🌱 Grow your Business Using Messenger Marketing With Jenna Dancy 💬

With the changes in today's fast-paced world, quick communications between businesses and clients are a must. Messenger Marketing is becoming a part of every business arsenal. In this episode, Adrienne Hill and guest Jenna Dancy, CEO and Owner of Freedom Funnels, discuss how to use Messenger to grow your business. Jenna talks about how she found Messenger marketing and how she used it to skyrocket her results, and how you can do the same. Learn impactful business tips and strategies from entrepreneurs just like you!

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🌱 Grow your Business Using Messenger Marketing 💬

I'm super excited about our topic. I am here with Ms. Jenna Dancy. She is a Digital Strategist and Messenger Expert. For those of you who are working to get your message out there to have an impact on your industry and with your audience and to change the lives of the people you work with but you find yourself getting stuck in the DMs or messages for hours. You're realizing, “There's got to be a better way.” There is. Jenna is here to tell us about that. Jenna, thank you so much for joining us. I'm super excited to dig into your genius.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to share because it can be craziness when you get into your Messenger or your DMs. It's easy to get sucked in there all day long. Nobody has time for that. We all have a mission to be out there serving others and sharing our message. That doesn't always happen if we're glued to our inboxes.

Connecting with people one on one is huge. We all know that business is all about connection but you can't knock yourself dead trying to do all the things yourself either. If you're doing a good job in business and you have lots of leads coming in, how on earth do you talk to all of them? For the people in the audience who maybe haven't met you yet, can you tell us a little bit about your business and how you found yourself moving into this space of working as a digital strategist and zeroing in on messages and DMs?

I got started online. I bought my first domain name in 2009. I feel like I'm ancient in the online space sometimes. My business started the furthest thing away from being passive or automated as possible. My first digital product, which I wouldn't even call digital, the cart was digital, was a food journal. People would go to my website and they would purchase it. I would take my USB, I would go to Staples, I would print it out, I'd buy a binder, and I would ship it to them.

It was not automated at all. Back in those days, that's how things worked. If you bought info products, they were usually mailed. They were binders, CDs, and audio. Things have transformed over the years. I’m thankful that they have because nobody has time to be going to Staples and mailing things anymore. Everything has changed. It's been fun to see the transitions that are happening in the digital space and they happen quickly.

My start was in health and wellness. My undergrad degrees are all around marketing and advertising. I have my MBA in marketing. It was this dual passion of health and wellness and marketing. Eventually, that path collided whenever I thought, “I can share my mission to help other entrepreneurs not feel burnout by adding automation.” That's what my focus has been over the last several years.

Several years ago, I was in a space in my business where I was doing everything myself and I was starting to transition where I could bring on a team but it wasn't quite there yet. Each month, I was either covering my monthly expenses or barely making a profit. I remember I was in my Facebook page inbox and I had this notification that had popped up. For the life of me, I could not figure out where it was coming from. I don't know if you've ever had that experience on Facebook.

I'm like, “What is this? How do I turn this on or off? Where did this come from?” I get it.

It's not intuitive. I remember I was looking and looking. I finally found this message and it was from somebody who wanted to work with me one on one. I was super excited. I started typing back to them, “Here's a link to my calendar. Let's get on a call.” I realized the message was from three weeks before that and I had missed it. I started responding to her. As you know, today, things are pretty much instant gratification. If they don't hear back from you within either the first few hours or the first couple of days, they're moving on. Needless to say, they found somebody else and I had missed out on that client.

We all have a mission to be out there serving others and sharing our message, and that just doesn't always happen if we're glued to our inboxes.

I was upset. I moved on. I thought, “There had to be another way to manage my inbox better.” I was a new mom at that point, so I didn't have all the time in the world to be spending it on Facebook Messenger or DMs. I found out about how to add automation through Messenger and using a platform called ManyChat, where you can build out this automation. I dove full force into what's possible with these. The power that you can have to not just reach out to people in your DMs but instead combine it with some ads and automation to have people reach out to you instead so that you're attracting those clients to you instead of messaging other people.

How many of you reading have found yourself in that place where you find a message from three weeks ago as Jenna did? The fortune is in the follow-up. You're trying to follow up with everyone but there are people who slipped through the cracks and you realize, “I never answered that person.” You have that moment where you're like, “Burn.” There's no way to keep track unless you have some system or some automation. You can't be a manual slave to your phone all the time either because what kind of life is that?

Chances are that's probably not why you signed up for business, to be stuck to your phone all day long. It was to have more freedom to make a bigger impact. That's not always the case if you're stuck to your phone.

