Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 24

Hey everybody this is Bryan Hatch, founder of AutomateBIG. I wanted to take you on a little walk with me to talk to you about some of the things that have been going on in my businesses as I've been helping infopreneurs, people that sell online training courses, and just teach cool things. It comes down to this thing that everybody keeps talking about in this space is staying power.

If you want to create something online, and have longevity, and actually be in the business for a long time, well, there are some things you have to do. One of the things I want to make sure that I mention is that when you get into the info space, and you have some kind of cool online training, and people are jumping in pretty relatively easy, it's not that hard to find something that you have that's valuable and to get it out there. The sustainable part is the hard part. It's the staying power that people want. 

I want to talk to you about some of the things that you need to be focused on if you want to be in the game for a long time. I really want to kind of focus today a little bit more on the stats. What I'm saying is that if you're in your business and you don't know the stats, it probably means that you haven't been in it for very long. If you haven't been in it for very long what that means is there's a lot of things you're missing out on.

I think the most fun part of the businesses is to be able to go through and say, look, with this set of circumstances, with this marketing campaign that I've created, if I look at these same situations, the same information over, and over, and over I can improve the numbers. I can improve the stats. If you don't measure it, and you're not actually calculating it, then you're not ever going to get better at it. If you want staying power, then you gotta do that.

When you're doing a marketing campaign you need to have an online funnel. And you're going to be collecting email addresses typically. When you're collecting email addresses, then you are going to have to be looking at your opens and your clicks, that's a given. Your opens, if they're about 20% on average, are a little bit less than that now, over the industry standard.

Clicks, you want to be in that one, three, five, or if you can get, an 8% click you're phenomenal. If someone just opted in that should be a little bit better. Those are some of the stats you should be looking at. Make sure you know your opens and your click stats. That tells you if people are engaged in what you're offering them or if they're not.

The next stat that I really love and want to drive home is your dollar per lead. Now, there's a cost per lead, there's a profit per lead. Those are all kinda the three in this realm. But your dollar per lead is what it is. So if you're driving leads to a webinar, you're driving leads to a call, you want to know how much it costs to get that person to do what you ask them to do.

That lead, getting their name and their email, you need to know that stat. It's not the same for everybody, so you might have a different stat than somebody else, that's okay. You want to know what it is, and you want to keep improving it. A dollar per lead is how many dollars it takes to get a lead, okay? Now, after that fact you want to know what it cost to get that, that's the dollar right there. You want to know your profit per lead, okay?

If it cost you $7 to get an email address, which that's a little high, but if it cost you $3 to get an email address that's a little more in line with typical, then how much does it cost you to get a sale, right? If your sale is $1,000, $500, or if it's $250, you want to know how much money you make per lead you generate. Okay, so if you generated in 30 days $25,000, and you generated 200 leads that created that $25,000, then you can back that out and know your dollar per lead if that makes any sense.

You also want to know the cost per lead and your profit per lead. Because that way you know if you're spending $7 to get a lead or $3 to go get a lead, but you're actually making $18 per lead. Remember the stats that you need to be looking at as you are selling online courses and training.

The baseline factor is you need to be generating an email list. You need to be able to have opt-ins which are a name and an email address. There are multiple ways to do that. When you get opt-ins you need to email them, you need to send them communication. One of the best ways to track that is clicks and open rate.

Open rate is something that you should be paying attention to. Far too many clients that I've worked with don't really pay attention to that very much. A 5% shift in opens and a 2% shift in clicks could really mean a difference in the longevity of your business. Think about this, right now industry standard is a 17% open rate, which is a bummer, it's just going down.

The click rate, if you can get to three, five, or 7% click rate you're doing pretty good. 8% click rate you're doing awesome. Those are some of the baseline stats you need to be getting involved in with your email stats. Beyond that, the stats you have to be looking at is the baseline. The ones you look upstream from there is your cost per lead or cost to get a name and an email address.

Whatever avenue you're using, whether you're using affiliates, or you're using paid advertising, you want to look at the cost per lead on those. That's a critical piece. Costs per lead is, you're getting 100 leads a week, and it's costing you $3.50 to get that lead, then you recognize, okay, that's my cost. Include everything that is in your marketing expenses, not just your advertising.

Throw in your advertising expenses, plus anybody that's running or doing this stuff for your hours, so you understand the cost it takes to get that lead. You want to look at dollar or cost per sale, okay? How much does it take you to actually get someone to buy? I like to look at the dollar per lead.

I learned this from one of the business owners I worked with for a long time. The dollar per lead is every lead that comes to the business, how much money do they make you? There's the gross, and then there's the profit. The gross revenue they generate is a critical number that you should be paying attention to. If you get 100 leads a week, on average how many dollars do you make per lead you get?

Obviously, not every one of those leads actually turns into a customer. I know that, and so should you. You have to realize that the dollar amount that it takes or how much revenue you generate for that lead, is a great number you can consistently look at. If you stop generating leads, then your costs are going to be in a different alignment, right?

If you look at that consistently and say, every time I get a lead on average say $22, then, look at your cost per lead included. Not just the lead cost to get it in there, but if you have any marketing team or expenses to look at that too. Add that into the budget of how much it costs you to get that lead. Subtract the cost from the revenue generated, and then that is your actual profit per lead.

Those are numbers that you need to be looking at as a business that has online training and teaching people. If you know stats, and you can improve them, that is where the longevity actually comes from. I hope you will take these small and simple stats and track them. Be unbelievably focused on these stats. If you will, then you can improve them, and you can reduce your costs and then maybe increase your profit.

You can add other revenue streams, or other ways to do upsells, or add an average cart value. Kick that up a little bit. Sometimes people think about the stats as being, boring. I think that's the most exciting part about being in business is being able to say I have a clear-cut process, right? It's a marketing campaign that I generate leads through my webinar or whatever it is that I'm generating leads through with my PDF, or my downloads, or my free mini-series training.

From there I have enough leads that are actually interested in what I do. Great, now I need to be able to sell them into something, right? And there are launches, and strategies, being able to launch products. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a consistent revenue-generating model and campaign that when you sit back you just say, wow!

Turn that dial up, and sweet, now those stats are rocking a little bit better. And, wow, we got a whole lot better customer lifetime value. If all you're doing is transactional sales, if all you're doing in your marketing campaign is to get a sale, like your cool course that you made, great. That doesn't mean that you're going to be able to do that all the time.

I go back to what we talked about in the beginning, if you launch a product, and you make a good amount of money doing that, that's great. How often can you launch without burning out your list and burning out the people that are watching you? That's a tough one to do. Now, having a couple of launches a year, great idea. I recommend you do that, but to have a longevity of a constant play that equals dollars while you're sleeping is something you need.

Generate those leads, focus on the stats of what it costs you to make those leads, how quick you can actually get them to open, consume, do the thing you ask them to do. Then you go ahead and follow through with your sale. So you know all those cool stats that if you just turn the dials up, like, wow! One of the clients that I'm working with right now literally is saying, sweet, we're making X-number of dollars, and it's only costing us this much.

That's a great return, now let's double it, now let's triple it. And when you have a consistent model that's all you gotta do is put a little bit more fuel on the fire. And then it gets bigger, which is great. So that's what I hope for you and your business. I want you to actually get the stats right and work on the right things.

If you ever want to talk about what's going on in your business and how this process is actually working for your online sale, online course, or online training, then go ahead and check out the link here on the page where you can actually schedule a call with me.

I'd love to be able to chat with you and talk to you a little bit more about what's going on in your business. Here to help, I love the community. And I love helping infopreneurs make a huge difference to their business. And this is just one small way to AutomateBIG.