Hey guys. Sorry it’s been awhile- we had an INSANE October over at SamCart. Add that to the fact that my wife is due with our third baby on Nov 1, and you can imagine how crazy things have been for me.
But I wanted to share some information with you about a recent ad campaign that totally tanked. The good news is we learned a lot from it, and I want you guys to learn from it too.
The first thing I should mention is that one of the most important things about advertising is offering your potential customers PROOF. Proof can look like a lot of different things: awards, customer reviews, publications about your product, etc. But the important thing to know is that proof will ALWAYS help your conversion. It never hurts to give proof because it helps validate what you are claiming.
With that said, we thought it would be a great idea to create a FB ad campaign that consisted entirely of proof. The video ended up being just a compilation of a bunch of SamCart customers sharing their experience and how SamCart has helped their business.
First, we thought we had struck gold. We were getting leads at the cheapest we had EVER seen them. Cheap leads are important- you want people clicking on your ads fast so you don’t have to pay as much. So we were excited to see high click numbers and low costs.
The problem was, NONE of those leads were converting to actual customers. They were clicking on the call to action (which was to join our webinar) but they weren’t actually following through. So we had to ask ourselves why. And we think we figured it out.
Our most successful ad campaigns are ones that give CONTEXT. Usually at the beginning of the ad, I give a quick explanation of who I am, what SamCart is, and what it can do for the potential customer. Those ads generate a lot of leads that actually end up converting. But they cost a lot more than the leads we were getting from the proof ads.
So, the plan is to combine them. Continue to give proof- and a lot of it- but throw in context either at the middle or the end of the video. That way, the people who end up clicking know WHAT they are clicking on instead of just clicking out of curiosity.
We think it’ll work. But we will keep you updated. For now, I’m going to go prep for this new baby. By the time you’re reading this, I may be elbows deep in diapers.
Thanks guys and I’ll be back soon.
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I have never seen proof hurt conversions of anything. If you add more proof to your webinar, if you have more proof to a sales page, more proof to an email, they will always convert better.BrianHey everybody, what’s going on? It is 11:54 PM on Halloween night. I have some big news, I don’t know if any of you follow me on Facebook, but my wife and I are expecting baby number three tomorrow, actually. Due date is November 1st. We thought she’d come early, but looks like she might come right on her due date. So I figured I’d get, there’s a podcast I’ve been meaning to record for you guys, so I figured I’d get it out now before I’m stuck in hospital for two days and then changing diapers for whoever knows how long. It’s going to be awhile.BrianBut anyway, I’ve been doing a ton. I took over our Facebook ad account. We tried an agency a little while ago for the third time. I’ll tell that whole story in another episode, but right now that agency is not running our ads. So I took all of our ads back over, running them in-house and kind of resetting a bunch of things, checking a bunch of numbers, seeing how things have worked in the last couple months. Going all the way back to a year ago and hit the refresh button on a bunch of stuff. Refreshed a bunch of our ads.BrianSo I have a bunch of new data that was very, very interesting. As you guys have probably seen, we’ve upped our video game quite a bit. I have a studio set up in my home office and a studio set up at our office around the corner. So we’ve been testing having really, really high quality video in our ads, on our landing pages, in our webinar, on our sales pages. And it’s been really, really converting well across the board. In the end, what I’m seeing is it’s not just a hard and fast rule that if you have great looking video, your conversions go up. Obviously if you’re making sales, you know what I’m about to say is true. If you’re not, you will learn what I’m about to say is true as you progress in your marketing and sales career.BrianThat it doesn’t matter how good your video looks, how bad it looks, it doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters unless you have a good marketing pitch. If you’re good at writing persuasive marketing copy. if you’re good at persuading people to buy. If you say the right things. It just doesn’t matter. So if we have an ad that the copy is crap and it’s not enticing, it doesn’t get someone’s attention, it doesn’t give them a good reason to click or go sign up or buy the product, or whatever the goal of the copy is, the incredibly high end, high quality video will not matter.BrianBut that’s besides the point. Today’s episode is about proof. I can’t stress how important proof is. And proof