Episode 53: What It’s Like to Work With Me Inside of the Empowered Business Lab

Monica Froese  00:04

You’re listening to the Empowered business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business. I’m on a mission to help 1000 Women make $100,000 a year. That’s right $100 million towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know, right here week after week. So you can join us on the journey to $100 million dollars. Sound good, then let’s jump in. Welcome back to another episode of the Empowered Business Podcast. Today we’re going to do something a little bit different. And I am going to take you behind the scenes of the Empowered Business Lab. The Empowered Business Lab is our signature program that empowers you to create a digital product sales machine. It’s a complete solution for creating strategizing building and selling your digital products. And we happen to be opening the doors to the Empowered Business Lab for the fourth time next week, if you’re listening to this in real time, and I thought it would be kind of interesting to show you what it would be like to work with me inside of the Empowered Business Lab. What I’m going to do is play for you three questions that I get during our monthly q&a calls inside of the lab, and give you a taste of what it’s like for me to answer your questions as a student of mine. Now, before we dive into the three questions from my students, I would love to invite you to a free five day training that we are doing next week starting on January 24, called the Digital Product dash live. Now this is the fourth time we’ve run this free training, we always get amazing feedback on it. And it is just a great way to figure out if digital products might be the right fit for you and your business. So what we’ll do is on day one, which is Monday, January 24, we have a welcome kickoff call. Then on day two, we jump right into actionable training, we’ll be live for about an hour and a half each day. And then on the fourth day, we’ll open the cart to the import business lab with a very special offer for you. And then on day five, which is Friday, we do a live q&a. And you will get to ask me any of the questions you have related to the training and or digital products. So it’s really a fun time. So if that interests you go ahead and sign up at empowered business.co forward slash dash. Now for our first q&a, I am going to answer a question all about how to evaluate results from a flash sale. So we’re going to get a little nerdy and talk about conversion rates and numbers and all this fun stuff. And you’re going to get a front row seat into how I help my students optimize their sales funnels for optimal performance and make sure they’re making as much money as possible. So let’s dive into the first student question. Anna, you launched your product, your email us and made sale. Oh, okay. Your list size is 11,500. And you had an average 35% open rate. So one week before the launch, you sent them an email, a nice pre framing email that included a free printable and told them about the upcoming sale. And you got lots of replies to the email. And that had a 35.6% open rate. It was a 60 sale on a $17 product which you market it at 75% off because it’s listed at 67. You sent four emails during the sale and got 275 unsubscribes. Totally legit, do not worry about that. Lead Pages Analytics says 280 People saw the sales page. And there was 83 main product sales, which means that out of the 2080 people that clicked to the sales page 83 bought, which is a 4% sale conversion rate. Also, I’m going to guess you gave me unique visitors and not total pageviews because I care more about the unique people who saw the page not a roll up of if someone clicked there 10 times you know what I mean? But I’m just going to go into the premise that these are unique people that saw the page, but keep in mind if it’s not then your conversion rates probably a little higher. I want to also draw attention I know we’re gonna focus on the conversion rate for this. Like that’s what the question is, but I also want to pull attention to the fact that you got 83 sales, which is amazing. And also seven your $7 order bump 48 Order bump sales, so your order bump converted at 58% amazing so you definitely hit the nail with that order bump like that is you definitely you definitely made a really good connection. between the main product and your order bump. And then you said Thrive cart says the conversion rate was 43%. So I mean, the people that ended up clicking over to the actual cart 43% of them proceeded to, to actually finish the purchase, we have lots of success with cart abandonment in Thrive cart. So essentially, they start filling out name and email, and then they abandon the cart. What what we do is that actually tags them in ConvertKit. It will be tagged like you know, cart, abandoned whatever the product is. And then an hour later, we fire an email. This fires an hour after somebody cart abandons on our ads at scale. So it says an hour later, so after an hour, it says, Beep boop, boop. My little tick robots just told me that you left ads at scale in your cart. Maybe you got distracted, or you didn’t have