Neil: Have you ever run a Facebook Ad and thought, “Wow, that was amazing. Look at the results I got from that thing.” Maybe you had the opposite experience; you ran the ad, Google Pay-Per-Click and thought, “What a dog. I’m never doing that again.” Today I’ve got Scott Desgrosseilliers from Wicked Reports on the podcast and we’re going to talk about marketing metrics and how to know if your advertising is really working for you or not.
Scott, I’ve known so many business owners that have said, “I boosted a post for 25 bucks and 1,500 people saw it,” or they’ve said, “Facebook Ads just don’t work for me.” Are either of those statements true?
Scott: They’re not.
Neil: Yeah. I didn’t figure you’d say they were. What’s wrong with those statements? How do we know, you know, when I spend 25 bucks and I boost this ad, how do I know that it’s really doing me any good? What should I really be looking at?
Scott: The thing is, is there’s a customer journey that takes place particularly for a smaller medium business that’s not a household brand, you can’t just pop up an ad and say, “Hey, come buy my stuff,” and someone’s going to be jolted out of scrolling through their Facebook feed and immediately grab their credit card. It just doesn’t happen.
Neil: Right. No.
Scott: That’s just not the case, particularly the more expensive product you have or the more it might require thought or … There’s a lot that goes into someone actually becoming a customer, sometimes it’s an emotional purchase and all that but not usually an emotional immediate purchase, unless you’re doing a commodity. There’s a customer journey you got to consider and that plays a big effect into how effective you’re going to be on Facebook.
Neil: Right.
Scott: We have four … In my opinion that statement is, well, it can work but if you’re advertising for the first time, you most likely want to spend a fair amount of your budget on just getting your brand out there, which can be frustrating because it’s hard to … You need to know if it worked or not, but you’re sending them just to your best content, or your best video, or your best free coupon deal, or whatever, but what we found is that there’s a process of points that you need to go through and branding is usually the initial one.
Neil: Okay. Take me through that kind of customer journey then that you’re seeing is working on Facebook, or in any ad medium that you guys are tracking, because you’re doing more than Facebook. I keep saying Facebook but-
Scott: It’s fine.
Neil: You’re working with Facebook and you’re working with Google Pay-Per-Click and what else have we got? Just social in general.
Scott: Social in general, [inaudible 00:02:41] Pinterest, Instagram, all of them.
Neil: Right.
Scott: What we find is that there’s four points that we have decided to track because they directly map to actions, and more importantly when you’re looking at your performance, you know why something worked, because you need to know that. You can’t just know, “Hey, this worked. I’ll keep doing it,” because there’re different reasons why something might have worked. Knowing that enables you to have more clarity and confidence when you go to spend the next round of advertising because you know why the buyers interacted with you at certain points in time. The points that we kind of settled on because they work so well was first click, which is branding, which means I am a … You’ve sent an ad to what’s called cold traffic, which is someone that’s never heard of you and this is the first time they ever clicked on one of your ads. First time they’ve ever come to your website in general for any reason, that’s trackable.
Neil: It’s their first interaction with you and their first click.
Scott: First interaction.
Neil: Wherever that comes from; comes from an ad, comes from social, comes from who knows.
Scott: Email.
Neil: Right. Okay.
Scott: I post this podcast on my Facebook page, my personal page, and my business page, and then someone clicks over to Email SPLAT or wherever you have it, that could be their first click, would be the podcast interview.
Neil: Right, so that came from you.
Scott: Then we look at first opt-in, which is a trademark thing we kind of invented way back in the day which was, what was the email click that … I shouldn’t say that, just edit that out. What was the click that led to someone first joining my email list? That’s important because you know all the different reasons. That’s kind of like a purchase of time and a commitment to say, “Hey, I want to hear about this person. I’m willing to listen to them and hear what they have to say.” At Wicked Reports we have a way of doing that so that it takes out the effort of the business owner having to configure that, but it’s really important in time because depending on how long your sales cycle is it’s probably … Unless you’re, again, something that’s like … You’re selling like Band-Aids and someone’s got a bloody finger, well then yeah, they’re just going to click and buy it. Actually they won’t, they need the Band-Aid right away. They’re going to go to the store.
