November 20, 2023 • 43 mins
The sad fact is that copywriting is only 20% of the work necessary to get customers. Yet copywriting impacts 80% of the results. Unfortunately copywriting is 100% more exciting than these frameworks I share in this episode.
Yet the framework is the critical factor that shows you where to apply copy. You can write the very best most clever copy in the world, but in front of the wrong audience you’ll have a flop. That’s why this framework is so critical.
The 80% of work that makes great copy possible is testing, measuring, and segmentation. It’s managing the six key variables that influence conversion. It’s how you apply your daily marketing budge, or how you have a budget for advertising at all.
Rather than hit and miss, you have targeted and focused. Rather than being at the whim of advertising platforms, you direct the show to get maximum return on advertising spend. Use these insights to drill down into markets so that you find the right buyers for what you offer.
This particular client now has a library of campaigns they can implement anytime they want a cash surge. They have a clear testing plan. They know what works and what does. And through this mange to recover every marketing dollar in 8-months, verses not at all.
What’s interesting about this approach is that I can teach it but most won’t implement it. I can show you how it works, but most won’t bother. It’s simply not as exciting as being creative, coming up with new ideas, and the game of copywriting. Sad but true.
If you are a serious marketer who wants to learn the secrets of direct response marketing so that your copy converts better. Or so that you increase profits from campaigns, then join us at https://www.adbriefing.co.uk/n...
#ConversionRate #ConversionOptimization #DirectResponse #SalesMarketing #MarketingCampaign #DatabaseMarketing #MarketingMetrics #LeadGeneration
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/adbriefing-copywriting-tips--3257924/support.
Yet the framework is the critical factor that shows you where to apply copy. You can write the very best most clever copy in the world, but in front of the wrong audience you’ll have a flop. That’s why this framework is so critical.
The 80% of work that makes great copy possible is testing, measuring, and segmentation. It’s managing the six key variables that influence conversion. It’s how you apply your daily marketing budge, or how you have a budget for advertising at all.
Rather than hit and miss, you have targeted and focused. Rather than being at the whim of advertising platforms, you direct the show to get maximum return on advertising spend. Use these insights to drill down into markets so that you find the right buyers for what you offer.
This particular client now has a library of campaigns they can implement anytime they want a cash surge. They have a clear testing plan. They know what works and what does. And through this mange to recover every marketing dollar in 8-months, verses not at all.
What’s interesting about this approach is that I can teach it but most won’t implement it. I can show you how it works, but most won’t bother. It’s simply not as exciting as being creative, coming up with new ideas, and the game of copywriting. Sad but true.
If you are a serious marketer who wants to learn the secrets of direct response marketing so that your copy converts better. Or so that you increase profits from campaigns, then join us at https://www.adbriefing.co.uk/n...
#ConversionRate #ConversionOptimization #DirectResponse #SalesMarketing #MarketingCampaign #DatabaseMarketing #MarketingMetrics #LeadGeneration
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/adbriefing-copywriting-tips--3257924/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
A marketer comes to me frustrated thatthey're spending more money and getting less results,
that they're constantly behind their competitors,they have difficulty launching new products.
They're frustrated with this whole thing calledcopywriting. They've tested all kinds of variations
and yet they are still not evenbreaking even on their marketing efforts. And
(00:22):
they've come to me and they said, hey, look, here's what we're
doing. And I admit they're doinga lot of right things, but they're
doing a lot in general a bulk, and they want to know how they
can improve their marketing results by writingbetter copy. I'm justin hit with ad
briefings, copywriting tips. Here's myapproach, and then I'm going to share
with you some key foundational principles ofdirect response marketing. In fact, it's
(00:48):
the boring stuff that creates exciting results. And so this individual was basically writing
all this different copy and then theythought they were testing. And so I'll
also cover kind of an outline ofhow to do better testing, kind of
how to apply your marketing dollars.So they're spending quite a bit of money
every month, and it doesn't reallymatter whether it's thousands or tens of thousands
(01:11):
every month they're spending on paid advertising. They were doing a lot of what
they called organic advertising, like organicsearch and trying to attract people on social
media platforms. And there's nothing wrongwith these things. They could all be
made to work if you understand thisunderlying foundation. And this foundation builds on
(01:34):
direct response, the kind of directresponses worked from time immemorial because it's essentially
a cause and effect chains. We'reinviting the prospect to raise their hand and
take a certain action, and thenwe respond to that they've responded to our
inquiry, we're responding to their request, and it goes back and forth.
(01:56):
We build up what first starts outas prospect. So these are the people
potentially in your marketplace who can buyyour product and service, the people you've
designed a product and service for andinquiries, those who've requested additional information about
your product and service to finding buyerswho after receiving information about your product or
(02:17):
service, has decided to make abuying decision. And it's a back and
forth dance between what is it thatwe believe the marketplace wants and what is
it that they actually want? Andnow this is a disturbing part of it
because the way I look at thisis if your customers are not buying,
you're either not reaching people which youalign with the message in marketmap to market
(02:42):
match is not there, or whatyou're offering the marketplace they don't want,
they don't care, they don't needit. Now, there are variety of
conditions or variables in the marketplace tomatch or to manage, and this cause
is confusion and very often causes usto try new things. So let me
(03:04):
first talk about the variables that wehave to management to manage that are constantly
changing because of the marketplace, becauseof the economy, because of consumer sentiment.
And these variables include the customer avatar. Who are we advertising to?
Who is that specific prospect in themarketplace? Do they have money to spend?
(03:25):
Do they pay money to solve thistype of problem. We're looking at
the source or campaign, What isthe copy and creative that we're sending these
individuals. We look at the mediumor list. Where have these where do
these people live? So just becauseyour customers on Facebook and they've been cookied,
and Facebook can tell you who thosepeople are and they're on the platform,
(03:47):
it doesn't mean that their mental statewhile on the platform is conducive to
receive your offer and to ultimately buywhat it is that you have to offer.
So, for example, Facebook's tryingto keep them on the platform,
and then you're trying to get themoff the platform, and then it's just
a big mess. There's copy elementsthat we have to worry about. There's
the month of the year or weekof the year, so there are some
(04:11):
offers that are time sensitive. Soat the end of the year, weight
loss offers are going to do betterthan at the middle of the year or
right before Thanksgiving. For example.You're not going to tell a specific audience
who needs to lose weight, whowants to lose weight right before Thanksgiving that
they could start a sensible diet andexercise program and start losing weight right now.
(04:34):
They don't care. They're gonna they'regonna be out at the holidays.
It's a difficult emotional time, it'sa difficult stressful time. Uh as far
as when it comes to eating isconcerned and so the right offer, it's
the perfect offer, it's the rightsolution. It's the right audience who even
has a desire to take action,but not right now and so depending on
(04:57):
how you segment your your and we'regoing to talk about testing. Depending on
how you set segment you're testing,you might have a week target date,
or you may have a month targetdate. In some markets, you might
have a outside temperature date, soif you're selling gardening supplies, you want
to be out there at a certainoutdoor temperature, or the same thing could
(05:20):
be with resorts and other tourism relateditems. Finally, there's going to be
in this. I shouldn't say finallybecause there are a lot of variables we
have to manage when we're doing marketingcampaigns, and that's why I'm going to
show you a framework that makes iteasier to manage these variables. But you
also have the price positioning. That'snot just the price of your product,
(05:42):
but it's your price of the relatedor relation to any other choice. Thats
prospect can make. Maybe you havea solution where somebody, for everybody who
wants to be millionaires, you havea solution that if they follow the instructions,
they will become a millionaire in ninetydays or less. And this solution
has been guaranteed. You have onehundred percent success rate and the product is
(06:08):
only two million dollars. Like,for everybody who buys this product on how
to be a Millionaire and they investthe two million dollars, they all become
millionaires at some time within ninety daysof the investment. See, people aren't
going to pay that because the barrierto entry is too high. The barrier
to entry. You know, therecould be the believability there could you could
(06:30):
be the right list, It couldbe the right offer for that particular audience.
But the price is what broke it. And so that's why I want
to share with these share these variablesthat you have to manage because there are
a large number of variables, andany one of these variables breaking the prospect
isn't going to buy. It's thekey that they have to know, like
(06:54):
and trust you in order to purchase. What's what contributes to knowledge, liking,
and trusting, Well, the contextthat's around the specific offer. So
let's look now at a framework.Because this individual when they came to me,
they had good marketing, they hadgood customer avatars, They understand who
(07:17):
they want to sell to. Thataudience has money to spend. They're sending
campaigns irregularly, and I think thisframework really helps you be more regular.
But they were sending campaigns that weregood campaigns. They were really good campaigns.
