Want to get more sales online, and improve your automated marketing funnel?
In Episode 83 of the Bean Ninjas Podcast, Bean Ninjas CEO Meryl Johnston talks to John Ainsworth about his 3-step process for how to make more money from your existing visitors and leads through some simple tweaks to your existing funnels.
(Source: facebook.com/datadrivenfunnels)
Episode Highlights
What we’re offering is what people want. And it’s very deliberate. Click To Tweet3.00 – John’s background, starting out in door to door book sales!
6.00 – Building a business offering automated marketing funnels.
11.00 – Challenges of scaling, building SOP’s and getting great staff.
17.00 – John’s strength in creating a vision and his inspiration.
23.00 – The key strategy of offering something at a low cost to initiate the customer relationship, followed by a timely upsell.
25.00 – The value in mapping out your current funnel versus your ideal funnel.
30.00 – The power of the webinar in your sales funnel.
37.00 – How to use John’s free website auditing tool.
Learn the foundations of financial literacy and using Xero with Meryl.
Transcription
3 Steps To Making Money From Your Existing Visitors & Leads with John Ainsworth
Meryl Johnston:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Bean Ninjas Podcast. It’s great to be recording again today and I hope you enjoy this chat with John Ainsworth. He is the founder of Data Driven Marketing and he’s here to share with you how to sell more to existing visitors to your website. So what can you do in your marketing funnel to convert more leads, more traffic into paying customers? I really enjoyed the chat with John, and I think you will, too.
Hey, John. Welcome to the show.
John Ainsworth:
Hey, Meryl. Thanks very much.
Meryl Johnston:
We were chatting before we went on air about us both attending a conference next week, DCBKK, which is some event that we’ve talked about a couple of times on this podcast. So, looking forward to actually meeting you there in person. And I believe you’re speaking at the event.
John Ainsworth:
Yeah. I’m very excited. I’ve been in the DC for four/five years; something like that. And every year, everyone’s like, “You’re going to DCBKK?” Just like, “Of course, you are. Of course, you’re going.” And it’s like, “I haven’t been able to go.” And this year, I’m like, “Right. This is it. So, I’ve got my chance. I’m there. I’m booked. I’ve got; as soon as the tickets came on sale; I booked to go there.” So I’m very excited.
Meryl Johnston:
And what’s the topic? What’s your presentation called?
John Ainsworth:
It’s called three steps to making more money from your existing visitors and leads including seven case studies.
Meryl Johnston:
Wow.
John Ainsworth:
And if you come and attend, there’s also a couple of bonus titles for it. So you’ll see.
Meryl Johnston:
Well, I’m booked in. So I look forward to checking it out. So again, we’re talking about funnels today. But before we get into that, I’m always interested in how you got into business; so a little bit of your backstory. So if you want to talk through that before we dive into funnels and everything related to that.
John Ainsworth:
Sure. Yeah. I’ll give your listeners a story from the start because I first started my kind of business ventures mostly at university. I had this; I saw this poster for this job where you could go up the states and run your own business kind of thing. And I was like, “Oh, this sounds very interesting. What does that mean?”
And it turned out what it meant was selling books door-to-door, and it was one of the hardest, most unpleasant things that I’ve ever done. But it was like, it taught me so much about how to sell how, how to run your own finances, what have you. It wasn’t really running your own business, but it was like, it was some of the parts of it, and that was, yeah, it was pretty intense. They had us go out and go through this sales process for like a week.
And then, I got out to the first street on the first day and I knocked on the door, and we’ve been practising the sales talk. We had this pitch; like I had this pitch memorized, I’ve gone through it a hundred times, and the guy comes to the door and I forgot every single word of what I was supposed to say.
And I had this bag with like the sample books in it, and I just reached down to them and I pulled out one, and I looked at the guy and I said, “Books?” It was like, “What am I doing? What am I doing? Am I ever going to succeed?” And the guy was like, “No, thank you very much.” And I was like, “Oh, what am I doing here?” But I did that for four years; I got the hang of it eventually. I’ve got better actually remembering the sales stuff and I built out a whole team out there.
