Episode #053: How We Converted at 17.39% In Our Recent Launch
How We Converted at 17.39% In Our Recent Launch
Hey hey not so average marketer, welcome back to another episode of the podcast, where we break down what's working now in the online marketing world.
On this episode of the show we're talking about our most recent launch and how we were able to convert 17.39% of people who joined our launch into our backend paid offer (our $49/month membership).
When you tune in you'll discover...
The NUMBERS from our launch, profit, revenue, conversions, and more!
Our (now) not-so-secret-strategy for using direct mail to create an epic conversion rate on our launch
The power of making your audience feel seen (and heard) in your launch, and my favorite ways to do it.
The importance of "high-touch" marketing in 2023 - and how you can leverage it to generate more sales!
I can't wait to hear what you think, and as always DM me over on Instagram @heartsoulhustle with what you enjoyed most about this episode!
Links Mentioned:
Bonjoro Video App (Affiliate Link)
Thanks.io Postcard Service (Affiliate Link)
Full Transcript:
Speaker 1:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 53, and in this episode we're talking about how we got our launch to convert at 17%. Yes, that means for every 100 people that signed up for our launch, 17 of them bought our product. So if you want to learn how we did it and why we think it worked so well and some strategies you can use to get results, then this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. I almost said I'm so excited for today's episode, but I say that every episode because I'm always excited to be talking to you. So let's just pretend that I didn't almost say it and get into the good [inaudible 00:00:43]. So I want to start by saying that we use kind of a clickbaity title if we're being totally honest with each other about converting our launch at 17%. But I'm not sitting here on this episode saying like, "Oh, here is how to convert your launch at 17%," or, "Here's exactly what to do and you'll get a 17% conversion too." Rather, what I want to do is take you behind the scenes of our most recent launch, give you the context for it, and tell you some of these strategies and things that we put in place that I think contributed to us having a really, really successful launch.
So for those who don't know, we recently did a Facebook and Instagram ad for List Building Bootcamp, and we charge $10 for people to join the bootcamp. And the bootcamp was essentially our five-day challenge launch system, which we teach inside the Challenge Launch Toolkit, which is our $37 product on Launching with Challenges. But we refined it a little bit and we charge for the challenge, and we do that because we find that people show up at a higher rate, engage at a higher rate, and buy at a higher rate. If you're listening to this going, "oh, should I charge for a five-day challenge?" You can. Just know we have a big audience and a bunch of affiliates, which makes it easier to get people signed up because it's hard to get people to sign up for something low ticket when you don't have an audience.
It's a lot easier when you have an audience and affiliates. So first things first, we charged for this bootcamp, it was $10, and then over the course of five days, we taught people how to run Facebook ads to grow their email list. And literally we had people running Facebook ads by the end of day two, like literally in the ads manager clicking buttons, publishing their content and generating leads. Okay? The reason I tell you that is because I want you to understand that when you charge or when we charge for a low ticket offer, we want to make sure that people have massive value and really tangible transformations as a result of joining. Okay?
So we charged $10, we ended up getting 690 people signed up for this challenge, which I was just gobsmacked by. It was like crazy unexpected. Up to this point, our largest promotion has been 236 people signed up, and this time we had over 600 people, 650 people sign up. We had a 2.92x increase in our largest paid launch signup to date. So that was pretty darn cool, and we'll talk about how we did that as well. But before we dive into what worked so well, I want to talk to you really quickly about the high level stats because I know you guys love these numbers.
We've talked about it on the show before and we get really good feedback. So basically, to get people signed up for the challenge, we had affiliates and anyone who referred someone to the challenge got the full $10 that they spent in the challenge. So if you referred somebody to the challenge, they paid $10 to join the person that referred, you got that full $10. So we ended up referring 387 people into the challenge from affiliates and 303 people that signed up internally or through our advertising and emails. So right from the start of the challenge, we had generated $3,030 in revenue, technically not in profit because we had expenses and technically only 3000 because the other 3,800 was from, went right to affiliates. So once we did that, we ended up generating 120 sales of our membership from the 690 people that signed up. So that's a 17.39% conversion rate.
