Using the New Instagram Automation Feature to Grow Your Online Business | Mike Yan

Matt Edmundson

Well good afternoon Welcome to the eCommerce podcast, live stream of the podcast recording. I need to come up with a catchy title than that, don't I really. But we are just about to record this week's podcast all about Instagram, and some really cool things that you can now do on Instagram. We are going to get into all of that. Yes, we are. I just do this quick Hello, just to say my name is Matt, if you've not been to the show before, and I've been to the live stream before, big warm welcome to you. If you are watching this live, feel free to join in in the comments. Say hi, share it out, do all of that good stuff. And just enjoy the conversation that I'm about to have about Instagram automation. I do know I'm talking about on is that is all gonna start right now. So just keep keep where you are because we are going to record the podcast starting now.

Sadaf Beynon

Welcome to the eCommerce podcast with Matt Edmundson, a show that brings you regular interviews, tips and tools for building your business online.

Matt Edmundson

Well, hello, and welcome to the eCommerce podcast with me Your host Matt Edmundson. Great to be with you. Great. You're here. Now whether you are just starting out in eCommerce or if you're like me in a, you know, a bit of an eCommerce dinosaur been around for a while. My goal is simple is to help you grow your eCommerce and digital businesses. Oh yes. Every week, I get to talk to amazing people from the world of eCommerce and ask them all kinds of questions about what they know, and how it's going to help us develop online eyes ourselves. I try and have the conversation that you would have if you got to sit down with them and grab a coffee with them right and just ask him those kinds of questions to help you and to help me grow our businesses because like you, I am an eCommerce entrepreneur, and I am super keen to find out what is happening so we dig into their story. We learn the principles that can help us start, adapt and grow online. Oh Yes. And so if you enjoy this episode, I would appreciate it if you if you're watching this online if you give us a like, give us a share, and all that good stuff, make sure you subscribe on YouTube or Facebook. But if audio is your thing, for most of you, audio is definitely your thing. If I look at the stats, a warm welcome to you on the audio podcast. Again, subscribe wherever you get your podcast from and share it out help us spread the gospel of eCommerce. Oh yes, because you know what this is worth talking about. Now, today, we have a very special giveaway that you are not going to want to miss. And so if you like giveaways, if you like all that kind of stuff, make sure you stick around until the end, especially if you want to use Instagram for your own online shop or store. I'm going to explain more at the end of the show a little teaser. Just so you know. Now today we are looking at how to use the new Instagram Automation features to grow your eCommerce business. Oh yes, we are this is going to be epic. Now if you're a regular to the show, you may well remember that in season five, we chatted with Fara Rosenzweig. About how to use bots to grow your eCommerce business. It was a great show, actually. And I really like Fara Episode 57 if you've not heard it, definitely worth a listen. Check it out. So a few weeks ago Fara gets in touch with me and says Matt, listen, you really need to talk to Mike, who is the CEO of Manychat about what's been happening on Instagram, and how it's basically gonna rock your world. So I thought I definitely should talk to Mike then because you know, Fara, I should definitely listen to Fara and talk to Mike. So we did just that. And in today's show, I am joined by Mike we're gonna have a great conversation. As I said he is the founder, the co founder and CEO of ManyChat, and he's made it his goal to disrupt Oh, yes love that words, the $5 billion plus email marketing industry. By bringing the convenience of messenger apps to business to customer communication. ManyChat has exploded into the market. It is now the number one chat marketing platform used in work used worldwide. We use it, I'm not gonna lie, I'm a fan. We are a customer of many chat full disclosure. In fact, I am one of almost 2 million businesses apparently, in 190 different countries, using ManyChat to drive sales, qualified leads, nurture customers, relationships, and so on and so forth. ManyChat, if you don't know is available for messenger by Facebook, SMS, email, but Mike's not here to talk about that. As good as all that stuff is. And as impressive as all that is. Even Siri wants in on the conversation. as impressive as you can tell, this is live because you know, Siri joins in and I can't edit it out. And he's Mike's here to talk to us about Instagram, and and how you can bring chat marketing and automation for Instagram, for the first time, how we can maximise that for our own eCommerce businesses. So make sure you grab your notebooks, I have mine at the ready with my pen, always. So all of the notes from today's show will of course be available as a free download on our website, just head on over to eCommercepodcast.net/68. This is episode number 68. And you can download them free of charge, catch it with all the links and all that sort of stuff. But that's enough for me. That's enough preamble. So without further ado, let me hit this button on my pad. And let's welcome Mike to the show, Mike. Good afternoon. How are you doing?

Mike Yan

Hey, Matt. Thanks for having ME.

Matt Edmundson

No problem, man. It's good to have you. It's good to talk again. Now we spoke Didn't we the first time a few weeks ago. And we were running through the whole stuff to do with Instagram and some of the stuff that's been going on. And so I'm super excited and keen that you're here to talk to us about this. But before we get into all of that, let's learn a little bit about Mike. So you're the CEO and co founder of ManyChat. How did that come about?

