Category: Data Beats Opinion

Want to take your funnels to the next level? Well, we would highly recommend you check out Fran Kern’s Hardcore Scaling YouTube series.

If you don’t know Frank Kern, he’s a marketing legend. He has been one of the top guys for over twenty years, especially in the direct response world. Having come out strong through the various waves of internet marketing changes, he’s definitely a dude worth listening to.

In the series he drops consistent wisdom bombs about how to give your marketing a boost. 

You will also see him using SegMetrics to analyze his own key metrics and marketing performance. These metrics are critical to his method of looking at long-term performance, so we wanted to take you into more detail about exactly how SegMetrics gives you access to the key insights you need to pull off his new strategies.

Focusing on more than attention

Frank defines the four steps to a sale as:

1. Attention
2. Lead
3. Offer
4. Follow Up

He discusses how most modern marketers typically focus on the attention stage. They spend most of their energy on ad campaigns and landing pages, trying to maximize the number and cost of leads they’re bringing in.

Attention is great, but it’s only the tip of the sales iceberg.

The next three stages are where the real salesmanship kicks in. It’s building up the desire for your product or service, then helping them make the decision to buy.

Think of it like a car dealership. Getting people in the door is great, but won’t matter if nobody is being offered test drives and your sales technique is turning people off. Getting traffic from ads is the same, it’s only people arriving through the door.

Being Misled by Metrics

This focus on attention and traffic is reinforced by the tools marketers have had access to.

The data within Google Analytics and Facebook’s Ad Manager is mainly designed to look at the Attention stage. With limited tracking and short attribution windows, they can only measure the revenue associated with very simple sales processes, such as an impulse buy in an ecommerce store.

But you can’t measure the full journey with these tools if you’re running more complex sales processes, such as a 30 day email funnel, a subscription trial period or following up with a sales call.

If the only metric marketers can measure is Attention, then it’s no wonder it becomes our sole focus.

After all, any attempts to improve the Lead, Offer or Follow-Up stages feel like stabs in the dark if we can’t measure the impact. You might deploy a new email sequence, but it won’t feel as rewarding when you can’t measure the impact it has had on your sales.

So, that’s why it is crucial to analyze LTV with a tool like SegMetrics.

It lets you analyze the full customer journey across the 4 stages, no matter the funnel length. You can measure the LTV of every lead across weeks, months or years, plus you can see how different funnel strategies affect your revenue.

Want to know the key data Frank Kern looks for? Well keep on reading

Lesson #1: Stop focusing on cost per lead

Cost per lead (CPL) is the key criteria people discuss when evaluating ad campaigns. People will cut campaigns with a high CPL and boost ones with a low CPL.

But really, the only thing that matters is return on ad spend (RoAS).

Unfortunately, not all lead sources are created equally. Far too often, the campaign bringing in cheap leads isn’t actually bringing in customers. Meanwhile, the expensive leads are regularly making purchases. 

What you really need to do is measure RoAS, which campaigns are actually bringing in a return.

SegMetrics helps by: tracking visitors through your funnel, not just until they become leads

Lesson #2: Look at long term RoAS

Don’t be too over eager when looking at your RoAS.

We can’t expect everyone to instantly whip out their credit card and throw money at us. This is where the Follow Up stage comes in.

You need to be patient, giving leads the time they require to decide that yes, they do want your product.

That means your metrics need to be patient too.

Frank gives the example by looking at one of his own campaigns. When looking at the RoAS within 1 week of people clicking the ad, the RoAS was down at 20% suggesting they were wasting money.

But, he then expanded the view to 4 weeks and the RoAS jumped up to 200%! The leads were great, it was just that they needed a few weeks of follow-up before they purchased.

It is only by looking at the long-term RoAS that he was able to assess which ad campaigns were turning a profit.

SegMetrics helps by: tracking lifetime spending per lead, even if purchases happen offline or on a different platform

Lesson #3: Test your offer and follow up

Your follow-up strategy could be secretly losing you sales.

When was the last time you gave your sales funnel the same care and attention you give to your ad campaigns? It is always worth coming up with a new array of ideas to test.

Maybe your webinar topic is missing the mark, you could be better segmenting your list into different groups, or offering a sales call would boost conversions? There are plenty of opportunities to test.

