Your email list is your most valuable asset as a coach. However, not many have really started growing it because they just don’t know how. If you are in this predicament, you’re in luck because Kendra Perry shares a unique strategy that will have your email list grow quickly: using Instagram DM automation. There is more to your Instagram account than posting updates. You can also use it as a gateway to email marketing. Find out how Kendra utilizes her Instagram account to grow her list. Learn the tool she employs to set up her DM automation so you, too, can not only build your list but also your relationships with your clients.
Leave a 5-star review for this podcast: https://ratethispodcast.com/wealthy
Get started on building your 6-figure business with our free training: https://go.kendraperry.net/training
—
Listen to the podcast here
How I’m Using Instagram DM Automation To Grow My Email List
I’m super excited to be here with you, and at the time of this recording, I have just returned from a three-week hiking in Italy with my boyfriend Ryan. We had such a good time. We ate all the pasta, the coffee, the croissants, and the food. We hiked to a lot of beautiful places. In the next episode, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of our Italy trip and I’m also going to talk a little bit about how I prepared to leave my business for a full three and a half weeks.
In this episode, I want to talk to you about a strategy that I’ve been using that I’ve been finding very effective, very powerful, and is building my email list organically quite quickly. This is direct message automation on Instagram. Essentially, you can use a tool to set up these automated messenger sequences in a direct message. You may have experienced this a little bit.
Sometimes people send you an automated direct message when you follow their Instagram account. Maybe you’ve gone into someone’s direct messages and you see they have little buttons with questions and you can type on those and you get an automated response. That’s not what I’m talking about. This strategy is a little bit more targeted and streamlined. Before we dive into how this works, I want to talk about the problem with the call to action on Instagram. Just so we’re on the same page, when I say call to action, it’s when someone tells you to do something at the end of the post.
I believe there needs to be a Call To Action or a CTA in every single post. You always got to tell people to do something because people aren’t going to do it if you don’t tell them to do it. When it comes to growing our email list, it’s a very important thing. Your email list is your most valuable asset as a coach and if you haven’t started growing one yet, do it. It’s way more important than social media. You’ll make way more money from email marketing than social media marketing. It’s effective. All my sales come from email marketing.
My number one priority in my business is always to grow my email list but on a platform like Instagram, this can be a little bit tricky because you can’t put a link in a post. There’s no clickable link. You could put a link at the end of your post, but people can’t click on it and they also can’t copy and paste it. They’re not going to manually type it into a browser. What a lot of people will say is, “Go to the link in my bio.”
In your bio, you do get that clickable link. They may do that, but it’s a little bit clunky because if people are on this post and they’re scrolling, you’re asking them to click on your avatar, your little profile picture. Go to your profile, click on the link, and then if you got a Linktree, they got to find the link you’re talking about within the tree of links. It’s not a streamlined process. I’ve never found this overly great or awesome at building my email list at the level that I want to.
You do get a link sticker in Instagram stories. Maybe about a few years ago and previously, you had to have 10,000 followers to get the swipe-up feature where people could swipe up and go to an external link. Instagram gave it to everyone maybe about a few years ago. You have this little link sticker so you can send people to an external link but I’ve found this to be very problematic because it tends to decimate my story views.
I don’t know if you’ve found the same thing, but I’ve heard from a lot of colleagues and friends that when they use that link or that link sticker in their Stories, suddenly their story views drop. For example, I’ll often on average get maybe between 200 and 300 views on my Stories. If I use the link, those views will usually go below 100 and sometimes as low as 50.
I don’t like to use it unless necessary because then it prevents people from seeing my Stories. I think this is because Instagram has now given it to everyone. They don’t want the Stories to become cluttered with all these external links. Instagram doesn’t love when you leave the Instagram platform. That’s why they don’t give you that external link on Instagram. To be honest, no social media platform wants you to leave the platform.
Even on Facebook where you do get a clickable link, Facebook doesn’t like that and your post will get less reach when you use that clickable link. The goal is to keep them on the platform, but then we’re asking ourselves, “How do I get people to join my email list while keeping them on the platform? Don’t I need to send them to an opt-in page?” You don’t when you’re using this DM automation strategy.
I’m going to tell you exactly how this is set up. We use a platform called Manychat. Manychat is this third-party software that allows you to automate DMs. It’s been around for a long time. I used to use it many years ago, maybe in 2017 or 2018 with Facebook. You could set all this up for Facebook and you could build this entire list on your Manychat list. You could get people to opt-in or to direct message like you could in the email list.
This was effective, but then I think people were abusing it and maybe getting spammy and Facebook cracked down. They made it hard to use and they instigated a whole bunch of rules. If you broke the rules, you get banned. I stopped using it because I didn’t understand how to use it anymore. It got confusing. I put it on the wayside and then I learned at the mastermind retreat that I went to in San Diego. One of the other members was talking about this strategy and I was like, “I love that. I didn’t know you could do that on Instagram.”
She connected me with her Manychat expert and this person set it up for me. What I will tell you is setting it up is very technical and it’s not something that I would recommend doing yourself. You need to understand the rules and the terms because if you break the rules, you can get banned. You want someone who knows what they’re doing.
You can find someone on Upwork.com. You can go to a site called HireAMarketer.com, where you’ll be able to find someone who understands these things and will be able to set it up for you. The woman that I used is very well-priced and she knows what she’s doing. She’ll make sure that your automations are set up properly that align with Instagram rules. Are there other platforms that you can use to set this up? There are, but I only recommend using Manychat because they’re partnered with Instagram.
