Leveraging E-Commerce Chatbots For Product Launching with Michelle Barnum Smith

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, Facebook and everyone on product Launch Hazards podcast. I am going live today with Michelle Barnum Smith and I'm so excited to bring her to you because I heard her speak in Hong Kong last October. We were both there speaking at the event and she just had me. I was like, I'm not a huge Facebook fan. I really don't love Messenger. But her stats are undeniable. So she's coming on here today to talk about what she's done, what she does, but particularly oriented to product launching and how successful this more intimate level of marketing can be.

Thanks, Michelle for joining me today.

Thanks, Tracy. Thanks so much for having me. Good to see you again. Since the last time I saw you, we were highly jet lagged and I didn't know where I was, so I'm glad it still came across. Oh no, you, you were great.

Yeah, I was a day earlier, so I think I was really exhausted, but I think I was on adrenaline, so it worked out.

Yeah, there you go. There you go.

That's how that always is. So why don't you just give a little bit of background? I mean, you've got an amazing bio and I could just sit here and read it, but I want hear it from you. So I mean, how did you get started in this marketplace into product launching and supporting that from a marketing standpoint?

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been doing marketing for over 18 years and I do moisturize and I had a whole corporate career before I started doing my own thing and transitioned from working woman to working mom and building my own business, my own brand. And a couple of years ago, I came across what I call the beginnings of Facebook messenger for businesses or messenger marketing campaigns. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so sexy. This is the future of marketing because it's so messenger. As you know, as most people know, it's conversational. Right? You're having an interactive experience with another person. And so now that businesses can have those similar kind of interactions, some live chats in real time, like in the form of customer service and support, or automated marketing, like in the form of messenger automations and messenger bots, that's like a super buzzy term. What are bots it's basically automated marketing. Right. And so when I started kind of getting into it and seeing the capabilities, it was just like, this is totally the future of this type of interactive marketing. We already know that email is kind of this, you gotta do it, but nobody really likes getting email.

I hate email.

Right, right, exactly. And so the more and more that I learned about messenger, the more I knew that this could be such a huge opportunity for any type of business. Because that's really what it comes down to is that any business can use Facebook Messenger. But especially for E commerce, whether you're selling direct or you're selling through Amazon, it's a massive opportunity to be able to use messenger marketing for your business.

So you've had 18 years of marketing experience and I guarantee you that there was a lot of old school stuff that you still apply. But, but there's a lot that doesn't work nowadays and there's a lot that we've had to throw out in. From a product launching standpoint, did you always have product marketing experience? Was that kind of your thing already or was it just general marketing experience?

Well, I came from a high tech background, so I've worked with them for many of the Fortune 100 as well as some of the most massive companies in the world like China Telecom and Vodafone. And when I worked in corporate, of course, we were always doing product launches. Not to consumer, but more B2B. But like you said, marketing is this. I don't know, this area of business is constantly changing, guaranteed. In the conversation in the last five minutes there's some new marketing tool that's probably popped up.

We're going to talk about one towards the end. I didn't prep you for that, but we're going to totally talk Instagram. It's up and coming, right? It is. Okay, see, so we're baiting you all. You have to listen to the end now.

Absolutely, absolutely. But I joke with one of my friends, runs an accounting firm and I was like, listen, accounting hasn't changed in like 1600 years, you know, since the Chinese.

That's why they call it Generally Accepted Accounting principles.

Whereas like with marketing, it changes constantly. It's changing all the time. It's new and adapting and growing. And so from a marketing professional standpoint, I'm not an expert in marketing, like, because how could you ever be? There's too many avenues, there's too many everything. But my focus is specifically messenger and how to leverage that for E commerce and product launches included in that when you have Something new and how to build an audience to be able to get it out there and drive revenue.

Right. So let's set up a little bit and then I want to dive into those numbers and Michelle has a few slides for us so she can really show you the numbers because, like, you.

Got to see it.

