Episode #072: Converting New Leads (From Ads) Into Buyers...
Converting New Leads (From Ads) Into Buyers...
very found yourself growing a solid email list of LEADS but not seeing the conversion to buyers? Then this episode is for you!
In this episode, Zach uncovers (5) ways that you can convert more leads into buyers each day, week, month, and quarter in your business so that you're seeing more sales and growth as your list gets bigger.
When you tun in you'll learn...
The absolutely essential thing to do with ALL new leads that join your list (whether from ads for organic)
The way we thing about listbuilding and sales in relation to our business model and goals (hint: we don't always see a positive ROI overnight)
An underused strategy for leveraging other people's work to get more sales from your list (while building stronger relationships with your audience and peers)
This is an episode you don't wanna miss - there will be SOMETHING you hear that you can implement TODAY to drive more sales!
LINKS MENTIONED:
Episode #070: The NEW Way of Marketing in 2024
Liz Wilcox: Email Marketing Membership
Full Transcript:
This is not your average online marketing podcast, episode number 72. And in this episode we're talking about how do you turn new leads into new customers? How do you get people who are joining your list organically, or from advertising, to actually start buying things from you? Because lead generation is great, but we want customers. So, if you've been growing your list, but you're finding that people aren't buying, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, as always, I am really stoked to talk to you today. You know that. But really I'm excited because I've been talking to a lot of different people, clients, customers, members in our membership, people in our bootcamp, and they're like, "Zach, my list is growing, but people are not buying the way that I need them to buy, to keep spending on Facebook ads or keep putting time and energy into my business." And it's actually a really common thing that we hear. Now, I want to first start by saying, "Why is that and acknowledging the elephant in the room." And that is that, it's much easier to grow your list, in my opinion, than it is to sell your products. Because when you're growing your list, you're like, "Hey, give me your name and email, no real commitment. And I will give you something for free."
Whereas when you go to sell something, you're like, "Oh, give me your credit card and I'll give you the promise of something that may or may not help you out down the road." Or may or may not help you out right now, but creates results down the road. And so, a lot of people struggle to get their new leads to convert to customers. And so what I want to share with you today is five really specific things that you can do to get new leads to become new buyers. So, let's just jump right in. The first, most important thing that you can do is get a sequence in place for new subscribers. I hear all the time, especially in the online world, like, "Oh, the money is in your list. The money is in your list." And I always like to say, "The potential money is in your list." Because yes, if people are on your list, they can buy from you, you can sell to them.
But at the end of the day, if you don't do that consistently, effectively, and regularly, you're not going to get sales. That's just the reality of the game. And so when people first join your list, especially through Facebook advertising, they have just put their name and email in to solve a problem, okay? They're in problem solving mode because you interrupted them during a social media session when, in most cases we're not working while we're mindlessly scrolling. But you still grabbed their attention and got them interested in your freebie. So what we do is we start with a simple five email sequence. It doesn't have to be complicated, it doesn't have to be crazy, but at least two of those emails pitch a product or a wait list for our business. And that's just a rule of thumb that we have. Every time someone joins our list, before we launch anything really intensive or scale up our ad spend, we want to make sure we have at least a five email follow-up sequence.
This is what we teach people inside of our membership to do, where we give them templates and walkthroughs, and in the new year, we're actually expanding. Because if you find that you got this five email sequence, here's the thing, in most cases, the five email sequence will get maybe some sales, maybe some engagement. But five emails is not enough to do a whole bunch of selling. You're not going to do a whole ton of selling inside of five days. Because, it's only five days. So start with a five-day sequence where you make a couple offers for your product. But then the second thing is, if you find that you're not seeing the sales you want, expand and extend your nurture sequence. So, like I said in passing, in our membership, in the new year, we're dropping a 14-day email sequence template series.
