The Next Big Thing for Chat Marketing feat. Mike Yan of ManyChat

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. And if you would like to become one or find out more, go to All systems go podcast.com, and you can find out not just how to become an automation service provider but a you’ll get access to a ton of resources as well. If you’re new to the podcast, make sure that you subscribe and share especially after you listen to this episode in its entirety at the time of recording this, the All systems go podcast is free to subscribe to. Okay, you can find the show in our main pot. All main podcasting apps like Apple podcast, Google podcasts, you can subscribe on YouTube, do me a favor while you’re at it, leave a five star rating and review it will be greatly appreciated. If for whatever reason, you are having a problem finding out where to leave a review. You can go to automation bridge.com/review, and we can take care of it for you. Okay, in this episode, I get to speak with Mike and the co founder of mini chat. And as the co founder and CEO of manychat. It’s his goal to disrupt the $5 billion plus email marketing industry by bringing the convenience of messenger apps to business to customer communications. And he’s well on his way to manychat is trusted with over 1 million businesses worldwide. And they source them with the ability to have one on one dialogue on a variety of social channels. You will hear Mike’s excitement and enthusiasm about chat marketing. And what recently dropped to the point where I am going to be moving, adjusting my publication schedule, so that this episode goes out early. So you all can take advantage of the next big thing in chat marketing. Mike is here to talk about it co founders manychat. Enjoy. Mike, welcome to the podcast. I’m glad to have you on man. How are you doing?

Mike Yan 2:50
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Chris Davis 2:53
Yes, yes. So this is I got probably just a drop from the cup of value that you’re about to give us today. By you announcing one one update that we really think is going to change the landscape of how people use social media and in close leads and everything else. And the timing of this podcast, the timing of this recording is spot on because it was just announced. So just enough of a teaser to get people to wonder, What is he talking about? So

Chris Davis 3:27
while we go there, Mike, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and your business. For sure.

Mike Yan 3:34
My name is Mike Yan, I’m the CEO and co founder of manychat and we are the number one chat marketing platform in the world. We help businesses automate conversations across messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and now Instagram dm automation and WhatsApp.

Mike Yan 3:52
But also other channels like email and SMS.

Chris Davis 3:56
Yes, and that’s big. I just want to I want to list it off. You said facebook, facebook is pretty standard. I think people may have engaged with the Facebook Messenger bot by now. Instagram automated dmws. That’s new. We’ll talk about that later. And WhatsApp and WhatsApp. I feel like I’m glad you mentioned it because it when you go outside, you know I’m us base but when you go outside the US the conversations and how people communicate are vastly different. And what’s at B begins to be one of those applications that you see cross country not cross state in the US but cross country. us more widely. So tell us a little bit about what drove you to the decision to start a software company? Is this something you always wanted to do when you were younger? Did you just always love marketing and messaging? Like what?

Chris Davis 4:52
What was the ingredients there?

Mike Yan 4:54
Yeah, we’ve been doing software startups since I was probably nine

Mike Yan 5:01
So it’s been a while. And

Mike Yan 5:04
I think that the inspiration came from my father, who was an entrepreneur,

Mike Yan 5:11
his whole life since he was just students. And since I wasn’t even like I was, either I was just born or somewhere around that. So he was always an inspiration to me. And

Mike Yan 5:26
yeah, as soon as I had a few jobs when I was in the the university, just doing waiting tables, just doing deliveries. But then as soon as I had an idea, we started to go the entrepreneurial route. And that’s how it all started. We had a few ecommerce, but like, we had an e commerce business we had.

Mike Yan 5:51
We had a few like consumer tech startups. And then in 2015, we started making shots.

Chris Davis 5:58
Nice, nice. So I would imagine you took some learnings from e commerce and marketing there. And then on some of the consumer products, like you kind of pieced it together. And was this more so a hole in the market that you found are more so something that you just wanted to do?

Mike Yan 6:18
Yeah, that’s a great question. It was definitely kind of like that hole in the market, I would say even, it was technology first, which is a lot of people love to talk about like, like, find the problem, like fall in love with a problem, though with a solution, right. And then if your solution is not good, then like, if the problem is there, you’ll find another solution that will solve it.

Mike Yan 6:47
For us, it was different. So I want to paint a picture where like it, the business could be opportunistic. The business could be you see something and you see, oh, this could be a great thing. And then it starts to piece itself together. So for us it was telegram, which is also a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. telegram has been getting a lot of traction internationally recently, they had only 65 million monthly active users, when when we started on the platform, right now it’s over half a billion. So they grew almost 10x in the span of six years. But at that point, they were one of the first messaging apps to open up their API so that developers like ourselves could create platforms, and enable businesses create products for businesses using that messaging channel. So that’s how we got started, we saw an opportunity where we thought, hey, there’s 65 million people using this messaging app.

Mike Yan 7:52
People businesses will want to do broadcast businesses will want to build lists on this messaging app. So we build a platform to do that, really, in a very simple way without doing a lot of a lot of like any coding, like it’s just was really visual completely text based platform.

Mike Yan 8:14
And before that, the only way that you could do broadcasts on telegram would be if you like, would rent servers and like hired developer, so it’s really, really hard. So imagine a world before MailChimp. Before any email marketing platform, the way you would do email marketing, would be like to set up an email server to set up a database of emails, and to like, basically code MailChimp yourself, right? So we were the MailChimp of messenger marketing, basically, helping businesses just do what they can themselves, which is gather a list of messenger subscribers, and to broadcast to sequences, do everything that you would able to do using the classical channels, but on any new channels where the customer attention actually is. And that’s how we got started on telegram nine months in. Actually, Facebook Messenger opened up and we were three people at that point. So it was really, it was it was really hard decision for us to switch over from telegram to Facebook Messenger because with just three people, we couldn’t support two platforms. We didn’t have enough power just in terms of people on the team to support two platforms and on telegram. We got a lot of traction already. So we are growing on telegram on messenger it’s a much bigger market, but we have to start from zero. So it’s a completely different environment. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to grow or not. So after a few weeks, like after a week or two of discussion, we’re like okay, we got a we got to make this leap of faith because it’s such a bigger market, if you want to build an international company, we got to go big. And we basically started from zero on Facebook Messenger, we weren’t able to transition. And you know, for telegram customers, because it was like it’s just geographically is different. So people in telegram are not like, overlapping with people who are using Facebook Messenger. But we were fortunate enough to like take all the learnings from telegram and to really understand what has to be built for messenger. And instead of building a chatbot platform, we were building a messenger marketing platform. So we were helping businesses achieve business results. And I think that’s what separated us from a lot of the competition who were building like something that sounded great on paper, and was really like buzz, like buzz wordy, but wasn’t really what people needed, and what businesses needed. And I think that was the key to our success on Facebook Messenger. And now, five years later, like Facebook Messenger launched in 2016. So now five years later,

Mike Yan 11:10
we just see so much opportunity for Instagram, Facebook Messenger is a great platform. But Instagram is going to be bigger. Because there the number of businesses who are using Instagram is bigger. And the fact that you already have such a huge organic reach on Instagram, allows you to re engage people, and allows you to create that attention and that engagement on the platform. But the thing that people are struggling with is conversion. So you have followers, you have likes you have comments, but you actually drive sales with your Instagram do you actually drive bookings do actually get leads? I think people are already like, definitely, they’re already doing it. But what we’re seeing is that you can do that 10 times better with dm automation with automating your direct messages. And that’s what we’re really excited to bring to the table. This is just like for everybody who is listening. This is something that’s just been released just a few months, like just on June 2, so basically, literally two months ago. And this is the most

Mike Yan 12:25
cutting edge technology for Instagram that you can find. And in the one year, Remember my words, in in one or two years, every business account is going to be doing dm automation, this is going to be just table stakes, this is going to be something that is a no brainer. Like having a bio relating, like having a link to to to capture people, etc. This is what dm automation is going to be because of how powerful it is. Just to give you a few numbers. For example, what you could do with dm automation, Instagram is you could post a story, let’s say and say hey, we got this new product coming out. DM us

Mike Yan 13:07
Let’s say the name of the product is going to be a

Mike Yan 13:12
I don’t know, let’s do let’s do an E book. Right? Like we got an E book coming out DMS ebook to get

