How Zohran Mamdani drove over 20K clicks from Instagram DMs
I talk to Gabriella Zutrau, the person behind the campaign's Manychat strategy.
By now we we’ve heard a lot about Zohran Mamdani’s smart use of social media throughout his campaign—but there’s a very specific tool the team used that I want to highlight today. It’s how they turned tangible online enthusiasm into volunteers and votes.
Influencers have been experimenting with it for years. Brands like the New York Times and Notion are now users. Are politicians next? Manychat, the comment-to-DM automation tool, is out to solve the “no one clicks links on social media” problem.
Here’s how it works: accounts can program the tool to automatically DM a user that comments a specific word on a post or simply tags the account in an Instagram Story. There are different flows an account can set up, but one of the most popular is sending a specific link or collecting an email address. Two notoriously hard actions to get users to take on Instagram.
For today’s newsletter, I chatted with Gabriella Zutrau, an independent freelance digital consultant specializing in political and nonprofit communications. She’s the one who pitched Mamdani’s campaign on Manychat and ultimately ended up running the strategy for it. She is also a content creator, managing an account for her influencer dog Edna the Runt—where she experiments with digital tactics like Manychat. Now she’s implementing it across accounts for her clients like MoveOn and Mamdani’s campaign.
I’m particularly interested in how this tool might be used in future political campaigns. Is it effective at turning online enthusiasm into votes? Do followers find it spammy? As Gabriella tells me, the tool helped Mamdani’s account send 77,000 messages—all containing calls to action that supported the campaign in concrete ways. Below she breaks down the results the campaign saw from the tool, the types of automations she set up, and why she thinks all future campaigns should use Manychat.
Rachel Karten: First, how did you get involved with the campaign?
Gabriella Zutrau: I used to do digital for New York State Senator Julia Salazar, another Democratic Socialist elected, serving as her Communications Director, so I had overlapped with some of the campaign’s staff and been aligned goals-wise for years.
When I saw Zohran’s video confronting Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan about the illegal abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, not only did it really move me, but I also saw within an hour that it was gaining an inordinate amount of momentum, followed by a steady uptick in followers. While virality is great, I knew that the question the campaign was likely asking itself was “how do we turn this internet enthusiasm into IRL volunteers and votes?”
I knew I could help because this is the question that all of my clients have—and something I’ve come up with a few solutions for, including utilizing Manychat.
I immediately asked Senator Salazar “who is running comms on Zohran’s campaign?” and she sent me the number for Andrew Epstein, the Communications Director for the campaign.
RK: What’s your experience with Manychat? It’s clear you felt passionate that the campaign understand its benefits.
GZ: A couple of years ago I noticed lifestyle influencers beginning to use Manychat, and it struck me as a potentially very high value organizing and list building tool. Not only was it a super low-friction way to generate click-throughs, it also gets around Instagram’s (alleged) algorithmic down-ranking of posts that direct users to “hit the link in bio” and break their infinite scroll. I was like “WHY IS NO ONE IN POLITICS AND ADVOCACY USING THIS!? Why is this insanely powerful tool being used to sell keto e-books and Canva templates and generate leads for creators, but no one is using this to collect petition signatures, send volunteer RSVP links, or ask for donations??”
After setting up an account for my dog Edna, I then pitched my longtime client MoveOn, a national advocacy and electoral organization, on Manychat as a potential game changer for funneling people off Instagram onto their owned lists. They immediately saw the potential and gave me the green light to begin experimenting with different use cases.
RK: What did your pitch to Mamdani’s team look like?
GZ: In April, just over two months left before the primary, I texted Andrew about how Manychat can be used as a tool to funnel people off of social media onto their owned lists. I explained that, because I have a bad back, I can’t canvass, and digital support was what I could contribute as a volunteer to support the campaign. I initially offered to set up a basic infrastructure and a few reusable message flows, pro bono.
Once Andrew and I got on a call and I was able to explain the benefits of Manychat, he was all-in, and I got right to work setting everything up. I designed a basic series of flows to be able to set it and forget it—but once the initial flows were up and running, the campaign asked me to come on as a consultant. They retained me to build additional Manychat infrastructure and help with other digital strategy like helping build out their email program and running their IG Broadcast Channel.
RK: Talk me through the set up. I've heard it can be cumbersome. What does that process look like?
GZ: Some flows take minutes to build, while others can take hours and may need ongoing maintenance. Their complexity depends on factors like the number of nodes, the types of buttons, the number of conditional responses you want to include, and the ways you want to tag users.
Tailoring the flows by using tags and conditions (e.g. condition: “if user has already received default reply #1, don’t send it to them again” or “if user’s email is unknown, send them to the email collection flow”) is key for making the bot feel more custom and less spammy. I honestly find the cumbersome ones to be the most fun to set up—they are like puzzles and it’s so satisfying to see them work!
