Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #88 “Exploring Manychat: The New Call To Action”

Phoebe Sherman

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman:

Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hello. Hello, Phoebe here. Welcome back to the Girl Gang Craft podcast. Today we are talking about funnels and manychat. If you noticed the past couple of weeks we've been talking about tech. We're going to continue a little bit along our tech journey because technology is so important for for your customers, for your systems, for efficiency, for creating time.
The right tech stack is going to help you move forward and make more money in your business. Before we get into all that, we are deep in our summer season. So by the time that this podcast episode comes out, we are moving right along and our next two events are our Salem event. So we have our Salem Craft Fair on pride here in the North Shore, here in Salem, and that is June 22nd. Wow, June 27th. And then we have July 27th, and then we have our August at the Crocker Art Museum. That is a night event. If you are in that area, go ahead and get tickets on our site. We'll have more information about the Crocker event shortly. For all of those of you who want to attend, make sure you're on our newsletter to get all that information crawling right along our app should be open for all our winter event, if not this week, the next week, so keep an eye out for that.

Again, you'll get that information right in your inbox if you're signed up for our newsletter. Or you can keep your eyes peeled on our Instagram, I think that's it for now. In regards to housekeeping. You can call me, call me up, that number to call us up is (413) 961-0855. Just call us up and we will include those questions in future episodes and answer them.
Or bring on an expert. So have you been seen on Instagram this text that says comment below e-book and we'll send you a link in our DMs. You've probably seen it on our page a lot of the time, and you might have seen it on a lot of the rest of the internet. So definitely it's Instagram focused. This is a tool that is not in Instagram.
This is another third party application. It's called Manychat. And we're going to talk about that today about how it can help your conversions aka your sales, but also other conversions like get folks on to your newsletter list. I'm going to go into all the stuff about it, but if you're like, okay, let's sign me up immediately. You can just go to bit.ly/GGCmanychat manychat is lowercase. We'll put that in the shownotes bit.ly/GGCmanychat and that will get you started with manychat. I think they do the first month free and then I think it actually charges you based on its usage. They have like a certain amount of touch points, almost like how Zapier works and you get charged for that.
Our bill hasn't been higher than $25 a month, and it's the best use of your money. And yes, we are a many top affiliate that's very recent. I've been begging them to allow us to be an affiliate because I really, really believe in what they're doing, and it's had a huge impact on our bottom line. We're going to dive into what a funnel is today and how to use manychat.
What is a funnel? Funnel is how you guide your customer along from seeing you the first time to purchasing, and then refer to them. So it's like a funnel because it's a funnel, like a funnel. Using a game, you go from a big audience to a small audience and you get them to do something. There's also a lot of ways that you can go about this and a toxic bro marketing sense, if you will, and also unintentional, but the main idea is to sort of gather your people and move them along with different touch points, to get them to purchase, to get them to be in a community.
And then a conversion is a metric that converts your customer from doing something to doing something else. Conversion can be a purchase. Conversion could be like an add to cart conversion could be. Sign up for the newsletter. A conversion could even be like click from your stories to watch your reel. These are like key metrics, key acts that your customer does.
And you could have a goal about helping your customer do the thing. But I'm going to talk about the main ones that I think are important conversions and that's a purchase and email signup you want to think about. If we're just sticking to Instagram today, which I think for all intentions, we're going to stick with any chat is not, I believe, on any other app yet.
I'm not sure about that. let's follow up on that. But right now manychat is, to my knowledge, just for Instagram. It doesn't work on Facebook, even they don't have it set up for TikTok yet. And you wouldn't need it on Pinterest because things are clickable and YouTube wouldn't make sense either ways anyways. Instagram, which I know most of our audience is on and that is our audience as well.
We serve mostly Instagram folks right now utilizing manychat again, you can sign up for it and I will take you through the steps of like how to set it up and why that works. But I want to talk a little bit about the marketing structure of a funnel also, and how you can create different pieces of content to help guide your customer to that conversion event.
Okay. And manychat is sort of like that last touchpoint. You want to create content that is top of funnel. And I think a lot of people, a lot of the community, a lot of you listeners might just be like, I'm posting to Instagram and I'm trying to get people to buy without necessarily thinking about the strategy, about when a customer is ready to buy.
