Finding $221,075 in New Revenue For Entrepreneur on Fire

SUMMARY

The Client
John Lee Dumas of EOFire sold over $2,137,739 in online courses this year. He’s a great example of how being generous with free stuff can be extremely profitable, giving away a steady stream of content to bring in leads and drive sales. The problem isーhe had no idea which content impacted revenue the most, or where he was just wasting valuable time and energy.

How He Used SegMetrics
For all its strengths, Infusionsoft doesn’t provide clear, actionable reports to help optimize EOFire’s marketing. So John turned to SegMetrics to pull back the curtain on where revenue was REALLY coming from, get unprecedented insight on his audience, and find new opportunities to super-charge sales.

The Results
With just a few reports in SegMetrics, John was able to finally get answers to critical questions about his marketing. Now he’s got a plan to add $221,075 to his annual revenueーsimply by making some changes to his free content strategy. EOFire can finally set measurable marketing goals and stay in touch with their progress.

John Lee Dumas, founder of Entrepreneur on Fire (EOFire), had a problem.

His business was churning out valuable content for his target customers — but he couldn’t tell which pieces were lighting the way, leading to valuable sales… and which were just dead weight.

EOFire brought in over $4 million in gross revenue in 2015, so clearly something was working, but with several free email courses, automated webinars, and dozens of PDF downloads, figuring out which pieces were most valuable felt next to impossible.

Yes, he could measure how popular each of these lead magnets were, but he wasn’t able to see if they were bringing in valuable leads, or just looky-loos.

John and his team were using InfusionSoft to handle their marketing automation, and were happy with all of the features and capabilities it offered them, however it was missing clear, actionable reports to help them really optimize EOFire’s marketing.

That led John to SegMetrics.

By connection SegMetrics to his Infusionsoft account, he was able to pull back the curtain on where revenue was REALLY coming from, get unprecedented insight into his audience, and find new opportunities to super-charge sales.

A Look at EOFire’s Content Marketing Funnels

At EOFire, John used a traditional content marketing funnel to drive leads from free products to his paid courses. He uses three different types of free products as lead magnets — free email courses, automated webinars, and PDF Downloads — giving them away in exchange for a lead’s email address.

His various giveaways are promoted on his website and he regularly mentions them during his podcast.

Each time someone signs up for a course, webinar, or PDF, they are tagged with a corresponding lead source tag as part of Infusionsoft’s marketing automation system.

This enabled John to see some basic numbers on how many people were opting in for each of these tools, but he couldn’t tell how much those leads were worth — or easily track how many would ultimately convert into sales.

From Questions to $221,075 in Additional Opportunities

When John turned to SegMetrics he had several specific questions in mind:

1. Are free email courses really worth all the time and effort it takes to create them?
2. How effective are Automated Webinars at driving sales compared with his other lead sources?
3. Were some PDF giveaways more valuable than others? Which were most valuable?
4. How could he change his marketing automation to boost revenue?

John designed a handful of reports in SegMetrics to help him answer these four questions.

The results?

EOFire found a number of opportunities to improve his marketing for a projected $221,075 in additional sales—just by leveraging existing free content more effectively.

“SegMetrics is hands down the best analytics tool for Infusionsoft.”
John Lee Dumas ー Founder of EOFire

Introducing SegMetrics: How Did EOFire’s Marketing Stack Up?

SegMetrics works off of your CRM’s existing tagging system (with a lot of extra magic behind the scenes). This allowed John and his team to integrate SegMetrics into their existing system and quickly generate new reports on the dollar value each type of lead magnet — even on their historical data from previous years.

The first question they wanted to answer for each marketing piece was whether it was actually effective. That is, were leads who signed up for each type of content more valuable than leads who hadn’t?

To find this out, John and his team created a report for each type of marketing content they offered to determine the lead value for a lead who had opted in to that particular type of content vs. leads who had not.

They started by looking at their Free Email Courses. With SegMetrics he was able to set up a report based on his existing email course tags.

This allowed him determine that leads who signed up for a free email course were worth an average of $41.67.

By creating a second report, excluding those leads, he could then compare people who did a free email course with those leads who hadn’t. This showed him that those contacts that didn’t sign up for an email course were worth an average of $19.11.

By comparing the two reports John determined leads who did a free email course were more than twice as valuable as leads who didn’t.

This meant that his free email courses were doing their job and generating a significant return on investment.