So that was kind of my start. And then, every year, people would say to me, like my mom’s friends were like, “When are you going to get a real job?” And I was like, “Oh, sounds like this real job must be a great thing for everyone to be so obsessed about me getting one of this.” So I went and I got a real job. And you know what? It wasn’t all that. I really didn’t enjoy it very much; having a boss, going to an office, all that kind of thing. It wasn’t really awesome for me.
So I stopped that when I was probably 28. So I’ve done that; I’ve done a real job thing for a few years and I kind of worked my way up to being campaigns manager for sporting and I had this idea that I really wanted to get into marketing physical activity; getting more people into physical activity.
And so I did that sporting, and then that was a bit of government organization for sport here. And that was pretty, pretty awful, but it gave me kind of access to a lot of people and super update for reputation. So I left there and I set up my own business. And I got a couple of the people I’ve been helping when I was at supporting clients, so Department of Health over here and some big charities and that kind of thing.
And so, I ran that for ten years and it was like; it was more; it should have been technically, it should have been charity. But I was convinced that if I could make this into a really profitable business, I could scale it much more and I could have much more of an impact in the world. And so, I was determined I was going to figure out how to make this work.
And the problem I found was that government is this weird beast to work with where they aren’t actually ever judging the projects that you do on the results that they get. They judge them based on how it makes them feel and what the politician think about it. So I was obsessed with the results and I managed to figure out how to get all these different groups into physical activities.
So I would do work with cancer patients, disabled people, with over 65, with people with different health conditions. And I would; I figured out how to reduce the cost per person active to about a quarter of what had been with the previous systems. And I found that nobody cared; they just were not interested that can we see the people actually in a class. Can we; they like to run classes themselves in the system that we had been involved running around classes. So they didn’t like that about it and they weren’t really judging an actual results that projects.
So eventually, I was like, “I’ll just give up, guys. Ten years of doing this and I put so much kind of heart and soul into it.” And so, I dropped that probably a couple of years ago. And so, I’ve been building automated marketing funnels for getting people into activity. And I was like, “Let’s see if the same thing, the same skills work for doing it for my own business.”
I started building automated funnels for getting people more clients and more customers in online business. And I was like, “Oh my God. This is so much easier.” Like, you have no idea how much easier it is to get people to pay you money and to get into physical activity when they got like cancer or they’re disabled or something.
So we started doing that; and so, that’s just been incredibly successful. Got people some amazing results and I’ve just been scaling the business because there’s been so much interest, there’s been so many people we’ve been able to help. And so, that’s kind of how I got to where I am now.
The book Rocket Fuel is quite impactful for me, just explaining about how there is a need for the visionary role and for this integrator role as well. And it really just made me feel a lot better because I was like, “Well, surely, everybody wants to do all the visionary stuff.” And it turns out, no, they really don’t.
Meryl Johnston:
Wow. And I have to ask, why do you think the government organization weren’t results-driven? Or they just were looking at different results? As someone who is very data-driven myself, I hear that and I think, “Oh, how frustrating for you that you’re generating these results and they just didn’t care.” Why do you think that was?
John Ainsworth:
Well, it’s very interesting because I always assume that, of course, they’re going to be interested in results. Like, and I couldn’t ever wrap my head around for ten years, the fact that they weren’t. And what I found was they just; that’s not how they’re judged. So government comes along or politicians come along, they decide, “Is this project worth funding or is it not?”
And at least in the physical activity space, there’s an automatic, the false assumption that if you’re going to help someone get into physical activity, the obvious way to do it is to put on new classes for it. So if you’ve got cancer patients, you’re going to put more classes for cancer patients. And then, the politicians who agreed to fund it wants to see those classes; they want to turn up, see it full of like 30 people in this one class and they’re having a great time and hear the stories. It’s a very emotional area.
If you can help someone who had some terrible health condition get into activity, and therefore, improve their health, it has this incredible impact and people love those cases of these. And charities and government are very driven by that; at least in this field, by the emotional side of things. People get into physical activity as a field, not for making money, not because they feel like it’s a scale that’s going to be very; a great career for them. It’s because they’re passionate about physical activity and sport.
And so, when they can see the people, and they can actually see the results that they’re getting those individuals, they really feel good about it and the same thing with the politicians. Whereas the approach we took was very much focused around; there’s tons of classes out there already, there’s tons of activities going on, let’s just match people up with the right ones for them. And that was much, much, much more cost-effective, but it didn’t allow the people running; paying for it to actually go and meet those people and see them and actually get that kind of real-life case study feedback.
