AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. In the States it is officially summertime. Cade, my son, is home from school and I just wanted to give a shout out to all of those parents that are juggling their kids’ busy summertime schedule as they are also trying to get work done for their own businesses.
Whether you work in a 9-5 and go to work every single day or if you are home every day trying to get work done with your kids home, it is always a little bit of a struggle. So I wanted to give those parents a shout out. I know how it feels. I’ve got a bunch of boys downstairs playing and I keep thinking, “I know I’m going to hear something break any minute now.”
Plus Gus, my dog, is barking like crazy because the boys have him all riled up and here I am trying to record this podcast. This is going to be my summer, I can just feel it. Plus I’m trying to hurry and get my work done before 4:30 today because we are going to go to the Jurassic World movie, I was going to say Jurassic Park but it is Jurassic World, at the fancy theater.
You know those fancy theaters that are popping up everywhere with the big recliners and they come serve you at your seat and all that fun stuff, well we thought we would do a fancy theater day and I am really excited for it. Except, I have a lot of work to get done before 4:30 so we had better get down to business.
I just wanted to give a shout out to all of those parents that are trying to make it work this summer. I know how it feels and I only have one kid so I imagine if I had a few, many of you do. So hang in there. We can do this. We have to unite as parents and get through the summertime.
Today’s episode is all about reviewing my recent Profit Lab launch. I am going to take you behind the scenes and basically show you what the launch looked like, what worked, what didn’t work, how it all went down.
What’s cool is that I planned this after I did a review of my project plan. In Episode #62 I reviewed the project plan I use for all of my promotions. I say promotions because sometimes I do big launches and sometimes I do smaller promotions. So, in Episode #62 I took you through the three project plans that I create for every promo. It is the pre launch, live launch, and post launch.
Basically, we do three plans for every promotion we do and the pre-project plan is 80% of the work. And that is where I spent most of the time in Episode #62. I went through every single thing we do in a promo. It was a little bit of a longer episode because I literally wanted to go through everything. But to make it really actionable I created a free PDF where I literally laid out all of the tasks inside a promo (pre, live, and post) inside a PDF freebie.
Go check out Episode #62 if you didn’t get your hands on that freebie yet. It is really valuable and I think you could put it to work in your next promo as well.
In this episode I’m literally going to break down some of those specifics in the project plan as they played out inside my recent Profit Lab launch. So, before we get there, there are two things I want to tell you.
One, as always, this podcast is brought to you buy Lead Pages. I really want you to make list building a priority in your business. You have heard me say it a million times if you follow my stuff. The energy of your business is directly aligned with the strength of your email list. Everything in business gets easier when you actually have a quality email list.
So, if you want to start focusing on list building make sure to check out my brand new training. You can get it at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/newleads and it is Four Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without spending all of your time on marketing. It is a free workshop I did.
The second thing I want to tell you before we get into the nuts and bolts of my recent launch is that I created a free PDF giveaway for this episode. As always, I have some kind of free giveaway for each of my episodes. This one is probably one of the very best. This one outlines the 18 different ads that I used during The Profit Lab launch.
I will explain this as I get into the details. But there are different phases to my launches. We create different ads based on those phases. There are 18 ad examples in this freebie and we take you through different Facebook ads and Google ads.
If you want to get your hands on this freebie just to see how I do my ads during a launch all you need to do is go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/64download. If you are on the move right now and you just want to text your info to get this free download we have a brand new texting platform we are using called Lead Digits. It is actually part of Lead Pages.
We were using something before that just was not working. We have now fixed it. If you have ever tried it before and it didn’t work for you it is going to work now. If you want to text us all you need to do is text 64download to 33444. We will send you this 18-example free PDF of all of the Facebook ads and Google ads that I used in my recent Profit Lab launch. I think it will be extremely valuable for you to check out.
Are you ready to do this? Let’s go ahead and dive in to The Profit Lab launch review.
The first thing I want to do is give you some framework about this launch so you really understand what it was all about and you understand when it started, when it stopped, and all of the good stuff in between. Then I’ll get into some of the specifics that really worked and some of the things that didn’t work so well.
First, the launch in review. We started the launch on May 6 and that was the day the cart opened and we did our first live webinar. We promoted the live webinar a week in advance, so that was before May 6. We did a few things that I will talk about in a moment as pre launch. But cart opened on May 6 and cart closed on May 26.
The launch was about 20 days. I will say it was my most successful launch I have ever done and there were some things I changed in this launch that made me believe we would struggle a little bit with this launch. I thought maybe it would not be my most successful launch because I took some big risks with the changes we made.
It turned out those risks really paid off and I’ll talk about those risks in a moment. But basically, it’s the biggest launch I’ve ever had. We were a little bit shy of a million dollar launch so I’m very proud of what we created. My team worked really hard. We had over 1,500 new members at different levels (I’ll talk about the levels) inside The Profit Lab. So it was a little less than a million dollars and I am really excited about that.
Let’s talk about the pre launch. The pre launch focused on a brand new lead magnet I created specifically for this launch. It was a free PDF guide. It was called the Product Maximizer. You can actually still check it out if you go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/freeguide.
I kept it open because it’s actually really valuable and I also wanted you all to be able to check that if you didn’t see it before just to see what a PDF giveaway might look like before I go into a launch. You will see in that free PDF giveaway I give a few different ways you can make money online. The final strategy I talk about relates to what I teach in The Profit Lab. That free giveaway was directly aligned with what I was going to promote during the launch.
We launched that about two weeks before May 6. About two weeks before the cart opened we started to promote the free giveaway. All you needed to do was sign up and you got it instantly.
That free giveaway was followed by webinars. I did multiple webinars but it was the exact same webinar every single time. I did five live webinars to my own list and to cold ad traffic. So, five live webinars to my own list and we drove cold ad traffic to sign up for those webinars as well.