And basically what we're saying is, "What you've really got to do is give people the opportunity to learn about you, to see your products, to offer it multiple times." Because at the end of the day, the goal with a sales sequence, yes, it's to turn new subscribers into customers, but really it's about nurturing and connecting with new leads. Because new leads don't know you. I was just doing, last night, a review for a client on their onboarding sequence, and I was telling them, "These emails are good, but they're not really telling people who you are and giving them a clear thing to do." So make sure that you really tell your story. Why should people trust you? What do you have to offer them? Share your free resources, share your paid resources. But my general rule of thumb, just as a side note for an onboarding sequence is one action per email.
So when I'm sending out emails, accept the welcome email, which might have, "Here's your freebie. Follow me on Instagram. Reply to this email." Most of my emails have one call to action in my sequence. So again, start with a sequence. Make sure that new leads are actually being automatically made an offer. And again, if you have a cart open, close course or a membership, put them on a wait list, okay? Second thing you want to set up is retargeting ads. So, this is for anyone who's doing Evergreen or even launching, you want to retarget the people who join your email list. Now, I sometimes get resistance from this because people say like, "Oh, I don't want to run retargeting ads because these people are already on my list. I don't want to advertise to them again." Here's the thing, repetition and consistency in your visibility will increase your conversions.
So we have three types of retargeting ads that we put in play, in the grand scheme of our business. The first thing is that, inside of our welcome sequence, we pitch a product and anyone who visits that product is going to be retargeted. So anyone who goes to our sales page, they're going to see an ad to remind them to come back and finish their purchase. Second type of retargeting we add is that when we do a promotion, whether it be a launch or a bootcamp or a challenge or a webinar. We run ads to all of our leads, our whole email list, to get them into the promotion. Again, resistance is like, "But they're on my list already." And it's like, "Yeah, they are." And they might not open every email you send. They might not click every email you send, but they will see you on social media.
And as long as you're freebie is relevant to your offer, which I've talked about in past episodes, you want your freebie to be relevant to the offer. They're going to be qualified people to put your content back in front of. And they're going to be more likely to opt in and more likely to connect with you. And then the third type of retargeting ad I do is a content retargeting ad. And this might sound counterintuitive because it's like, "What is a content ad? How is that going to make me money?" But we take some of our best performing podcast episodes and we run them as Facebook ads to all of the people who are joining our email list. And again, it's like, "Does that really make money?" Technically, no. But you'll remember earlier, and by earlier I mean three minutes ago, I said that consistency in your visibility increases your conversions.
So, if you can create more visibility, even if you're doing it through advertising with your content, you're going to increase the number of people that see your content and connect with it. Four very specific example about how this can still lead to sales is, you're listening to this podcast episode. At the beginning of this episode, we have a pre-roll. And what that is it's a dynamic ad that we can change out. At the time that I recorded this, it was for our Facebook ads bootcamp, but we have a 60 to 90 second little clip that plays before the episode starts, that says, "Hey, come check out our Facebook ads for List Growth Bootcamp for $25."
And so we're retargeting people who are joining our list with a podcast episode who are going to hear that ad. Then if they hear that ad and go to the sales page, they're going to get retargeted from the sales page to buy the bootcamp. And then if they don't buy the bootcamp still, the next time we do our bootcamp live or do a live launch, we're going to retarget them all for the promotion. So essentially, once someone gives me their name and email, I'm doing my best to show up everywhere in multiple ways, free content, paid content, launch content. So if they see it, I want them to then see me forever.
And this leads directly into the third thing, which is promotions and launches. So, a lot of times I talk to people and they have this perception that we are just raking in, as of right now we're not, thousands of dollars in sales every single day with our low ticket offers and our trip wires and our funnels and our content. Realistically, every dollar we spend on Facebook ads, we only return in real time through, within the first week about 50 cents. Sometimes a little less.