And they just don’t; nobody measures the numbers. They do not measure the numbers of how much they’re spending per person active. And it blew my mind; I really struggled to believe it for so long. And I would tell people that this is what your current; how much you’re currently spending and this is results you’re getting. And then, this is what we’re spending and the results we’re getting.
And they would look at ours and go, “Well, that’s kind of expensive.” And I’d look at theirs and say, “No, that can’t be right. I’m sure it’s less than that.” And they’re like, “No, but it’s not, is it? Because here’s your budget and here’s the results,” and they just didn’t ever look at the numbers. And they went out, too, central government enforced it, too. So I don’t know. It’s a problem, but it’s just the way things work.”
Meryl Johnston:
I think that’s such an interesting lesson in thinking about your customers and what they’re measuring or what they’re valuing. Yeah, it’s such an interesting lesson. And also around metrics and what’s getting measured and what matters.
So we move on to your business now, which is around building the automated marketing funnels. Could you talk a little bit about what that business has been like? You mentioned that you’ve been running that for a couple of years now and scaling it up and it sounds like it’s an easier product or service to sell where these new customers and business owners are excited about the results you’re generating. So could you talk a little bit about what it’s been like recently in this newer business?
John Ainsworth:
Yeah. So the huge difference for us is that what we’ve got now is product market fare. What we’re offering is what people want. And it’s very deliberate; like in the previous business, it was all about like, “Okay, I feel like I should make this change in the world.” And what we’re doing now was all based around I asked lots of people, “What do you want help with?” And they would tell me, I’d say, “Okay, cool. We’ll do that, then.”
So it was more like lined up with what people are actually after. Like, with your business, like people want bookkeeping down in Xero already, you are not going out and trying to convince them that that’s a good idea, there’s already people who want that done, and then you’re saying, “Well, we can do that for you.” And they say, “Oh, great. Thank goodness because most people aren’t understanding what online business is. Cool. Okay.”
And for us, it’s like, I’m going to think, “People, we can help you to build a funnel for your online business and make more money from your existing visitors and leads.” And they’re like, “Great. That’s what I want. I want to make more money from my existing visitors and leads. I know that I should have a funnel, but I don’t really know what a funnel is and I don’t know what to do about it and I don’t know what’s a good idea to put in place.”
So I explain all of those things. I spend a lot of time giving presentations and writing blog posts and going on podcasts, explaining to people this is how a funnel works, this is what it is. It’s not that scary, it’s just a lot of work. And therefore, people are like, “Oh, great. That’s exactly what we need. Can you help us with that?”
So my problems now are much more around, “Okay, how do we keep up with them on? How do we scale faster? How do I build a team and get everything trained up with the right standards and make sure everything just runs really smoothly?” which is a completely different type of problem to what I have before.
So most of my work nowadays is around, “Okay, how do I build better SOPs, how do I design the standard operating procedures for the team to actually be following? How do I make sure the team is taking the right kind of training so that they’re really, really good? How do I hire the best people possible who can actually implement these funnels really well for people? How do I make that process for clients who are onboarding easier and smoother?” That’s the kind of stuff that I’m working on now.
It’s like if you go into McDonald’s and you say, “I’ll have a burger,” they’ll say, “Would you like fries with that?” They’re offering you something else that you might want to get at exactly that time. They didn't say, “Give us your… Click To TweetMeryl Johnston:
It is and it sounds like all the parallels between what we’re running or what we’re doing at Bean Ninjas. I guess because even though we’re solving different problems for our customers, but they’re both in that for productized service business model. And so, yeah, I think a lot of it is about how do you deliver and scale and deliver a great experience for your customers when you’ve got to be a team involved in the service delivery.
John Ainsworth:
Yeah. It’s not much of a coincidence, really, but it’s along the same lines because like you guys are a total role model for me. So I’m like, “Okay, cool. I can see how they’re doing it. Let’s keep watching. What’s Meryl up to? What’s Meryl after? Okay, cool. Copying that. Doing some more of that.” So you, and then Hurley from HubSnacks and Max Hardy from 10X Travel and Dan from WP Curve and all of those kinds; it’s like, “Okay, great. Just keep working what these guys are doing because they’re clearly on to something really smart.