your credit card handy, or your toddler close your laptop with sticky fingers. Hello to my redhead? Definitely speaking from experience here, no worries, there’s still time to grab this special one time offer. Don’t forget, I’m only offering it for Black Friday. Do you have any questions for checking out hit reply my team, not robots, we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. I can’t wait to see you inside. Here’s your quick link for joining that goes out an hour later. And actually, it’s all effective. Because I didn’t know she set this up. And I was testing the cart. And I got distracted by my toddler and clicked off. And then an hour later, I’m looking at my emails. And I was like, Haley, what’s this email you just sent? Oh, like, I wasn’t expecting us to be sending you an email to our list. I’m like, What’s this? Whoa, whoa, whoa, email. I didn’t even realize I got sucked into my own funnel and got our cart abandonment email. And she’s like, Yeah, oh, my gosh, this is effective. It worked on me. And it’s my product. So I recommend doing that, by the way, because it really helps with cart abandonment. So now to continue on with the question. The redirect after the timer expires and sends them to another sales page that says flash sales and it but they still get 60% off with the code, no order bump. Can I ask why no order bump? Why? When the order bump converts at 58%? Why? Why would we not have it? Why? Please put that back. I’ve had 10 more orders come in through that. Awesome. Put the order bump back please. Lead Pages says 350 People have seen that page. So that’s a 3% conversion. To consider there’s a portion of my list, this product is not appropriate for those in the late stages of dementia. Like that part of the list. I don’t know how much of my list is made up of these people. And right because it is hard to segment your list I get it. It’s really hard to identify where people are on their journey, it gets messy. A friend of mine in my niche sent an email to her list about my offer. Her sales page had a 20 minute timer, her email resulted in 52 main product orders with 20 Order bumps 20 divided by 250 3%. Okay, so we’re about 50% on the order bump that too. So her Leadpages had 840 people that saw the page, and that was a 6% conversion rate. So in other words, your friends list converted better once they clicked to the page, but it was the same exact page only difference being the 20 minute timer. I think that’s probably validated on a 2% Bump. A 2% bump on purchases is huge. That’s a lot of money. So that is validated enough that I would change your flash shield to 2020 minutes as well. Because like why not? I mean, that’s the biggest difference. That’s the only difference. So yeah, definitely change it. I am a fan of shorter urgency windows for lower priced products, we have tested everything up to 60 minutes. And we have defaulted for a long time now at 20 minutes. So I will say I don’t test that anymore, because I tested it a lot in the early days of my smaller digital products. And that’s where we settled as well. Okay. You said the sales pages were the same. Is there another? Nope. Okay, so the question then, and I have the page will in a second, this is the product I would like to offer in my double dip funnel. Since my conversion rate with my list is so low, won’t likely be even lower, offered in a double dip funnel to new subscribers. How can I improve this offer? Thank you so much. You know, I sat with this one earlier, when I was looking through the questions, and I know you asked a couple days ago to I don’t know if I would say a 4% conversion rates bad to be honest with you. You know, because there’s there’s a couple of ways to look at it. There’s, we could look at your overall list, which let’s just do that. For argument’s sake. So your overall list if we had 11,500 Wait, you had 83 sales, so 83 divided by 11,500. That is a low conversion rate that’s like, that’s low. That’s not even a percentage point. It’s essentially point 7.0 7.72 of a percentage point. Anyways, math, whatever, you know what I’m saying is less than a percentage point. So overall, two Your list, we could argue it was a lower conversion rate. But you also don’t technically know how many out of those 11,000 people are relevant for this offer. So when we frame it like that, then we think well, then, you know, a better indicator is likely the people who clicked but then we have the issue of not everyone’s gonna see our emails, right. So I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle for you. And a 4% conversion rate off of an 11,000 person list is amazing. 4% off of the 2000, who clicked is like, could we do better? Probably. But again, I think your truth lies in the middle, because of the fact that we don’t really know not everyone will see our emails. And we don’t really know how many of those 11,000 people are relevant for the offer. So I mean, if we could like split the difference, I think you’re probably somewhere in like the 2.5% conversion rate for your list. And that’s not bad. That is not bad. Because also keep in mind, you did this once. You did this once, you know, so. So do I think we can improve? Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about that. Do I think it’s bad? No, I don’t. Now let’s talk about the double dip funnel. Before we look at your page here. When you go, obviously, the double dip funnel, you start with the opt in. And that’s meant to bring new people to your list. So it’s a cold audience. However, let’s talk about how targeted the traffic will be to the double dip. So that’s something we have to consider as well, like, where are you bringing people in from how Dialed In is that method of bringing people in because the nature of tripwires and urgency people are okay. Even to backup another step. Essentially, buyer behavior, you have two types of people you have one of my mentors describe it as the the rabbit and the hare. So like you have the impulsive, I want it now give it to me, I’m more like that. It’s like, Oh, you got what I need, you’re you’re presenting on this offer, I’m going to take you up on the offer. And then you have people who need to think about it. And so we can’t discount the fact that you have half a half of the people. Okay, so let’s just say the people who are interested in your offer on your list, not all of them are gonna see it the first time around. So you’ve already eliminated a decent amount of them, simply because you hit them at the wrong time. They weren’t in their emails, they missed your four emails, right. And then on top of that, you have a decent amount of people, at least half of those people who are like, well, they don’t take urgency offers, they need to be nurtured more. And this is the power of funnels, because you hit the urgency people up front. But you don’t give up on the people who need more nurturing. And so I want you to keep that in mind, in terms of, and this happens a lot, you know, even for people like and you validated this offer, but I see people all the time, they’re like, they call their offer a flop. And it’s like, But not everyone’s gonna buy something the first time, do you know how many people have told me for like four rounds of EBL that like they’re going to buy, but it’s not the right time for them. So imagine if I was like, Oh, I guess we’re just gonna give up. You know, it’s just like, you can’t do that. Because it just might not be the right time for them. Or they might not buy with the flash sale mentality. They need more nurturing. And so that’s the great thing about marketing, you can always be trying different tactics as well, once they’re on your list of of what gets those other 50% of people who don’t really take urgency. How do you get them to buy? Like, what can you be giving them for free? Like, you know, what, can you be giving them a value that’s going to convince them to buy? Can you run out challenge? Can you run a, like a three day challenge for this, that really will appeal more to the people who need more like convincing, you know, like, and I’m not saying you should run a challenge necessarily for a $17 product, I’m just giving you my mentality on sales. And I want you to keep in mind that those people for the double dip, like it’s relative, because again, you’re dealing with 50% of the population will ever take you up on urgency offer, which by the way, while I’m on my tangent here, I don’t know if you’ve been around online marketing for a long time, you probably saw a big push from people who were like, always lead always like always lead essentially with what the triple dip is always lead with the triple dip always lead with the product. I just want to list the buyers, I want to list the buyers. Okay, I get that. And listen, like I talked about that when you have someone who will pay you up front you are you’re much more likely to get them to pay you in the future that know like trust factor. But you’re leaving all the people that don’t take urgency offers on the table. You’re leaving, like half of the population out of that are interested that would buy your products out because they don’t take urgent offers, you know, like it’s actually misguided in my opinion to to and that’s why I teach you that’s why we’ve concentrated on the two funnels. Let’s bring them in. Let’s get the urgency people on the back end to bringing them in. But now we got to nurture the people that didn’t take that. We don’t give up on them. But in the way of only leading with your with your offer. You’re paying offer when you only lead with that you’re eliminating half of the population from taking action. It doesn’t make sense. Let’s move on to the second question. This question is all about my thoughts on email marketing, and I get a little bit rebel ish with my opinions per usual, I think you’ll enjoy this one. Let’s dive in. Adrian says, this is a good one. These are one of these rebel Monica is going to come out on this answer and just let me know I actually put that in my my notes. Um, so this is Adrian. I’ve been wondering lately about email marketing, and the lines between too many verses not enough. I’ve noticed a few of my of the main people I follow nearly email every day. Granted, I don’t read them all, but I see them all the time. So I do read the odd one when it catches my attention. However, I can