Funnel Building

Julie Chenell

Inside the Course Chemist Launch

Today I want to breakdown some of the details about our most recent launch at Funnel Gorgeous.

This was the first time releasing Course Chemist, so those first time launches are always fun, but this one had one big wrench in it.

We basically thought no one would buy because we gifted it to 700 of our most loyal diehard customers. Because of that, we didn’t have super high hopes of an amazing result, we simply wanted to get the content out there because it’s so desperately needed.

So how did it go?!

393 students purchased!

A lot of people are curious how the numbers break down on each day so here’s the cumulative revenue for each day of the cart being open.

  • $15,366 on Sunday
  • $6,895 on Monday
  • $8,405 on Tuesday
  • $9,883 on Wednesday
  • $9,877 on Thursday
  • $24,625 on Friday

As you can see, the first and last day of a launch are always the biggest. This is why you really don’t need long launches. In fact, the longer they are, the more chance you have for mindset trash and other issues to come in and cause problems. Five to six days is our favorite.

Typically our launches have a bigger first day than last because of our early bird special. But we didn’t have one for this so last minute buyers beat out day one.

One additional point about our revenue: We actually earned more than what is listed because we offered Course Chemist for free for anyone who enrolled in FG Society. We had a lot of people interested in FGS + Course Chemist, so it was a chance to finally bite the bullet and dive in for both.

We had 18 additional FGS students join last week, which added an additional $11881 in sales (with more coming due to payplans and the pay as you go nature).

Cash collected –> $77,929 with enough coming in later on FGS to *technically* call it a six figure launch. ????

We’re super excited about our audience’s reaction to Course Chemist and despite our concerns about investing all this time + money into a course that we were giving away for free, it turned out to be quite the profitable launch.

What We Didn’t Do

We didn’t do:

  • Webinar
  • Big affiliate push
  • Paid ads
  • Lead generation leading up to it
  • A challenge

We also didn’t offer a payplan. It was just a straight $197. The nice part about this is there was very little in the way of customer service issues because there was only one option.

The Power of Building A Strong Brand

We had this level of success without one testimonial on the sales page. In part because it’s new, but also because we have a reputation in the industry and people were ready to buy without obvious social proof. Another +1 for strong memorable branding and reputation.

#marketingwithheartisprofitable

We did do a livestream, Clubhouse, design teardown, emails, IG stories, posts, and a plot twist!

The MOST Important Question

Whenever I’m helping someone with a launch, especially projecting revenue, I always ask one question: How many humans do you think you can get to the offer? Most people have no idea about this number.

And it’s not a matter of a simple benchmark. You have to create your OWN benchmark based on your following size, marketing, etc.

So whenever possible, I like to peel back the curtain to show you what Funnel Gorgeous can do. It helps to set expectations.

With our following of 32k on an email list, plus 10k FB group, etc. we were able to get 2990 people to the sales page in six days. If we’d used ads, it would have been a lot more. But some of you reading might be surprised that a following of our size led to 3000 people on the page. THIS is the number everyone overestimates. Learn how to estimate this. (This is something we teach in Launch Gorgeous).

What it means is that the beautiful Course Chemist sales page that Cathy styled converted at 13.1% to our warm audience!

If we cut that conversion rate in half or 2/3’s, that would be a good estimate for cold traffic. Which is between 3-4% – benchmark for a cold conversion rate.

Hope you found some helpful nuggets there!

xx

 

Julie Chenell

The SLO Funnel Stages of Grief

If I could spare even just one more person from this rollercoaster, I would. Which is why I’m writing this post today.

Many of you know that I am a 1:1 private coach to everyone in my Digital Insiders mastermind. Inside my program they get access to my content, an incredible community, some amazing coaches, plus access to me in three ways…

  • 1:1 via Voxer daily (yes I will answer Voxers every single weekday so many of them I speak to on the daily)
  • Weekly audit (I will review one piece of your business a week – funnel, ad, email, P&L, etc.)
  • Weekly group meetings (this month we’re doing a Copy Clinic as we work along the new FG Society Phase 2 Content)
  • Periodic hotseats – Sometimes you just need 20-25 minutes to hash out one particular issue so I’ll do Zoom calls for these moments

This means I’m in the unique position of working with 75 people in a really integrated and deep way on their businesses and their funnels. And if I could give you a sneak peek into my Voxer account when someone is building, launching, starting an SLO funnel (sometimes called a low ticket funnel or a tiny offer), then you would start to see REMARKABLE patterns emerging.