The initial set up that I suggested included three simple universal comment-to-DM flows to direct people to the campaign’s most frequent calls to action, and two auto-reply flows—one reply for people who DM’d the campaign and a slightly different one for people who mention @zohrankmamdani in their stories.
Ultimately there were four main types of flows that I built out for them. What they did was:
Respond to hundreds of daily DMs with an ask to volunteer, take a pledge, and/or register to vote (depending on whether or not we already had their email).
Respond to the tens of thousands of times that someone mentioned the account in their stories.
Automatically respond to certain trigger words in comments with specific messages. Rather than just saying “hit the link in bio,” we asked people to comment a specific word or phrase like “CanvassNow” or “vote” to receive a link sent straight to their DMs. Not only is this extremely sick and low-friction from a UX perspective, it also has important algorithmic benefits.
Automatically capture emails natively inside Instagram’s direct messaging platform, without the user needing to click through to any website. This secondary flow asked people to opt in to receiving email by simply typing in their email as a DM message. The bot would then automatically capture that data and send it to our CRM (Mailchimp). This flow captured thousands of emails in a few weeks. I can’t emphasize enough how COOL it is to capture leads from just a text response, but this flow is a little harder to set up well.
RK: Are you able to share some of the results? For example, do you know how many phone bankers or volunteers came through Manychat? Or how many emails you collected?
GZ: Data is one of Manychat’s less robust areas, and if you’re constantly editing and optimizing flows, it can be nearly impossible to keep track of all the numbers you might want. Really granular data requires meticulous tagging. There are some numbers we can be sure of though:
We replied to over 40,000 story mentions and over 16,000 initial direct messages, asking users who messaged the account or tagged the account in their stories to canvass, phone bank, or volunteer another way.
We drove over 20,000 clicks from all flows (auto replies and comment-to-dm).
Users triggered a DM from us by commenting a key word when prompted (like “CanvassNow” or “Bronx”) over 21,000 times, with a click-through rate of 76%, generating over 16,000 clicks. We used this “comment XYZ and we’ll send the link to your DMs” call to action on dozens of posts.
The in-DM email collection flow was one of the last ones I set up, so it only ran for a few weeks, but it collected over 3,000 emails in that time. I don’t have an exact figure for the precise number of Instagram users we added to our email list using Manychat, but my low and conservative estimate is above 10,000.
It would have been impossible to manually respond to all of the people interacting with the account. Manychat allowed us to answer almost every user that sent us a message. Instead of being limited to what we had time and capacity to answer, we sent over 77,000 messages containing calls to action that could support the campaign in concrete ways.
Even more incredibly, it did all of this for just $318 total over the course of just two months—giving us a CPA a little over $0.03, conservatively. I cannot overstate this: these numbers are insane.
RK: Can you see Manychat being used on future campaigns? To me, it feels like a nice complement to the text message campaigning that so many people complain about. It's opt in and delivers information to voters where they are.
GZ: Absolutely. I pretty much feel like any serious electoral campaign should have a chatbot automation strategy—or they should at the very least turn on Instagram’s native FAQ autoreplies, which can also contain clickable links. Any campaign or organization that has a list growth goal and some consistent social media engagement could benefit from using Manychat. If their account begins to go viral and receive an influx of messages, an automation strategy is crucial…unless you want your social staff to lose their minds and/or quit.
Like you said, I think having an IG chatbot is a good complement to other digital engagement strategies, especially in this current environment where people’s phone numbers are being sold en masse, and voters have no choice but to tune out the steady flow of “we need your support now more than ever” text messages that they never even opted into.
It’s very clear that people want to be engaged in the political process, but spammy one-way fundraising and traditional digital tactics are showing their limitations and have trouble breaking through the noise.
As we plan for an iOS update that looks like it could be catastrophic for text message fundraising, alternative routes and complementary tactics are super crucial for campaigns to explore. While Manychat can of course become spammy if you don’t add the right tags and conditions to your flows, there is something more consensual and user centric about Manychat—partially because Meta has its own spam filters that put certain limits on how messages can get sent without explicit opt-ins.
RK: What did you love about working on this campaign?
GZ: One thing that felt special about this campaign was a “why not try it?” attitude—if someone had a great idea, there was a lot of freedom to just let them cook. The most successful digital projects of the 2024 election cycle, like Kamala HQ, also carried this cautious but less risk-averse attitude in their operations and processes, and I feel like it’s going to be a defining characteristic of the political comms successes we’ll see in the near future. The staff behind this campaign are just phenomenal at what they do. Watching comms and field and operations all work in concert here, while executing fresh and original ideas and strategy, was so thirst-quenching and revitalizing. I’m really grateful to the team for trusting that my work could help deliver a win, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of it.
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Fun and informative read!
So cool!