How to start webinar funnels in messengers, warm up customers, and reach a 35 % conversion? Read on to learn how messenger marketing specialists from the Townsend digital agency manage to regularly attract potential students to webinars and collect applications for studying at the online university.
Contents
About the Company
Townsend is a marketing agency that helps business set up work with customers in messengers and CRMs, i.e., increase the number of requests and sales, collect customers into a single database, and automate sales.
Tasks and Purposes
The MAED marketing academy made a request to Townsend. Task: set up an automatic funnel in Telegram and VK to attract customers to marketing courses.
Activities
Townsend specialists set up funnels and mass messaging based on chatbot builder in Chat2Desk. This scenario is like email funnels, but in messengers. The work consisted of seven stages, described below.
1. Customers were brought to messengers
At the first stage, you need to bring as many users to messengers as possible. It allows you to work with them in there.
Townsend specialists mapped all possible traffic sources:
- after registration for a webinar from the “Thank you” page;
- from the blog;
- from platforms in social networks;
- from targeted advertising;
- landings of specific courses;
- from emails.
Townsend used different lead magnets for each category of users.
- Educational and entertaining content, such as quizes, tests, and webinars, was used for cold customers. Here it is important to show your expertise and not bring customers to sales at once.
- Warm customers received information about the product and offers for free lessons.
- Hot customers are ready for buying, so direct offers were sent to them.
As soon as a potential customer goes to a messenger and subscribes, a lead magnet is sent to them. Then the system tags the customer and starts a sales funnel.
2. Customers were welcomed
People are more willing to communicate with each other than impersonal bots. So, Townsend made such a chatbot that greeted customers on behalf of Andrey Gavrikov, the founder and a teacher of the school.
After the greeting, a messenger quiz was offered to users. It helped assess the level of marketing knowledge and provided a brief description of the course program.
Then Townsend subdivided the audience into segments depending on the source advertisement, the sphere of work, and the funnel part. Each segment was duly tagged in Chat2Desk, and segment-specific funnels were started.
3. Integration with amoCRM was set up
Chat2Desk has a ready-made integration with amoCRM. Townsend set up data transfer as follows:
- As soon as a user texted to a chat, a request was created in amoCRM. Their name, phone number, email address, and transaction type were pulled up.
- The data in amoCRM and Chat2Desk were synchronized, making it possible to use a single customer card.
- Users were tagged to enable audience segmentation.
The phone number should be entered manually in Telegram and VK. In order to avoid mistakes, an additional check was introduced: if the phone number was wrong, a chatbot requested the user to correct it.
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Checking the phone number in VK and Telegram
4. Hot customers were warmed up additionally
In order to prevent customers from cooling and leaving for competitors, Townsend introduced an additional warm-up. Soon after applying, users received message chains. They provided information on the course program as well as its advantages and capabilities. Then a company manager contacted the customer.
5. Cold customers were warmed up
It is the hot audience that applies most. But you need to work with other customer categories as well.
Those who did not apply right away were offered to select one course lesson for free. So, the customers could get a closer look at the materials and understand what to expect from the studying.
Each customer was tagged to indicate that the user had already selected a lesson. Thus, a restriction was set up — one trial lesson per user.
6. Content series were prepared to convince customers
If persuasion, free courses, or offers give no results, you should not give up on the customer. Probably, they are not ready to buy right now. But you almost always have a chance to convince them.
For that, Townsend prepared 10 content series — cases, quizes, and tests.
The resulting general funnel structure was as follows.
All stages of working with customers via a messenger
7. A webinar funnel was built
Webinar funnels were being developed in parallel with the main series. They were intended for attraction to live marketing webinars instead of course sales.
Their structure looked like this.
Webinar funnel structure
1. The registration for the webinar was arranged via a chatbot using invitation messaging. The messaging showed the best results several days and hours before the webinar. In the first message, a customer received a successful registration notification and a lead magnet.
2. It was followed by segmentation. Some questions were asked to understand person’s experience in marketing.
3. A quiz was offered to those who answered the questions to engage the audience and learn its knowledge level. It was shorter than the previous one by five questions. After the test, the person received webinar details and conditions.
4. Reminders were sent to the users on the day of the event.
5. After the webinar, the customers were asked to leave comments in brief form, by clicking on the button, or by writing a detailed answer — it all helped receive feedback and improve the quality. Users’ answers in the chatbot were saved and automatically transferred to the manager’s email. The feedback made it possible to obtain a lot of useful information on the webinar itself and understand the target audience better. At the very end, the users were brought to the main funnel, where they could learn more about the main course.
Townsend specialists used variables when creating the webinar funnel. Thus, they received a template that could be used for other activities. It was enough to change names and dates, so all other data would change and reminders would adjust.
Analytics and Results
In order to carry out a detailed analysis, Townsend recorded, counted, and analyzed all data they possibly could obtain:
- subscription sources;
- funnel start links and tags;
- number of impressions, clicks, and registrations;
- applications and their status;
- conversion of each channel and lead magnet.
Some interesting conclusions were made:
1. Telegram had a larger interested audience than VK.
2. The “Thank you” page on the MaEd website, where the person found themselves in case of registering via the landing, showed good results. People willingly went to messengers and reacted to content.
3. The function of automatic funnel start when clicking on the messenger button proved useful — a funnel-starting code was integrated into the link to the messenger itself. It narrowed the funnel and increased the conversion.
4. Users subscribed via the chatbot wait for text communication more.
The average completion rate of all channels was 35.9 %. The graphs below show specific data on the conversion of each channel where funnels were launched.
Here is a conversion example for one of the targeting content funnels:
| Date | Visits | Applications | Conversion, % | Unsubscribed |
| December 17, 2021 | 136 | 7 | 5,15 | 1 |
| December 24, 2021 | 230 | 8 | 3,48 | 3 |
| December 28, 2021 | 276 | 12 | 4,35 | 3 |
| January 11, 2022 | 388 | 18 | 4,64 | 5 |
| January 14, 2022 | 415 | 20 | 4,82 | 5 |
| January 24, 2022 | 514 | 25 | 4,86 | 5 |
| January 29, 2022 | 578 | 27 | 4,67 | 6 |
| February 4, 2022 | 630 | 29 | 4,60 | 7 |
| February 11, 2022 | 747 | 35 | 4,69 | 9 |
| February 18, 2022 | 832 | 43 | 5,17 | 13 |
| February 25, 2022 | 888 | 44 | 4,95 | 14 |
| April 4, 2022 | 1036 | 50 | 4,83 | 19 |
| April 27, 2022 | 1092 | 57 | 5,22 | 24 |
| May 5, 2022 | 1128 | 57 | 5,05 | 25 |
An example of webinar conversion in February:
Messaging about the webinar through the Telegram base. The conversion is 35.4 %
Registrations and conversions in the Telegram channel. The conversion is 37.6 %
Registrations and conversions via the Telegram bot. The conversion is 28.40 %
Messaging about the webinar through the VK base. The conversion is 30.1 %
Registrations and conversions from the VK public. The conversion is 52.9 %
Registrations and conversions via the VK bot. The conversion is 31.01 %
During 2021 the chatbot gave the customer 809 direct applications immediately from messengers and has been stably working for attracting audience with a long transaction cycle, gradually warming it up and encouraging it to decide to start studying.
Thus, Townsend works with the audience using a developed messenger funnel throughout the entire life cycle from the subscription to repeat sales.
Tell us what challenges you would like to address with Chat2Desk — text us in messengers via the widget in the screen corner, so we will show you where to start and find an optimum solution for your business.