Neil: Exactly. That’s a great example.
Scott: …purchases through the Facebook feed and so … When you sit back and you’re trying to strategize and you want to know, “Hey, where did I find my best customers?” you kind of want to know where did these leads first join my email list from. That’s a critical thing because then you know what lead gen to cold traffic attracts the best customers. That’s why we track that.
Neil: Right. Facebook is just going to tell you that you had a conversion that they opted in, but they’re not going to fill in the future story for you.
Scott: They don’t fill in the future and they run a … They’re constantly innovating and changing things but basically they rely on last click through their channel only, which means in the last seven days, if someone clicks on one of your ads and hits one of your goal pages that you configured in Facebook, show it as the conversion. That may or may not be the conversion. When you don’t bring time into effect and when you don’t look at all the other things you’re doing, and you don’t know how much you already knew about that person before they hit one of your goals, then you don’t really know. It might be someone is just clicking on your ad and they’ve already been in your email list for two years, and then you think, “Hey, I’m getting a bunch of new leads from this.” No, that’s actually working great on people already on your list.
That brings me to the next point of the customer journey which is called re-opt-in which we call, when did they last … If they submit their email address for any reason, like let’s say they want to opt-in to watch this podcast but they were already on your email list, then we want to track that point because it’s an indicator of engagement that, “Hey, I’ve been on your email list for a while but guess what? I’m willing to opt back in to get this video series, or get this PDF, or opt-in for this consultation,” and whatever it is. It could be all kinds of things; coupon code is a popular one. That’s a popular one that Mark from Get Maine Lobster did, he’s selling lobster online.
You start doing all this retargeting, and it’s not even like … I’m not even talking like $100,000 a month budget, you start doing a couple of thousand dollars in advertising on Facebook and then you want to do … Then you suddenly notice retargeting on AdWords from other people and you’re like, “Well I should probably do that also.” As soon as you start doing that, and you’re emailing, and you’re doing posting, suddenly you got four or five different sources of clicks and they’re all going to … The more you do and the bigger your email list gets, the more they’re all going to overlap and take more and more credit-
Neil: Exactly.
Scott: You have less idea what the hell goes on…
Neil: Yeah. They’re all going to say, “It was me. It was me. Keep spending money over here. Keep giving your money to Facebook because look at what we did for you,” or, “Keep giving your money to Pay-Per-Click because look at what we did for you,” but that might not be the cause.
Scott: Exactly, and Google AdWords has something called View-Through Conversion which they all do but AdWords’ default setting has been for a long time, if you … You’re scrolling one of those pages and you see a display ad and you don’t click on it. Well, if 29 days later you hit the checkout page of that ad, that brand’s ad, whatever it is … Like let’s say Get Maine Lobster 29 days ago you see his ad on espn.com, you don’t click, then you [inaudible 00:08:05] 29 days later, if you haven’t clicked any AdWords ad since, that display ad takes credit for the conversion. That’s impossible. I quadruple-
Neil: You didn’t even notice it.
Scott: I was nervous to even … I was like, “Why isn’t anyone talking about this?” I don’t know, I guess because he notices what we deal with all day and people, when we show the numbers and they’re different, people really sometimes can be upset. Particularly an AdWords person if they’re making a lot of View-Through Conversions, well that’s contributing to the sale. I’m like, “It may be, it may not be, but we’re not going to tell someone, “Spend a bunch of money on this because 29 days ago someone viewed it, or even bought.”” That’s an extreme example. I mean, there’s some good AdWords people out there but that’s just the most egregious rule I’ve seen an ad platform do.
Neil: Right. Yeah. That’s pretty liberal, to count that from 29 days ago.
Scott: Yeah, it is.
Neil: Especially in our-
Scott: I would say a video-
Neil: No-attention-span society to remember something from 29 days ago, that would just be a miracle.
Scott: It would be. I do think the video View-Through of a day makes a lot of sense. If you watch a video and you buy the next day, that’s a really valid measure and that’s something that the ad networks do really well at. If you’re seeing same day View-Through Conversions on your video, you can trust those and that’s a great thing if you’re getting that.
