Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:56]
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing podcast everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Anna Tutckaia who is a self-made marketing maven, a dynamic mother of two, and an international entrepreneur who’s run successful businesses on two continents. Now as Head of Digital Marketing at ManyChat, the world’s leading chat marketing platform, she’s helping to reshape the marketing strategies of nearly two million businesses around the world. Welcome to the podcast Anna.

Anna
[00:01:34]
Hi, a thanks a lot for having me.

Arlen
[00:01:37]
Yes, you’re welcome. And I’m really excited to to talk to you today. We’re really gonna be diving deep into your bread and butter today, which is chat automation and everything around that and how businesses and specifically e-commerce businesses can take advantage of all of this automation with regards to to chat and how that can benefit their business, lead them to more sales and more engagement with their end customers. But you know, before we do get into all of that, I, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

Anna
[00:02:10]
Sure, yeah, let’s start there. So I’ve been in marketing for the last 10 years and I started my journey when I moved to the United States. I’ve been always an entrepreneur and when I moved here I was like, do I want to continue that journey or do I want to try something else? And I remember that the most fun thing that I really enjoyed doing was marketing for my businesses. So I really dove deeper and decided to become an expert there. So I’m here in Silicon Valley and since 2014 I’ve been helping tech startups drive their customer base drive, revenues, engagement, retention, and eventually the revenues.

Arlen
[00:02:57]
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s ultimately, of course the bottom line is driving the revenue. Every e-commerce business these days is focusing on improving the revenues, improving profits, and everything kind of revolved around that. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. Definitely appreciate that. Now speaking of increasing revenue, increasing profit, I guess let’s, where we wanna kind of start at is because there’s a lot under the umbrella of chat, chat, live chat, there’s chat bots, there is all of these different chat tools that are available directly on businesses, websites via social media. We’ve got the Facebook messaging, all of that. So it’s kind of a broad topic and so why don’t you kind of narrow it down for us and kind of give us a detailed definition of chat automation and specifically what that is and how a specific e-commerce business can take advantage of chat automation across various platforms.

Anna
[00:03:50]
Yeah, how about we do a little bit differently because I think what could help is also a continuation of the story, how it got to chats because it’s very related to eCommerce businesses. So I don’t know, around 6, 5, 6 years ago I’ve been working with startup called Luma BodyTech, which is also an eCommerce startup. We were producing devices for posture and for running. It’s so funny, when I see posture, I wanna straighten up right away.

Arlen
[00:04:17]
Yeah.

Anna
[00:04:18]
And I was responsible for customer acquisition there. So like customer acquisition manager doing a lot of ads, doing a lot of influencer marketing partnerships and of course email, right? It’s a huge channel with email, it’s always tricky, right? You can only get to, I don’t know, I’ll say 40% open rates, but I’m sure a lot of your listeners were like, Okay, we’re not getting even 40, right? The number very often is even below that. And I was trying to figure out at that time, how can I solve that? Like how can I bring my message across to huge audience that they will read my emails and also click on them and perform the action that I want them to perform. So I started researching and I found the platform many chat that would allow me to pretty much do email marketing, but on chat where actually all the people are, I’m not sure about your email box, Like are you very strict about it? How many unread emails do

Arlen
[00:05:25]
You have there? My I, I have a variety of different email box boxes that I check and that I manage. A lot of them are some for marketing purposes, some different ones are for partnerships. So we kind of have different inboxes that I manage along with our team and they can get a little, they can get a little hair sometimes for sure.

Anna
[00:05:42]
Exactly. But then the question is how many unread messages do you have on your Messenger or Instagram dms?

Arlen
[00:05:50]
Yeah, not many.

Anna
[00:05:51]
Not many. Not many. Yeah. And that’s why I was trying to find this channel where my messages will be opened and I found ManyChat and I used it for Luma BodyTech at that time. So basically converting all my emails to Messengers so I can send it to folks that are subscribed, communicate to them. And I got to over 80% open rates and over 20% CTRs, those mind blowing such an amazing channel. So after a couple of companies, like we sold Bua Body Tech, I was at the different company at that time, Many Chats reached out and they were looking for head of digital marketing and I was like, Heck yes, the tool is amazing. I used it, my myself and I jumped right in. So that’s a long answer to what chat marketing is and how I got there.

