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Most funnels don’t work out of the gate, but that’s where real marketing begins.

Most people give up too soon on their offers. In this episode, I’m sharing how we reduced cost per lead from $16 to $8 by embracing this mindset of testing and optimization.

You’ll see when to tweak things vs radically shift the positioning, and why the latter can get you outsized returns. If your marketing isn’t working and you’ve been looking for the “right strategy,” this will shift how you think about it completely.

Key Takeaways

• What I look at first when my launch numbers are off
• What a high cost per lead actually tells you
• The one place most people look last (but should look first)
• Why this process GUARANTEES your marketing works

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

I believe that the real marketing starts when something doesn’t work. When you disconnect from this idea of it didn’t work and I’m failing, and what if it doesn’t work? And that fear that creeps in, that overwhelm, that fear, and it creates this kind of like spinning and you just go, okay, what is this telling me? What is this data telling me? And then let that drive my actions.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. This is my last big recording session in this podcast studio. I’m doing a batch recording and then I’m moving my studio soon. So I’m so excited we’ll have a new setup. It it’s gonna be a little bit bigger of a space, not a little bit, actually a lot, like four times the size.

And my intention is to. Be able to record more content there, have a little bit more space, and also the start of the embodied headquarters. I don’t know exactly what I want that to look like over the next, year. but I do know I wanna have more of an in-person team and have some team members in person because there’s just nothing like the ability and the collaboration that you can have when you’re in person.

There just really is not. And so when I went to Cody Sanchez’s headquarters. Back in whatever end of last year. I was so inspired by that and just so inspired by like seeing her team all working together and brainstorming together. And I’ll probably never have a hundred percent in-person team. I love my team that I have, which is all over the US right now.

And but there’s some key roles that we’re hiring for. That I’m starting to hire Austin talent, and so now I’ll have a space that’s big enough for at least a few people to work in and big enough for me to go in there and work. And it’s downtown. You can see the, you can see the city from the window.

There’s all this natural light. So I’m really excited. It’s always about the vibe. I took a while to pick my spot because I refused to go in any of the very corporate feeling. coworking spaces and spaces. It just. That’s not it for me. And then natural light. So this place has a ton of natural light in it.

It’s an older building. It’s got like these old hardwood floors. My dream, I think one day, I’ll say it out loud, my dream is to get an actual, like old house, not old house, but like old in the sense it has character, but really cute house downtown Austin and turn it into an office. That would be my, that would be my dream.

One day it’ll happen. So today’s episode, I wanna talk about the power and necessity that is. Being able to pivot and handle curve balls in business. And I wanna share a couple of behind the scenes things because I was reflecting on this about how so often entrepreneurs are looking for, what is the exact right strategy, what is the exact right path, the right decision, the right next step that I can take that’s going to guarantee.

It’s gonna work, it’s gonna get me where I want it to, et cetera. And with anything, but especially with anything new, there’s such a power in understanding when that it’s about the refinement process. That it’s about the pivoting. It’s actually about what you do with the data that you receive when you do launch something new.

And this is true across the board with business. I’m gonna talk about this in a deeper way as well. But anyways, I wanted to share something about a recent, in the last, a recent marketing strategy for us. Actually two, like both worked this way, and I wanna talk about it because it’s like, IE live, eat, breathe marketing, right?

And so you might make the assumption that everything I launch works out the gate, and that’s not the case. I rarely launch something that doesn’t work at all. But almost always we launched something that can be better through a refinement process. And both of our last two funnels that we launched required us to do some refinement and optimization upon launching them.

Both had two high costs per lead. Like the CPM on the ads was too high. The click through rate on the ads wasn’t high enough and they required refinement. And I feel like this was such a good lesson because on one of the launches of the funnel, we had plenty of time. We gave ourselves a little bit of extra time to launch it so that we could see the initial data and make some decisions, but we actually.

I did a big pivot and I was like, something is just off with the title of this, the actual direction of this. I got on a call with my copywriter and I was like, let’s just take a step back. What do we know works? What do we know is a simple, doesn’t sound like everybody else? Let’s brainstorm this.

And we actually within that day, reworked. All of the messaging and the copy, turn the ads off, relaunch the ads within a 24 hour period. And so I want to bring this up because again, you could make the assumption that everything I launch just works. And I think true marketing actually happens in these moments because you cannot get something perfect.

