Meet Seminal | How a blockbuster media company understands their customer journey
Seminal is a media company that is a leader in creating amazing, expert-focused content. They are phenomenal at teaching entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and thought leaders how to create blockbuster content for niche audiences and become recognized experts.
Understanding where visitors come from, how they interact with content, and how they go through the customer journey is core to optimizing the performance of those blockbuster articles and deciding where to focus Seminal’s marketing efforts and dollars.
Frustrated with Infusionsoft’s reporting
The Seminal team uses Infusionsoft to manage their marketing funnels. While they found it worked well for communicating with their customers, creating the reports they needed to actually understand their customers and optimize their marketing was difficult and time-consuming.
“It took us so much time doing the manual reporting with Infusionsoft because it’s not intuitive. It was such a pain. It was hours and hours of work that wasn’t even guaranteed to pull the right reports. We needed a better way to not only do reporting, but also attribute our marketing.”
— Ian Chew, Founding Executive, Seminal
Seminal had explored other tools to help them with reporting and attribution, but didn’t find one that quite fit their needs. While they saw other tools targeted at enterprise-level and large eCommerce companies, Seminal wanted a platform that catered to info-product companies like them and that was built to integrate directly with Infusionsoft.
Although they saw the potential value of SegMetrics when they were introduced to it, the Seminal team still wasn’t sure if it would work out for them.
“We liked what we saw, but wondered, ‘Is this going to be what we need?’ We weren’t sure if we were going to use it consistently enough.”
— Ian Chew
Being able to see the data far more clearly and easily
Seminal has SegMetrics dashboards set up for their different products to show the metrics they need on a daily basis — number of leads coming in each day, where those leads are coming from, which campaigns are causing leads to convert into sales, cost per lead, and their return on ad spend.
Hana Abello, Seminal’s Social Media Ads Manager, helps manage ad campaigns for Seminal and was tasked with creating reports on key metrics. She says that being able to see everything on one page is very helpful, especially when she started working with Seminal and didn’t have much experience using Infusionsoft.
“SegMetrics is a very intuitive tool for beginners or for people that aren’t very familiar with Infusionsoft. The dashboards allow me to see everything in a matter of seconds. It helps me see the data clearly and make sense of it.”
— Hana Abello, Social Media Ads Manager, Seminal
Seminal is also starting to use SegMetrics for cohort analysis to analyze their retention and churn rates, which will help them better project their recurring revenue as well as forecast future sales and launches.
More clarity leads to better decisions and more efficient spending
After using SegMetrics for more than a year, the Seminal team has not only saved a ton of time and frustration with reporting, but they are also able to more accurately attribute where leads are coming from.
“Before, we couldn’t track UTM parameters, where the customer is, or where the leads are coming from. After we started using the attribution code from SegMetrics and added it to our sales pages and lead forms, we could see it in Infusionsoft on the backend. It’s made reporting and attributing a lot easier.”
— Hana Abello
The data Seminal is now able to clearly see helps the team make decisions to spend advertising dollars more efficiently when they are about to launch a new campaign or pick a current campaign to double down on. Ian says the main benefit of SegMetrics is the increased clarity of what’s happening in the business on a daily basis.
“Frankly, not having the visibility in the business that we get in the day-to-day reports through SegMetrics would be pretty scary. If you don’t have daily visibility into your back-end data and you don’t have the right attribution, you’re leaving a ton of money on the table. Without that clarity, you could be making big mistakes that are really hurting your growth, and not even know it.We doubled our business since last year. Obviously there’s a lot that went into the process, but SegMetrics was a big part of it. Without the amount of clarity, I think it would have been a lot harder to get there.”
— Ian Chew
Seminal has found the underlying value of SegMetrics is being able to test and disprove assumptions around the media they use and not having to rely on opinions to make decisions.
Hana points to one example when she checked the attribution of sales for a particular month. There was an assumption that most of the sales from that month were coming from the Facebook ads Seminal was running, due to the high number of people being exposed to the offer and the dollars that were being invested.
“It would have made sense that most of the purchases for the month would come from Facebook ads. But when we looked at the data, it turned out that most came from email newsletters that we sent. The value of those customers was higher. I think it allowed us to really appreciate email — to do more email campaigns and focus on building relationships with our existing leads.”
— Hana Abello
As Ian notes, having the clarity and confidence that SegMetrics provides is crucial for a company that is serious about building a culture based on data and avoids shooting blind when making decisions about marketing campaigns and where to spend time and money.
“We have a compass to fall back on versus he says/she says. Instead of saying, ‘we think that’s the case, so maybe we should do another campaign,’ we say, ‘let’s look at the reports and see what the trend line is. ‘ We have clarity on exactly what we have to do, because we have the charts to back it up.”
— Ian Chew
Looking for an accurate compass to guide you on how to best spend your marketing dollars? Try SegMetrics for free for 14 days and see how it can help you find the hidden profits in your marketing funnels.