Golf is a huge industry in North America & other parts of the world. Due to the pandemic, this was one of the industries that were hit hard by the Covid wave, resulting in the drop of Golf Tournaments & Corporate Golfing Events. Our client ZAP Golf Gifts (formerly known as Millennium Logo Glove) were into this industry for more than 10 years and they gave us the task to build their brand from the scratch.
In this particular case study, we are going to showcase how we implemented chatbot marketing automation (using Facebook Messenger), and our marketing campaigns to achieve over 5000 leads and 8500 dollars in sales.
Table of Contents:
Project Introduction:
The idea was to sell something different and keeping it affordable at the same time. Our client pitched an idea to offer a ‘Free + Just Pay Shipping’ product to the market. The product was a personalized golf glove where the users would be able to insert an image of their choice on the magnetized detachable ball marker, which in turn, would be attached to the golf glove.
The ideal pricing of the product is $29.95 and we planned to promote the offer by providing the coupons which will turn the product’s pricing to free and the customers would only have to pay the shipping fee. We targeted users under golf interests and categories in the USA and Canada, pricing the shipping at $9.95 per glove.
Please note that this is just one of the projects we implemented for our client. We have quite a few running at the moment. PointUp Digital will focus on the implementation & completion of such marketing automation projects and will add more case-studies in the future.
Implementation of the Marketing Automation System:
For those who struggle to understand the technical terminology, we will try to explain it in a simpler way.
It all starts with a system that can accept orders. We built the entire website with a lot of complicated elements involved. One such thing would be to implement a process where the users could upload the image directly on a specific area of the product. In this regard, we have a product page set up for the golf glove where the users can upload an image of their choice and check out with the shipping fee!
The regular marketing method would involve sending the users from the advertisement to this page and waiting for orders. We decided to implement a chatbot sequence which collects the email address of the prospects and then give the coupon code in the chat, and then direct the users to the product page. For a simpler understanding, we are dividing this process into a customer’s journey:
Prospect/Customer Finding the Advertisement on Facebook:
For this project, we only leveraged the audience from Facebook. A customer finds our ad on Facebook and immediately interacts with it. Remember that the user would be interacting with the chatbot first before landing to the product page.
Chatbot Lead Generation
The chatbot focuses on collecting the email address before giving the coupon code to the users. The flow of the chatbot was kept minimal. The first name, last name and the email address were sent to a specific Google Sheet so that we can keep a track of all the data and conversions. Automation was implemented to pull the data from the chatbot and pass it on to Google Sheets.
Purchases
Once the user leaves his/her email address, the chatbot sends the user to the product page so that he/she can upload an image of his/her choice and checkout by just paying the shipping fee. We had users checking out with 6 gloves by paying $59.70 as the shipping fee.
Users Who Did Not Buy
For the users who left their email address, but did not purchase the glove, we have automated a process of sending 4 emails in a span of 13 days, encouraging them to buy. We got a few additional sales this way. The automation portion would be discussed in detail in the upcoming sections.
Abandoned Carts
For the users who initiated the checkout but weren’t able to complete the purchase for some unknown reasons, we have configured a couple of emails to be sent to them, directly from the website. These emails would include the link to their carts so that they can check out in a few clicks.
We will now break the entire process in a detailed manner. If you are curious about how we got the entire things working together, we are more than happy to share our knowledge with the world. Again, we are breaking this into bits and pieces to keep this as interesting as possible.
The Product Page:
This wasn’t a regular product where everything seems easy to configure. A product where the user can upload an image on the specific are of the item comes with digital complications. We built this e-commerce website on WordPress (using WooCommerce plugin) and after reading the documentation of 5+ plugins, we chose the right one based on our needs (for other customizable products as well).
We used the Fancy Product Designer (with advanced settings) plugin to make this possible. After getting all the User-interface right, we were able to create the product page successfully. We would like you to check the product yourself:
(Update on 4th Feb 2024: The client switched to a new domain. Zap Golf Gifts is now a successful business on Etsy)
Messenger Chatbot Automation:
Earlier, we mentioned that we used the chatbot to collect the information of the user in a conversational way. The conversation was direct, reminding them of the offer, and encouraging them to click a button to grab it.
Upon clicking, they’re immediately asked for their email address. A few would just leave the conversation but a lot of them did grab the offer by giving out their email. Well, the numbers speak everything! We generated 50+ leads every day through the chatbot. The users who clicked the button initially would also become our messenger subscribers even if they do not leave their email address. We’ll briefly discuss the advantages of gaining messenger subscribers towards the end.
Once we capture the email address, 3 main details are sent to the Google Sheets (first name, last name and email). Do note that a particular Google Sheet was created for this campaign, with the respective fields. The data was sent automatically from the chatbot platform to Google Sheets. The image below is the backend of the chatbot tool we used:
The chatbot is configured to give the coupon code along with the instructions to purchase the golf glove, immediately after capturing the email address. This message also includes a link to the product page so that it’s easy to click, apply the coupon code on the checkout page and purchase the product.
Choosing the right messenger chatbot platform that can do this without any third party software involvement is also an important thing. We used Chatrace as our messenger bot platform, which has built-in automation with Google Sheets and 20+ other apps. In short, Chatrace seamlessly integrates with Gsheets and sends the data from the chatbot to the specified sheet in real-time with a delay of less than a second.