Now, one thing we noticed isthey couldn't tell which campaigns were good
under these variable conditions in order toactually repeat a campaign. So one of
(07:42):
the mistakes that they made is theywould do a decent campaign and it wouldn't
work, and then they and howdo I know it's decent, Well,
because we got results when we addedthe framework, But they do a decent
campaign, it wouldn't do what theyexpected. And then they'd do a different
campaign and it wouldn't do what theyexpected. So these folks actually had a
library of campaigns. These are marketingpackages that included follow up email, newsletters,
(08:11):
follow up postcards or postal mailings.You know, there was a full
kit. They didn't need to geta new copy. They had at least
twelve really decent campaigns. They wereeach done one time. And so again,
how do you build familiarity where youneed to have kind of a repeat
interaction, you need to demonstrate yourvalue in the marketplace. These are all
(08:33):
things that are we all know,but we're still not getting results. The
thing they were missing was a frameworkto understand that we must take a prospect
through a lead funnel in order forthem to become an inquiry. Now an
inquiry, they've requested information. Weneed to take a inquiry through a sales
(08:54):
funnel in order for them to becomea buyer. At least that first initial
tran is action because in many highticket sales, folks aren't buying cold.
Now again, I caveat high ticketsales. These this group had a product
that started at three thoy, ninehundred and ninety seven dollars. And then
it's a services based company. Thatalmost doesn't matter, but it's a services
(09:18):
based company that had a customer lifetimevalue of about twenty eight thousand dollars a
year. So, and that's Idon't like to always get I don't like
to give numbers because you might say, well, I don't have a product
of twenty eight thousand, Well,then invent one. But the customer lifetime
value for context here was a twelvemonth period and that is the gross.
(09:41):
Okay, the organization has about atwenty percent margin, and these things are
important to understand. And then theinitial sale was three nine nine seven initial
So let's just say that a highticket product is four figures a lifetime five
figures. Now, they were haphazardlyapproaching the marketplace and just kind of throwing
(10:07):
stuff out there to see what willwork. They didn't understand the variables that
influence their buying decision. And thisis first exercises. You make a list
of the variables that impact the decision. If there's a male decision maker,
they're going to consult with their wife. If it's a business and there's two
decision makers, but there's five total, we need to have at least a
(10:30):
majority of the decision makers in ourfavor. If there's a decision maker in
one department, they and they checkwith another department, we need to market
both sides of that. Those arethe things we need to understand. Now.
The framework is that the lead funnelhas an AB split going to an
opt in. Now, what isan AB split. This particular client was
(10:52):
sending just one off. They didn'thave any basis of comparison. If you're
going to do direct response, youneed a basis of comparison, which typically
becomes that control that that document orthat campaign that just works regularly, it
works consistently, It doesn't you know, necessarily satisfy all your needs. But
it's a baseline to test where youknow that the cost per lead, for
(11:13):
example, or the cost per saleor the conversion rate is pretty consistent well,
and we want as many of thoseas we can. I've talked about
a five x five plan in thepast, where we have five controls over
five different mediums, and then wejust keep, you know, Royal rumble
testing those things out until we canbeat them with test cases. But a
(11:35):
B split is either your control versusa comparable test, or it is a
it is two campaigns going out once. So this case, inside the campaign,
the opt in page could have versionA versus version B, and you
(11:56):
can just send traffic to it,and if there's enough volume, you could
have pay per click A versus payper click B both going to the opt
in page and then with your conversiontracking in your analytics in place, and
their analytics could use some improvement,but the analytics in place, you'll be
able to know which source creates whichinquiry. Now, this is very informative
(12:20):
because it allows us to better understandwho becomes leads. So within the variables
of customer avatar, within the variablesof campaign copy, within the variables of
medium or list, where is thead being put, timeframe, everything else.
We can know that this type ofprospect is attracted by the combination of
(12:41):
a when it comes to pay perclick, copy a in pay per click,
and offer a on the ab splitat the opt in page. So
we're learning something, and that's probablythe biggest takeaway is that every marketing campaign
has you have to learn something.The biggest thing that this client learned was
(13:03):
that they hated their marketing and theywere trying to find some help. But
the marketing wasn't necessarily bad. Whatwas bad is the selective nature of sifting
and sorting through these mediums and liststo identify highly qualified prospects. Now,
once you've got people on a list, an inquiry list, which could be
(13:24):
an email list, it could bea mailing list, you now send campaigns
to those people, which could bea prospect newsletter, it could be a
follow up series, it could bea lot of different things. And we
do the same testing again, whichwould be ab split to an offer.
So that prospect newsletter, we havethis month's newsletter and it contains an offer.
(13:50):
That's kind of a clue there.Anything you send to a prospect or,
a customer or somebody on your listneeds to have some kind of offer,
and then we can hell because theoffer takes them to a sales letter
or a landing page, which sourcecontribution led to a purchase. See what
(14:11):
we're doing is we're building audience segments. We take the large prospect marketplace,
all the people possible who could buyyour products and services, and we invest
money, time and resources into generatinga small list of people who are interested
in the solutions that you have tooffer. They're highly qualified, they've checked
(14:31):
off all the boxes, they havea desire to take action, and then
from there we make specific offers accordingto their needs. So you may have
on your front end these variables sixdifferent variables that I described here, and
then those variables will be clustered intotest A versus test B. Now you
(14:52):
can do more complex multivariate testing.This particular client did not have the analytics
structure in place, so that's oneof the things we're going to work on.
They didn't They couldn't test a chainof events let it alone. Did
they have any idea of what theywere doing. If they did, they
would they wouldn't need someone to organizethings or to implement these frameworks. But
(15:15):
what the framework is doing is it'sgiving you structure to apply marketing dollars so
that you're not writing twelve newsletter issuesand not learning anything. Because you want
to have and curve version rates improved, you want to have the opt ins
increase. You want to have thesethings. But the framework gives you a
(15:39):
structure to do one test at atime. Because there are so many variables,
we can't assume that the test wedid last week is going to respond
exactly the same this week until wehave enough volume, until we have repeatable
performance, meaning the ad is sentout the same way every time. Now,
(16:02):
the good news is these mailing listsare pretty big. So what we
typically did when we were doing directmail is if we had a list of
twenty five thousand people, we wouldsend a letter to two cells, which
would be smaller subsets of the biglist. We would randomly select them,
and one cell would be fifteen hundredpeople and another cell would be fifteen hundred
(16:22):
people, and we'd send a variationof letter A to one list and letter
B to the other list, andthen the next week we would swap the
two so each letter was seen bythree thousand unique people, and then we
could do the math to see whichone is statistically more significant than the other.
(16:44):
So we're looking at the behavioral change, which is someone raising their hand
and buying a product or service,and they were doing some math that determine
which of these two letters was mostprofitable. And then we know we have
twenty five thousand names, we've onlymailed three thousand of them. So now
we take the winning letter and we'dmail it again to another group of individuals
selected from the primary list, andmaybe we're going to send three thousand this
(17:10):
time. But when we send thatthree thousand, because we're in a third
week, by the way, wewould then add a new campaign to test
against it. It's being sent tothe three thousand people we've already contacted,
or another subset within this set withinthe group. Now I can draw this
out for your organization. If you'vegot a library of content, I can
(17:32):
show you how this lays out.But essentially, what we're doing is that
somebody on that list every week isgetting an offer from you, or getting
a follow up piece of email,or getting a greconnection, or getting a
letter in the mail, or gettingsomething by some other means of which we're
concentrating on those who are most likelyto purchase because we've had a previous interaction
(17:56):
with them. So you have alist of twenty five thousand individuals. We're
farming that list. Maybe you rentedthe list, maybe it's a certain platform,
maybe it's something you've in house andyou've grown it over time, but
we're farming that list with tests.Using these frameworks, we're either going to
(18:17):
generate a lead to find out ifsomebody is interested in a product or service,
and then follow up that interest withan actual offer, and these can
be chained together and it can beautomated. But ultimately we're not mailing the
whole list because if it costs adollar to mail somebody, and a lot
of folks say, well, emailsfree, social media is free. If
(18:41):
you are even considering your time,then there is no platform that is actually
free. So that creative and thatcopy you've written, the copywriter you've hired,
that cost you something. We haveto factor that into our costs,
even in the course of an email. So I used to estimate that it
costs fifteen cents to mail somebody onmy own list. I literally calculated the
(19:04):
cost of the email newsletter product thatwe're using, the overhead related to creating
a offer or creating a message,the contributed overhead of the organization itself,
and then I would factor my desiredprofit margin in and that would give me
(19:26):
a price on the email. Now, we were mailing so much email that
it was about fifteen cents per email, but for your company it could be
thirty dollars per email sent out.Now, of course, it depends on
the size of the list. SoI let's say it cost one hundred dollars
to set up a campaign and toget it scheduled and get it ready to
(19:48):
send out, send out. ButI have a list of one hundred people,
then it's going to be a dollarper contact. But if I have
a list of one hundred thousand individuals, now the fractional rate gets much smaller.