We offered automated webinars. It is really interesting how we did this. It was something kind of new but we basically offered automated webinars to anybody we were promoting ads to that was an international audience. Because I was doing live webinars at specific times we had gotten so much feedback during the last launch that my live times just were not working for an international audience and most of them would have to stay up into the middle of the night in order to catch my live webinar.
That was frustrating for many people so in order to fix that every time we ran ads, let’s say to Australia, we would actually run an ad to an automated webinar. That automated webinar would actually playback the live webinar I had done earlier in the launch. So on May 6 I did my first live webinar.
We took the recording of that and made it into an automated webinar. We didn’t tell people it was live. I didn’t try to pretend anything. We just didn’t say it if it was live or recorded. We just played that webinar back. We also had a live chat available if people had questions on the automated webinar.
We wanted to give them a feeling that we were there for them if they had questions but, of course, I couldn’t stay up at every hour to do live webinars. So this was our way to actually support our audience. And that worked really well.
We also did eight affiliate webinars. I had affiliates but I have a very small affiliate program. I don’t love to have a bunch of affiliates that I don’t know and don’t have relationships with. It just makes me a little bit nervous. So the affiliates we welcomed to this Profit Lab launch were all people I had known, had worked with, or had a friendship with and I know they would really respect my brand. So we only had eight affiliates and I did live webinars for each of them.
We had two levels of pricing. We had self study and mastery. Self study had two price points and mastery only had one. I will explain that in a moment. For self study we did an early-bird pricing and a full price. It was $497 for early-bird pricing. Or we did three installments of $197. Then the full price was $597 or three installments of $237.
Self-study early bird went until about May 22. I may be off a few days, but until around May 22 we kept early-bird pricing and it then went to full pricing. So the last week of the launch was full price.
Mastery was $997 or three installments of $397. Mastery only went until early-bird pricing ended. Mastery was closed the last week of my launch. The reason for this is that mastery involves a lot of one-on-one. Every single day for 90 days I am in a private Facebook group answering every question anybody has about the program if you are in mastery. Because it takes hours of my day for 90 days we had to cap that because if there were more people in there I wouldn’t be able to answer all of those questions.
Mastery early bird was $997 but there was never really a full price for mastery because we shut it down when we hit a certain number of people. I will talk about why that didn’t work so well this time and what we will do to change that. We will get there.
First we are going to talk about what worked really, really well. I think the reason this was almost a million dollar launch was because I have been doing consistent content all year. If you are in any of my paid programs or if you just follow my content a lot you know I have been talking about the power of consistent content.
By consistent content I mean you are at least putting something out every single week as often as possible. Ideally, you have a new blog post or podcast every single week, or your are emailing your list every single week.
I think that really did help build trust and affinity with my audience because the engagement we had during this launch was like nothing I’ve ever done before. This is the first year that I’ve been really consistent on that weekly content.
I think my podcast played a huge part in that. So, if you’ve ever needed a really good reason to get up every morning and be sure you are creating consistent content, if you’ve got a promo coming out I promise all of that hard work to create content every single week will really pay off if you really stick with it.
In addition to that, I did a survey a few months before The Profit Lab. I talk about that survey in Episode #55 (if you haven’t checked it out yet). That survey was designed specifically to help me understand how to speak to my audience when I’m talking about The Profit Lab.
To back up a little bit, The Profit Lab is a program I created to teach you how to create a social media sales funnel. A social media sales funnel is basically a way to grow your email list and sell your product, program, or service online.
We did a survey just to make sure that my audience really wanted something like The Profit Lab. And, I figured if they wanted it or not I would figure that out through the survey. I wanted to know how they would speak about the challenges they are having related to growing their email list and making money online.
I won’t get into all the specifics, but that survey was probably the most powerful survey I’ve ever done in all of the five or six years I’ve been doing this. It really allowed me to speak to my audience in a specific way to make sure they understood the importance of creating a social media sales funnel. That truly did lend to the success of this launch.
I talked about that Product Maximizer, the free PDF giveaway we did a few weeks before the launch. At the time that I took all of these notes we had over 7,300 people opt in in to that free giveaway with a 60% opt-in rate. We ran ads to it and I emailed my entire list an opportunity to sign up for the Product Maximizer, the free giveaway before we actually started the webinars.
If you think about it, over 7,000 people opted in. I got to speak to those 7,000 people in a different way than anybody else on my list. I could say something like, “Hey, I saw you signed up for our Product Maximizer, you are obviously interested in learning new ways to make money online. Now it’s time for you to dive a little bit deeper. I want to invite you to my live webinar where I’ll talk about XYZ.”
I was able to create a bridge between those who wanted the free PDF giveaway and those that were going to sign up for my free webinar. I got to speak to them in a different way and that always helps opt ins.
Going back to that Product Maximizer where we got over 7,000 opt ins, I used Lead Pages to do it. I used a really simple Lead Pages template. Again, you can see it at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/freeguide. I think that template was part of the reason we had a 60% opt in with over 7,000 people opting in in just a few short weeks. It definitely helped our webinar invites by segmenting that list early on.
Another thing that worked really well for this launch is that we completely rebranded everything. In the past The Profit Lab used to be called the Facebook Marketing Profit Lab and I never really had consistent branding. It was pretty ugly, to tell you the truth of what I did have. I never really put a lot of effort behind the look of the logo and the look of all of the materials related to the launch period.
This time I wanted to up my game a little bit. I hired one designer. I found a designer, Jessica. I absolutely love her. She actually put together the logo for The Profit Lab and in addition to that she then created all of the materials.
By all of the materials I mean all of the ad images and all the icons that are on that opt-in page for the Product Maximizer. They were created by Jessica. She created the cover art for the Product Maximizer. She created the entire template for the sales webinar I did during the launch. Then she created all of the materials that go in the members’ area as well.
I had complete alignment for all of the imagery and branding I used for The Profit Lab. That might not sound like a really big deal in terms of how to get more sales. But I really do believe it made us look more professional, more serious about what we were doing, and I think it led to more sales.