Mike Yan

So we started back in 2015, when telegram messenger opened up their API's. So some people already heard about telegram, it's now much bigger platform. But back in 2015, it was about like 65 million monthly active users. So compared to a giant like WhatsApp or messenger, which had that point 600 million 900 million type of numbers in terms of monthly active users. It was a relatively much smaller messaging platform, but they were one of the first Western messaging apps to actually open up their API's, their messaging, API's and Allow third party developers like ManyChat, to actually build things and tools for businesses to read better communication patterns with their customers and do things like chat marketing for lead generation qualification, sales service and all the other use cases that you can do through chat. Oh, basically developed into messenger marketing with built the number one messenger marketing platform in the whole world, sending billions of messages. And, as you've mentioned, serving a lot a lot of customers in basically around the whole world. And now the thing that I'm most excited about right now is the fact that Instagram for the first time in history, opened up their official, not black hats, not some work arounds for entertaining stuff, their official messaging APIs. So now you can actually officially automate your DMS on Instagram. And I think this is a huge deal. I think this is something that every business on Instagram that is serious about using Instagram for conversions, and Otherwise, why would you be investing in like growing your following and increasing engagement? Do and it's gonna be a matter of time when this is used by millions of businesses around the world? And right now, this is basically been out for just the week. Yeah, so wait for just a month, sorry, June, June 2, the last f8. That's when Facebook announced the opening of API's. And the really great news right now is that just yesterday, Instagram rolled out the phase two of this API's, which allows everybody that has from 1000 to 100,000 followers to use it today. It used to be the phase one was basically 10,000 200,000. So it was like, in that in that No. But now everybody that has over 1000, but less than 100,000 can use the platform. It's a it's a limitation that's coming from Instagram. But I'm really glad to say because this is this is basically hot off the press, this just happened yesterday. And we know from our stats that a lot of people, the majority of people are actually below 10,000. followers. Yeah, so so you guys can now actually,

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, when we talked a few weeks ago, we actually walked through this didn't when we use my Instagram account, which was fine, because it had more than 10,000 followers. And so actually, what you're saying now is as long as your Instagram has got more than 1000 followers, your Instagram account, you can actually take advantage of the automation tools, this this stuff, yes. Get into the show, which is great. Is it always I mean, when we talked about this last time, you talked about phase two, but is there like a phase three or phase four coming where this will become available to everybody on Instagram?

Mike Yan

Yeah, it's basically the phase three is everybody. And it's gonna happen probably in August or September.

Matt Edmundson

Okay, so you're listening to this show? We're recording it in July. And so at the time of recording, as long as you've got 1000 followers or more, you can take advantage of this. And just to read

Mike Yan

Less than 100,000 unless there's a lot of people over over 100,000, who we cannot onboard, we're reaching out saying like, Can we do an exception? The answer is the Instagram team is being very, isn't really doing any exceptions right now. So everybody who has.

Matt Edmundson

I wonder why they capped is just really fascinating to me that they've decided.

Mike Yan

I would say, I think that they want to just make sure that everything works before rolling out for the bigger accounts, which account for a lot of the engagement that is happening on the platform. But yeah, I think the main point is that it used to be that, like people would be talking about DM automation for some time, right. And before, June 2 before last month, and everything that you could do in terms of DM automation would be against the policy, and you would be risking your account getting blocked or suspended or something bad happening to it. And that's why we like we'd like people who have been asking us to integrate with Instagrams, yums and automate and help them automate those before since we started on messenger. And we always wanted to do that. But there wasn't any official API's and we don't want to go and we don't want to risk. People spend their years building up their accounts just for that account to get suspended because they're using something that is not approved by Facebook. So now that is approved by Facebook and that it's 100% supported by them. Finally, we can open up the gates for every Instagram account that meets the following criteria and actually allow them to use the automation. And there's so many use cases that we can get into, like, why everybody should be excited about this. Because I think a lot of people who were on like on the messenger side, they already know the power of automating the Convert conversational automation. A lot of people on Instagram, who weren't really focused on messenger will be learning about this. And I'm super excited because we already have five years of experience from building platform and messenger. And we know exactly which strategies work and what you can do with this, how you can grow your number of emails, number of phone numbers, number of qualified leads, and how you can actually convert people to sales, decrease the volume and the number of the amount of support volume that you're getting by automating service questions. There's lots of things that you can do with this.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, it's, um, we're gonna get into that. It's pretty exciting. Now, we knew all I knew ManyChat, because of the integration with Facebook, and you could, you could do a lot of cool stuff with like, messenger, or Facebook bots. And I know that Facebook, changed the rules overtime, and they introduced this sort of 24 hour old in there. And they've were you. I think they're all states, basically, you can only contact people use an automation within 24 hours of them engaging with you some ways that right? Yes, yeah, that is that carry on over to Instagram?

