The Hack = Knowledge | The Knowledge Comes From Data

Are You Ready For Real Business Growth - Based on Real Data?

Have you fallen for any of these big business growth myths?

Myth #1: All you need is …

Myth #2: A Membership site is the Answer

Myth #3: A mastermind group is the answer 

Myth #4: Your coach will solve everything

Myth #5: A VA can do everything

Here’s the good news and the bad news.  And it’s all simpler than you’ve ever imagined.

Jay Abraham Says: There Are Only Three Ways To Grow A Business

  • increase the number of clients
  • increase the transaction amount per client - ie. offer higher ticket items OR
  • increase the frequency that your clients buy from you.

Want to know how you can do all three by automating both lead generation and increased purchasing via a machine that links your social media, content marketing, email marketing and analytics?

Once you start implementing what the latest AI and automation technologies are now offering, you are effectively building yourself a growth machine that will keep working for you (whether you are working or not).  Here's how.

Using AI To Enroll More Clients & Gain Visibility

  1. Your 24/7 Assistant (Automation)

Imagine having an assistant that served your clients 24/7.  Once enrolled, the assistant could help clients get onboarded, sending forms, setting up meetings etc.  Your assistant would also know when it was time for clients to buy more product, or move on to your next program.  Because your customer’s every need is taken care of, they are satisfied and stay with you a long time. Not only does this assistant work for free (once trained), this assistant makes you money because your customer is satisfied, happy, buying more, and telling their friends. The good news is that you probably already have this assistant in your modern autoresponder.  However, you do need to know what to automate and how, otherwise you just end up doing the wrong things faster!

  1. A Crystal Ball (Audience Segmentation)

What if, in addition to having a magical assistant, you could read the mind of your customers.  Your emails would always arrive just when they are thinking of buying. The email would be about exactly the product they were considering.  This is the magic of segmentation. Segmentation is all about delivering exactly the right information > to the right people > at the right time (ie. when they are looking for that information). When you do that, the more likely you are to move them along the path towards a sale. More sales = growth.

        3) A Sticky Spider Web  (Getting Your Social Media to Work with Your Email)

You know that you are doing your online marketing right when people say “Meredith - I see you *everywhere*.  It takes over 11 exposures for your client to be aware of your message. Just sending one email is not enough. By using AI correctly, you can set up an “awareness” net.  Your client will connect with you on LinkedIn. Then they will get a message from you via email. Later in the day, they’ll see the video ad you posted on Facebook. Because they see you so many times, they’ll trust you more.   Major corporations pay hundreds of thousands for this type of placement… the good news is that you can set it up inexpensively -- using your autoresponder.

      4) A Science Lab (Tracking and Metrics)

Major brands spend a huge portion of their budget on tracking and metrics.  Often tiny tweaks taken over time can double or even triple profits. I’ve worked on million dollar launches where every element of the launch is tested. Even if the first iteration doesn’t perform well, consistent testing leads to consistent profits. Adding metrics to your business processes can be one of the most effective actions you can take to make more money in your business. The good news is that while tracking used to be difficult and tedious, modern technology (and our recommended autoresponder) make the whole process a lot easier.

      5)  A Sales (Chat) Bot

No discussion of AI is complete without talking about chat bots.   As a new technology, chat bots have been very popular with marketers -- mostly as a way to use with Facebook Messenger as a type of (very effective) autoresponder.

A bot is nothing more than a computer program that automates certain tasks, usually by chatting with a user through an interface that mimics a conversation.  Chat bots can give your customers information and help them make choices. Since the technology is “new”, they can also add some fun to your marketing.

Segmenting Your Audience To Increase Sales

Customers like to feel that you are paying attention to them and it helps build that ‘like and trust’ with the customer.
 
Nothing is more annoying to a customer than having bought a product, being continually targeted by emails and Facebook ads that are pitching them for the very same product. It makes them feel like no-one is paying attention to what they are doing. 

Some of the data that can be used for segmenting includes (but isn’t limited to):

  • How they got on your list (what lead magnets they’ve signed up for)
  • The pages they’ve visited on your site (if your autoresponder has site tracking)
  • The links they’ve clicked in your emails (this is a great way of getting demographic info)
  • The products they’ve purchased
  • The actions they’ve taken on your site (have they opened messages, shared your content…)

As you can see… the possibilities are endless.  Plus, modern autoresponders, like Active Campaign, make it easy to create slight variations of messages  to go out to different groups. This is called conditional content - and is a big timesaver.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the ability to assign a points value to different actions that your prospect takes.