Also, for the first time, I decided to take off the Facebook Marketing part of the title. We went from Facebook Marketing Profit Lab to just The Profit Lab. This was the big risk I was most afraid of. I am known for Facebook. I obviously teach Facebook and I enjoy teaching Facebook, especially Facebook ads. However, I knew that I wanted to create this program in a way that it went beyond just Facebook.
If you are inside The Profit Lab you know that The Profit Lab is all about seven steps to create a sales funnel. One of the major steps, a big piece, is Facebook ads. But the whole program is not just about Facebook marketing.
I survey my audience after they go through the program. I have been doing this program since 2012 and a lot of surveys last year in 2013 and 2014 (actually for the last two years) said I really should tell people this program is not just about Facebook because there is so much more to it. There is email marketing, sales page, we talk about building a lead magnet, and different ways to grow an email list out side of Facebook.
Some people were saying this was a great program and that I needed to tell people it wasn’t just about Facebook. Other people were saying I kind of confused them with my marketing. They thought it was a Facebook program but it really isn’t. So I had people that were happy about it and people who were not happy about it.
I decided I would take a leap and take out Facebook Marketing from the title and be really straightforward about what the program is all about. I was scared because I know Facebook marketing is a big draw. I know I’m known for Facebook. My fear was, what if people think they don’t want that and don’t need that? What if they think they need something about Facebook marketing.
I was afraid to change the title but I needed to be more honest about what this program was all about. I knew it was so much more powerful by making it not just about Facebook. So I changed the title. I was then really straightforward about whom the program is for and whom it’s not for.
I said the program is for anybody with a digital training course (online training course, membership site, any kind of training program, product, or service). If you have these then this course if for you. If you have a brick and mortar store this course is not for you. If you sell a physical product that you do not think you can market with information then this product is probably not for you.
The funny thing is we actually have a lot of people in the program that are selling physical products. We even have a few people with brick and mortars but they were well aware that this program is not necessarily focused on those areas. However, they felt they could still get great value.
As long as they understand how I set up the program I am totally fine with all of those different types of businesses in the program. But it felt really, really good to me to say this is whom the program is for. This is what I know best. I know online trainings and information products. I know how to teach that. I have never had a brick and mortar so it is a little more difficult for me to use those examples in my training.
The lesson to you is to really stand behind your product. Who is it for? Who is it not for? Do not be afraid to put that out there. The more specific you get the more quality customers you start to attract. Let me tell you, your experience inside your own programs will be so much better. I was very scared to say, “here’s who it’s for and this is what it’s not made for.” I was scared to say that and it actually proved to be a huge success factor in my launch.
I just wanted to put that out there. Oh, and one more thing I was really specific about was the return policy. You couldn’t actually return The Profit Lab unless you showed that you did work. This was also a big deal because some people probably didn’t buy the program because they were thinking they didn’t want to do that. They didn’t like the return policy. If you didn’t like it, that’s okay.
I could never ever get you results if you don’t actually go in and try my program. I didn’t think it was fair that you just go in and look at all my stuff, see if you like it or not, and then say, “I’m going to ask for a refund” without having ever even really tried it. This time, to get a refund you actually had to do some of the work.
I’m going to make that even more specific next time I do it and note that you have to do Cheat Sheet #3, Cheat Sheet #4, and show me XYZ. I am going to be even more specific because I know that I can get you results if you do the work.
As you can see, there is some confidence that I finally had behind this program that I hadn’t had in the beginning. That’s normal. The first few times you launch a brand new program you don’t have a whole lot of confidence behind your return policy and standing up and saying this is who it’s for and this is who it’s not for. That’s a scary thing to do.
As you start to do your product promos for a while you definitely start to get more of that confidence and I want to encourage you to find that confidence as fast as possible. It took me a good three or four years before I actually stood behind it like that.
I also mentioned that I hired a designer to do all of the imagery. There was a whole long list including social media images, images for my email marketing, images for my bonuses, and all that. I have created a list of all of the images I wanted my designer to work on in advance. This is the first time I have ever done that. Holy cow! It made a huge difference.
I talk about that and give you the list of all of the images in Episode #62. Again, I want to send you back to Episode #62 if you haven’t listened because I will show you every single image I asked my designer to create in advance. In the past I didn’t have that list and I was scrambling to get images created as we went live. That is completely too stressful.
Moving on. Another thing I changed up and I think it was a huge success factor for this launch, the actual sales webinar. It is the webinar where I teach for a good 45 minutes and then sell for 20 minutes after that if not a little bit more because we do a live Q&A.
I did a few things differently in this webinar that I think really contributed to the success. I talked right away about the importance of a social media sales funnel. My audience might not have been familiar with that term, social media sales funnel, so I had to talk about what it was and why it matters.
I painted the picture that many of the top marketers all have a social media sales funnel and told them what was included in that. This is in the teaching part before I was selling anything. I wanted to make sure my audience understood what a social media sales funnel could do for their business.
The webinar was the seven steps to actually put together your sales funnel. I took them through all seven steps. This time I addressed Facebook objections right away. All the time I am going to get people that ask if Facebook is included in the sales funnel. People say Facebook doesn’t work well anymore or the Facebook algorithm changes all the time or the Facebook ad dashboard changes. I addressed all of that.
I really let people know that I understand their frustrations but that doesn’t mean we want to jump ship. I show a new way to use Facebook inside a sales funnel. I painted that picture for them and told a lot more stories. That is something I am not always comfortable with because it doesn’t come naturally to me. But I thought of a few stories to tell during the webinar and I think it made things more personal so that people could connect with me and my content more.
One of the stories I told is the rise of my business. You often see marketers tell you, “I’ve been featured on XYZ” a lot in webinars along with “I’ve done this,” and “I’ve done that,” and “I’ve been teaching for this many years.”
Instead of doing that I told a story of what my business looked like before and what it looks like now and some of the factors that were involved to get me to the success I have. Through stories I wasn’t so egotistical. It wasn’t so much about me but was more entertaining.