Like, it's one thing to hear these big numbers and then you go, wow, that's amazing. So I'll have you brought that up in a second. But what I wanted to frame up is that product launching is really hard. Right. It's not got a fast return on investment when you're launching as much as you want it to. Like, I have product, I'm ready to sell it, and then sales trickle in. Right. That's how it goes for a lot of people. So we have to utilize tools and things and we have to plan for them. I'm going to say that really loudly here. Plan for them from the beginning as a part of our product launch strategy. Because you can't run out of money when you've got this product in. Right. You've got to have money for this marketing because it costs to play today. So talk a little bit about that. It's like there are challenges to launching products.

Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because so many sellers, they, you know, building a list or having a launch audience becomes something that they think of down the road instead of being part of the core. First thing, one of the first things you think of, especially whether you're selling direct via like your own website or you're launching on Amazon, for example. On Amazon, if you're launching a new product, there's processes that you use to launch with and you have to have a certain number of inventory that you're planning on pretty much giving away. Right. Pretty much blowing out to be able to rank your product. And the biggest frustration I have is when I get on a call with somebody and they have like 500 units total. Not even just in FBA, but total. But they're launching in a highly competitive space and they're going to have to give away 400 product to be able to get launched. And I'm like, why even get launched if you're only going to have 100 product to be able to sell at the end of it? So you have to think strategically in how you're going to launch your product. And then having enough product in stock to be able to invest in that.

Yeah, they have to go hand in hand. And that's why it has to be a Plan from the beginning. So, you know, here's something that we talk about here, and we haven't talked about this yet. I think, Michelle, we had a couple of conversations since we had a conversation in Hong Kong, neither of us probably remember. And from global Search.

Right.

But, you know, we also had one since then. But one of the things that we do here at Product Launch Hazards is we really go for the strategy that you should build your audience first. And I think that ties really well into what you are doing here. So whether that means that, like, I want to make an innovative, really cool juicer blender. So today what I recommend to my clients is go find a juicer and a blender and sell them and build the audience on the ones that exist today while you're developing your others. Number one, so that you're the sales of the juicer blender is supporting your product development process. But two, so you're building the audience at the same time who has cursory interests. They may not have an interest in the combined unit, but you have the right people in your community at that point. So how could someone do that with what you're doing?

I think a lot of times people get a little intimidated when we talk about building a list. Right. It feels overwhelming. It feels, you know, maybe they don't have the technical skills. They're scared of Facebook. They're super scared of Facebook ads, and they're scared of how much it's gonna cost. And I gotta say, in the years that I've been doing launches with messenger and building launch lists, because that's essentially what you're doing is building a launch list. We figured out how to run campaigns in such a way that you can build a launch list of about 2,000 subscribers in less than two weeks for less than a dollar per subs, which is insane. That's crazy, right? It's totally crazy. And our latest campaigns are less than 50 cents per subscriber. So we're saying there's ways that you can do this so you're not like breaking the bank. You're not having to learn this new Facebook ads skill. You really don't. Because once you build a launch list, and this is what's so cool about messenger, is once you build that launch list, you don't ever have to do run Facebook ads ever again. You really do have this audience now. Just like an email list, you have access to that you can promote and educate and inform your audience about your products, about cool topics related to your products. Not just like, sell, sell, sell, but Information. So, like the juicer blender scenario, what are people going to do with that? They need recipes, they need health benefits. And so you can provide ebooks. You provide blog posts, podcasts, cool information to prepare people so that they know, like, hey, these people are not just trying to sell me something they really care about educating me on the benefits of this product that I'm trying to put together.

Right, yeah. So let's talk about numbers, because I think this is really significant, because when we say email lists, you can't do that with 2,000 emails nowadays. You've got to have at least probably 10 times that minimum and maybe a hundred times that in certain areas. So the numbers really aren't there. So let's go to your numbers.

So one of the reasons why. I'm so glad you brought that up, Tracy, about, like, an email list of 2000 people, people will be like, really? That's it, right? Because back in the day, it was like kind of this. The bigger the better, right? Like 10,000 people, 50,000 people, 100,000 people on your email list. And the reason, the real reason why your email list had to be so massive is because the engagement rates were such crap. And when I talk about the engagement rates, I'm talking about open rates and click through rates. So this is one of the sexy stats of messenger and why I love it so much is you have on average a 90% open rate.

Well, I feel like we need, like, drumroll, like.

Right, exactly. It's like if I don't get a 90% open rate on my message, I get my feelings hurt.

