Well, I’m finally getting back into the groove of things after the arrival of our new baby. It’s been a wild ride.
I want to share a simple but majorly helpful tool with you guys that I’ve been using. It’s basically a marketing journal, and it has become the most important document in my business.
The reason this document came to be was simple: we had too much data and we didn’t have a way to interpret any of it. When you are constantly changing up your marketing strategy -whether it be new landing pages or new ad sets or whatever – you have a ton of data points regarding what worked, what didn’t work, what time of year certain promos convert well, etc. We had ALL this data, but we didn’t have one localized place to point to and say “okay this is the move we should make based on this info”.
So, we came up with a genius plan: create a google doc. No really, that’s it. We just have a running google doc with every marketing change we make, our metrics at the time of the change, why we are making the change, and then the results of that change. This allows us to go back to one point in time and see the exact impact of any given change we made. It has been insanely valuable because it keeps us from just guessing, and instead allows us to made educated decisions based on what we have already seen.
If you aren’t tracking your marketing strategy, I can’t stress this enough: START NOW. It is such a simple thing to implement and it makes a huge difference. Now is a perfect time to start because every business has different strategies for the holidays. If you can start tracking now, you can see what works and what doesn’t for your specific holiday strategies and you’ll be more informed going into this season next year.
Keep an eye out for Black Friday information from us soon. If you are a business owner, you NEED to have a Black Friday strategy. I’ll have more info on our strategy, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and our plan for this year. Stay tuned for that.
As I was kind of resetting everything, I’m looking at some of these numbers and they’re just not adding up to me. Something’s not adding up. And so, I start diving into everything and start uncovering what ends up being the solution.
Hey, what’s going on, everybody. Happy Monday. It is November 18th. It’s kind of hard to believe it’s already almost Thanksgiving. It’s nuts how time flies. I don’t know if it flies faster when you have kids or it just always flies no matter what, but either way.
I was looking at something the other day. I’m slowly starting to get back into the grind a little bit, going into the office here in a little bit. For those of you that didn’t know, we had a baby a couple of weeks ago, so it’s been pretty nuts. But one of the things that I want to talk to you guys about today is just a little tip that has really, really helped me and our marketing team here at SamCart out over the past couple months, and that is keeping effectively a marketing diary or a marketing journal.
I’ve always kind of struggled with this. I’m guessing a lot of you do too, where you make a ton of changes, whether you’re changing ad campaigns, or landing pages, or upsell flows, or you’re testing prices, or email marketing campaigns, whatever you’re doing on the marketing side of things with promotions, and you run promotions all the time, and then all of a sudden you’ve been doing it for two, three, four, five, 10 years. And there’s a ton of data that if you had on all of your old past campaigns that would really, really help you out.
If you guys are like us, you tend to jump from solution to solution. I know over the years we’ve used probably every email marketing platform on the planet. We’ve used a bunch of different website builders, and so all of a sudden you get all this data that is kind of spread out between tools that you might not even have access to anymore, so how are you supposed to know? For example, it’s going to be Black Friday next week, and if you are going to run a promotion, chances are maybe you’ve run promotions in the past on Black Friday and wouldn’t it be nice to go back and get that data and find out what worked and what didn’t, so you didn’t have to make those decisions or those mistakes year, after year, after year.
Kind of where this started was we were making changes to our Facebook ad campaign. Like I said, we had hired a couple of agencies to help us with our ads. We hired somebody back in February, March, tried them a couple months. That ended up not working out, then we tried somebody else in June, July, August, September. That didn’t work out. And so I’m back to running our ads for the time being. So as I was kind of resetting everything, I’m looking at some of these numbers and they’re just not adding up to me. Something’s not adding up. I start diving into everything and start uncovering what ends up being solution. One of the things I found out was that we had been running for this one campaign that we run ads to, which is a webinar campaign, that the webinar that we were running traffic to for the last couple of months was actually not the highest converting version of that webinar that we had.