Telling a story about whom I am to people that have never been on the webinar actually allowed me to really build a relationship with them much more quickly on the webinar. I had tons and tons of examples. I am always a fan of showing not just telling. These are some of the things I am going to talk about in my new webinar course that is coming out later this year. It will include different things you can put in a webinar to make it more personal and to make it flow a little bit better so that people are following you every step of the way.
When I talked about the product I made sure I talked about what people were going to get but also what they will do inside the program and how it will actually help their success. When we got to the part of the webinar that I talked about the program I really made sure they understood what is in it for them and why they should care instead of just talking only about the product. I kept it moving back to them and their business. I think that helped a lot as well.
Another thing when it relates to the live webinars, we didn’t use GoToWebinar for the first time. We used something called Wirecast. Wirecast was really techy, to tell you the truth. I had somebody help me with it so I didn’t have to figure out all of the technology. It cost about $500, a one-time fee, to set up Wirecast on my computer.
Basically, we were broadcasting live from my computer and it was going to a web page. If you were on one of those webinars you saw the web page looked very different than in the past. The page where you were watching my webinar looked really clean and without a lot of bells and whistles. It was just the video and a box underneath for asking questions. That was pretty much it.
Wirecast allowed us to break the barrier of 1,000 people on the webinar. GoToWebinar, which I love, and really promote and use on my smaller webinars could not be used for this because once 1,000 people are on live everyone else got locked out. We had over 20,000 sign up for those webinars throughout the entire promo. I didn’t want people to get locked out so we tried a different technology.
It was good. It wasn’t perfect. There were still some buffering issues we needed to work out and some glitches so we will continue to play around with that. Maybe if I absolutely fall in love with it I will teach it. But until then we are experimenting. However, it did break through that 1,000 barrier so more people could get on live.
Another thing that worked really well were the emails as part of the email marketing of this launch; 95% of the emails we used in this launch were written in advance and loaded into Infusionsoft into a campaign. I wasn’t trying to write emails while we were live, while the cart was open.
This is significant because every single launch I have done up until this point included emails that were written up until the last minute. That created a lot of stress and I know I wasn’t doing the best work when I was exhausted from a live launch. The minute your cart opens you feel exhausted.
In the past the live launch was going on and it was midnight and I was trying to write emails. It just didn’t work out well. Because I have done this launch a few times I knew what emails I wanted to use. So we went with a series of emails after you signed up for a webinar.
All of those emails, probably ten of them, were written in advance. They were loaded into Infusionsoft so we were ready to go. If you registered for a webinar we knew the exact emails you would be getting after that. That took away a lot of stress.
It’s not always doable but do your best to get those emails written before you open the cart. I promise you it will make things go so much more smoothly.
I also hired a copywriter for the first time. This copywriter, Ryan, wrote four emails for me. If you signed up for a webinar we sent you a few emails before the webinar and then all of the emails after. All in all there were probably 15 different emails written that were part of my team loading them up in advance. I wrote all of those emails. But there were four additional emails that I had a copywriter write that were to anybody who did not sign up for a webinar.
This is important and really interesting if you are thinking about doing a big promotion that is focused on webinars, in the past I would create webinars and then invite everybody to join the webinar and then, if you joined a webinar, you were the people I would send emails to after the webinar to encourage you to sign up for The Profit Lab.
That was my segmentation. You joined a webinar, you got all of the promos after the webinar. But there were a lot of emails on my list that did not ever sign up for a webinar. I would just totally neglect them. So over the last few years we have figured that out and started emailing people that never signed up for a webinar.
But you have to be careful because I send out three invites to my webinars. So if you’ve received three invites and you never signed up for one of my webinars you’re probably never going to sign up for that webinar so I had to switch gears and think about what I wanted to say to you now to promote The Profit Lab. You have already gotten three emails from me that you have kind of ignored. So it’s an interesting mix of copy that I need to think about writing in terms of still grabbing your attention.
That’s why I hired a copywriter. Ryan and I, together, worked out a series of emails. There were four emails, to be exact, that encouraged those non-webinar registrants to check out The Profit Lab. You may or may not have seen these emails. If you signed up for a webinar you didn’t see them.
One of the emails was all about the movie, The Notebook. I have my favorite movie, it is kind of embarrassing to say, but it is The Notebook. It is super sappy. He made a comparison between The Notebook and The Profit Lab and how they are both simple in terms of strategy and he kind of painted the picture. It was kind of entertaining.
He then talked about different ways to celebrate when you have a big success. He kind of shared some ways I celebrate and then he painted the picture of how they would celebrate when they start seeing success in their business; one way to do that is through The Profit Lab. He told stories and was a master copywriter. He did an amazing job.
Here’s the interesting part, out of more than 1,500 people who signed up for The Profit Lab, 450 people never ever signed up for a webinar. So, if you are part of The Profit Lab and you never signed up for a webinar that’s really interesting to me because I think that’s the way I’m really going to paint the picture about why The Profit Lab is so valuable.
There are still people that just don’t get on webinars. So, for your next promo, however you are doing it, if you are relying heavily on one type of media (let’s just say the webinar is my media) I have to remember that not everybody likes to take in information that way. So I used email marketing and I was able to make 450 more sales outside that webinar with some really good email copy. That’s my way of saying email copy matters.
Become a student of copywriting and then when you have the funds definitely find a copywriter you really love and include them in your promo in different ways. My way was to have Ryan write four of the emails so I could write the rest.
It is important to me that I am part of my copywriting because 1) I enjoy it, and 2) I think my voice really needs to come through. But that doesn’t mean I can’t ask for help. That’s what I did and it proved to be extremely successful.
Moving on from emails, another thing that worked really well was the fact that we invited alumni to come back at a discounted rate. Some people have programs where if you join the program you have lifetime access. That is awesome.
I don’t do that with The Profit Lab (we give a one-year access) because Facebook changes way too much and I end up having to redo a good majority of the program every single year. Even though I changed the title there is still a huge portion of The Profit Lab that is all about Facebook ads. Since the program is almost brand new every single year because of all of the Facebook changes I set it up so that you get a one-year access into the program. If I change the program within that year you get all of the updates.
