Evergreen Empire, Part 2: The Blueprint for Passive Profits | The Growth Booth #91

Aidan 

Welcome back to The Growth Booth. This is episode number 91. A couple of weeks ago on episode number 89, I had Allison Hoyt, our CMO, join us to start talking about evergreen sales funnels. If you missed that episode, you can go and check it out. Again, it's episode number 89, you can find it over at thegrowthbooth.com, and in that episode, we sort of laid a foundation to what some of the important parts of an evergreen funnel are, and indeed, what an evergreen funnel actually is. We spoke about the types of funnels you can use, how webinars fit into the process, and how you can build a very, very simple funnel if you want to, and it could work for almost any product or niche that you can possibly imagine. Now, this is the second part of that interview, and we're going to get a little bit more granular today. We want to give you a little bit more information about some of the steps and some tips and different things to consider. So with that in mind, Allison, thank you for joining me here again today.

Allison 

Thanks for having me back.

Aidan 

Let's get straight down into the operations of setting one of these things up. What are the steps that someone would need to go through in order to start building out their funnel?

Allison 

So in the last episode, we talked a lot about your landing page and your registration pages, how it is nice if you have something or you can create something, to create a lead magnet. That is something that you can give away for free, whether it be a one-pager or a video, infographic, report. You start at the very top of the funnel: you need an awesome freebie, so something that people are going to see through ads or see on your page and say "I need that. I will give you my email address, I will sign up for the event just because that sounds interesting." It's to attract the person, and it should be very similar to the topic that you'll be talking about or something that complements the topic that the sales offer or what you'll be talking about in a webinar is.

If your paid product is a course on email marketing, your lead magnet might be Email Deliverability Tips For 2023. Or if your product is a photography business, your lead magnet, may be the Top 10 Photography Hacks You Need To Know. This also can relate to an affiliate offer. So if you're doing a lead gen into a product or an offer that isn't yours, you still do a lead magnet that can relate to that. It can be an affiliate offer about, I don't know, dog walking, and then your lead magnet can be something about like Best Places To Walk Your Dog In 2023. Whatever it is, it should link close to what your offer is and what you're trying to sell them, whether it's yours or an affiliate offer.

Aidan 

When we're talking about a lead magnet, just to really hammer this home, we're talking about something that someone who lands on your website can get for free. This whole lead magnet name is, essentially, you're attracting them in, you're giving them something of value that they want, and trying to advance the sale, the eventual sale, because in the lead magnet, there's probably going to be nothing to buy but reports like The Seven Most Common Mistakes When Trying To Teach Your Kids To Sleep Through The Night, or, you know, and we know plenty about that, Allison, we've both got young kids. But something to advance the sale, and I would say something to overdeliver in a big way. Because if you get a lead magnet, and you're like, "Oh wow, this is amazing content. I would have paid for this," then what's happening is the person that's consuming that content, when eventually presented with something that they can buy from you, they will remember "Oh yeah, this guy or this girl delivered great content. Imagine what I could get if I'm actually paying for it because they gave me amazing content when I was getting something for free."

I think these would be good considerations when putting a lead magnet together, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Just something super simple – it could be a one-pager with seven tips or seven common mistakes, or something like that related to your niche, and we can spit out a bunch of these. Now, if it's in the photography niche, The Seven Most Common Mistakes That Newbie Photographers Make, The Seven Most Powerful Hacks For Taking Photos With Your Smartphone, and this is the kind of thing that can be rinsed and repeated across almost every single niche. There's a great way that you can generate content for these types of things. Any ideas about how we can create the kind of content, the push of a button, Alison?

Allison 

Oh, just some AI tools that you could use that are out there everywhere now.

Aidan 

Exactly. Yeah. So AI tools, you can put a question in something like Chat GPT, as an example, "What are the seven most common mistakes that beginner photographers make?" It's going to give you a list, put them into a Word document, save it as a PDF, and you've got your lead magnet, and it's taken you all of a few minutes. Doesn't have to be more complicated than that. If you really want to make it fancy, you could get some AI-generated imagery to go on the front page of it. You've got something which has got even higher perceived value. So lead magnet, that's the first thing. What comes next?

Allison 

Yeah, so like Aidan said, it's never been easier. It's really just thinking of the topic that you want, and then it spit out for you. The second one is creating your landing page or your opt-in form. This is the page that the subscriber will see when they land on, when they click through an ad, or from a blog post or from an email, anywhere. Your lead magnet will be on this page. It's where they will sign up, enter their details. For a lot of people, I mean, this is the first impression that people are seeing of you, so it should look clean, straight to the point, have great copy, but also, this is the page that people are going to trust you to give your email address. We do know, I mean, that's the first obstacle. Yeah, of course, you want to sell them something, but in order to get their email, that's always going to be the first step because a lot of people just don't trust that and don't want to do that anymore. Really promoting that lead magnet on that page and making it really prominent and making it something that people, again, will trust and want to put their email in.

Aidan 

Right. If we think about how we could create a landing page, in its simplest form, you mentioned keeping it nice and clean. A way that I like to think about it all the time is "Less is more" because the more information you have on there, the more chances there are that people are going to be distracted, and the more chances that you may actually turn them off your offer, whereas if you've got just one headline, and maybe a very brief sub headline, or a one-liner paragraph type thing after that, and then an opt-in box, that will normally, in my experience, out-perform more complex, more detailed pages.