Arlen
[00:06:47]
Okay, great. Yeah, thank you for kind of giving us a kind of a dig a deep dive into that and what that is. It does make sense you, you mentioned the difference between the regular inbox as well versus what we all have as far as our direct message inbox within Instagram, our Facebook messenger and it, it’s totally different. It’s we’re managing, you know, like I said, hundreds of unread dms, you know, that’s where it’s celebrity, they’re kind of on a different level and I’m sure they get blindsided by tons of dms that they probably just end up deleting anyway. But if you’re not at that celebrity level where you’re getting tons and tons of these and you’re just, everybody’s managed a lot better, it’s a lot easier to manage that. The engagement is there. You’re a little bit more interested in seeing what are people saying, what are they asking, who is it? And it’s kind of a whole different thing.

Anna
[00:07:34]
Exactly because you are exactly where your customers are and your customers are a messenger, your customers are on Instagrams crawling, your customers are chatting with their friends on dms and that’s where you want to be. You want to be right there. And then of course there are so many other cool things you can do with chat, which we just touched based on, I would say engagements and retention where you just communicate with your customers, but then you can also acquire your potential customers through chat and be way more efficient with that. If you want to like I can give you more details and how you can do that.

Arlen
[00:08:16]
Definitely politeness.

Anna
[00:08:18]
All right, so the thing, especially with all the iOS 14 changes, I know that a lot of your listeners are know what that is, but pretty much as brands, we can’t track our landing page visitors, website visitors at the ease we used to do, right? Because people do not like it. People do not accept our terms and con conditions. So what happens is you drive traffic from ads to acquire your new customer to the lending page with a hope that this person likes everything from first site converts and become your customer. Unfortunately, that does not happen each time, right? The conversion rates again on the landing pages are no higher than five 7%. So more than 90% of people actually drop. And the only thing you can do is retarget those folks through another set of ads, which you pretty much can’t do for those who did not accept your term terms and conditions and who decided not to allow you to do so.

Anna
[00:09:26]
So that’s where acquisition through Chat comes into place. So instead of sending traffic to the landing page where you can convert your customers, you can send traffic to Messenger or you can send traffic to Instagram dms where you are not losing anybody, they’re all there, your subscribers, then you can introduce the product you wanted to introduce through chat and automation. And the coolest part is you can retarget those folks for free because you can always get back to them again through automated messages, let’s say the next day and ask, did you complete your purchase or do you have any questions that I can answer? Is there anything I can help you with all through chat? And again, you are saving everybody that you drove to that experience. So that’s the beauty of it.

Arlen
[01:10:25]
Yeah, that’s, that is very powerful. And I understand what you’re saying when with regards to you’re sending people to a particular landing page, a lot of times, like you said, the click through rates and engagement that goes on with those landing pages is no higher than just kind of your normal traffic. You can have calls to action where you can try to get people into your mailing list, which is kind of the traditional flow, your offer something, maybe it’s not overly salesy, but you offer them some type of information that’s geared around your particular product or your industry and just try to get ’em into your list. And so that’s all fine. You can definitely do that. But what you’re saying, what you’re saying is instead of sending them these cold emails every so often, engage with them where they’re gonna be, where they’re gonna respond really. Which is like you said, the Instagram direct messages and the Facebook marketing. So that makes a lot of sense.

Anna
[01:11:16]
Exactly. And it’s not only emails. So pretty much you are removing ads that you drive traffic to the letting pages, but, and you introduce ads that you drive traffic to Messenger and Instagram dms. And the thing is, email marketing is still there. So capturing emails, phone numbers is very important too because yes, it doesn’t get more than 30, 40% open rate, but it’s still a channel that you own and that you can utilize. So capturing emails and other like phone number, name, last name through chat is also an option. And you do it in a very interactive and pretty engaging way.