Out the gate, you can’t, you have zero data and you can look at it all day long and be close to it yourself and say this is really good and this is gonna crush it, and this is exactly what people are saying and what they’re gonna want. And then you can go to launch it and it doesn’t get that response.

And then you can see new things that you didn’t see before and you can go, oh, I see how this could be confusing, or, this sounds too fluffy. Let me explain how I know when it’s like an overhaul versus optimization. ’cause another funnel that we launched maybe about two months ago, out the gate, it was a little bit too high cost per lead, but we didn’t change the whole messaging and the positioning.

We just did some changes to the landing page in the ad copy and the creative. And we probably got the cost per lead down like 30% and it stayed there the rest of the time. And that funnel is crushing it. When I launch something, when we launch something new, if out the gate it’s like an exorbitant cost per lead, which to me is above for me, 12 to $13, a lead above that, I’m like, that’s really expensive.

I like my cost per lead for most things. I would say PDF downloads and really simple opt-ins might be even less than this, but I like around eight to $9 if I can get an eight to $9 cost per lead to my webinars, to my challenges, to my events we’re always profitable. That’s a pretty good cost per lead.

’cause I also go for quality. If you’re listening to this like also, and you’re like, oh, cost per lead, that should be mine. I am in B2B, so that’s more expensive. Cost per lead, my clients in B2C, we can get dollars, $2 cost per lead. But you see a difference in the sales conversion and you also have to keep in mind the audience.

Like I have a client who targets restaurant owners. Crushes it built his business to a million dollars over the last year working with us. And he pays more cost per lead, sometimes $20 cost per lead, but it’s super profitable ’cause he’s super niche. So take when anybody talks about cost per lead with a grain of salt, but I know people would ask, so for me, because I have so much data, I know if we’re above really, if we’re above $10, I don’t like it.

But if we’re above $12, I’m like, Ooh, this might take some more. Finessing than just a little bit. So this most recent funnel, we were at 14, 15, $16 out the gate, within the first 24 hours. And yes, there’s optimizations, but it’s hard when you opt, when you do that, when you launch it that high, it’s hard for us to cut that down by, five, $6 a lead possible, but hard and also a short period of time.

So this was for a live launch and. So we only had so much runway, right? So there’s only so much optimization you could do in, let’s say max two weeks, but really more like 10 days. So I was like, okay, we’re gonna pause these ads. They ran for I think, almost two days and they were just trending high, even with optimizations.

And I’m like, something is off with the positioning. We missed it just a little bit. Got on with my copywriter. So the trigger for me was that really high cost per lead and like it’s gonna take a lot of force. To get that down. And so let’s look at the positioning as a whole. And I think that is oftentimes something people miss, is they try to tweak a lot of small things.

Obviously things like ad copy and creative, the landing page conversion, make a difference in your numbers. They are important, but if the overall positioning of the event of the offer is a miss slightly. Then all the finessing of ad copying, creative and landing page conversion isn’t really going to make a difference.

It will, but it’s not gonna bring it down to where you, where the KPI that you want. And so we got, I got on a call with my copywriter. I’m like, all right, let’s look back. We have so much data. What do we know works? did we do and how can we improve this positioning? And so we reworked it.

We that day reworked the landing page copy. Relaunched the funnel. I did new ad videos, new ad copy, and then we relaunched it and we cut the cost per lead by about $5 just when we relaunched it. So then I knew, okay, we hit the positioning right? And now where we can optimize. And so one thing we’re doing right now is for whatever reason, Facebook has decided that it’s gonna have a really high CPM, which is cost per impression.

And that’s like Facebook’s metric that it sets for you based on its rating of what you launched your ads to your offer. And it’s hard to change that because what they do is they take your link, they have bots that crawl the page, and they basically give you a score. No one knows exactly what that score is given based off of, but I think that they do it based off of also like the initial response.

So if you launch your ads and in that first day, it’s not the best response, I think it gives you a poor rating. If it is something that sounds like everything else, if it sounds, fluffy, too good to be true, whatever. So for whatever reason, Facebook rated. This lower for me than usual. And that’s really hard to, it sucks when that happens.