If you want the really tangible numbers, of people that signed up from affiliates, 13.95% of them, or 54 of them ended up joining the membership. And of those that came internally, 66 out of the 303 that signed up internally or non-affiliate joined the membership at a rate of 21.78%. So I know I've talked about the membership on this show before, and I kind of just jumped into this, but the offer we made at the end was for our $49 a month membership, not your average membership, which teaches you how to automate your list growth, your sales, and create low ticket products to move into your ecosystem of growth. So we ended up converting at a really high rate, 17% overall, and 41% of people went annual or semi-annual, and 58.5% of people went monthly. So 70 out of the 120 people went monthly and 50 out of the 120 people went annual or semi-annual.
So I gave you those stats just to give you some context on everything that we put into it, but let's talk about the expenses and how we were able to leverage our expenses and our energy into generating the maximum return on investment. So first things first, one way that we were able to drive up our conversion and drive up our sales is that we ran ads. So we ran ads to get people to sign up for the challenge, and we ran ads to retarget people. And now, if you didn't listen to last week's episode of the show, episode number 52, the Sphere of Influence in Marketing, I highly recommend that you go back and check out episode number 52 because I talk about who we targeted with our Facebook advertising. And ultimately what it comes down to is we tested running ads to cold audiences to get them to sign up for the $10 bootcamp, and they did okay.
We were paying about a $100 per purchase, which is a little high, and then we compared it to warm ads just to people who were in our sphere of influence, people who had been to our website, people engaging with us on social media, people on our email list. And what ended up happening was we got a really healthy percentage of people were signing up for our bootcamp at around $20 per purchase. And you might be saying, "well, the bootcamp is only $10. Why would you spend $20 to get someone in?" Because once somebody joins the bootcamp, 17% of them buy our membership. So we actually generate more revenue on the membership than we do on the bootcamp. So that's the first thing. We ran ads, we also ran retargeting ads, and our retargeting ads had about a 3.5 to 4x return on ads spend.
So if you are doing a launch, whether it be for a course, a membership, a coaching program, I recommend that you set up retargeting ads. Retargeting ads are really, really simple, really, really powerful. And that's where most of the revenue came from. We had about a 100 people sign up for the challenge from ads, but we converted a really healthy chunk. I'm actually looking at the stats while I record this. We ended up referring into the membership over 35 people who had joined the bootcamp. So 35 of our 120 purchases can be attributed to Facebook ads that we ran as retargeting ads. So don't neglect the power of retargeting. In total, we spent $4,289.26 on ads to the challenge and retargeting. Now, just to give you a sense of what worked and what didn't, our total revenue was $21,570. If you don't include affiliate sales, if you do include affiliate sales on both the bootcamp and the membership, our revenue was $28,590, but obviously we owed about 7,000 about, of that to affiliates for the bootcamp, and we give them a commission if somebody buys the membership.
And our total expenses were right around $6,000. So our profit on this launch was $15,629.88 on a $49 product. That's what I want to like really impress. It was like $49 a month and we generated over $15,500 in profit. Okay? Now, why am I telling you that? Because here's the reality. We put 4,300 give or take into advertising to generate about $15,500 in profit. So we about 4xd our ad spend in profit, and we about 6xd, 5 to 6xd our ad spend in revenue. So that's the first thing we really used ads, and obviously that makes sense. We talk about ads a lot on this show, and also it was an ads challenge. So of course we ran ads. You might be wondering, "Hey, you just said that you spent 4,300 about on ads and you said your expenses were closer to 6,000. What was the other money going to?"
So I'm so glad you asked. I want to talk about another strategy that we employed in this launch that I think really was a game changer, and that was postcards, direct mail, sending mail directly to people who sign up for our challenge. So when you sign up for our challenge, we asked for your mailing address, and what we did was we used an automated service, it's called thanks.io. And what happens is they send out a postcard that thanks them for signing up for the challenge, and we sent them all out for everyone that had registered about a week before the challenge. And then we used automation to basically every time somebody signed up for the challenge, about a week, five days to a week before automatically sent out a postcard one at a time, and we paid between 60 cents to a $1.60 per postcard.