Mike Yan

Yes, it does. And this is one of the biggest questions that we get, like, will we be able to do broadcasting because a lot of people who were on messenger and who were really successful messenger, the way they were successful as they were grow their messenger list. And then they would do sequences, and they would do broadcasts, and this is how they would keep the audience engaged, and their contact list engaged. And when Facebook really started to tighten the rules and remove the broadcasting functionality, and only allows you to automate the conversations within 24 hours, a lot of people basically got discouraged. And they're like, we see it in our numbers, that there's still hundreds of 1000s of people who are succeeding with this. But a lot of people were using it for that specific case of like broadcasting and sequencing everything else. Now, there's two things. First of all, yes, the 24 hour rule does apply to Instagram as well, before everybody like starts, see, oh, this is this is something that's the same as Facebook Messenger, I think there is a very important difference. And that is that Instagram provides you with the rule like with with the broadcasting already. And that is through the means of posts, stories, lives and reels, Instagrams organic reach is 10 times higher than the organic reach of the Facebook page. Oh, the Facebook page has has followers, it's it's somewhere like the reach of your followers for a Facebook page for a post is going to be somewhere around one to 5%, depending on the content, quality of the quality, everything else, the organic reach of Instagram, for your followers, depending on the type of post isn't the story or the post or the reels, it's going to be anywhere between 10 and 50%, sometimes even higher, because of explore and everything else like the hashtags, there is the discovery mechanism there. So you get to organically reach on Instagram. Your audience already, you don't need broadcasting on Instagram, because it's already solved through stories, posts, reels and lives. The key thing that was missing is that yes, you already have the audience, right, you have the you have the attention. You have the engagement through likes and comments. But how do you convert? Yeah, and this is where DMS came in. But until up until this point, you had to manual, respond to those DMS and service them. And this is basically you got two options. Either you're a small account, and you're doing it by yourself and things are falling through the cracks and people stay in requests or they're getting replied 24 hours later when they're already cold. And then the New World, the leads do not get cold over a matter of weeks or days leads at cold over a matter of minutes and hours. So you really need to be there instantly to serve as your customers needs because they're going to get distracted by the next notification by the next app or the next thing and they're not going to come back and what DM automation allows to do is it allows you to instantly respond to whatever people are asking you about. And moreover, not only respond, but actually have a conversation with your folks. And either qualify that lead or ask them their contact information. And really add that back to your CRM, your ecommerce website, help them with product recommendations, and actually close that sale. Yeah, so this is the power of the DM automation is that it's instant, it's scalable, and super affordable ManyChat starts like $10 a month, which is nowhere near what you would pay for like virtual assistants who are going to be still not instant and going off script, etc, etc. So this is I think the key thing to to the understanding is that on Instagram, you already have organic reach, you already have a way to broadcast. And that is to post a just a feed post or to post a story. Right? You already have a way to to go after your audience. The key thing that was missing is the conversion engine and Instagram DM automation is that the version engine that creates personal one on one communication.

Matt Edmundson

That that's very, very helpful. And I'm, again, I'm making lots of notes here. You mentioned that, depending on whether use a real story or a post, you're going to get between 10 and 50%. Reach on Instagram, do out of those things, which is the most, which has the most organic reach of the moment, is that a combination of those things? Or is it is it like reels are really trendy at the moment, you know, you should be doing reels.

