Tech Tuesdays: How to Convert Your Best Followers Into Engaged Omni-Channel Subscribers
Introducing the VIP Strategy: A system for automatically channeling your best social media followers into your own list of VIP subscribers
Tech Tuesdays is a special type of post for the Impact Generation newsletter. In these issues, we will break down a system for completing one step in your selling solution.
Up first is our VIP Strategy which is a system to automatically channel your best social media followers into your own list of subscribers.
Introduction
If you are a social media influencer with a decent following, you could be sitting on a small fortune. But building your business primarily on social media is a risky venture. What you need is a system that automatically channels your best followers into your own list of engaged VIP subscribers.
The magic that makes this happen is called the VIP Strategy.
Before we jump into the details, it’s important to understand why you need to implement this process as soon as possible.
Social Media is Shaky Ground
If your business model relies heavily on a social media platform, here are five reasons why you are on shaky ground.
You are building your business on borrowed territory - Your audience does not belong to you. It belongs to Meta or Google. They can take it away at any moment and they don’t have to give you a specific reason.
Content churn for little algorithm love - You are forced to post multiple times per day since each post is only shown to a small percentage of your followers.
The Algorithm Shuffle - When you build a business on social media, you are always chasing the algorithm. This is a race you will never win. Last year, Instagram started to favor reels over images in order to compete with TikTok, the upstart video social media platform.
Highly distorted ecosystem in which to sell - The average social media newsfeed is bombarded with dozens of offers every single minute. Why would you want to compete against so much distraction?
Risk of shadow ban or outright cancellation - The number of allowable opinions keeps shrinking in our culture. All of the social media platforms gleefully cancelled accounts during election season and the pandemic.
When your account gets cancelled, your audience disappears overnight. And good luck trying to get someone at Meta to take your call.
So what about social media?
If you are a sovereign creator, social media is great for one thing: lead generation. This requires that you channel a percentage of your best followers into an engaged list of subscribers.
This is the purpose of the VIP Strategy.
Overview of the VIP Strategy
The VIP Strategy is straightforward.
The idea is to invite your social media audience into an inner circle or VIP group. The psychology behind a VIP group is that you are giving followers what they most desire: more intimate contact with you, your brand, and your products.
This gives you direct access to an audience without the interference of an algorithm or the distortions inherent in social media.
You control the level of intimacy
An important factor with the VIP Strategy is that you control the level of intimacy and benefits for this VIP group. You decide how open you want to be.
Your only goal is to make this group feel important, like VIPs.
You can do this via coupons, special merchandise, special communications, or even live streamed events. For example, one of our clients sends out a weekly newsletter with updates on his band. But this is ONLY available for those in his VIP group.
The Mechanics of the VIP Strategy
There are only two steps to the VIP Strategy:
Invite your followers into a VIP group
Use a dynamic conversation (chatbot) to collect an email.
We’ll tackle these one at a time.
Invite Your Followers into a VIP Group
The easiest way to invite your followers into your VIP group is via your social media banner(s).
Here is an optimized banner for a Facebook page (with instructions).
Image: Hero shot of you in action or that captures emotion / story.
Impact Message: Join [Name’s] Inner Circle VIP (or VIP Group) or whatever you feel comfortable saying.
Call to action – Click here on a big button.
Clicking the button launches your lead generation system. For the Impact Generation, this means a chatbot.
Adaptations of the Template
This template can be adapted for any social media platform that has a banner or portal (for example, YouTube).
For Instagram, you would need to communicate the same message as the banner above. We suggest you place it in a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your bio:
Join Sara’s VIP Group.
Click the link => Join VIP Group
You can also create posts and reels from time to time that communicate this offer.
Lead Generation Chatbot
Once someone clicks on your link, or sends you a direct message, you will then launch your lead generation chatbot.
NOTE: You can send people to an e-mail opt-in form, but opt-in rates tend to be low (15%-20%). With chatbots, we are getting a 60-80% opt-in rate. This is one of the main reasons to incorporate chatbots into your subscriber system.
You want to think of a chatbot as connecting a pipeline to the river of activity that is flowing through your account. Its sole purpose is to redirect a portion of your followers into your VIP group.
Here is an example of our lead generation chatbot.
Lead with the same image from your optimized banner.
Confirm visitor’s interest in joining your VIP Group.
Request an email. Within Messenger, the email is pre-populated which increases opt-ins and reduces errors.
Acknowledge VIP subscription and say goodbye.
Make an offer – This is the perfect time to reward your subscribers by making a VIP offer.
The beauty of using a chatbot is that it flows like a dynamic conversation. There are interactive choices that provide a different experience than a static landing page. In addition, you can use any form of media to communicate inside of your messages (text, image, audio, and even video). Finally, this approach gives you two channels of communication with your peeps: via e-mail or direct message.
From here, you would have a nurture follow-up strategy to convert your best subscribers into Lifetime Customers™. (This is a post for another day.)
Summary and Conclusion
The VIP Strategy takes advantage of the normal activity within your social media account. It works because there will always be a group of followers who want to come closer to you and to your brand.
The VIP Strategy converts your best followers into engaged omni-channel subscribers. From here, it is up to you to convert them into happy and repeat customers.
Here’s to your success!
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