When a customer comes into your space, they don't immediately buy often. Actually, I bought candles the other day and like went through that conversion so fast I like saw myself doing. I saw the candles. I were like, these are great, I need candles right now. And I like went to their Instagram, followed them and immediately purchased these candles.
I forget the name. I'm searching for them. They're like very close to me. Hold please. Because I might as well give them a shout out. Okay, they're called row in ROI and I'm holding them up if you're watching on video. But they were so cute and colorful and they sounded like they smell delicious. Yes. So I just went ahead and purchased.
But that's rare. That is a rare thing. Typically, even with products and services you want to in this like intentional economy, unless you're shopping at like target, Walmart, all of these things, a lot of folks want to get to know you before they purchase. They want to know about your vibe. They want to know about your ethos. They want to know about the materials you're using, all these sort of things to have them in your community and to convince them to convert, to buy something. Thinking about the different stages of the customer journey, if they're ready to buy, if they're just meeting you, if they are in the dream stage, you want to create different types of content for all of these stages. Top of funnel content is when people don't know you at all, and then they see your content and hopefully they would follow your content.
That is top of funnel for us, and for a lot of you listeners, probably is something that is funny or emotional. Our memes are really good at top of funnel content, and those are often shareable, and that sort of exponentially brings more eyes to the content. I find that, yeah, the most impactful top of funnel content is funny or has emotions attached to it.
That's top of funnel, right? Someone doesn't know about you, and then they see you, and then they know about you whether or not they follow you. That's sort of besides the point. Ideally, they follow you. Maybe you need a couple of those touchpoints for those people to see your work before they even follow you. So top content that is top of funnel, thinking about what gets people to stop. And there scroll to follow you. And of course are making sure that our page, our Instagram page, our Instagram account is looking really good in your bio section so people can, when they go to your page, if they see your piece of content, they know what you're doing and they want to follow you. That's a little bit besides the point right now.
But it's important making sure that when people see your first piece of content, that they immediately are interested in what you're doing because you explained it well, what you are doing on your profile page, okay. And then people, so they followed you. They're starting to get to know you. You want to make sure that you have content that gets people to hang around, gets people to engage with you, gets people to tell other people about you.
And this is called nurturing content. A lot of people have other different words for it. I'm going to call it nurturing content. And this can be like a ton of content in the middle behind the scenes. This could be educational. This could be entertaining, but sometimes that entertainment goes to top of funnel kind of thing. Also, what's your ethos?
How did you get started? A lot of these sort of I'm going to call it more meaty pieces of content that aren't maybe necessarily relatable to the general population. So you are serving the people who have already followed you for the most part. Maybe some of these things are going to double as top of funnel, but mostly these types of content are pieces of content that someone already knows you at least a little bit.
Okay. And then we have the conversion content. And this is the content bottom of funnel we call it that gets people to convert these two conversion touchpoints that I'm talking about today are the go to the website and order or email list. A lot of the times I I'll do two of those separately, for example. So let's say you're in a launch, right?
And you have a new product. So it could just be like new product launches. Open some variety of that piece of content that is going to serve the bottom of the funnel. Yes. Maybe it's going to also be part of the middle funnel. Yes. It's going to maybe sort of also be by the top of the funnel, but most likely that's going to be bottom of the funnel.
People who have already gotten to know you, they've already been nurtured by you and they are ready to buy. You are describing the product, describing maybe what it does, how it can make your life better. And this goes for services and products as well. Again, how are you getting people from Instagram onto your website to buy? Maybe you have also some call to action, right? Which is where manychat comes in that you're literally saying go to the website or again comment below and we'll send you the link to the DM. I'll send you a link in your DMs to buy and we'll get back to that in a second. The other conversion part that we're talking about is email marketing, right? So maybe this is again, sign up for our newsletter for 20% off.
And then what? We have a lot. We're doing a lot of pushing our e-book, which is our free crosshair e-book. If you don't have it, you can grab it. Croghan Craft com slash e-book. And that is our nine page guide to help you have the best damn craft fair that you can have. So we talk about like in that book, we have a craft fair checklist.
We have tips and tricks about layout and storage, organization, what else we have in there as well, like tips for like how to be present at your booth, things like that. So that's a really good if you're if you're new to the craft fair scene or even if you're not new to the coffee scene, that could be a really good free guide for you.