Where with postal mail you still gotto pay a dollar a letter,
even if you have ten thousand lettersor you have five thousand letters. But
again we know the cost, wehave a framework for implementing the campaign.
(20:15):
After a certain number of contacts,we can then calculate which is most likely
to be repeatable, and then nowwe test against that where the underlying people
contacted are different people, so we'renot sending the same thing to folks over
and over again. And that's oneof the things that this particular client was
doing, is they would sometimes resurrecta campaign, but they'd send it to
(20:37):
the same people who got it before, and they didn't have a framework for
testing. And so, yes,they made a few sales. And yes,
it's true that you can send thesame social media posts I send.
So I have a library of socialmedia posts that were posted years ago,
and every so often they wake up, and you know, every two or
three years they get posted again.It is a different audience. But ultimately,
(21:03):
without that measurement, you don't knowwhat you should go back to in
the library. You also don't knowwhere to apply the capital because if it
costs you let's say you're doing payper click, and it costs you five
dollars per click and you only haveone hundred dollars a day for a budget,
then where do we apply that money. Well, it's the same concept
(21:25):
that we just talked about. Youmight say, for example, if you
have one hundred dollars a day budget, you might put twenty five dollars on
a so remember, in our framework, we have an AB going to a
landing page, and you might puttwenty five dollars on b AB go into
a landing page. Now you mightbe saying, well, justin I have
one hundred dollars day budget. Well, you don't know where that you don't
(21:47):
know where that is best applied.So we want to maintain a small reserve
so that we can apply. Youknow, we can grow our budgets.
You and I know that most dailybudgets are arbitrary. When I talk about
and what works well for my clientsis we have wor chests and we say,
okay, this year, we're goingto spend one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and we're going to spend itin such a way that we get two
(22:08):
hundred and fifty thousand dollars at theend of the year in our budget because
ten percent of every sale is goingto go into our marketing reserve. And
that marketing reserve we've tried to matchprofit. By the way, if you
got a ten percent margin, we'reput inside ten percent in the marketing budget.
And you might be saying, well, just to my numbers are too
tight. Again, you can createnew products, you can improve your overhead.
(22:32):
But here's my point. Week one, we put twenty five dollars on
A and twenty five dollars on B. Week two, we take the winner
from that AB split and we putfifty dollars on it. And now we
introduce C and we put twenty fivedollars on that, and then as long
as we have a winner, wekeep incrementally incrementing the winner and reducing the
(22:53):
losers. So if we have anAB test this week and we can't tell
whether or not it's working, weof course exclude anybody who's on our list
and only look at new people.And the AB doesn't give us a definitive
answer, we can't statistically show thatit's repeatable. Then we might continue twenty
five dollars and twenty five dollars onAB. But if we do have a
(23:17):
winner, we want more of thewinner and so we ultimately will put a
little bit more money on it.So the framework is critical because it allows
us to keep going back to acampaign, and I build the frameworks into
the campaign, but we can goback to winning campaigns with new audiences.
(23:38):
So you're doing a campaign on Facebook, it's working out really well, you've
tested it to determine what is statisticallyaccurate. Where can you put your money
to repeat winners, and where canyou take money away from losers. Now
you have this structured campaign together,you don't stop there. You now take
it to Twitter, take it toLinkedIn, take it to Pinterest, take
(24:00):
it to some other platform, becauseyou're gonna have controls. Now, I
don't know the five by five planthat I talked about before. I have
a program for that. I'm notsure if it's actually structured, but here's
the concept. You're gonna end upwith five campaigns that you know work based
on these variables. You're gonna knowwho the audience is, where the campaign
(24:22):
works, You're gonna know what timeof the year you want to be sending
that campaign. You're gonna know aboutthe individuals who have responded to the campaign
in the past, and you're gonnaknow about the typical person who buys.
You're gonna go then take those campaignsand you're gonna keep kind of keep fighting
them out there. It's like Marchmadness. You're gonna keep going to you
find winners, and you want fivewinners. Now, for some companies,
(24:45):
you want twelve winners. For somecompanies you'll have fifty two winners. But
if you can't get five winners,you're not gonna be able to get twelve
winners. You're gonna apply the marketingbudget in a logical way, adding more
money to what works until it stoppedworking, by the way, and take
money away from those things that arelosing, because you might find that in
(25:06):
the first quarter of the year youcan ramp up a certain campaign, but
in the last quarter of the yearyou can't run that campaign at all.
And so now we're going to havea variant that is a test case within
a time period where the winners youhave in January are going to be different
(25:27):
than the winners you have in March, April, May, June, July
just really depends. Now, theback end of this is data analytics.
We can very often measure it withGoogle Analytics or the website, but if
you're a multi channel advertiser and you'vegot advertising with mail and you've got outbound
phone calls, it gets a littlebit more complex. And so the framework
(25:49):
itself helps us at each point ofimplementation develop a case for a campaign,
and then when we recall all thatcampaign in the future. We were able
to have an idea of where contextit works really well. So what happened
to this client, Well, firstoff, they found out that their three
(26:10):
hundred and ninety nine three nine hundredand ninety seven dollars product was too big
as the first step, they hada very long sales cycle for it,
and the people who were converting,they they weren't getting enough of those people
in their in their ecosystem, intheir their house list. So we looked
at creating a Prospect newsletter. Sowe recycled a lot of their old campaigns.
(26:32):
We wrote a series of twenty fouremail messages and we started a opted
email opt in campaign to get peopleinto a Prospect newsletter in order to warm
folks up a little bit more beforewe made the offer of the three nine
hundred ninety seven dollars product. Nowwe are gapping out between they've joined the
(26:56):
list and they've made a monetary decisionto try to find a way to get
micro engagements as well as some smallmonetary sales. Because once they're a customer,
there's the laws are different. Youcan follow up with them differently.
You can have offers at the bottomof a of an opt in if they
buy a thirty nine dollars book.In this case, we build a special
(27:17):
report and small course. If theybuy a thirty nine dollars program, you
can upsell them to the coaching andconsulting. You can start defining what tiers
take the three nine hundred and ninetyseven dollars solution. And by the way,
I'm using some of my numbers,not the actual client's numbers, because
they're confidential. And so you'll noticeI offer a three nine hundred ninety seven
(27:40):
dollars a monthly program that's available topeople call my Platinum program. They have
their widget, which is a fourfigure offer. The key is we had
to bridge between the folks that areinterested, and while we're gathering information about
who these folks are, some kindof initial offer, which is kind of
(28:00):
in this case, it is aself liquidating lead generation in order for us
to even talk about the higher ticketproduct, because it's an aside rather than
the primary offer. So when theymade the primary offer, they had such
a low conversion rate like one ortwo percent, and they didn't have a
list big enough. So we createdthings to build the bigger list to farm
(28:22):
that list in order to find highlyqualified individuals and then only send the higher
ticket offer to the highly qualified individuals, where they got a thirteen percent conversion
rate, so quantity was higher,the conversion rate was extremely high, but
instead of getting two to three salesper offer, they were getting same number
(28:44):
of offers, they were getting twentyor thirty sales per offer. So their
money went way up. But theyhad a consistent way of drilling down into
that customer list. And so nowit was the problem became because by the
way, I don't solve problems,I create new problems. And what do
I mean by that, Well,once your revenue starts growing, they got
(29:07):
excited about that and they want tospend more money on marketing, but they
didn't have a framework in place toknow what money spent was good investment versus
the money they were just pissing awaytrying new stuff. And so ultimately,
with the framework in place, wewere able to segment out two teams.
One team just focused on lead generationand one team focused on sales generation.
(29:29):
But the governance of the lead teamwas determined by those who bought, not
ideas and creatives and not you know, things we might try, but actual
who bought product, and then thelead team spun off into a demand generation
team who took what they learned fromthe sales conversion. It took what they
(29:51):
learned from the lead conversion and triedto find new channels, new mailing lists.
And by the way, for mostcompanies, these are one individual for
each and they all work on thesame team, and so they share ideas,
but the ideas are built around aframework, and then the results of
this test set, which is inthe framework is what we use for direction.
So basically, knowing who the buyerswere, these other two teams,
(30:15):
the demand generation and the lead generationside or lead acquisition side, would go
out and try to find more peoplethat look like buyers. So maybe they're
getting getting some leads on Facebook,and now they're going to take it over
because this is a business to businessoffer, They're going to take it over
to LinkedIn. Then they're going togo try Rise, and then they're going
to go try all these little tinyniche networks. Because by the way,
(30:37):
some of these tiny niche business networks, you can go in and advertise on
them for pretty cost effectively. Andthey had decent conversion. And remember it's
different people on these websites, andthen they found that Facebook groups was useful,
but they had actually better revenue onthe LinkedIn groups. Now, again,
this could be completely different for yourorganization. It could be a certain
(31:00):
mailing list that you rent, Itcould be a certain type of pay per
click campaign on a certain network.We have to figure that stuff out.