can be a number of things. It’s usually, when people say proof, usually think testimonials. Having somebody vouch for you, vouch for your product, say that this guy, this girl knows what she’s talking about. This product is fantastic. It’s helped me get X, Y, Z result. Proof can also be the fact that you’ve spoken on stages, or that you have a New York times bestselling book, or that you are endorsed by Facebook or YouTube, or that you’re a HubSpot certified consultant. Third party proof. Proof can take a number of forms. You can back up a claim that you make with an article in the newspaper that talks about that, something similar that vouches for what you’re saying or what you’re claiming, even though it’s not somebody backing you up personally.BrianTwo things. Proof is actually, I have never seen proof hurt conversions of anything. If you add more proof to your webinar, if you had more proof to a sales page, more proof to an email, they will always convert better, usually. There are some exceptions to the rule, but for most part, you don’t have to worry about the exceptions. Proof will increase your conversion. But here’s one crazy thing that we tried. We tried on Facebook a quick 60 second all proof video. When I say all proof, I mean the entire video was quick clips of our customers on video vouching for SamCart, saying SamCart helped me increase my sales, SamCart helped me do this. SamCart helped me do that. Brian taught me how to do this. Brian taught me how to do that. We were driving people to one of our webinars where we teach people how SamCart works, we give them a special offer, and that webinar converts extremely well. It’s converted extremely well for a long time.BrianWe were looking for new ads to get people on this webinar. There’s all kinds of ads you can run, especially on Facebook, which is where we do 60, 70% of our ad spend. You can have carousel ads, you can have image ads, you can have video ads that are square, that are 16 by nine that are short, long, medium. There’s all different kinds of creative you can put out there. So we tested a 60 second video of just quick clips, one after another after another after another of our customers vouching for us. That was it. That was the entire video. And then the text of the video had a call to action and said, “Hey, if you want to learn how to do X, Y, Z, click here. Go jump on this a training session and come learn about SamCart.”BrianTwo crazy things. At first I thought this was the best ad we’d ever made. We were getting leads for half the price that we normally get. We’re getting leads down for four or five bucks to a webinar, which is extremely, extremely cheap in the world that we play in, in our market. In other markets it might be expensive, it might be cheap. But in our market, that’s extremely cheap. Here’s the problem. None of those people bought. This is the problem with, that a lot of marketers will make. You look at one stat that hints at the fact that this could be a very, very good promotion, a good campaign, a good ad, a good whatever, but you forget that in the end, the only thing you really should care about is does that ad actually ROI? Does it actually generate more revenue on the back end? Does it actually generate more revenue for the customer, for the life of the customer? Some people just look at the day one ROI, but even that’s a mistake.BrianLook, in the end, every business is a little bit different. Your business might not need to look at the ROI of an ad campaign. There’s a lot of companies that that don’t, like Apple when they’re releasing a new iPhone and they run commercials, they’re not looking at ROI of that ad. They’re not looking for somebody to see that ad on TV, be watching the Superbowl, see an ad about the iPhone and then pull out their Droid and go to apple.com and buy an iPhone. They can’t. You can’t even really track that on TV unless you’re giving out special codes, which hardly anyone does. My point is, for us in this scenario, we ran this quick testimonial ad that was all about proof. It made us look extremely credible, but no one was buying. I started to think, why? Why is that ad converting into sales at a much lower clip than any of our other ads?BrianI looked at our other ads, and the ones that convert the best are videos that are anywhere from 15 seconds all the way up to three and a half minutes. We’ve had videos at all lengths convert really, really well. But the big difference between those videos and the videos of our customers saying this tool helped me, this tool helped me, this guy helped me, is they don’t have any context. For this proof ad, nobody knows what these people are talking about. No one knows who SamCart is. No one knows who I am. No one even knows what this webinar or what this sales pitch they’re about to see on the next page is about. They’re just hearing a bunch of people say, I use this thing to build my business online. We could be bringing in people that don’t need a new sales platform. We could be bringing people that aren’t selling online at all right now and they’re just not a good fit. So there’s no context.BrianI