My content could be like that, right? It could just be talking about the Craft Fair e-book and again, getting people to sign up for your news list. I have other podcast episodes about how to get people on your news list, how to create something of value to get people's email in exchange. We also have a class for that.
So we do have an email marketing class that's on our classes. Gargan craft.com/classes okay, so back to that CTA the call to action. You're getting people to move. You're physically getting them to get off Instagram and on to your email list or your website. Right. These are the two conversion actions that I'm talking about today. In the olden days, maybe just a few months ago, we were saying link in bio, link in bio.
Make sure to click on the link in bio to sign up for our newsletter or to get to the website. Right. Problems with that link in bio? That's great. We want to make sure that we're keeping our link in bio. Good to go, but saying link in bio is fine, but the money type system is way better. Let's say you're like okay, LinkedIn bio.
Someone finally like it's like, oh, okay, fine, maybe I'll click in it. If they don't click on it immediately, what is the likelihood that they're going to go back to your link in bio another time? It's just more space for chance. Now the let me DM you my link which is automatic via money chat. That link is going to be in their inbox, so even if they want to come back later, they can check their DMs and that link is going to be right there.
And that's just like the basic act of manychat. Manychat does automations via third party and Instagram. You can create keywords comment below. E-book. That's a keyword that you create in manychat and it automatically sends you whatever you like. Program any chat to send, which maybe we have a sentence and then our link. That's a basic thing of any chat.
You can take it deeper and then have an automation that happens after that. And you can create like a full automation sequence. In the DM someone was talking about, like creating a whole quiz. And in the DM, I will get back to you about their name, but they do a whole sequence about getting people to decide on like what program is right for them.
So you could do this with multiple classes. You could do this with even a scent profile. So let's say you do candles. You could have have that all automated about what scents people like or something. Or if I'm like what they're allergic to, I don't know. You could have the automation be pretty sophisticated. And again, you connect it to links and there's other things you can do to like build your email list directly from manychat.
I'm still sort of exploring the full extensive ecosphere that manychat is, but for all of you starting out a basic man chat that is super accessible is. Comment below blank and we'll send you a link to blank. Okay. And that shows up in the DM automatically and gets your customer to do it. And not only that is it create engagement on your post so you can sort of see how many people.
Obviously you can see how many people have done that CTA because it's in their inbox, but you can also that create engagement in the comments, which is kind of wild. And you can even automate manychat to give a response. So if you've done that to me, comment below, e-book or comment below. Like to get our podcast episode.
That's another form of conversion rate to get listeners. You can program it to automatically say, great, we're sending you this to your DM or fabulous, we've got you covered. Whatever. You can automate all that. So it's pretty extensive and pretty amazing. And again, I'm still diving into the full gamut of what manychat can be, and I'm sure that they're going to grow and change as well.
As we all grow and change and all the tech grows and change. But I really do recommend manychat. There's so many ways that you can use it for product or service based businesses. DM the new candles. We're really on a candle a candle space today, but like comment below earrings to get my new earring launch. Whatever I've been seeing a lot of influencers use it to even pulled in with like to know it or Amazon Shop or like these other link spaces to send that link directly, and that's going to help their affiliate conversions as well.
Tons of ways for you to use manychat. If you're checking it out, please use our link. Yes, we do get a little kickback if you sign up with us. So Bitly again, I'll cap manychat and I'll go ahead and put all that info in our episode notes, and I will continue to share about my chat for the next little bit.
If you're listening to this, when it comes out, we're probably talking about money chat for the next couple weeks. We talked about flodesk. Asked last week if you need an email marketing which has been tied in with this conversation. We love flodesk. I've got 50% off for you. I think that code is bit.ly/ggcflodesk We'll put that in our show notes. And what other tech are we talking about after this? I don't remember, but stick along for the journey and if you like this episode, please share it with a friend. If you think someone else can rock. Manychat and it's a good use for their business, send that link along. Send those folks. There's podcast episode and if you have any questions around funnels or money, chat or email marketing or anything at all, you can just call us up at that phone number again and it is (413) 961-0855. Okay. Thank you for listening, and please consider leaving a review and sending to your friends. Til next time. Bye!.

OUTRO
Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for shownotes and more. See you next time.