For example, you might assign
  > 1 point if they visit a web page,
  > 5 points if they share your content on social media,
  > 10 points if they sign up for your free optin,
  > 15 points if the purchase a small tripwire product, such as your book.

Then you can create trigger points so that, for example, if they reach 20 points you know they must be interested in what you have to offer as they have taken more than 2 interactions with your online presence, so that triggers a particular automated email sequence based on their interests, and with the aim of getting them to purchase a higher priced item - all done completely automatically and trigger by a prospects interactions with your various web presences.  

You want to get people while they are interested in you - and before that interest wanders on to something - or somebody - else.

Another way that lead scoring can be very valuable in rewarding your very best customers - your evangelists - is to track the things they do and when they have done enough ‘things’ (per their lead score), it triggers some kind of reward - maybe a free mug, or tee-shirt, or even a coupon-based reward of some sort. 

Creating a Sticky Client Web With Email & Social Media

From Email List To Facebook Custom Audience

Another thing Active Campaign can do is talk to Facebook.  

You can take your email list - or segment of your email list - and create a ‘custom audience’ (in Facebook Ads terminology), and therefore target that custom audience for Facebook Ads. 

So, for example, you can send out a Facebook Ad to everyone who visited your web page about your retreat (you need a minimum of 100 people to create a custom audience). You can also track them where they are through a sequence.

So, for example, if they are doing your multi-part e-course and they finish the final lesson, you can send them a message through Facebook Messenger through Chat Bot saying “Congratulations on finishing the course!  Have you thought about scheduling a Roadmap session with us?”

Metrics / Analytics​
​
Tracking metrics and analytics is usually done on the meta level rather than the individual level.

So metrics on the meta level might look, for an email campaign, for example, at the open rates for a particular headline - or A/B testing of two different headline for the same message. You check the overall open rates for both headlines and then use the better of the two in subsequent campaigns.

What I’ve learned from working with companies that have million dollar launches is that the first try is never the one that wins. It takes testing, over and over again, to really find the option that works.  Those tweaks over time are super valuable.

Another email metric to track is which email is actually selling your products for you. You can find that out through Google Analytics. The great thing about Active Campaign is that it automatically tracks those links for you. Previously, you had to create and add complicated UTM links if Google analytics was to track such clicks. Now Active Campaign just creates those tracking links for you. And THAT is a game changer - not to mention time-saver!  

It certainly helps to have someone set up the dashboard for you, but once Google Analytics and Active Campaign are hooked up and the dashboard created, it is easy to see what emails are working for you and which are not - and not just in terms of the individual email - x number of people opened email 4, x number of people clicked on the link, x number of people purchased the product. It will also be able to tell you, for example, that everyone who opened email 1 in the 5 email sequence sequence went on to buy the product.  That is incredibly useful information to have and which you don’t get just from your autoresponder.

Once Google Analytics is hooked up to Active Campaign, events on your website can be recorded in Active Campaign - ie. if an individual on your list visits one of your web pages, Google Analytics will pick it up and Active Campaign will record that event in the individuals contact record.  Thus page visits can result in tags being added to a particular content, as well as numbers of contacts being turned into custom Facebook audiences for eventual targeted advertising.

If you have a sales call with one of your prospects in Active Campaign then that record of website pages visited will come up on their customer record (also visible from within your Gmail sidebar with the addition of a chrome extension).  Having that information available during the call can be very useful as you know exactly what they have been looking at.

Metrics is very much a seed that you plant early and which grows over time in terms of its usefulness. Looking at trends over time - usually months - can highlight areas of your funnel that need attention. For example, if a you are getting a good volume of traffic to your landing page, but you are not getting the sales you were expecting, then you know that something in the copy of the landing page - or the layout - is not working for those that visit it.  If there is a problem, chances are the metrics will show you exactly where the problem is.

You have to track the numbers to know what the truth is. It’s not what your gut tells you is working, it’s what the numbers tell is working, is working.  

And someone else’s numbers are not YOUR numbers, because your audience will always be unique to you.

You also need a certain amount of people in your universe before the numbers can tell you anything meaningful - which is why it takes time to get, (maybe up to 6 months or more), and why what you learn becomes more valuable and meaningful as your audience grows.