also see how people would quickly get annoyed and it could feel spammy. Have you found that more than once a week can be helpful or harmful. And she just gives some more anecdotal information that she did her first product launched her email list of 400. She had zero purchases, it was a little disappointing, because she had 18 People say that they’d be interested in the product. She did the sale over four days, she sent one email a day, they weren’t very salesy. It just had an offer at the bottom. Each day, she noticed her email open rates dropped, and they were a lot lower than her normal weekly emails. Also, she did it over a weekend. She said she won’t do that again, I think and she says she thinks that contributed to lower open rates. Well, anytime you send emails back to back, your open rates are going to go down, right for the I mean, you indicated it because you know, like people are gonna eventually just, they’re not going to click on every single email. And sales emails, by nature have lower open rates as well to like, even though you said it was at the bottom, once you get to your second third email in a row, people know you’re selling them something. So this is all pretty common. like nothing’s like, alarming to me here. So here’s what I said in my notes, we’ll just we’ll just go with that. Email marketing is unique to your own business. And I truly believe that I don’t subscribe to any rules around what I should or shouldn’t do. And that is my rebel side coming out. Some people crush it emailing every day, my friend, Jennifer Roskamp, from the intentional mom, that is like literally her whole strategy. She emails every night. And I find them fascinating. Actually, I don’t read them all. I know Jennifer very well, personally, I don’t read them all. But her strategy works. And she has a very, I mean, she’s she’s very successful business. Others annoy the heck out of people when they email every day. So I don’t think it’s a matter of being at being Monday or on the weekend, necessarily. It’s a matter of what do your people want? Do they want to hear from you in a different way? Do they need more emotional email, shorter emails, you won’t know, if you don’t experiment, you have 400 people on your list. So I just want to like point this out. When I launched my first product I had, I had like, 413 people on my list. You’re in the early stages, like you can’t make any determinations based on sending it to 400 people. And the fact that was over weekend, I’m never gonna do that again. No, don’t don’t, don’t please. I mean, it took me years to figure out and it’s still like a moving target. You know, one of the things ended up working for me, and one of the solid ways that I grew was I would send very lengthy, emotional emails that were like, they drew a motion out of people, they were raw. So when people respond to your emails that tell us the emails, the email gods that people are reading, it keeps you out of spam. That worked for me, I hit on that. That’s like literally how we grew for three years. It’s why I have people that bought something from me three years ago, and show back up three years later and still want to buy stuff from me. And they’ll still remember those emails that I wrote. So there is no one size fits all in my marketing. And I cannot stand when people ask like there is there’s just not, it’s what works for you, and what will resonate for your people. And you shouldn’t know that already at 400 people, I have 60,000 people and I don’t really know it and it changes it changes, you know, like the emotional emails. I had a scale back on because well, first of all, from my own, like how much time I had to do stuff. Emotional email would take me eight hours to write. I don’t have eight hours anymore with all my other responsibilities as the business grew. So we started podcasting. And now our regular communication comes out in the form of a weekly podcast email, and you can listen to my voice on the podcast, it changed like, I couldn’t have done that with 400 people. So this is one of those situations where do not get hung up on like, there, there’s this like perfect should way of doing it. There’s just not, and it’s not going to reveal itself over one sale. And because you sent some emails on a weekend, they’re great, but let me let me also be really clear. You’re asking great questions. These are questions you should be asking like my email open rate dropped when I emailed 40 Zero. Okay, maybe I won’t do that again. Let’s try something else. Maybe they do need to hear from me in a different way to feel connected to me so that they do want to buy for me, maybe they need to know any more preferred For this product in like over a month period where I’m warming them up before I drop the next one on them, like, those are all the things that you’re going to discover as you build your email list. You shouldn’t have all the answers yet. Like, if you if you came to me, you’re like, I know, I have 40 people on my list. I’m like an email marketing expert. I’d be like, okay, like, you know what I mean? Like, don’t don’t do that you’re not. Yeah, that’s, and that’s the brilliance of this, because now you get