Mike Yan

every every content type has its own purpose? I would say that stories, which probably gets four different again, these numbers are vastly different for smaller accounts. And for bigger accounts, as you know, as the same of engagement numbers, right? Usually, the bigger the account, the lower the percentage of engagement is gonna be. But there are really, there are some really great outliers. People, for example, like Chris Doe, right, who's teaches about Instagram marketing, who has like over half a million followers and who still has an engagement rate of three to 4%, which is insane for for a an account of that size. So you can't actually do those things. But if you're talking about specifically which one of them gets more exposure, I would say reels is great right now, because it's being supported by the algorithm. And it's like Facebook wants more people to create reels so they're paying with attention for those reels, and they're not they they just want the reels ads, but not a lot of people are using them. So the attention that is in reels all of it goes to creators, and there are that not everybody's using it right now. Right? Even though it's getting a lot of hype, still, you can get a lot of traction there. You just have to really follow the format. And like don't make reels, because you have to make reels, make reels because you feel inspired by somebody else. Yeah, I would, I would always suggest like, stay true to yourself. Don't try to copy someone else's path, learn from it. But always make sure to make it yourself like to make sure that you're authentic with your audience and with yourself. If you don't feel natural, like dancing to funny music and pointing fingers at certain text, captions, etc. Like, don't do it. Right. Or like, unless you feel inspired. And you know, like there's something that you want to share. But also, do not confuse going outside of your comfort zone. Right? Because when you're doing something new, there's always going to be this this this hesitancy right? So I think it's it's a balance, right? When you're looking like inside, like, do you want to do this, but I would just experiment right? When you're trying to learn something new. Just experiment and see if it fits you and if you're getting the vibe. But yes, it reels are definitely getting the exposure and can help you get audiences that you've never like beyond your followers free beyond your current followers because the whole reel algorithm is not based on who you follow. The whole algorithm is based on what's engaging, right? So it's it's much more closer to that explore, experience, then to the subscription feed. Now, the posts in the feed. carousels are doing great right now, if you can post information carousels and make them stand out in terms of design in terms of branding. And in terms of obviously, the substance, which is number one thing, which is foundational to to everything, then this is something that you can get traction with. And always like using the hashtags to get to the Explorer to get into the right feeds. That's what can grow your account beyond your current following stories are much more around building a personal relationship with your existing followers, and actually closing those sales. So I will use stories to, to not try to grow the account in terms of followers, but to close the ones that are actually following me already. And this is where things like keywords and doing the automation in the keywords will actually make a lot of sense, because it's really easy to go from watching a story to messaging a person. So you could say something like, We're going into the one of the typical examples of what you can do with Instagram dm automation, which is post a story saying, Hey, we have a coupon for our Instagram followers, dm us the word coupon to get it, right. And as an e commerce store you can do today, right? And what you would do when somebody dms you the word coupon, the automation, you can do two things. First of all, you can just dm them the coupon. And that's it. Still, you're getting engagement, and you're good getting DMS, which is beneficial for the ID algorithm, because it sees that people are engaging with your stories and writing you, which increases your signal. I would say ranking, right? Basically, it makes you more Instagram sees that your stories are engaging. Yeah, which will tell the algorithm to show your stories to more people or rank them higher than other people. So this is already giving you a better outcome. But you can go even further you can say dm has the word coupon. But when somebody dms, the word coupon, the automation can, for example, say, Hey, what's your email for us to send you the coupon to write. So now you're growing your email list? through Instagram, yeah. And you're doing it seamlessly through a story mentioned and using the native tools of the igdm. And it's all automated. Once you set up that campaign, you don't need to do anything else, you don't need anybody answering those messages or making sure they're being followed up on or anything else, you just set it up, you post the story, ask people to send you the word coupon, people send you the word coupon, they leave their emails, you can zap those emails in your CRM into Shopify into klaviyo. Wherever you want, we have a direct integration with klaviyo. So you can do that. And then you can send them the coupon. So it's as easy as that. And you basically are growing your email list on autopilot, you can even have the keyword in your bio and say like, hey, for all of our IG followers, we have a special coupon which is only available through Instagram, dm the word coupon and like, do a pointing finger to the messages button. So now everybody who visits your profile is potentially is now seeing that message. And some of them are going to take action and the only without doing anything else. You're now getting more from your Instagram efforts. So this is like one of the most basic campaigns that you could do. There's so much more that you can do with this. And you can see now the the power of the automation.

Matt Edmundson

You can and I you know what it gets your juices flowing, doesn't it? Mike, when you start to think about actually some of the your brain starts just go Oh, hang on a minute. I've got all kinds of ideas here are things one of the things that we did? Well, I did this morning, it took me about 20 minutes was I set up one of these automations or ManyChat now, I'll be totally straight with everybody listening to the show. I did not have a clue what I was doing when I started. Okay. Now I know we've used ManyChat in the past, that doesn't mean I've used it. And so it took me 20 minutes to set up this automation. I'm going to explain a little bit more about that, because we've tied it in with today's giveaway, I want you to see how this thing works. And so you, you get it. And as always what was happening, Mike was as I was creating this automation, which I have to say is very straightforward on your system. And you know, you guys have done a good job on the UI for that well done. And as I was creating this automation, I'm thinking oh, I could do this, I could do that. And I started to create all these branches and I thought I haven't got the time right now. So I deleted some of these branches and thinking, I don't know, let's make it real simple for now and I can expand on it later. Because you do get your your juices flowing, that's for sure.