• The average value of leads who signed up for one of EOFire’s free courses was $41.67.
• The value of leads who didn’t sign up was $19.11.
• This means:

Email Course leads are 118% more valuable than those who didn’t sign up for a free course

Comparing Marketing Channels: Which Giveaways Work Best?

John was able to easily create the same type of reports for his webinars, using his existing lead source tags.

Running these reports showed him that his webinars were also offering him a significant positive return on investment.

• The average value of leads who signed up for on of EOFire’s Webinars was $81.05.
• The value of leads who didn’t sign up was $23.66.
• That means Webinar Attendees are 243% more valuable than those who didn’t attend a webinar.

But, more importantly, it allowed him to objectively compare these two different types of content to each other.

• Leads who registered for the webinar have an average value of $81.05
• Leads who sign up for an email course are worth $41.67 on average
• That means webinar leads are 95% more valuable than Email Course leads.

There was one additional piece of information he needed to consider before he could truly put this information to good use.

While 21,617 leads signed up for email courses, only 4,081 have registered for the webinars.

So while webinars are extremely high-converting, they bring in fewer leads overall. That will need to be taken into account as John sets his goals for the future.

Still, he and his team can feel confident relying on both tools and focus on promoting them to more people.

Having these numbers also means they can now further analyze this data to project future profits. But more on that in a minute.

Looking at PDF Downloads: Are They All Created Equal?

While SegMetrics allowed EOFire to compare different aspects of their marketing, it also allowed them to take a deeper dive within each specific content type to identify which specific pieces of content were most effective.

Over the years, EOFire has created dozens of different free PDF downloads.

Using Infusionsoft, they could see how many leads each brought in and determine which PDFs were bringing in the most leads — but they couldn’t tell how valuable those leads actually were.

That’s where SegMetrics comes in.

Just as they do for webinars and email courses, EOFire applies an Infusionsoft lead source tag every time somebody downloads a PDF.

Using SegMetrics, John was able to generate a report with ALL of the PDFs he wanted to analyze and compare them.

Looking at the Table Reports for these PDFs, he was able to see all kinds of key metrics for each one.

While on average, the PDFs aren’t performing at the same level as EOFire’s other free content, they were still producing a positive ROI.

• The Average Lead Value from PDF downloads is $40.44.
• The average value of people who haven’t downloaded a PDF drops to $25.36
• That means leads who download a PDF are 59% more valuable.

But that’s not the full story.

It’s easy to write off PDFs as a comparatively weak lead magnet when comparing their average value to that of Email Courses and Webinars.

Using the Table Reports feature available in SegMetrics we’re able to take a closer look — which allows us to see that some PDFs are 2X as valuable as the average!

Three PDFs in particular stand out:

• KT Burnout Template has a value of $114.75
• The 4 Essential Principles Cheat Sheet has a value of $113.10
• Top 5 Reasons Podcasting is Exploding $100.13

Now John and EOFire can see exactly which PDFs are the clear winners — and can see how these leading PDFs compare to his other types of content.

Going From Insights to ROI: Creating a Dramatic Boost in Revenue

While knowing all of this can help John prioritize which types of content and which specific pieces of content he should promote, and how heavily, it also allows him to project how much revenue EOFire can generate if it invests in additional marketing.

This is where the real value of this data comes into play.

Because he knows how valuable each type of lead is, he can identify where the largest opportunities for new growth are and set new goals for each type of content.

For example, 39% of EOFire’s leads joined one of their free email courses.

If John could increase the percentage of leads that join a free course from 39% to 49% — that would add $126,424 in revenue over the next year.

That’s six figures of additional revenue that doesn’t require hours of planning, promotion and brand new content… Just giving away existing content to more people!

Using this same logic allows John Lee Dumas to set a new actionable lead gen goal for his webinars too. Getting just 1,000 more people to sign up for the webinar per month could drive a $57,390 increase in revenue!

And finally, look at the data SegMetrics provided on his PDFs, John can determine that if EOFire swaps low-converting PDFs with their highest-converting ones and raise their average lead value by just 10%, they’ll increase annual revenue by $37,261!

Not only did SegMetrics give John Lee Dumas the clarity on his marketing automation that he’s wanted for years, every aspect of EOFire’s funnels can now be reliably measured—and by extension, improved.

Achieving just these three new, actionable goals creates a projected $221,075 in additional revenue.

Interested in finding out the true value of your lead sources? How about finding revenue-boosting opportunities buried in your funnels, the way EOFire did?