We went back to the alumni, 2,500, that I had never marketed to before since 2012 when we started the program. We went back to all of those people and did a special webinar for them. It was cool because I could talk about The Profit Lab in the webinar without having to build up to it. It was a whole different conversation and it was really easy to have with someone that had already gone through my program.
I made the comparisons and let them know what we updated. With that we invited alumni to come back for $200 off self study and $300 off mastery. We didn’t know what to expect and it turned out to be a huge success. I want to say over $40,000 came in just from alumni. But it actually created a little bit of a problem for me in mastery. I will talk about that in a moment. That is something that didn’t necessarily work as planned. It was a very quality problem but it was a problem. Anyway, we invited alumni back at a discounted rate.
We also had affiliates. Like I mentioned, we had a small group of eight affiliates that we invited, who I trusted, to promote the program. All of them but one were amazing. One just didn’t show up as planned and it was a bummer. I’ll talk about that in what didn’t work. But the other seven of them were amazing. They gave bonuses. They talked about it on social media. Many of them ran ads. They treated my program as their own and I just couldn’t be more grateful for that. It was a great experience. The affiliates did fantastic.
Something else that worked really well for The Profit Lab launch was Asana. I talked about Asana in Episode #62. Every single task that we did in pre, live, and post went into Asana first. We didn’t have a project manager on this as we do for the next one. I talked in Episode #62 about how we hired Chloe, our new project manager, but she wasn’t on board for this one and Trivinia, my assistant, took the spot of the project manager and just did an amazing job.
She made sure that any task that came up, if I asked for something extra, if an affiliate was having an issue, if we had to address this or that, it first went into Asana so that we had it documented. It was then assigned to somebody with a due date no matter where we were in the launch. This is so very valuable because nothing got lost.
For the first time in any launch I have ever done, nothing fell through the cracks. That’s a big deal. So making sure you have some kind of project management tool during any promo is a really good idea and ours just happens to be Asana.
In addition to that we did morning calls. Every single morning, and I have been doing this for several years, during a promo we do 15-minute calls. A little secret about me, I hate meetings. I think it’s from all my years being in the corporate environment and I hate phone calls. I am not one to get on the phone with you and talk for hours. I don’t know what that is about my personality, it’s just not the way I like to communicate.
When we decided to do these morning calls I really didn’t want to do them. But we decided to do them. During The Profit Lab they are now essential. We jump on, we talk about what’s working, any problems anyone is having, we jump off. The calls are really quick but it is great to make sure we are checking in every day until the cart closes.
In addition, customer service was really dialed in this time. I won’t get into all the specifics because I do talk about this a lot in Episode #62 because this is how we always do customer service. We create schedules. During The Profit Lab, Trivinia created a schedule so we would know who would be manning the sales page chat. We had live chat on the sales page. We knew who would be manning that and who would be manning the chats for the live webinars and the recorded webinars.
We also made sure any question we could possibly be asked was documented in advance. They would give me a question and I would draft my response so they could copy and paste a lot of the frequently asked questions. We brought on Kate, an extra during our Profit Lab. She is not usually on my customer service team but Trivinia hired Kate to be on full time during The Profit Lab.
She needed to know this product quickly and needed to know how to answer all of the questions. Drafting them in advance was kind of a huge thing for us. We also had a 1-800 number that people could call in and talk to Trivinia one on one if they were on the fence. That proved to be really successful. We also had email support so someone had to be on email the whole time as well.
I like to keep a really small, lean team so during high-traffic times like a big launch we hire people to come on and then after the launch they go on and do the other things they worked on outside of my business. That has proved to be really helpful to us as well.
I have a business coach, Todd Herman. Todd and I talk once a week and you may have seen Todd. He recently did a big launch called the 90-Day Year to 10x your company. Todd is my business coach and he taught me that I need and on-boarding experience for new members.
When you are a new member of The Profit Lab, for the first 30 days you get pretty consistent emails from me. I think I am going to punch this up even more on the next launch. But I wrote a series of emails and every few days, when you join the program, you get a new email from me.
Todd wanted me to do it every day for the first 30 days. That just felt a little overwhelming to me. That’s a lot of email. I do not quickly write out emails to my list. It takes me a while. I decided to just go with every few days in the beginning.
When you join the program, every few days for the first 30 days you will get an email from me. One email inspires you to jump into the program. A lot of people buy an online training program and never even start it. So I encourage people to get in there with the caveat there is no stress and no hurry because you have a full year inside the program and when you are ready we are waiting for you. You don’t want to pressure people and make them feel behind so it is an art and science to those emails.
When the program got started, because I have a forum for self study and a private Facebook group for mastery, I was getting a lot of success stories. There were little successes. Someone would work on an opt-in page and I would give them a bunch of feedback and they would change it so I would have the before and after. I would create emails so that people could take a look at what was done, what was changed, and why it was changed.
My emails were very timely this time. I was writing them as the program went live. It was stressful. I don’t love it but it allowed me to make it very timely and show people what was working right now in the program that they were taking.
This next time around I now have a bunch of emails already written. I will still add a few timely emails based on the experience of the current members. But having a series of emails is a really cool thing because it made all of my members feel supported. My self-study members don’t get direct access to me but I made sure they could hear from me regularly through the emails.
This is a side note, but my self-study members don’t get direct access to me so I surprised them with a live Q&A last week. A few days before we did it I announced a special bonus for self study and told them we would have a live Q&A call. I did that and answered a bunch of questions for about an hour and a half.
In addition to that, everybody gets something that I call the stick strategy. Basically I want them to stick with this program and really do it. So, after you joined you got an email that said I had a bonus module that has not yet been released.
After people have been in the program for about a month I release one more bonus module that helps enhance the social media sales funnel they have created. I do that so that people will stay with me, especially during the refund period when people haven’t started the program yet and don’t feel like they have the time. People make a million excuses.