They are SO obvious to me now but that’s the great honor and privilege I have as a coach who is helping others. So now I’d like to outline the typical life cycle of grief that one goes through when building this type of funnel.

I say grief because there is a lot of letting go in this process. More than you might think. And yes, even when things go SUPER well (as you’ll see).

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Before You Launch Your SLO Funnel

1. Someone joins Digital Insiders and sees all the talk about the SLO and gets REALLY excited to build one for their business. Using the Offer Cure and a few other resources, usually within a few weeks – they have a solid idea and a ton of momentum. We are SQUARELY in the honeymoon phase here. In fact, sometimes my job as a coach is to convince them that they shouldn’t build two SLO’s at once. ????

2. After going back and forth on Voxer, and me doing an audit on their idea – it’s time to build. Some people decide to do the copy and build themselves (they use Offer Cure, Phase 2 of FG Society, as well as an FG template and they get it built). It goes through a few weekly audits as Helen (one of my coaches) helps with copy, and then it comes to me for copy review and design review. It’s normal for this to come through my audit board at least 3 or 4 times before launch.

3. At this stage, there’s a bit of ???? going on. Every time they send it to me, there are revisions. And more revisions. And that doesn’t even include building the content itself. If they haven’t let go of the idea that this “tiny” offer is actually mammoth in effort, they will now. SLO’s are some of the hardest types of funnels to build! There’s a bit of grief here. It comes in the form of “How the hell with this thing get launched and I’m never doing this again!” One of my other coaches Jessie, is a huge help to most people who need tech support and automation help as the logistics of the building are taking place.

4. What happens next depends on if you’re a Tatiana type SLO builder or a Ashley type SLO builder. Tatiana (an original Insider) was so busy in her service business, it seemed her original SLO would NEVER launch. At some point, I had major bribes and warnings that if she didn’t get it out the door, I’d stop answering her Voxers. ???? Ashley was different. She was moving at lightning speed because she had an agenda. She was gonna crack six figures come hell or high water because she was ready to be done with service based work. I see all variations of Tatiana’s and Ashley’s in my group – and both really end up at the same finish line, just with slightly different timelines. *Both went on to have six figure funnels*

During The Launch Of Your SLO Funnel

5. This has the same level of excitement and nerves as a wedding day. Again, you’ll notice there are a few types of people here in this moment.

  • Those that want to know EVERY LITTLE DETAIL about ads, obsessing about everything from time of day, to day of the week, to exact budgets, creative, etc. Their desire for information helps quell the nerves about spending (and really – betting $1000) on themselves and their work.
  • Then there are those that can’t bear learning ONE MORE THING and want to just hand it off to someone else. Either way, the butterflies and “moment of truth” feeling is intense. These folks have spent all their energy just getting it built, it’s like asking someone who just finished a marathon to go ahead and run another one with Facebook Ads. Just.No.
  • I’ve gotten late night Voxers where people have decided their SLO sucks and they want to totally redo it, right before it’s done. I also have people who launch it WITHOUT doing all the things I advise, in sort of a “Well if it doesn’t do well, I’m just testing it anyway” type of self-sabotage response. All in an attempt to mitigate their expectation if it doesn’t work.
  • And then there are the people that are sure they will have $100k in their account in just a few days (none of these people are in Digital Insiders because I am working with them 1:1 and I want to be DAMN sure they have reasonable expectations before they switch on ads).