’cause it’s hard to combat because it’s a set metric by Facebook and it’s like we have a really good click through rate, which means we have people clicking on our ads. We have a really good landing page conversion, but we are paying a lot for this traffic. So what we did there was we actually completely redesigned the landing page, put a brand new link to hack Facebook’s.

Bots and relaunched it, to try to lower that CPM, which typically that does work. It’s a lot of work, but that metric matters. So that metric is one that’s frustrating when you have a high CPM because it’s like Facebook’s grade on your ads and your offer more, so your offer, and it’s hard to get that.

Down quickly. So that’s also what we did. And as a result, cut, the cost per lead now is down into the KPI that we are shooting for with this. So I wanted to explain this because I launched something and the cost per lead was too high. And so those are the actions that I took, and that’s how I knew it was a bigger positioning, a bigger messaging.

Struggle that we needed to rework very quickly because it’s a live launch. It’s happening on a certain date. And so that’s kinda how we handled that. Now the other funnel that was from, I think it’s been two months since we launched that funnel, that’s an ongoing funnel. So we had a little bit more room for optimization because we didn’t have a deadline of, it’s a live event happening on this day, and then the ads stop.

When we launched that funnel, I think the cost lead was around $12, which for me is too high. I wanted it lower and I wanted it lower because I wanted to be able to put a lot of money into this and have it be a consistent lead generation strategy for us. And so on that one, what we did was reworked we looked at the metrics and first it was our click through rate on our ads were a little bit lower than we wanted.

We aim for a 2%. Click through rate. That’s a pretty good click through rate. It’s on the higher end again, especially in B2B, but for me that’s a good number and I feel like we can hit it just because we have hit it several times. So we reworked a lot of different ad copying, creative, and tested a lot of different things.

And then the landing page, we aim for a 35% conversion on the landing page, and that’s cold traffic, my warm traffic landing page. So I separate my traffic out. And anything I promote to my list and to my audience is like a 50% landing page conversion. So if you mix those, you’re gonna see a blended, landing page conversion rate.

So I aim for 35% with our ads. That’s a good number for us. that’s a good metric in general. And so we tweaked things and we basically just massaged that it took about. Maybe two weeks. And we’ve hovered around now like the $8 cost per lead for the last 6, 7, 6 weeks. and that took just, we didn’t change the topic.

We didn’t change the topic, we didn’t change the messaging and the positioning because it wasn’t a big miss where it felt like, okay, we’re way off. It’s gonna be hard to get this cos bleed down. And we also had time. We were able to do smaller tweaks and adjustments, and then we’ve since launched new copy, new creative.

Anytime those metrics start to slip, the click through rate, the landing page conversion we make adjustments. And I have an ads manager, obviously, and they’re doing more than I am explaining because he’s doing audience optimization, turning things off, launching new things, and constantly looking at those triggers.

But mostly I wanted to talk about. That this is the game, like this is the game of marketing. And I oftentimes see people where they launch something and it doesn’t work out the gate, and then they give up or they get so frustrated or they get scared and they like shut off all the ads or they, pull way back on launching it when if you just use that as data.

Then you’ll be able to say, okay, what actions do we take to get it to where we want it to be? And so there’s some important pieces to this kind of formula, right? The first is you have to know your goal. So if you’ve never launched ads before, that is harder. But you can go off of some industry averages, like when we launch ads for a new client, we always make projections.

Here’s the ranges of cost per lead goals. Sales conversion. To be able to get us profitable. So first you have to know the target, right? Because how do you know if something isn’t working, if you don’t know the target? And so the core kind of metrics with that, especially as we’re talking about ads, is click through rate.

That’s the percentage of people that are clicking on your ad that’s directly driven by your copy and creative in your ad. Then the landing page conversion, the people that are getting to that page and are they taking the action, are they signing up for the thing? And that is, is that page right? It’s directly driven by the copy, the design.

Where’s the button? Really? The headline, the sub headline on that page. and how is that? As it relates to the ad, is there a disconnect? So those metrics matter a lot with your ads. And then of course, down the funnel you have show up rate sales conversion. I forgot to mention that we also did on that longer funnel that’s been running for a few months, we did a split test of the landing page and we ran that for a few weeks and then we chose the winner.

So we did two completely different designs and different headline sub-headline. Strategy and we’re able to chose choose the winner with an evergreen ongoing running campaign, you have a lot more room for that. With a live launch, it’s a lot harder to do a lot of testing and split testing, and that’s why having a live launch that you can rinse and repeat is nice because you know it works.