And I share that with you, not to be demoralizing or say it's not possible to create a front end positive return on ads, but our philosophy with ads is to think big picture. And I talked about this in episode 70 of the podcast, and that is like, "We are not thinking, how do I create an instantaneous ROI?" We are not thinking, "If I run ads on Monday for $10, I'd like to see $20 in revenue on Monday." That's not the way we're thinking. We are thinking, "I'm spending money to grow an audience, because nurturing an audience, connecting with an audience, showing up consistently with an audience is always going to serve me at a deeper level than creating an instantaneous sale." That's just my opinion.
I'm not saying that only running ads to freebies is a bad thing. I'm not saying that only running ads to low ticket and having no freebies is a bad thing. I'm saying that for us, having a hybrid of the two has served us at a very deep level. Because what happens is, every 90 days we do a promotion or a launch of some kind. And so what happens is, all these people that are joining our list, think about it like this, based on what we've said so far. They're going through an onboarding sequence. So for a couple of weeks, they get to know me, they maybe get integrated with the podcast, they maybe look at my offers, even if they don't buy, but they've been exposed. So they've seen what I have for sale. They know who I am, they've maybe listened to the podcast, and then they're going to get retargeting ads.
So they're going to get retargeting ads for my content. They're going to start listening, hopefully, to the podcast. As they start listening to the podcast more, then I'm also going to retarget them with content for more podcasts. And, when I go into my launch, they're also going to see ads that say, "Come to my launch," whether it's webinar challenge video series, whatever, they're going to see an ad that says, "Come to my launch." Well, as you may or may not know? Launches typically perform better than Evergreen. There's this live energy. Typically, you have some sort of limited time offer. But most importantly, they're doing things together with other people, and there's this group movement, especially with five-day challenges that gives them a reason and a cohort to buy with. And so typically, we see more conversion in that two to four week period where we're launching, than we do in the two to three month period where we're running our sequences, running our retargeting ads, growing our email list every single day. We are really seeing big impact once a quarter.
So I share that with you, not to get you down, and if you really want to hear our ideology behind this again, I'll link up episode number 70 of the podcast in the show notes. But just understand that what I'm really getting at is, don't neglect the value of having Evergreen and live content. Don't neglect the value of that, because they both have the time and place and live launches just bring a lot of energy and revenue into the business, okay? So super quick recap. We're always running a sequence to new subscribers. We're always retargeting new subscribers in a variety of ways, and then at least once a quarter, we're doing a promotion or a launch. Now, the other things that we do are a little more, I don't want to say nebulous, because that's a really wordy word. But they're more abstract, they're more intangible, but they're really important.
And one is that we are... Because we have people with all of what we've done before, in theory, through our sales sequence and our onboarding sequence, they are starting to listen to the podcast, starting to follow me on Facebook, starting to follow me on Instagram. So what I do is, I have, number four, ongoing passive promotion. So in a lot of the emails that I send, and I send a lot of emails, I do what's called a super signature. And I did not create this. This was invented by a marketer named Dean Jackson. But at the end of my email, you've probably seen people do this. It's like, "Ready for more? Here's three ways you can work with me." And we ascend in complexity. So at the end of our email, we're like, "Number one, listen to the podcast. Number two, join our Facebook ads bootcamp. Number three, join our membership."
This does two things. One, some people will join the bootcamp, pay the money, buy our low ticket offer. Some people will join the membership, buy the membership, become an ongoing customer. And, again, it comes down to that conversion and consistency. People are seeing at least a couple times a month, if not more, that I have things to buy. So they're seeing my signature and they're seeing the offer to work with me. I also do passive promotion on Instagram stories and on Facebook. So to me, passive promotion sounds fancy in the sense that it's like, "You don't have to do anything." But really it's like, "How do I plug in promotion of the offers that I have, whether low ticket, Evergreen, wait list, whatever, into what I'm already doing every day?" So for us, we try to email our list at least once or twice a week. Typically once a week, sometimes two or three.