Meryl Johnston:
Yeah, it’s funny you say that; there’s a little community with productized services, so there’s other people, people that you’ve mentioned and others that I follow in the industry. I actually did a podcast this morning with Dan Norris who works for WP Curve, and you mentioned, and now is running a brewery, which is so different from a productized service.
John Ainsworth:
I didn’t know that. [Crosstalk 00:13:36] Wow.
Meryl Johnston:
So it’s really interesting to see the way that different entrepreneurs develop and move into different things. But I’m definitely doubling down on productized services at the moment. And I do want to segue into talking about or understanding how you explain funnels. But a quick couple of productized service questions I can’t resist; it’s one of my favourite topics.
(Source: datadrivenmarketing.co)
John Ainsworth:
Go for it.
Meryl Johnston:
When you are starting to scale your team, who was the first person that you hired, what was their role? And who was the second person, and what was their role?
John Ainsworth:
I was incredibly lucky. So I had; I mean, if you go back, I hired a few different people before and things kind of happen quite worked out. And then I hired this guy, Josip, and hired him through a website called Job Rack; and it’s jobrack.eu. And it’s for hiring from Eastern Europe. And a couple of DCers had set this up and I’d heard about how great it was hiring from Eastern Europe because it’s obviously a very close; time zone wise, to the UK.
And the skills of people out there are really, really high; very high education, very good internet access, very hardworking, right kind of attitude. Hiring from The UK, it’s not so good. There’s few places rather where all people hire from, which are brave about Argentina, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Philippines; that kind of thing.
So Eastern Europe for us was perfect. So I hired this guy Josip, and he was just an assistant; he was just helping out with some stuff. And then, as I gradually started to have more problems come up and things that needed solving, I try giving him stuff and he would just like knockout the park.
And so, one day, we had this client and I just was like, “You just do the whole project. We’ll just see what happens.” And I, after the project was finished, got on the phone with them and I couldn’t get off the phone because they were raving so much about how amazing Josip was, what a great job he did. I was like, “Nobody has ever talked about the stuff that I’ve done for them.” I was like, “Whoa. Okay, a little bit humbling, but on the other side, this is amazing. I’m clearly on to something here.”
So he was like, and I just fell into that. It was like, I mean job right for a part of it because I was hiring from the right place and I hired someone really fine and I did make an effort to get someone who’s really good. But I didn’t know what I had when I first hired. So he was the first one. And then, he is now my operations manager. He runs all the delivery.
So then, I hired a second person, probably about a year ago, and she has also been fantastic. We kind of put together a whole hiring SOP in the system for how we’re going to choose who the right person is. And so, we’ve been refining that over time. And she worked out great and she was doing a lot of work around marketing for us, but then also, doing delivery for clients.
So then, we’ve just hired another two people in the last six weeks and they’re both involved in the delivery side of things. So they are leading on making sure that we’ve got great results for clients, they’re doing implementation of all of the building the funnels, setting up all the sales pages, the emails, retargeting; all of that kind of thing.
And so, we’ve now got like half the person working on, supporting me around marketing us, and then, the rest of the time, it’s all around just how to improve the quality of delivery. And so, the standards of delivery had been going up and up the less that I’m involved because all of them were better at the implementation than I am because they’re all really detail-oriented and knows my weakness, right?
I’m really good at the visionary side of things. I can have the idea of this where we should go, this is what we should do, and I can set something up, and I can build a great system, but I then get really bored in terms of running it on an ongoing basis. And these guys are all just like head down, do the work, follow the system, improve the system, make it better than what I did.
Meryl Johnston:
It’s funny, I hear that story a bit and I think it’s the testament to looking at what your skillset is as an entrepreneur. And often, it is that visionary skill set of thinking ahead, understanding the market, understanding problems, and I think we can be attracted to hire people like us. But actually hiring the process based on people that can help with or detail-oriented and follow processes are more improved; actually, it’s what helps to leverage the business and help create scale, so it was interesting that you mentioned that.
John Ainsworth:
Yeah. The book Rocket Fuel is quite impactful for me, just explaining about how there is a need for the visionary role and for this integrator role as well. And it really just made me feel a lot better because I was like, “Well, surely, everybody wants to do all the visionary stuff.” And it turns out, no, they really don’t.