Mike Yan 13:21
50% off, let’s say like it’s a special deal only for the it subscribers, right? People who dm your ebook, right? What you’re going to do, you’re not going to deliver them the ebook itself, you’re going to say, Hey, where should we send the 50%? off coupon to what’s your email? Yes. So you’re capturing emails automatically in your DMS instantly. And you know what the conversion rate to like them giving out their email after they’ve sent you the initial keyword

Mike Yan 13:52
was it’s 50 to 80% 50 to 80% conversion from social. Wow. Yes. And that’s because it’s native. And that’s because it’s native. And it’s it creates, first of all, the fabulous native it’s it can be like people don’t really get like how important that is. People are familiar with the interface. There is zero load time. So it’s not a website that’s like takes a second or two to load, which is really important in mobile. attention spans on mobile are less than a second. Like it’s if it’s not instant, it’s gone. Because people got a notification got a call got a message they’re already out. So the thing that it’s familiar interface is zero load times zero latency. It’s instant. And the fact that it’s a trusted channel so you’re not somewhere in the open giving out their email. You’re actually conversing directly with Chris or directly with the business in a private closed environment that nobody can see. Right

Mike Yan 15:00
DMs are not accessible by anybody other than the two parties who are there. So it feels much safer, and

Mike Yan 15:09
much more intimate to give out here. And that’s why we were seeing, like, the the conversion rates are just out of this world. And this is why I’m saying like, this is what’s gonna happen like the next 12 to 24 months, every business account who’s actually utilizing Instagram, seriously, and a series about the business and growing that and using the channel is going to be using the automation. So your is the thing that everybody should keep, like, I’m sorry for talking through this, but like, I’m just gonna keep going, keep going.

Mike Yan 15:40
So this is the thing, if you want to get the highest conversion rates, you got to start right now, because as with any channel, as with any marketing tactic, call it a tactical strategy doesn’t matter. Anything that’s new, will have the highest conversion rates, the first year it’s out, right, once it starts to get adopted by everybody else, conversion rates start to drop. Now, this is this is not to say that this is going to go away. And I think that’s it’s the same thing as with websites that with email marketing, instead of looking at email marketing, every year, open rates going down, CTR, click through rates are going down. Are we like dropping email marketing? Are we thinking Oh, we got to stop doing like no, because it’s it works. Because no matter how low those conversion rates are, they’re basically free, right? And like, there is nothing like doing an email broadcast is nothing compared to spending $1 $2 on a click on Facebook. So this is the same thing with dm automation, if you want to be in the lens of 80%, open rates, you got to start right now and capture all of the best conversion rates, because this is what’s going to happen in one year, you’re going to hear about this 20 more times from other influencers not from like the CEO of the company, but you’re gonna like hear about this from everybody else we are working with and we’re working with like basically, the the major Instagram marketing influencers everybody else, coral, there’s already 1000s of people who are using this, but compared to 10s of millions of businesses on Instagram, that’s basically nothing. So nobody’s basically using this, but we already have the benefit of of seeing 1000s of people who are already using this. And what’s what’s going to happen is that you’re going to hear about this 20 more times, after a year of hearing about this, you’re going to become convinced that this is something that you should do. And but the year will have already passed. And you’re going to be getting on with the early majority, not with the innovators and the early adopters. So this doesn’t take this doesn’t take like like a long time to set up or anything. This literally like if you want to do like the basic keyword automation, or the basic conversation starters, which is basically allows you to help people start a conversation with you without having to type like, you know, when you like go to profile click message. Yes, it does do that.

Chris Davis 18:21
Hold on, Mike, let’s do that. Because I don’t want to I don’t want to get too far ahead with with the audience.

Chris Davis 18:28
And you’re about to so are you. I told you, everybody I told

Chris Davis 18:34
told you what Mike was gonna bring. So let me say this. All right. First off, I need to hats off. And congratulations with your early success with telegram, right? To be able to use that platform and and establish success and be able to leverage that quickly and more. I’ll say, leverage it more effectively for Facebook, and build on that. I feel like everything that you’ve done has just been one step to get you closer and closer to this moment with this big innovation for you guys to be leading the charge, right. So there’s a group of people who are listening to this end have not, maybe they’ve engaged with a messenger, or maybe and they knew what it was and maybe they didn’t they’re like, wait a minute, somebody wasn’t typing. Wasn’t typing that to me. Just break it down in layman’s terms, what messenger marketing is when you guys started with Facebook, and now what it’s going to evolve to as we migrate over into Instagram. That’s a great question.

Mike Yan 19:39
Basically, and we used to call it messenger marketing when we were just in Facebook Messenger.

Mike Yan 19:46
In 2019, we switched to chat marketing, because it was obvious that this is going to be a multi channel approach and the Flow Builder that that allows you to this is going to be applicable to any messaging app.

Mike Yan 20:00
So I’m going to talk about chat marketing, if you

Mike Yan 20:04
if you’re good with chit chat marketing is is the discipline of using chat as a two way communication, to do marketing, sales and service. And we focus on chat marketing, because that’s the number one use case that people usually come to us for. Because that’s the thing that gets your top line growing. Like you’re not trying to cut costs, usually people are trying to grow sales. And so so in layman’s terms, the way it works is that

Mike Yan 20:39
on Facebook Messenger, you’re you have a Facebook page, a business page, right, and it can have conversations. So it has it can actually converse with with with your customers. So when somebody messages you, it can automatically reply to them and, for example, capture their order information, or it can capture their email information. So it can ask them questions. And it can, for example, qualify the lead, right? If you run a marketing agency, you can ask them, What marketing budget do you have? How long have you been in business, and you’re asking these questions, just to make sure that it’s a good fit for your business. So you’re not spending time with clients who are not going to be a good fit. And maybe you can,

Mike Yan 21:23
I don’t know, send them to your blog post, maybe to YouTube video, maybe to some materials. But if it’s a good fit, then you can get an instant notification that hey, there is a really hot lead on the line and they fit perfectly the business, you got to talk to them, and you could capture their phone number and get on the phone with them instantly. And in our day and age of like mobile interactions. Everything has to be instant, if like the leads grow cold, not over a matter of like weeks or days they grow cold over matter minutes, right? If you’re not there to serve the customer right away and answer their questions that customers probably going to change their mind, find somebody else like it’s everything has to be really, really fast these days. And this is what chat is about. It’s about how to create those instant, private, personal and converting connections. And I’ll tell you this, real quick. Let me let me interject real quick for sure. Tell me this. When you have your check your check your chatbot going and you’ve collected their first name, their email and their phone number. Where do you store that information? Are you able to sync it with the CRM is it in a spreadsheet, like what what happens with the contusion after you capture it? You can do anything with that. Like you could save it then many shots. We have direct integrations with Google Sheets, you can go you can send it to spreadsheet, we have direct integrations with like CRM, like HubSpot, CRM,

Mike Yan 22:58
or Zapier, you can send it through Zapier to anywhere, basically. So there is

Mike Yan 23:06
if you have something set up already, you can use that and just send over use many chat as a data capture tool as a lead capture tool and then send it over to your system. Or you could use main chat, some people use mini chat for this also, because we do have what’s called custom fields. So you can save all the information about the customer, right inside main chat and then use it to call people or to message people, etc.

Chris Davis 23:33
Love it, man. It’s like a social CRM. Yeah, exactly. No, one of the way one of the ways to talk about it, not a lot of people like to be honest, like if we’re talking about like, the smaller businesses like Not a lot of people know about what the CRM is. People know about, like, I got an email lists I got, I got a customer list.

Mike Yan 23:52
CRM, like comes from Salesforce and from like the bigger enterprise clients, but now I feel like it’s getting more and more acceptance, which is great, because that’s exactly the thing that we were doing. Y

Chris Davis 24:03
eah. And I’ve also seen, and you tell me, if you’ve seen the usage of manychat, expand, but now that Facebook has kind of changed their algorithms, so many times over, people aren’t engaging with page, business pages as much. But now you’ve got a lot of people creating Facebook groups, and then they’ll do a training in the group and say, Hey, if you want this, this trainer, you want access to this resource? Comment below, and then that comment triggers messenger bot to say, hey, you said you wanted this, here it is. And then it says, Where Where can we send this? Is that something that you guys are seeing more and more of being effective in terms of Facebook group usage in manychat. Yet the thing with Facebook groups is that you cannot really automate comments to the group posts because the way that Facebook works is that it has to be the automation has to be attached to a Facebook page. So

Mike Yan 25:00
The group itself like it’s, it’s,

Mike Yan 25:03
if you’ve seen that that’s probably somebody hacking the API’s. Because that’s not available through through the through the official API’s. But you could do that you could use the group to send people over to a Facebook page with, like, you could you could, for example, share and share at Facebook pages posts inside the group. And if they comment on the Facebook pages post, yes, you could automate those replies to the group.