So yes, it was an expense. Yes, we technically, quote, unquote, "lost money on it," but it's something most people aren't doing, and it disrupts and it grabs attention. And we tracked it, and I'll explain how in a second, but we tracked it and we found that a really healthy percentage of people that were getting postcards actually engaged with the postcard. So we sent out just over 670 postcards because not everyone's address populates correctly or there's issues. And 113 people actually engage with our postcards, which is about 16%. If you were to compare that to the open rate of an email on average, it's like literally 10 to 15% or 10, I shouldn't say percent, 10 to 15x higher than an email engagement. So how did we track that? Well, everyone who we sent a postcard to, we put a QR code on the postcard and we said, scan this QR code for a free gift or go to this URL for a free gift.
And we tracked how many unique people went to that code. And over the course of sending the postcards, we had 113 unique people go and visit that postcard page. And so on that page, we basically gave them a freebie. We just had another freebie that we had created for in the past that we repurposed for this challenge on Facebook ads that worked well for us. So it was a Facebook ad swipe file, and we gave that to them if they scanned the QR code or visited the URL on the postcard. So why does this matter? Why do I think this increased our conversion? Because it reminded people about us. It reminded people to jump into the bootcamp. It reminded people that we were paying attention, and it's just a unique personal touch. I think, and I know I talked about this briefly in the last episode, but I think 2023 is going to be the year of high touch personalized marketing, whether you're low ticket or high ticket, people want to know that they're being seen, that they're being heard, that they're being appreciated.
And so what you have to do is actually engage with these people. And so what we did to engage is we sent a postcard. So that was the second thing we did were these custom postcards, and I literally just designed them in Canva, built a QR code and sent them on their merry way with automation and a little bit of budget. The third thing we did that I think was a little different that contributed to our conversion rate was during the bootcamp, we responded to every single comment. There were just under 2000 total comments in the group. The week of the challenge, and I want to just be super transparent, not every comment was other people. At least 30 to 40% of them were me responding. But just to give you context, we responded to hundreds of comments, and on the first day of the challenge, we literally said, drop your Facebook ads copy and creative, and I will give you feedback.
And I literally copy reviewed, I mean literally at least 150 pieces of copy over the course of two or three days, right? Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't like, let me rewrite this full copy for you. I was either like, yes, this is great. No, this is not. Tweak this, change that, run with it, don't run with it. But I took the time to reply, and y'all, there is conventional wisdom out there around launching right now that's like, "oh, don't give people too much in a launch because then they'll say, I don't need you anymore. I've got everything I need." Y'all, we literally gave people everything. We gave them everything how to literally write, create, set up, run and convert on a Facebook ad, including personalized copy reviews for 10 bucks, and people still bought the membership at 17%.
So it's not necessarily the respond to every comment thing. If I'm being completely honest, it did almost kill me. And maybe that's an episode for another time, not literally, but mentally it was very taxing to respond to hundreds of comments. I would probably bring somebody in to support me the next round that I do this. But it worked really well. And what I think this comes back to is kind of what I mentioned earlier, is that people want to be seen and heard. People want to be acknowledged. People want to feel like they're not just a number or a drop in the bucket, that is your business. And it sounds silly, but it's like just taking the time to respond to somebody's comment can make a huge difference. It's like people want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to be acknowledged.
Because frankly, in the online marketing space, and especially in the one to many model, people don't feel heard. People don't feel seen, people don't feel acknowledged. And that means that we're in a world where people aren't getting the attention that they need to feel supported. And speaking of, I want to add one other thing to this conversation, which I don't necessarily think that this increased our conversion rate, but it was super powerful. And that is that we use an app called Bonjoro. And what Bonjoro did is every time somebody bought the membership through ThriveCart, we use ThriveCart as a checkout page. It would send use Zapier, which is an automation tool to send a message over to this other software, Bonjoro, which would tell us, "Hey, Paul just bought the membership." This is where it gets really cool, Bonjoro would then let me click a button either on my phone or my computer, record a 60-second video and send it to them.