I think the number 20% open rate on email list, like, that's a good list. That's a really good list.

Really good list.

Right. But you know what? It's so not where I see most of the lists that people are utilizing nowadays. I don't see them anywhere that. Now the difference, though, that is that I have seen from our podcast, for instance, from our list here, we get closer to 40 to 50% because it's so niche down and we're providing 90% content. They don't feel like they opted into something promotional. So I think that that's a little bit different. So what you would consider to be a service list, right? You're serving them content and you're serving them, and that's really. I think we'll talk about that in a little bit, but I think that's really where you want to go. And what you were mentioning about not just selling them stuff on their list. Right?

Exactly, exactly. And Facebook is trying to prevent that from being the case. Like, I subscribe to Bath and Body Works because I like their deals and whatever, but I cannot handle how many emails they send me. They send me like five emails a day.

Right.

And they have to do that because only one every 10 days would I ever open. And so Facebook's trying to prevent that level of spamming to happen on their platform because they want to protect it. They want to make sure that it's maintained and protected as an engagement platform, not as a spamming platform. And so you as a consumer is like, oh my gosh, I don't ever want to use messenger again because all these businesses are here. But guess what? Facebook has your back. They're protecting consumers, but business owners. Now when it comes to using messenger, you got to play by the rules. Or you could get yourself banned off of Messenger.

Definitely you got to play by the rules. But I think you also have to employ like really good marketing practices like you were talking about. Then that's where your experience really comes in handy. That part of marketing, relationship marketing hasn't changed, right?

Exactly. Exactly. We've been testing things so much over the last few years to see what works and what doesn't work. And of course the platforms are changing all the time too. So sometimes it's a game of whack a mole. Some other slides that are another thing I want to share with you guys is this stuff. It's so crazy. When it comes to messengers, we have an average of a three second retime. So you think about an email list and I read a report once that said that when you receive an email, you either read it within an hour of receiving it or never.

Never is probably more likely. So I know a lot of people, someone in this office right now who commits email bankruptcy about every 90 days or so. Which is for those of you who don't know what that is. That's when you like dump everything in your inbox into some folder or into the trash and you're like, well, they get back to me.

Exactly, exactly. And that's how most people operate. I mean, there's going to be a few weirdos out there who are super, myself included. I'm very much like, I like to clean girl.

I have to tell you, there isn't a single email that I don't read, but I don't read them within an hour. That's so true.

Well, the reality is, is that on a regular basis, most people just do the like the mass delete. They just want to get rid of all of those notifications and all of those things. But with messenger, most people still have, like, their notifications open and they want to hear. They want to know when they get a message. So an average read time of 3 seconds versus emails, either hour or never read time. So this is a really important stat, and one of the things I love so much about it, and the last one, not the last one, I do have one more I want to share with you. But something that people are concerned about is migration off the platform. You know, oh, my gosh. Facebook selling my information or I'm worried about privacy or all of these things. And the reality is that Facebook is still the biggest game in town. They have over a billion users just on messenger itself. So you think about that in the messenger penetration for your audience. If you worry that your audience or your customers are not on the platform, don't worry about it. They're there for sure there. Aside from WeChat in China, Facebook messenger is the biggest chat platform.

Michelle, do you happen to know the statistics of number of women on Facebook versus men?

You know what? I don't. I don't. I'm sure it would be easy to.

Find, because this is one of the things that I talk about on the show and in my column all the time, is that retail product sales are predominantly focused on women. And so when we have 86% of purchases being bought or controlled by women, we want to be where women are hanging out. And so that's Facebook, that's Instagram. It's not as much LinkedIn thinking about that. Where are they hanging out? And so to miss out on that audience, that's crazy.

Oh, totally, Totally. Absolutely. And I got to say, anytime our clients are trying to target a specific type of audience, we're able to do that over and over again. With Facebook, it's not a problem. It's not a problem.

So lots of niches in those niches. There.