to decide like, don’t, we just printed up a bunch of stuff with my favorite motto, which is I don’t do failure. And what that means is, it doesn’t mean that nothing’s ever, like not gone my way, or we haven’t sold as many as I want it, it means that I don’t do failure. So when something doesn’t work, well, we’re gonna keep trying till it does. And that is like the mentality that I would love for you to have with emails, keep asking these questions, keep thinking about when to send, what not to send, what is resonating with people, what gets responses from people, and don’t be afraid to experiment with your list. So that’s like my, my rebel side advice coming up. For our final question, we are going to learn all about Pinterest ads, and we’re going to dive into someone’s actual campaign. And you’ll get feedback on exactly what I would do to make the campaign more successful. My Pinterest tag was not firing during my first consideration campaign. Yes, and she has since fixed that. But that’s like, we should know that when she ran, the first campaign that we’re going to be looking at her tag was not properly installed, which would not be able to track conversions, which is why she has these questions. So her first question is, should she go and if you’re not an add in funnel feeders yet, which is where we talk about Pinterest ads, you can just be like, I’m gonna not pay attention to this part yet. But essentially, the way the methodology works is you run a consideration campaign formerly known as a traffic campaign, to beef up your conversions on your tag, because your conversion campaigns heavily rely on the data that’s being fed to your tags. So you need to get those conversions so that the algorithm can optimize. So we start with the consideration campaign. So her question here is, Should I repeat the consideration campaign now that the tag is firing, so it can gather data? Yes, the answer is yes. And follow the instructions as if it’s the first consideration campaign. Yes. Also, our and she said also do need 50 Signup events total or do you need the momentum of having 50 within seven days? Okay, so 50 Pinterest has changed this so many flippin times. Thank you Pinterest, and you wonder why I don’t have a course dedicated to anymore. Um, here’s the deal. So I’ve seen a couple things happen here. There was a rumor on the street, which I don’t think ended up being true was that if you had a new Pinterest tag that they were going to require you to get 100 signups and or purchases to open consider conversion campaigns. I think that was tossed I don’t think that’s I have yet to see anyone in real life have that actually happened to them. The 50 signups used to be a very hard rule. When conversion campaigns were immature, essentially, like the algorithm wasn’t very mature, because I’ve been doing them since they were in beta. So I like know, the whole history behind them. It’s not a hard and fast, it is a best practice. So when I see students get momentum on their consideration campaigns, like they might end 38. And they’re like, so can I not move to a conversion campaign? No, you should move. It’s a guideline. And most things in ads are guidelines. This is the thing that kills people about ads. Everyone wants like, No, it has to be you have to give me a number. You have to it’s like, it’s not really the way it works. Unfortunately, it is like numbers are your guide. But there are still a level of like, you have to try things too. And see what works and what doesn’t. So it’s a guide, but the the gist here is you should go back to a consideration campaign and after seven days, like if you pretty much it’s subjective. I would I weigh all of your stats before I’d say to move to a conversion campaign. But the best stat is if you have 50 events, for sure, you should move to a conversion campaign. Okay, so to my pin engagement audiences now at 800 insights due to the first consideration campaign, should I include them in the next consideration campaign? Or just stick to the cold audience like the initial? Yeah, no. 800 is like so negligible. I wouldn’t even bother. You’re gonna want to build that engagement audience up for your retargeting, which is step three of how I teach you to run your ads. So no, don’t bother. Stick with your cold. Three in my keywords for the first consideration campaign. There were a few that had zero impressions. Should I try those again? Or are they duds? And then you went on to give me a spreadsheet? Thank you because you comment it you’re like I know Monica likes talking spreadsheets? Sure do. So here’s the thing you spent a total of $110 not enough for me to tell you a keyword as a dud that it’s just not enough. So I would proceed with the keywords that you were using as long as They irrelevant, which I assume they work, she probably did your keyword research. Don’t rely on $100 to tell you if a keyword is not. So that’s my answer there. Okay, Pinterest kept recommending that I pause this campaign while it was running. On day three, I added a seasoned, proven click worthy pin to the campaign out of frustration that I hadn’t gotten any signups at that point. But I know your tag wasn’t working. So