How We Generated 4,240 Facebook Messenger Leads for $400USD + 3 Surprises

Lately tons of brands have been complaining about the increasing costs of online advertising. A study by eMarketer found this to be an overall trend. But does it have to be true for you? Not if we have anything to say about it. Let's start with the bad news. It's true. Online marketing is getting more expensive. Here's the good news. You'll get a high return on your campaign if you get creative. Let me tell you a story about how we generated 4240 Facebook Messenger Leads for about $400 USD in ad spend.

Why Create a Facebook Click to Messenger Marketing Campaign?

There's a simple answer to this question. Along your road to online marketing success, try every possible method to create interest and generate leads about your product or service. One thing we've found on our startup journey is - no matter how logical or deliberate our actions, the internet is a mysterious place. It surprises us every day. If you're lucky, you'll have more good surprises than bad surprises. So roll up those sleeves and give it a try.

We created a Facebook Click to Messenger marketing campaign for one simple reason. We were looking for 50 people to participate in a closed beta for our WhatsApp integration. Although we already had plenty of users to pull from to create a pool of closed beta users, we also wanted to get feedback from users who had never used Rocketbots before but were in need of chat automation for WhatsApp.

Let me be clear, we had never tried using a Facebook Click to Messenger ad before, we only had a few days and a limited budget to pull it off. The amount of Facebook Messenger leads we generated astonished everyone...

Surprise #1: Our Click To Messenger Ad Generated 4240 Facebook Messenger Leads

I'll be honest; we were genuinely surprised at the cost per result. We've heard Click to Messenger ads were still cheap because they were seldom used. However, the cost per lead was a big surprise. Before we get to the numbers, keep in mind that we converted all our costs to US dollars, but our ad account bills in Hong Kong dollars, so our images reflect that.

The results speak for themselves, we generated 4240 Facebook Messenger leads for our WhatsApp closed beta over three days, and we spent about $400 USD to do it. Overall, our cost per lead ended up being around $0.10 USD.

Professional lead generators out there are probably saying these results are 100% impossible. To a certain extent, they're right. You probably won't be able to generate leads for 10¢ a pop if you're exclusively targeting the US.

We targeted our ad to run globally. We did exclude some countries where historically we've seen bot-like behavior, and our return on investment in previous campaigns meant we weren't going to target there again. Overall, we did hit every continent except Antarctica.

Surprise #2: Our Click to Messenger Ad Generated at least 120 Sign Ups

This was perhaps the happiest surprise. We don't have the highest budgets for generating user sign-ups, and we thought that running this messenger campaign to generate leads for our WhatsApp closed beta would result in a reduction in the number of total sign-ups we got that week. Thank god we were wrong.

We do admit that the cost per sign up was a tad bit higher than we see with our best-optimized campaigns. However, considering we did not optimize this ad at all with a little tweaking, Facebook Click to Messenger marketing campaigns may become the bread and butter of our paid sign-up campaigns.

I hope you noticed that we mentioned that this generated at least 120 sign-ups. That is because we are not done working with these leads. First, we're going to use them to choose 50 users for our closed beta program. But at the end of the day, they're now contacts in the Rocketbots CRM.

This means we have 4,000 more people to send our Facebook Messenger blog & platform updates to. And we have 4,000 potential customers to reactivate once we've released our WhatsApp integration publicly. With our Facebook Messenger open rates hovering at around 92% we're sure this is going to result in at least a couple hundred sign-ups somewhere down the line.

Surprise #3: Our Facebook Page Responsiveness Skyrocketed

You may ask why this is important. Every person that comes to your Facebook Page sees how responsive you are to messages on average. The more responsive you are, the more people are going to click and chat with you, which means more Facebook Messenger leads.

Unfortunately, we're not a global company, yet. However, we do have customers all around the globe who use Facebook Messenger to chat with us for support. People who are on the other side of the planet and message us first thing in the morning must often wait a few hours before we can give them a detailed response, dragging our average response time down.

One of the surprising results of this Facebook Click to Messenger marketing campaign was that it raised our averages way up. Unlike customer support, which in our case involves some very complicated questions, we qualified all these leads using automation on the Rocketbots platform. With virtually no time between question and answer, we got this pleasant surprise, and it's not even our birthday!