There's lots of niches in those niches. Okay, so the last stat that I want to show with you guys, and this comes from kind of that, like, fomo, where people are like, oh, my gosh, this is so sexy. But crap, I've missed out on the opportunity. You haven't On a recent training for the platform that I use on top of messenger, it's a marketing platform, is called ManyChat. And they had a conference in late fall last year, and the Facebook messenger product managers came to this conference. So to get, like, somebody from Facebook to actually come to a conference is a Very big deal. And so the Facebook gods arrived. They were there and one of the stats that they shared was that only 1% of businesses on Facebook are actually have messenger connected on their Facebook business page. Which, I mean, that's not even talking bots. That's just saying like somebody could message your business and ask you a question. Right. Or if they have a customer service issue or something like that. It's only 1% of businesses are even using and connected. Right. It's like, wow, that's low hanging fruit, people. You know, low hanging fruit. You don't want customer service issues on your Facebook page. You know, you want somebody to message you and let you know if there's something they can help you with. So when it comes to the product adoption curve, we're not even in cutting edge, we're in the bleeding edge product adoption curve. And sometimes with bleeding edge, there's a reason why it's called bleeding edge and that's because there's blood everywhere. Because everybody's learning how to use this for the first time. And sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we have really awesome wins. And it's this process of figuring out what's working, what's not working. And like I said, where we've been doing this for two years now, we're pretty much in the flow of consistently having the same process over and over again because we're figuring out what works, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

If people are concerned about like, did I miss the boat? No, the boat is still in the dock. Please join us. At least turn on the messenger connection between your business page and your subscribers or people coming to your page so that they can message you and then check out platforms like manychat to start building these automations so that you can start to build your subscriber base and build that launch list.

Let's pop out of this now. And so I can just talk about you because this is what you do every day. You have courses, you have groups, you have programs. Like this is what you do. And you know, the interesting thing is this. I was like, I had expected when I met you it'd be like this full consulting done for you service. And it's really not. And it became really clear to me from talking with you. I think you just have to stop sharing.

Stop sharing, Stop sharing. There it is. Sorry guys, sorry. I am very technically advanced. Zoom is my.

Something about Zoom that always confounds all of us. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, yeah, I mean, this is the thing. At the end of the day, I really realized and I Was like, well, why isn't she offering this done for you? I'd be like, just let me pay you do it for me. Right. But what it realized is that you have to have so much input from your clients that you have to have so much core knowledge on the product. And your messaging has to be done by you at the end of the day or done by your team, if you've got a team of people. But it has to be done by you. It's not something you can do for them, but the principles of how it all works and how you do it that you can guide them on. So talk about your club. I mean, that's what you call it. So yeah, I was like a club.

My cool kids club. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, and you're spot on. I can't be a product expert on your product. Right. Like that's for my clients to, you know, source this product. You've invested so much time and energy and it's your baby. Right? But like you said, we've established the best practices and we figured out what works consistently to get our clients results. And so really, when it comes down to it, our process is really about building that launch list, building your subscriber base, then creating engagement so that you can, you know, if you're an Amazon seller, rank your products, harvest reviews, drive revenue. If you're selling direct, developing a relationship with your customers with your subscribers, converting them over into customers and then just continuing that relationship. And something to keep in mind is that different products are going to need different kind of marketing solutions. Right? And typically what I see is the more expensive the product, the longer the nurture, right? That's kind of marketing 101. So a product that is disposable and cheap and people can respond to like a great deal where it's like a 50% off offer and the product is like 7 bucks at that point. Like it's kind of a no brainer for a lot of people. If you sell a $250 product and you're doing a buy one, get one free, well guess what, that's still $250 that people have to invest in. So what I'm getting at is this is not like a silver bullet platform. This is not a do it once and reap. All of the re. Have to have a long term perspective and a long term investment attitude when it comes to building a subscriber base and building a relationship with an audience that you can have this give and take with. It's not just this one Time thing. And you have to be careful that because some marketing tactics are very much like all this new cool thing. I just got to try it out real quick. Well, guess what? When you do that, you invest money and you get very little in return because it was a short term fix that you were looking for. And we all know what quick fixes result in.

That's right.

Shame and regret. Right?

Big shame and regret. So this is really interesting, Michelle, because as I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking that our product launch hazards group here is probably better suited to what you're doing than some of the Amazon sellers I speak to all the time. Because those Amazon sellers who are like all over the place in all the different types of product arenas and areas that they're in, where if you're in a very niche area, you're offering an innovation, you're building a passionate brand around something, you are more likely to be able to build that long term relationship and be able to nurture that list and get more value from that for both you and for your customers.