Email Marketing Automation:
This needs no introduction. Email Marketing is still effective and we configured 4 emails to be sent in a span of 13 days, if and only if the user hasn’t purchased the glove within a day after leaving the email address (in the chatbot).
The email platform was Infusionsoft (client already had this for ages & also uses its CRM) and here’s the flow of automation:
There’s a small step before we come to this stage. Every user who belongs to this category (who wouldn’t purchase in 24 hours) would have a tag applied to them. We labelled the tag as ‘Free Glove Prospects.’
What if the user purchases within a day or after a few days? We got that covered as well. As soon as a user purchases the glove from the website, the data is sent to the CRM through another automation rule (will be discussed in the next section). This flow will remove the previously applied tag and then apply a new tag ‘Free Glove Purchasers.’ Here’s the flow:
An email would be sent to them welcoming them to the family!
Automating Different Platforms to Interact With Each Other:
We covered the part where the first name, last name and email address of the user is passed to Google Sheets by the messenger bot. The next step was to send the data to Infusionsoft using an automation platform.
After using Zapier for initial weeks, we switched to Integromat, which provided 10 times more tasks at the same price of Zapier. Inside Integromat, we have the ability to create a lot of automation scenarios. The first scenario is represented below:
The initial step of this scenario was to keep checking the dedicated Google Sheet for new rows (that gets filled by the chatbot). Integromat runs this check every 5 minutes and then passes the data (first name, last name, and email) to Infusionsoft, thereby creating a new contact.
For example, let’s say there are 3 new rows that get filled in Google Sheets in a span of 5 minutes, this represents that 3 new contact records must be created inside Infusionsoft. Upon creating the records, the tag (Free Glove Prospects) will be applied to these 3 contacts. Do note that the rows in the Google Sheet are automatically filled by the messenger bot.
We also created a second scenario where the data of purchases must be passed from the website (WooCommerce – WordPress) to Infusionsoft, remove the previous tag (Free Glove Prospects) and then apply a new tag (Free Glove Purchasers). Here’s the flow:
What’s the ‘Router’ doing here? This is just good-to-know information. We have quite a few products on the website. We want the automation to run only for one specific product, which is the golf glove. A router would help the automation to pass only the glove-based orders to Infusionsoft. In simple terms, a router acts as a filter to pass specific data to the next step, ignoring the rest.
This summarizes our entire use of automation for this project.
The Hook – The Facebook Advertisement:
This is the most vital part of our entire marketing strategy. If the hook (the AD) doesn’t deliver our message about the offer, we wouldn’t get enough chat conversations.
Our campaign’s objective was to get messenger conversations from the AD, allowing the chatbot and other automation rules (discussed above) to do the rest of the work. Here are the 2 ad creatives we set up for this campaign:
For 3 months, the amount we spent for the ads on Facebook was close to $2050; a daily budget of $25:
Results:
With all the strategies implemented above, we generated 5000+ leads, 650+ sales amounting to 8500+ USD in revenue. Here’s a snapshot of the sales during this period:
Simple math would show the conversion rate is over 13% (679 orders from 5014 leads). Our client was quite happy with the results as the average sales per day was around 6 to 10. As the production and shipping are done in bulk, the profit margin was high (exact margin cannot be disclosed due to confidential agreements).
Do note that all these leads belong to our target segment in Golf. We have sent emails to these leads showcasing different products available on the website, especially during Christmas and we received a lot of sales for the products priced at $99.95.
We believe each lead is worth over $20 (in future value) and we can keep marketing to them again and again, and get more sales.
Why Opt for Messenger Marketing?
A simple answer would be “It’s highly beneficial for the future!” Let me tell you why:
Users who interact with the messenger bot would also become your messenger subscribers. In this particular timeframe, we gained over 5700 messenger subscribers, out of which 5014 members left their email address.
Let’s assume a simple scenario where you have an offer worth $100 to put in front of these users. You’ll send an email to 5014 members and just with a decent benchmark as your open rate, close to 20% of them would open their emails, which is roughly arounf 1000 members. Your offer would actually be read by only those who opened your email.
Now, we have the ability to send our message to our messenger subscribers as well. This is in the form of ‘sponsored messages’ under ‘messages’ campaign. This campaign would cost less than $50 to send the message to your exisiting 5700 subscribers.
Did you know that the open rates in messenger are more than 85%? Yes, you heard that right. Just imagine your message being read by 85% of your subscribers inside the messenger. This means more visibility to your offer which would lead to more sales.
For the future, you can implement this method multiple times to your subscribers showing them multiple offers. That’s why messenger marketing is extremely benficial for your business.
Summary:
The heart of this entire project was the Messenger Marketing Automation. The chatbots industry is growing rapidly and we’d encourage you to use messenger based chatbots and marketing automation for your business.
We hope you found this chatbot marketing case study helpful. Our main goal to write this case study was to help you leverage the power of marketing automation yourself and implement the things as we described. If you’d like us to implement your project, we would be more than happy to help!
Just send us an email to support@pointupdigital.com and we’ll revert quickly. If you enjoyed reading this blog, we’d like you to share this case study with your contacts as it might be useful to them.
Cheers!