You can't serve your audience well if you can't even keep track of all the people you're talking to or you flat out lose people and you're thinking, “They thought I ignored them and I missed it.” I love what you talked about when you're using it correctly. It's not that you're always going out and trying to go to the people. They start coming to you. I imagine when you first started working inside Messenger and implementing some of these strategies and all of a sudden, you felt that pull of more people in your inbox reaching out to you. Did that change how your business felt and your confidence level?

Absolutely. I transitioned from thinking, “Where am I going to get my next client? Who wants to work with me?” Instead, it was like, “How do I sort out the best person to talk to? How do I qualify these leads more so that I'm only getting on the phone with the highest quality prospects?” That way, my close rate increased, my sales went up, and my business morphed. I saw a bigger vision of what was possible for me and my business.

Not only was your close rate and your profits going up but your freedom was going up because you weren't stuck with the manual hustle of it all.

What was cool was, inside of Messenger, there was a way to start to sort out who I was talking to and figure out if they were the right fit for me to talk with to see if we were good to work together with one on one or join a program of mine or maybe what was a better solution for them. I could do that by asking the right questions.

It was all automated, too. If somebody raised their hand and said, “Jen, I want to apply to work with you,” I could send them through an actual automated application inside of Messenger. I could go back and see if they got stuck anywhere. I then could go in and manually follow up but they were already through the process. They were already starting to raise their hand to work with me. It added a whole other side of time leverage for me and my business.

Certain elements of it are automated and they're screening out the perfect people for you. By the time you are having that manual, organic conversation, you already know you're talking to someone who's super interested.

This works across any niche, any industry. If you're a coach, a course creator, a network marketer, or an affiliate marketer, this can work depending on what you do. For example, for me, some of my services revolve around Facebook, Messenger, and ads. I'm able to ask a question to find out if they've ever run Facebook ads before or if they have a budget.

If they say that they have zero budget for Facebook ads, I know they're likely not going to be a great fit for my work because that's what I do. The same thing with you. Let’s say you're a content creator. If there's somebody that doesn't want to use organic social media, they might not be the best fit for you to create content. It helps you make sure you're talking to the right person.

If the people in our audience wanted to test this out and start seeing if some simple automation would be right for them, how do you get started moving into this space? What's the first step?

For me, one of my favorite things to suggest to clients is if you've ever gone to somebody's Facebook page and then you've seen the little Messenger greeting pop up in the corner where it says, “I've got a free X, Y, Z. Click get started and I'll send it to you.” That's the first place to dive into Messenger because, number one, it helps to grow your Messenger list.

Most of you reading have probably started an email list. I'll make a couple of comparisons here because the terminology is similar. You've got your email list. You're growing your email list with subscribers, the same thing with the Messenger. You can have a Messenger subscriber list, meaning that whenever you send out a broadcast message, it's similar to sending out a broadcast email to your list. That helps to leverage your time and your message and to get it out there.

One thing that's different is the open rates when you're comparing email and Messenger. I remember when we first got started in email. At any time somebody sends you an email, you open it up, and you read the whole thing, word for word. Now, we're lucky if they open it, skim it, or click on anything, we have to work extra hard to get those open rates.

Across the industry, it's about 15% for open rates. For Messenger, those across industry averages are about 88% to 90%. You are reaching a huge amount of people in comparison to your email inside of Messenger. Start with that Get Started button to start getting people into your Messenger so that you can start tapping into those bigger open rates and start to nurture them inside of Facebook Messenger.

Whenever we make email and Messenger work together is when you can really skyrocket your results.

To make a jump from 15% open to 80$% plus, that right there is going to increase your traffic, your conversions, everything because more traffic is more traffic. More eyes on it are more eyes on it.

I'm not saying that email doesn't exist anymore. Email is necessary and it gives you this omnipresent feel to be able to email, message, and reach out to them on other social channels. It helps you show up in all the places. Whenever we make them work together is when you can skyrocket those results. With email and those open rates, let's say you're growing your list and you want to have 10,000 people on your email list. I remember that was one of my first goals or my longest goals. I remember hearing, “You're going to earn $1 per email subscriber on your list.” If you have the goal of having 10,000 people on your list, that means you're going to earn about $10,000 a month. There are many variables there.

If you're thinking and maybe you're getting started and you're like, “My email list has not even 1,000 people yet. I have so far to go.” What's neat is when you consider those open rates to get the number of opens on a 10,000-person list, you only need about 250 Messenger subscribers to reach the same people. There's a huge impact on you. I don't know about you but I'd rather focus on 250 quality people versus 10,000.