Mike Yan

Yeah, that's really one of the suggestions like people when they figure out how easy it is to like build the Flow Builder and build the different conversations, they get so excited that they started to build really elaborate conversations. And I would just say, focus on the outcome. First, start with something simple with a linear flow, ask for the email, ask for the phone number, do something really simple. Follow up with your product recommendations in an hour, because you do get the 24 hour window. So people think like, Oh, it's only 24 hours. And I say, it's freakin 24 hours, you can message people in an hour, you can message people in six hours, you can message people on the next day in 23 hours, and you're still within the 20 to your landing page messaged people with 80% open rate in on the next day after they visited it. This is like, yeah, this is the thing about the igdm automation is that I don't this clever, I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I wouldn't suggest that you like just messaged your folks like every hour, because you can't like you got to make sure that you're staying on brand and you're being respectful. And that's like the golden rule of marketing, like message, somebody in chat with somebody in the way that you wouldn't be, you would want to be message yourself, right market to others, as though you would want to be marketed to, right. So one follow up. That is that that requires engagement from the customers i think is totally acceptable. Like if you start to send 20 messages every hour, because you can I think that's completely not acceptable. And you're going to ruin your brand that people are going to, like block you and unsubscribe from you. So but if you use this power, because it's its immense power, like the ability to grab somebody's attention these days is one of the most important abilities of a business, it's so hard to stand out, it's so hard to have that moments of interaction with your customers, and you have to pay for every click. So IG automation allows you to have those moments automatically in a channel that's completely new, and not saturated. I tell you, in two years, millions of businesses are going to be using this, because it's such a no brainer. And right now, since it's only been a month, nobody's using this, like when I say nobody I mean, I mean, 1000s of businesses already using this because we see our numbers, but compared to 15 million businesses who are using Instagram, that's zero. So right now, if you're going to be adopting this, this year, is the best year to start. And today is the best way to start because you're going to be getting the best results. Because nobody is doing this right now. If you start doing this a year later, or like when this is going to be less of a new feature, etc, etc, you're just gonna get average results, you're gonna be in the majority of people who are waiting, like who don't want to, like invest in something use that, or I think there's a lot of people who are talking about, oh, this new thing, that new thing. And so like I get it, people are sceptical about all of the new things coming around, etc. But IG is not new. Instagram has been around for years. And it's the most important social platform right now. And I can tell you why it's the most important social platform is because it's going to be the highest grossing the highest revenue, social platform and just a few years bigger than Facebook. And I can tell you like where those numbers are coming from. Yeah, but exactly is only 50% year over year in terms of ad revenue. And it's going to surpass Facebook itself in 2023. So Instagram is the most important platform right now. And dm automation is the way to convert people. So it's not some some some hacking you thing that's going to be hyped up and then like gonna fade away in half a year. So we've been doing this for over six years. Yeah, messenger marketing, telegram. And Instagram now is, I think, the biggest launch yet because it's the most important platform. And everybody everybody who's taking Instagram seriously, should be paying attention and should be implementing iddm automation. I'm not saying this because, like, we're just like, all the roadshow voting is wrapped. Like this is something that I've come to. This is why we're investing all of our company resources in terms of marketing product into this because like, we like the the the number of people who are working on this main net is 150 person company right now. And we're adding more and more people. And the majority of those people are working on Instagram right now, because we believe that this is the most important channel. And you should be like, just go to ManyChat, we have a free plan. Moreover, we don't only have a free plan, we were doing a thing called Instagram summer right now. So basically, if you if you register before the end of the summer, so before August 31, you can activate the free trial, which will give you three months of pro features for free. Yeah, so you're going to be able to use all the pro features without having to pay anything, and you can test it out and see for yourself, like we were making zero on this, if you don't like it, you can cancel the subscription, and you're going to be charged zero. So test it out, it's completely risk free. Because I'm, I'm sure you're gonna like it. And you're gonna be like, it's the same thing that that happened to messenger A while ago, at first people like don't know what's happening, and then everybody's talking about it. So what you want to jump on to be the first get the cream of the crop the best results before everybody else jumps on this. And, yeah, we just know that this year is going to be the year when the best results are achieved. Because all of those strategies are going to be completely novel. And they're not going to be replicated by millions of businesses who are going to do this probably in two years, when this is going to be just a massive win. We're gonna see massive adoption from the majority. Yeah, because innovators and early adopters come first and get the best results.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, it's interesting. I remember, as you're talking, I'm remembering the story of how I first got involved with ManyChat. There was a guy who was selling a course, right. And his course was on like, bot marketing. And it just started to take off or something like that. And he said, Listen, I'm just going to show you how this works. I just want you to find me on Facebook and message me this word. And I messaged him on Facebook, and I got this instant message back and I thought, goodness me, I'm in a conversation with this guy, right? And so we're going back and forth. And he was asking me questions, and I was going yes and no. And given him more kinds of information, it took me a little while to realise I was actually talking to a bot, I'm not gonna lie, you know, I wasn't the sharpest tool in the box. And I and I, I thought this was magical. And I gave him $50 of my money there. And then to tell me exactly what he had done. And all he done was set up a ManyChat account and he charged me 50 bucks to tell me and I am hats off to the guy who did it really, really well. And I, I kind of see what you're talking about here. Now that's coming to Instagram, you can actually engage your your Instagram followers in these conversations, and they feel like in some respects, they're talking to you. Now I've I've watched your, your videos. So again, if you're new to many chat on many chats website, in the support section is a course we have free course which you guys have done on how to use a system, which let me tell you was super helpful. And the lady on the Instagram videos. I don't know who she is, but she sounds really happy. Right? And I thought, you know, get Well done on the videos. And and so I thought this is great. This is great. And I'm watching the videos. And she's got all kinds of examples of how you can use it. One of the questions I, I wondered, and I don't know if this is possible, Mike, but can you integrate the system, say with your CMS somehow? So for example, a customer goes, I want to know where my order is, right? So can you integrate it with a system which goes, well give me your order number, I'll go away and check. And I'll come back and tell you can it be that clever?