think, this is my gut, and we’re going to do a lot more research and a lot more split testing of these ads and I’ll report back to you guys, but the ads that are outperforming the video of just our customer saying this is great, this is great, this is great, those ads sound more like this; “Hey guys, it’s Brian from SamCart and if you click on this ad on the next page, I’m going to you how you can launch your business using this simple piece of software that helps you do A, B, C, D, and E.” And I go into detail and I kind of explain how it works and then I might show a couple of testimonials. But I’m explaining to them what this whole offer is about, what SamCart is about and how it can increase your business. And if you’re interested in that, then you should click. It’s a little less curiosity than the testimonial video that’s 60 seconds of eight or ten people saying how great this solution is. It doesn’t even tell you what the solution really is. It just says how great it is.BrianSo again, just kind of a crazy finding for me, something I did not expect to see that I figured I’d share with you guys. I’m going to keep testing this. I’m going to test putting maybe 15 seconds of context at the end of the video with all testimonials at the beginning, or vice versa. Because the one thing I do know, this type of video, this 60 seconds of quick, hard hitting different faces showing up on the screen, people vouching for me, what I do know is it’s getting insanely cheap traffic. And that’s step number one. Step number one is it’s getting cheap traffic because something about the video is catching people’s attention. Maybe it’s the quick cuts. Maybe it’s that you see one face for two seconds, one face for three seconds, another face for four seconds, and it’s just catching their eye. That is got to be what’s happening, because the click through rate is insanely high, which, if you’ve run Facebook ads, click through rate determines how cheap your traffic is.BrianIf a lot of people are getting caught by your ad and it’s getting their attention, Facebook’s going to charge you less money. That’s step number one is get cheap traffic. Get the cheapest traffic you can get, but not all traffic is created equal, because I just proved to you that this ad is getting very cheap traffic, but it’s not getting the right people. It’s getting people that are just curious to find out what all these people in this ad are talking about. And when they hit the page, maybe they aren’t interested in SamCart. Maybe they are completely happy with using Shopify, or whatever else they’re using, and they’re not someone I’m going to be able to convince to switch over. What I’m going to try to do is add some context. Add a little bit of context maybe to the middle or the end of that video so that it still catches their attention, but then it tells them what this is about so that only the interested people click.BrianAnyway, I know I’ve always said proof, adding proof to an email campaign, a webinar, a sales page, any marketing campaign really will usually increase conversion, and in almost every case does, except in this case when the entire marketing message is proof. That got us very, very cheap leads, it got a lot of people into this campaign, but the conversion rate of turning those people into customers was a lot lower than it normally is. So crazy finding, figured you guys would want to know. You guys test it out, let me know if you have any different results there and I’ll keep reporting back and letting you know how all our new ads are doing.BrianBut anyway, if you guys, I can’t remember the last time I posted, I think it was before we released the new drag and drop editor inside of SamCart. If you guys are SamCart customers, you’ve got to go in and check this thing out. You should recreate all of your checkout pages. You should recreate all of your sales pages on SamCart with our new traffic report. Now, if you’re using SamCart to build your sales page, you can actually know where your sales are coming from, which is insanely valuable, especially if you’re getting traffic from more than one place. Ton of other updates that I’ll do another post about, and a bunch of new updates coming. If you guys saw our big release in October, just wait until January, February timeframe. 2020’s going to be a big year and you guys are going to get more tools than you’re going to know what to do with for growing your business.BrianSo stay tuned. We’ll have a lot more coming. I need to go get some sleep. This’ll probably be the last night that I’ll get a full night’s rest because I’m pretty sure this baby is coming in the morning. We’ll see what happens. Anyway, hope you guys are doing good, and I’ll talk to you all soon.BrianIf you’re looking for an easy way to launch your business online and start making sales, or a simple way to get fast cash out of your already established business, then check out how I’m making $1,729 per day with a simple one page website. I break it all down over at 1pagefunnel.com. That’s the number one, pagefunnel.com. [/expand]
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