Then the last thing we talk about is last click, which means just what was the last click before the purchase. That’s a customizable time frame because some people … Like if you’re doing an event for $5,000, $6,000, I’m in one next week, someone may click on something a week ago but then they get a call to make the purchase because it’s expensive or they got to go get approval to pay because it’s a lot of money. That last click window is … There’s a science to it behind how involved your sales process is, but if you’re doing like online goods and you’re also a store … I use the lobster guy because I can, Get Maine Lobster; he does a 24-hour window, which we feel is really nice. If the last click was in like an email and then we see a purchase within 24 hours, we give credit to that email because it’s within a day and that seems safe to us.
We also do cross channel because again, if you’re doing multiple things, they’re all going to take credit, and so you have all your credit one spot. A lot of people come to us, “My Facebook conversions are higher than my sales, how could that be?” I’m like, “Well, read this blog article.”
Neil: Yeah. I see that one a lot.
Scott: It’s going to [inaudible 00:10:35] technical, you’re probably just going to scan it, you probably won’t even read it, just take my word for it. Yeah, it happens. [inaudible 00:10:40].
Neil: Yeah. It’s that double attribution or whatever you want to call it.
Scott: Yeah.
Neil: That they do.
Scott: Or the pixel fires twice or you’re using the old pixel, you named it Lee but it was really… There’s a lot of things that can go wrong just in the pixel configuration where it could work well but there’s a lot of errors and whatnot, so we don’t rely on them because of that. If you set them up right you can get some good data but it’s tricky.
Neil: Well let’s review these four again. We had first click, we had first opt-in, we had re-opt, and then we have last click. This is what you’re saying are the four main actions that a customer is going to go through from discovering your brand to purchasing.
Scott: Yeah, and sometimes you can … Some people will act faster than others and some slower than others and some may not need re-opt-ins but in general, they mapped to four strategies which are branding, cold traffic lead gen, because everyone always tries to get more leads of course. Then retargeting and trying to close the sale. I mean, of course you always want to just close the sale as fast as possible, I’m not disputing that but it just doesn’t always work that way unfortunately. [How 00:11:51] Wicked Reports started is the guy spent four grand and only got one sale in Facebook and is like, “Well, Facebook doesn’t work.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Well, I spent four grand and I only got one sale.”
I was like, “Well, why don’t you try… that might help. Actually do email marketing, it’s not like some secret strategy.”
“I don’t know what to send.”
I just was like, “Just send them stuff, I don’t know, figure it out,” and he did.
Neil: You’re a data guy, yeah.
Scott: Yeah, exactly. My marketing is … We would launch a new site now because some marketing person who’s fantastic figured it out for me, can figure out how to talk about my own stuff…
Neil: Not unusual.
Scott: Yeah.
Neil: Well that brings up an interesting point, because we’ve kind of been talking about … We’ve been talking about ads, but where does email fit into all of this then?
Scott: Email fits in heavy for us on the last click for a lot of people. I know people do lead email JVs as well and it fits in heavy because generally you paid … Where Facebook and AdWords for a smaller business can really pay off is getting the leads that you end up converting on email, but you got to be able to convert them on email, or you have to know, “Hey, you know what? I got a ton of leads but it’s not the lead source, my emails aren’t converting anyone.” Even though your email is actually making legitimate sales, and I know it’s fun for people to … I mean, I send emails out a fair amount, to get a reply back, “This is just what I was thinking …” To get positive feedback or to get clicks or to get opens, everyone wants to be heard. It’s just a fact of being a human but the fact of a business is you need revenue and we …
I used to get hired a fair amount of times, it was just people at these big involved fancy sequences, and almost no one was … or even lasting to the end. … whereas Facebook stuff dipped down and it was the fifth email of a new sequence. He had bought some gurus email system, which can be awesome, but Mark’s implementation of it was terrible, which I don’t mind saying because he’s a multimillion-dollar successful businessman … and they sacked Mark. Well, he sent them through this email and only 90 people clicked on the fifth email. You have this sequence that’s supposed to close all these sales, well, no one cared by the fifth email or even read it. That was an intel to know, “Hey, the email is actually killing any interest in the product or something’s gone wrong with this email sequence. All these leads may still be good, I just need to find something else to send.” I think it’s critical to know what emails are making people buy or not because that’s the real indicator in my mind; what’s making someone pay? That’s the-
Neil: Yeah. I like to say that those clicks … The clicks and open rate, that’s kind of like your batting average in your ERA. They’re kind of important but it doesn’t tell you who won the game.