Mike Yan

Yes, the answer is yes, you can do that. And we already have an integration with Shopify. I'm not sure if we support natively from out of the box, things like tracking numbers and send those back. Or we'll just have to double check with the product team. If we don't make no mistake, it's going to happen this year. And we're just going to expand that configuration. But you can already do that through Zapier and through things like direct API access, and you can really mix and match any message with anything. So for example, you can take any piece of data that somebody sends you over Instagram, save it relay to your own system to your CRM wherever you want, get data back and send them a custom message based on that data.

Matt Edmundson

So that's awesome. So you I mean, really, you're starting to now talk about the skys being the limits Aren't you with what you can do with this automation? So, exactly to certain as simple as DM me the word coupon to DM me your order number and I'll give you an updated status on where thats at. Exactly what about what what I mean, that's all direct message. One of the things that you can do with ManyChat, which I like is like on a live stream, you could say to people listen, write such and such in the comments, and then ManyChat will, will pick up on that and start to engage them in a conversation because they've written a word in the comments. Can you do that with Instagram yet? Or is it just we just talking direct messages?

Mike Yan

Right now what you're talking about is what what's called comments growth tool. So right now, it's not available and whoever, like, again, there are blackhat companies or like using shady API's to make that happen, which will put your accounts at risk. So the reason that you should trust me and those guys is that we are an official Facebook business partner, we have a standing call with Facebook, we have a call every Thursday, and we talk our partnerships manager about what's like what's allowed, what's not allowed. We talk about the product roadmap, give feedback, and synchronised launches and everything else. So right now, comments growth tool is not allowed on Instagram, as soon as it's going to be Make no mistake nature, there's going to be the first platform to enable that functionality for our customers because of how powerful it is. But yes, we'll have to just wait for that one.

Matt Edmundson

Okay, do they do they think do you think it's coming? Or do you just think it's gonna be?

Mike Yan

Yes, I, I'm, I'm, I would say 80% confident that it's going to happen.

Matt Edmundson

Okay. Okay, cuz that again, it's that when that happens, we'll have to get you back on the show. Because that's another game changer, isn't it? It's that the engagement through posts, as well as through direct messaging.

Mike Yan

Right. But let me let me just tell you that what you can do with the posts is what we're working on right now is automatically replying to the messages under the posts, which is already possible through the API's. So we're again, we're double checking with the Instagram to make sure it's within the policies. But I'm hoping that we will be able to, for example, if somebody messages you and writes a comment that you can reply to them personally as a reply on the public posts, right, in the comments itself, saying like, Hey, thanks for the post. message us this, too. That's right. And you can make sure that those get into their notifications, and that they get those that message. Okay, that's one of the things that is probably coming really, really soon.

Matt Edmundson

That's awesome. That's awesome. So I mean, you know, I, like I say, if you're listening to this, and you think you're starting to get some ideas of how automation can help you with direct messages, we've just literally scraped the tip of the iceberg here. And there's some great examples on the site, you know, in the course, which you can sort of make happen there and deep dive into that. But you're Mike, you're the CEO of ManyChat. You're, I mean, when we talked a few weeks ago, I'd never met anybody more excited about Instagram automation. It was just you even today is quite infectious. You obviously really came to this, which is great. But where do you Where do you see this going? Over, say the next 6-12 months? What? What's your crystal ball? Say is? I mean, obviously, it's not a it's not an exact science, but what do you think is just is around the corner for those that sort of do get on board early?

Mike Yan

Yeah, I think key thing right now is that there's already enough features to create such engaging and converting campaigns that everybody's every marketer socks are going to be blown off. So I think the key thing right now is to invest 100% of your time in learning what you can do with it. So again, when I say 100% of your time, I mean, like if you're really big on Instagram, this is a goldmine for your conversion rates. And you should look at our course which is completely free. We're not making any money on the course. It's 13 lessons, it will tell you everything that you need to get started. And the way you find find the free course is that you just go to ManyChat.com, there's gonna be resources button in the navbar so go to resources and there's going to be a button that's called free course. Inside that free course there's gonna be a module that's dedicated only to Instagram. So manychat.com, resources, free course, find Instagram there. That's that's a you're going to learn a lot from that course itself. It's completely free and we work hard on making it super engaging. I think that you watched it. So you can testify to that. Probably. Right. And the next thing, the next biggest thing that people should do is if you're watching this live, I don't know when this is going to come out in the recording. But if you are watching this live right now on July 15 to 16th, we have IG summit that is coming up. And it's the first in the world Instagram dm automation summit. It's the first in the world conference that is dedicated to this art. And we have speakers, the best speakers, you can imagine, like people like the marketing, Harry Christo, Nathan Chan, of founder, Jasmine star, and lots of practitioners, our agency partners who have been using Instagram dm automation for over six months since the beta came out back in October 2020 are going to be sharing their strategies and tactical advice and step by step guides on how you can actually apply igdm automation for your specific business, be eCommerce intrapreneurship local business or professional services. And what you do here is you go to igsummit.com, that's igsummit.com and you grab your ticket. And again, we believe in the long term, we're not making any money from this event. We're just trying to recover the costs. And that's being hard right now, because of the how good the speakers are. But we believe in educating the community. Because in the end, the more people succeed with igdm automation, the more people will see the remaining shot. And we will all succeed together, we will live in a win win scenario, just so