Mike Yan 25:30
Facebook, I would say, like, Listen, if I’m being honest, the most important social network right now is Instagram. And I’m not saying that because

Mike Yan 25:44
of the user numbers, because Facebook is bigger in terms of number of users.

Mike Yan 25:49
I’m saying that because of the ad spend,

Mike Yan 25:53
the ad spend on Instagram is right now, if you think about like Facebook as a company that owns Facebook, and WhatsApp and Instagram, etc. If you think about the revenue split, and the specifically ad revenue split, Instagram is responsible for 36% of Facebook’s total ad revenue. Wow. Yep. And that’s, that’s a big chunk, because of just how recently Instagram was acquired by Facebook. I mean, that was, that was a what, five years ago? I think, maybe maybe more? Probably, probably more is fine, man. So probably more, but either way to take 36%

Chris Davis 26:36
that’s a huge chunk. Man. It’s a third. You know, that’s it’s a huge portion. And what thing Oh, I think like people don’t know this number.

Chris Davis 26:46
But I think what the, the, the key part is that not only is it already 36%, the rate at which it is growing. So right now, let me tell you this, right now Instagram has grown 50%. year over year. So next year, it’s going to go from it’s going to go to probably 45 billion. So right now, Instagram is 36% of ad like Facebook. So revenue. In terms of dollars, it’s 30 billion. So three zero. revenue a year is going to go probably to 40 to 45. This year in 2021. Yeah, Facebook proper is, is growing much slower. And if you think about, like the overall Facebook growth as a company, Facebook earned in 2019 70 billion, totally, including Instagram. So Facebook as a company earned 70 billion in 2023 84 billion. So that’s 20% growth year over year. And I’m doing this math, like it’s gonna be hard to do this over audio, but bear with me. So Facebook added 14 billion from 17 to 84 billion, it added 14 billion in incremental revenue. Does it make sense? So in 2020, Facebook, increased your revenue, additionally, earned 14,000,000,010 out of that 14 came from Instagram.

Chris Davis 28:33
Hmm, so Instagram, iit’s here to stay.

Mike Yan 28:37
Instagram is responsible for 70% 70% of Facebook’s growth right now. Yeah, just just think about that. 70%. It’s driving the company forward. It’s the main engine that’s driving phase before with right now. Now, this is the kicker by 2023.

Mike Yan 29:01
Instagram is going to be responsible, but for over half of Facebook sole revenue. True. Sure. So right now it’s 36%. It’s going to go over 250 or over 50% by 2023. That’s just two years, just two years. And Instagram is going to be the major source of ad revenue for Facebook. And for people for like, Oh, this is projections. We don’t know what’s going to happen in two years, etc. It already happened in the US. I’m talking about globally. Right now, in the US. Instagram is already making more money for Facebook, that Facebook proper. It’s already over 50% less. So that’s already happened.

Chris Davis 29:48
Mike, I cannot count how many people that I’ve talked to in the last month I’ll say. In fact, I talked to a associate just the other day and they told me

Chris Davis 30:00
Look, we do all our sales through dm on Instagram, with no set no calls. And this is not like 50 $100 products like Mike, these are five figure products being sold on Instagram. And this is manual messaging. So what’s your what’s your introducing now? Is this dm automation? Is this available to everybody? How does somebody get their hands on it? Just if you sign up for mini chat, and it’s there, like, Is there an exclusive waitlist? Do you have to have a certain amount of followers? Like, what’s the process? That’s, that’s a great question. So right now, it’s available to anybody with either from 1000 followers, 100,000 followers. And that’s not our limitation, that’s a limitation that is coming from Instagram itself. So they’re doing a phased rollout. But since you already told me that this is going to air in a few weeks, I must correct this. If you’re listening to this in the recording,

Mike Yan 31:04
then it’s already available to everybody. Because the somewhere in the first half of August, they’re doing phase three. And phase three is when it’s rolled out to everybody. So by the time you hear this, anybody, literally no matter how many followers you have, you can just go to manychat.com. Sign up, and you’ll be able to automate your DMS. And we have we do have we do have a gallery of templates? Like we Yeah, that’s what I was gonna ask. Yeah, how easy is it to get started? Mike. Now look, I know from experience, you guys have a visual builder, which speaks my language, I can see arrows and you know, from each message, and I can see the pathing. So for somebody who is great at Instagram, they’ve been seeing their following grow. This has perhaps been the missing piece, Mike. And they’re like, I’m so glad I heard this podcast, I’m going to mini chat. Now, you already know there’s that initial overwhelm. Whenever somebody logs into new software, you guys have templates, what else is there waiting for them to help take advantage of the DM automation. That’s exactly what we’ve been working on this summer, is how to make it easy for people to get started. And basically what what will happen is that you’ll go through the onboarding process, and then you’ll be able to select which campaign you want to start with. And we already have

Mike Yan 32:34
a lot of campaigns there, how to capture emails, how to qualify leads, how to do conversation starters, basic keyword, automation, anything that you would want to get started with, like it’s already there, you just you just

Mike Yan 32:51
basically set up the template, change the content to suit your voice. And it’s very visual, like there’s, as you’ve mentioned, zero coding required, you don’t need to like coding anything. It’s like basically, if you can post on Instagram, you’ll be able to like use use, use many chats, it’s very visual, like if I send this message, add this button, like if person presses this button, then send this message, it’s very visual, just drag and drop, what you see is what you get type of thing.

Chris Davis 33:22
Yeah, and I’ll say this, if people are not putting together the importance of this chat, just chat marketing period, when you bring that into social media, there’s a lot of anonymous activity, a lot of anonymous interest that’s happening on your page, you don’t see all your pageviews, but you see your likes, that’s a fraction of the people actually seeing your stuff. So now, when you have these tools that allow you to capture on the attention that you’re grabbing, it goes from unknown, anonymous, to known and reachable, right, like I now know, is that because I said, Hey, we’re running this special, if you want to get a discount, just type in special. Exactly. And we’ll send you know, they type in special. And then the DM automation takes over says, Oh, great. You’re Where should we send your 15% discount. And now once they respond, you have captured somebody who would have been just anonymous to you. Instagram would have seen that that person visited your page, Facebook would have seen it but you would have had no clue. And now you can capture that information. Wow, man.

Mike Yan 34:34
Now, can I get the cherry on top?

Mike Yan 34:38
when somebody does that, what’s what happens is it opens up a 24 hour window, what’s called a 24 hour messaging window. So whenever somebody starts a conversation with your account, it gives you Instagram gives you 24 hours to talk to that person back. Now, you could ask them for their email.

Mike Yan 35:00
email and to send them the coupon, etc. What you could also do is, let’s say in an hour, you can check in and say, Hey, have you had the chance to use the coupon? Yeah. Right? How How valuable is frickin that? Because that gives you like, like, again, look, Instagram notifications are are on, right? Like if you if you get a DM you check the thing. It’s you’re getting for 24 hours for that, like when somebody messages you, you get 24 hours of a really clean and

Mike Yan 35:41
and high signal channel with that specific customer, it’s so hard to get a high signal channel right now. Because like where are you going to get that like it’s it’s email is very low open rates were low like it’s it’s spammed to death. It’s like so many messages that are you’re getting there, and every other channel is basically paid, right? You have to like pay for reengagement or retargeting, etc. Here, when somebody expresses interest, you get 24 hours to build a relationship with them. And if they click on like, Hey, have you had a chance to check out the like to take advantage of that coupon yet? You can say yes, or not yet. If they click any of those that restarts the 24 hour window, because the thing is they’re engaging with you. It’s a rolling 24 hour window, any action in the chat,

Mike Yan 36:40
like gets you another 24 hours. So obviously, like at some point, people are going to disengage. But that’s not the point is that you can actually they can say, oh, not yet, you can say you can use that not yet. Like it. People could say, Oh, that’s a negative

Mike Yan 37:00
response, you got to give them that negative response. Because if people already took the advantage of that, that’s great. You can promote something else, you can upsell down so you can upsell cross sell, right? If they say yes, I did that, you know, say great, you know what comes great with that specific thing. Like if it’s like if it’s something, if it’s a an educational product, you can say like, here’s another thing that comes with it, like you’re doing this challenge here is a diary like or you could you could promote the cross promote a course. Or if it’s ecommerce, you can say, Oh, you bought these shoes. Here’s something else that what like, does great with this. So you can actually cross sell.