Scott: That’s a great…
Neil: That’s the cash register. The cash register tells you whether or not you want-
Scott: … if I do that. I’ll copy that. Awesome.
Neil: You’re stealing it. I gave it to Andy a while back and he said he was going to steal it but I don’t think he did.
Scott: I know. I don’t think he did. He should have, that was awesome.
Neil: He should have. Yeah.
Scott: It is the … I mean, because we found things like … Mark emailed out on his birthday … You have a product, you can’t just … If you’re like a brick-and-mortar that has an online presence, you pretty much just want people to buy your stuff. You don’t want to have necessarily this big long relationship with people or they don’t want it with you. They just want to either buy your clothes or whatever you’re selling.
Neil: Your service or whatever it is, yeah.
Scott: You can’t just always say, “Hey, I have a deal. Hey, I have a deal. Hey, buy my stuff.” You got to figure out how to do different angles and to Mark’s credit, he did some really interesting ones that the stats look horrible from traditional stats but actually did great. I’ll give you one example where I saw he’s selling lobster, writing emails, “Hey, I ran the half marathon yesterday.” That was the title and I was just so embarrassed. Then you click on it and it’s like some blog about him running the marathon and then he mixed in, “Hey, save on lobster,” because that’s the point of all his emails, right?
Neil: Yeah.
Scott: I’m like, “Oh man.” I go, “Well …” He sends a lot of email; he sends two to three a week but you know what? He’s seven figures on email and I’ll explain the other step in a second here. We pull up stats a couple days later, had … I’m doing this from memory but the marathon one had maybe 800 clicks out of 100,000-person list, so that’s 0.8% click rate. He’s going to be bragging, “Hey, look at me…”
Neil: “Look at click-through on this one, woo-hoo,” yeah.
Scott: Yeah. Eight out of every thousand clicked.
Neil: Thousand, right.
Scott: …the wrong way because I think … No it’s not that bad.
Neil: It can’t be that bad, but it is.
Scott: Yeah, but he made 9,500 bucks and his average email … Then you don’t know, is 9,500 good or bad? Well, everything’s relative in business I’ve learned. We have people, astronomical businesses and people that are just starting out. His average email does $2,000, so we did almost five times the normal email by doing this marathon one even though not many people cared, some people were probably cringing in horror. Me as a data marketer I was like, “Dude, why would you send that?” Well, guess what? Those people bought…
Neil: Who was the smart one in this situation?
Scott: That was in his top 100 emails of all time…
Neil: Who was the smart one here? It was Mark. Yeah. By comparison, what was his normal click-through rate, you know, if we were 0.8 on this one, what does he normally get?
Scott: It’s around two and a half percent, two and a half, three percent.
Neil: We did almost five times the sales with five times less clicks.
Scott: One sixth [inaudible 00:17:32].
Neil: One sixth, yeah. Wow.
Scott: That’s a dramatic statement to say that email sells, your personal emails that not everyone is prepared for do work. I love that story because all the guru advice you hear, like those people that sell the training, we have training as well, it works for … Our training is all around, here’s a couple of ideas … going to test them real time in your business and find out if they worked out or not the next day. I don’t make any claims they’re going to work, I just say, “Hey, look, they worked for someone who’s allowed me to tell you how he’s doing it. Let’s go find out if it works for you,” because you don’t know. You can’t tell how … In my opinion there’s the forces of the market you’re in, there’s the market, and then there’s your product and where it’s at in that market, so your relationship with … and that’s how you chose to speak that day, and what time did you send it. Did you send it when people normally would buy? All those come together and the output is stats that make you either you should do it again or you shouldn’t.
Neil: Right, because-
Scott: That’s how you get to approach all your marketing.