Matt Edmundson

remind me the dates again, Mike for the summit,

Mike Yan

July 15th to 16th. So it's going to happen right now is July 8, so it's gonna happen in a week, when from our recording, and we're going to be happy we're going to be the tickets starts like so, you know, like, what, what the price is, the price starts at $35 for the general admission, which gets you basically every session, and it's a two day event for $35. So, and for $45, we'll send you your own swag bag with like actual t shirts and the things Oh, and all the recordings. Exactly. So So guys, just make sure to take advantage of this. This is and if you cannot make the lives it's completely virtual. So you don't have to fly anywhere. It's a it's a virtual events, and the recordings are going to be available. So IGsummit.com. If you want to learn more from the best of these, like people who are doing IG automation. Now,

Matt Edmundson

I have to be honest with you, Mike, I when we talked last time you told me about the summit, we had to look at the website and some of the speakers you had on there. I was like I'm going you know some of my team, we're going to be there we're going to, we're going to be looking at this summit, and definitely the ones that we can't watch during the day because the time zones, we'll watch the recordings. That's what that's for dang Sure. So where I have, let me say, those who are listening, I'm really excited about this particular feature that you can now do with Instagram. And I think it is a bit of a it's one of those tools which you can have, which can foster clear and engaging communication with your customers with your Instagram followers in a way that you've not been able to do before unless you are literally just sat on it the whole time, right messaging people. And that never works for anybody. So you know, check it out. And make sure you check out the Instagram summit, I'm going to be there I'm really keen to hear what people have got to say because we all know Instagram is such a powerful force for our eCommerce business. And this is such a great tool to help us go to the next level. And like Mike's been saying this opportunity is going to be around but the best time to get involved is right now because it's going to be standard in six to 12 months time everybody will be doing it. Whereas now you can capitalise on it and grow. I'm really excited about growing my email list through this this one of the big things I think you know, we can actually start to extract email list. Email yes from from users. I think that's really great.

Mike Yan

The conversion rates from people sending the keywords like giving out their email are insane. Anywhere from 50% to 80%. Sometimes with the right offer and 90% 95% Wow, just landing pages do not do that. It's just insane because it's the reason the reason I think I have a theory why this is happening because when you message somebody the word coupon or webinar or whatever, and somebody says, Hey, sure. What's your email, you feel in the private setting in the private one on one intimate setting where it's not some flashy pop up? That is Like looks spammy, etc. It's a conversation. Yes, it's automated. But it's a conversation, which is one on one. And you feel much more safety. Doing that over over over Instagram over a chat interface. And like, again, the conversion rates are just insane right now. So this is, this is the best time to get in. I think why would you wait for a year? Yes, then same time learning the same things when everybody is going to be doing this to get worse results. When you can spend the same amount of learning this and to get the best results?

Matt Edmundson

There's two things that come to my mind my when you asked that question number one was, if I do this, now I can I can be the one which creates the YouTube videos telling you how to do it and get all of those views. Thank you very much. Exactly. And the second thing is, we have some digital courses, right. And I don't really talk about these that much on the show. But we do have some digital courses. I'm I think I'm tempted to talk to the team about this. I'm tempted to do a trial where we do one course where there's a traditional landing page. I wonder what the results are going to be if Actually, I ditch the landing page, and I say, Listen, if you want to know more about this particular course, DM ME, rather than going through the sales process on the page engagement and compensation. I'm really keen to try it out because I just do it. I think it's gonna be fascinating. We should do, I'll find a product we can do it with as well. And we can do some trials on this. So we'll, we'll see how that goes. Yeah, that'd be great.

Mike Yan

We would like to do a case study wants to get the results and I'm sure you're going to beat your landing page results. We would love to do a case study.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, I know. That sounds fun. It sounds it sounds immense fun. Mike, listen, it's been great having you on the show. How do people connect with you? How do people reach out to you if they wanted if they want to touch base? Do DM ME on Instagram? I'm gonna say that Yeah, to say that really? dm Mike on Instagram, on Instagram.

