Dear PPC advertiser,
Have you ever tried to optimize your campaigns like this yet?
One thing we found at my firm doing tests like this is:
Running these types of offers always performed better when technical questions were the normal part of the customer’s buying process, and my clients’ revenue was affected by as much as 100-500% when these tests were successful, usually within three to six months of introducing it as the primary or exclusive offer in their campaigns.
In addition to that, with the lift in CTR that also accompanied this type of adjustment, it was realized these lifts in CTR occurred because people wanted this information in the first place;
or in other words, we were previously wasting our time advertising a solution to people who were mostly not ready to buy.
Vs.
Having collected a huge list of people who are wholly interested in what you sell, you can turn that into a whole lot of sales opportunities using email and PPC remarketing strategies, similar to an example from a client shown here that you can examine:
For users we initially attracted to our initial offer, they were enticed with even more related content until each prospect’s market specific information was actually satisfied, eliminating the need for our prospects to get it from anyone else.
Doing things this way, our results were much better than asking for the sale right away, as you can see …
As time consuming as it is to have to educate your prospects this way, expecting your clients or customers to figure this out on their own is just asking them to go to your competitions’ sales department and get the information they want there.
Finding the Most Relevant Offer for Each Prospect
The best way to optimize your ad budget is to offer this information to the parts of the campaign that need it.
By looking at your bounce rates by keyword, you can quickly identify which campaign segments should be isolated and tested with your offer of information if you are not typically already offering such information in your campaigns.
Having figured out which section of the funnel each of your campaign’s traffic is from, we can begin to test what should be offered to each new group that we need, which we will get into how to do next …
Info Offer Creation
Before going out and creating the new offers for your campaign, I highly recommend looking around and seeing what other types of informational offers are out there being used in your niche, as that can help you pick out a winning strategy more easily.
Research what your prospects are passionate about that surround your general niche to leverage your efforts.
Spy tools to make this process simple:
For TV Commercial Spying
Source: iSpot.tv
For Facebook Ad Spying
Source: AdEspresso Ad Gallery
For Google Display Banner Advertising
Source: Moat
Whatever it will take to get the email of the person who is in-market for what you sell, use it.
Getting the Opt In
No matter what type of products or services you are advertising, you will always be tasked with figuring out how much value should be presented to the user before you initially ask for their contact information.
Asking for their information too soon in the marketing process will leave you with a very poor opt-in rate and/or a high proportion of fake emails …
It’s always best to offer more value up front than you think you need, to ensure that the opt-in quality and rate is high.
Very straightforward types of offers may only require a sampling of the information presented to them on the landing page to gain their consent to further communicate, by far the most common approach I use.
For people further away from making a purchase, you can use a similar approach, albeit with a bit longer process:
My Previous Results From This Type Of Strategy
Other Info Offer Considerations:
You should still always consider giving your prospects multiple calls to action to pick from on your sites/landing pages, as the process you use to attempt to segregate out people by interest type will never be 100 percent accurate.
You will also definitely want to test different ways of wording your call to action text to get their email, as that WILL significantly impact your results.
Source: Marketing Sherpa (36:30)
Past the Opt-In
Out of the different ways one could follow a lead up to make that sale, that next step will always start off with email.
Email Autoresponders
After having content sent out to these leads on a weekly basis until they are ready to take the next step, you can test your subject headlines to keep them reading, as statistically, the more they read, the higher the likelihood they will end up doing business with you.
At some point in this email sequence, we will want to set up the sales opportunity for ourselves using phone or by mail, which we will get into next.
Scheduled Callbacks
If you are going to be calling people up to sell the product or service, I highly recommend using a programmable CRM system to track everything you are doing and see how well it actually works.
All decisions to program the CRM automation should be data driven:
As you can see from a similar campaign I have run, even the float time from the target email you need them to reach to the time you call makes a difference in the success of your program.
Why Longer Sales Funnels Are Usually Needed, Even After You Got Their Email
While you can’t possibly know how much information you should put in front of these people before asking for their money, they will still have the same buying habits as they always do when you deal with them any other way …
For example, if your normal customer sales cycle is eight weeks, then your drip campaign should also be about eight weeks to give them adequate time to process the information you have given them.
I usually base the raw number of touchpoints for my sales sequence on the price of the item itself:
For selling items or services that are less than $300, I will typically use one step or stage before asking prospects collected to buy.
For $300-$1000 items or services, I will usually use three to four steps after the opt in before asking for the sale.
For $1000+ priced items and services, five-plus steps after the initial opt in is usually required to get someone to seriously consider a direct sales pitch, spaced out over the average length of your sales cycle.
How you ask for the sale can be done in any number of ways and should ideally include different calls to action sprinkled throughout your email sequence as well:
Direct Mail
If you are already offering your prospects an e-brochure that everyone else is doing, you can start presenting that material in the physical realm, as this in my experience almost always makes up for the “direct cost” of the mail piece itself.
People are more willing to give back when they feel an increase in value of the effort put in to help them first, not to mention putting more stock in information presented in that hardcopy format given anyway.
If you have a hardcopy book you can send out to your prospects, make sure it’s for those people who are tuned in on your email content, it is worth every penny.
For five-figure deals, I highly recommend going with the physical product angle, as it almost always ends up netting you more sales than what you could have gotten with digital-only delivery, by my personal experience.
Whatever you do, don’t skip right to calling or sending stuff by snail mail for those who come directly from your campaigns, as asking for a phone number or an address on your actual website will give you far fewer contacts per dollar spend on ads than you could have started with:
Source: Marketing Sherpa (13:33)
Not only will your opt-in rates easily be multiple factors fewer initially per dollar spend on ads if you try to take a shortcut in the process this way, but people will also just shut down on you anyway if they don’t have enough information about the sale before you ask for it.
Bonus:
Alternate Ways to Get People to Opt In Without Immediately Committing to Purchase
Custom Live Chat Boxes
If you are in a particularly competitive niche, one way to really stand out from the pack, minus having the best offer, is to simply switch up how you are presenting it.
For buy-ready traffic, this may include using custom live chat boxes, which can significantly increase your lead flow vs. the standard web form.