Arlen
[01:12:02]
I see. So the chat automation could, it’s, you can use that to then get other information, other data from the customer because they’re the, I guess I see what you’re saying, the responsiveness on these other platforms is gonna be a lot higher. So rather than just giving them a cold email opt-in box with the offering, you get them to, you engage with them on the other platforms, either the dms and the other, the messengers to then pull in, extract other information from them, like you said the email, the phone number. So I get it that that definitely makes sense. It’s just kind of like the entry point. And that’s really the most important thing is that initial contact that you’re gonna have with that prospective customer. How are you gonna effectively get that first conversation started? And that’s through the automation. Now with this automation, of course automation speaks to it being automated where you’re gonna be engaging with them through a system that’s going to send them messages. I guess the question is how do you decide, how do you craft this flow of messages that are gonna be sent to people and how do you know what are some rules of thumb rather with regards to the content or the questions rather that you’re gonna ask the end customer? How do you know really what to do?

Anna
[01:13:22]
That’s a really good question. I would say the rule of thumb is remember that it’s conversational marketing. It’s not a one pager or long email where you just, you know, put everything there and pray that your customers or potential customers read through it, right? So this is actually a conversation where you imagine you are chatting with a friend and you build it the way that it is short, engaging, fun and personalized. Okay? So we can use let’s say Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns that are coming. And I’m sure a lot of eCommerce businesses are super excited about the season. That’s the best season for them, as an example. So for example, you have your, let me see, I’ve already touched based on paid ads, but maybe you have a lot of followers on your Instagram account that are organic and you want to convert them to your customers.

Anna
[01:14:22]
And you put together this beautiful Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign where there is a promotion associated with that. So you put together Instagram stories talking about introducing this campaign and you want your followers to act on it. So often e-commerce businesses, they, what do they do again? They send the traffic to the lending page. It’s usually like click on the link on bio and get to the landing page, use certain coupon, right? And that’s pretty much it. And on the lending page you can exchange coupon for your email tone and so forth. Again, this audience is lost. The way you can do it differently is you create engaging organic stories, talking about the promotion. The promotion is coming, maybe it’s a pre-sale only for Instagram followers because they’re loyal. We introduce this pre-sale and this coupon to check out our product before they run out.

Anna
[01:15:24]
And you can say dms, the word Black Friday to learn more and get all the details. So as a follower, you go to dms, you send them the message Black Friday and you get automated response where, oh we are so excited that you want to take this chance and get the promotion. Here are the details, give us your first name, last name, email, and we’ll send it to you as well. So that’s how you can generate this email lead. And then also you can again add the website URL and send the traffic there. The cool thing is once your audience went to the website, took the coupon, probably not all of them decided to use it right away. And that’s where you can also create a message with a waiting line of let’s say 23 hours. So the next day and follow up with everybody who DMed you this word, it’s like, Hey, did you find what you needed on the website?

Anna
[01:16:31]
Do you have any questions? And then the person can answer yes or no and then it will be another automated message that comes after that. But the cool thing is if you want to interact personally with those who started this automation, you can also send them personalized messages through live chat. Okay. And just chat with these people as a real human being and answer their questions if they’re very specific. Or let’s say if this person is specifically of interest into your business and they’re more likely to convert. So we have a ton of options there. I

Arlen
[01:17:09]
See. So actually how would that work? You’re saying, let’s say you, you get this automation going and I get your point as far as keeping it simple, keeping it conversational, just imagine yourself kind of having a real dialogue with that in customer asking short questions and then based on the responses, maybe it’s a yes or no question you’re asking, then you’re kind of sending ’em through a kind of a decision tree of different responses as you’re gonna feed back to them. Then let’s say they ask more of a detail, longer detail question that your automation has no way of kind of responding to that. How then would you kind of kick in the live chat at that point once you kind of reach that point where they’ve asked a very detailed question where they just really need to chat with like a live agent, a live salesperson on the company’s end where, how does that work?

