- Background.
A US-based training company was offering online courses priced at $367 to a very specific niche: women looking to start and/or grow their network marketing business.
- 95 percent of their clients were from North America. They had been running three automated webinars daily at 11 am, 3 pm and 8 pm for the last two years.
- They spent approximately $30,000 a month to generate approximately 5000 new webinar registrants each month.
- Increased ad costs were making the sales funnel less profitable.
- Webinar attendance rates were poor: between 22-28 percent.
- The company had no real follow up after the webinar, except a monthly newsletter.
- They had seen a marked decline in email deliverability and open rates.
Problem.- Solution.
After consultation with the company, they implemented the following recommendations:
- Change the timing of the automated webinar to be “top of the hour” and then run it hourly from 8am to 10pm.
- Send SMS reminders to attendees – to be triggered as soon as someone registered, four hours before the webinar started, and 15 minutes before the webinar started.
- Trigger Facebook ads based on the campaign sequence, by adding and removing tags within the campaign.
- Build out a cart abandonment sequence.
- Build out an “encore” sequence to funnel those who didn’t attend, rather than the traditional replay sequence.
- Segment attendees into “no shows” and those who left before the offer was made and create separate follow-up sequences based on their actions.
- Increase the course price from $367 to $497.
Within30 days of implementing the new system, the client reported:
- A 306 percent increase in overall profitability of the funnel without any additional ad spend: Previous gross sales (before refunds) of $60,000/month increased to over $183,000!
- Webinar conversions dropped slightly from 8.7 percent to 7.8 percent, although this shortfall was more than compensated for by the 35 percent plus increase in sales price.
- Estimated monthly ad cost savings of $3000 (annualized at over $30,000).
The increased sales were due to:
- Improvement in webinar attendance rates: The use of SMS reminders and dynamic Facebook ad retargeting, as well as offering more time slots boosted attendance to 61 percent of registrants.
- Conversion of “lost” leads into sales: The cart abandonment sequence recovered potentially lost sales and helped improve overall conversion from 9.6 percent to 14.7 percent.
- A dramatic improvement in email delivery and open rates: Our campaign dynamically tracked the overall engagement levels of the list, isolating contacts that had either never engaged or not engaged for over 120 days from future email communication. This resulted in around 34 percent of the list being quarantined and increasing open rates to 43 percent. Click-through rates have also risen from around 1 percent to 2.8 percent (More clicks and opens = more sales!)
- An increase in back-end sales: Although the results are not yet statistically conclusive, we have added a “4-Day Cash Machine” promo to anyone who doesn’t purchase after the webinar. In the first seven days of going “live”, it has generated nearly $3000 in sales.
Other major benefits of the solution included:
- Cost savings: The client has benefited from a lower monthly Infusionsoft subscription, as well as a lower ad spend through more focused targeting (we dynamically update Lookalike audiences based on buyers, which has already brought the CPA of a webinar registrant down by 9.3 percent)
We are now running several split tests, including the registration page and two simultaneous versions of the webinar presentation, to further optimize the sales funnel.
- We are building out two more campaigns that non buyers will automatically drop into after the webinar.
- We expect to improve on sales revenues (without additional ad spend), as we add more campaigns and promotions for the client.
Summary.