But I'm a big email marketer. I loved email. So if I email, and I email more than just my podcast out, I make sure to include those super signatures. If I'm going into a launch or I have a day where I'm like, "It'd be cool to generate some extra revenues today." What I'll personally do is I'll post on my Facebook. I'll say like, "Hey, if you haven't grabbed my Facebook ad bootcamp yet, here's what so-and-so had to say." And I'll share a testimonial. So I'm leveraging my assets, social media, email, whatever, to just casually mention that I have things for sale. The old school way of thinking about this is people used to say, "ABS, always be selling." And I like to say, "just always be making offers." It's like you never know who's watching. Somebody who hasn't watched your Instagram stories in four months might watch on the fifth month. And if you haven't mentioned your bootcamp or your low ticket offer or whatever, at all this month, they don't know it's for sale.
Same thing with Facebook. I'm always talking on Facebook and I'm just growing my audience. And you can always amplify this with things like live videos, TikTok, YouTube. There's all kinds of ways that you can take this to the next level. But for me, what it comes down to is, essentially, am I a voice for my own business? And it's a really important question to ask yourself. And if you step back for a second and think, "Am I talking about my business? Am I talking about my products?" And I know, that, we won't go too deep on this episode, but I know that there's certain fears and concerns we have that hold us back. We're like, "Oh, what if my mom sees me posting about Pilates. Or, my dad sees me posting about launching your business. Or my grandma sees me posting about finding your soulmate."
What are they going to think? And it's like, "I get that. I do." And, in most cases, you got to think about what grows your business, and what serves your life. And if you let the judgment of others, whether family, friends, or frankly strangers on the internet, hinder you from doing what you love, what you believe you're called to, what you know is going to help grow your business, your life, your health, your wealth, and you don't do it out of fear, I get that. I do. It's normal. I was there when I first started.
I was like, "No one caress what I'm posting on the internet." But you won't grow. No one is going to be an advocate for your business the way you are. And I say advocate in the sense that, no one's going to go out there and be like... At least when you're getting started, I know there's exceptions to this, but no one's running around being like, "Oh, have you seen Dina's business? It's so good. You have to buy her products. She's so amazing. I'm going to write a post on Facebook. I'm going to email my list for nothing just because I'm going to post and tell my friends. I'm going to refer people."
Sure. As your business grows and as you get more satisfied customers, you may start to get word of mouth content and word of mouth action. But especially when you're getting started, and especially in the long run, people aren't just talking about us all the time. I always jokingly say, "We are shockingly self-absorbed creatures." We think everyone's worried and paying attention and thinking about us when in reality, most people are thinking about them. The same way that we are worried about what other people think of us, they're worried about what other people think of them, which ultimately has nothing to do with other people and everything to do with us.
We are the one with the concern. We are the one questioning. And so, I know that that's a little bit of a tangent, but I just want to throw that out there because, again, no one is going to promote your own business like you. So we have ongoing promotion through the super signature, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, video content. And we're moving, hopefully in 2024, into YouTube a little more. The last thing that you can do is a way to, I don't want to say capitalize, but... Maximize is the word I want to use. Maximize your email list. So I'll give you a really specific example. We talk in our membership and on the podcast a ton about Facebook ads. And I have a little bit of content inside my membership about email marketing. But email marketing is not something that I talk about outrageously, extensively.
I'm not going on and on about email marketing 24/7. I do in my podcast, because it's important. I do in my membership, because it's important. But it's not like, if somebody was like, "Hey, I need an email marketing expert. Who do I go to?" People aren't recommending me, and I'm not jumping and throwing my name in the ring either. So what I do is I am an affiliate for really strong email marketers. Liz Wilcox is a great example. And if you go to heartsoulhustle.com/emm, she has a membership that's nine bucks a month called, "Email marketing mastery." Oh my gosh, it's so stinking good. I won't go on forever and ever. That is an affiliate link, by the way. But, she teaches, she gives a template every week for nine bucks a month on how to email your list. Like, "Here's what you should email your list this week, if you're trying to stay connected and keep building that relationship."
