[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Sales and retargeting ads can be a gold mine for your business…
We’ve been able to generate hundreds of thousands and even a million dollars from abandoned cart ads that we only invested a few thousand of dollars into in ad spend!
But it only works if you already have a converting strategy in place.
If you don’t, you can throw up all the sales and retargeting ads you want, but they’re never going to work.
Wondering how you might be able to turn $1K into $100K, or even $1M like we have?
Then today’s episode is for you!
I’m sharing five tips on maximizing your sales and retargeting and letting you in on the exact same process we followed that generated those insane returns on ad spend.
If you implement any of the tips from this episode in your marketing shoot me a message on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) and tell me all about it!
If you need additional support with your sales and retargeting ads and other aspects of your marketing, head to helpmystrategy.com to see if you qualify to work with Team Hirsh.
Subscribe To & Review The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.
Emily Hirsh:
Hello everybody and welcome back to the podcast. If you could see me right now, you would probably be laughing. I am in San Diego with my family, and it’s hard to record podcasts on the go, doable, but hard. So I am sitting on the floor to get everything all set up, right, cause I don’t have a room with all your perfect desk and you got the microphone, but we’re here and I am here with you guys today. We’ve been doing a lot of traveling, which is weird because of COVID, but I came to San Diego like a month ago to visit my friend, this was a separately planned trip. And then my husband had a five day certification program that actually was still being put on and so he came here for that. And so I flew with my nanny and my kids, like a couple of days after he started his program, so that we could come and meet him and we’re going to the zoo tomorrow, all that fun stuff, but we have had these like a lot of trips. And so it’s kind of been interesting. I used to travel a lot like last year, but then I didn’t cause of COVID and now I’m like, okay, now I remember, you know, on the go you have to be so on top of content because doing things like recording podcasts is a little bit harder. So anyways, if you could see me right now, you would definitely be laughing, but isn’t this one of the gifts of having an online, remote business and all of that? So it’s amazing.
Today, what we’re going to talk about is maximizing your sales and retargeting. So this is step five of The Hirsh Process, the final step of the five step process, where what you look at really is maximizing all of the follow up that you have going on in your funnel. So after somebody gets through those first few steps, whether it’s a webinar, or a video series, or an application, whatever that is. Now, if you are a physical product or a SLO funnel, then you’re starting right with the sales and retargeting. Although, I shouldn’t say SLO funnel because that first product is oftentimes just lead generation. So with this, this is going to be after you have a lead and they’ve already been pitched an offer, whether that is a digital product offer, a physical product offer, a service offer. This is where you’re really trying to close that sale. And we’re going to talk about maximizing that retargeting and those sales strategies. All right.
So the first thing to make sure of, and it sounds basic, but most of the time people are lacking in this area, is to make sure you have enough follow up in place that you have an ecosystem of follow up – whether it’s emails, retargeting ads, social media posts, if it’s a live launch – where people cannot misunderstand what you’re selling, that it’s for sale right now, and ideally that there’s some form of urgency connected to that sale. Oftentimes I see people think they’ve talked about what they’re selling enough and they’re like, everybody knows, you know, I’ve sent out two emails, or I have this one follow up email or these two follow up emails after my webinars. So I think people already know what I sell and I talk about it and I’m afraid to talk about it more. And really though, people don’t pay attention to you as much as you think they do. So you most of the time need more follow up than you think you do, like probably double.
So if you have a sales period in a promo period after your webinar, let’s say it’s five days where there is either an open cart, or a price discount, or a bonus, or something there that you want people to take advantage of, which I recommend having. That’s one of the ways that you maximize your sales and retargeting is you have some form of urgency attached to it so you have some way that somebody’s like, they are really motivated to take action and not wait around for weeks and weeks. And so you’ve got to push that action. Okay. During that period, I would have for sure very specific retargeting ads running, which we will talk about more. I would also have an email at least every day, maybe multiple times, especially towards the end where the promo is ending, or the cart is closing, or whatever that discount is, bonus disappearing, whatever that urgency pushes. So making sure you have enough follow up in place.
