This is a really cool and useful case study for anyone who sells a high ticket offer and wants to generate more qualified appointments and sales calls.
Let me get straight into it. This is a funnel I built for a client and good friend of mine – Niyc Pidgeon.
Backstory:
I first met Niyc in February 2016, when I was speaking at a marketing event on Daydream Island which is just off the coast of Queensland. You can see, at least Niyc, in the photo here.
I was helping Niyc with her marketing at that event. We stayed in touch and I saw her 3 months later at an event in Las Vegas.
The following year, she emailed me and asked for some advice on a funnel she was running. She was having issues with another agency and it wasn’t working out.
In August 2017, she asked if I could build her a funnel. Which is what you’re about to read… it’s what I call the Million Dollar Funnel – because it generated $100,000 per month in sales.
1. Strategy:
I didn’t actually come up with this strategy, I just developed the copy and big idea for the campaign, and executed it well… really well.
Once it was converting and I scaled up the traffic, we were able to generate some pretty crazy results. This funnel is very simple and if you’re coach helping people with:
- Fitness
- Health
- Business
- Mindset
- Spirituality
Or more… this will work really well. But on top of that, I had a client with a property investment business that generated $480,000 in sales in 30 days using this funnel.
They generated hundreds of applications every month and still use it, nearly 12 months later.
If you’ve read my other client blogs, you’ll know that when it comes to developing a marketing strategy the most important thing you need to do is ask “what do you actually want to achieve?”.
In this case for Niyc we wanted qualified strategy sessions with female entrepreneurs that were interested in working with Niyc in her ‘Ultimate Success Accelerator’ 12 Month Mastermind.
Niyc is a positive psychologist and international success coach for women. She’s on a mission to help over a million women change their life using positive psychology by 2020.
She’s worked with incredible brands like Virgin, Red Bull, Marie Claire, Lorna Jane, Men’s Health, BBC and more. Helping them to understand what really drives happiness and fulfilment.
As a result of this, she has a big brand and is adored by lots of female entrepreneurs. As Niyc is super busy, travelling the world and speaking at many events, the strategy needed to be somewhat different.
You may have seen this blog where I used a webinar strategy to generate $26,400 in sales in 15 days. For Niyc, I didn’t want to run a webinar because she literally didn’t have the time. So I used what we call a 2 step application funnel.
The good thing is, these funnel’s are simple – at least in terms of their setup.
You have a landing page, where the prospect opts in for access to a video training. On the video page, they can watch the video and then we ask them to book a call, once they do, they see a thank you page.
This is the basic version of the funnel which we ran initially. The only details I get are name, email and phone number. Now, people normally say at this point, why don’t you get people to fill out a more detailed application form?
Great question. The thing with marketing is – and most marketers won’t tell you this. It’s an educated gamble at best.
I want to test any idea I have as quickly as possible. I don’t romanticise with it or attach myself to it. I see if it works and if not… I ditch it.
So I create a basic version of the funnel, get some people applying and then change it based on the results – which is what happened here
We tested it and were getting low quality prospects. I was willing to accept a lower conversion rate, as long as it meant we could increase the applicant quality.
So we added a 10 question application after the video page, before a prospect could opt in and speak to Niyc.
The most valuable part of this funnel is the video on the video page. It’s about 20 minutes, or in Niyc’s case – 27 minutes long.
It follows a specific sales letter format to help people understand who Niyc is, why they should work with her and the benefits they’ll get as a result.
At the end of the video we offer a complimentary strategy session where female entrepreneurs can speak to Niyc to receive strategy advice for their business.
Now – here’s how the metrics work for this funnel. If you’ve seen my other posts, my initial goal is to generate a 10X ROI from any paid marketing funnel.
Now in many cases you generate a much higher ROI on your marketing ad spend, as Niyc did here. However, 10 times is a great place to start because it’s achievable for everyone.
Niyc’s program is $10,000 – which means she can afford to pay $1,000 to acquire a customer.
Which means:
– $1,000 Customer Acquisition Cost
– Convert 25% of Strategy Calls (1 in 4)
– $250 Cost per Strategy Call
Therefore, as long as Niyc pays $250 per strategy call and sells 1 in 4, she will pay $1000 to acquire a $10,000 customer.
