Amazon Rebates, ManyChat & the Email List Flywheel

It’s 2020, and the hot method for launching products is rebates.

ManyChat, the popular way to build and run rebate funnels, has become a staple tool for Amazon launch experts. But recently, a lot of people we talked to have raised concerns about changes to Facebook’s terms of service in regards to messaging, as well as a spate of bans and suspensions.

That’s why we built a new feature – rebate landing pages. Our new way to build rebate funnels is designed to work alongside, or in place of Messenger, for sellers who are concerned about Facebook’s TOS, and the reduced value of building a list on Messenger.

Launch expert Tony Brooks (owner of marketing agency Brand Conqueror) helped design and test the feature, to ensure it provides sellers what they need to launch in an effective and sustainable way. Tony sat down with us to discuss the landscape of rebates & ManyChat, as well as his experience with rebate landing pages.

Check out our chat in the video below, and scroll down to read a summary of the key points of discussion.

“We’ve been searching for an alternative [to ManyChat], because we have clients who are scared of losing their messaging capabilities.

I’ve shifted some of my clients completely onto LandingCube. Some I’m using ManyChat for, sometimes for a client we use both.

It helps me sleep at night knowing that I have an alternative method and an alternative funnel that I can drive traffic to.”

Tony on how he uses LandingCube & ManyChat.

Tony’s been using ManyChat to launch products for 2-3 years. When he started, it was the wild west – no rules, you could message people whenever. This was up until about a year ago (late 2019), when Facebook changed their terms to where you could only message people within 24 hours of last contact.

As with most things in Amazon & online marketing, there is a workaround.

Messenger Tags

A lot of people had been getting around the new restrictions by tagging messages with one of several tags Facebook introduced:

CONFIRMED_EVENT_UPDATE
POST_PURCHASE_UPDATE
ACCOUNT_UPDATE
HUMAN_AGENT

However, Facebook has started cracking down on people using these tags, taking action on anyone who has been using these tags for promotional purposes.

As a result, a lot of brands had messaging privileges removed temporarily on their Facebook page, which means they can’t even reply to normal messages from their customers during this time.

The Declining Value of Your Messenger List

While ManyChat works well for launches, you’re paying all this money for Facebook ads, but you can’t actually use your audience, as Facebook severely limits your ability to contact them.

The only way to build a list you can really control is an email list – which is why at LandingCube we developed email capture rebate landing pages, which Tony has been beta testing.

Diversifying Your Sales Channels

Tony had been looking for an alternative to ManyChat, even before accounts started getting warned – because he didn’t want this to be his only way to drive traffic, especially when it’s a platform you have no control over, and you don’t own the list you’re building.

Now, for some clients he’s using only LandingCube, some only ManyChat, some a mix of the two. Overall, he’s seeing similar results for the rebate landing pages as he had for rebates via ManyChat.

Results aside, he mentions how much easier it is to sleep at night, knowing he has more than one option to drive traffic. You never want to be in the position where a Facebook suspension shuts off all traffic to your funnel.

How Tony Uses Rebate Landing Pages

Tony places the rebate landing page on his Shopify store, where he uses it sometimes alongside ManyChat, and sometimes as his main funnel.

One of the advantages of being able to place your rebate funnel on your own site, like this, is that it results in residual buying traffic from people who stick around and browse the rest of your store.

Rebate landing pages also work very well when you’re using an email list to launch. With email, some customers don’t want to click through to Facebook. Tony’s team finds success in offering options for a ManyChat flow or a landing page. The customer can choose which they are most comfortable with.

Giving that additional option results in more conversions and sales you otherwise would have missed.

The Flywheel Effect

An email list acts as what we call a “flywheel”. Meaning, each email you capture keeps working for you and providing value in the future.

Think of it like this – you drive a sale from Facebook Ads without capturing any contact info, you get the value of that one sale, and that’s it.

However, if you capture an email, you can use that email to ask for a review, and market to that customer over and over in the future.

The value you can extract from that subscriber often far eclipses the value of a single sales + a boost in rankings.

Capturing Messenger subscribers used to provide a similar effect. Not anymore, however, with stricter rules by the day on how you can contact these subscribers.

The Facebook Pixel is another flywheel, which rebate landing pages allow you to use. As you get more people coming to your landing pages, and either converting or bouncing, you get a more sophisticated reading on who your target demographics are. This lets you constantly improve your Facebook Ads targeting, cutting down the cost of each subsequent ad campaign.

Utilizing flywheels like those we discuss here don’t give an immediate impact, so it’s easy to think there are other strategies that are more “worth it”. But by thinking long-term, you’ll eventually build up extremely powerful assets, which will take you ahead of your short-sighted competitors.

Summing Up

To sum up, one of the things that made ManyChat so powerful was the ability to send follow up messages to your customers – especially to ask for reviews. Facebook has taken that away now.

So while ManyChat is a worthwhile tool for launching, it doesn’t give you the ongoing value you get from an email subscriber. You may find you get more long-term value by using rebate landing pages to launch.

Whether or not rebate landing pages will replace Messenger in your launch strategy, they offer a great alternative and a backup plan if you find yourself victim to Facebook’s strict terms of service.

Diversification, and a “plan B” is important – that’s what you get with LandingCube’s newest feature.