TIP #1 – From 5k to 100k monthly website visitors (including help from wheelio at later steps).
[UPDATE, I re-read my thing and it’s a bit rambling too long but if you have time read the whole post because this has worked for other people too that have followed the steps]
Hey all,
I’m the director of ecommerce at Heroclip, hoping to give back some knowledge and data to the community.
You may have seen us in stores like Ace hardware, Brookstone…or from our multiple crowdfunding campaigns that raised $200k+, or maybe from media like ESPN.
Even though big retail and PR from top influencers may not be at the stage of focus if you’re in earlier stages, I’m super excited to share what I think this group will appreciate- That is our digital marketing and growth-hacking using funnels and ads that we’ve only figured out in last several months.
Recently I presented at Ecommcon event and Zipify/Smartmarketer group with part of our case study on optimizing customer journey. I rarely do this outside of Ryan Moran’s group, the only mastermind that I’m in but wanted to share more how we went from 5,000 monthly web visitors to 300,000+ in the past 3 months.
I’m not selling any course or service. I already have a Ph.D. so I don’t need to prove or convince anyone of anything. I hope to condense lots of data and testing for you in easy steps. The selfish reason I’m doing this is to help other brands scale up their marketing so some you will grow, and then be able to co-market with us through brand partnerships. Our Heroclip product is very versatile, I’m sure it will complement products and audiences for at least a few of you. I’ll be happy if you replicate our strategies and go from $50 FB ad spend to $1000+ daily profitably and make impact with your brand.
Alright that’s enough social proof and introductions. I’m sure someone spending $50k daily on FB ads will totally destroy me but I hope this helps some of you with how we literally went 20x on our daily traffic and sales in a week’s time.
TIP:
The most important factor that has created immediate success for us is testing as many variations as possible. 2-10 variations is good but I challenege you to test more.
Everyone hears about split-testing and A/B testing. Gotta do it, and even more than you think you should unless you have a gift of intuition and getting it right the first time.
We always send out multiple email subject lines to a select subgroup, whichever gets the most opens, clicks, and purchases is then sent to the rest of the email list. Same goes for taglines and featured images on our landing pages. Even with low sample size, some data is better than no data. Sure 25% vs 30% email open rates is important in the short-term. In the long-term, each of your tests will incrementally improve your marketing performance and at some point will be repurposed across channels and assets based on what is working the best. So that a 1% increase each in your ad CTR, landing page conversion, and email click rate will all compound on each other exponentially, but you will see this benefit over time.
The actual tip part of 4 step process I use…
Specific to Facebook, I tested 100+ images, body text/copy, and headlines (YES, 100+) in a set of three experiments at about the same time, with all other factors being the same and controlled (for example only 1 broad targeted audience and 1 placement).
What this does is:
1. Gives you a relative comparison across many variations so you can make appropriate data interpretations. Don’t turn off an ad if CTR is much lower but one ad is desktop while the other is Instagram. Your decisions have to be based on apple-to-apple comparisons.
2. Once you come up with a bunch of variations, you are challenged to come up with even more that you may not have originally thought of by resonating with diverse psychologies of your potential customers. By pushing the creative limit, your visuals for testing should be extremely diverse. Don’t just show a picture of a spatula from 20 different angles. Some people want a discount, some want to see the product features, some a lifestyle feeling, others an emotional trigger, and some it may simply be advertising effects from time of day moods or weather outside, etc).
This is where in the past I used to test 3-4 images and get unique link CTR’s 0.5% – 1.5% and be happy with the best. Not anymore. Now I’ve discovered that most will stay in that range but occasionally there will be some that jump out at 2%, 3%, 5%…just by really pushing the creative limit by coming up with more variations (either with competitor/audience research for ideas, asking team members for each to create or find unbiased copy/images, or do a “crazy eights” type of brainstorming exercise for idea generation). In early stages of testing (when searching for winning creative/copy before considering testing audience/objective), I always found it more effective in having more variations at smaller budgets than less variations at higher budgets. In a later tip, I’ll say how we then take these results and progress them to 5-15% CTR.
SUMMARY: Next time you’re running an ad, make at least 10+ ad set variations (30+ even better per test) and quickly turn off the worst ones. Then using the winners proceed as you normally would if you were only going to do 1-3 variations.
I use 4 total steps. The tip above is part of step 1. There are some excellent strategies out there by FB guru’s but for me many of them are at my step 3 and 4, while I see many beginners try them right away and fail because the order of the strategy is a bit off. Just need to do certain things in the right order (when choosing ATC/Purchase objectives is mandatory and when it actually doesn’t matter at all, etc.). Hopefully that was a bit insightful.
It’s like 1am now so I hope I didn’t ramble or boast. Should have some downtime now that Q4 is done and will be planning out 2018 before things pick up.
I’ll do a detailed case study soon of the 4 steps I use for FB ads and funnel optimization, if there’s enough interest and discussion here. Thanks for reading to the end, or for just reading the last sentence only.