These are the the initial numbers and concept we use. Once we get results from running it, we can see if it’s the best strategy and modify it if necessary.
Now onto the build.
2. Build
Once the strategy was mapped out, we were on to building the funnel. I used Clickfunnels to build the landing pages and sales funnel.
Infusionsoft was used as the CRM because that’s what Niyc uses and she already had a list of about 12,000 people.
Now I want to talk about the most important part of this funnel, which is the video in the centre.
The video is a roughly 4,000 word recorded script – with a visual powerpoint presentation. The reason it’s so important is because it’s the main conversion piece in the funnel. If people watch that and they take action, we will generate qualified strategy calls – which is the goal.
Realistically – it’s the make or break piece in the funnel. It’s what makes people want to work with Niyc, so the words used are very important.
When I write this script, I initially need to develop a big idea, or content piece that the video will be based around. We need to make sure this is very tangible.
Now what do I meant with that?
Well, far too many coaches all selling things that are impossible to measure: “How to be more confident”, “Increase your energy”, “5 steps to be happier”.
The problem with this is, it’s impossible to measure. We all know when we are feeling good or bad, but if you can’t quantify and measure the improvement, you won’t pay for it.
So what is tangible that people will pay for?
“How to make more money”, “lose 5kg”, “find your dream partner”…
All these things are measurable. We know if we did them or not, and we know how much we improved by.
So… I said to Niyc “What results have you achieved that other people would want to achieve?”
Niyc told me when she first started for coaching business, she generated $35,000 in 35 days. She then made $100,000 in 100 days.
We went through the other things she’d done, I said to her:
“Niyc, that’s your hook, $35,000 in 35 days.”
Niyc had created another program before we worked together, so she already owned the domain: 35kin35days.com. We used that and then I went about designing the landing page, which you can see below.
As you can see, I created a big, benefit driven, social proof laden headline.
Niyc’s first book “Now Is Your Chance: A 30-Day Guide to Living Your Happiest Life Using Positive Psychology was published with the world’s largest self help publisher. Therefore, we started with the phrase “International Hay House Author,” and then discussed the benefit: how to generate $35,000 in just 35 days and build a 7 figure coaching business.
The landing page design is simple. An image of Niyc on the left, looking towards the Headline on the right. On mobile I actually took out the picture of Niyc because it didn’t format well and I just wanted to focus on the copy.
Then we move to the Call To Action (CTA) button along with Niyc’s bio and her media features for proof. The page finishes with a final quote and image from Niyc plus testimonials to enhance trust.
The page design is incredibly clean which made it convert well. Initially this page converted over 80% and even after we’d ran like 5000 leads through it, we’re still converting over 70%, which is insane. I didn’t even split test it.
Now… if we look at the second page:
Let’s talk about the structure. Firstly they’ve opted in for the case study.
In my other posts, I talk about how when someone takes action you need to acknowledge the action they’ve taken before you make them another offer.
In this case the action they’ve taken is to get the video on the next page so there’s no need for an acknowledgment – just give them what they want. We can then run straight through the video, which I’ll get to in a second.
The rest of the page contains CTAs and testimonials, all serving the purpose of driving the person to take action and book in for a call.
Now, let me cover the video. Its 27 minutes long, so I couldn’t break it down in one post. But it’s also based on years of experience writing sales letters and learning what works and what doesn’t.
It essentially looks like this:
– Who is Niyc
– Why is she worth listening to?
– The 2 types of people she encounters (action takers vs dreamers)
– Who the presentation is for and who its not for
– How she generated $35,000 in 35 days (the strategy)
– 5 client case studies and the results they got
– The close and the offer to book a call
All of these things contribute to helping with her book qualified strategy calls and enrol more members into her Mastermind.
These were the key design and copy aspects that helped the funnel convert. After this was completed we obviously finished setting up the tech and integrated everything to make sure it worked.
Which took us to the next step…
3. Facebook Campaign
When it comes to running Facebook traffic – there’s 2 main elements: Creatives and Targeting.