Anna
[01:17:58]
So you can create triggers that will ping you or other admins on the platform that, okay, here’s a question that the bot can’t answer or you can actually offer it throughout the automation. Do you want to speak to a real human? And by the way, you want to be very explicit that the whole interaction is happening through the bot. And honestly, I read a study saying that people prefer interacting with the bot as long as they know that it’s automation. And then you ask, do you want to speak to a real human? And they say, Yes, I do. And then you have your phone like it’s all in the app or it’s on desktop, whatever you prefer. You got the notification that there is someone who wants to chat with you and you jump right there. The cool thing about it is you can see what that person chose when going through automation. So you save your time, you already know what they’re looking for. You already can personalize your approach talking to this prospect or customer.

Arlen
[01:19:03]
Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. That makes sense. And yeah, I definitely follow that. So the, so it just seems like at any point in time, and I understand what you’re saying as far as people wanting to know that it’s a bot and not kind of being, cuz I, I understand unfortunately a lot of companies don’t do that. They don’t immediately say, okay, this is a age, this is a bot, it’s not a real human. If you want to speak to a human or go click here or say agent in the dialogue box or whatever, YeahFor, it is frustrating and I, cuz I can be, I’m on the other side of that as a consumer, many times I’m engaging with these systems and it’s obviously a bot, but they don’t really acknowledge that it actually is a bot. They try to kind of come off like it’s a real person.

Anna
[01:19:50]
Oh yeah, you should not do that.

Arlen
[01:19:52]
Yeah, very frustrating. And then my, my whole default, anytime I’m trying to get support these days that I is, if I’m trying to get to somebody, I immediately just kind of skip past all that and just say hey. And then usually, like you said, that triggers, that kicks in a trigger where I can speak to a live person. But there are instances where I just have a quick question and I don’t need to get into a long dialogue with, with a live agent. And then so I can just say, okay, how much is product X or something like that where then usually a lot of these systems can be intelligent enough to be able to to respond correct answer just specific details about a product. If they’re asked, you can give them the right answer. So I definitely see that. Now of course we’re speaking a lot of tools like MiniChat that are allow, that are gonna enable you to make all of this happen, to make all of this magic happen outside of MiniChat or any other tools like MiniChat. What other technologies or tools does a business have to have in place for really all of this stuff to to work smoothly and to have this whole flow be kind of seamless to the end customer.

Anna
[02:20:57]
If we’re talking about this strategies that we just discussed, then the business does not need anything else outside of their messenger basically accounts, Instagram accounts, ideally Instagram followers and just have many chats connected and build automation on it. And it sounds pretty complicated probably when you are just talking it through, but it’s actually a plug and play solution where you can use a ton of prebuilt templates. Of course you would need to optimize it for your business, you would need to add a text and add your promotions, add your FAQs to those. But pretty simple, inexpensive, you can start and test it out for free. You can start with our pro features included into $15 per month subscription and just play around with it. Go and give it a try. If you’re an e-commerce business, there’s nice integration with Shopify. If you use Shopify and that’s where a lot of additional features come into place, like Car Ments, you can do it also not through email but through Messenger or send an Instagram DM when everybody leaves something in your card. So stuff like that just go and explore. We have a free video core that you can find on mini chat.com website with a lot of examples. We have a lot of webinars. Just explore and I’m sure you’ll see a ton of value for your business.

Arlen
[02:22:27]
That’s awesome and thank you for sharing that and pointing out those things. But lastly, before we do let you go, I wanted to see if there’s any examples of any businesses that you’re familiar with that have used of your tool or any of these automation tools to increase their engagement with customers? And was there a spec specific tactic or technique that they used that really kind of propelled the success of their campaign?

Anna
[02:22:48]
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So we have over 2 million businesses on the platform, okay. With a huge variety of industries. So if we talk on ins on e-com specifically, I really like the example of mind welly, I’m not sure if you know the brand, their global brand. And they sell their video classes and video courses. They started using Instagram automation and they increased their signups by 522% for their master classes. And then they were able to upsell and resell to those people who signed up for their master classes. So that that is one brand and one example, another brand is, it is called Roma Bachi. And they, again, were using Instagram automation and they, they increase their engagement by 741%, believe me or not. And which followed by huge revenue increase in their sales. So and lastly, Nike, I’m trying to remember. I think Nike’s soccer Instagram account, they’re using Instagram automation to increase their sales. You can go ahead check out how they use it, but most of all through the tactics that I described to you, when they are creating organic, personalized content through their Instagram stories, through their posts and they drive traffic, not to the landing page but to the dms where they again convert those folks and reengage them to save money on retargeting ads.

