How To Close High-Ticket Sales In Instagram DMs (Even With A Tiny Audience)

When it comes to making sales online, a lot of people think you must either 1) have a BIG audience that you can blast loads of automated messages to.

Or 2) spend HOURS cold DM’ing strangers in hopes they respond to your offer, let alone actually BUY from you.

I know you’ve probably heard that “sales is simply a numbers game” but that is not entirely true, and I’m going to prove it to you.

I’ve closed thousands of dollars in high-ticket sales through my Instagram DMs with NO sales calls, NO sales page and NO relentless cold outreach.

And I know what you’re thinking, “Alex, you have a large audience!! Of course, this strategy works for you.”

But I’m going to stop you right there because one of my mastermind members JUST made $100K in a few days with the same strategy that I’m about to show you. She has just over 2000 Instagram followers, but she offers a highly targeted and high-value service to her clients.

I’m telling you, this works no matter how small your audience is, and it gets more and more effective over time as you continue to create trust with your audience and build your personal brand.

I call it my Push Pull Sales Strategy, and it’s 2 easy steps.

First, I’ll show you how I use Manychat and DM automation to get highly qualified leads to RAISE THEIR HAND and show interest. So that’s step 1.

Then, I’ll share my targeted follow-up strategy for converting these leads into customers. That’s step 2. All without coming across as spammy or sending hundreds of desperate cold messages. 

I’ll even share with you an exact DM I sent that closed a $3,000 sale in just a few seconds.

But first, in case you’ve been living under a rock and don’t already know what Manychat is, let me introduce you to the tool that massively leveled up my marketing and is the sponsor of today’s post.

Manychat is a chatbot tool that allows businesses to automate interactions and engagement with their audience in a conversational and personalized way.

The best part is that you decide what your chatbot says and does after a user comments on or replies to your content – whether it’s delivering a free resource, promoting a sale, or starting a conversation in the DMs.

You simply build your chat sequence once based on a keyword that YOU select, and it does the hard work for you. It’s so easy to set up that you can even do it from your phone.

Now, I use Manychat exclusively for generating leads and driving sales through Instagram DMs and comments.

But you can absolutely use Manychat for Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email marketing too.

It’s a game-changer, and I dropped a link below for you to check it out with a special code to get started for free.

Which will definitely help you out with STEP 1 of my Push Pull Sales Strategy.

Step 1: Automation 

So as I mentioned, the first thing you want to do is get HIGHLY QUALIFIED people to raise their hand and say, “Oh hey, I’m kind of interested in this!”

But the problem with most “push” marketing on social media is that you really have no idea who is actually interested and paying attention to what you’re sharing, and who is just a bystander, your second cousin, your old friend from high school.

So you just sort of spray your offer all over the place and pray people see it and take immediate action. Aka buy from you or sign up for your services. I call this the spray and pray method.

BUT, and you’ve heard me talk about this before. Most people need a LOT more time and touch points with you before they are willing to take out their credit card or hop on a call with you. Especially now in this “skepticonomy” ™. 

So your first goal should NOT be to get the sale. That’s a tall order.

Your first and only goal here should be to get as many interested and qualified leads as possible to make themselves known to you. You want them to raise their hand in some sort of way that tells you, “hey, this lead is worth following up with.”

That’s it.

Now, of course, you could argue that a simple “like” of an Instagram post or “view” of your Instagram story is expressing interest, but I disagree.

While those metrics are great for measuring engagement, we all know we watch people’s stories all the time that we didn’t intentionally seek out, and we often “like” content based purely on the visuals alone. It’s not a TRUE gauge of actual interest.

So what if you had a way to automatically separate the real leads from the regular lurkers?

That’s where Manychat comes in. By asking someone to comment a KEYWORD to get something, they are doing far more than a few quick subconscious taps of the finger to express interest.

Let me give you an example:

During the last promotion of my flagship program, the Copy Posse Launchpad, we used Manychat to get people to comment “Season 6” if they were interested in learning more about the program.

We got hundreds of people raising their hands and, of course, used Manychat to instantly deliver the link to the enrollment page in their DMs. Great. 

But here’s the mistake 99% of people make.

This is where they STOP. They automate the process of delivering the offer link to their highly qualified lead and think “I guess my job here is done. I’ll just let the sales page and funnel do the work now.’

You see where I am going with this, right? Now, listen, if this is all being done to get people to sign up to your email list to get something for something FREE, cool. I say, let your landing page and funnel do the work. I love using Manychat for list building, by the way.