And again we use the framework togo from prospect to a lead funnel to
an inquiry, from an acquiry toa sales funnel to a buyer, and
then actually pixeling each of these conditionsalong the way, actually building mailing lists
(31:22):
in house or in house list segmentation, actually going out and buying appended data
to fully understand your buyers, andthen going back to the marketplace and looking
for buyers. See, it doesn'tmatter how much traffic your website gets.
It doesn't matter how many leads yougenerate. Only matters buyers. Buyers are
voting with their dollars. Now wecan take the buyers and we can digest
(31:45):
them into the variables to manage.So we can say, of our buyers,
what does their customer avatar look like? What is their demographics? What
is their psychographics? Of these buyers, where did they come from? Now
you can go back to those sameplace, or you can go back to
proxies of those places of those buyerswhen did they buy the most. So
(32:06):
now we're looking at the months now, depending on your volume, this could
be monthly, this could be quarterly, this could be weekly. And we're
again then building in the copy.So the copy is actually only five to
ten percent of the functions that arenecessary to know which copy works. So
the copy is critically important. Itcan have eighty to ninety percent of the
(32:27):
impact in a campaign. But ifthat copy is in front of the wrong
people at the wrong time, infront of people who have no money,
in front of people that have adifferent search intent or engagement intent. So
if they're on Facebook to have funand they see your ad, they're not
necessarily going to jump over and actuallyin a business to business offer. If
they're on Facebook at home and theysee your ad, they're not necessarily going
(32:52):
to be able to click through andtransact because they're not in their work computer
or their work environment. And thenwhen they're in their work environment, they
can't access Facebook, so they can'tsee yours. And they're also on different
browsers, so the cookies don't workthe same way you might imagine anyway,
So this particular client ended up.We talked about the one to two percent
conversion rate going up to thirteen percentconversion rate. I gave you the context
(33:15):
that at thirteen percent, even thoughthey're sending to fewer people, it was
a higher quantity of people who tookthe offer. We talked about an intermediary
product which turned out to be veryprofitable and helped them recover much of their
advertising costs. So if they justwanted to break even, they could run
their lead funnel all day long withpaid advertising and even do joint ventures and
(33:38):
sponsorships and influencer marketing. They coulddo the whole gamut of everything and break
even on the lead funnel. Andnow their sales offer for the four figure
item was a high value. Buthere's another thing that we did for a
value add because it's five by five, five ways to get leads, five
(33:59):
ways to get customs, and thenyou can even go to five different products.
But this is what we did.We added another tier, we added
another product. So we had peoplewho bought the high ticket service. Through
our research, we discovered a variantof the high ticket service, and now
they have an AB option on thehigh ticket service. So now we're not
just offering A and then having peoplesay no, We're not just offering B
(34:22):
and having people say no. Nowwe're offering AB. So there's three choices
total. And again i'm running upon time here. If you want to
talk about this specifically for your organization, if you want to optimize your conversion,
increase your sales, boost your profits, generate greater results, then you're
going to visit me at www dotAdbriefings dot co dot uk. But here's
(34:43):
the bigger picture of everybody who theyhad enough people buying their high ticket service
that they needed to offer something else. What's next factor, it's a big
mistake not to have something that's next. So for everybody who bought the first
primary high ticket offer, we nowoffer them this new one and started a
whole new test cycle. So thetest cycles in series that we talked about
(35:07):
here can be applied at your leadlevel, at your sales level, and
now at your customer retention level,which would be additional purchases represents retention.
We're going to gain increment the winners. We're going to statistically accurately measure all
of our results, and we're goingto use a framework that has an ab
(35:30):
split on everything that we do.We're testing the headline or we're testing the
whole piece against a conversion event.A lot of times folks increase their conversion
by actually measuring it. But inthis case, these individuals were able to
(35:51):
double their gross in the course ofa year and add eighty percent to their
profit. So it does cost todo things like this. It is more
technically disciplined than doing this other ways, but it works better than the other
ways. The other ways is throwingspaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.
(36:14):
Testing campaigns without much idea of whyyou're testing it, and then ultimately
being creative. That's a recipe forgoing broke. If you're a small and
medium sized business, you cannot affordto keep doing things without knowing what works
and what doesn't. Now, whyis this particular methodology not regularly taught.
It's not that exciting for a lotof people. Some people are even scared
(36:36):
of it is because I'm asked.I asked them to step back from what
they were doing. First thing wedid was cataloged all the campaigns they did
in the past. We built we'vegathered all the mailing lists that they had.
Some mailing lists they didn't have permissionto market anymore, so we actually
had to use those lists to buildsimilar audiences and start the lead generation from
scratch. We had to go throughtheir CRM system and make sure or the
(37:00):
tagging, flagging, grouping, subgrouping, all that segmentation work was available to
be done. We had to makesure their analytics worked correctly whether the sale
came from online or offline. It'sa little bit of work, but again,
including my costs, their investment inmy organization, their investment and staff
to manage these things, they wereable to produce an increase in profits.
(37:24):
So theyre gross increased, but sodid their administrative overhead because we're actually testing
marketing campaigns. Yet their profits stillincreased because we're getting more qualified, higher
value customers. And then, likeI said, I tend to create more
problems than I solve. The newproblem that they had was now in the
(37:45):
operational side, as far as makingsure they didn't end up with so they
had capacity in the past to growthe business. Now they need to get
the right people in place so thatthey can increase their capacity because they're topped
out. Now we increase pricing,we adjust some of the packages, divide
packages up, and different things likethat, and they're going to more than
(38:07):
survive. But if they want totake this business to the next level,
the new problem they have is nowoperational. And so that's why again,
when we catalog the campaigns, wewrote processes and procedures to catalog. When
we designed the campaigns, we usedcontrols before we made monetary decisions about where
to apply money. So, forexample, if you have one hundred dollars
(38:28):
a day budget, we don't spendthe whole hundred dollars until we know we
got something that works, and thenwe might double down. But there's a
control in there so that we're preventingthat runaway spending that a lot of people
have where they feel compelled to useup their whole marketing budget. So these
are good and happy problems that businessowners want to have, especially since they're
able to net out of the businessmuch higher than they were before. They're
(38:52):
also able to build up a warchest because at that one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars they were spending a yearon marketing gets recovered. Now this is
probably a topic for another time,but it gets recovered within eight months rather
than not recovered at all, Sothat one hundred and fifty thousand dollars they
spend this year comes back this year, rather than you know, trying to
(39:15):
scrimp and save next year trying toyou know, pay for the marketing budget.
So technically, after the first yearthey can spend three hundred thousand dollars
if they don't change their budget,which everybody tries to change it. But
if you could spend one hundred fiftythousand dollars this year to break even,
and I was able to help yourecover that one hundred fifty thousand dollars this
(39:35):
year, then next year you canspend three hundred thousand dollars to get a
customer to break even. Does thatmake sense? See, there's some things
that you have to really understand.I know I've tried to cover a lot
in a podcast. I hope ithasn't been confusing. I'm going to give
you a quick summary. The frameworkhelps focus energy and effort so that you
(39:58):
are understanding the variables impact conversion,but you're also managing your budget to reinforce
the conversion activities that work at agranular level. Now that we can measure
at a granular level, we cantest this versus that and then do more
of whatever works. Also, becausewe split the sales funnel, we're able
(40:21):
to kind of fill people up ina queue, so anybody interested in your
products or services become a lead.We're queueing those folks up, and then
as long as we're making consistent offersto that house list, it's hard for
our competitors to copy those offers.Because we're building a library of offers and
keeping track of who received what offer. We can also send offers that have
(40:43):
worked in the past to people who'venever seen the offer before, and then
all the sequential follow up associated withthat offer can go out. And then
you can also build out generic offersthat we put into the prospect newsletter or
we put into follow up messages orjust drip campaigns, and then finally lead.
Because we can measure, we cannow use statistics to identify what has
(41:05):
the highest probability of repeating. Also, when we have these variables, which
of these variables I'm going to sayit at a nova, but which of
these variables contribute to the performance increase? Because in order to maintain this.
You know, I can get youa quick win, but in order to
maintain the quick win and consistently growyour business, you do need to know
(41:27):
what contribute, what contributing factors inthe marketplace lead to a lead or a
sale. Now, just because they'rea lead on the list doesn't mean they're
worthy as a customer that it doesn'tmean they're going to buy so more favorably.