Mike Yan 37:40
If they say not yet, you can highlight the benefits of the product. And you can say, Oh, no worries, you still got, let’s say 23 hours, you can say like that that’s a timed coupon, right? There is a, there’s a hard limit on how like when you can use it, when they say Hey, no worries, you got it, you still got 24 hours, nothing to worry about, by the way, this is why I think you should do this. And this is why you should you should take advantage of this coupon. So that’s, I think it’s a very powerful

Mike Yan 38:14
it’s a very powerful way to communicate over social and over specifically Instagram, which is now as I mentioned, the number one social network. Because revenue wise, and revenue is the most important thing, because that’s where businesses spend their money. And businesses do not spend their money out of their like goodwill or anything like they spend their money because they’re getting an ROI. Right, right. And if messages.

Mike Yan 38:44
If Instagram, if Instagram is is going to be the biggest social network in terms of revenue in just two years, that’s where everybody’s eyes should be. And if your business is not using Instagram, you should you should start like being there because you should be part of the conversation. Even if you’re a local business, even if you’re professional services, it’s like word of mouth, right? If somebody comes to your place, you got to be taggable. Like there, the there has to be a profile that they can tag so other people can find you, right? If you’re doing professional services, same thing, somebody is going to show up, like the work that you did for them, you’re doing renovation and somebody is going to say like, hey, look at what this guy has done for us or this company has done for us. Great. Now you’re getting more and more clients through word of mouth. So you got to be it’s like it’s like websites and everything else. Like you got to be a part of that conversation. Even if you’re not doing this, like every day posting 10 stories, etc. You just got to have a profile that showcases it’s kind of like becoming like a new website, right? Like you are basically showcasing your products and everything else you’re doing. And exactly like with a website, there has to be a certain automated piece.

Mike Yan 40:00
to it, where people can find out more, make an order, leave their email and contact you and talk to you. So yeah, so yeah, we’re we’re here. Yeah, we’re super excited about this.

Chris Davis 40:12
I can hear I can hear the excitement I see it in. Man I can I could just listen to you talk about it all day, because Instagram, I’ll be honest, is one of the platforms that hear us your over automation bridge we haven’t fully tapped into. But it’s been on our radar, and things like this. Anytime I hear the word automation it, it grabs my attention. And what I really like about it is I know some people will be like, Oh, man, only 24 hours. I’m rejoicing because there’s, there’s maintenance built in, usually in my CRM, I have to program it, hey, after they haven’t responded to X amount of emails, mark them as disengaged, like I have to program that part in there. But it being built in that that’s great for me, because now I know whenever I log into manychat, and it shows me who I can reach and who I can, my engagement percentage is right there. So I can kind of shake my expectations. When we do this promo, or when I do this video, these are the amount of eyes that we’ll see it and then there’s a whole organic piece to it. So as people are becoming disengaged, we’re organically adding more engaged and you know, it becomes the the marketing machine. People have have heard, they’ve heard your enthusiasm about Instagram, you probably have a lot of mini chat fans listening because a lot of the people in my programs and that follow me use manychat. So everybody is probably fired up right now, Mike, everybody’s like, Alright, so where where is the best place for them to go to take advantage of not just the DM automation that we’ve mentioned, but just get integrated with manychat as a whole.

Mike Yan 41:51
It’s just manychat.com That’s the best place to start. By the way, we haven’t mentioned one thing, which I think is a great place to start, which is our now I’ve just got a message from from

Mike Yan 42:08
our kind of the content director of content. And she said that we won a video award for our Instagram course. So we have a free award winning Instagram dm automation course now gets a award winning, which is kind of cool. Love, basically, it’s 13 lessons. And it will tell you everything that you need to get started with about instagram automation. And the way you do that is you go to manychat.com And there’s going to be a resources section. And you’re going to go to free course and there’s going to be a iddm automation course. So just manychat.com resources igdm automation course. And

Mike Yan 42:55
it’s a great place to get started. Right now we have until the end of summer, if this does come out late August, then you still have a few days before the IG summer, which is we’re giving away all of the pro features for free for three months. So if you register and start your Ig summer before August 31 if we can make this go out before August 31. And people will be able to take advantage of this No pressure.

Mike Yan 43:27
No pressure.

Chris Davis 43:29
No You came bearing gifts.

Chris Davis 43:33
I want people to take advantage. So if we can turn the the production time around on that we will and then we’ll have the link in the chat. Manychat.com it’s in the show notes. If you want to type it in right now you can’t wait go in the Resources tab, we’ve got the award winning Instagram course the Instagram course. So Mike, I can’t thank you enough, man, thank you for bringing your enthusiasm. And you know what, thank you for bringing some numbers. With that in

Chris Davis 44:04
the nerd in me the analytic side of me. We’re really enjoyed hearing those numbers, the growth and just that statistical baseline right, that statistical foundation of why people should be looking at multiple channels in your marketing man. So thank you so much, man for coming on to the podcast. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this. And you will see me everybody listening. Just know. I’m not just interviewing Mike. I’m also listening. So I’ve got a handful of notes. I will go back to the team and say hey, look, there’s something we can’t afford to ignore.

Chris Davis 44:41
So I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty as well, man, but thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it man.

Mike Yan 44:47
Man, thank thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed this conversation.

Chris Davis 44:52
Yes, absolutely. Now I’ll see you online buddy.

Chris Davis 44:56
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me just say This, if I didn’t hit pause and stop, Mike would have gone on. And I don’t mean that to be like, Oh, he’s so long with it. No, he was passionate. I hope you guys heard that the passion in his voice for you to get in early. His passion convinced me to get this published sooner, just for you all. I don’t know which one of you who who is using Instagram or who could benefit greatly from this, but it just sounds like there’s an opportunity at hand to get in on the ground level of something, why not be a part of it. So hopefully, this episode is your entryway into making q4 that much greater by adding an element of chat marketing specific dm automation to help scale your sales. And do me a favor make sure you share this with your local Instagram marketer or influencer, that person that you know spends a majority of their time on Instagram trying to grow their following. As a business owner that has a business page, they’ve got to have a business page, share this episode with them, let them get excited. Don’t keep this from them. They’re probably working too hard as it is and this new feature may be able to just not only set them free, but set their sales free to scale as well. All right. Lastly, lastly, before I go into to our outro make sure you subscribe to the podcast Did you not enjoy Mike as a guest? I hope I hope my voice is soothing enough or or easy enough to listen to to where it’s not a heavy lift to really grab these concepts, these marketing concepts, the automated marketing concepts for you and your business because here at automation bridge, we’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. Small Businesses need it you heard Mike said these businesses everybody’s trying to figure out what’s the next platform What should we be doing? Where should we be small businesses are in dire need of of marketers that understand the technology that’s available, but also the strategy so that they can marry the two and build the automated systems that are going to be responsible for your rapid growth. Okay, what we’ve done is we’ve made it easy for you to get access to everything that you need. I told you we’re dedicated to sourcing you with everything that you need. Do me a favor, go to Allsystemsgopodcast.com and you’ll get access to the latest episodes, you’ll be able to get access to our amplify my automation package where it is designed to put automated marketing and sales systems in your business over the next six months you have an immediate access to that we have a free Facebook group you can join you can request or refer someone to be part of the podcast to be a guest on the podcast. Just like Mike if there’s software that you’re like man I just wish Chris would talk to the CEO and and extract more out of their brain or extract more out of what Hey, refer them allsystemsgopodcast.com The link is right there. You’ll see it says be a guest you can click on the link put their information in or put your own information in. And any resource or training mentioned on the podcast is all there one URL to remember gets you access to everything in this all systems go podcast.com Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online Academy responsibly my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. And if you would like to become one or find out more, go to All systems go podcast.com, and you can find out not just how to become an automation service provider but a you’ll get access to a ton of resources as well. If you’re new to the podcast, make sure that you subscribe and share especially after you listen to this episode in its entirety at the time of recording this, the All systems go podcast is free to subscribe to. Okay, you can find the show in our main pot. All main podcasting apps like Apple podcast, Google podcasts, you can subscribe on YouTube, do me a favor while you’re at it, leave a five star rating and review it will be greatly appreciated. If for whatever reason, you are having a problem finding out where to leave a review. You can go to automation bridge.com/review, and we can take care of it for you. Okay, in this episode, I get to speak with Mike and the co founder of mini chat. And as the co founder and CEO of manychat. It’s his goal to disrupt the $5 billion plus email marketing industry by bringing the convenience of messenger apps to business to customer communications. And he’s well on his way to manychat is trusted with over 1 million businesses worldwide. And they source them with the ability to have one on one dialogue on a variety of social channels. You will hear Mike’s excitement and enthusiasm about chat marketing. And what recently dropped to the point where I am going to be moving, adjusting my publication schedule, so that this episode goes out early. So you all can take advantage of the next big thing in chat marketing. Mike is here to talk about it co founders manychat. Enjoy. Mike, welcome to the podcast. I’m glad to have you on man. How are you doing?