We've all heard the saying, “It's all a numbers game.” It's only a numbers game if you do it right. Wouldn't you want to go for the higher quality people who are excited to see you pop up in their Messenger versus maybe some email people who passively signed up one day and forgotten about you? They don't even check that email. Who even knows?

For those of you reading, keep in mind that Jen is an expert in both ads and Messenger. Both of those stem from your Facebook business page or some people call it a fan page. If you're still operating only on your personal page, it's time to evolve. A business page opens up the gateway to all the good stuff in terms of automation, ads, and putting fuel on the fire once you find something that works.

We're not talking about that personal Messenger that you're using to reach out to your family and friends. This is coming from your business page. I'm glad that you clarified that.

Tell us a little bit about what's possible once someone sets up a Messenger funnel, for lack of a better word. Do you have some examples of results you've had or results from other clients that you've worked with of either how much time it saved them or the revenue it generated? What's possible when you start moving into this space and building out some automation using Messenger?

I have many fun things that we could dive into here. I'll start with an experience that I had that showed me what's possible with Messenger. There's something called a Sponsored Message Ad that you can run on Facebook. Without going too detailed on this, that's an ad that you send out to your Messenger subscribers.

When I first started playing with Messenger to see what was possible, it was around Black Friday. I didn't have anything planned for my own business. In hindsight, I was thinking, “Why didn't I have anything planned at that time?” I had another affiliate offer that I was promoting. My Messenger list was people that were interested in social media, content creation templates, and Messenger. I knew that they were all along with the industry of needing templates or social media posts or content calendars.

This affiliate offer that I decided to promote, she handled a lot of that. I knew that this would be the perfect offer to combine for my list. What I did was I decided to send the sponsored message and I spent about $6 sending this out. If you're thinking of Facebook ads, you’re like, “$6 is nothing.” When you're thinking of the big picture with Facebook ads, from that, I was able to earn $600 in affiliate commissions personally. The person that I was the affiliate for generated over $2,000 on her end from that $6 ad spend. That was exciting to me.

When I saw that happen, I was like, “There's something to this. Let's see what we can figure out.” Since we're talking about affiliate marketing here, I had a client who was an affiliate for a summit, which was neat because here we are on a summit. She was an affiliate and she wanted to set up a Messenger campaign to promote it. She earned a percentage from the ticket sales. When we set this up for her, we sent it live. It was towards the night. We were ready. We were running the ad to start at midnight.

She texted me as soon as she woke up and she was like, “I woke up to four sales from my message.” I was like, “Yes.” Since then, she ended up with about $5,000 in sales, which was huge as an affiliate marketer. It’s not even total ticket sales. That was her affiliate portion of it. This was cool to see her be able to do that in a span of a few weeks promoting the one event.

I've worked with coaches who work on either an application basis or work directly one on one with people. I’ve worked with one where we set up an application to work with her inside of her Messenger. She was able to segment who she got on the phone with for her one-on-one discovery calls so that when she got on the phone, with her limited time schedule, she was only talking to the most qualified people.

This application segmented them by either offering a link to her calendar to book or it offered them a down-sell in Messenger that was more of an entry-level working opportunity with her instead of that one-on-one time based on how they answered the questions. For her, it saved her a lot of time. She also ended up with 35 calls from that application, which was huge. They were much more targeted than sending out maybe the actual link to book a discovery call with her. She was able to close more of those calls, get them on as one on one clients, and see the results in her business.

How many of you reading would love to spend $6 and make $600 or promote an affiliate offer that doesn't even belong to you and make $5,000 or set up a consultation style funnel and have 35 highly qualified leads who are getting on the phone with you because they want to be a client for you? This is what's possible. This is energizing and motivating.

Personally, I have the feeling the audience is like, “Are your wheels turning? Are you feeling this right now?” The audience is getting how this goes and why it's worth their time. The simplest automation can clean up so much for you and free up so much time. I understand that you have a free gift for our audience to help them get started. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

Automation adds that leverage to free up more of your time to go do the work you're meant to be doing.

I have a free quiz for you all. If you're reading and you're thinking, “I don't know how Messenger could work with my business or how I can use it to grow a business.” Maybe you've tapped into it a little bit but you're not unlocking its true potential. This quiz will help you figure out what your best next step is to dive into Messenger and utilize it to boost your business. You can take that quiz over at ChatBotsUnlocked.com/quiz. It's only ten questions. You should be able to get through it in the next 2 to 3 minutes. As you go through it, it should not take long. You'll get some targeted ways to move on to the next steps in Messenger for you.