And I basically said, "Hey, thank you so much for joining the membership. I really appreciate you trusting me. Here's kind of what to do next. If you don't get your login, let us know. We'll get you taken care of. Go into the portal, post your intro post." It was just a really great way to literally put my face to camera and say hello and thank you. And we recorded literally 120 of these, and it was very tedious. I'm not going to lie, but guess what? I can't tell you how many responses I got. I should be able to quantitatively, but I can't because I don't have it pulled up. But I can tell you that we got dozens, dozens of replies, dozens of replies of people just saying, "thank you so much for taking the time to send me a message. Thank you so much for welcoming me to the membership. Thank you for saying my name." Right?
Because we didn't just send it and say, Hey, and then send the same message to 120 people. We literally said one at a time. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you so much, Pam. Thank you so much, Carrie, thank you so much, Alexis. Thank you so much, Catherine. It's such a small thing, but it really makes people feel seen, heard and appreciated because we do appreciate it. I think sometimes we get so obsessed with the numbers and the conversions, and even this podcast episode, I called it how we got a 17% conversion on our launch, but it's not just about the numbers, it's about the people. And we have to have, have to, have to remember that, okay? Now, the fourth thing that we did to drive additional sales was affiliates. And this was a game changer. Y'all, I have to give massive kudos to my affiliates.
They just played full out. We got nearly 400 affiliate sales of the bootcamp, and our affiliates were just awesome. But I also want to acknowledge, if I can toot my own horn, toot, toot, we made it super easy for our affiliates. So we put together an entire affiliate toolkit, and that affiliate toolkit was like everything that you could need to promote. So what would happen is first thing, we started a Facebook group for all of our affiliates, and then this was inspired, I have to have credit to her name is, excuse me, Elizabeth Buckley Goddard. She was part, she did something called the Christmas Party a few months ago that I was an affiliate of, and she just had it laid out so smooth. So what we did was we emulated what she did, and we created a Google Doc, a Google Drive folder, and the first one, first document in there was like a, here's everything you need to know.
Here's all the information about the bootcamp, your commission split, what it costs, how to get your affiliate link, how the bootcamp and the membership are structured, common questions you might have. And then this is where it gets really cool. We made marketing assets, so we gave them a complete spreadsheet that was like a done-for-you marketing plan. If you don't want to even have to think, here is a complete spreadsheet with dates of when to send, when to post and how to do it. And then here are swipe copy email. Here's invitations to the bootcamp invitations to the membership, swipe copy for social media, captions for the bootcamp and captions for the memberships, graphics for the bootcamp, square vertical, logos, testimonial images. We gave them everything that they would need to promote successfully, and we wanted to make it easy, so it was easy for people to say yes. And I saw my swipe copy out in the wild, and that made me so happy. And if we can be real for a second, we didn't even really do that good of a job with our affiliate promotion. We gave people two weeks notice.
We literally two weeks before the bootcamp said, who of my students and customers would like to be an affiliate? I personally reached out to a handful of people, a handful of my friends or customers that I know had done a good job or affiliates in the past, and I said, "would you be open to promoting this?" But for the most part, I just opened it up to my audience, and if my audience said yes, I want to share it, then we invited them into our community, our Facebook group where we posted updates and we also did contests. Now, here's the thing. I've been a part of a lot of affiliate promotions where it's like a leaderboard. It's like, who does the best? Who gets the most sales? Who makes the most money? And I never loved that because a lot of times when I was in affiliate promotion, I was a small fish in a big ocean.
I've only won affiliate leaderboard contests a couple times, and it's hard to do and it's stressful, and you're like, "I just want to be in first. I just want to climb that ladder." And what we did instead was we did giveaways. So we said, "Hey, today, if you email your list, you're going to be entered for $100 Amazon gift card. If you post on social media today, you're going to be entered for a chance to win this. If you make one sale in the next 24 hours, we're going to enter you into a raffle for a prize." And I really liked that. Our affiliates seem to really like that, and I liked it because it leveled the playing field. It really leveled the playing field. The last thing that I want to touch on that we did, and that I think worked really well is we actually emailed a lot more than we typically do.