6. Approximately 4-24 hours into the test… everyone in DI knows that they need to spend $1000 in just a few days. I don’t want them to launch with less. So another layer of grief sets in if they hit one of the following scenarios…

  • They have a trickle of sales and realize as much as they mentally prepared for not quite making their money back in the first test, it’s one thing to expect it, and another thing to feel it. The urge to turn off the ads is STRONG. The voxer convo goes something like this, “Send me the stats. Let’s take a look. Don’t turn off the ads yet. We’re not at $1000.”
  • They have a CRAZY amount of sales, way more than they thought, and there is no grief in sight. It’s just “HOLY CRAP!” Screenshots of Stripe accounts, Apple Watches with Stripe dings, and all kinds of excitement. This is insane! My job now is to celebrate with them, but I’m still looking at the stats, wanting to see what about the funnel and/or ads is doing so well. The urge here is to make big decisions quickly because you’re on a high. We work on not doing that just yet. I remember Ashley was ready to close up shop in her other business about a week into her funnel and I was like…HOLY WOW. Okay hang on. LOL (turns out her funnel was a unicorn type and she went on to crack six figures in 30 days).
  • No sales. Heart crushing even if you’re ready for it. The Internet didn’t like it. After 24 hours of no sales if you’re running $300 a day in ads, we pause the ads to see what is not connecting. This is a really hard pill to swallow but it happens more than you think. The only people who really lose in this game are the ones who give up entirely. If you don’t, you’ll eventually get it working. One of our best tactics here is to see if we can find a warm/hot body of traffic to send the funnel to so we can see if it’s a rapport or trust building issue. Grief here is self-explanatory.

Post Launch SLO Funnel

7. This is the part most people don’t talk about. Up until now, you might have expected most of this. But here’s where the rubber meets the road in this funnel game, and what happens here, is everything. Before we dive in, a few things I want to share. Most people post launch with an SLO fall into one of four camps…

  1. They spent $1000 and made $500 back (ish).
  2. They spent $1000 and broke even.
  3. They spent $1000 and made $1200.
  4. They spent $1000 and made $3000+.

8. In the case of #1 + #2, the name of the game is going back to the drawing board, not to redo things, but to optimize. If they’ve got the right mindset that this is a long term game, the horizon is bright. The hardest work is done. Now it’s singular focus on optimization and experimentation. It’s important to note that I work with them to make sure they understand whether or not the funnel was broken or working. MANY working funnels are not profitable. I repeat, many working funnels are not profitable. This is another stage of grief. Recognizing you can have a working funnel that isn’t on its own profitable.

9. In the case of #3, these are the hardest waters to swim in. There’s a lot of grief and frustration when they try to scale because the profit margins are so slim, it’s like just enough candy to think they can hit these crazy goals, but as is true with scaling, scaling typically eats some profit and will push these WORKING funnels into no profit land. If they are working with a FB ads agency and that ads agency isn’t doing ads for any other funnels, the monthly management fee immediately pushes these funnels into the negative as well.

In essence, it feels like a catch 22. If you want to scale, you have to be ready to eat profit. If you want to use an agency, you have to be ready to eat profit. No one wants to do either because the funnel is “teasing” them with ROAS that looks like with enough tweaking, it’ll become a unicorn.

IMPORTANT! I’ve seen funnels (for example Jennifer) who’s funnel started like this and after 12 months of continual optimization (and her doing her own ads) she got it to $20k profitability per month (which is epic for a $27 offer). That takes dedication. And moving through your grief of what you thought this would look like. And it means not giving up when your ad account goes down (which it did for her). It was not a smooth ride and most people would have given up.

Others sort of toggle back and forth between using an ads manager, and then doing it themselves. Each time trying to eeek out a bit of profit while still optimizing. The most important thing I can do here as a coach is work with them to understand lifetime value and to continue to build out a company, not just place all the hopes and dreams on one funnel. We also work to “catch” the fall off with excellent follow up, launches, etc.

I’ve seen funnels like this grow and grow in profitability, and I’ve seen others sort of hang in this minimal ROAS space for months.

10. In the case of #4, this is one of the most fun results, but also – the higher the high, the harder the crash. With these funnels, they do amazingly well for a month or two or even three. But ALL of them, even the incredible ones, do crash and burn. Whether it’s a disabled ad account, rising CPA’s, hiring an agency that didn’t scale properly, or just fatigue, eventually the unicorn funnel stops producing at that level.

The grief is intense here. And it can be mixed with fear because as they funnels grow, so do expenses. The ads team, the customer service, and most importantly, the pressure. So when things inevitably tank, the pressure is on to figure it out and get it back to its heyday fast.

