Case Study: Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano x ShopPop
Tomorrow's White Day, the day exactly one month after Valentine’s Day. In countries that observe this holiday, Valentine’s Day is usually celebrated by girls and women buying gifts for boys and men.
One month later, on White Day, they're expected to return the favor by buying their female lovers gifts. Popular White Day gifts include cookies, jewellery, white chocolate, and marshmallows.
Dutch DJ and record production duo, Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano did something entirely different to celebrate the day of love a month ago. We show you how they used Messenger to let fans surprise their lovers in this totally unique Valentine’s Day campaign.
The set up: Comment-to-Messenger to gather Valentine’s DMs
The dynamic DJ duo started off their campaign with a Facebook post, for which they set up a Comment-to-Messenger rule. Anyone who commented on the post received an automatic response in Messenger.
This is what the post said:
Always wanted to send your crush a message but never had the courage? Comment a ❤️ (or anything else) and we’ll do it for you! Let’s make this your best Valentine’s Day yet! 🌹
And this is what that looked like on Facebook.
The post included a ‘Send Message’ CTA and the team over at Moon Jelly Agency set up a Comment-to-Messenger rule that made sure anyone who commented triggered the campaign flow.
The campaign flow: a simple chat form in Messenger
Next up, people who entered the Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano Messenger channel had to answer a few simple questions:
- What’s your Valentine crush’s Instagram handle?
- What secret Valentine message should we send them?
- Would you like us to mention who it’s from, or would you rather stay anonymous?
You can set this up so the answers are stored in custom fields linked to your audience’s user properties.
With the click of a button, export the specific segment of your audience that participated in the campaign and you’ve got all that information ready in one place.
Here’s what this flow would look like in the chat-editor:
Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano started their campaign on the 8th of February. The only thing they needed to do was let it run until the 14th, gathering data on auto-pilot. On Valentine’s Day, they could simply start forwarding their fans' messages, one by one, on Instagram.
The results - spreading the Valentine’s Day DM love
On February 14th, the team behind this Valentine’s Day campaign (shout out Moon Jelly Agency) sent out the messages that were gathered through Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano’s Comment-to-Messenger post.
Here's what that looked like. We’ve redacted the names involved in these conversations, for obvious reasons 🤫.
One by one, they hit up Sunnery James and Ryan Marciano’s fans’ Valentine crushes in their Instagram inboxes.
As to be expected, the reactions were nothing short of amazing.
Imagine getting a personal message from these DJ superstars, written by your loved one.
It’s an original and creative way to boost fan engagement and strengthen positive brand association.
Apart from that, it’s also a lot of fun for everyone involved, of course!
Crying tears of joy, that is, of course ☝ If this isn’t true love, we don't know what is...
What did the people behind this campaign think of it?
We asked Mees Berkouwer from the Moon Jelly Agency team a few questions about their experiences running this campaign for Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano.
What issues did you run into?
When we came up with the idea of sending out fans' Valentines messages, we immediately ran into a few issues.
First up: How are we going to organize all those messages, and in the end, successfully deliver them to the right person?
It was extremely helpful to have all answers and Instagram handles saved in our custom fields.
This made it way easier to copy/paste all answers to Instagram DM, where we sent all the messages sent. Apart from this, it is very important to keep the DM rules of Instagram in mind:
If you send out too many messages within a small amount of time, your Instagram DM inbox will be banned for 24 hours. Luckily, we were aware of this, and we were able to successfully send out all messages.
How did fans respond?
The recipients' responses were lovely to see. Everyone was completely surprised they received a message from Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, and felt so blessed that someone sent over such a beautiful Valentines Day message.
You've just seen some of the examples above, but those were just a few of the hundreds of messages we received. In the end, the responses were all messages filled with pure love and positivity 💝.
What were the biggest benefits for the artists?
A campaign like this really affects the image of an artist in a positive way, we think. By running this campaign, every follower got to see that Sunnery & Ryan forwarded all these messages to fans, which is something lovely to do.
Moreover, we received way more engagement on our organic posts about this campaign, and collected over 500 new contacts in our ShopPop database.
Any important takeaways or lessons learned?
We think this campaign is the perfect example of how both the artist and the fan are positively influenced.
The artist has collected some data, spread positive energy, and activated their audience. The fans had the opportunity to be in contact with Sunnery & Ryan, and to send their lover a message.
It is always important to keep two things in mind when releasing a Messenger campaign: what is in it for us, and what is in it for the fans?
Always make sure the fans are positively influenced, and that they leave the campaign in a good mood!
Or why don't you connect with ShopPop directly through Messenger at https://m.me/shoppophq