How To Set Up a Facebook Messenger Marketing Campaign for Lead Generation

Below, we're going to go over how we set up our Facebook Click to Messenger marketing campaign. To copy what we did, you're going to need a:

• A Facebook Page

• A Facebook Ad Account

• A Rocketbots Account - Sign Up Free Here

How We Set Up Our Click to Messenger Ad

Although we're going to be generating Facebook Messenger leads, we're not going to be doing this using Facebook Messenger lead ads. This is because we want these leads to message us and enter the Rocketbots CRM. Once that's done we'll be able to converse with them and reengage them over Facebook Messenger in the future.

1. Create a campaign with a message objective. To generate Facebook Messenger leads, you'll need to select the message's objective. Choosing this objective will mean your call to action will become Send Message.

2. Set your message destination to Click to Messenger. At the ad set level, choose the Click to Messenger destination.

3. Choose your audience. We're not going to share our audience for this campaign, but it wasn't anything special. We used a few interests provided by Facebook and excluded some geographies to create our audience.

4. Choose your ad placement. We used automatic ad placement.

5. Select your budget and schedule. We used a lifetime budget over 3 days and we scheduled our ad to run only during business hours from the users perspective.

6. Choose your format. Our ad was a simple image so we chose image.

7. Enter a text & headline for your ad. Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow dynamic text & headlines for these type of ads. We do recommend that for the best performance you test out text and headline messaging using a dynamic image ad before you run this campaign.

8. Set up a tracking reference. You'll need to set up a tracking reference for your Click to Messenger campaign. Use the format ref=YOURREFERENCE. The reference will be used to trigger a rule on the Rocketbots platform, so this step cannot be skipped.

10. Create a custom welcome message. Facebook Messenger users must send at least one message to you in order for you to receive the lead. The best way to achieve this is to set up a custom welcome message specifically for this campaign.

We created this custom welcome template.

11. Publish. Just make sure your campaign doesn't start right away because you'll need to do a little setup on the Rocketbots platform.

How We Qualified 4240 Click to Messenger Leads Automatically

We had no choice but to qualify these leads automatically because we don't have the staff to handle 4000 Facebook Messenger leads over 3 days. Especially the ones that come in overnight. To qualify these leads automatically we had to do the following:

• Create a qualification survey

• Create an automation rule

How We Created The Qualification Survey

Because our WhatsApp closed beta is targeted toward businesses who are already using WhatsApp, we decided on 3 simple questions to ask:

1. Do you answer customers using the WhatsApp Business App or Personal App?

2. How many messages do you send & receive per day? (Roughly)

3. Do you use Broadcasts to send messages to your contacts in the WhatsApp Business App?

These questions were designed to give us an indication of the quality of the Facebook Messenger leads that we generated.

1. Create a new survey. Go to the surveys module. Press Add Survey. We added a name as well as survey success and survey failure messages to our survey.

2. Add your questions. We used multiple choice responses for our 1st & 3rd questions and  number only responses for our 2nd question.

Repeat step 2 for as many questions as you have, and press done once you've finished creating your survey.

Now you'll need to create a rule to trigger this survey every time a new contact enters from the Facebook Send to Messenger ad.

How We Triggered The Qualification Survey For Every Contact From Our Messenger Marketing Campaign

To ensure that every Facebook Messenger lead that we generated received the qualification survey, we created a rule in the Automation module.

1. Add a new rule & set up your trigger. Remember, in step 8 of our Facebook Click to Messenger ad creation, we created the tracking reference: whatsappclosedbeta. Now, we've created a rule that is triggered by that reference.

2. Set up your actions. We wanted to send our Facebook Messenger leads an explainer message and then receive the first question of our survey. So we created two actions. One is to send a message, and another is to send the survey.

We also created an additional action at the end of the rule so that we could segment contacts added to the Rocketbots CRM via this messenger marketing campaign. This action added the tag WhatsApp Closed Beta to all the contacts.

Now press done to create the rule and you're ready to go.

Final Thoughts

Make sure you test the final experience of the users who receive the ad and go through the qualification survey. To do so, go to the Ads tab of your Facebook Ad Manager, select the ad, click Preview, then select Ad Preview, then press Send Notification to Facebook.

Good luck with your Facebook Click to Messenger marketing campaigns. We wish you many Facebook Messenger leads to come.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this article, here are some readings that may interest you.

• The Practical Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads

• Facebook Messenger Push Notifications: A How-To Guide

• WhatsApp Lead Generation: How to Use WhatsApp to Get More Leads