We went and tried a new live launch, which I know is gonna convert on the backend. Probably better than my other challenge, my other launch that I’ve done. But we had to finesse the front end and the front end messaging because we hadn’t launched it before. So anyways, you have to know your target, what is that goal, and then you say, okay, if I am.

Not hitting that goal. Where’s the drop off? So you look at, okay, what is the clickthrough rate? What is the landing page conversion rate? What is the show up rate? What is the sales conversion? Where is the actual drop off? And then most of the time where when you find the drop off. You can bring it back to messaging because that is what moves the needle so much.

Yes, landing page design is important, but a lot of times I find it is in the actual like messaging and positioning of what it is you’re promoting. So I had a friend, I’m gonna do a separate episode on this conversation because it was good, but they were in this experience where they launched something and they had a whole wait list of people that were.

On the wait list for this new offer. They were super excited. They’re like, it’s gonna crush it. I’ve got all these people on the wait list, I’m probably gonna be able to sell half of them, like in that high energy, launched it. And that’s not what happened. They sold only a few and they were really frustrated and I wanna do a whole conversation about that ’cause it was such a powerful conversation.

But. My point in this episode with that is I was like, just use it as data. You are people, you’re, you send out an email. Did they open the email? Did they click on the email? No, they didn’t click on the email. I’m like, they haven’t even gotten to the offer yet. Then you need to look at the email copy.

Where is the action that people stopped and then what drives that action? In this case it was actually, they emailed out their wait list and people opened it. They had a 40% open rate, but they didn’t click on it. I’m like, it’s your email copy and then you can go to, is it your sales page? And so use everything as data and.

When you disconnect from this idea of it didn’t work and I’m failing, and what if it doesn’t work? And that fear that creeps in, that overwhelm, that fear, that like what if this and what if that? And it creates this kind of like spinning and you just go, okay, what is this telling me?

What is this data telling me? And then let that drive my actions. And I really want you to understand that Even the best of the best, even the big brands and people who know their audience and have incredible offers, and in my case, a multi seven figure business. I launch things that don’t hit the numbers I want them to, and I make adjustments until it does, and it’s just it’s like a game. It’s like a game.

It’s okay, we launched it. Here’s the numbers. So here’s the actions. And I just take everything as data and that’s it. My point in all of this is I want to empower you to understand your numbers because so much of business and marketing is data, and then. To remove the emotion that can happen of overwhelming fear and failure. And all of these things defeat when you go to launch something and it doesn’t work and see it for what it is instead of failure or it’s not gonna work.

Or what if this doesn’t work or I gotta shut all this down ’cause I’m gonna waste money and understand, like I believe that the real marketing starts when something doesn’t work. And is how you respond to that and your understanding of what actions do you need to take because the more empowered you are to understand what data drives, what actions, and you’re able to implement those actions quickly.

That’s the other thing that you could pull out from my example is like the moment that I knew. We needed to adjust the positioning. We did it all same day. I didn’t sit on it because it was a live launch. I didn’t have a lot of time to sit on it. But the faster you move into action, then the faster it’s gonna improve.

Now you have to balance that with, you can’t change, you can’t change things every day. You have to give things time to actually, get the data and gather the data. I’ll say on my live launch, like we spent almost a thousand dollars in that day. With the two high cost per lead. So I was getting data also quickly.

Whereas if you had spent just like a hundred dollars, it may have been too early to make some big changes. So I think there, there is like an element of it that’s also your gut. I do, I think, I definitely think all of this can be brought back to data, but right when it comes to the moment of do we make the change, do we not?

There is also that kind of gut instinct. That if you can tap into and tune into it should play a role. And I just knew in my gut we missed the Mark A. Little bit on this messaging and I don’t wanna push trying to make that happen. Let’s just rework it and reset it. And that was a little bit of that intuition, right?

Paired with data. All right everybody, hopefully you guys found this helpful, getting a little bit behind the scenes of my own marketing. And I’ve done so many launches, so many webinars, so many things, and I still have those experiences and I don’t even care because that’s just part of it.

That was just part of the game. It’s how you respond to it. And you learn every time and then you build off of that. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in today and I’ll talk to you next time.