What I also see sometimes is people focus really heavily on their lead generation and they focus on getting people in the webinar, or getting them to see the offer, or getting them to fill out the call application, or the sales application. And then they don’t put effort into this piece and they jumped to a whole different strategy, when instead and the better thing to do would be to maximize fully on this strategy that you have and really build out your sales and your retargeting so that it is very thorough, very good. The messaging goes deep, hits on objections, and somebody cannot miss and misunderstand that this offer is for sale. It’s for sale, now here’s why they should buy it and this is what it’s going to do for them. So the first step is making sure you have enough follow up, follow up emails, retargeting, anything that you are staying top of mind, especially during this promo period.
The next point is that you can improve your sales conversion by improving your messaging around your offer or improving your strategy that leads to your sale. So if you’re struggling, so let’s say you have a sales funnel, you’re getting webinar registrations. You’re getting those webinar registrants to actually watch your webinar and show up to that webinar, but you are not getting them to buy. So you have a gap with your actual sales piece. Now, if you’re not getting sales, the place to really look is your messaging. There is likely a misunderstanding or a gap where the lead is getting that far, and then you’re not successfully communicating to the lead why they should buy right now. A lot of times what happens is people talk about what the offer is. So they’ll talk about like it has 20 modules and it has, you know, bonus calls and information about this and this, but they don’t talk about what that offer does for them.
And what you have to remember is people really don’t care about what’s in the offer. They care about what that information will actually do for their business, or their life, or their health, or whatever it is. So if your sales is not converting and you are getting the leads, that’s an important piece. You can’t say it’s not converting if you’re not getting the leads to prove it’s not converting. So in this case, you’d be getting the leads. People are looking at your offer, they’re hearing your sales pitch and it’s not converting. What you should look at is your messaging around your offer as the first thing. So that’s the first thing I said. So your messaging, are you clearly articulating the benefits of the product, what it’s going to do for their life, for their business, for their health, why they should buy it now, really hitting on those pain points that that person is experiencing as they are listening or reading about your offer? Are you hitting those most likely there’s room for you to go deeper?
The other part B component to this is improving the strategy that leads into your sales. So what do I mean by that? I mean that typically you would have a lead up to that strategy. So that could be a webinar. It could be a challenge. It could be a video series, the content in that stream, in that strategy. So the actual webinar itself, or the videos and the video series, or the challenge, or the way that you have people participating in whatever it is could use improvement in order to position the sale better.
So a common mistake people make is the strategy leading up to the sales overwhelms the individual going through the experience and then they don’t buy. They get way too many of their questions answered and they feel like they have a list of things to go implement and so then they don’t buy the actual offer. So that’s a common mistake. And so you have to even back it up and look at the strategy, leading up to the sales to make sure that is positioning your offer in the best way possible. And so what you want that to do, that content, whether that’s webinars and, you know, video series, like I said, or challenge, you want that content to support the offer and actually make them feel like by the time they get to the offer that it’s their next step and they really, really need it.
And so, you know, we’re preparing right now for a launch. I just recorded a lot of the content for it. And what an important piece that I went through in all of the content was making sure that the video series correlated with the webinar and that the webinar was a perfect lead up to the offer. And we spend a lot of time thinking through the messaging of what does somebody need when they’re scrolling the Facebook feed and they’re going to sign up for this video series. What does that person then need after this? They go through video one, after they go through video two, like what’s the next progression, video three, okay, the webinar, and then the course that I’m selling has to be the next progression. And sometimes we mess this up. We overwhelm the lead. We give them too much to do. We’re not attracting them with the same problem that our offer solves. So that’s a common one, too. People will have a disconnect, they’’ll be attracting somebody at this stage of their life or business when their offer solves a different stage. And they have this disconnect of people coming in and then they’re not converting to their offer because they’re attracting the wrong person through the front end.
So if your sales is not converting, the two things to look at really right now are your messaging, how you’re positioning the offer. Are you really focused on the benefits, the hook, and also the pain points that that person is experiencing? Or is it the strategy leading up to that offer? That’s not necessarily putting it in the right place and is not really successfully laying the foundation for your offer and that being something that’s like an obvious next step for them. Okay. All right.