Mike Yan 2:50
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Chris Davis 2:53
Yes, yes. So this is I got probably just a drop from the cup of value that you’re about to give us today. By you announcing one one update that we really think is going to change the landscape of how people use social media and in close leads and everything else. And the timing of this podcast, the timing of this recording is spot on because it was just announced. So just enough of a teaser to get people to wonder, What is he talking about? So

Chris Davis 3:27
while we go there, Mike, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and your business. For sure.

Mike Yan 3:34
My name is Mike Yan, I’m the CEO and co founder of manychat and we are the number one chat marketing platform in the world. We help businesses automate conversations across messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and now Instagram dm automation and WhatsApp.

Mike Yan 3:52
But also other channels like email and SMS.

Chris Davis 3:56
Yes, and that’s big. I just want to I want to list it off. You said facebook, facebook is pretty standard. I think people may have engaged with the Facebook Messenger bot by now. Instagram automated dmws. That’s new. We’ll talk about that later. And WhatsApp and WhatsApp. I feel like I’m glad you mentioned it because it when you go outside, you know I’m us base but when you go outside the US the conversations and how people communicate are vastly different. And what’s at B begins to be one of those applications that you see cross country not cross state in the US but cross country. us more widely. So tell us a little bit about what drove you to the decision to start a software company? Is this something you always wanted to do when you were younger? Did you just always love marketing and messaging? Like what?

Chris Davis 4:52
What was the ingredients there?

Mike Yan 4:54
Yeah, we’ve been doing software startups since I was probably nine

Mike Yan 5:01
So it’s been a while. And

Mike Yan 5:04
I think that the inspiration came from my father, who was an entrepreneur,

Mike Yan 5:11
his whole life since he was just students. And since I wasn’t even like I was, either I was just born or somewhere around that. So he was always an inspiration to me. And

Mike Yan 5:26
yeah, as soon as I had a few jobs when I was in the the university, just doing waiting tables, just doing deliveries. But then as soon as I had an idea, we started to go the entrepreneurial route. And that’s how it all started. We had a few ecommerce, but like, we had an e commerce business we had.

Mike Yan 5:51
We had a few like consumer tech startups. And then in 2015, we started making shots.

Chris Davis 5:58
Nice, nice. So I would imagine you took some learnings from e commerce and marketing there. And then on some of the consumer products, like you kind of pieced it together. And was this more so a hole in the market that you found are more so something that you just wanted to do?

Mike Yan 6:18
Yeah, that’s a great question. It was definitely kind of like that hole in the market, I would say even, it was technology first, which is a lot of people love to talk about like, like, find the problem, like fall in love with a problem, though with a solution, right. And then if your solution is not good, then like, if the problem is there, you’ll find another solution that will solve it.

Mike Yan 6:47
For us, it was different. So I want to paint a picture where like it, the business could be opportunistic. The business could be you see something and you see, oh, this could be a great thing. And then it starts to piece itself together. So for us it was telegram, which is also a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. telegram has been getting a lot of traction internationally recently, they had only 65 million monthly active users, when when we started on the platform, right now it’s over half a billion. So they grew almost 10x in the span of six years. But at that point, they were one of the first messaging apps to open up their API so that developers like ourselves could create platforms, and enable businesses create products for businesses using that messaging channel. So that’s how we got started, we saw an opportunity where we thought, hey, there’s 65 million people using this messaging app.

Mike Yan 7:52
People businesses will want to do broadcast businesses will want to build lists on this messaging app. So we build a platform to do that, really, in a very simple way without doing a lot of a lot of like any coding, like it’s just was really visual completely text based platform.

Mike Yan 8:14
And before that, the only way that you could do broadcasts on telegram would be if you like, would rent servers and like hired developer, so it’s really, really hard. So imagine a world before MailChimp. Before any email marketing platform, the way you would do email marketing, would be like to set up an email server to set up a database of emails, and to like, basically code MailChimp yourself, right? So we were the MailChimp of messenger marketing, basically, helping businesses just do what they can themselves, which is gather a list of messenger subscribers, and to broadcast to sequences, do everything that you would able to do using the classical channels, but on any new channels where the customer attention actually is. And that’s how we got started on telegram nine months in. Actually, Facebook Messenger opened up and we were three people at that point. So it was really, it was it was really hard decision for us to switch over from telegram to Facebook Messenger because with just three people, we couldn’t support two platforms. We didn’t have enough power just in terms of people on the team to support two platforms and on telegram. We got a lot of traction already. So we are growing on telegram on messenger it’s a much bigger market, but we have to start from zero. So it’s a completely different environment. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to grow or not. So after a few weeks, like after a week or two of discussion, we’re like okay, we got a we got to make this leap of faith because it’s such a bigger market, if you want to build an international company, we got to go big. And we basically started from zero on Facebook Messenger, we weren’t able to transition. And you know, for telegram customers, because it was like it’s just geographically is different. So people in telegram are not like, overlapping with people who are using Facebook Messenger. But we were fortunate enough to like take all the learnings from telegram and to really understand what has to be built for messenger. And instead of building a chatbot platform, we were building a messenger marketing platform. So we were helping businesses achieve business results. And I think that’s what separated us from a lot of the competition who were building like something that sounded great on paper, and was really like buzz, like buzz wordy, but wasn’t really what people needed, and what businesses needed. And I think that was the key to our success on Facebook Messenger. And now, five years later, like Facebook Messenger launched in 2016. So now five years later,

Mike Yan 11:10
we just see so much opportunity for Instagram, Facebook Messenger is a great platform. But Instagram is going to be bigger. Because there the number of businesses who are using Instagram is bigger. And the fact that you already have such a huge organic reach on Instagram, allows you to re engage people, and allows you to create that attention and that engagement on the platform. But the thing that people are struggling with is conversion. So you have followers, you have likes you have comments, but you actually drive sales with your Instagram do you actually drive bookings do actually get leads? I think people are already like, definitely, they’re already doing it. But what we’re seeing is that you can do that 10 times better with dm automation with automating your direct messages. And that’s what we’re really excited to bring to the table. This is just like for everybody who is listening. This is something that’s just been released just a few months, like just on June 2, so basically, literally two months ago. And this is the most

Mike Yan 12:25
cutting edge technology for Instagram that you can find. And in the one year, Remember my words, in in one or two years, every business account is going to be doing dm automation, this is going to be just table stakes, this is going to be something that is a no brainer. Like having a bio relating, like having a link to to to capture people, etc. This is what dm automation is going to be because of how powerful it is. Just to give you a few numbers. For example, what you could do with dm automation, Instagram is you could post a story, let’s say and say hey, we got this new product coming out. DM us

Mike Yan 13:07
Let’s say the name of the product is going to be a

Mike Yan 13:12
I don’t know, let’s do let’s do an E book. Right? Like we got an E book coming out DMS ebook to get