Arlen
[02:24:33]
Okay, great. Well thank you for sharing those. Those are definitely some really big heavy hitters. Nike Mine Valley, I’m familiar with Nike, of course Mine Valley. I’ve actually gone through some of their courses as well from some other content creators that use their platform. And yeah, that’s definitely a kind of a testament to, to say that if these huge global brands are doing this using the Instagram automations, then you know, it’s obviously something that’s been tried and true. So any of the e-commerce brands that are listening or e-commerce marketers are listening know that this stuff is solid. So there’s been a lot of marketing spent to kind of make these things a success. As you can see, you might as well go forward with it, you know yourself well. Yeah, it’s been awesome talking to you. I appreciate you sharing with us and enlightening us on all of this whole, It’s kind of like we’re in a real different new world here with this automation and all of these things that you can do to engage customers without actually even directly engaging with them. So it’s so much that can be done kind of pre-sales, I guess you can say, that can really help warm the customer up, get them informed so that they can make a wise decision and kind of you can make that sales. So yeah, it’s good to know all of these things. But lastly, before we do let you go, I always like to switch gears here with one final question, if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think our audience would be interested to know.

Anna
[02:25:54]
Ooh, that’s an interesting one. Let me think. I think the fun part, the fun thing about me is I always choose adventure in my life. Starting from when I was in college, I had my rock band and playing in clubs, really enjoying doing that. Then after graduation, traveling world with over 15 countries visiting and finally finding myself in the United States. And lastly now, now we’re talking about many Chad, but I’m taking, I’m jumping off the cliff and taking my own adventure, building my consulting business with educational content and doing that and seeing all my life as this adventure that I am taking on and always have fun.

Arlen
[02:26:41]
Okay, that’s good. Good to know. Thank you for sharing that and great piece of advice. And no matter what you do, make sure you look at it as an adventure and always have fun. Cause as we all know, business owners, everybody listening, it’s tough. Running a business is not easy, especially e-commerce these days. It’s a lot of competition. So if you’re, if you don’t look at it as being an adventure, trying to get to that next level as an adventure, then it could be a drag. So yeah, I’m glad that you have a positive attitude about it and that’s definitely something that can, can take on as well.

Anna
[02:27:10]
Exactly. The way I see that is, especially after this 15 countries of traveling and now being in the United States and working with startups, building my business is, it’s similar to traveling, right? The every day is a new thing to look at and look at it from the perspective of a masterpiece that is here. You don’t need to go to and like look at it this way.

Arlen
[02:27:35]
Yeah, e Exactly. It’s all about that mindset, how you look at things.

Anna
[02:27:38]
Right.

Arlen
[02:27:40]
Well great, well, we’ll close on that, but lastly, thank you eight Anna for joining us and before we do let you go, if you don’t mind letting our listeners and viewers know what’s the best way that they can reach you if they would like to pick your brain anymore about chat automation?

Anna
[02:27:55]
Absolutely. You can check out [email protected] and that’s where like all the contact information and you can leave me a note there and I will always get back to you. And also my LinkedIn account is Anna Tuska. You can find me there. Feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to chat and help if I can.

Arlen
[02:28:15]
Okay, great. Thank you for sharing that. I’ll definitely have that link in the show notes. That’s Anna digital.co for everybody that wants to look you up and pick your brain anymore. Well, thanks again, Anna. This has been an awesome time having you on the podcast. I learned a lot and our listeners have as well, and we appreciate you joining us today.

Anna
[02:28:32]
Thanks a lot darling. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, happy to be here.

speaker 1
[02:28:36]
Thank you for listening to the e-Commerce Marketing podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Anna Tutckaia
Head of Marketing at Many Chat