For me to combat excuses I tell people I have something really good but you have to stick with the program to get it. Once they get through those 30 days they are more likely to say they are in and are going to do the program. At that time I release a final module after the 30-day refund period and that really encourages people to stick with it.
Our refund rate has dramatically declined and that is awesome. I think there are three reasons for it. The on-boarding emails helped immensely to make people feel supported during their first month, if not beyond. I can continue those emails beyond and I will.
We also have that stick strategy: Stick with it and I will give you a really cool bonus at the end of your first month. That was big.
For the first time I also have a forum inside self study where I am not in the forum but I do have a trainer that is in the forum. Anybody going through the program that might get stuck can get feed back from other people in the program. I think that helped immensely in terms of people staying with it and sticking with it and really getting it done.
There are a few factors that help us see a big decline in our refund policy as well. It has always been below 10% and that is pretty much industry standard. But I would like it to be 3-4% and we are getting closer and closer to that as we add in extra features.
The final thing I will say before we get into talking about Facebook ads and what worked and what didn’t, I also had extra support at home. I know not everybody can have this. But when you are going through a promotion you need to plan ahead and make sure you are supported during that promotion. Again, that is something I had never done.
I am a slow learner guys, let me just tell you. If I have been doing this since 2012 this year, in 2015, is the first time I added a little extra self care during a launch. I just know how I feel after those 20 days of launching and I wanted that exhaustion to kind of decrease a little bit at the end. At the end is where I start to really feel it.
I am lucky. I am embarrassed to admit it, but my mom lives about five minutes away from me in Carlsbad. My mom is retired and she is the best mom in the entire world so I asked her if she would help me a little bit during the launch.
She came over and helped me prepare meals in advance. Everyday in the kitchen I would go down at lunchtime and there was a salad waiting for me in the refrigerator. She then helped with dinner that night for my family. She would pick up around the house. She was there when I needed her.
I know not everybody has a mom that lives five minutes away to help them. But if you can ask for a little extra help from your spouse, your friends, however it might be, that does definitely help. She was amazing during that whole thing. I want to give my mom a shout out, not that she listens to this podcast, but in addition to that I made sure I got eight hours of sleep every night.
I know that is not always possible during a launch. But, if you can get it in there that also helps immensely.
Let’s talk about Facebook ads and Google ads. This was the first time we did a really concentrated play on Google ads. I had done them a little bit last time but not very much. So this is the first time I felt like we really put a concentrated effort on Google ads. Then, of course, we definitely focused big on Facebook ads.
I will say that we hired somebody to help us with Facebook ads this time. There is just no way I could put all of my efforts into ads when I was focusing on the content and the live webinars and all of that.
I got a lot of help. We literally have somebody that is going to help us with Facebook ads now during our launches. For the first time we used AdEspresso. AdEspresso allows you to load tons and tons of ads at once and split test. It is not something I teach to my newbies.
AdEspresso isn’t something I’ve ever done and I have been in business for five years now, I am coming up on six years. But when you are just starting out that is a really big step to take to actually hire someone to help you with your ads and have them use AdEspresso. With AdEspresso you need to do a lot of different ad types in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.
I won’t get into details about that but you definitely can research to see if it is something you want to do. But when we ran ads we ran them in phases. We had ads for the free PDF giveaway, the Product Maximizer I talked about that we released two weeks before we actually did our first live webinar. We also ran ads to the webinar registration, a big bulk of our ads.
When the cart opened we ran ads to those that signed up for the webinar and we ran ads to retarget them. We also ran cart open ads to my fans only and to my email list only. Then, when the cart was going to close we ran ads for that. There are different phases of the launch where we were running ads.
Then when we released a timely bonus (an extra bonus people didn’t know we had up our sleeve) we would run an ad to announce the bonus that was available for people who signed up for The Profit Lab. We had a lot of ads going and that is why the free PDF giveaway from this episode will be so cool to look at so that you can see the different types of ads I ran. The PDF of all the ads I used is available at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/64download.
I am going to run through some quick numbers for you. We spent a total of $48,000 on ads. Some of you might be thinking I am crazy. But remember, this is almost a million dollar launch. You have to put money in to get money out. I love online marketing so very much because you can put something like $48,000 into something and get almost a million dollars back. We are definitely in an amazing business when we can get returns like that.
Yes, we spent almost $50,000 on ads. Like I said, we ran ads for all different phases of the business. We also ran retargeting ads.
Here is something that did work and didn’t work. We ran retargeting ads. For those of you that don’t know that term, basically, if you went to the page to sign up for a webinar and you didn’t actually sign up we ran an ad that encouraged you to sign up for the webinar. Maybe you got distracted and you didn’t sign up so we retargeted you to encourage you to sign up for the webinar. If you signed up for the webinar we retargeted you and sent you to the sales page.
The only time I ever run an ad where I send you to a sales page is if I am retargeting you because you have already shown interest in my product but you haven’t yet signed up. I just want to make it really clear that is the only time I ever send an ad to the sales page.
We retargeted the cart open. So you received a retargeting ad if you went to the sales page but didn’t sign. We had 90 conversions. That means 90 people signed up when they saw one of our retargeting ads. The cost per conversion was $5.75. We ran that ad the longest. Right when the cart opened we started the retargeting ads and received 90 conversions.
We also retargeted people at the price increase. The ad actually said the price was increasing by $100, or “save $100 for one more day.” When early bird was going to end we ran retargeting ads and promoted that $100 savings. We got 47 conversions at $6.18 cost per sale. That means 47 people bought off of those ads at $6.18 per conversion.
When the cart was closing the retargeting ads would actually say the cart would be closing in one day (you will see the actual ads in the PDF giveaway). We had 53 conversions from those emails and we paid more, $11.13 per conversion. But remember, out of those 53 sales people were spending at least $600. By that time, when the cart was closing, the only thing you could sign up for was self study, full price at $600. Cost per conversion could actually go up if we were actually making more for each sale. But we got 53 conversions with that.