But of course, you’ll want to measure more than just email click rates. Using a tool such as SegMetrics will let you see how each new idea affects the revenue per leads.

SegMetrics helps by: letting you A/B test whole sequences or strategies, along with seeing how different groups of leads respond to each idea

Suggestion #1: Upload lookalike audiences

You probably teach your AIs to send you more traffic like the people who met an initial goal like downloading the lead magnet.

But what if you could use a higher quality indicator? Like just the people who watched the full webinar, booked a sales call or read the full email sequence?

You can use SegMetrics to upload lookalike audiences based on any lead attribute such as actions they are tagged with.

It ties into Frank Kern’s methodology of Behavioral Dynamic Response.

It is all about carefully responding to the lead’s behavior and guiding them through to the sale, instead of just sticking all onto a conveyor belt.

Suggestion #2: Optimize for sales with Conversion Feeder

Even better than indicators of lead quality is knowing which leads made a purchase.

Tools such as SegMetrics’s Conversion Feeder can feed attribution data back to the ad AIs, even if they were outside the inbuilt attribution window.

That means the bots will know which ad clicks bought in actual revenue. They can optimize for traffic that turns into customers, not just leads.

If you then improve your follow-up, there will then be more data to feed the bots, letting them better refine the traffic, and causing a great big positive feedback loop.

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Optimizing your marketing means going beyond the Attention stage. And that means going beyond Google Analytics and Facebook’s Ad Manager, and using tools that allow you to track the full lifecycle of your customers.

When your tools limit you to only focusing on Attention metrics, then the only thing you can optimize for is Attention, and lose sight of the revenue sitting right beyond your key metrics. Without lifecycle attribution metrics, any attempts to improve the Lead, Offer or Follow-Up stages feel like stabs in the dark.

Get started with your free trial of SegMetrics today — and start getting the marketing insights you need to pull off the Hardcore Scaling strategies.

Recently Keith chatted with Dan McGaw, the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, formerly known as Effin Amazing, a marketing technology and analytics agency. Dan is also the creator of UTM.io, a campaign management and data governance tool.

McGaw (the guy, not the company) explains his process for his clients: where he starts, what he recommends for his new customers, and how he navigates the information he collects from that customer’s site analytics. Dan also discusses the process of measuring a business’s touchpoints and the significance of each touchpoint. 

A lot of what McGaw (the company, not the guy) does is help you with governance. What is governance? It’s like the glossary for your website, or even sometimes your entire company. How should an organization be referring to social media websites? What vocabulary should one be using in marketing copy and how can an entire company stay consistent with those words? Dan answers these questions and more. 

You’ll also hear Dan tease a second book while promoting his first, Build Cool Sh*t. Build Cool Sh*t is for the CEOs and the CMOs of a company; Dan skipped all the fluff and got right down to the information that marketers like you are seeking when you buy the guide. 

In this interview with Dan, you’ll learn about:

• The importance of governance
• The significance of measuring your business’s touchpoints
• Why accepting imperfection is key to understanding the limits of your data source
• Build Cool Sh*t, Dan’s first book

McGaw (the guy AND the company) can be found here: https://mcgaw.io/

We’re back with another episode of DBO with Keith Perhac. This week, Keith chats with Anansi’s Say Gabriel. Say’s main goal in life is to create cohesive systems that support strong communities.

Frustrated by watching stressed-out digital leaders get mired in constantly shoring up shoddy systems, Say set her focus to the digital world a decade ago, just as it was rising in impact on everyday life. Today, Say helps agency leaders troubleshoot and build strong marketing, operations, and admin systems.

In this interview, Keith and Say discuss:

• The importance of modifying your typical checklist SOP
• The differences and the benefits of both a top-down system and a bottom-up system
•  How she reduced her team’s revision process from 2-3 week to just 45 minutes

Say’s motto for her team is, “Done is the new perfect.” She believes failure is just the first step to success and she wants to get you just as excited as she is about effective processes and how they can not only help you, but they can help your team, your clients, your marketing, your sales, and so much more.

Find Say at:

• linkedin.com/in/sayatagabriel

• https://www.anansicontent.com/