Andrew here – marketing strategist, coming to you almost live from the MeMedia Burleigh Heads studio. Flying solo today for episode 82 of ‘Get Fact Up’, and today I want to talk about Open Rates. Specifically, how to get much, much higher Open Rates, Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) and signups through new, less crowded channels.

So, open rates, what do I mean by that? You could say that means anything that you’re broadcasting to your prospects, so let's look at email.

Open rates for emails are statistically about 24% across all industries – to be honest, in my experience that’s a stretch.

You might get that if you are well known and deliver amazing content, have excellent subject lines, good mobile compatibility – but in my experience it’s between 10 and 15% for a lot of people.

Even if you’re getting 24%, it’s not going up – at the start of last year it was about 32% in Australia.

What’s worse is the click through rates – that is the clicks on the links in your emails. It’s about 4% across all industries. Pretty low.

I’m not writing off email marketing here – it’s certainly better to have your own list of prospects than rely on another platform that is subject to whimsical changes.

That brings me to Facebook.

Anyone with a Facebook page is probably noticing that organic reach on Facebook is getting lower and lower – and after the recent blow up with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s hard to say for sure, but it seems like they’ve done it again.

Organic reach for Facebook pages is at an all time low – leaving a lot of businesses no choice but to promote their posts or boost just to reach their own followers. Not good if your business model depends on Facebook followers and viral posts for sales.

Not to mention, if more people have to pay to get the views, advertising prices will go up.

So, what can you do?

Well in a previous podcast, we spoke about using SMS marketing to supplement your traditional channels.

The open and click-through-rates are way higher, apparently 80% – even if that’s an exaggeration, i’d be very happy with a 60% open rate compared to email.

It’s a great service – relatively cheap and fairly untapped still for some reason.

BUT while I was looking up SMS broadcast packages I found something even better.

Automated Facebook messaging. In fact I was told about automated Facebook messaging through an automated Facebook message from Brendan Burns – a well known Instagram marketing expert.

We haven’t spoken much about this before in our podcasts – it’s still relatively new. Also, until recently, it’s been a bit of a pain to setup.

Basically you can create a bot to be able to take care of Facebook messaging for you – to be honest, i’ve not recommended it much because the idea of bots turns most people off.

But recently a few new services have popped up that have really streamlined and simplified the whole process and added new features.

So the standout one for me is called ManyChat, but there are others popping up.

This allows you to send scheduled broadcasts to your followers, then manage or even automate their responses. Best way to describe it is kind of like MailChimp, but for Facebook Messenger.

And it’s cheap - $15 per month per 1000 followers.

Let me give you some examples of how you could use it to reach 100% of your followers instead of about 1% organically:

• If you were running a special on your ecommerce store, you could send out a Facebook Messenger broadcast to ALL of your followers sending them a link to the sale page.
• If you had a webinar or event scheduled, you could send all of your followers a link to register… then for anyone that registered you could send them a reminder the day before, one hour before, sending them a link, Google Maps directions etc.
• If you released an article on your website, you could message your followers letting them know what it’s about.

Also you can set up canned responses for people, so that they can simply choose an an answer instead of typing a response.

You can personalize your messages to include the person’s name, so it feels more like it’s coming from a real person (same as you would in email broadcasts).

You can segment your audience same as you would if you were managing email lists – so split up your followers based on product interests.

You can schedule message broadcasts and create automated sequences the same as you would in an email marketing tool like MailChimp.

There are also a whole load of growth tools for turning commenters into followers, website integration and more.

Best of all the open and click through rates are the best i’ve seen – industry stats are yet to be released, but i’m seeing people say their campaigns are getting anything up to 98% open rate which is insane.

So – I’m sure you can imagine there is a tonne of ways you could benefit from this. I’d say this is definitely a space to look at taking advantage of if you’re tired of the poor results you’re getting from traditional digital marketing channels.

If you want to know more about how to get started with automated messaging, setting up a bot or creating a strategy around automating your facebook, just drop a comment below, give us a call or send a message – we’re here to help!