I love that because that helps people figure out how to get started if they're thinking, “Maybe this is for me. Maybe I need to learn a little bit more about Messenger.” That's awesome. I understand that you also have a super high-value gift for our VIPeers as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, I do. If you are reading and you got the VIP pass, I've got something extra special in there for you so that it makes it easier for you to get started. When you're first getting started in Messenger, even if you have a roadmap, sometimes you have to go in and start learning how to do all this setup on the back end.

What I'm including inside of that VIP bundle is a Messenger template. You can do a one-click install into ManyChat, which is a platform that runs on Facebook Messenger. It's set up where it's free for the first 1,000 subscribers. If you don't even have anything to do with Messenger or ManyChat, you can do this without adding another monthly expense to your business. How cool is that?

Number two, this way, you can see what it's like to edit one of these templates and how to use it in your Messenger. I'm going to include some suggested copies and some button ideas so that you know what you can plug and play with inside of Messenger so it'll make your transition to getting started a lot easier.

What a nice gift to give people, if you're a VIP ticket holder, make use of that template. Any templates like this can save you tons of time. If time freedom is something you're looking for, this one's a no-brainer. If you're not a VIP ticket holder yet, there's still time to scoop one up. Of course, remember to pop into our Facebook page where you can ask questions and Jen will make sure that they get answered for you and can interact with you a little bit there as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Jenna. Personally, I'm super energized by this. I'm excited about the potential of what can happen when you unlock Messenger automation using the right strategies and the right templates, including the one that you're giving away for free, which is awesome.

This has been fun. I've enjoyed sharing what's possible for you and the readers. If there was one key takeaway that I could share with getting started is you don't have to be robotic with automation. It's about tapping into who you are and the message that you're serving. If there's one thing that I know from working with the clients that I serve, the biggest fear is sounding out of alignment with what they're doing.

If you're a VIP and you're playing around with this template, the way to do that is to think about how you talk. What gifts do you use? Do you use your voice? How can you integrate that into your Messenger so it shows up as you and your personal brand? This is not something that you can use if you run an eCommerce store that doesn't have a face to the brand.

It works wonders for personal brands, especially if you're at this stage in your business where you're on the edge of bringing on somebody to help you, or maybe you're struggling to manage it all. Your first thought is to bring on somebody to help you organically have these conversations. I’ll ask you to think about that for a second and consider whether maybe a little bit of automation to show up and answer questions as your own voice is the best way to do it or maybe bringing on somebody that doesn't quite talk the way that you do.

If you're anything like I feel, it's you that is the one that sells what you do the best. You're the one that shares what you do the best. You're the one that knows the answers to the questions that your potential clients have the most. Utilizing this automation is the best way to scale those conversations that you're having. I'm not saying that it's taking you off the table because you're what makes your brand shine. It's adding that leverage so that you can free up more of your time to then go do the work that you're meant to be doing.

Only you can be you. You can shine through even if you are using automation. I love that. Thank you so much, Jenna. This was amazing. I cannot wait to see the energy in the Facebook group and the conversation that comes out of this one. Thank you so much for blessing us with your wisdom.

Thank you so much. It was so much fun.

See you in the Facebook group.

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About Jenna Dancy

With a B.A. in Advertising from Penn State, and an M.B.A. specializing in Marketing, Jenna has always had a love of marketing and advertising. Having spent the last decade-plus in PR, sales, marketing, and coaching, Jenna has been in the online space since long before digital downloads and evergreen masterclasses--I’m talking since coaches were printing and mailing binders as info products!

These days, Jenna specializes in lead-generation messenger marketing campaigns (also known as Facebook Messenger or Chatbots) which helps coaches step away from their computers while continuously growing their client list. While tech implementation of bots sounds intimidating, Jenna makes this marketing strategy super approachable and regularly sees her clients booking more calls, selling more courses, and interacting with more potential followers, all without being hooked to their phone 24/7.

As a trained yoga teacher and certified health coach, Jenna loves a holistic way of living which is why automation and quick wins for life and business are so important to her.

She’s also a mom of three, raising her barefoot littles on a 119-acre homestead in New Hampshire, loves gardening, and is an aspiring beekeeper.

PodcastAdrienne HillMay 23, 2022Automation, Engagement, Messenger, Email, Entrepreneurship, MarketingComment