Over time, the people in this camp come to accept that this is a pretty typical lifecycle for a unicorn funnel. And just like in the other scenarios, my job as a coach is to help the person build a company and suite of products that help mitigate a few bad months on a funnel. We build out a whole value ladder. Look at lifetime value.

I remind them the importance of spending to acquire a customer, even if you’re not getting 10x out like you once were.

Many of these people will go back and forth between agencies, doing it themselves, and hiring an in person team. Most importantly, as their business grows, something cool happens…

They stop focusing so much on the metrics of JUST one funnel. They start seeing the marketing budget as a part of a system that feeds the whole. They see the interconnectivity of organic traffic, paid traffic, and multiple offers through a customer journey.

And that’s really the end goal of all of these scenarios. Because once you get here, you can truly appreciate the POWER of a funnel and what it can do, no matter which kind you happen to get.

  • Waking up to sales you didn’t have to personally close
  • Learning that the side benefit of building a customer list vs. a subscriber list is you have people ready to buy further products
  • Developing a system to continue to build funnels in your company
  • The acceptance of how paid traffic works in a company and taking a more holistic view of your business than just one funnel

Funnels are amazing and like children, also a pain in the ass.

Many of these businesses have moved through this cycle, stuck with it, and come out the other side ready to keep building, keep growing, and keep letting go.


A couple last notes…

I have about 10 spots remaining in Digital Insiders. If you’re making $100k a year and ready to scale and invest in a coach/mastermind, I invite you to apply.

If you’re not there yet, but really want to build this type of funnel, make sure you’re on the waitlist for Launch Gorgeous. We’re launching another live experience in September and it’s not to be missed!

Was this helpful for you? Let me know in the comments below!

Inside Digital Insiders With Ashley Buffa’s $70k in 30 Days Funnel


If you missed our interview, you should definitely check it out over on Facebook!


Ashley joined Digital Insiders in May 2019, and there have been some exciting developments in her business over the last 9 months that I want to share with you!

We met at ClickFunnels, where she was working as an agency owner/contractor there, and she was in charge of the messenger bot. We got to talking and one day, she told me she was really hoping to launch an online brand about being a mom/parenting, etc. A few weeks later she joined Digital Insiders to help grow that brand.

And as you know how life goes, just a month or two later, she found out she was pregnant with… wait for it… her 10th child! ????

Now the pressure was on. She had nine months to really light this brand up, because agency work really isn’t conducive to a newborn.

So how did it all go down?

Step one: First she decided to launch her Freedom Moms Challenge internally to her small list of 1000 people. She didn’t have an OTO, so we did a small pressure launch with just one product…and her results were good. People bought it! The market had showed her that yes, they did want this product. But they also showed her that they wanted something else…

That valuable market feedback from her audience was the catalyst for what happened next. Turns out, moms think the solution to reducing the amount of housework they do is to get their kids on board with doing chores. And as is typical with people who have superhuman skills, Ashley hadn’t realized that her ability to get her kids to do chores was in fact a big deal! She had a skill to share!

Step two: We brainstormed the next funnel and out of that came Smart Kids Chores. This was a classic funnel, with an order bump and an OTO. She did a Power Launch (this is a term I’ve coined for launching a low ticket funnel with ads – and is explained IN DEPTH inside of the course Launch Gorgeous). Her funnel consisted of…

  • A $49 chores course
  • A $12 order bump with SOP’s for kids chores
  • A $29 OTO for the Freedom Moms Challenge

Ashley went against the grain in a couple of ways… first she charged more for her front end than is typical for a Power Launch Funnel. Next, she charged LESS for her OTO. Finally she pre-sold this offer (something I don’t usually recommend on a low ticket funnel). Just goes to show that taking chances does pay off (as long as you’re aware you’re taking those risks).

Step three: Design the funnel! She used the Funnel Ink design – and submitted her funnel and copy for an audit inside of DI. We tweaked and tweaked, until we were sure it was good to go for her $1000 Facebook Ad Test.

(By the way, if you’re interested in the types of tweaks I recommend plus the Facebook Ad test, you should check out Funnel Rx – the special offer after Offer Cure)

I wish people could see inside my daily Voxer routine. I have 75 Insiders so on any given day, I’m spending a solid 2-3 hours answering questions on all things marketing, funnels, mindset, etc.