Here is where things did not work: We actually targeted my fan base. We sent ads to my fans, whether they signed up for a webinar or not, whether they showed interest in The Profit Lab or not. We encouraged my fans to check out the sales page when we opened the cart for The Profit Lab. We only had nine conversions at $31 per conversion. That was a total fail.
It is so great for me to teach this because we kind of knew it wouldn’t work but we wanted to prove that. When people are not showing interest at all and you send them to a sales page it is very difficult to get those people to buy.
What we did earlier is send an ad to my fans only for the PDF giveaway or we sent ads to my fans to register for a free webinar. That was highly successful. We got tons of conversions at about $5 per lead. But when we sent my fans directly to the sales page we only got nine conversions at $31 per conversion. That was not good.
We also had only two conversions from my email list. We uploaded my email list, whether you signed up for a webinar or not, and we sent you to the sales page. That was a total fail. It was $48 per conversion and only two people bought from those ads.
This just proves that you want to make sure you are giving great free value before you sell on Facebook.
That is why I believe that 99% of the time I do not sell anything on Facebook because of this kind of numbers. They are not good whatsoever.
One more thing, we targeted fans to the sales page at cart close. Remember, we targeted all of my fans, we sent them an ad to go to the sales page when we opened the cart? We only got nine conversions. We only got five conversions when we did that again with the cart close and we spent $50 per conversion. That’s not good at all.
In an ideal world I want to stay under $5 per conversion. We could go up to about $12 and still be doing really well with the kind of numbers we were generating. Still, $5 is ideal. That is where we want to stay. With those big fails, sending people directly to the sale page even though they didn’t show interest in the product, I do not suggest it and we will not be doing that again.
Let’s see, again, just to make sure you understand, the PDF freebie is 18 ad examples of all of thee phases I just went through. You can text the phrase 64download to 33444 to get the free PDF. Or, go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/64download and get all of those ads.
I also included a few Google ads into that free giveaway. We spent almost $2,000 on Google ads. We spent $1,867, to be exact. We have used Google ads in the past but not like we are using them now.
Forty-seven people clicked on a Google ad and actually bought from that click. We had $39.74 cost per conversion on those direct clicks. That might seem really high but we know Google ads worked really well because 606 people actually had a view- through conversion. At one point they clicked on a Google ad and actually bought but may not have bought on that direct click. That is 606 people. Out of 1,500+ people buying The Profit Lab, more than 600 of them actually at one time or another clicked on a Google ad. That is really cool and that is $3.08 cost per conversion and that is not bad.
Google ads definitely are something we will do and probably spend even more money on them in the future. I will tell you one thing that didn’t work with Google ads. At one point one of my girlfriends sent me a screen grab from a gardening site. With Google ads you might pop up anywhere.
My picture about The Profit Lab popped up on the gardening site but I was at the top, side, and bottom. There were three different ads on one page. That is fully obnoxious. I don’t want to see my face that many times. We had to get with Google to scale back a little bit so that my ads weren’t showing up with multiple ads on one page. You definitely don’t want that.
I am not sure why it happened but we were able to fix it mid launch. But, for a while you were seeing way too much of me. If I followed you everywhere that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I wanted to stay top of mind while we were in the launch and while you were watching my webinars, getting my emails, possibly visiting my sales page. I wanted to pop up in other places. And it worked extremely well. I just didn’t want to pop up multiple times on one page. Who wants that, right?
That was something we had to fix mid launch but overall, Google ads is definitely something we will try again.
I went over a little bit about what worked and what didn’t work with ads. But let’s talk about what didn’t work in addition to just ads. You would think I would learn but remember, I’m a slow learner sometimes, the first huge mistake I made during this launch, and I’ve done this before in the past, I completely redid The Profit Lab right before we launched.
I didn’t mean to wait until the last minute. It took me a good month to get the entire program redone. But I recorded every single video, redid every single slide deck because we had a new look and feel, plus I wanted to teach in a different way.
We added things we had never had in the program before. I do an entire training about creating a survey, I do an entire training about enhancing the product you already have. Those were new. Plus, again, I redid every slide deck and recorded every video including every bonus.
That took forever and that is the last thing I wanted to be doing right before I went into a really stressful launch. There is no way around it, a live 20-day launch is going to be exhausting and stressful at times. There are just a lot of moving parts. I was already worn out before we even opened the cart. That is something I do not want for any of us.
What I have done in the past is what I am doing right now. At the time of this recording it is June. Next week I am doing my rehaul of the videos. I am not going to redo every video. I had to this time because we rebranded. But there are some things I want to change in the current program. And if you are in the program now you will get those changes. But I just want to teach it in a little bit of a different way, add a little bit here, move around this or that.
I am doing all of those changes in June. If Facebook changes something I will have to go back in and fix a few things. But leaving it until September, which is what I would have done in the past, is just too close to doors opening and too close to me being fully stressed out before we even get going.
My goal, I really struggle with this, but it is to try to get way ahead of it if I can. It is in my calendar. I do not have one thing on my calendar next week except five days of revamping The Profit Lab for the October launch. That’s pretty cool, right? 90% of it will be done. I know I am kind of like that person that can’t ever be fully done with content. So I will still be tinkering with it but not trying to record videos and get them transcribed the day before our cart goes open.
That was just too stressful. Thank God I was so dedicated to the content that it turned out great. But I never want to do that again. I also stressed out my team as well. That is the last thing you want to do to people you love. I hated that I did that and it was a huge mistake. That is why I am not a huge fan when marketers teach that you should promote a program and then create it once it is promoted. That is a little hard for me because you are now on the hook and hurrying. I don’t think we create the best content when we are under pressure and hurrying like that. At least I don’t so I have never been a fan of that.
Another thing, there were a few people that just weren’t in place yet. I needed a programmer so that when little tiny things came up I could ask them to please go fix that now, or that isn’t working, or “go do that.”
