Turning people from cold traffic into paying members of a membership program can be a challenge, to say the least!
This episode we're going to find out how to structure your cold ad campaigns, how to make the most of your retargeting, as well as how to turn people into loyal members!
We've managed to pin down ad genius Gavin Bell to find out what strategy he would use and how he gets top results…
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Usually we would run a cold Facebook ad into a one-off product, then upsell and cross-sell into a membership, is there a better strategy for that?
- The main to think about is the commitment level required by the person, as well as who the person is and how they typically buy.
- One way that works well is actually running cold traffic to a one-dollar trial offer. The commitment required to hand over one dollar is next to nothing.
- When it comes to Facebook ads, funnels, membership sites, in general, you want to know how much you are spending to acquire a new customer, the lifetime value of a customer. Do these numbers tie-up?
- If you can get people in cold for a one-dollar trial, then get them in for the first-month price, then if they stay longer than a month you're in profit.
- Commitment level is required. If your membership is priced high the there may be too big a gap, so maybe do something like a webinar first to provide some value there.
How long would you run the one-dollar trial for?
- No longer than 7 days.
- The level of commitment required is minimum. When you get people buying that one-dollar trial, you're going to get things like competitors paying a dollar to see what’s going on in there, people that see what’s in there and then leave straight away, because the commitment level isn’t high.
- 7 days allows that person to get in and get comfortable. You get an idea in 7 days of whether a product is going to be for you or not.
- This means that you'll filter out the people who aren't right and encourage the people who are.
Do you only send interest-targeted traffic or are you also retargeting to people who have been through a certain process? What are you testing, what are the results like?
- When creating any facebook campaign, focus on two parts, the warm part, and the cold part.
- Warm, being retargeting. Messages you send to specific groups of people is very different. Start with retargeting campaigns, your warm audiences.
- You are going to get people coming but not actually purchasing, so using retargeting to bring them back is always so important, and the results are always really good.
- The only problem with retargeting is it is not scalable. It is purely based on the number of people you got in your audience, so that is why you start with retargeting, but we also have cold campaigns as well.
- Cold campaigns are going to look different depending on the membership site, the industry, the price point, the people you are going after, their purchasing behavior.
How do you position the ad copy and creative for cold traffic?
- Think about the journey of the customer, what steps we can get them to take and how do we break it down into as little steps as possible-micro commitments.
- The first step is seeing the ad and clicking on it, it’s the first micro commitment to becoming a member.
- If they don’t know you, it benefits to sending them to something like a free guide which solves a specific problem.
- The next step, giving us their name, email and we know what problems they have at the moment so that bridges the gap a little more. Tailoring it toward people we want to go after with the problem we want them to have.
- Start ad copy with a yes question, if they have answered yes to the question you have hooked them into the ad. If they consume the content and the ad is good enough to take them to that next action, a free guide or a webinar.
- Free trials to membership, at which point you take credit card details and you can bill them after 2 weeks, so they are almost becoming a customer.
- It’s this psychology around these micro-commitments.
What does that ad structure begin to look like on a whole?
- Break into two parts. The cold campaign, going after people we don't know who they are. And warm campaigns, your retargeting.
- Depending on how much you want to spend determines how to break the retargeting campaign into different ad sets and depends on the audience size as well.
- If you have a larger audience, it makes sense to break those audiences up, with different messages going to those different audiences.
- Ask how can I make myself relevant to this person, acknowledge it in the ad copy, which makes you immediately relevant.
Have you ever testing running ads to people once they are a member in order to try and push them through the consumption of the content in those early onboarding stages?
- A lot of time, marketers focus more on getting people in as opposed to the experience they have once they are in.
- Run retargeting ads to people that coincide with your onboarding emails.
- You don't have to ask to do anything, you are not getting an ROI on that ad but at least they are seeing your face.
Are you looking to run ad campaigns alongside their membership that’s now fueling those sales and are they the easiest ads to run?
- It’s the biggest retarget ad spend you’ll probably ever spend.
- If you're giving a good experience they should be willing to buy from you anyway.
- Running a one-dollar a day ad is going to get you good retargeting. You're most likely going to make a few sales from every single one of those people. And the worst-case scenario that will ever happen with that is some people not buying but they will comment and like it.
How do you break down your ad spend budget?
- Based on audience size.
- About 1% of the budget goes on running the one dollar a day ads.
- From a retargeting point of view, probably spend around 10%-20% of the budget, which is the real conversion drivers. The number of people you target there is limited in its not a scalable audience, so still keep the budget really small.
- The remaining percentage goes to a cold audience. A mixture of 60% pure audience building and the rest going to a one-dollar trial for example.
- Most people will spend the majority of their budget trying to drive cold traffic into becoming a customer right away. They won’t spend money on promoting video content or blog content or a podcast.
- If you are spending 80% on driving views of video content, there is not an ROI you can tangibly see with that, which can be found difficult to small businesses.
- If you got retargeting setup and you see profitable results, then the only thing that's stopping you from getting better results is the number of people in that retargeting audience.
A book that you would recommend…
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
What is your top success habit?
Break down your goals, break them down into daily tasks.
What are your favourite apps right now?
Autosleep
Here’s the big one… who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
Redhead Rob!
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
You can find out more over at mrgavinbell.com or over on Instagram.
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