But when you’re trying to CLOSE SALES, especially high-ticket sales.

My friends, the real work has only just begun. 

I’m only going to say this once, so pay attention:

If someone comments a keyword under your post to get something, then reads your DM, and then takes action by clicking the link in your DM. That is a HOT LEAD and they are WAY more likely to say yes to whatever it is you’re offering.

And what do most businesses do? They ignore them. 

Like, can you imagine if someone walked into your store, picked up an item, and then you just hid behind the counter, hoping they’d figure it out themselves?!

What if they have questions? What if they have doubts, concerns, or objections?

99% of the time, they’re just going to walk away without buying anything, or without saying a single word.

So this is where Step 2 comes into play.

Step 2: Personalization 

Now that you know WHO your most qualified and interested leads are, thanks to Manychat, NOW is when you want to follow up with them and start a 1:1 conversation.

This is when “pull” marketing comes into play. Instead of pushing even harder –  and blasting out even more automated DMs.

You pull people in with a personalized follow-up message.

If you only take ONE thing away from this post, it should be this. Automation gets attention. Personalization gets the sale.

Now, of course, you could just manually follow up with every single person who commented with a keyword on your content.

But that would take forever, and if they didn’t engage with your DM, they probably aren’t really that interested anyway.

So here’s what we do instead.

Inside Manychat, we take a look at all the people who commented on the keyword AND ALSO clicked the link that we sent them and they still didn’t buy – for whatever reason.

Btw this is important because in order to get the link they had to consent to receiving more messages and updates from us in the DMs (which is another awesome feature of Manychat).

So, we then send a message to those people to let them know we saw they checked out our program and that we’re here to answer any questions they have. This opens the door for a really valuable 1:1 conversation.

The message I send might look like this one I sent here.

That’s it. No pressure, no pitch. Just a human conversation.

I can’t even tell you how powerful this level of personalized segmentation and follow-up is.

Not just for sales, but for starting real conversations with our audience, understanding what our customers need, and most importantly, BUILDING TRUST. 

Even if this conversation doesn’t lead to a sale.

It often WILL shed light on a question or objection that other people are likely having too. 

Which you can THEN address in your marketing emails or social posts. So here’s how the rest of this particular 1:1 conversation went.

And you can see they were looking for a discount, which I couldn’t offer to them to be fair to my other customers.

But I was able to offer a slightly extended payment plan to help make it more accessible for them. 

They needed a little extra time to think about it. I said no problem. 

And guess what? This person joined the Launch Pad! It was literally that simple. 

Now, obviously, not every single person you follow up with 1:1 will become a customer. 

For this specific Launch Pad Season 6 promotion, we had a 6.25% conversion rate from all the people we followed up with, which is pretty good. 

But even the people who didn’t buy still absolutely LOVED this personalized follow-up strategy.

It’s not intrusive or annoying the way endless automations can be.

When you show up personally, not just as ‘the brand,’ but as YOU. That’s how trust is built. Which as you can see here, might not lead to a direct sale for THIS promotion, but in this case, they did end up purchasing something else that was a better fit.

And I’ve had many cases like this where they weren’t ready for the financial obligation YET, but because of the 1:1 conversation and communication, they came back and purchased later. 

So yes, automation is AMAZING for getting attention and getting those hands raised. But personalization is what closes sales. So follow up. Ask questions. Start a conversation.

Because at the end of the day, people don’t buy from funnels. They buy from HUMANS.

Automation gets attention. Personalization gets the sale – write that down!

How You Can Use This Strategy

Honestly, this works for any business no MATTER the size of your following. If you think there’s no point in using a tool like Manychat because you only get a few comments on your content, here’s a new perspective.

The way Manychat allows you to automatically DM instant links and resources to your most engaged followers ALONE makes this tool a no-brainer. But then add in the ability to segment, follow up and start 1:1 conversations with qualified leads, and it is a freaking GAME-CHANGER. 

I’ve been using Manychat since 2020, when my audience was wayyyyyyy smaller btw, and since then, I’ve started conversations with tens of thousands of new qualified leads and have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.

Setting up an automation with Manychat literally takes 5 minutes, you can do it right from the app on your phone – it’s so easy. 

I have an entire blog post showing you how to do that, so if you need help setting it up, read this post.

And, as the sponsor of today’s post, Manychat is going to give you your first month of Manychat PRO for free – just use code: ALEX at checkout.

And if you want more strategies to grow your business WITHOUT douchey sales and marketing tactics, I’m your girl. Subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss my next post.

Until next time, I’m Alex. Ciao for now!

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