How This Beverage Brand Used Facebook Messenger Automation On Shopify Plus To Make $280,000 In Extra Monthly Revenue

Let’s do this.

What Is Skinny Mixes? 

You know how when you go to a Starbucks, a restaurant, or your favorite bar, and they can make you anything from a hazelnut coffee to a strawberry margarita? Well, Skinny Mixes sells syrups that allow you to be a barista or bartender right from home, and the best part is that everything is zero-calorie. 

“We all wanted a drink with few calories and less sugar. So, I figured if my friends wanted it, and I wanted it, then women everywhere must want something like Skinny Mixes,” – Jordan Engelhardt, Founder of Skinny Mixes

After a year and a half of recipe tweaking, Skinny Mixes launched in 2009 with their best-selling Skinny Margarita Mix. Today they are growing quickly online (with Shopify Plus, Klaviyo, and Octane AI) and via their retail partners like Bed Bath & Beyond.

But, like most online brands, a large percentage of people coming to the Skinny Mixes website were leaving without completing a purchase (most brands only convert 1% to 3% of site visitors).

A customer can give your brand permission to message them on Facebook. This can happen when they go to your Facebook page and message you, if they click an Octane AI powered button on your website, or even if they leave a comment on one of your posts.

The same way you automate emails, you can now automate interactive messages on Facebook. Once a customer has given you permission to message them on Facebook, you can use Octane AI to automatically trigger messages that are personalized to that specific customer’s journey. 

• Cart abandonment
• Browse abandonment
• Welcome series
• Replenishment
• Order confirmation
• Delivery confirmation
• Custom

• Facebook messages vibrate your customer’s phone with a push notification.
• Messages are free to send.
• Messages are interactive. Customers can push buttons to send messages back or complete purchases, and this data can be saved and used for retargeting on Messenger, email, SMS, and ads.

Additional superpowers of Facebook Messenger automation:

• A customer can send you their phone number by pushing one button! When they do this it goes into a list on Octane AI that you can use to send SMS announcements to.
• A customer can send you their email address by pushing one button. You can use Octane AI’s Klaviyo integration to instantly send this email address, and all available data, to Klaviyo. You can literally segment email automations based on what customers message you.
• You can create click to Messenger ads on Facebook where you get the ability to send follow up messages to anyone who clicks your ad!

With billions of people messaging through Facebook every month, tapping into Messenger is an easy way to quickly increase revenue.

The Problem Skinny Mixes Was Running Into

Skinny Mixes didn’t so much have problems — they were already doing very well — but they had leaky parts of their funnel that, if addressed correctly, could be (and were!) turned into huge profit drivers for their business.

Here are the problems (opportunities!) that Skinny Mixes was dealing with:

• Most site visitors didn’t submit their email address or give any contact information. This meant that Skinny Mixes wasn’t able to follow up with any direct communication to customers who didn’t convert, but instead had to rely on chasing them around the internet with retargeting ads.
• Most site visitors who did submit their email weren’t opening the emails sent to them. Again, this isn’t specific to Skinny Mixes — if you compared their email open rates to yours, they might be doing even better than you. This is about email in general — it’s just not the channel that most people spend their time and that naturally means that emails get opened a lot less than they did 5 or 10 years ago. You can have the best abandoned cart email series ever but if the emails aren’t being opened, it’s never going to bring that customer back.

What Skinny Mixes needed to do was increase the percentage of new site visitors who went on to give contact information. If they could achieve this — even slightly — it would result in a huge increase in revenue.

This is exactly what we helped them do. We took conversational automation techniques that we’ve used to generate millions of dollars and we applied it to the Skinny Mixes website.

The Conversational Automation Strategy We Used to Increase Skinny Mixes Monthly Revenue by $100k to $280k

Improving Opt-Ins by 2X

Here’s the thing: when someone lands on your online store and you ask for an email address, that actually takes a lot of work for the customer to type out.

1. They have to review the offer and think if they want to give you their email address.
2. They have to click into the text field.
3. They have to type their email address out.
4. They have to hit submit.

“Matt, what are you talking about? There are only four steps here!? This only takes a few seconds?!“

I know — I hear you — but every time you ask the customer to do something, no matter how small, you give them another opportunity to get distracted and change their mind. When you collect email there are four times the customer can drop off and fail to connect with you.

So how do we solve this? How can we reduce the number of decision points a customer has to deal with in order to connect with Skinny Mixes? 

This is where Facebook Messenger comes in.

So what did we do? We used the Octane AI platform to implement a one-click subscribe button for Skinny Mixes customers to connect on Facebook Messenger.

Customers who click this button are able to receive automated follow up messages from Skinny Mixes (similar to email but with higher open and click through rates).