Well, relationship building and email marketing is a cornerstone of our business. And, what you do is you grow your list with ads. So it's very symbiotic for me to share with my audience that they should check out Liz. I'm disclosing it. I'm above board. That's all very important to me, but I'm just sharing. I'm just sharing that, "Hey, if you want to learn more about email marketing, check out Liz." And what happens is Liz gives me 50% of the monthly membership fee. So every person I refer, I get 450 a month, which is awesome. And, I'm serving my audience without having to create more products, without having to spread myself thin, without having to dilute my message about Facebook advertising by saying, "Oh, and I do email marketing and I do this, and I do that." I have another handful of people that I refer to, but it's like, what I'm ultimately saying, what I'm ultimately doing, is I'm giving people multiple ways to work with me. Including with my friends.
And so affiliate marketing, you don't have to do it. It's not essential. But if you're like, "I've got these people on my list that are like, this is great, but I don't need X, Y, Z. I need this." Awesome. Share it with them. Find somebody who's awesome that you can support and that you believe in and that you can send people to and give them the opportunity to work with those people. And you get a commission in exchange. Things that you can refer, like software that you use, services that you love, people that you love. But for me, we haven't, full transparency, it's not a key piece of our income. I would say our affiliate marketing, it used to be bigger a couple years ago. We haven't done it as much in the last couple years, and that's why it's a little smaller. But for Black Friday, I absolutely shared affiliate offers.
For when I have guests on the podcast. I'm absolutely like, "let me affiliate your stuff. Let me share out your links." So just know if you're like, "I feel like my audience needs this and I don't want to make it. Or I know that my audience is also looking for this and I'm trying to pick up some loose opportunity." Affiliate marketing is a great way to also convert new leads into buyers and create goodwill. When you send people to someone else, it creates goodwill in that relationship, but it also creates goodwill with your audience that you're not like, "You have to learn from me. I am your guru. You must come to me." They're also getting this sense of like, "Oh, this guy knows people. He's connected. This gal knows what's up. This person knows how everything is working. They're privy to what I need and how to help me."
And so you build goodwill in the customer relationship. You build goodwill in the affiliate relationship. And, you generate revenue in the process. So what's not to love about that? So yeah, just a super quick recap of everything is, number one, if you want to convert new leads into buyers, put a sales sequence in place. Number two, set up retargeting ads, specifically your sales retargeting ads, your promotional or launch retargeting ads and your content retargeting ads. Then think big picture with promotions and launches. How are you going to create influxes of revenues in set periods of time? Ongoing promotion from super signatures to Instagram stories to Facebook posts, always be promoting yourself because no one else is going to do it like you do. And finally, consider making affiliate offers. What else can you share that maybe you don't have for sale that would benefit your audience and generate revenue for you? So I hope that this has been helpful.
My goal with this episode is really just to give you new ways to think about bringing money into your business as you're growing your email list. If you'd like, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap072. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap072 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 72. We'll have the full show notes there. I'll have all the links that I mentioned for you from the episode number 70, the email marketing membership, full transcript of this show, timestamp, show notes, all that good stuff.
So, again, heartsoulhustle.com/nyap072. Everything is waiting for you there. I hope you have an incredible rest of your week. Hope you have an incredible rest of your year. I'm going to be out with a few more podcasts before it ends. But I just wanted to say, if you are growing your list, the goal is to get buyers. And I'll leave you with just this one thing to think about, that I've said a couple times. Consistency in content and presence increases conversions. If someone has just joined your list, you can't be consistent in the first day. You can't show up everywhere in 24 hours. But in seven days, you can email them every day. In 30 days, you can hit them on Facebook and Instagram. In 90 days, you can invite them to a launch. In a year, you can build a relationship.
Don't become so shortsighted about, "How do I create an ROI right away, right now, here now, right now?" Because businesses are built on relationships, community, connection and perception. And those that are playing the long game, those that are building relationships, those that are connecting with the people who join their list, they're going to be the long-term winners, and I know that's going to be you. So get out there, convert those leads, and until next time, stay not so average.
