Children’s author CK James brought me on to help grow his Facebook Page presence and his email list. As a new author looking to launch his career our goal was to build a list of people most likely to buy a children’s book: Mothers with children ages 2-10.
The cornerstone of the campaign was a monthly children’s book giveaway powered by King Sumo, a WordPress plugin for designing and running giveaway campaigns
Our giveaway was each gold medal Newberry Award winner from the past 5 years.
First, the results.
New Emails Acquired
921
Cost Per Email
$0.10
Average CPE
$0.01
These are pretty great numbers by any stretch. We were able to achieve these metrics by matching the right audience with the right offer. And our secret sauce was using a chat boy powered by ManyChat to turn page engagement into link clicks.
The Targeting
As far as the original interest and demographic-based targeting, we were focused on two things. First, we knew we wanted to target Moms with children ages 2-10 since Moms are most likely to make children’s book purchasing decisions. Secondly, we wanted to only target moms who were interested in children’s literature. So we layered those two targeting options together to achieve a small but highly-targeted audience.
The Creative
We start out with a video ad:
The part that really makes this work is the call to action in the ad text. Once people comment the correct word “books”, they receive a Facebook message with the link to the giveaway. Here’s what it looks like on the back end using ManyChat’s comment growth tool:
The power of centering the campaign around comments is that it creates such an overwhelming social proof for the audience. This then creates a virtuous cycle – the more comments you already have, the more comments you’re likely to get.
All together, we wound up generating 1600 comments. Below are the full stats for the post including likes, comments, and shares.
Acquiring ManyChat Subscribers
Facebook Messenger is the new frontier of “one-to-many” individual communication. It’s email 2.0, and the open rates are insane (much like email open rates back in 2000)
Because of that it was important for us to collect as many Messenger subscribers as possible. The only problem is that in order to acquire the right to initiate communication via Messenger to someone, that person first has to message you.
To encourage this, we included a short sentence that would illicit a response:
Here’s a look at how we did in terms of Messenger subscribers for the campaign. We got around 400, which is around 50% of all commenters.
What makes Messenger so awesome is that as of January 2018, marketers have not yet ruined it. That means open rates are actually insane. They mirror email open rates from 1997. Remember when you were excited to hear “You’ve Got Mail!” from AOL? Yeah, that’s what Messenger is like right now. Have a look at the metrics for our first Messenger broadcast:
97% Open Rate! There are 20,000+ email lists out there that don’t reach as many people as this Messenger broadcast.
The Landing Page
We used the WordPress contest plugin King Sumo Giveaways for both the landing page and the management of the giveaway itself.
Partner Pages
We never wanted the campaigns to rely on paid traffic alone. We took the time to search for and reach out to other pages with similar audiences within the childhood education niche. We asked those pages to share the giveaway. Lots of them either didn’t respond or said no. But a few did. And one particular page wildly exceeded our expectations.
Check out the stats below for Page shares. Growing Book By Book garnered nearly 10,000 video views and 801 engagements!
Key Learnings
The Power of Social Proof – People are more likely to engage with an ad that has lots of likes, comments, and shares. When they see a post with 1000+ comments they tend to stop and look to see what all the fuss is about. This is the equivalent of a restaurant having a line out the door. It’s a powerful message to the public that something very desirable is inside.
Facebook’s New Algorithm Does Not Affect Ads – We were a bit wary going into this campaign since Facebook had recently announced they would be cracking down on “engagement bait”, which is basically what we were doing exactly. But the numbers we were able to generate suggest that this change only applies to organic posts.