that’s another thing. But the added pin was seasoned meaning she had already had it on her account, and it was getting organic traction. And visually very different from the other original add pins, that pin did quite well. And I eventually got nine signups total, should the images in the pen be more similar or more different with one ad campaign. And since the original ad images are now seasoned, is it worth to reuse them in the next consideration campaign? I’m almost positive, there is at lesson and funnel feeders about this because I talk in funnel feeders, I can’t I don’t know the title last off top my head because I’ve been I have been teaching ads for a long time. And so but first of all, Pinterest will always favor what it knows, it will always favor what it knows. So if you put a new image in an ad against an existing image that has organic traffic, the algorithm is gonna be like, Oh, more science to that one more science to the original one. And so here’s the thing, you can’t effectively test your creative because the algorithm is going to pick the impressions to go to that season pin. So you really don’t really you really don’t know if those new images that Pinterest has ever seen are viable, because they’re not giving them a shot and the algorithm. That’s how the algorithm works. And actually Pinterest has come out and said this in various different ways. If you read between the lines, and also read all their geeky, get documentation, like I have over the years. So it’s not fair to put a new pin image a new ad pin image against an existing seasoned pin, it’s just not going to be fair. So there are times when I run an ad that I’m if I’m just trying to get like my conversions pumping, I’ll just run one pin that is proven that works that organically is working. You can do that, like I wouldn’t have told you that a couple years ago. But you can do that now. Because the algorithm is just so much more mature for ads that you can do that. But now if we’re if you’re talking about the fact that you want to try these new ad images, then you have to run it with the new ad images and not put it up against the season image to see if it gets traction. And I think you gave me the images. So let me just click. I’m gonna guess because I’m gonna guess this was the organic one, because these two look an awful lot like. And they’re different because they’re different. They look so much alike that I’m like, I am looking at different images like, yeah, so these must spend the two new ad images and then this was the one you added in that season. And then got all the traction. This is a tough one. Because the consideration campaign is all about getting traction with your your signups so you can move to a consideration campaign. I don’t think you want to put all three in. First of all, I don’t think putting more than two ad images is even effective anymore. It’s just not especially when you don’t have big budgets, you’re just spreading your impressions too thin. It doesn’t make any sense to have three images. If it were me, when it comes down to it, that’s like the best I can do for you is to like tell you if this were me what I would do take it with a grain of salt. You don’t have to do what I say but this is what I would do. I would restart my consideration campaign. I would put my proven image in there. And I would choose the best performing out of these two. likely it’s going to favor this one. But if it gets you to your if it gets you to your signups great. Who cares? Like who cares, right? The tricky part comes in that if it does favor this, which I suspect it probably will. When you move to the consideration campaign, what do you do? Well, what I would do is I would likely make another ah, this is so tricky. Do me a favor and let me know how the consideration campaign goes. Then I will tell you what I would do for your conversion campaign because I really, but when you tell me how it goes, I need to know how each pin performed. I can’t I don’t need just the campaign roll up I need to know how each individual pin performed. That will help me significantly. I hope you enjoyed that behind the scenes look into how I work with my students inside of the Empowered Business Lab. I also hope you picked up a few golden nuggets along the way. If you are interested in joining us inside the lab, I would love to have you join us for our free five day training starting next week, Monday, January 24. And you can sign up at empowered business.co forward slash dash. Also if you want to talk to me directly, don’t be shy and send me a DM over on Instagram. My handle there is at Monica dot Froese and yes, we do respond to all of your messages. I’ll see you back here next week. Thanks for tuning in to another episode. of the Empowered business podcast. If you want to get started creating your own digital products and don’t know where to start, I am hosting a live five day free training that can help. It’s called digital product dash live, how to discover your unique million dollar digital product formula, head on over to empowered business.co forward slash dash to join us live the week of January 24 2022. I’ll see you back here again next week.