Step four: Do the $1000 ads test. Ashley was nervous. You can hear it in her voice when she described fearing that this funnel thing wouldn’t work for her.

Turns out, her nerves were not needed. She was profitable from day one with her ads!

Step five: Optimize. She submitted the funnel two more times to me for review, and we continued to optimize the page using the checklists I made for DIers (inside Funnel Rx). Her conversion rate slowly climbed, as did her ad spend, and her profit.

  • Her sales page is currently converting at about 3.7%.
  • Her order bump is around 84%.
  • Her OTO is around 45%.

She used the spreadsheet in Module 4 of Funnel Rx to assess her numbers and got three green lights! That means that she proceeds to the stage of micro-optimizations rather than macro-optimizations.

The first thing I noticed when we sat down to look at her numbers was how unbelievably high her order bump was. The solution to that? Raise the price until the conversion is sitting at around 40-50%.

Ashley turned her ads on on December 5th.

At the 30 day mark, she’s spent $20,185 in ads and earned over $71,000 in revenue.

That’s a $50,000 month she just had – and if you had asked her if she was okay spending $20,000 in ads on that first day she would have been nervous. But that’s the thing people don’t realize.

Once you’re making profit, you can roll some of that money back into ads and continue to scale!

At the end of the interview, you’ll hear Ashley talking about how grateful she is for not just the coaches in DI, but the members as well.

I received a voxer message from her about two weeks into this funnel launch. She thanked me for creating Digital Insiders – because she knows it was the pivotal thing that helped her create, build, launch, and grow a product that will allow her to take her maternity leave, enjoy her 10th baby, and not have to grind 24/7 to make ends meet.

Ashley has some big plans for later in 2020, where she’ll be rolling out some new programs for her growing audience. She is one to watch!

If you’re interested in working with me, here are three ways you can…

  1. Start by picking up a copy of Offer Cure + Funnel Rx – where my partner Cathy and I team up to bring you the best in offer and funnel training.
  2. Next, if you’re ready to launch something new, get on the waitlist for Launch Gorgeous. That program is a curriculum created DIRECTLY as a result of working and launching with Insiders for the last two years (plus my experience at ClickFunnels), and is also with Cathy and Funnel Gorgeous!
  3. Finally, if you’re making $100,000 a more a year, and you’re ready to join a high end mastermind and worked directly with me 1:1, you can apply to Digital Insiders. Membership is limited to 100 and we’re more than 75% full.

Hitting the 1 Comma Club With The $1k Facebook Ad Test (Case Study With Tatiana’s Funnel Boards)

As the Voxer message came through, I braced myself for a panicked message.

After all, this is what happens nearly 100% of the time. No matter how many times I prepare and warn my mastermind clients about the feeling of dropping $1000 in 72 hours on ads, all my reassuring words of advice and logic fly right out the window once the ads have been live for 24 hours. I’ve come to expect it, and know that it’s just part of the process.

But this particular morning, I was pleasantly surprised when Tatiana’s message came in (she’s given permission to be featured in this post by the way)…

Believe it or not, this is NOT normal. Usually, it’s more like this…”WHY AREN’T PEOPLE BUYING MY PRODUCT YET?”

I usually login to their account, pull up the stats and see something like:

  • Pageviews = 41
  • Sales = 0
  • Ad $$ Spent = $175

And then I begin my very calming reminder of why we wait 72 hours and $1000 before making ANY decisions about the funnel. By the way, if you haven’t listened to my podcast episode called “In Defense of my Controversial Facebook Ad Advice”  – you should listen. It goes into detail about my advice, why I give it, and what it produces when you do it that way.

But back to Tatiana…

She finally launched her funnel last week.

Important details to note:

  1. When my mastermind students want to launch something low ticket, I recommend a $27 to $37 front-end offer with NO lead magnet in front.
  2. Just a straight-up, GORGEOUS sales page (a la Funnel Gorgeous) to an offer that’s so juicy, I can’t even stand it.
  3. I make sure that their sales page checks off ALLLL the things on my sales page checklist (by the way, Tatiana’s is not complete by my standards yet, but I wanted to feature a real example, not a pretend perfect one).
  4. Once that’s done, I make sure there is an order bump and at least one OTO (I like the order bumps between $12-$37 and the OTO between $77-$97).
  5. Then, after testing and all that blah blah blah, we start the Facebook Ad Test.