Automated Customer Service & Upselling

This is the place where people leave the most money on the table.  

Business owners tend to be very focused on getting people to purchase, but then having got the sale they ignore the customer and move on to the next prospective sale.

As we said previously, it is, in fact, far easier to get someone to buy again, having previously spent money with you, than it is to get someone new to buy.

What well executed automation for customer service does is meets people where they are and helps them consume your product, helps them give feedback, and helps them move on to the next product and/or re-purchase.

The Olive Oil Example
So, for example, we have a client that sells flavored olive oil sourced from particular olive producers.  The olive oil comes in fairly small bottles, when compared to supermarket brands, and she has calculated from customer’s experiences that one bottle usually lasts for about one month. 

So her first message is “Hey, what did you think of the olive oil? Here’s a little bit about me and my olive farmers (it helps them feel good about the product choice they made), and while you are at it, if you would like to send an invitation for a friend to try it, here’s a 50% off coupon for them.  It is a nice, customer-focused message - any customer would feel good about receiving that message.

A follow-on message might be “Hey, here’s my favorite salad dressing recipe for the oil flavor you purchased), again, this is where conditional content can vary depending on what they purchased) - AND which might include a particular mozarella cheese for which there is an affiliate partnership, so she is making money on that too.

Then, about week three, you send a message saying “Hey, hope you enjoyed the olive oil - are you ready for your next bottle yet - here’s a coupon for your next bottle?”

So even though it is an automated email sequence, because it is based on the specific product that they purchased, it feels very personal.

You can then go on to get deeper to learn more about the customer by asking questions in the message - “Are you using the olive oil mainly to dip?  For salad dressings? Or for cooking? Each question might be linked to an appropriate recipe and by clicking on a particular link they can go into a new sequence that  is more specific to that choice. So if they click on the salad recipe link they get more content pertaining to salad dressing recipes. So the next message in the sequence might be “Hey, I know you can create some great salad dressings with {product they purchased }  but you might be interested in this new flavor which makes some great salad dressings as well.

This kind of sequence is not something you build all at once and then you are done - it is something that is built over time from customer date and experiences with your products. But it will certainly create more upsell opportunities and repeat business by using such sequences = more revenue = more growth.

Whether is nurture sequences to encourage people to buy, or customer follow up sequences encouraging people to buy again, maintaining contact over time, in a very personal way helps you build your customer base over time.

Referrals & Testimonials
Asking for customer referrals and feedback is an important part of the process. Ask them to rate your product or service between 1 > 7, 1 being awful, 7 being fantastic!

If they are unhappy but you call them and ask what went wrong - let me make it up to you with a free product, they will appreciate the effort and you can turn them around, from a hater to a loyal customer - or, at the very least, they won’t give you a horrible review on Google.On the other hand, if they rate you a 6 or 7, then you might be able to turn that person from a happy customer into an evangelist!  They might be willing to provide a testimonial, or tell their friends, or give you great review on Google or Yelp, which helps build that all important social proof. Because if people see others having a good experience with your product or service then it engenders trust and those prospects are much more likely to become customers themselves.

The way you get those things is by having a piece in your follow-up funnel that actively asks for those things.

People do business with people they know, like and trust.  
Customers who feel like you are listening to their needs will like and trust you all the quicker. Customer complacency is a recipe for growth - for your competitor!

To do all these things we describe above used to be very hard. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and it used to be the case that you could only do it if you created hundreds of tags and UTM tracking links, in a sort of electronic plate of tangled spaghetti, but now, using the new AI and automation technologies available in tools like Active Campaign have made the process a lot easier.  

You still need to know what you are doing, but it does mean that such a growth engine can be created without all the attendant confusion and duplication that went on before. 

A well set up, intelligently thought out system can be fairly simple and straight forward.

So why Active Campaign?
Even Infusionsoft, for all its sophistication, doesn’t move people through an automated funnel sequence like Active Campaign does.  Active Campaign has a superior CRM system that is a lot more intuitive than Infusionsoft. The downside is that Active Campaign does not have the in-built shopping cart and affiliate management systems that Infusionsoft has. However, that can be very simply remedied by the integration with Active Campaign of ThriveCart, which does both - AND for a one-time purchase price - not the ongoing monthly charges of Infusionsoft.

Want a Growth Machine for your business?  Find out more about us and how to work with us.