And the last takeaway is that we'reskewing our actions based on buyers,
(41:49):
those customers who voted with their dollars. And then on the back end,
which we haven't talked about this withthis particular client, but on the back
end, you start surveying those buyers. Once you got one hundred buyers,
you can start servying those buyers,adjust your products, introduce new products.
You're really building the business there.The key takeaway is it is a systematic
(42:12):
approach. As much as people likethe creativity, the copy is only about
twenty percent of the activity, itdoes impact eighty percent of the outcome.
But in order to make informed decisionswith your copy or with your marketing campaigns,
you need to implement these frameworks.If you'd like help implementing these frameworks.
If you have questions for clarification,because I did cram a lot into
(42:32):
this forty two minutes. If youare concerned for some problem in your organization
and you want new, more excitingproblems which could be a very high free
net cash flow and the urge totry things rather than having a systematic discipline
approach, then contact me at wwwdot Adbriefings dot co dot uk. I'm
(42:54):
just a hit with the ad BriefingsCopywriting Tips newsletter and to hear, I'm
going to help you transform business relationshipsinto profits by drilling down into customer segments
and bases and then applying words thatsell in a meaningful and measurable way.
Again, the copy is only twentypercent of the work you're going to do,
(43:15):
but it is eighty percent of theresults, and so let's apply that
copy where it matters. I'm lookingforward to your questions, comments, and
more, and if you like thislong form let me know I could do
more in the future, or ifyou'd like me to keep it nice and
short, say so thanks for listening. I'm just a hit with AD Briefings Copywriting Tips
A marketer comes to me frustrated thatthey're spending more money and getting less results,
that they're constantly behind their competitors,they have difficulty launching new products.
They're frustrated with this whole thing calledcopywriting. They've tested all kinds of variations
and yet they are still not evenbreaking even on their marketing efforts. And
(00:22):
they've come to me and they said, hey, look, here's what we're
doing. And I admit they're doinga lot of right things, but they're
doing a lot in general a bulk, and they want to know how they
can improve their marketing results by writingbetter copy. I'm justin hit with ad
briefings, copywriting tips. Here's myapproach, and then I'm going to share
with you some key foundational principles ofdirect response marketing. In fact, it's
(00:48):
the boring stuff that creates exciting results. And so this individual was basically writing
all this different copy and then theythought they were testing. And so I'll
also cover kind of an outline ofhow to do better testing, kind of
how to apply your marketing dollars.So they're spending quite a bit of money
every month, and it doesn't reallymatter whether it's thousands or tens of thousands
(01:11):
every month they're spending on paid advertising. They were doing a lot of what
they called organic advertising, like organicsearch and trying to attract people on social
media platforms. And there's nothing wrongwith these things. They could all be
made to work if you understand thisunderlying foundation. And this foundation builds on
(01:34):
direct response, the kind of directresponses worked from time immemorial because it's essentially
a cause and effect chains. We'reinviting the prospect to raise their hand and
take a certain action, and thenwe respond to that they've responded to our
inquiry, we're responding to their request, and it goes back and forth.
(01:56):
We build up what first starts outas prospect. So these are the people
potentially in your marketplace who can buyyour product and service, the people you've
designed a product and service for andinquiries, those who've requested additional information about
your product and service to finding buyerswho after receiving information about your product or
(02:17):
service, has decided to make abuying decision. And it's a back and
forth dance between what is it thatwe believe the marketplace wants and what is
it that they actually want? Andnow this is a disturbing part of it
because the way I look at thisis if your customers are not buying,
you're either not reaching people which youalign with the message in marketmap to market
(02:42):
match is not there, or whatyou're offering the marketplace they don't want,
they don't care, they don't needit. Now, there are variety of
conditions or variables in the marketplace tomatch or to manage, and this cause
is confusion and very often causes usto try new things. So let me
(03:04):
first talk about the variables that wehave to management to manage that are constantly
changing because of the marketplace, becauseof the economy, because of consumer sentiment.
And these variables include the customer avatar. Who are we advertising to?
Who is that specific prospect in themarketplace? Do they have money to spend?
(03:25):
Do they pay money to solve thistype of problem. We're looking at
the source or campaign, What isthe copy and creative that we're sending these
individuals. We look at the mediumor list. Where have these where do
these people live? So just becauseyour customers on Facebook and they've been cookied,
and Facebook can tell you who thosepeople are and they're on the platform,
(03:47):
it doesn't mean that their mental statewhile on the platform is conducive to
receive your offer and to ultimately buywhat it is that you have to offer.
So, for example, Facebook's tryingto keep them on the platform,
and then you're trying to get themoff the platform, and then it's just
a big mess. There's copy elementsthat we have to worry about. There's
the month of the year or weekof the year, so there are some
(04:11):
offers that are time sensitive. Soat the end of the year, weight
loss offers are going to do betterthan at the middle of the year or
right before Thanksgiving. For example.You're not going to tell a specific audience
who needs to lose weight, whowants to lose weight right before Thanksgiving that
they could start a sensible diet andexercise program and start losing weight right now.
(04:34):
They don't care. They're gonna they'regonna be out at the holidays.
It's a difficult emotional time, it'sa difficult stressful time. Uh as far
as when it comes to eating isconcerned and so the right offer, it's
the perfect offer, it's the rightsolution. It's the right audience who even
has a desire to take action,but not right now and so depending on
(04:57):
how you segment your your and we'regoing to talk about testing. Depending on
how you set segment you're testing,you might have a week target date,
or you may have a month targetdate. In some markets, you might
have a outside temperature date, soif you're selling gardening supplies, you want
to be out there at a certainoutdoor temperature, or the same thing could
(05:20):
be with resorts and other tourism relateditems. Finally, there's going to be
in this. I shouldn't say finallybecause there are a lot of variables we
have to manage when we're doing marketingcampaigns, and that's why I'm going to
show you a framework that makes iteasier to manage these variables. But you
also have the price positioning. That'snot just the price of your product,
(05:42):
but it's your price of the relatedor relation to any other choice. Thats
prospect can make. Maybe you havea solution where somebody, for everybody who
wants to be millionaires, you havea solution that if they follow the instructions,
they will become a millionaire in ninetydays or less. And this solution
has been guaranteed. You have onehundred percent success rate and the product is
(06:08):
only two million dollars. Like,for everybody who buys this product on how
to be a Millionaire and they investthe two million dollars, they all become
millionaires at some time within ninety daysof the investment. See, people aren't
going to pay that because the barrierto entry is too high. The barrier
to entry. You know, therecould be the believability there could you could
(06:30):
be the right list, It couldbe the right offer for that particular audience.
But the price is what broke it. And so that's why I want
to share with these share these variablesthat you have to manage because there are
a large number of variables, andany one of these variables breaking the prospect
isn't going to buy. It's thekey that they have to know, like
(06:54):
and trust you in order to purchase. What's what contributes to knowledge, liking,
and trusting, Well, the contextthat's around the specific offer. So
let's look now at a framework.Because this individual when they came to me,
they had good marketing, they hadgood customer avatars, They understand who
(07:17):
they want to sell to. Thataudience has money to spend. They're sending
campaigns irregularly, and I think thisframework really helps you be more regular.
But they were sending campaigns that weregood campaigns. They were really good campaigns.
Now, one thing we noticed isthey couldn't tell which campaigns were good
under these variable conditions in order toactually repeat a campaign. So one of
(07:42):
the mistakes that they made is theywould do a decent campaign and it wouldn't
work, and then they and howdo I know it's decent, Well,
because we got results when we addedthe framework, But they do a decent
campaign, it wouldn't do what theyexpected. And then they'd do a different
campaign and it wouldn't do what theyexpected. So these folks actually had a
library of campaigns. These are marketingpackages that included follow up email, newsletters,
(08:11):
follow up postcards or postal mailings.You know, there was a full
kit. They didn't need to geta new copy. They had at least
twelve really decent campaigns. They wereeach done one time. And so again,
how do you build familiarity where youneed to have kind of a repeat
interaction, you need to demonstrate yourvalue in the marketplace. These are all
(08:33):
things that are we all know,but we're still not getting results. The
thing they were missing was a frameworkto understand that we must take a prospect
through a lead funnel in order forthem to become an inquiry. Now an
inquiry, they've requested information. Weneed to take a inquiry through a sales
(08:54):
funnel in order for them to becomea buyer. At least that first initial
tran is action because in many highticket sales, folks aren't buying cold.
Now again, I caveat high ticketsales. These this group had a product
that started at three thoy, ninehundred and ninety seven dollars. And then
it's a services based company. Thatalmost doesn't matter, but it's a services
(09:18):
based company that had a customer lifetimevalue of about twenty eight thousand dollars a
year. So, and that's Idon't like to always get I don't like
to give numbers because you might say, well, I don't have a product
of twenty eight thousand, Well,then invent one. But the customer lifetime
value for context here was a twelvemonth period and that is the gross.