What is The Facebook Ad Test?

For this type of offer, I want to spend $1000 in 72 hours…ish. About $333 a day.

Campaign Objective = PURCHASE

Yes, even on a new pixel. It’s scary, but we do it. Because you know what? It doesn’t make sense to dabble with ads. It’s just a waste of money (listen to my podcast). If your offer is good enough, it’ll convert usually at least 1 sale in three days at that price point. That’s what I’m looking for. Just any sign of life on planet funnel!”

You can do Campaign Budget Optimization or the old Ad Set Budget (which is sunsetting soon), but whatever you do, it’s about $300 a day or so….and it spans about 5-10 different audiences. If you have Lookalike audiences, DO THAT. But….whomp whomp, Tatiana has never run ads to an offer and has no list. So we had to do Facebook Interests Targeting.

Tatiana went after traditional entrepreneur audiences because her product are these insanely cool Trello boards that help you keep track of all 800 bazillion steps of funnel building. She knew people who liked Russell Brunson would like the boards.

Here’s the funnel thing: When you know you’re going to spend $1k in a few days, you make sure everything is working…way more carefully than if you dabble. The mindset shift is huge. She made a few ads and had all the ad sets compile onto the individual post IDs.

She was just about ready to go.

Then I got this Voxer message…

My response?

On Thursday at 9:59pm, she had two ads in review.

Not quite 24 hours later… this is what we had (about $130 in).

UNBELIEVABLY promising so soon in the campaign. Again, I’m looking for 1 sale per 100 people that see the offer. This is my benchmark to start. The test is designed to get data from Facebook, not to get rich in 5 minutes. Tatiana was excited!

The next day, the message I showed you at the top came in. $1k in sales in one day on $300 of ad spend.

Do you want to what’s hilariously funny?

The next day she only had one sale and turned off her ads. ???? I didn’t give her too much crap since she’d successfully completed her $1k test, but took a moment to remind her that you need to TRACK DAILY, DECIDE WEEKLY.

Never make ad decisions based on one day. Track the day, decide based on the week. It’s a golden rule of “Not going insane when running ads”.

 

What did her stats look like? Here’s the breakdown.

She had 745 people view the offer and 41 sales. That’s a buy rate of 5.5%. Which is VERY good.

Order bump is 9.9%. Already, super obvious this is the issue in her funnel. It should be above 20%.

Her OTO is KILLING it at 29%. I expect around 10% or so, so that’s amazing.

So at the end of her test, she had spent $1200 in ads which resulted in 24 sales with an average cart value of about $60.

She had an additional 17 sales from organic traffic sharing her product around, and also some of these were from the follow up sequence she created off the funnel. Note to self: Great offers get shared! 

What does she know now?

With a three day test with this much ad spend, she has so much important information she didn’t have before.

First, she has a validated offer…period. She NEVER has to worry again in the market wants it. They do. End of story.

She knows she needs a better order bump.

She needs to optimize the sales page per my checklist.

She needs to spend her time and energy on ADS. That’s the goal.

Isn’t that cool?

And even if she hadn’t had such a successful ad test (like MANY of my clients who don’t break even on the first shot), they at least get market validation.

This is why I advise the way I do. Go all in. Spend hard for a few days, make up your mind that you are paying for data, and get the data you need. Adjust and keep going. Please remember that this works best on a straight to sales page offer of $37 or less. There are other variables that come into play with different funnels. But the general rule is…

Stop dabbling, give it your best shot, and give your funnel the best chance of success!

xx Julie

P.S. I have another mastermind student who did this exact strategy and grossed over $85,000 last month. Too legit to quit. 🙂

 

Funnel Math That Makes You Feel Better About Your Marketing

Episode 23: Funnel Math That Makes You Feel Better About Your Marketing

In this episode, I go into “funnel math” – and explain why understanding funnel math is the difference between winning and quitting.