How else we maximize sales and retargeting is we incorporate strategic retargeting ads. So I don’t just mean here’s a common way that people do their sales ads is they’ll have one. So they’ll have a webinar and they’ll have one generic sales ad. And it’ll be like, this course is open, make sure you sign up before it expires or go and fill out your application, whatever, you know, whatever it means. Or let’s say it’s a product business, okay. It’s just straight to that product, which is good. We want that sales ad, but we can get much more granular by having sales ads. I would consider replay ads like to a webinar in this category, abandoned cart ads, application ads, abandoned application ads, testimonial ads, all the different places that you want somebody to take action after they have that initial touch point, you should be retargeting. So if someone lands on your sales page and doesn’t buy, you can have a specific ad for them with a video. If somebody goes all the way to your checkout page, same thing. If somebody signs up for your webinar and doesn’t watch your webinar, why don’t you retarget them back to the webinar so we can really get them to hear that content and hear that pitch? Because the likelihood of them buying, if they do that shoots up tremendously.
If you have a physical product and you know people are making it to your website, or making it to your offer sales page, but not buying, retarget them with abandoned cart ads. Or maybe they even bought one product and you want to retarget them to buy more to increase your average cart value. So really think through what are all the ways that I can get people either back to my offer to buy more of my offer, or to take the next step in the customer journey. Right? So if I sign up for a webinar and I don’t attend, the next step for me is I need to watch the webinar. So I’d have an ad for that. If I sign up for a webinar, I attend the webinar, I make it to the sales page, but I don’t buy. The next step is I need to buy. Same with if I make it to the cart page. And then when you create that, those ads and that content, keeping in mind how do I speak to those people based on where they are at in their customer journey?
So I know if somebody makes it all the way to a sales page and they don’t buy, then they need to have their objections knocked down. Obviously it wasn’t a priority for them. For whatever reason, they’re doubting the investment. They lost interest out of lack of time to buy. They don’t have the urgency because if they want it, they would have bought it. Right? So I need to push them over the edge. So speaking to objections, showing testimonials of people who maybe were hesitant to buy, but then did buy, or talking about how time is running out and it won’t take them a lot of time to sign up, but make sure they do by this date. All of those type of things can be in the messaging of this retargeting to just increase the chance of the lead actually finishing the action you want them to take, which is buying. So that’s super important when you plan that.
Now on that note, I do want to say this. Your sales and retargeting, I look at it as icing on the cake to an already converting strategy. This is very important because here is what people hear when I say this. I go and speak about this and every time people love the retargeting strategies, cause they’re like, that’s brilliant. Like I want to do an abandoned cart ad with a video. I’m going to do it right now. And that’s great. These are brilliant strategies. We’ve literally had, you know, ads that have spent a thousand dollars and made hundreds of thousand dollars and even a million dollars from an abandoned cart ad because there’s such a hot, hot audience. So they are amazing, but if the strategy you are retargeting to and the offer you’re retargeting to is not already converting, the retargeting will not make a difference.
Here’s where it’s hard with retargeting because you think you need it. If you are spending a thousand, or a couple thousand dollars a month on Facebook ads, all of your budget really should go into getting people into the top of your funnel, whatever that is. If it’s a product, if it’s a webinar and opt in, your budget should go there because you need as many leads as possible to go through the top of that funnel in order to convert them. Where people make a mistake is they spread that budget and they say, okay, I’m going to spend $1,200 on my lead gen ads, I’m going to spend $500 on my retargeting ads and a couple hundred dollars on my visibility and engagement. The visibility brand awareness ads are good top of funnel ads. I would take all the retargeting budget and put it in there because your audience is not going to be big enough.
Let’s say you spend a thousand dollars. You paid $5 cost per lead. You don’t have enough leads to even retarget yet, so don’t worry and stress about having all this layered retargeting until you have a strategy that’s converting. So make this a future goal. And the reason I say it’s icing on the cake, because once you get your strategy to that level where you’re able to spend more and get more volume in your funnel and you add in retargeting, you start getting more sales. You start really increasing the return on your ad spend as you maximize on that to the fullest potential, but if you’re not getting enough people in the front end of the funnel, it’s just not going to work. And it’s actually, in most cases, Facebook doesn’t even spend the budget because you don’t get enough people really in there if it’s a couple hundred people that you can even target. Okay. So that’s important.
And I don’t think enough people talk about that because retargeting ads are always one of those kinds of sexy things that people are like so excited about. And so they use it as promotion, but I’m like, wait a second though, our foundation still has to be working. We still have to be getting enough volume of people in, use the email follow ups and all of that. But you may not need to focus on all of these granular retargeting ads if you only have a couple of hundred people that you can target it with. Okay.