(09:41):
Okay, the organization has about atwenty percent margin, and these things are
important to understand. And then theinitial sale was three nine nine seven initial
So let's just say that a highticket product is four figures a lifetime five
figures. Now, they were haphazardlyapproaching the marketplace and just kind of throwing
(10:07):
stuff out there to see what willwork. They didn't understand the variables that
influence their buying decision. And thisis first exercises. You make a list
of the variables that impact the decision. If there's a male decision maker,
they're going to consult with their wife. If it's a business and there's two
decision makers, but there's five total, we need to have at least a
(10:30):
majority of the decision makers in ourfavor. If there's a decision maker in
one department, they and they checkwith another department, we need to market
both sides of that. Those arethe things we need to understand. Now.
The framework is that the lead funnelhas an AB split going to an
opt in. Now, what isan AB split. This particular client was
(10:52):
sending just one off. They didn'thave any basis of comparison. If you're
going to do direct response, youneed a basis of comparison, which typically
becomes that control that that document orthat campaign that just works regularly, it
works consistently, It doesn't you know, necessarily satisfy all your needs. But
it's a baseline to test where youknow that the cost per lead, for
(11:13):
example, or the cost per saleor the conversion rate is pretty consistent well,
and we want as many of thoseas we can. I've talked about
a five x five plan in thepast, where we have five controls over
five different mediums, and then wejust keep, you know, Royal rumble
testing those things out until we canbeat them with test cases. But a
(11:35):
B split is either your control versusa comparable test, or it is a
it is two campaigns going out once. So this case, inside the campaign,
the opt in page could have versionA versus version B, and you
(11:56):
can just send traffic to it,and if there's enough volume, you could
have pay per click A versus payper click B both going to the opt
in page and then with your conversiontracking in your analytics in place, and
their analytics could use some improvement,but the analytics in place, you'll be
able to know which source creates whichinquiry. Now, this is very informative
(12:20):
because it allows us to better understandwho becomes leads. So within the variables
of customer avatar, within the variablesof campaign copy, within the variables of
medium or list, where is thead being put, timeframe, everything else.
We can know that this type ofprospect is attracted by the combination of
(12:41):
a when it comes to pay perclick, copy a in pay per click,
and offer a on the ab splitat the opt in page. So
we're learning something, and that's probablythe biggest takeaway is that every marketing campaign
has you have to learn something.The biggest thing that this client learned was
(13:03):
that they hated their marketing and theywere trying to find some help. But
the marketing wasn't necessarily bad. Whatwas bad is the selective nature of sifting
and sorting through these mediums and liststo identify highly qualified prospects. Now,
once you've got people on a list, an inquiry list, which could be
(13:24):
an email list, it could bea mailing list, you now send campaigns
to those people, which could bea prospect newsletter, it could be a
follow up series, it could bea lot of different things. And we
do the same testing again, whichwould be ab split to an offer.
So that prospect newsletter, we havethis month's newsletter and it contains an offer.
(13:50):
That's kind of a clue there.Anything you send to a prospect or,
a customer or somebody on your listneeds to have some kind of offer,
and then we can hell because theoffer takes them to a sales letter
or a landing page, which sourcecontribution led to a purchase. See what
(14:11):
we're doing is we're building audience segments. We take the large prospect marketplace,
all the people possible who could buyyour products and services, and we invest
money, time and resources into generatinga small list of people who are interested
in the solutions that you have tooffer. They're highly qualified, they've checked
(14:31):
off all the boxes, they havea desire to take action, and then
from there we make specific offers accordingto their needs. So you may have
on your front end these variables sixdifferent variables that I described here, and
then those variables will be clustered intotest A versus test B. Now you
(14:52):
can do more complex multivariate testing.This particular client did not have the analytics
structure in place, so that's oneof the things we're going to work on.
They didn't They couldn't test a chainof events let it alone. Did
they have any idea of what theywere doing. If they did, they
would they wouldn't need someone to organizethings or to implement these frameworks. But
(15:15):
what the framework is doing is it'sgiving you structure to apply marketing dollars so
that you're not writing twelve newsletter issuesand not learning anything. Because you want
to have and curve version rates improved, you want to have the opt ins
increase. You want to have thesethings. But the framework gives you a
(15:39):
structure to do one test at atime. Because there are so many variables,
we can't assume that the test wedid last week is going to respond
exactly the same this week until wehave enough volume, until we have repeatable
performance, meaning the ad is sentout the same way every time. Now,
(16:02):
the good news is these mailing listsare pretty big. So what we
typically did when we were doing directmail is if we had a list of
twenty five thousand people, we wouldsend a letter to two cells, which
would be smaller subsets of the biglist. We would randomly select them,
and one cell would be fifteen hundredpeople and another cell would be fifteen hundred
(16:22):
people, and we'd send a variationof letter A to one list and letter
B to the other list, andthen the next week we would swap the
two so each letter was seen bythree thousand unique people, and then we
could do the math to see whichone is statistically more significant than the other.
(16:44):
So we're looking at the behavioral change, which is someone raising their hand
and buying a product or service,and they were doing some math that determine
which of these two letters was mostprofitable. And then we know we have
twenty five thousand names, we've onlymailed three thousand of them. So now
we take the winning letter and we'dmail it again to another group of individuals
selected from the primary list, andmaybe we're going to send three thousand this
(17:10):
time. But when we send thatthree thousand, because we're in a third
week, by the way, wewould then add a new campaign to test
against it. It's being sent tothe three thousand people we've already contacted,
or another subset within this set withinthe group. Now I can draw this
out for your organization. If you'vegot a library of content, I can
(17:32):
show you how this lays out.But essentially, what we're doing is that
somebody on that list every week isgetting an offer from you, or getting
a follow up piece of email,or getting a greconnection, or getting a
letter in the mail, or gettingsomething by some other means of which we're
concentrating on those who are most likelyto purchase because we've had a previous interaction
(17:56):
with them. So you have alist of twenty five thousand individuals. We're
farming that list. Maybe you rentedthe list, maybe it's a certain platform,
maybe it's something you've in house andyou've grown it over time, but
we're farming that list with tests.Using these frameworks, we're either going to
(18:17):
generate a lead to find out ifsomebody is interested in a product or service,
and then follow up that interest withan actual offer, and these can
be chained together and it can beautomated. But ultimately we're not mailing the
whole list because if it costs adollar to mail somebody, and a lot
of folks say, well, emailsfree, social media is free. If
(18:41):
you are even considering your time,then there is no platform that is actually
free. So that creative and thatcopy you've written, the copywriter you've hired,
that cost you something. We haveto factor that into our costs,
even in the course of an email. So I used to estimate that it
costs fifteen cents to mail somebody onmy own list. I literally calculated the
(19:04):
cost of the email newsletter product thatwe're using, the overhead related to creating
a offer or creating a message,the contributed overhead of the organization itself,
and then I would factor my desiredprofit margin in and that would give me
(19:26):
a price on the email. Now, we were mailing so much email that
it was about fifteen cents per email, but for your company it could be
thirty dollars per email sent out.Now, of course, it depends on
the size of the list. SoI let's say it cost one hundred dollars
to set up a campaign and toget it scheduled and get it ready to
(19:48):
send out, send out. ButI have a list of one hundred people,
then it's going to be a dollarper contact. But if I have
a list of one hundred thousand individuals, now the fractional rate gets much smaller.
Where with postal mail you still gotto pay a dollar a letter,
even if you have ten thousand lettersor you have five thousand letters. But
again we know the cost, wehave a framework for implementing the campaign.
(20:15):
After a certain number of contacts,we can then calculate which is most likely
to be repeatable, and then nowwe test against that where the underlying people
contacted are different people, so we'renot sending the same thing to folks over
and over again. And that's oneof the things that this particular client was
doing, is they would sometimes resurrecta campaign, but they'd send it to
(20:37):
the same people who got it before, and they didn't have a framework for
testing. And so, yes,they made a few sales. And yes,
it's true that you can send thesame social media posts I send.
So I have a library of socialmedia posts that were posted years ago,
and every so often they wake up, and you know, every two or
three years they get posted again.It is a different audience. But ultimately,
(21:03):
without that measurement, you don't knowwhat you should go back to in
the library. You also don't knowwhere to apply the capital because if it
costs you let's say you're doing payper click, and it costs you five
dollars per click and you only haveone hundred dollars a day for a budget,
then where do we apply that money. Well, it's the same concept
(21:25):
that we just talked about. Youmight say, for example, if you
have one hundred dollars a day budget, you might put twenty five dollars on
a so remember, in our framework, we have an AB going to a
landing page, and you might puttwenty five dollars on b AB go into
a landing page. Now you mightbe saying, well, justin I have
one hundred dollars day budget. Well, you don't know where that you don't
(21:47):
know where that is best applied.So we want to maintain a small reserve
so that we can apply. Youknow, we can grow our budgets.