Neil: That example you gave us with his marathon email, if he had just looked at the traditional stats that everybody’s looking at, open rate and click-through, he would say, “Well, I’m never doing that again. That was a big old waste.”
Scott: Open rate is a tough one.
Neil: Yeah. If he’d just looked at those things like what most people look at, he wouldn’t do it again but if he’s adding in this last click, this fourth step that you talk about, if he’s watching that, well that would have told him then, you know, “Here’s …” Obviously you guys are, that would tell him, “Hey, here’s the sales from that email.”
Scott: Yep. I’m not disputing, there’s always the exceptions where there’s people that have these great relationships with their list and have their open diary with their list. Then they always buy whatever they say, or whatever. I’m sure there’s people out there that pull that off but it’s very rare, and so you need … Plus, or at the end of the … Plus you’re the one that’s in tune writing all your emails and once you go into business and you’ve passed one person, you’re not going to have time to probably do all your emails or it’s not your skill, or you hired someone in or you’ve had a couple of different copywriters over the years, you’re going to be able to just assess, “What do I want to keep doing or not?”
There is some value to … You do want to send value-based emails that hopefully are getting clicked on. It doesn’t mean every email has to be a sale but in Mark’s business where I’m selling lobsters, it kind of does. People aren’t looking to hear from you about, “Check out how I shuck this lobster tail today.” I guess people might watch that but I wouldn’t. Who cares?
Neil: Yeah. Well you wouldn’t have read the marathon email either.
Scott: Yeah. Particularly his type of business. There is some … If you’re doing the 80-20 rule of, “Okay. I’m going to send … Every ten emails, two are going to be for sales and four are going to be here’s something interesting you need to know,” you still want to know if those interesting need-to-know emails do get clicked on because that’s really a bigger indicator of interest than open. Open’s not a valid rate to measure because if they don’t have images, then you’re not going to know if they opened it or not, even if they did.
Neil: Right.
Scott: Opening, think about they have them on and they’re just scrolling through their phone, clicking their emails like, “Why is that really proving that your email is good,” it’s not telling you anything if they just happen to open it because they’re on their phone banging out 20 unread emails while they’re in line somewhere. The clicks are much stronger indicator than an open if you’re just saying, “Hey, is this worth me to continue to send.” Then obviously the sales are really where you know this is the topics people care about because they actually bought my stuff after they read it…
Neil: If you had to pick the one metric that businesses should be looking at when it comes to their ad-spend and what they’re trying with marketing, what is that metric?
Scott: I like two, I’m going to pick. I guess I’m going to go with…
Neil: We’ll let you have two.
Scott: You’ll give me two?
Neil: Yeah, we’ll let you have two.
Scott: I think it’s ROI. It’s return on investment if you’re doing paid stuff, or it’s return on investment of your time and effort if you’re doing unpaid, so ROI and lifetime value. If you know what your customers are worth, then you know what you can spend to get them, and the lifetime value … Kind of a big discovery at Wicked Reports is that lifetime value varies greatly based on where you found the people. For example because it’s different in this … Mark and Facebook, he’s made $740,000 in 18 months. This is the guy that spent four grand and was going to give up, on $125,000. Well when he did that, it was because we found out where the customers have sky-high lifetime value relative to how much they cost to get, and that’s what enables that really high revenue per the cost.
Well, let’s look at Wicked Reports and let’s say we do this podcast. It’s going to go up to some people. Now if I do it to a chamber of commerce meeting where people don’t even have websites, they might all love this interview but I’m going to get zero business. They don’t even have an online business. Then I would, if I was looking at conversion rate, “Hey, this podcast didn’t sell anything. It must not be any good.”
“Well, I gave it to the wrong audience, it was to people that don’t even have websites,” or the conversion rate of, “It is all people that like … marketer.”
“You know what though, it was a college class. None of them have freaking businesses either.” This is a bad audience for a higher-end analytics to a higher-end markets, lower-end compared to corporates.
Neil: Corporate, yeah.