The next point, I have two more main points to make about how to maximize on this, is the more specific you can get to objections then the more effective your sales will be. So using things, I kind of touched on this, but I really want you to think through using things like testimonials, or maybe it’s a private walkthrough of the behind the scenes of your course, or your program, or your Facebook group, or an example of something that you’re selling, creating this real time FOMO for somebody that they haven’t bought yet, but also nailing down any objection they might have. Which usually objections are time, money. They don’t think they can do it. You know, the confidence. So really you have to know your audience to know the biggest objections they have and then strategically use content, whether that’s you in the content, it’s testimonials in the content if you have them to knock down those objections. Don’t just have general sales ads and be like, go buy the product because it has, you know, six modules and two workbooks and it’s great. Like that’s not going to entice them. You have to go deeper to that emotional connection where you are really knocking down those objections. Okay.
The final piece to maximizing your sales and retargeting is making sure that you track your sales conversion and take note anywhere someone falls off. So what I want all of you to know is are they falling off on the webinar? Are they maybe not even getting to the webinar? Are they falling off when they apply for your sales call? And then they’re not qualified leads, they’re not getting approved. Are they falling off on the actual sales call? Are they falling off, they’re getting to the sales page and the checkout page, and then falling off for some reason?
You need to know the stats of, look at it as a journey of where that lead is going and all the steps they’re taking and when are they stopping? When are they dropping off, losing interest forgetting, not pushing the needle, not pressing go, when is that happening? And then you can fix it. So it’s very important to know your sales conversion, but then even more than that, kind of know as much as you can the journey that that person is taking.
So I want to point one thing out. So I had in our Ignite course, I answer sometimes personalized questions for people who turn in their pathway checklists, like they’re making progress in the course once a month, we do like a shout out. And if you put your screenshot, I will give you a personal video answer to your question. And somebody asked me a question recently, where they wanted to know how to scale their ad spend or scale their profit up to $15K. And they were splitting their budget through an optin and a webinar, and they had their tracker filled out. And so I was able to look at that, but one thing I told her to do was she had 24 sales and I said, if you can go into those sales and figure out out of those 24 people, how many of them went to your opt-in and your webinar? How many of them just came from your webinar? Like, what was their student.. their path? I said student path, what was their lead path to becoming a buyer? What content did they consume to then move to the next place and ultimately take action?
We do the same thing. So when we get an application we manually go in and it’s not that hard. If you have the tagging set up, my VA goes in and she will look at the last place that they signed up for something. So they signed up for our Hirsh Marketing Report, or one of our opt-ins, or our automated webinar, or podcast secret series. She’ll put the avenue that they last came from and if they’re cold or warm traffic. They’re cold traffic, they were not on our list. Warm traffic, they’ve previously been on our list. This allows us to see what pathways are working the best.
So her question to me, this student, was should I put all my money in my webinar, or do I need to keep doing my opt-in retargeting those people to the webinar? I said, I don’t know. Go look at those 24 people who bought from you and you answer that question with the journey that they took. Are they going opt-in to webinar to sale? If so, yes, keep doing that because that means they need that much nurturing to get to your offer. Are people coming to you… are 70% plus of the people coming in from your webinar and they don’t need the opt-in and then they’re converting to your sale? Okay, put your budget into your webinar.
So knowing that student pathway, which sometimes doesn’t just come, I keep saying student pathway, that lead pathway or that customer journey and the steps all of them are taking. It sometimes doesn’t just come from even the numbers. It comes from actually going in and looking at the journey they took and the exact actions that they took all the way through and looking in your backend at that, which isn’t that hard, especially if you don’t have, you know, thousands of people to look through. You can go through and do that research and you might learn a lot from that. So that’s my last tip on maximizing your sales and retargeting.
Thank you so much for tuning in with me today, guys. Now I did talk about all of those strategic retargeting ads. There’s so many that you can get and get granular with it and strategic with it, and that’s something that you should be really delegating, in my opinion, to somebody else. So if you would like support with that, you can go to helpmystrategy.com to see if you qualify to work with Team Hirsh and I’ll catch you guys on the next episode.