You and I know that most dailybudgets are arbitrary. When I talk about
and what works well for my clientsis we have wor chests and we say,
okay, this year, we're goingto spend one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and we're going to spend itin such a way that we get two
(22:08):
hundred and fifty thousand dollars at theend of the year in our budget because
ten percent of every sale is goingto go into our marketing reserve. And
that marketing reserve we've tried to matchprofit. By the way, if you
got a ten percent margin, we'reput inside ten percent in the marketing budget.
And you might be saying, well, just to my numbers are too
tight. Again, you can createnew products, you can improve your overhead.
(22:32):
But here's my point. Week one, we put twenty five dollars on
A and twenty five dollars on B. Week two, we take the winner
from that AB split and we putfifty dollars on it. And now we
introduce C and we put twenty fivedollars on that, and then as long
as we have a winner, wekeep incrementally incrementing the winner and reducing the
(22:53):
losers. So if we have anAB test this week and we can't tell
whether or not it's working, weof course exclude anybody who's on our list
and only look at new people.And the AB doesn't give us a definitive
answer, we can't statistically show thatit's repeatable. Then we might continue twenty
five dollars and twenty five dollars onAB. But if we do have a
(23:17):
winner, we want more of thewinner and so we ultimately will put a
little bit more money on it.So the framework is critical because it allows
us to keep going back to acampaign, and I build the frameworks into
the campaign, but we can goback to winning campaigns with new audiences.
(23:38):
So you're doing a campaign on Facebook, it's working out really well, you've
tested it to determine what is statisticallyaccurate. Where can you put your money
to repeat winners, and where canyou take money away from losers. Now
you have this structured campaign together,you don't stop there. You now take
it to Twitter, take it toLinkedIn, take it to Pinterest, take
(24:00):
it to some other platform, becauseyou're gonna have controls. Now, I
don't know the five by five planthat I talked about before. I have
a program for that. I'm notsure if it's actually structured, but here's
the concept. You're gonna end upwith five campaigns that you know work based
on these variables. You're gonna knowwho the audience is, where the campaign
(24:22):
works, You're gonna know what timeof the year you want to be sending
that campaign. You're gonna know aboutthe individuals who have responded to the campaign
in the past, and you're gonnaknow about the typical person who buys.
You're gonna go then take those campaignsand you're gonna keep kind of keep fighting
them out there. It's like Marchmadness. You're gonna keep going to you
find winners, and you want fivewinners. Now, for some companies,
(24:45):
you want twelve winners. For somecompanies you'll have fifty two winners. But
if you can't get five winners,you're not gonna be able to get twelve
winners. You're gonna apply the marketingbudget in a logical way, adding more
money to what works until it stoppedworking, by the way, and take
money away from those things that arelosing, because you might find that in
(25:06):
the first quarter of the year youcan ramp up a certain campaign, but
in the last quarter of the yearyou can't run that campaign at all.
And so now we're going to havea variant that is a test case within
a time period where the winners youhave in January are going to be different
(25:27):
than the winners you have in March, April, May, June, July
just really depends. Now, theback end of this is data analytics.
We can very often measure it withGoogle Analytics or the website, but if
you're a multi channel advertiser and you'vegot advertising with mail and you've got outbound
phone calls, it gets a littlebit more complex. And so the framework
(25:49):
itself helps us at each point ofimplementation develop a case for a campaign,
and then when we recall all thatcampaign in the future. We were able
to have an idea of where contextit works really well. So what happened
to this client, Well, firstoff, they found out that their three
(26:10):
hundred and ninety nine three nine hundredand ninety seven dollars product was too big
as the first step, they hada very long sales cycle for it,
and the people who were converting,they they weren't getting enough of those people
in their in their ecosystem, intheir their house list. So we looked
at creating a Prospect newsletter. Sowe recycled a lot of their old campaigns.
(26:32):
We wrote a series of twenty fouremail messages and we started a opted
email opt in campaign to get peopleinto a Prospect newsletter in order to warm
folks up a little bit more beforewe made the offer of the three nine
hundred ninety seven dollars product. Nowwe are gapping out between they've joined the
(26:56):
list and they've made a monetary decisionto try to find a way to get
micro engagements as well as some smallmonetary sales. Because once they're a customer,
there's the laws are different. Youcan follow up with them differently.
You can have offers at the bottomof a of an opt in if they
buy a thirty nine dollars book.In this case, we build a special
(27:17):
report and small course. If theybuy a thirty nine dollars program, you
can upsell them to the coaching andconsulting. You can start defining what tiers
take the three nine hundred and ninetyseven dollars solution. And by the way,
I'm using some of my numbers,not the actual client's numbers, because
they're confidential. And so you'll noticeI offer a three nine hundred ninety seven
(27:40):
dollars a monthly program that's available topeople call my Platinum program. They have
their widget, which is a fourfigure offer. The key is we had
to bridge between the folks that areinterested, and while we're gathering information about
who these folks are, some kindof initial offer, which is kind of
(28:00):
in this case, it is aself liquidating lead generation in order for us
to even talk about the higher ticketproduct, because it's an aside rather than
the primary offer. So when theymade the primary offer, they had such
a low conversion rate like one ortwo percent, and they didn't have a
list big enough. So we createdthings to build the bigger list to farm
(28:22):
that list in order to find highlyqualified individuals and then only send the higher
ticket offer to the highly qualified individuals, where they got a thirteen percent conversion
rate, so quantity was higher,the conversion rate was extremely high, but
instead of getting two to three salesper offer, they were getting same number
(28:44):
of offers, they were getting twentyor thirty sales per offer. So their
money went way up. But theyhad a consistent way of drilling down into
that customer list. And so nowit was the problem became because by the
way, I don't solve problems,I create new problems. And what do
I mean by that, Well,once your revenue starts growing, they got
(29:07):
excited about that and they want tospend more money on marketing, but they
didn't have a framework in place toknow what money spent was good investment versus
the money they were just pissing awaytrying new stuff. And so ultimately,
with the framework in place, wewere able to segment out two teams.
One team just focused on lead generationand one team focused on sales generation.
(29:29):
But the governance of the lead teamwas determined by those who bought, not
ideas and creatives and not you know, things we might try, but actual
who bought product, and then thelead team spun off into a demand generation
team who took what they learned fromthe sales conversion. It took what they
(29:51):
learned from the lead conversion and triedto find new channels, new mailing lists.
And by the way, for mostcompanies, these are one individual for
each and they all work on thesame team, and so they share ideas,
but the ideas are built around aframework, and then the results of
this test set, which is inthe framework is what we use for direction.
So basically, knowing who the buyerswere, these other two teams,
(30:15):
the demand generation and the lead generationside or lead acquisition side, would go
out and try to find more peoplethat look like buyers. So maybe they're
getting getting some leads on Facebook,and now they're going to take it over
because this is a business to businessoffer, They're going to take it over
to LinkedIn. Then they're going togo try Rise, and then they're going
to go try all these little tinyniche networks. Because by the way,
(30:37):
some of these tiny niche business networks, you can go in and advertise on
them for pretty cost effectively. Andthey had decent conversion. And remember it's
different people on these websites, andthen they found that Facebook groups was useful,
but they had actually better revenue onthe LinkedIn groups. Now, again,
this could be completely different for yourorganization. It could be a certain
(31:00):
mailing list that you rent, Itcould be a certain type of pay per
click campaign on a certain network.We have to figure that stuff out.
And again we use the framework togo from prospect to a lead funnel to
an inquiry, from an acquiry toa sales funnel to a buyer, and
then actually pixeling each of these conditionsalong the way, actually building mailing lists
(31:22):
in house or in house list segmentation, actually going out and buying appended data
to fully understand your buyers, andthen going back to the marketplace and looking
for buyers. See, it doesn'tmatter how much traffic your website gets.