I think that’s big because we don’t want to get banned. We want to follow the terms. Instagram prefers Manychat because they’re partnered with them so just go with Manychat. Essentially what happens is we set this up in Manychat so that when people comment a certain set of words in the comments of one of my Instagram posts, they automatically get a direct message. I’ll give you an example of the one that I use for my free training.
I’m going to break down how we have this set up and the whole sequence of the automation. If you’re having trouble picturing this, go to my Instagram account and comment on any one of my posts, “Free training,” and you’ll see this whole automation in action. If at any point you’re like, “I don’t quite get it,” just do that. My handle is @KendraPerryInc.
I’m going to walk you through how this works for our free training. I read a post. Maybe it’s a Carousel post, a static post, maybe it’s a Reel, or whatever and my call to action is my free training and that’s what I want people to do. I want people to go opt-in for the free training. We have this set up for all our freebies, but I’m going to use the free training as an example.
I’ll tell people, “If you want to get access to my free training which will show you how to make a full-time income in your wellness business, comment the words free training. If you go into the comments and you comment free training, instantly you will get a reply from me that says, ‘I’m sending you the link to your DMs.’” Instantly, you will get a message from me in the DMs.
Again, this is automated. This is what it says. It says, “Hello name.” It’ll say hello, and then your handle. “I’m so pumped that you are ready to make a full-time income in your business. Hooray. Next step, go ahead and enter your first name below.” This all happens. There’s no need for you to click on any link or go anywhere. You are just going to type your first name into the direct message.
Let’s say your first name is Jane. You’ll type in Jane. I’ll say, “Perfect, Jane. Now, can you please drop your best email below?” You’re going to type in your email address. What happens is your first name and your email get sent over to ConvertKit. ConvertKit is my email marketing software. You might use something like AWeber, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or something like that. Whatever you’re using, it will send over that information to your list so then you just got a new email subscriber. That information goes there.
Again, they end up on your email list, they’re going to receive the confirmation email that has the link to your training, and then your email nurture sequence. Whatever you send out in that automation, they are going to receive that. However, instead of them having to go to their email and get that download link, you are going to give them the download link right in a direct message. That’s what I do. I give them the link to the training.
Hopefully, you can see how this is awesome. Instead of them having to go to a page, opt-in, and go to their email, they just type in their first name and email address. That information goes over to your email marketing provider. They get all the emails necessary, but then they get the link to watch or the link to download right in the direct message. They can then click on that link and start watching the training right away or if we’re doing a download, they can access that download right away.
I love that because you can see how seamless it is. It’s because you can imagine, even though it only takes a few seconds for someone to go from your post to the link in your bio, there’s a lot that can happen in that time period. People can get distracted or maybe it feels like too much work or whatever. However, you can see that with this, they automatically get that comment that’s going to give them a notification, then they’re going to automatically get a DM from you that’s also going to give them a notification and then they don’t have to go anywhere. They can give you their name and email and then they get that link to download or that link to watch.
The next thing we do is send out a follow-up message. This goes out 24 hours later and we say, “Hey again, Jane. I hope you love the video. What questions do you have about the training? How can I help?” The purpose of this is to initiate the conversation and this is powerful even though it’s automated because it starts the conversation. Truly, all the magic happens in a direct message. This is a big part of what I teach my students inside the Health Coach Accelerator is DM conversations and DM selling because this is going to happen way faster than other types of selling. It’s because it allows you to build trust and build a relationship with people and have a two-way conversation, which is often missing on social media.
When we post to our social media, we’re only having a one-way conversation. We’re shoving information in people’s faces that could be helpful but when you start a two-way conversation with people, it is powerful. Essentially, what you can do here is you send out that follow-up question and if they don’t answer, you can send out another one maybe 12 hours or 24 hours later and be like, “Just checking in again. I wanted to see if you watched the training,” or whatever. Also, you can do it manually.
If they answer you, if they say, “Kendra, that was good training. I’m wondering about this. I have a question about HCA or this or that.” It allows me to have a conversation with them and follow up with them. Also, I can get a sense that they are interested in signing up for HCA. If so, I can help them come to the empowered decision of whether they want to join or not, or maybe they’re not ready right now, but they have a few questions. However, it allows me to build a relationship with them, follow up with them, and then eventually invite them into my program.
I love this. Could you do this manually? Yes. I used to do this manually for a long time. I would get people to comment on a word and then I would manually send them the link to the thing, but it would be to the opt-in page or to the registration page. They would still have to click on that link, go through the process, and go to their email. I find this so much more streamlined. Since I’ve been implementing this, I’ve been getting a lot more email subscribers. It’s very powerful stuff.
If you want to get this set up for your business, I’m going to link to the woman who has set up all my flows. There are lots of other people who do this just in case she’s not available. I don’t know what her busyness is right now. Again, I do not recommend setting this up yourself because you could get yourself banned. Instagram is very strict with the rules and how frequently you can message people and the type of language you can use. You want to make sure you get someone who knows what they are doing. I hope this helped. I hope you love this strategy.
If you implement this, let me know how it goes and if it’s also helping you grow your email list. If you want to support the show and me and the free content that I bring to you each and every week, I would love it if you could give me a five-star review on iTunes. You can go to RateThisPodcast.com/Wealthy. I hope you have a fantastic day. I will see you next episode at the same time and the same place where I help you become wealthy AF.
Important Links
- Manychat
- Upwork.com
- HireAMarketer.com
- @KendraPerryInc – Instagram
- ConvertKit
- AWeber
- Mailchimp
- ActiveCampaign
- Health Coach Accelerator
- RateThisPodcast.com/wealthy