Right, exactly. The type of sellers that this benefits, this strategy benefit the best Amazon private label sellers. We're not wholesaling, we're not arbitrage, it's private label. You're wanting to build a brand new both on Amazon and off Amazon, right?

Yeah.

As well as sellers who are selling direct. You know, you have your Shopify or your Magenta store or some process where you're like, I want people to know like and trust me, my brand, my products, not just Amazon or not just Walgreens.

Right. And the thing is it's great for e commerce sellers who are doing direct sales too. So I mean you can start really launching a product off Amazon. You can really drive traffic direct to you. And that's a great benefit too. Especially if you have a product line launch strategy where you're really going to be expanding and offering a bigger program over time. This makes sense because you now really have a nurtured list in that area health and wellness like we were using before as an example.

Yeah, absolutely. I have a lot of private label sellers who are on Amazon but also want to build that direct list as well. And just because you start with building up your subscriber base and used to sending them to your Amazon store, doesn't mean at any time you can't send them to a new link. Right. You can't send them to. And I think it's even better that way because if you're building a subscriber base from Cold traffic like Facebook ads. They don't know you yet, but they do know Amazon. And so if you're sending them to your product listing on Amazon, they're familiar with that. They like their prime, they can read reviews, you know, all of those things. But then once they become your customer and they bought your product, guess what? Then they know like and trust you. You've piggybacked and leveraged that brand power that Amazon has, and now you've leveraged it on your own behalf. And your subscriber list is more likely to buy from you in the future, even if you're selling direct.

I love that. Well, we teased everyone talking about some of the new stuff coming out on Instagram, and we're seeing a lot of product sales happening on Instagram. I interviewed Gary Vee a couple months ago and he said he can't spend enough money on Instagram. He wishes there were more influencers so he could spend more. And he was spending like $100,000 a month on ads and killing it because he was doing millions of dollars of his shoe product over that thought that was so interesting. So what's going on over there that we want to know about this year and we want to pay attention to?

Well, Instagram is not my area of focus or expertise in general. Like I said, there's too many. Right. The umbrella is so large. But one of the things, from a product perspective, influencer marketing is still important. Those people who have their reach, their audiences. Right. But one of the opportunities that you have with that is partnering with those people to build your own audience, build your own list, your Instagram following or your Facebook following. An interesting statistics that I was reading the other day is that people will follow you on Instagram but buy on Facebook.

Hahaha.

That's interesting because Instagram is the pretty place, right? It's not the place for the ads and the political discussions and all of these things. It's the place you go for inspiration.

Do you find people going from Instagram to Facebook Messenger?

Mm, oh yeah. Oh yeah. And pretty soon there's gonna be platforms that are becoming released for Instagram direct message. So everything that we're doing on messenger to be able to automate marketing there. Well, it's not there yet. We're getting there, but it's coming.

That's gonna be killer.

So what I tell people is start your campaign, start building your subscribers and building kind of these campaigns with your messenger list, and then start to test and replicate that experience when the platform becomes more out of beta and into like the real time so that you're ready, you're ready for those, like, automated direct message type of relationships.

Interesting. And you know, this is the thing about Instagram that your Instagram guys can go straight back into your Facebook from the content standpoint.

Right.

So if you start thinking about Instagram as your content service place, right. So the pretty photos, the like cool stories, interesting quotations, like nurturing that audience through story and messaging from the visual standpoint, like thinking about that and then pulling that back in through Facebook, it's also going to help attract people to join you on Messenger.

Yeah. Because you can target your Instagram followers in your Facebook ads that end up in your messenger subscriber list. So I mean, that's kind of advanced stuff, but I mean, it's. Oh, well, when Facebook owns the platform, they can do whatever they want. Right. So. And it's only a matter of time because they own WhatsApp as well. So there's lots of. It's all intermingled. So if you're trying to target. And I like that, I like that you're saying build the content presence on Instagram, have those followers and then market the crap out of it on Facebook ads and go convert them into messenger subscribers. Because the reality is, is that a follower and a fan are just vanity stats until they become messenger subscribers. Because messenger subscribers means you own them. Because the reality is, is that with your content on social media platforms like Facebook, the algorithm will only feed your story to their newsfeed like 2 to 5% of the time organically. And if you boost a post, it goes up to like 15 to 20%. But guess what? If you get somebody as a Messenger subscriber, they will see your content 100% of the time.