And so that kind of freeze me up to be like, “Oh, well then, I’ll focus on that and I’ll get other people do the other side of things.” So yeah, it’s very powerful when you know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and you can get others who can do the things that you’re not good at.
Meryl Johnston:
I’ll link in the show notes to an episode Wayne and I, my business partner, Wayne did an episode about Rocket Fuel and the visionary and integrator framework. And he is visionary and I’m kind of in the middle between a visionary and integrator, so it’s quite an interesting conversation about how; what that means, but how we’ve used that framework and then understanding of each other to shape the way that we’re growing our team.
John Ainsworth:
Nice.
Meryl Johnston:
So now, let’s chat funnels. So if you were doing a presentation, you’ve got a room full of business owners, they’ve got a website going, they’ve got some traffic coming to their website, how would you introduce the concept of a funnel?
John Ainsworth:
Okay. So the first idea that’s really important to understand is once you’ve got product market fit, you’ve got traffic, you’ve got people like buying your product, but they’re just, not enough of them are converting. The kind of things that generally people tell me their frustrations are, “I feel like my customer lifetime value should be higher. Like, I feel people should be buying more; more of these people should be buying from me. Like, it’s so good, what we’ve got, but I’m not getting it across well enough.”
And people get quite frustrated about it and a lot of people know that they should be working on a funnel, but they don’t really know what a funnel is or how to do it, so they keep working on something that we’re all doing, like SEO or YouTube or what have you to drive traffic along to the site. And I totally get that; it makes sense total sense. It’s really difficult to take up a whole new skin and start doing something you’re not so good at.
But the power of a funnel is it’s about how do you support more of those people who are coming to your site to actually go and buy something from you and get a good result and be happy with it. And the general idea, the thing you see most often with the funnel is this; it’s like a diagram and it’s got, top one is wider, and the next one is a little bit less wide, and the next one is a little bit less wide, and it kind of narrows down, and it looks really neat and really organized.
And it’s true; it’s useful as a metaphor, but it’s not actually the way the things; like it’s not the way you actually build it, it’s not the way things actually work. So there’s a couple of really crucial ideas, there’s a couple of things that if you understand it and you implement it can make this astronomical difference in the kind of results you’re getting from your existing visitors and leads.
So the first idea is that you have to understand there’s a sequence that goes on in people’s brains. There’s like a psychological point in people’s brains when they are ready to buy something from you. And if you aren’t aware that this is happening, you will just miss that opportunity. You will completely miss it.
So the first one and the easiest one for everybody to fix is if you’ve got a website with traffic, and you got a lead magnet, you got something free you’re giving away, and people are signing up for it. Try going and signing up and seeing what happens on the confirmation page; what is the next step that happens? For 99% of people, the next thing they have available there is it says, “Thank you.” And either it will say, “Here’s the download,” or “We’re going to email the download to you,” whatever that is, if it’s an e-book or a video course, what have you.
And this is, it gives me nightmares. It’s so painful to see because this is the moment, this is the critical moment in people’s journey when they’re getting stuff from you. So they’ve gone on to the internet, they’ve got a problem, they want to get that problem solved. They’ve searched in Google, they have seen your website come up there, likely looked at that you’ve appeared out from Google and they likely looked at from search results. They’ve clicked on it, they go through to your site, they like the look of your site, they’re feeling good about it, they haven’t left, they haven’t bounced off again.
They’ve seen that you’ve got something available for free. They trust you enough to give you their email address and they sign up. They have this problem so clear in their head, so precisely figured out that a whole bunch of those people are ready to buy right now. And instead of giving the opportunity to buy something, what most people do is say, “Thank you,” and just leave and then email them later.
I was like, “No. You just miss this perfect moment.” About 5% of people will buy at that point if you make them the right offer. So understanding those kinds of points in the process and making something available for someone to buy something right then when they’re ready when they’ve thought it through and they’ve got the problem in their head.
So if somebody buys at that point, you can offer something quite cheap. Like I do, most of the work we do is with info product businesses; so people selling e-books, courses, that kind of thing. And so, if you have a business to consumer offering, you can have something at that point, which is, let’s say $7 or $9 or $19; something around that kind of mark, something so cheap that it’s really easy for someone to think, “Oh, yeah, I could get that. That’s not a big deal.”