Typically, in our launch, we email once a day and we emailed one to two times a day, plus four or five, I'd have to double check, I want to say five times on cart close day. We did, we did do five times on cart close day, and I actually was really hesitant about this, but we made sure that every email had an intention, it had a focus, it had an outcome, it was benefit driven, and that it really spoke to a different angle about our membership. And I know this works because I got one person who emailed us back and said, "Zach, I normally don't like receiving this many emails, but you gave so much value in the bootcamp, and I'm so interested in the membership that I'm not upset. I just wanted you to know, like keep going." And yes, we had unsubscribes. We absolutely had people unsubscribe and leave.
If we were to do it again, I probably would've done a couple strategic, like I'm not interested in the membership, but keep me on your list. We were just so swept up in how much bigger it was than we thought it was going to be that frankly, we were trying to keep up with tweaking and changing, which I'll talk about in a second. But we really sent a lot of emails, and I have a friend, his name is Bobby Klink, and he used to jokingly say, "when in doubt, send another email." And so that's what I did. I was like, "man, it's quiet. I'm going to send another email. Man, I don't know what to do. I'm going to send another email. Man, I don't know what to say today. I'm going to send another email." And we just sent another email. We just kept going.
Now, of course, we used traditional launch strategies like our Facebook group for our challenge, and we posted in there and we had our retargeting ads going, but we really used email. So I just want to do a quick recap of the things that I think contributed us to having a really high converting launch. And number one, it was that we charged for the bootcamp, right? We charged for the bootcamp. I think that gets higher engagement, higher attention. I used to fight it and say, people who pay don't necessarily pay more attention, but the statistics don't lie. They do. Number two, we sent out personalized postcards to everyone who joined the challenge. We were able to do that because we can ask for a billing address when people paid for the bootcamp. Number three, we responded to every single comment that came through the Facebook group as long as we didn't miss it.
That included tech support requests, copy reviews, questions, everything got a reply. And a kind of subnote to that was that we sent a welcome message, a personalized 60-second welcome video to everyone who joined our membership during the launch to thank them and tell them that we appreciated them jumping in. Number five was affiliates. So we used affiliate marketing to get more people to promote, and in retrospect, we would've given it more time and focus, but we still got really, really good results from our affiliates. And finally, we sent out a lot of emails, more emails than I'm comfortable with. We've even started emailing our list on a daily basis just to engage our audience. But here's the thing, when in doubt, send another email per Bobby Klink. So there you have it. That's how we were able to get our launch to convert at 17.39%.
As you listen to this episode, my goal isn't for you to convert at 17.39%. My goal is for you to take some of these ideas, take the inspiration and run with it, send a postcard, send a personalized letter, respond to people in your launch. Consider affiliates. Send another email. If you take just one of these strategies and implement it, and it gets you just one or two extra sales. It's worth the 26 minutes and 10 seconds you spent so far listening to this episode. Well, now it's been 26 minutes and like 16 seconds, but here nor there, it's worth it. So we've mentioned a lot of different things. I will link them up in the show notes over at heartsoulhustle.com/nyap053. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap053. For Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 53, we'll link everything up that we mentioned, the challenge launch toolkit, the last episode of the podcast, that Bonjoro app that I like to use, the postcard app that I like to use, thanks.io.
We'll link all of that up in the show notes along with a full transcript of the show so that if you want to go back and review anything or do a search for a specific word or phrase that we talked about, you can do that too. I hope you got lots of value from this episode. As always, feel free to tag me over on Instagram at heart Soul hustle with you listening, where you're listening, what you're listening on, or just a screenshot of the episode and what your favorite part was. I love hearing from you guys, and I just want to give a shout-out to everyone who has DMd me on Instagram saying how much you've been enjoying the show lately. We've actually seen an uptick in DMs from you guys, and it really does mean the world to me. I read and respond to everyone.
I love hearing that you love the show. So don't be afraid to reach out. And even if you don't want to post publicly on your story and be like, "I'm not marketing for you, Zach," maybe that's not even what you're saying. Maybe you're just like, "my audience doesn't care about marketing." That's okay too. Still DM me, drop me a DM at Heart Soul Hustle. I still want to hear from you. I still want to know that you love the show, and I'd love to hear what you want to hear more of. So all that being said, I hope you have an incredible rest of your day, week, month, year, and until next time, stay not so average.