Yeah, that's awesome. Because that's what we really want.

I'm just going to close with that. Yeah.

So I'm one of these people who doesn't love Facebook messenger like pop it up messages because so many people abuse it. And remember when you were in Hong Kong, you talked about some of like the good guidelines to how do you really make sure that you're not doing that? Because that's my fear is that what happens is. And it has happened in other areas of Facebook. So my fear is that what happens is you get so many messages so often and so much of that message becomes irrelevant. It becomes like, what's going on in email? And then we turn off our notifications and we say forget this and we don't use it anymore and. Or what happens to me is I get so many messages in messenger from people who, you know, want to interview me or want me to interview them or doing all these things. I view it and I see it, but I don't always respond right away because I've got to get another link or do something and then they get buried down in that list and I forgot about them because once they're no longer active notifications, they're not active anymore.

Right, right.

That's a little bit different than flagging an email. And so that's also another thing. The more content we get through messenger, the worse it can end up being. So let's talk about some guidelines, because you have some great, great guidelines.

Yeah. So, I mean, for me, I really like to use the platform as a notification system. So kind of like how you have, like the apps that you've left on pop up and notify you on your smartphone, like you want them to be the most important thing that they can be. It shouldn't be just like telling your life story or those kinds of things. That's what email is for. In fact, with messenger campaigns, you can make it so you can bring somebody in as a Messenger subscriber and an email subscriber at the same time. And so I genuinely recommend having both and having that multichannel experience so that when somebody becomes an email subscriber, they get your welcome series. You get an email per day for six weeks or whatever it looks like. But with Messenger, I don't want you to do that. I want you to do like up to one message per week.

So. See, guys, nice and low. Let's think about this. Because it's also not as much work, right?

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Because with email, you're writing like all of this copy, right? And it's just like. And you got to do all this design work.

You're writing a short little message here, right?

Exactly. With messenger, it's like, hey, we got a new post up about xyz. Click the link below to check it out. It really is just like a quick thing. Or, hey, we have a new product that we're launching. It's going to be a crazy good deal for a short period of time. Click below if you want to hear about when the deal is live. And what I like about that as well is that it's permission marketing. Any time that you can give people a choice and whether they want to engage with you or not is like a winning opportunity. And people will be like, yeah, but what about those people who say no? And I'm like, well, you don't want them on your list. Like, why do you want people on your list who don't. Who aren't interested in your products? You know, at least you know, after a period of time, you'll get a really good feel for those people who are good, who are the type of subscribers you want to have on your list. And it's just good messenger interaction anyway to be able to let make it easy for people to unsubscribe so they don't, like, block or delete your conversations. Because then Facebook will flag those and get too many of those and you get banned.

Definitely. Well, this is something that was just. So I want to frame this for those people who are in the product development. There's a reason I brought Michelle on, and that is that it's like the marketing can't wait till the end, number one. You guys know I say that all the time. But there's also another opportunity for how you might use your list right now. Use your messenger list. I hate calling a list because then it sounds like it's not good.

Your subscribers, your subscribers, your community.

Right? Yeah. But there's a way. So let's say we go back to that juicer blender example. Now we've got 2,000 people who are interested in either a juicer or a blender. And I've got my new model, I've got my new prototype. Now I have something to say. Hey, I'd like some feedback from you.

Yeah.

Now you can invite them into your development conversation. You can invite them into your pricing discussion. Like, is this too much to pay? Is this perfect? You can invite them into what colors am I going to make this thing? Yeah. You know, now you have an audience. Because what I always want you guys to get is market proof that people will buy what you have to sell. Not market proof from the standpoint of I think I like it and my family likes it, and I sold a few here, but, you know, I was presenting it every time. We've got to find a group who's bought from you because they've spent money. So now they were willing to plunk down dollars before. Now let's have a conversation with them. And that's really where I think you could really be utilizing your list for future product development as well. And it would be much easier than trying to run an email survey.

