If you’re yet to try a Facebook Sponsored Message, which allow you to bypass the 24 hour rule, then here’s a powerful strategy I’ve used that generated 5x ROI.
Many of you may have heard about “botgeddon” or the Facebook Messenger rules change, which limits your contact with your subscribers to just the first 24 hours after they’ve interacted with your chatbot.
(You can read more about these changes in my post here.)
Here, I’ll unpack the exact Facebook Sponsored Message strategy I used just for you. Stick around to the end, where I’ll give you some links to resources to help you improve your conversational copywriting to make bank, too!
The Purpose Of My Facebook Sponsored Message
I wanted to use my sponsored message to tell my subscribers about my LinkedIn Strategy blog post, How This Magic LinkedIn Message Strategy Landed 100+ Email Addresses of High-Ticket Prospects (Without Making Me Feel Like a Salesy Slimeball…).

Setting Up The Facebook Sponsored Message Ad
In ManyChat’s Ads feature, I set the lifetime budget at $100, and bid control at $400. It’s probably not high enough to deliver to the entire audience of 490 subscribers, but Facebook has no recommendations for any of these parameters, so we all play a game of trial and error as people have set their bid controls to $10,000 and still it only delivers to half of their list.
I had created a Custom Audience in Facebook Ads Manager of all my current subscribers. You need to deliver to a Custom Audience because delivering to your existing audience will also send it to those who have unsubscribed (by default).

Facebook Sponsored Message Copy
In the first message, we have character limits, so the button will open up to a flow to deliver more information.
So the first message has to do a few things:
1. Create enough interest for people to open it and click through
2. Clearly tell my subscribers what they’ll be getting once they do click through
As my background is as a journalist, I learned the importance of headlines and conveying as much information in a few words as possible, so I put this in practice with sponsored messages.
Here’s what I wrote:

So you can see it fits in with my overall tone of voice, it ties into the blog post, and captures attention to make people want to click through.
I’ve also used emojis to add some humour and be friendly. Remember, your message is being sent to someone’s phone, so it’s immediate. It will interrupt their day with a notification, so you want them to click through, but you also want them to understand it will be worthwhile if they do.
When creating your copy, remember to think of what message will get their attention but compel them to open. Think about what you’re offering them in the message, and what benefits they’ll receive if they click on your button.
Speaking of buttons, don’t neglect them! They also provide a valuable way for you to communicate to your subscribers. In this one, I’ve put “No More Slimeballs” which fits in with my blog post copy, but it’s also a fun button for people to click through, as opposed to “Learn More” or “Read Blog”.
My Facebook Sponsored Message Ad Strategy
My Sponsored Message was to promote my latest blog post. On my blog post landing page, I had a $7 product upsell as well as a free LinkedIn guide delivered by Facebook Messenger pop-up.
Here’s the message subscribers receive after they clicked “No More Slimeballs” button:

The Results
My Sponsored Message had 287 impressions, with 29 clicks and 54 optins, at a cost of a tiny 11 cents per message.
The ad appeared to only deliver for 48 hours then stopped.
Here are the stats:

BUT… Here’s the REAL results that you want to see.
From my ad spend of just $6.90 on this message, I received 5 sales of my $7 product, which equals $35 on autopilot.
So here’s my favourite equation:
$6.90 on ads, 5 sales @ $7 each = $35 on autopilot.

BOOM!
The Difference Between Facebook Ads (Traffic Ads) & Facebook Sponsored Messages
Next, I wanted to test the same post to cold traffic (not my bot subscribers) using a newsfeed ad with a traffic objective to get it in front of as many people as possible to see what the difference would be to my sponsored message.
Here’s the ad I created:

And here are the results:

I spent $46.86 over 48 hours, with 53 link clicks, 24 landing page views, and a cost of $1.95 per landing page view, and I made ZERO sales.
I do understand that this is to COLD traffic not to my bot audience, which is warm or hot, as they are already familiar with me; however, I didn’t even get a single curious optin to my free LinkedIn guide pop-up from that ad.
Zip. Zilch. Nada.
So that’s why I prefer sponsored messages. 🙌🏻
The Reasons My Facebook Sponsored Message Generated 5x ROI
I gave my audience something they truly longed for
I noticed a lot of my Facebook friends thought LinkedIn was a cesspool and really didn’t offer any value to their business. My blog post answered a need, and also outlined how to use a messaging strategy on LinkedIn that really worked to bypass all of the icky sales pitches. So make sure you offer for your sponsored message is truly irresistible!
The message was compelling enough for them to want to learn more
The first message was exciting enough with the copy and a dash of humour, so they wanted to click through to find out more.
Remember: copywriting can generate millions of dollars of new business, so don’t ever ignore your copywriting!
The upsell was affordable at $7
The upsell was a “tripwire” price of $7, and something that gave my subscribers back their time and a shortcut to better leads. They also had instructions on how to use it right away with my blog post, and I already could prove the results as I had trialled the strategy for a year.
Time to try it out…
So there you have it!
Now, you can go and try this for yourself, but if you would like my 7 powerful tactics that master copywriters use to help make your dreaded cashflow problems DISAPPEAR… 👻
👉 Click here to read my blog post to unlock the 7 tactics you can use to generate results starting today!
Or if you want to take a deep dive…
Give me 30 minutes, and I’ll talk you through, step by step, the powerful copywriting techniques that I use daily that generated 5x ROI in my masterclass. 💸
👉 Click here to get lifetime access to my masterclass, The 3 C’s – Copywriting, Chatbots & Cash.