Scott: Then if I show it to people that are using ONTRAPORT already, that’s a great audience for Wicked Reports because we’re already integrated with them and I’ve presented everything else. Knowing that, the lifetime value of the people from ONTRAPORT that we get into Wicked Reports is very high. That’s why I like to do it because then you know the … If you have some marketing, it may or may not be affected but you got to know, “Who am I showing it to?” Because then you can really do the 80-20 and then just focus on the people that you’re meant to serve your product to, that are interested in it and want to buy it. Then if it doesn’t work, then you know, “Hey, I do have a problem with marketing. It’s the right people and no one cared.”
Neil: Yeah.
Scott: I would use Thai food as an example, like if I showed it to … You have a great buy one get one Thai food offer to get people to buy. Well, if you show it to my grandmother, she’s in a nursing home, she’s not going to Thai food. Show it to my mother, she’s going to have diarrhea. She can’t go, she can’t eat spicy food. If you show it to my wife, she may or may not, but generally she’s quite selective as well, or you show it to one of my kids, well, they can’t go either. Then if you show it to me, I love Thai food. I’m going to go. Well guess what? Your conversion rate is one out of six already and then you’re like, “Well …” Maybe you needed to get one out of three, and guess what, you already think it stinks but actually when you hit the right customer, potential customer, you converted them. We break everything down very detailed because that’s where the money is.
Neil: Right, so the more we can-
Scott: Metric is ROI and lifetime value laser-focused on the character demographics of that person.
Neil: Segments. Right, because if we can find the group of Scotts to show Thai food to, then instead of wanting six we’re going to have four and six, or five and six, if we find-
Scott: Yeah, exactly, or my lifetime value is so high that wherever you … Where the lifetime value comes in is, “Well Scotts are going to go there 10 times, I’m going to make 500 bucks on lunch with him. Even though I’m only hitting one out of six, it’s worth 500 bucks a pop, so who cares?”
Neil: Right.
Scott: Mark’s lobster thing, all that money, he’s only converted 4% all time.
Neil: Wow.
Scott: I just was cutting the screen share with us because it was fresh in my brain here for our new marketing [inaudible 00:25:26]. Over 45,000 leads never bought ever and like I don’t know, it’s 2% so it’s that … 800, I don’t know, it’s something ridiculous where 4% have ever bought or 3.91 or something. Just imagine that, you say, “Okay. I want to show a lead so I should go and spend 100 grand.” You’re only going to convert 4% of them. You’re not going to probably be that excited about that.
Neil: No, that doesn’t sound promising.
Scott: It is 600%, and furthermore, when you run them you’re not going to … You’re going to be break even or lose money when you’re paying for it, name it all. 4% and I’m not going to have more money than when I run the ad, no way.
Neil: Because this is the long game. He’s getting them months later not days later.
Scott: Yep. The long game, the spread was at 25% of his customers come the first day and then the other 75% are spread out over six months.
Neil: Wow.
Scott: You can’t just run it … When you’re first starting out you can’t just run a blind and just say, “Hey, Scott said in six months I’m going to make money.” No, you got to be … Initially that’s very fearful, you already know you have something that converts; people do buy and they do want and then it snowballs once you see it. You get repeat buyers that are coming from ads that you don’t even run anymore, that’s when it gets fun. You say, “Hey, I ran a report and I see I had three sales for 600 bucks but I didn’t run the ad that day.” We’re like, “Yeah. That’s a lead that’s still buying from him.” Then they get it and then they’re…
Neil: Yeah. Then we know it works.
Scott: “I’ve made money on ads I didn’t even run, this is awesome.”
Neil: Well we got to wrap this up. We’re running out of time here. The final question is, what could somebody do today to get started, other than obviously going and buying Wicked Reports, which we’re going to pitch here in a minute? What else could they do to get started? What’s the most important thing that they should look at?
Scott: “the most important thing is to go and look up something called google UTMs. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module which … You’ll just call them UTM forever now. It’s a tech that Google bought many years ago. The whole point is that you can put identifying things on the end of every link you post everywhere and then your Google analytics will report all its various metrics based on those UTM variables and values, the values being whatever you choose them to be. That allows you to then start seeing, “Does anyone care about all these things I’m running around doing?” Particularly as a new business you get a lot of whiplash following all these different ideas, everyone does it. I still sometimes get sucked into it myself, but you really just want to try to find one or two channels that you’re making sales and then get really good at those. Don’t worry about trying to do everything.