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Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, hope you’re doing awesome. Today, I want to take you through a little bit of a math problem. Nobody run away screaming from the room. I know math isn’t always our favorite subject, but I just came back from my Digital Insiders Mastermind and one of the biggest aha moments that everybody had, happened after I showed them this particular math. So if you are listening to this podcast and you’re at the gym or you’re driving, I would listen to it a second time with a pad and a paper and a pen because I want to show you how math can make you feel awesome.



So, Brie, she is in my mastermind and she built a funnel sales funnel. A webinar funnel that leads to her program that she’s selling called Cashflow Day. It’s about a $300 program and she’s been struggling with feeling like is it working, is it not working? And it’s funny because I keep telling her it’s working, but for some reason, she didn’t believe me.

Sometimes when you’re first running ads, your ad costs are higher. You’re not very good at ads yet. So then it can feel like you’re not making any money because you’re spending all that money in the ads. But I wanted to kind of calibrate expectations.

So I did this entire exercise at the mastermind and showed everybody how to adjust their expectations and how to know if a funnel is actually working. So if you are sitting down with a pad and paper, I want you to draw three boxes in a row, okay? So basically we’re going to draw out a funnel together.

Now, the first page in the funnel is going to be the squeeze page. That’s going to be the page where you give away something for free. So in that first box, just write “FREE” and then the box right next to it, put one box to the right. That’s going to be the offer. That’s the thing that you sell after they opt-in right? You give them something for free and then you’re like, ah, awesome. Okay, here is a $27 course. So in that second box, write $27. Now a lot of people who work with me, or if you know Russell and you’re in the funnel world, you know that when you get somebody to say yes to something like a workshop or a course for $27, you’re leaving money on the table.

If you don’t add what’s called an order bump. And that’s a little thing at the bottom where if you check off, it adds something extra to their order. So at the bottom of your little box, the word order bump, and then put a price of $37 because maybe you have something else you can sell them. That’s a simple order bump. Then the third box, the next box over to the right is going to be your OTO. This is your one-time offer. This is an upsell. So they’ve said yes to your $27 workshop. Maybe they clicked the box to get the order bump, maybe they didn’t. And now they’re being shown a page that says, wait, your credit card is being processed. But before you go, I have a one-time offer. Click YES or NO to buy. So let’s pretend that you have an OTO that’s a course that’s $77.

So now on your paper, you should have a squeeze page that says FREE, a box in the middle that says $27 with a little order bump at the bottom of the box that says $37. And then you should have the third box, which is the OTO, and that should say $77.

Now, here’s where we do the math. You want to figure out if your funnel is going to be profitable, you need to understand what is “normal.” And I put normal in quotes because for every industry it’s a little bit different. And eventually ,you’re going to have benchmarks for yourself. You’re going to know what your normal is and then you can compare yourself against yourself. But when you’re just getting started, you might not have any stats. So I’m going to give them to you. So in the first box, I’m going to tell you that it’s pretty normal to have somewhere between a 20% to 30% optin rate.

So just write 20% to 30% in that first little box. Okay? That’s normal. On the middle box, the offer box where you’re selling that $27 course or workshop, I want you to write 1% to 5% because that’s normal. It is normal for 1% to 5% of people who see this page to buy it. Not 10 percent, not 20, not 30, not 50, right? We think, Oh, if one hundred people see this offer, we’re going to get 10 sales. No, you’re probably not.

So, I’m trying to calibrate your expectations with this math problem. Now, if you go to the bottom of that box, for the order bump, believe it or not, has a higher conversion rate than the actual product. And why? Psychologically when you get somebody to say yes, it’s easier to get them to say yes again.

So they’ve already put their credit card information for the $27 workshop. Now all they have to do to say yes to that order bump, that $37 order bump is just check a little box and now they’ve said yes. So it’s actually a lot easier to get money from an order bump. So put 40 percent. Now that’s a little high. I would say, if you’re just starting out or you don’t have a good order bump, probably it’s closer to 20 to 30 percent. So if you want to be conservative you can be conservative. So put 20 to 40 percent right there next to the order bump, okay? And then the last box, your OTO box where you have a $77 offer, you can say safely say 3% to 10% of people will buy the OTO, again, still higher than the initial offer.

That initial $27 offer in that middle box is the hardest thing. And once you get them to say yes, you get more and more people.