And then, they’ve bought, they get it, and they’ve got something really good, and they’re used to buying from you now. And now, you’ve got another confirmation page that comes up. Well, the opportunity now is to offer them something else. And if you look at really well-run info product businesses, this is exactly what they do.
And it’s not like some idea I came up with. This is like what everybody who is making really good money from info product is doing, is having something cheap available to get in their door and having an upsell of some other things. And this has existed in business for thousands of years as a basic idea, it’s just applying the same thing to the internet.
It’s like if you go into McDonald’s and you say, “I’ll have a burger,” they’ll say, “Would you like fries with that?” They’re offering you something else that you might want to get at exactly the ton. They didn’t say, “Give us your email address and I’ll email you about fries later on.” It’s like, this point is so important. That is the point when somebody is in the process of buying, they’re thinking about buying, you offer them something else, a percentage in them will buy something else.
So that’s one of the crucial ideas to understand, and if you can understand that and offer the right things at the right time, it can dramatically increase your sales. I helped somebody a little while ago increase their revenue for their whole business 25% by just implementing that one thing.
But the power of a funnel is it’s about how do you support more of those people who are coming to your site to actually go and buy something from you and get a good result and be happy with it.
Meryl Johnston:
So if you were starting to work, so a potential client has approached you, they’ve got a bit of an understanding of what a funnel is. They were at that presentation that you were just doing, and they’ve decided, “Yup, John. This sounds amazing. I need this. I’m wasting on a lot of traffic.” They said, “Yes, I’m doing that with my thank you page. All it’s got is the thank you, it’s going nowhere.” What would that look like? So what would the next steps be in starting to map out a funnel or to build it? Where would you go next?
John Ainsworth:
There’s a three-step process we go through with everybody. And the first step is to map out your current funnel. And most people have never done this. And the kind of comments I get from people are things like, “Oh, there’s probably not all that much to it,” and “Oh, it’s not that great, I’m afraid.” And they kind of get embarrassed laughs about it.
And I think that that feeling of slight awkwardness stops people from doing this. And that’s part of my job is going to go through that process with people and start watching that mapped out. But most people have never mapped out what their funnel is at the moment, what pages are there, what’s the next step that somebody sees, what emails do they send, etc. what sales pages they got?
So just drawing all that out, there’s an amazing tool with Funnelytics. It’s funnel, and then y-t-i-c-s. And they have a free mapping tool built-in; that’s like their free offer to get you a chance to try out their whole main tool. And so, you can go in then and you can map out where I’ve got this page, and then I’ve got this email, and then I’ve got this other page people get sent to and so on. And just on its own, doing that, will probably allow you to spark some spaces, some places where you go, “Oh, why haven’t I got anything here or why does that work like that?” So that’s step one.
Step two is to map out your ideal funnel. So how do you know what the ideal funnel looks like? Well, I’ve got seven different types of funnels that work for different kinds of online businesses; info products, for people running an agency, for whatever it is. So I’ll give you details at the end of like how you can get hold of the map of the ideal funnel for you.
But we’ve got some of that stuff up on our website, and some of it, I’ll give you details of exactly what page to go to. So that’s step two, is you map out what is your ideal funnel looks like. You start with one of these standard funnel maps that looks like this is the kind of funnels working for businesses like yours. And then you tweak it to kind of match what have you got in place already and what’s going to work.
And then, step three is crucial, is to then figure out how much money it might make you. And the crucial idea there is you look at, “Well, what is the ideal scale? What’s benchmark data for any of these types of funnels? What percentage of people will convert at this step and how much might they spend and what will convert at this step and how much might they spend?”
That one really freaks people out sometimes because it probably is going to involve a spreadsheet. And as you know, not everybody loves spreadsheets as much as; I’m going to guess here, Meryl, but I bet you love a spreadsheet?
Meryl Johnston:
Absolutely. I work out into that, but I definitely have some spreadsheet stories. Maybe we could share them at DCBKK.
John Ainsworth:
That’s the basic way to do that. And again, I’ve got like resources I can give people if they want them for like example spreadsheets for putting that kind of thing together. But yeah, you have to figure out how much money it might make you. And it’s not like a guarantee. It’s not like you figured that out and you go, “Right. That’s how much I’m going to make.” But it gives you an idea of if this is going to be worth it.