Creatives
So – the hook for the campaign is “$35,000 in 35 days”. Knowing this, I tested an image on Niyc speaking on stage vs a picture of her that looked like the landing page image. I normally don’t test my copy on the first split, because I’m a copywriter, so I always know my stuff is on the mark.
Here are the images:
The copy followed my standard format:
– Big curiosity based headline that matched the landing page
– Calls out the Audience
– Offers Value
– Demonstrates Social Proof
– Call to Action
After we tested these images for a while, I had my graphic designer create new images. As you can see below they look really, really good. And they helped us generate awesome results.
Targeting
As Niyc’s in a very competitive space in the coaching and personal development industry, I’m going to target a wide range of people. Because you don’t know what audiences will convert, it’s important you test a tonne of options to see what works best.
On top of that, Niyc had a bunch of warm audiences and lookalikes we could use. Starting with a campaign wide budget of 100 british pounds per day, we tested:
– Remarketing for anyone who had viewed or engaged with her previous content
– An Engagement Audience for anyone who engaged with her FB page
– Lookalikes Audiences of her list in the UK, US, Canada, NZ and Australia
– Lookalike Audiences combined with interests such as Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, Ali Brown, Gabby Bernstein and Brendon Burchard.
I created these audiences to test as many thought leaders in the personal development space as possible. This way, with a great range of audiences, we would know what works the best.
4. Results
After this was setup, we launched the campaign. Below I’ve included the results for August 2017.
You can see above, there was multiple campaigns running (3 in total). The reason is, we ended up making significant funnel changes. I don’t recommend launching different campaigns – and now, 6 months later, I can’t exactly remember why I did it this way… but it worked!
In August, we tested numerous different audiences and spent just over 1500 pounds on ads, which is about $3,000. In total, we generated over 1,500 leads.
As I said earlier, not long after we launched the initial version to Niyc’s internal list, we changed the funnel. We went from having a simple, 3 field opt in (name, email, number) for the phone call, to a proper application page, which you can see here:
Now, as you saw above, the Clickfunnels data looks somewhat messy because of the changes I made to the funnel. Obviously the original funnel converted better, but the prospect quality was lower. The new funnel produced a much higher prospect quality, helping us to generate enough calls to make 10 sales into Niyc’s Accelerator and generate $100,000 of sales income in August.
Here’s a breakdown of the metric’s for August, 2017:
2,622.97 Pounds Adspend
Facebook Data:
Leads = 1,485
Application = 119
Conversion Rate = 8.01%
Clickfunnels Data:
Leads = 1,514
Application = 125
Conversion Rate = 8.25%
I don’t have the data on how many of the calls from these applications were held, because the original funnel produced 103 lower quality applications, and the newer funnel produced 22 applications.
Overall, 10 sales were made for $100,000 of revenue. It must be noted however that some of these sales were on payment plans, so $100k wasn’t banked in August. But hey… a stunning result right?
You can see here that this is a rinse and repeat process. Spend more money on ads, and you will be able to increase your output, and keeping all other things constant, your revenue.
Now – will this convert the same the whole year round?
No, over time any marketing is going to fatigue, you’re going to need to find new audiences and ways to scale your traffic.
Your sales team obviously need to keep performing and you’ll probably need to refresh the funnel over time because that’s what it’s going to take to continually get epic results.
5. Analysis
The reason this worked well is:
1. Niyc has a great brand. She’s a well known speaker and thought leader, with a decent sized following. I can’t underestimate how this influenced the results we achieved.
2. Solid marketing message. We were giving the market what they wanted – the opportunity to learn how to make more money. My first marketing mentor told me that selling the opportunity to make money will always be the best offer you can make someone.
3. Solid strategy. We were able to grow Niyc’s list, whilst liquidating marketing spend and increasing revenue. That’s the dream when it comes to paid traffic.
4. Sales. As always, having a killer sales team that converts will never be underestimated. Marketing is about attracting them, indoctrinating them and creating the right opportunities for the sales team.
So there we have it! The Million Dollar Funnel.
I hope you enjoyed that – let me know your thoughts in the comments below
Ciao,
JH