So just search for Mike Yan. It's my name is on the screen right now. And Mike Yan., the the the full handle is The Mike Yan. The reason it's not it's not an ego thing. It's just like Mike Yan was already taken and began with a dog was taken, everything was taken. So I had to use the The thing. Yeah, follow me on Instagram for more news around igdm automation for more tips. And me if you have questions, I do have a like the way that I use DM right now is that I'm not overwhelmed by them. Because I'm only like, my main job is not the one of like an influencer with hundreds of 1000s of followers. I'm the CEO, I run a company I the product guy. So this is where the majority of my time is spent. So I have two and a half 1000 followers, which allows me to actually be very responsive. And I do have some automation set up. Because I'm also

Matt Edmundson

because there are over 1000 that right

Mike Yan

now I'm the one who is testing the practices. So this is why I believe in dogfooding. And I've already found immense value even for an account with like myself with two and a half 1000 followers. In the automation piece. I've had a live right, just yesterday with close to 100 people from Latin America, like our agency partners and other folks. And basically during the life of step three automations I kid you not three automations during the live because I wanted to share some things with folks. And I couldn't do it through the chat. So one of the things that people got excited about the future, what's up integration that we're working on? And people said I want to apply? And what I did is I set up a really simple flow in ManyChats right on the call, asking like five questions. What's your business name? How many employees? How do you plan to use? What's up automation? What's your email once your phone number. And out of the I think it was about 85 people were in the room at that point, I got over 40 fill out of that form on Instagram. And it's completely portable, like it's a CSV. So I basically used IGDM automation as a really simple way as well really, as opposed to like a Google forum or something. And I got more followers and I got more engagement. And now connection with those people. Can your Google forum do that?

Matt Edmundson

Maybe that should be the title of the podcast. Can your Google Form do that? Listen, so if you want, obviously follow my go DM and see what happens and we'll put all the links to Mike in the show notes. But Mike, listen, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been great to talk to you super excited about the possibilities. And I am a bit you know, I'm a fan of ManyChat. So Well done for that. Really appreciate what you guys are doing. Thanks. Thanks again.

Mike Yan

Thank you, man. Excited to be here.

Matt Edmundson

Appreciate it. So wasn't Mike fantastic. Now if you're as excited by this as I am, and you can start to see the possibilities, you are definitely going to want to connect with Mike. And as I said, we will link to Mike in the show notes, you can obviously find him on Instagram, The Mike Yang. Do that and see how you get on and just connect with him or reach out to him. I'm sure be super helpful. You can also go to manychat.com to find out things more things about ManyChat and IG summit to find out more things about the summit. Yes, you can. But we'll put all of those links in the show notes. And the web address for that is eCommercepodcast.net/68 two because this is episode number 68. Now, I mentioned we're gonna be doing a bit of a giveaway at the start of the show. And we are and like Mike, I thought we'd do this one a little bit differently. So all you've got to do is find me on Instagram, and message me the word many chats just send me the word many chat and a message. Not only will you get to see some of these automation things happening, this is what I spent 20 minutes playing around with earlier on. basically what's going to happen is I'm gonna say hi, what do you think to the show you just let me know. And I'll I'll then the automation then sends you a few bits and bobs in terms of the giveaway. So let me tell you what the giveaway is. Now you know how to get it go to Instagram messenger. And just direct message me the word ManyChat even if you're just curious just to see how it all works, you're going to be intrigued, right? And what I will do, like I say, we will send you the link to sign up to the 90 day free trial with ManyChat. That's number one, because 90 days, that's a hell of a time, right. So you're going to definitely be able to test the crap out of this thing. Let me tell you, and just enjoy it. Right, just enjoy it and play around on it. The other thing that we're going to do is we are going to give away some of the tickets to IG summit. That's right. So if you fancy going to ig summit, if you're listening to this in time, this is a very time sensitive thing because it is the 15th and 16th of July, which at the time of recording is next week. We have got some tickets to give away. Yes, we have. So all you've got to do is go to messenger DM me the word ManyChat, and we'll let you know how you can get hold of them. And yes, I do ask for your email address so we can send you the information because why would I not? It's all about that kind of stuff, right? So check that out. hope that makes sense. But if you want to go to the summit, and you want a chance, again, some free tickets, so we got to do and trust me even if you don't get the free tickets, you are want to gonna want to go to the summit, right? It's going to be epic, it's going to be great. And because this is so new, and so fresh, it's a good time to learn about it and pioneer, right? So have a go see what happens, because I think you're going to enjoy it. So that basically is everything from us today. Hope you've enjoyed this show. Like I say wherever you get the show from if you're watching the video on YouTube or Facebook, or if you subscribe via you know, an audio system like apple or Stitcher or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from, make sure you subscribe, I would appreciate you guys leaving us a review writing some comments and all that kind of good stuff because we just enjoy making the show and we hope you get as much out of it as I get out of it myself for my own business. So that's all for me. We'll be back again very, very soon with another episode of the eCommerce podcast. Bye for now.