And the thing that will come up there is, “Well, how many products have you got? Have you got offers available to put in for those upsells? Have you got offers available that you can make if they don’t buy the first thing from you so they can go and buy something else? What percentage of people tend to buy these things when they get to your sales page?” That kind of information and then looking at benchmark data from others will tell you how much you might make from it.
And the typical amount that implementing one of these funnels can make you if you do everything right is going to be doubling the revenue that you’re getting from your existing visitors and leads. Now, that’s a bunch of work for that in place, but that’s the kinds of numbers that you’re looking at is doubling what you’re currently getting.
Meryl Johnston:
And is there a certain amount of traffic you need to; like a minimum level of traffic that you need to have in order to get those kind of results?
John Ainsworth:
Well, no. But there’s a certain level you need to be at for that, for doubling it to be worthwhile; for considering the amount of work it’s going to take putting into everything. So I helped somebody once to double her revenue. So then, at that point, you might be better off focusing on like, “How do I just keep improving the product to the right traffic,” until you get to the stage where you’ve got enough traffic.
Like, we tend to only work with people who’ve got like, 10/20,000 visitors a month to their website already because with info products, you need quite high traffic for it and there’s lots of people at that stage. But there’s lots of people who aren’t there yet and they shouldn’t be hiring us. They maybe should be building a funnel, but it’s probably going to take a while before they can make really good money from that improvement.
Meryl Johnston:
That makes sense. So originally started by mapping out the original funnel. And then, from there, looked at what would the ideal funnel look like. And so, is the next step then just to go and implement it or you’ve looked at how much potential money you could take or you should make by implementing these different tweaks and changes and upsells? And so, the next step for me I assume is to then go and just get it done and implement it?
John Ainsworth:
Yeah. And if you want to get really smart with it, what you can do is as you’re planning out how much money it might make you, you can look at which of these bits that I could implement is going to make me the most? And start with that one. And I nearly always suggest with people to start with that tripwire, after the tripwire offer, after the lead magnet because it’s the easiest.
I’ve seen people set that up within a day and instantly increase their revenue. And that’s just like, “Okay, great. I’ve got one. I’ve got this thing in place already. I’ve already got something that I could have as a tripwire. I’ve got a sales page I’ve already written. I’ve just got to tweak it slightly and put that at the confirmation page and then offer that as a tripwire. And then I can straight away be getting something from it.”
And that gives people a bit of confidence. Like, “Oh, this is working.” And the amount of extra revenue just from that tripwire is not huge because you’re only selling something for a small amount of money. But the principle is I’ve implemented something and I’ve got a return back from it. So you’re looking at what’s the things that are easiest to implement and what’s the things that are going to make you the most money and try to balance those two so that you can get some successes and get moving.
Meryl Johnston:
And what are your thoughts on where a webinar might fit into a funnel?
John Ainsworth:
So a webinar is not the easiest thing to put together, but the results you can get are dramatic. They’re absolutely fantastic. So the reason that webinars work so well is because you have someone’s attention for an hour. If someone comes on a webinar and you keep them involved, you keep them interested in the end, they are paying attention to what you’ve got to say for an hour. And then that is dramatic.
The only thing that probably is more effective is then giving a presentation like a conference or something where somebody is, you’re in person, they can see you as well. But the difficult thing with it is how do you actually get together a really good webinar presentation in the first place. That’s the bit where I see people get stuck.
The basic gist, I’ll give you the outline, and this is all stolen from Russell Brunson because he has this system called The Perfect Webinar and it’s fantastic. And then, there are so many DCers who’ve implemented it and then skyrocketed the results that they get from it.
But the basic idea of a webinar is that you are not pitching someone, you are not trying to sell them. You are trying to convince them of one idea and only one idea that is completely true, and if they believe it, the obvious next step is to buy your product. One of the difficult bits at the beginning is figuring out what is that one thing? What is it that if they believe, then the next obvious step is for them to go and buy your product?
So for example, I did some work for a guy who was doing a work in property. And he wanted to run a webinar to his list and he wanted them to sign up for this new service that he had. And the service was going to help people who didn’t have that much money or experience to be able to go and invest in property to buy their first property, do it up and then sell it on.