Before when you don’t know any idea what’s happening, you got to put those tracking variables and point them back to places on your website and find out, “Are people clicking and are they becoming at least opt-ins from that?” Even if you don’t know if it’s revenue, at least that’s a stronger indicator of interest than just likes and retweets and all that stuff that doesn’t really make anyone any money.
Neil: Yes. UTMs, just very powerful and definitely people should go look that up. That’s a good place to get started with all this metrics and data, and to understand how it works. Scott, thanks a lot for coming on the show today. I really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge about data and metrics around marketing.
Scott: It was really fun to talk about. Thanks for having me Neil.
Neil: Yeah. Thanks.
Scott: Take it easy.
Neil: Today Scott shared with us his four stages of the customer journey and how he likes to track data around marketing. Those were mapped to branding, cold traffic, retargeting, and closing the sale, and those corresponded to that first click, you know, where did they first find out about your brand, your business. That first opt-in, how did they first get on your email list, that re-opt-in, where maybe they signed up for the next stage of your business. It might have been a sign up for a call or a demo or maybe for another email list that you’re doing. The last one being that last click, what is the last thing they did before they bought your product or service.
Those are how Scott looks at the metrics of his customer lifecycle and how he corresponds those metrics back to his advertising and just his marketing efforts in general, even if it’s not paid. We’ve talked about before on the show how you have opportunity costs and if I’m running this ad, I’m not able to run this other one. Even if it’s, you know, I’ve got opportunity in addition to just the cost of those things. Those are the four stages that Scott talked about that you can look at in your own business.
Scott also talked about his two kind of holy grail metrics of marketing and that was ROI, where they’re again, ROI in money, or ROI in time, so your return on investment. How much are you getting back for the ad-spend you’re putting out? The other being lifetime value of your customer; how much are they spending overall not just on that first initial sale? You heard his example that Mark from Get Maine Lobsters actually losing money on a lot of his initial ads but he making it up over the next month, two months, three months up to six months, until he makes that money back and they become a profitable customer for him. He knows he can do that because he’s got these metrics to back up what he’s doing, it makes him feel comfortable that, “Hey, I can invest that time, I can invest that money and it’s going to come back to me.”
Now if you want to dip your toe in all these marketing metrics and just see what’s going on and how it works, Scott recommended that you check out UTMs, which I won’t even attempt to pronounce that again. It’s like Urchin something, I forget. I can never remember what UTM stands for because it’s just a UTM. The UTM is a code, it’s a string of code you stick on the end of your URL so you know where that traffic came from and then Google Analytics, or any analytics package, can track that and tell you where your customers are coming from. Do they come from an email? Do they come from a Facebook ad? Do they come from a social media post of any type? If you want to find out more about UTMs, I’m going to have a link to an article about UTMs in the show notes where you can check that out and learn a little more and start experimenting with some of these metrics.
If you want to skip the whole learning it on your own, just go straight to Wicked Reports, they can help you out especially if you’re on Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, or ONTRAPORT, those CRM platforms. They tie in with some others as well, I can’t remember them all, but I know those are the big three. If you want to find out more about Wicked Reports and what Scott does, head on over to http://beyondtheoptin.com/wicked where I will link you to a demo video that you can watch about Wicked Reports and see what that does, how it works. It’s by far the best analytics thing I’ve seen with CRM, with ONTRAPORT specifically. Again, beyondtheoptin.com/wicked.
Lastly, if you’re new to this whole world of marketing automation and metrics and all these cool stuff, and you’re trying to figure out just where to start; what email platform or CRM platform is going to work best for you, head on over to http://beyondtheoptin.com/quiz, where I will walk you through a quiz that you can take to help you figure out which platform is best for you to get started on and which one is going to be good for you in the long run still. http://Beyondtheoptin.com/quiz and you can find out some more about some CRM platforms.
That’s it for today’s show. Until next week, I’m Neil Kristianson.