Mike Yan 13:21
50% off, let’s say like it’s a special deal only for the it subscribers, right? People who dm your ebook, right? What you’re going to do, you’re not going to deliver them the ebook itself, you’re going to say, Hey, where should we send the 50%? off coupon to what’s your email? Yes. So you’re capturing emails automatically in your DMS instantly. And you know what the conversion rate to like them giving out their email after they’ve sent you the initial keyword

Mike Yan 13:52
was it’s 50 to 80% 50 to 80% conversion from social. Wow. Yes. And that’s because it’s native. And that’s because it’s native. And it’s it creates, first of all, the fabulous native it’s it can be like people don’t really get like how important that is. People are familiar with the interface. There is zero load time. So it’s not a website that’s like takes a second or two to load, which is really important in mobile. attention spans on mobile are less than a second. Like it’s if it’s not instant, it’s gone. Because people got a notification got a call got a message they’re already out. So the thing that it’s familiar interface is zero load times zero latency. It’s instant. And the fact that it’s a trusted channel so you’re not somewhere in the open giving out their email. You’re actually conversing directly with Chris or directly with the business in a private closed environment that nobody can see. Right

Mike Yan 15:00
DMs are not accessible by anybody other than the two parties who are there. So it feels much safer, and

Mike Yan 15:09
much more intimate to give out here. And that’s why we were seeing, like, the the conversion rates are just out of this world. And this is why I’m saying like, this is what’s gonna happen like the next 12 to 24 months, every business account who’s actually utilizing Instagram, seriously, and a series about the business and growing that and using the channel is going to be using the automation. So your is the thing that everybody should keep, like, I’m sorry for talking through this, but like, I’m just gonna keep going, keep going.

Mike Yan 15:40
So this is the thing, if you want to get the highest conversion rates, you got to start right now, because as with any channel, as with any marketing tactic, call it a tactical strategy doesn’t matter. Anything that’s new, will have the highest conversion rates, the first year it’s out, right, once it starts to get adopted by everybody else, conversion rates start to drop. Now, this is this is not to say that this is going to go away. And I think that’s it’s the same thing as with websites that with email marketing, instead of looking at email marketing, every year, open rates going down, CTR, click through rates are going down. Are we like dropping email marketing? Are we thinking Oh, we got to stop doing like no, because it’s it works. Because no matter how low those conversion rates are, they’re basically free, right? And like, there is nothing like doing an email broadcast is nothing compared to spending $1 $2 on a click on Facebook. So this is the same thing with dm automation, if you want to be in the lens of 80%, open rates, you got to start right now and capture all of the best conversion rates, because this is what’s going to happen in one year, you’re going to hear about this 20 more times from other influencers not from like the CEO of the company, but you’re gonna like hear about this from everybody else we are working with and we’re working with like basically, the the major Instagram marketing influencers everybody else, coral, there’s already 1000s of people who are using this, but compared to 10s of millions of businesses on Instagram, that’s basically nothing. So nobody’s basically using this, but we already have the benefit of of seeing 1000s of people who are already using this. And what’s what’s going to happen is that you’re going to hear about this 20 more times, after a year of hearing about this, you’re going to become convinced that this is something that you should do. And but the year will have already passed. And you’re going to be getting on with the early majority, not with the innovators and the early adopters. So this doesn’t take this doesn’t take like like a long time to set up or anything. This literally like if you want to do like the basic keyword automation, or the basic conversation starters, which is basically allows you to help people start a conversation with you without having to type like, you know, when you like go to profile click message. Yes, it does do that.

Chris Davis 18:21
Hold on, Mike, let’s do that. Because I don’t want to I don’t want to get too far ahead with with the audience.

Chris Davis 18:28
And you’re about to so are you. I told you, everybody I told

Chris Davis 18:34
told you what Mike was gonna bring. So let me say this. All right. First off, I need to hats off. And congratulations with your early success with telegram, right? To be able to use that platform and and establish success and be able to leverage that quickly and more. I’ll say, leverage it more effectively for Facebook, and build on that. I feel like everything that you’ve done has just been one step to get you closer and closer to this moment with this big innovation for you guys to be leading the charge, right. So there’s a group of people who are listening to this end have not, maybe they’ve engaged with a messenger, or maybe and they knew what it was and maybe they didn’t they’re like, wait a minute, somebody wasn’t typing. Wasn’t typing that to me. Just break it down in layman’s terms, what messenger marketing is when you guys started with Facebook, and now what it’s going to evolve to as we migrate over into Instagram. That’s a great question.

Mike Yan 19:39
Basically, and we used to call it messenger marketing when we were just in Facebook Messenger.

Mike Yan 19:46
In 2019, we switched to chat marketing, because it was obvious that this is going to be a multi channel approach and the Flow Builder that that allows you to this is going to be applicable to any messaging app.

Mike Yan 20:00
So I’m going to talk about chat marketing, if you

Mike Yan 20:04
if you’re good with chit chat marketing is is the discipline of using chat as a two way communication, to do marketing, sales and service. And we focus on chat marketing, because that’s the number one use case that people usually come to us for. Because that’s the thing that gets your top line growing. Like you’re not trying to cut costs, usually people are trying to grow sales. And so so in layman’s terms, the way it works is that

Mike Yan 20:39
on Facebook Messenger, you’re you have a Facebook page, a business page, right, and it can have conversations. So it has it can actually converse with with with your customers. So when somebody messages you, it can automatically reply to them and, for example, capture their order information, or it can capture their email information. So it can ask them questions. And it can, for example, qualify the lead, right? If you run a marketing agency, you can ask them, What marketing budget do you have? How long have you been in business, and you’re asking these questions, just to make sure that it’s a good fit for your business. So you’re not spending time with clients who are not going to be a good fit. And maybe you can,

Mike Yan 21:23
I don’t know, send them to your blog post, maybe to YouTube video, maybe to some materials. But if it’s a good fit, then you can get an instant notification that hey, there is a really hot lead on the line and they fit perfectly the business, you got to talk to them, and you could capture their phone number and get on the phone with them instantly. And in our day and age of like mobile interactions. Everything has to be instant, if like the leads grow cold, not over a matter of like weeks or days they grow cold over matter minutes, right? If you’re not there to serve the customer right away and answer their questions that customers probably going to change their mind, find somebody else like it’s everything has to be really, really fast these days. And this is what chat is about. It’s about how to create those instant, private, personal and converting connections. And I’ll tell you this, real quick. Let me let me interject real quick for sure. Tell me this. When you have your check your check your chatbot going and you’ve collected their first name, their email and their phone number. Where do you store that information? Are you able to sync it with the CRM is it in a spreadsheet, like what what happens with the contusion after you capture it? You can do anything with that. Like you could save it then many shots. We have direct integrations with Google Sheets, you can go you can send it to spreadsheet, we have direct integrations with like CRM, like HubSpot, CRM,

Mike Yan 22:58
or Zapier, you can send it through Zapier to anywhere, basically. So there is

Mike Yan 23:06
if you have something set up already, you can use that and just send over use many chat as a data capture tool as a lead capture tool and then send it over to your system. Or you could use main chat, some people use mini chat for this also, because we do have what’s called custom fields. So you can save all the information about the customer, right inside main chat and then use it to call people or to message people, etc.

Chris Davis 23:33
Love it, man. It’s like a social CRM. Yeah, exactly. No, one of the way one of the ways to talk about it, not a lot of people like to be honest, like if we’re talking about like, the smaller businesses like Not a lot of people know about what the CRM is. People know about, like, I got an email lists I got, I got a customer list.

Mike Yan 23:52
CRM, like comes from Salesforce and from like the bigger enterprise clients, but now I feel like it’s getting more and more acceptance, which is great, because that’s exactly the thing that we were doing. Y

Chris Davis 24:03
eah. And I’ve also seen, and you tell me, if you’ve seen the usage of manychat, expand, but now that Facebook has kind of changed their algorithms, so many times over, people aren’t engaging with page, business pages as much. But now you’ve got a lot of people creating Facebook groups, and then they’ll do a training in the group and say, Hey, if you want this, this trainer, you want access to this resource? Comment below, and then that comment triggers messenger bot to say, hey, you said you wanted this, here it is. And then it says, Where Where can we send this? Is that something that you guys are seeing more and more of being effective in terms of Facebook group usage in manychat. Yet the thing with Facebook groups is that you cannot really automate comments to the group posts because the way that Facebook works is that it has to be the automation has to be attached to a Facebook page. So

Mike Yan 25:00
The group itself like it’s, it’s,

Mike Yan 25:03
if you’ve seen that that’s probably somebody hacking the API’s. Because that’s not available through through the through the official API’s. But you could do that you could use the group to send people over to a Facebook page with, like, you could you could, for example, share and share at Facebook pages posts inside the group. And if they comment on the Facebook pages post, yes, you could automate those replies to the group.