And so, the things that they were missing were knowing how to find the right people to actually be able to implement all of these differences do up of property to find the right builders who are trustworthy, to have enough money available at the beginning in order to be able to buy the initial property and just kind of expertise around the whole process.
So we built a webinar that was teaching people exactly how to do all of those things. The process that worked in order to be able to get the money, to find the right people, and then to do the property and then sell it. So we taught people exactly what that process was.
Now, implementing it is still obviously difficult, and here’s the service that made it easy. So at the end of that, they knew exactly how to do it, and so the obvious next step was then to go and hire; pay for his service where they could actually do it. So you’re trying to find what is it that if you can teach people about it will get them to that next stage?
When you’re selling info products, what you are absolutely 100% not doing is just teaching something from out of your course. That is what most people do and it’s a terrible idea. But you’ve got to try and figure out what is it that somebody if they knew, they would go to that next stage and they would buy what you have available.
So for example with my previous business, I wanted to convince people that Facebook ads were the most cost-effective way to get people into physical activity from hard to reach groups, to disabled people or cancer patients, what have you. And it was totally true and nobody knew and no one believed it.
So I would spend an hour giving people all the evidence and showing them that that was true. So at the end of it, they were like, “Oh, I guess that’s true.” And then, I presented them with the choice to deliver the work for them. And we used that webinar to make $100,000 in sales by setting up a sales course at the end of that webinars.
Meryl Johnston:
Yeah. That makes sense. I have heard of that webinar strategy before, but I think you’ve explained it really well with that one thing, and definitely not giving away part of the course. And listeners of the Bean Ninjas Podcast will know that we’ve developed the Financial Literacy Course. And so, we’ve been experimenting with different sales techniques and learning about how to sell it. And we do have a webinar as part of that sales process.
(Source: pexels.com)
John Ainsworth:
Nice.
Meryl Johnston:
And it was very tempting to give away some of the courses. So…
John Ainsworth:
And the reason that doesn’t work, it seems so obvious, right? If you teach some of it, people see how good it is, and then they’ll go to the next stage. What happens in people’s brains if you teach some of it is they go, “That was really helpful. Thank you very much. I better go and implement that now,” and not buy the rest of your course because they haven’t even had time to implement the first thing.
So it doesn’t actually line up with the next obvious thing, being, making the sale. And that you can give or you can have some part of your course that you give people at a cheaper price. That’s exactly what a tripwire funnel is, that’s exactly how that style of funnel works. It just happens not to work with the way that people’s brains work for a webinar funnel.
There is huge value in teaching people why something works, and what works, and changing their beliefs about the world, and showing them this thing is important and this is the basic overall idea. So then they go, “Oh, I get it,” and that then leads them to think, “Great. Now I need to know how to do it,” and that’s what the course is, how to do it.
Meryl Johnston:
Yes. Very interesting. Well, John, thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we wrap up, did you have any parting words around funnels or webinars? That’s one question. And then, the second is just asking where is the best place for the audience to get in touch with you. And you mentioned a couple of links that you wanted to mention.
John Ainsworth:
Yeah, of course. So in terms of parting words, the things that I would say is guys, if you are running an online business and you haven’t put time into your funnel, you can crush it with this stuff. So many people, your competitors are not doing this work. Most people are not doing it to actually implement a really good funnel.
If you implement it, it can make an astronomical difference for you. Really worth putting in the work, whether it’s hiring someone to build it for you, going and learning more from digital marketers’ courses, signing up for this stuff from us. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, you can absolutely crush it with this stuff. It makes this really huge difference in your business.
And then, in terms of where people can get in touch, people can email me if they want to at [email protected]. The best thing for most people is going to be going to datadrivenmarketing.co/miniaudit and what we do is we help people who have an online business to identify what is the ideal type of funnel for them. I mentioned a couple today, that webinars and tripwire funnels.
There are seven really good funnels that apply across most different businesses, whether it’s FBA or agency or info product or what have you. There’s different types of funnels that work for each person. So if you go to datadrivenmarketing.co/miniaudit, then we will do a totally free mini audit for you.
Meryl Johnston:
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that, John, and really great chatting with you. It’s always fun talking about productized services and really enjoyed the chat about funnels, too.
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