It doesn't matter how many leads yougenerate. Only matters buyers. Buyers are
voting with their dollars. Now wecan take the buyers and we can digest
(31:45):
them into the variables to manage.So we can say, of our buyers,
what does their customer avatar look like? What is their demographics? What
is their psychographics? Of these buyers, where did they come from? Now
you can go back to those sameplace, or you can go back to
proxies of those places of those buyerswhen did they buy the most. So
(32:06):
now we're looking at the months now, depending on your volume, this could
be monthly, this could be quarterly, this could be weekly. And we're
again then building in the copy.So the copy is actually only five to
ten percent of the functions that arenecessary to know which copy works. So
the copy is critically important. Itcan have eighty to ninety percent of the
(32:27):
impact in a campaign. But ifthat copy is in front of the wrong
people at the wrong time, infront of people who have no money,
in front of people that have adifferent search intent or engagement intent. So
if they're on Facebook to have funand they see your ad, they're not
necessarily going to jump over and actuallyin a business to business offer. If
they're on Facebook at home and theysee your ad, they're not necessarily going
(32:52):
to be able to click through andtransact because they're not in their work computer
or their work environment. And thenwhen they're in their work environment, they
can't access Facebook, so they can'tsee yours. And they're also on different
browsers, so the cookies don't workthe same way you might imagine anyway,
So this particular client ended up.We talked about the one to two percent
conversion rate going up to thirteen percentconversion rate. I gave you the context
(33:15):
that at thirteen percent, even thoughthey're sending to fewer people, it was
a higher quantity of people who tookthe offer. We talked about an intermediary
product which turned out to be veryprofitable and helped them recover much of their
advertising costs. So if they justwanted to break even, they could run
their lead funnel all day long withpaid advertising and even do joint ventures and
(33:38):
sponsorships and influencer marketing. They coulddo the whole gamut of everything and break
even on the lead funnel. Andnow their sales offer for the four figure
item was a high value. Buthere's another thing that we did for a
value add because it's five by five, five ways to get leads, five
(33:59):
ways to get customs, and thenyou can even go to five different products.
But this is what we did.We added another tier, we added
another product. So we had peoplewho bought the high ticket service. Through
our research, we discovered a variantof the high ticket service, and now
they have an AB option on thehigh ticket service. So now we're not
just offering A and then having peoplesay no, We're not just offering B
(34:22):
and having people say no. Nowwe're offering AB. So there's three choices
total. And again i'm running upon time here. If you want to
talk about this specifically for your organization, if you want to optimize your conversion,
increase your sales, boost your profits, generate greater results, then you're
going to visit me at www dotAdbriefings dot co dot uk. But here's
(34:43):
the bigger picture of everybody who theyhad enough people buying their high ticket service
that they needed to offer something else. What's next factor, it's a big
mistake not to have something that's next. So for everybody who bought the first
primary high ticket offer, we nowoffer them this new one and started a
whole new test cycle. So thetest cycles in series that we talked about
(35:07):
here can be applied at your leadlevel, at your sales level, and
now at your customer retention level,which would be additional purchases represents retention.
We're going to gain increment the winners. We're going to statistically accurately measure all
of our results, and we're goingto use a framework that has an ab
(35:30):
split on everything that we do.We're testing the headline or we're testing the
whole piece against a conversion event.A lot of times folks increase their conversion
by actually measuring it. But inthis case, these individuals were able to
(35:51):
double their gross in the course ofa year and add eighty percent to their
profit. So it does cost todo things like this. It is more
technically disciplined than doing this other ways, but it works better than the other
ways. The other ways is throwingspaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.
(36:14):
Testing campaigns without much idea of whyyou're testing it, and then ultimately
being creative. That's a recipe forgoing broke. If you're a small and
medium sized business, you cannot affordto keep doing things without knowing what works
and what doesn't. Now, whyis this particular methodology not regularly taught.
It's not that exciting for a lotof people. Some people are even scared
(36:36):
of it is because I'm asked.I asked them to step back from what
they were doing. First thing wedid was cataloged all the campaigns they did
in the past. We built we'vegathered all the mailing lists that they had.
Some mailing lists they didn't have permissionto market anymore, so we actually
had to use those lists to buildsimilar audiences and start the lead generation from
scratch. We had to go throughtheir CRM system and make sure or the
(37:00):
tagging, flagging, grouping, subgrouping, all that segmentation work was available to
be done. We had to makesure their analytics worked correctly whether the sale
came from online or offline. It'sa little bit of work, but again,
including my costs, their investment inmy organization, their investment and staff
to manage these things, they wereable to produce an increase in profits.
(37:24):
So theyre gross increased, but sodid their administrative overhead because we're actually testing
marketing campaigns. Yet their profits stillincreased because we're getting more qualified, higher
value customers. And then, likeI said, I tend to create more
problems than I solve. The newproblem that they had was now in the
(37:45):
operational side, as far as makingsure they didn't end up with so they
had capacity in the past to growthe business. Now they need to get
the right people in place so thatthey can increase their capacity because they're topped
out. Now we increase pricing,we adjust some of the packages, divide
packages up, and different things likethat, and they're going to more than
(38:07):
survive. But if they want totake this business to the next level,
the new problem they have is nowoperational. And so that's why again,
when we catalog the campaigns, wewrote processes and procedures to catalog. When
we designed the campaigns, we usedcontrols before we made monetary decisions about where
to apply money. So, forexample, if you have one hundred dollars
(38:28):
a day budget, we don't spendthe whole hundred dollars until we know we
got something that works, and thenwe might double down. But there's a
control in there so that we're preventingthat runaway spending that a lot of people
have where they feel compelled to useup their whole marketing budget. So these
are good and happy problems that businessowners want to have, especially since they're
able to net out of the businessmuch higher than they were before. They're
(38:52):
also able to build up a warchest because at that one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars they were spending a yearon marketing gets recovered. Now this is
probably a topic for another time,but it gets recovered within eight months rather
than not recovered at all, Sothat one hundred and fifty thousand dollars they
spend this year comes back this year, rather than you know, trying to
(39:15):
scrimp and save next year trying toyou know, pay for the marketing budget.
So technically, after the first yearthey can spend three hundred thousand dollars
if they don't change their budget,which everybody tries to change it. But
if you could spend one hundred fiftythousand dollars this year to break even,
and I was able to help yourecover that one hundred fifty thousand dollars this
(39:35):
year, then next year you canspend three hundred thousand dollars to get a
customer to break even. Does thatmake sense? See, there's some things
that you have to really understand.I know I've tried to cover a lot
in a podcast. I hope ithasn't been confusing. I'm going to give
you a quick summary. The frameworkhelps focus energy and effort so that you
(39:58):
are understanding the variables impact conversion,but you're also managing your budget to reinforce
the conversion activities that work at agranular level. Now that we can measure
at a granular level, we cantest this versus that and then do more
of whatever works. Also, becausewe split the sales funnel, we're able
(40:21):
to kind of fill people up ina queue, so anybody interested in your
products or services become a lead.We're queueing those folks up, and then
as long as we're making consistent offersto that house list, it's hard for
our competitors to copy those offers.Because we're building a library of offers and
keeping track of who received what offer. We can also send offers that have
(40:43):
worked in the past to people who'venever seen the offer before, and then
all the sequential follow up associated withthat offer can go out. And then
you can also build out generic offersthat we put into the prospect newsletter or
we put into follow up messages orjust drip campaigns, and then finally lead.
Because we can measure, we cannow use statistics to identify what has
(41:05):
the highest probability of repeating. Also, when we have these variables, which
of these variables I'm going to sayit at a nova, but which of
these variables contribute to the performance increase? Because in order to maintain this.
You know, I can get youa quick win, but in order to
maintain the quick win and consistently growyour business, you do need to know
(41:27):
what contribute, what contributing factors inthe marketplace lead to a lead or a
sale. Now, just because they'rea lead on the list doesn't mean they're
worthy as a customer that it doesn'tmean they're going to buy so more favorably.
And the last takeaway is that we'reskewing our actions based on buyers,
(41:49):
those customers who voted with their dollars. And then on the back end,
which we haven't talked about this withthis particular client, but on the back
end, you start surveying those buyers. Once you got one hundred buyers,
you can start servying those buyers,adjust your products, introduce new products.
You're really building the business there.The key takeaway is it is a systematic
(42:12):
approach. As much as people likethe creativity, the copy is only about
twenty percent of the activity, itdoes impact eighty percent of the outcome.
But in order to make informed decisionswith your copy or with your marketing campaigns,
you need to implement these frameworks.If you'd like help implementing these frameworks.
If you have questions for clarification,because I did cram a lot into
(42:32):
this forty two minutes. If youare concerned for some problem in your organization
and you want new, more excitingproblems which could be a very high free
net cash flow and the urge totry things rather than having a systematic discipline
approach, then contact me at wwwdot Adbriefings dot co dot uk. I'm
(42:54):
just a hit with the ad BriefingsCopywriting Tips newsletter and to hear, I'm
going to help you transform business relationshipsinto profits by drilling down into customer segments
and bases and then applying words thatsell in a meaningful and measurable way.
Again, the copy is only twentypercent of the work you're going to do,
(43:15):
but it is eighty percent of theresults, and so let's apply that
copy where it matters. I'm lookingforward to your questions, comments, and
more, and if you like thislong form let me know I could do
more in the future, or ifyou'd like me to keep it nice and
short, say so thanks for listening. I'm just a hit with AD Briefings Copywriting Tips
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