I had a high-level programmer that worked on our sales page and worked on our order forms but he wasn’t somebody I could pull in any given minute to fix something. When we started the launch we found somebody, a really great guy in the Philippines, that we took on full time during the launch.
When you hire someone in the Philippines it tends to be a lot less expensive. We asked him to work full time with us. Even if we used him only one hour a day we wanted him to be at our beck and call, to be quite honest. I know that sounds horrible but I needed that because the launch is 24 hours every single day for 20 days.
That actually proved to be great but I didn’t have him in place when we opened the cart and we had some stress in the beginning. Choosing who is going to do what and having that very clearly outlined in advance would have been a smarter strategy for us.
Remember how I told you we did those automated webinars? We did live chats so that if anyone had a question during the automated webinar we were there. I didn’t have enough people to support all of those live webinars and all of the automated webinars and the chat on the sales page and on the order form. I probably needed one more customer support.
Those automated webinars were three times a day at random times of day. I needed one more person to make sure we weren’t stretched. We were pretty stretched when it came to live chat for the automated webinars so I don’t want to do that again. So just scheduling them in advance would have helped immensely.
Another big one, this is kind of a big fail, we actually had to cancel two live webinars. Remember when I told you we did five live webinars? We actually had seven scheduled over 20 days. We only did five because we couldn’t scale our ads less than $5 per lead. That was our goal, $5 or less a lead for all people that registered for the webinar.
After we did about five webinars we just couldn’t get it below $5. It was $10 or $15 at some points. We didn’t want to take too many risks and pay too much for the registrations if they didn’t convert at the level we were hoping. So we ended up canceling two live webinars.
The next time around we are going to have to play around with it and decide. If we can get the ads to scale great but if we can’t what will our backup plan be? We really didn’t have a backup plan so we had to cancel them.
One of my affiliates didn’t really come through. It just didn’t work on their end. They had some email delivery issues. Their audience didn’t respond like they did the year before. We expected maybe 50 sales from this person and had about four.
It isn’t a big deal. I still love this affiliate dearly. The reason I say this is because you can never fully rely on your affiliates, at least in my opinion, I never want to fully rely. It is really important to me that my list converts. That is why I create that consistent content. That is why I continue to do a podcast where I probably spend way too many hours preparing. But I want it to be good.
I want my list to trust me and like me and get really excited to hear from me and sign up for my webinars and sign up for my programs. This is what I can control. I can’t control my affiliates. I can’t control their email service issues or anything like that.
They might decide at the last minute they just don’t feel like promoting The Profit Lab and that is their prerogative. Because of that I need to make sure I have my platform solid. I always look at affiliate marketing as icing on the cake.
Down the road that might change. I might want to create a big affiliate program and hire someone to handle my affiliates and go bigger. I don’t know, that’s the great thing about being an entrepreneur, we can change our minds at any time if we want to. But right now I don’t want a big affiliate program and I want to really rely on what I’ve created.
Again, affiliates are icing on the cake. I had seven amazing affiliates that made that icing oh so sweet. So, if you were one of my affiliates, thank you. It meant the world to me that you were a part of this.
Lastly, here is a big thing that was an issue, mastery ended up being too full. My initial goal was to have 100 people in mastery. Those are the people that I answer questions for every single day in a private Facebook group. They get three live Q&A calls and I review their entire social media sales funnel with a private video. It is a lot of work on my end.
I set that at 100 people. The alumni jumped on the opportunity to get into mastery again. We never expected that. We had 60 alumni in mastery within the first few days. I thought, “Holy cow, we’ve got to change this.”
We actually created two different smaller groups for mastery so I could support both groups. It has been fine. It has actually been an amazing experience. This is the first time I have loved mastery more than anything because it is just the first 90 days. I know I am in there. I have booked it on my calendar. I give them a few hours a day and make little videos to answer all of their questions.
This has proven to be great because my business coach, Todd, asked me if I knew how much I could learn from my audience if I got in there to answer questions every day. So I have been doing that and it has been great. But the next time we are actually going to increase the price of mastery to make it more exclusive.
Mastery has been a lot more of my time than I had planned. So when it is more of your time I think it justifies a higher price point at time. We are actually going to increase the price of mastery but we might even allow 400 this next time and break it up into small groups, so that there are smaller groups than the Facebook groups, and enhance the experience even more.
That is just something we are thinking about. I am not positive, but I do know the price will increase for mastery because we are going to give even more to that smaller group and make it an exceptional experience. I think it has been an amazing experience this time around so that is what has fueled me. The reason I want it to be 400 people, right now it is less than that, I feel if you can get my one-on-one support it is a whole different level of experience and I want that for more people.
We are working it out but it is a quality problem. We have a lot more people than I thought and that is great. At the same time, I want to make sure everyone is supported so we have to figure that out. Mastery started out really stressful with more people than we thought but then it turned out to be an amazing experience for me and those in it so I just want to enhance that even more.
There you have it. That was the whole entire review of The Profit Lab program. I hope you found some value in that. I know I went over a lot but I just wanted to paint the picture of what worked, what didn’t work, what the launch looked like.
I will add that some of the biggest expenses were Facebook ads, paying for my staff to work overtime, or paying more people to come on my staff during the launch. Those were big expenses. The designer doing a whole rehaul was expensive as was programming, copywriters, building a whole new membership site. Those were probably the big expenses in this launch.
Again, it isn’t anything compared to the revenue we were able to generate. That is why I love online training courses. I am going to be talking a lot more about creating online training courses and what it can do for your business and how it frees you up and how it allows you to create some amazing revenue but also make an impact in your audience’s lives.
We will get into that in future episodes coming up. I can’t wait to dive in deeper. If you didn’t get the free PDF go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/64download and make sure you download the PDF of the 18 examples of ads I used during The Profit Lab. I think you will get some great inspiration from those as well.
Thank you so very much for being here. I love sharing this information and taking you behind the scenes with me. I hope you love it as well. I will see you next week. Take care.