We’ve gone through six different versions of this webinar, we had tweaked it and improved it every single time, and every single time it looked like that webinar was the highest converting one. What I ended up finding out when I dove into the data was that it appeared to be the highest converting webinar but it really wasn’t. How can you make that mistake? Well, the reason’s pretty simple. We had added a payment plan offer to this webinar. We send people to this payment plan with retargeting ads on Facebook, with email, with ManyChat, with text message follow up. We were getting really good at that followup, so we were selling a lot more units of this webinar offer because we were getting really good at selling the payment plan on the back end. Well, those payment plans are not worth as much to us as a full pay, pay in full customer, and so we were artificially inflating our webinar conversion numbers without knowing it.
I was shocked when I found that out, but not totally surprised. One of the things we started doing in late August was keeping effectively a marketing diary or a marketing journal. The way it works is I just have a simple Google doc. It’s just a running doc that I add today’s date to the top, and any changes that I make, I go outline them in this Google doc. For example, I go back to September 3rd, 2019, and I wrote a quick update. I uploaded the new video to our Facebook webinar landing page and I pasted the link here so I can go back and see it. The Austin video was uploaded last week. This Austin video was a version of one of our ads that we recorded while we were down in Austin with our other half of our team. I said it didn’t change the opt-in conversion rate much, so I’m trying this one now. Then I pasted in a screenshot of our last 30 days of show up rate, cost per click, webinar opt-in rate, cost per lead, all from Facebook’s dashboard.
Now I’ve snapshot at that point in time so I can go back and see, okay, if our opt-in rate all of a sudden goes down, our cost per lead goes down or goes up, what changes have I made in the last month? When did this start to happen? And if I can go back and see, okay, that’s the day we added this new headline on this landing page, or that’s the day we added this video, or this is the day that we fixed the mobile version of that page, or this is the day we added a video to our checkout page. I mean, we have seen probably more benefits from this one move than a lot of moves over the last year that we’ve made, and it’s just by keeping basically this diary, this journal.
I tried for years to find a piece of software that would help me do this that would kind of keep track of everything, but in the end, like always, simple wins, and we just have this simple Google doc that now when I look back, it’s 25 pages long, it’s got four or five months of data that I wouldn’t give up for anything. This is probably one of the most valuable documents in my business now. I make notes on when I added a tracking pixel for a one of our landing pages. I have a note here from when I removed certain ad sets from our campaign cause they weren’t working. Right here, it says our new attendee followup is in place of via email. Here, I switched back to our original webinar thank you page video. Here, I changed the headline on our homepage. I’m just documenting this so that I can go back and find out what’s working and what isn’t.
Again, we’re going to be using this document to make a lot of decisions for our next promo that’s coming up, which is on Black Friday. You guys most likely are probably going to run a Black Friday promotion. If you’re not going to, if you have an audience to make a special offer to, you should. If you’re not sure on how to pull off a good Black Friday promo, check out this SamCart Facebook page this Wednesday. It’s going to be November 20th at 2:00 PM Eastern. Me and Scott are going to go live and we’re going to cover our top five or 10 tips for pulling off a really, really profitable, really well-put-together Black Friday promo.
If you do this right, it can be the single biggest cash flow day, the single biggest sales day in your entire year. We’ll show you based on our last 10 Black Friday sales, what has worked and what hasn’t, plus some of the details that we have gotten to see from all the tens of thousands of people using SamCart and pulling off their own Black Friday sales. We now can see what works and what doesn’t more than almost anybody. So check out the Facebook page on Wednesday afternoon, the 20th of November at 2:00 PM, and we’ll show you guys how to pull off that promo.
But either way, create a Google doc right now, call it your marketing diary or marketing journal, whatever you want to call it, and just put today’s date in and any changes you make to any campaign, anything that you’re doing on the marketing or sales side, start to take notes, and within a couple of weeks you’ll be very glad that you did.
If you’re looking for an easy way to launch your business online and start making sales or as 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 1pagefunnel.com.
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