THE STORY

I’m going to tell you a little story about Dr. Eric Berg’s Facebook Messenger channel, the top Health & Fitness Facebook Messenger channel on the planet.

Over the years, one of my biggest obsessions has been DISCOVERING OPPORTUNITIES. I don’t pretend to create trends but I can definitely boast that I’ve successfully picked up a few trends before the average marketer did. Probably before most marketers do, even the good ones!

Facebook Messenger has been the biggest opportunity I’ve found in my 6 year marketing career.

Dr. Eric Berg’s story starts in August 2017. As I was obsessively in pursuit for the next growth hacking opportunity, I got introduced into ManyChat by a fellow friend.

The obsession was INSTANT. I knew it would be the future and I knew I had found what I’ve been looking for.

At this point, Dr. Berg (one of my biggest clients) was struggling to connect with people further outside of his social media channels. Basically, people were stuck in the TOP OF THE FUNNEL and email leads were coming in but we struggled to get more than 12% of them to open our emails.

Imagine that! We worked so hard at generating email leads and then we worked so hard at copywriting and building funnels and in our best day, we would get 20 out of 100 people to open up our emails. This was frustrating! It was unscalable! I knew the world was changing and something must change with it or we will eventually fall into a state of irrelevance.

I’ve always said, in my seminars that being a good marketer is about recognizing changes in behavior and stepping in front of waves as this social behavior evolves.

Well, I did exactly that. We didn’t STOP any marketing efforts. We continued running Facebook & Instagram ads, Google AdWords, Email marketing and everything in between. I simply decided to jump on board the opportunity and build a Facebook Messenger channel especially after seeing the enormous level of interaction people were doing on Messenger.

For a few weeks I sat down and I worked FULL-TIME building Dr. Berg’s Messenger channel. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Thousands of words, Day in and day out.

I knew this channel would pay large dividends because email marketing was downtrending while Messenger Apps where uptrending. It was very simple logic.

What did I do in all these days of writing?

A massive content sequence:

• Dr Berg’s Story
• His basic education
• Video content
• Graphic content
• Story telling

Etc…

I ended up writing over 20 messages that would be delivered spread out over 3 days once a person comes in to our messenger channel.

These messages were created in a very different way to what you would do on email.

Shorter, engaging, value-packed and conversational.

I invited people to learn more and I worked on turning the channel into a massive education channel. Why turn it into a massive educational channel? Why not just sell? Because there’s simply too much competition out there and the ones that win the game of business today are the ones that provide value first before asking for the sale.

I created an education channel where people can come and learn anything and everything regarding Dr. Berg’s niche market (The Ketogenic Diet). It was the sure gateway towards developing not only customers but raving fans. 

I also knew that selling on messenger was possible. But if I didn’t provide value first, it wouldn’t be selling, it would be borderline spamming. I wanted to build an ENGAGED audience that would allow me to send them offers and have them interested in these.

I knew that building an engaged and educated audience on Messenger was the key to turning audiences into buyers. Here’s a few examples of how the channel promotes to engaged subscribers:

Once all these VALUE messages were created and conversational sequences were fully established that would provide value to people come in looking for specific information. I then focused on my next problem to resolve. And this one is a major one I see people struggling with today…

“How do I now get people to come into my list and get onto these sequences?”

I evaluated this problem and the solution was composed of a few elements but it can be subdivided in 3 parts:

1. Using existing social media audiences across all platforms.
    
2. Using paid advertising through social media platforms.

3. Using existing email lists to bring people into our new highly engaging messenger world.

Once all these VALUE messages were created and conversational sequences were fully established that would provide value to people come in looking for specific information, I then focused on my next problem to resolve. And this one is a major one I see people struggling with today…

“How do I now get people to come into my list and get onto these sequences?”

I evaluated this problem and the solution was composed of a few elements but it can be subdivided in 3 parts:

1. Using existing social media audiences across all platforms.
2. Using paid advertising through social media platforms.
3. Using existing email lists to bring people into our new highly engaging messenger world.

Knowing that messenger presented a 90% open rate channel and knowing that MONEY follows ATTENTION, I started obsessively working on the implementation of GROWTH TOOLS that would bring people into our new channel.

These are the main resources we’ve used to bring people into our messenger since we started:

• Mini-Courses: This has been cutting edge. To this date I haven’t really seen anyone do it like we’ve done it. We created a series of 5 FREE mini-courses that we knew people would be interested in doing. We promoted these mini-courses to warm audiences organically and to cold audiences with social media paid advertising. We even invested on paid advertising towards warm audiences to get people into these mini-courses. We knew this would pay off big since people would be way more connected with the brand if we had them on messenger. These Video mini-courses (an average of 4 videos per mini-course) did a powerful upsell towards the end that over 30% of opted in for.

• FREEBIES: We created documents Dr. Berg approved that would bring people into our channel. Cheat sheets, Remedy Cards, Common Facts, 5 Tips, you name it! We again used both organic and paid channels for this.

• We embedded growth tools that would offer the mini-courses on the websites. These delivered a steady stream of new subscribers.

• There’s many other things we did in between. All of them more or less effective but none as significant as the things mentioned above. Quizzes, contests, flash sales deals, etc… The possibilities on messenger are literally ENDLESS.

Today, Dr Berg’s Messenger channel, only 20 months after its creation, has accumulated over 700,000 messenger subscribers opening up their Messenger broadcasts, sequences and more at unprecedented rates of 90%. Our promotional upsell and cross-sell messages enjoy over 20% Clickthrough rates. While at the same time our email Clickthrough rates are barely getting to 2%.

I am a Facebook expert, I’m actually a certified Facebook professional, I know everything Facebook and Instagram marketing. My obsession has become using Facebook and Instagram to generate an explosion of my messenger list.

Why did I go so crazy? Did I lose my mind? Do I not care about sales? Do I just want to waste my clients money?

Actually quite the opposite, I cared so much about Dr. Berg’s expansion, his message and his brand, that I went ALL IN with the strategy. And boy, has it paid off!

700,000 Messenger subscribers, real people, generated for pennies on the dollar. His social media following flooding the messenger channel and taking their relationship with Dr. Berg to the next level, hundreds of thousands of people helped through the Dr’s message.

And last but not least… 

 SALES! A massive sales channel generating hundreds of thousands of sales a week of people visiting Dr. Berg’s store from the messenger sequences, mini-courses and overall the Messenger channel.

Today, this channel alone, is responsible for generating over $7 million in sales in just the last 9 months.

Are we stopping now? No! We’re actually just getting started.