Yeah, absolutely. So let me show you something really quick. So this is the client who sells optics. So like binoculars for bird watchers. And so this is an example of like a broadcast that went out where somebody had just joined the subscriber list for like, I think they were signed up for an ebook and we wanted to learn about them fairly quickly afterwards. And for one thing, with these stats, I just love them so much. When was the last time you got like 85% open rate, 50% click?

That's awesome.

I mean, technically it's a survey, right? But like, when was the last time you, like some store that you were buying things for sent you a survey and you're like, why yes, I will take this survey. You know, you're like, get out. I don't want to. But it's so fun.

So we take polls all the time in Facebook. Like people do it all the time.

Yeah, polls are different. Polls are different. So essentially what we were trying to find out is learn about this audience and see who are these people because they have different levels of products that they sell beginner, intermediate and advanced kind of optics as well as price points. So here we're learning. Of their subscriber base, almost 40% are beginners. They're not traveling to do bird watching. Most of them are just doing it in their backyard. And 34% of them are, you know, like almost 50% of the subscribers are mostly interested in optics of $200 or less. So from a product development standpoint, that's really important information, at least from your messenger standpoint in the audience that you build standpoint, if all of a sudden this client decided they wanted to go luxury and start doing, competing with like the big brands that are selling the optics for 2000, 5000, $10,000, well, guess what, their audience is not interested in those types of products. So it's not to say that they can't do that, but the audience in this launch list that they built, they're not interested in those types of objects. These people are really going to give you that kind of feedback on what kind of products they're interested in, the types of price points that they're looking to buy at. And so this information is so important and crucial because in the future we're tagging these people so we know this information about them. So if we're sending broadcasts in the future for like a $200 plus optic or product, probably the best suited just to send it to these people who've expressed interest in that type of product. So from a survey perspective, this took them probably like less than 30 seconds to do. And you can see from like the click through rate that the drop off was very low. So people started it, they Finished it. Right. So it's really great information from a product development standpoint and easy to set up, easy to use and to be able to segment your audience in the future for future marketing campaigns.

So, Michelle, all your information is going to be in productlogahazards.com so there's going to be a profile for Michelle. You'll be able to find her. You'll be able to connect into our club. It's called the Amazon Messenger Bot.

Amazon Messenger Bot Club. And we do have E commerce. It's not just for Amazon sellers. We do have E commerce templates in there as well. I think we released 12 for the just the holiday season back in December. So I mean we're cranking stuff out all the time for our E commerce people like you who are selling products and want to use messenger to do it.

Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of resources there of all price points. So this is like a learning platform. You can dive deeper, you can get some more hands on help. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff there. I bring you these things because I want you to experience them early. I don't want you to wait till the end. I want you to go in early and start to understand and think about because you can make some different decisions in your product development cycle and in your launching plan. When you say, I have this at my access, I'm capable of using this. This is going to be the right choice to make. And so thinking about these things early, it's really not too early for you to explore them and get in there and check out our group and start learning about what you could be doing here. And for those of us who are like already past that, it's not too late either because Michelle stat just showed us we're like really less than 1% of the people. That is astounding, Michelle.

And if you already have an email list and a Facebook audience and an Instagram followers, even better because then you don't have to go to cold traffic to bring people onto your messenger platform. You can start to harvest people from your email list, from your Instagram and your Facebook followers and get them into your messenger so that you can get those sexy engagement rates that we're seeing on the platform.

I love that. An early return on investment because that's what our product launchers really want at the end of the day. Well, Michelle, it's been such a joy having you here. I'm so glad. I know we'll come back as new things start to change. We'll definitely want you to come back and do an update for us and let us know when. There's always algorithm changes. Stuff happens all the time.

All the time. I'm like, what has happened in the last 30 minutes?

That's right. That's why you need an expert in your corner, right? That's why we're all about the right things in the right order with the right resources here at Product Launch Hazards. And this is one of those right resources. Guys, so glad I was able to bring her to you today.

Thank you, Tracy. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, guys.

Thanks everyone for listening. And we'll be back next time with another product launch hazard expert.

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