Mike Yan 25:30
Facebook, I would say, like, Listen, if I’m being honest, the most important social network right now is Instagram. And I’m not saying that because

Mike Yan 25:44
of the user numbers, because Facebook is bigger in terms of number of users.

Mike Yan 25:49
I’m saying that because of the ad spend,

Mike Yan 25:53
the ad spend on Instagram is right now, if you think about like Facebook as a company that owns Facebook, and WhatsApp and Instagram, etc. If you think about the revenue split, and the specifically ad revenue split, Instagram is responsible for 36% of Facebook’s total ad revenue. Wow. Yep. And that’s, that’s a big chunk, because of just how recently Instagram was acquired by Facebook. I mean, that was, that was a what, five years ago? I think, maybe maybe more? Probably, probably more is fine, man. So probably more, but either way to take 36%

Chris Davis 26:36
that’s a huge chunk. Man. It’s a third. You know, that’s it’s a huge portion. And what thing Oh, I think like people don’t know this number.

Chris Davis 26:46
But I think what the, the, the key part is that not only is it already 36%, the rate at which it is growing. So right now, let me tell you this, right now Instagram has grown 50%. year over year. So next year, it’s going to go from it’s going to go to probably 45 billion. So right now, Instagram is 36% of ad like Facebook. So revenue. In terms of dollars, it’s 30 billion. So three zero. revenue a year is going to go probably to 40 to 45. This year in 2021. Yeah, Facebook proper is, is growing much slower. And if you think about, like the overall Facebook growth as a company, Facebook earned in 2019 70 billion, totally, including Instagram. So Facebook as a company earned 70 billion in 2023 84 billion. So that’s 20% growth year over year. And I’m doing this math, like it’s gonna be hard to do this over audio, but bear with me. So Facebook added 14 billion from 17 to 84 billion, it added 14 billion in incremental revenue. Does it make sense? So in 2020, Facebook, increased your revenue, additionally, earned 14,000,000,010 out of that 14 came from Instagram.

Chris Davis 28:33
Hmm, so Instagram, iit’s here to stay.

Mike Yan 28:37
Instagram is responsible for 70% 70% of Facebook’s growth right now. Yeah, just just think about that. 70%. It’s driving the company forward. It’s the main engine that’s driving phase before with right now. Now, this is the kicker by 2023.

Mike Yan 29:01
Instagram is going to be responsible, but for over half of Facebook sole revenue. True. Sure. So right now it’s 36%. It’s going to go over 250 or over 50% by 2023. That’s just two years, just two years. And Instagram is going to be the major source of ad revenue for Facebook. And for people for like, Oh, this is projections. We don’t know what’s going to happen in two years, etc. It already happened in the US. I’m talking about globally. Right now, in the US. Instagram is already making more money for Facebook, that Facebook proper. It’s already over 50% less. So that’s already happened.

Chris Davis 29:48
Mike, I cannot count how many people that I’ve talked to in the last month I’ll say. In fact, I talked to a associate just the other day and they told me

Chris Davis 30:00
Look, we do all our sales through dm on Instagram, with no set no calls. And this is not like 50 $100 products like Mike, these are five figure products being sold on Instagram. And this is manual messaging. So what’s your what’s your introducing now? Is this dm automation? Is this available to everybody? How does somebody get their hands on it? Just if you sign up for mini chat, and it’s there, like, Is there an exclusive waitlist? Do you have to have a certain amount of followers? Like, what’s the process? That’s, that’s a great question. So right now, it’s available to anybody with either from 1000 followers, 100,000 followers. And that’s not our limitation, that’s a limitation that is coming from Instagram itself. So they’re doing a phased rollout. But since you already told me that this is going to air in a few weeks, I must correct this. If you’re listening to this in the recording,

Mike Yan 31:04
then it’s already available to everybody. Because the somewhere in the first half of August, they’re doing phase three. And phase three is when it’s rolled out to everybody. So by the time you hear this, anybody, literally no matter how many followers you have, you can just go to manychat.com. Sign up, and you’ll be able to automate your DMS. And we have we do have we do have a gallery of templates? Like we Yeah, that’s what I was gonna ask. Yeah, how easy is it to get started? Mike. Now look, I know from experience, you guys have a visual builder, which speaks my language, I can see arrows and you know, from each message, and I can see the pathing. So for somebody who is great at Instagram, they’ve been seeing their following grow. This has perhaps been the missing piece, Mike. And they’re like, I’m so glad I heard this podcast, I’m going to mini chat. Now, you already know there’s that initial overwhelm. Whenever somebody logs into new software, you guys have templates, what else is there waiting for them to help take advantage of the DM automation. That’s exactly what we’ve been working on this summer, is how to make it easy for people to get started. And basically what what will happen is that you’ll go through the onboarding process, and then you’ll be able to select which campaign you want to start with. And we already have

Mike Yan 32:34
a lot of campaigns there, how to capture emails, how to qualify leads, how to do conversation starters, basic keyword, automation, anything that you would want to get started with, like it’s already there, you just you just

Mike Yan 32:51
basically set up the template, change the content to suit your voice. And it’s very visual, like there’s, as you’ve mentioned, zero coding required, you don’t need to like coding anything. It’s like basically, if you can post on Instagram, you’ll be able to like use use, use many chats, it’s very visual, like if I send this message, add this button, like if person presses this button, then send this message, it’s very visual, just drag and drop, what you see is what you get type of thing.

Chris Davis 33:22
Yeah, and I’ll say this, if people are not putting together the importance of this chat, just chat marketing period, when you bring that into social media, there’s a lot of anonymous activity, a lot of anonymous interest that’s happening on your page, you don’t see all your pageviews, but you see your likes, that’s a fraction of the people actually seeing your stuff. So now, when you have these tools that allow you to capture on the attention that you’re grabbing, it goes from unknown, anonymous, to known and reachable, right, like I now know, is that because I said, Hey, we’re running this special, if you want to get a discount, just type in special. Exactly. And we’ll send you know, they type in special. And then the DM automation takes over says, Oh, great. You’re Where should we send your 15% discount. And now once they respond, you have captured somebody who would have been just anonymous to you. Instagram would have seen that that person visited your page, Facebook would have seen it but you would have had no clue. And now you can capture that information. Wow, man.

Mike Yan 34:34
Now, can I get the cherry on top?

Mike Yan 34:38
when somebody does that, what’s what happens is it opens up a 24 hour window, what’s called a 24 hour messaging window. So whenever somebody starts a conversation with your account, it gives you Instagram gives you 24 hours to talk to that person back. Now, you could ask them for their email.

Mike Yan 35:00
email and to send them the coupon, etc. What you could also do is, let’s say in an hour, you can check in and say, Hey, have you had the chance to use the coupon? Yeah. Right? How How valuable is frickin that? Because that gives you like, like, again, look, Instagram notifications are are on, right? Like if you if you get a DM you check the thing. It’s you’re getting for 24 hours for that, like when somebody messages you, you get 24 hours of a really clean and

Mike Yan 35:41
and high signal channel with that specific customer, it’s so hard to get a high signal channel right now. Because like where are you going to get that like it’s it’s email is very low open rates were low like it’s it’s spammed to death. It’s like so many messages that are you’re getting there, and every other channel is basically paid, right? You have to like pay for reengagement or retargeting, etc. Here, when somebody expresses interest, you get 24 hours to build a relationship with them. And if they click on like, Hey, have you had a chance to check out the like to take advantage of that coupon yet? You can say yes, or not yet. If they click any of those that restarts the 24 hour window, because the thing is they’re engaging with you. It’s a rolling 24 hour window, any action in the chat,

Mike Yan 36:40
like gets you another 24 hours. So obviously, like at some point, people are going to disengage. But that’s not the point is that you can actually they can say, oh, not yet, you can say you can use that not yet. Like it. People could say, Oh, that’s a negative

Mike Yan 37:00
response, you got to give them that negative response. Because if people already took the advantage of that, that’s great. You can promote something else, you can upsell down so you can upsell cross sell, right? If they say yes, I did that, you know, say great, you know what comes great with that specific thing. Like if it’s like if it’s something, if it’s a an educational product, you can say like, here’s another thing that comes with it, like you’re doing this challenge here is a diary like or you could you could promote the cross promote a course. Or if it’s ecommerce, you can say, Oh, you bought these shoes. Here’s something else that what like, does great with this. So you can actually cross sell.