So all your percentages. So now you should have your three boxes that make up your sales funnel. You should have the different prices and you should have the percentage points. So now this is where the math comes in.

Let’s say you get 5,000 people to see your squeeze page, to see your free offer. Okay? 5,000 people. If we’re going with a 30 percent opt in rate, okay? Because it’s between 20 and 30, let’s just be optimistic. Thirty percent of people opt in. How many people are actually going to get to that second box? 1,500, right? So 1,500 people are actually going to see your offer for that $27 product. Now we said one to five percent will buy.

So if we say three and a half to four. Again, let’s be optimistic here. That would be about 50 sales. 50 sales of your $27 offer works out to be $1,350 ish. Okay.

So you’ve just made $1,350 because 50 people bought your offer. And why did 50 people buy? Because you had a four percent buy rate on the 1500 who saw it and why did you only have 1500?

Because at a 5,000 people that landed on the squeeze page, you had a 30 percent opt in rate. So we’ve made about $1,350. But now we have to remember there’s the order bump and there’s the OTO. So if you look at the order bump and you assume that 40 percent of people who bought. So 40 percent of those 50 people bought that $37 offer that actually adds an additional $700 in sales. I think it’s like $740.

And lastly, of those 50 people who bought, let’s say seven percent of those people actually take the OTO, that’s another $300 in sales. So all together, if you take $1350 right? Which was how many people bought the original plus the additional $700 from the order bump plus the additional $300 from the OTO you’ve actually now made $2,350.

Now the last question is, that means the funnel is working, right? Those that you’re basing it on percentages. Now, the reason why people don’t think the funnel is working is because when they run ads, how much is it going to cost them to get that sale?

Well, we started with what number? We started with 5,000 clicks, right? 5,000 views. So this is where Facebook Ad math works super easy. So we know that if you can get your funnel to convert like that, we need to get 5,000 people onto the squeeze page and you’ve made $2,300.

Okay? So if Facebook is charging us .50 cents a click over to that squeeze page, we’re going to have to spend $2,500 to get 5,000 clicks. But we only made $2100. So what’s happening there? People are like, God, the funnel doesn’t work and they get mad. But does the funnel work? Yes, the funnel works. The funnel totally works.

Why? Because we looked at the percentages and we know that those percentages are correct. So the funnel does work. You just aren’t making money because why? Because the cost per click for advertising is too high. So you have one of two choices. You can either try to get the cost per click down on the ad or you can try to raise the conversion rate somewhere on your funnel. But based on the math that we just did, this is a very, very high converting funnel based on the benchmarks, right?

Because we were optimistic today. So you need to try to figure out how to get your cost per click down. Okay. So maybe it’s with content, maybe with social strategy, maybe with better ad targeting. But let’s say you can get it down to thirty cents a click, right? So thirty cents, it’s twenty cents less. That doesn’t seem like that much. But guess what happens now it’s only costing you $1,500 to get those 5,000 views on that page.

And based on our math we’ve made $2150. So if you take $2150 and you subtract the 1500 at cost, you’ve now made $850 in profit. And if I said to you every day you’re going to give me $1,500 and I’m going to give you $2,350 back, would you do it? And the answer should be hell yes. Right? So some buddies like, well I’m not a millionaire in 15 minutes because my sales funnel only made $850 this week and we feel depressed about that.

But it’s because our expectations are completely off about what a funnel actually does in this math problem that we did. If you can get thirty cents a click to get 5,000 clicks to your landing page and then you have all those conversion rates that I just showed you, you are profiting $850 for every $1,500 you put in.

It’s not quite getting doubling your money but almost. And that’s as good as it gets. So if you built one funnel that’s amazing and if you were getting fifty cents a click, you were not positive, you are net negative and you probably felt like a failure.

So my encouragement to you today, and for those of you who are not sales funnel geeks, this may have felt like Greek to you.

But what I want to say to you, number one is this: manage your expectations. It is the best thing you can do for yourself and your clients. Manage your expectations, do the math and figure out if your funnel is really working or not. Because oftentimes your funnel is working. It’s the ad costs that aren’t. And if your funnel isn’t working, then you fix that and then try again. Thanks so much. Appreciate you guys. Talk soon.

If you’re ready to create, grow, and scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

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