I Realised I Should Take My Own Advice

This episode explores the essential connection between effective email marketing and successful advertising.

I share valuable insights from personal experience, discussing how the right strategies can turn leads into customers, alongside the importance of self-liquidating funnels.

• Discussion on failed ad campaigns and expensive lead generation 
• Highlighting the necessity of compelling offers and email follow-ups 
• Introduction to lead magnets and their role in email marketing strategies 
• Exploration of crafting a self-liquidating funnel 
• Importance of nurturing leads with follow-up email sequences 
• Realisation of transforming ad spend through effective conversion systems 
• Future plans for implementing refined advertising strategies

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. Okay, so, first of all, if you can hear kids screaming and playing in the background, that's because my nephews and nieces are over and I can't get their parents to control them. My brother's, okay, but that's life when you have five children under eight downstairs. So I do apologize, but my family is important to me, so we'll just have to get on with it.

Speaker 1: 0:34

Okay, so I wanted to talk to you today probably a quick episode, pretty short episode around just an epiphany or an insight that I kind of discovered this week, and it's kind of just me discovering a parallel between all types of online business, or like when I used to coach people on subscription boxes, I kind of noticed a mistake that they made over and over again and I wanted I kind of made this. I'm going to tell you a story about how I made the same mistake myself and how I realized I should be taking my own advice. Okay so, basically, a couple of months ago I was running ads on Facebook because own advice. Okay so, basically, a couple of months ago I was running ads on Facebook because I'm trying to build up a leads list of online coaches, fitness trainers, whatever and I basically turned on the ads and I was trying to build up my email list and I just turned on lead ads and I basically got like 60 or so leads, just like email addresses, not even calls or anything, and it cost me like $1,000. Okay so, like 60 or so leads, just like email addresses, not even calls or anything, and it cost me like a thousand dollars. Okay so, it was like 15 euro or $15 a lead, which is quite expensive, and I realized I had no way of making any money back from those people. So it was going to be a long, slow, painful process to build up enough volume on my email list to actually make any money back and I would have been two, three, 4,000, 5,000 or more in the hole before I actually made a cent. Because you're just not going to make too many sales from just 60 emails. You generally want to have a couple of hundred at least before you can have enough volume to really make enough offers.

Speaker 1: 1:54

So I turned the ads off and I kind of went back to it again this year in January and I realized something is like a lot of people how they get email marketing wrong is like, of course you still need a traffic source, but the email kind of makes everything work better. So what do I mean? So I realized that, like in the subscription box industry when you used to coach people, it's like you know, everyone would turn their ads off, just like I did, because the ads would be so expensive and nobody would. Nobody would buy their offer and nobody would convert on their website. And the reason why was because they didn't have an offer that people wanted, whether that be they're just their product or their actual offer that they're given to get people to sign up, and they didn't have an email system to follow up with people. So if you're just expecting people to sort of click on your offers and buy or download or take whatever you're offering them on the first look, then you know it's very unlikely that anyone's going to do that, okay. So that's why email is so important and that's why you know, if you don't have an email system and you have ads running, you know way to remind people to take your offers, you're going to burn money, okay.

Speaker 1: 3:00

So what I started to do, and what I realized I needed to do before I turned my ads back on, was to create a funnel and like an email system. So what I'm doing is I created a lead magnet and that lead magnet is sort of my front end offer and I created a landing page which I hope is going to convert. But when people I'm going to run the ads again, but this time instead it's just having like oh, give me your email address and let's talk later. It's going to be here is my lead magnet, this piece of value that I'm going to give to you, and then I'm going to make them an offer straight after they download that lead magnet, for $50. Okay, it's going to be like a workshop or like a mini course, basically, or a masterclass, and then what the goal of that is is I'm hoping that some people will buy this offer immediately after joining the email list, okay, or immediately after downloading the lead magnet. And the reason why is because that's going to help me liquidate my ad costs, aka, if it's costing me like $5 a lead or even $15 a lead.

Speaker 1: 3:55

Again, let's say, $5 a lead for EasyMats and I can get 10% of those people to buy the $50 offer. Well then, 10% of 50 is five, so I get $5 in and $5 out. It's going to cost me $5 a lead and I make $5 on average for every lead if 10% of them take the offer. Now, that's obviously the ideal. That may not happen, but that's what I'm trying to aim for. Okay, but it doesn't mean that I need 10% of people to take that on the first go. Okay, because I have an email system now set up with 10 emails that I've spent the last couple of days writing on the weekends here and basically the emails are just reminders to go back over and to buy the $50 masterclass.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Okay, and the reason why that's important is, again, people are not necessarily. They've just come from Facebook. They might have downloaded my lead magnet, they might be interested in it, they might be interested in the messaging that I have, but they're just not going to whip out their credit card and buy right away. So I think what I'm doing now is going to be much better and more likely, and, of course more likely because I think what I'm doing now is going to be much better and more likely of course, more likely because I had nothing before but more likely to actually get people to purchase. And then, if they purchase, it will help to reliquidate partially or fully my ad costs, and that's what's called a self-liquidating funnel or a self-liquidating offer. So what that means is that if I can get $5 in and $5 out, I'll be able to scale the ads unlimited and grow my email ads for free. Now, that's obviously the ideal scenario. It may not get there. Ad costs are quite expensive and if it's $15 again, maybe I'll have some hassle. Okay, but that's the kind of point.

Speaker 1: 5:22

And the reason why it's interesting is I taught a lot of people in the subscription box industry over the last few years. You have to have an offer that converts, aka the lead magnet, very quickly. Your ads go off if the system isn't working. So it kind of just clicked in my head. It's like, oh yeah, like it's not actually about really even the ad cost. It's about making the ad cost worth it with your offers and your emails, and it's the system and how well you can get that working that determines whether you can afford the ads or not, and it's the same for a subscription box business. So it's kind of like, oh, that's what I've been teaching people for the last like five years website emails, ads. And then I'm like, oh well, I just made a complete wrong mistake of just not doing that. So now I have lead magnet emails ads. Okay, again, lead magnet will go on a website or a landing page too.

Speaker 1: 6:11

So it was just something interesting for me. And whenever you're paying for traffic, like the ad costs are just kind of the ad cost to a certain level that you can get them lower with optimizations. But eventually it just becomes you need to be able to monetize the traffic that comes to your, to your website or to your email list, and that's up to you. So that was just an interesting thing for me to kind of realize, and I'm going to turn my ads on, hopefully next week, if not the week after, when I have a few other things ready and I will report back with the results. But that's kind of what a lot of people miss out about email and like marketing and like business in general. Online business it's more about what you can control and usually that's easier to control, like your own conversion systems, than the ad costs which just need to be paid anyway if you want to get any sort of scale. So that's pretty much it for this week. I hope this episode was helpful.