Mike Yan 37:40
If they say not yet, you can highlight the benefits of the product. And you can say, Oh, no worries, you still got, let’s say 23 hours, you can say like that that’s a timed coupon, right? There is a, there’s a hard limit on how like when you can use it, when they say Hey, no worries, you got it, you still got 24 hours, nothing to worry about, by the way, this is why I think you should do this. And this is why you should you should take advantage of this coupon. So that’s, I think it’s a very powerful

Mike Yan 38:14
it’s a very powerful way to communicate over social and over specifically Instagram, which is now as I mentioned, the number one social network. Because revenue wise, and revenue is the most important thing, because that’s where businesses spend their money. And businesses do not spend their money out of their like goodwill or anything like they spend their money because they’re getting an ROI. Right, right. And if messages.

Mike Yan 38:44
If Instagram, if Instagram is is going to be the biggest social network in terms of revenue in just two years, that’s where everybody’s eyes should be. And if your business is not using Instagram, you should you should start like being there because you should be part of the conversation. Even if you’re a local business, even if you’re professional services, it’s like word of mouth, right? If somebody comes to your place, you got to be taggable. Like there, the there has to be a profile that they can tag so other people can find you, right? If you’re doing professional services, same thing, somebody is going to show up, like the work that you did for them, you’re doing renovation and somebody is going to say like, hey, look at what this guy has done for us or this company has done for us. Great. Now you’re getting more and more clients through word of mouth. So you got to be it’s like it’s like websites and everything else. Like you got to be a part of that conversation. Even if you’re not doing this, like every day posting 10 stories, etc. You just got to have a profile that showcases it’s kind of like becoming like a new website, right? Like you are basically showcasing your products and everything else you’re doing. And exactly like with a website, there has to be a certain automated piece.

Mike Yan 40:00
to it, where people can find out more, make an order, leave their email and contact you and talk to you. So yeah, so yeah, we’re we’re here. Yeah, we’re super excited about this.

Chris Davis 40:12
I can hear I can hear the excitement I see it in. Man I can I could just listen to you talk about it all day, because Instagram, I’ll be honest, is one of the platforms that hear us your over automation bridge we haven’t fully tapped into. But it’s been on our radar, and things like this. Anytime I hear the word automation it, it grabs my attention. And what I really like about it is I know some people will be like, Oh, man, only 24 hours. I’m rejoicing because there’s, there’s maintenance built in, usually in my CRM, I have to program it, hey, after they haven’t responded to X amount of emails, mark them as disengaged, like I have to program that part in there. But it being built in that that’s great for me, because now I know whenever I log into manychat, and it shows me who I can reach and who I can, my engagement percentage is right there. So I can kind of shake my expectations. When we do this promo, or when I do this video, these are the amount of eyes that we’ll see it and then there’s a whole organic piece to it. So as people are becoming disengaged, we’re organically adding more engaged and you know, it becomes the the marketing machine. People have have heard, they’ve heard your enthusiasm about Instagram, you probably have a lot of mini chat fans listening because a lot of the people in my programs and that follow me use manychat. So everybody is probably fired up right now, Mike, everybody’s like, Alright, so where where is the best place for them to go to take advantage of not just the DM automation that we’ve mentioned, but just get integrated with manychat as a whole.

Mike Yan 41:51
It’s just manychat.com That’s the best place to start. By the way, we haven’t mentioned one thing, which I think is a great place to start, which is our now I’ve just got a message from from

Mike Yan 42:08
our kind of the content director of content. And she said that we won a video award for our Instagram course. So we have a free award winning Instagram dm automation course now gets a award winning, which is kind of cool. Love, basically, it’s 13 lessons. And it will tell you everything that you need to get started with about instagram automation. And the way you do that is you go to manychat.com And there’s going to be a resources section. And you’re going to go to free course and there’s going to be a iddm automation course. So just manychat.com resources igdm automation course. And

Mike Yan 42:55
it’s a great place to get started. Right now we have until the end of summer, if this does come out late August, then you still have a few days before the IG summer, which is we’re giving away all of the pro features for free for three months. So if you register and start your Ig summer before August 31 if we can make this go out before August 31. And people will be able to take advantage of this No pressure.

Mike Yan 43:27
No pressure.

Chris Davis 43:29
No You came bearing gifts.

Chris Davis 43:33
I want people to take advantage. So if we can turn the the production time around on that we will and then we’ll have the link in the chat. Manychat.com it’s in the show notes. If you want to type it in right now you can’t wait go in the Resources tab, we’ve got the award winning Instagram course the Instagram course. So Mike, I can’t thank you enough, man, thank you for bringing your enthusiasm. And you know what, thank you for bringing some numbers. With that in

Chris Davis 44:04
the nerd in me the analytic side of me. We’re really enjoyed hearing those numbers, the growth and just that statistical baseline right, that statistical foundation of why people should be looking at multiple channels in your marketing man. So thank you so much, man for coming on to the podcast. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this. And you will see me everybody listening. Just know. I’m not just interviewing Mike. I’m also listening. So I’ve got a handful of notes. I will go back to the team and say hey, look, there’s something we can’t afford to ignore.

Chris Davis 44:41
So I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty as well, man, but thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it man.

Mike Yan 44:47
Man, thank thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed this conversation.

Chris Davis 44:52
Yes, absolutely. Now I’ll see you online buddy.

Chris Davis 44:56
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me just say This, if I didn’t hit pause and stop, Mike would have gone on. And I don’t mean that to be like, Oh, he’s so long with it. No, he was passionate. I hope you guys heard that the passion in his voice for you to get in early. His passion convinced me to get this published sooner, just for you all. I don’t know which one of you who who is using Instagram or who could benefit greatly from this, but it just sounds like there’s an opportunity at hand to get in on the ground level of something, why not be a part of it. So hopefully, this episode is your entryway into making q4 that much greater by adding an element of chat marketing specific dm automation to help scale your sales. And do me a favor make sure you share this with your local Instagram marketer or influencer, that person that you know spends a majority of their time on Instagram trying to grow their following. As a business owner that has a business page, they’ve got to have a business page, share this episode with them, let them get excited. Don’t keep this from them. They’re probably working too hard as it is and this new feature may be able to just not only set them free, but set their sales free to scale as well. All right. Lastly, lastly, before I go into to our outro make sure you subscribe to the podcast Did you not enjoy Mike as a guest? I hope I hope my voice is soothing enough or or easy enough to listen to to where it’s not a heavy lift to really grab these concepts, these marketing concepts, the automated marketing concepts for you and your business because here at automation bridge, we’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. Small Businesses need it you heard Mike said these businesses everybody’s trying to figure out what’s the next platform What should we be doing? Where should we be small businesses are in dire need of of marketers that understand the technology that’s available, but also the strategy so that they can marry the two and build the automated systems that are going to be responsible for your rapid growth. Okay, what we’ve done is we’ve made it easy for you to get access to everything that you need. I told you we’re dedicated to sourcing you with everything that you need. Do me a favor, go to Allsystemsgopodcast.com and you’ll get access to the latest episodes, you’ll be able to get access to our amplify my automation package where it is designed to put automated marketing and sales systems in your business over the next six months you have an immediate access to that we have a free Facebook group you can join you can request or refer someone to be part of the podcast to be a guest on the podcast. Just like Mike if there’s software that you’re like man I just wish Chris would talk to the CEO and and extract more out of their brain or extract more out of what Hey, refer them allsystemsgopodcast.com The link is right there. You’ll see it says be a guest you can click on the link put their information in or put your own information in. And any resource or training mentioned on the podcast is all there one URL to remember gets you access to everything in this all systems go podcast.com Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online Academy responsibly my friends