I think one of the reasons here is distraction. Distraction also means not having unnecessary links, outbound links, and things like this. You want to give people one simple task to do that they need to do, and that is to provide the information that's at the core of building a landing page. And then these items that make it more trustworthy and professional, important as well, because that's going to lead to a higher conversion rate. So what are some of the things that come to mind, Allison, when thinking about ways that we can make a page more professional or have more credibility?

Allison 

I definitely am big about doing an About at the bottom. I know when we promote, especially people may not know who you are, they might not know your credentials. So to get even, it's not just about the sale, it's to get your information, they're giving you their information and saying "You can contact me." Part of it, to make it better converting and more trustworthy is to give an About, what you've done. Like you said, make it clean. If you've been on some people who are promoting products, or working with someone that has done interviews on CNN, or Yahoo business or whatnot, put all the logos on where they've done interviews, anything to just make it more trustworthy and know that that person is known, and more comfortable for the user.

Aidan 

I think from a visual element as well. Oftentimes, we talked about having a really good domain name, and I would say a .com has always been more credible, in my opinion, than a .net or a .org, or something else. And to your point, if you're selling your product as an affiliate, you're using a lead page as part of a funnel that you're building up as an affiliate. Chances are the product vendor has got some street cred, and they may have been on these interviews, like you were mentioning. We can lean on that credibility by simply including things if it's true and potentially happen, of course, as seen on such and such.

So, the landing pages, pretty simple, don't overthink them. There are lots of different tools that you can use out there. To do these, we've got one called Float Funnels, which you can get as the top tier plan in Float Hosting, which you can find out more about by going to floathosting.com. But there are a lot of different landing pages, landing page builders that you can use. You're not trying to build something overly complicated. The point is just to sort of get it done and have the sequence ready.

What else have we got there? Anything else on landing pages?

Allison 

No, I think that's it. Like you said, just keep it clean and short. The main thing is that you have one goal: get them to sign up and not trying to link off to a ton of different pages.

Aidan 

So we've got that goal, trying to get them to sign up. They've signed up, we've got the email. What's the goal of the email? What's the objective? Why is the email so important?

Allison 

So the email sequence afterwards, I mean, there's so many, this is to me like, it doesn't have to be complicated, because again, once you have it, and you have it laid out, but there are so many things that you're trying to do once somebody signs up. The first welcome email that they get is the first email they received from you. Of course, it's hard with autoresponders right now and inboxes, actually, to inbox right away, but you want to try to keep it out of the spam box. You want to keep it clean, you want to keep it engaging, you want an engaging subject line, engaging content, like this is the first time they're hearing from you. You want it to be thoughtful and full of good information. Any emails that you send them after they register, it's along the lines of what we said about the lead magnet, like you don't want to just give them good information when they pay for something. You want to give them good content and useful content to get them to trust you and to want to buy from you and show that you're giving them something beforehand.

You want it to be automated. Everything about this is about being automated. You want no specific times unless you're going to make that dynamic and ever changing, but you want it to be automated so that's not something that you have to go in and fix all the time. If it's a limited time offer, even with evergreen, you can make it limited time, you could say like "In a week, this is closing." You're not saying the date, you're just forever saying that this is the scarcity of the offer. There's a lot of things that you can do in that email sequence for them to hear from you, and to make it engaging and trustworthy, but also like that scarce, like you have to buy now.

Aidan 

You shared a couple of things that I think are really important there, one being that the very first email that you send as part of your funnel, it's really important that that one gets opened. Ideally, it's got a link in it that people can click on because if someone opens the very first email that you send them, and they actually click a link on it, then that is going to help you land in the inbox much, much more easily, and subsequent future emails that you send them. I think the easiest way to do this is you're making a promise when they are landing on your landing page, you're offering a lead magnet of some kind, and then it's just delivering it straightaway. And then in automated fashion, make sure that the subject line of that email ties back to whatever it was that you promised them.

So if you've promised them a free report sharing the seven most common reasons why dogs bark or something, then the subject line might be "Here's Your Free Report, The Seven Most Common Reasons Revealed". That might be a subject line, and then right at the top of the email, you'll have a link that they can click to get the report. You're achieving multiple things, that you're getting an open and a click, and that really boiled down to the basics as a good starting point.

In terms of what you can put in your email, just like you can use AI tools to create content for a lead magnet, you can use AI tools to write your emails. In fact, and SendPad, which you can see at sendpad.com, it's got AI functionality built into it already. You can simply use the AI functionality without even needing to use Chat GPT or anything. You just tell SendPad what you want an email to be about, and it will craft an email for you, and then you can just tweak it if you want to, or not at all.

So in terms of the content for the email and what to put, I think that's pretty simple. That email itself, I prefer not to have too many images and things like that in my emails. I normally just have them in a gray box, essentially. Very, very simple, minimalistic, I would say, and they tend to work really well. The other benefit is you're making it as easy as possible on yourself. You're more likely to be able to get it done in a timely manner. The goal is to get these leads coming in, provide them with what you promised them, get them engaged. What are some of the things that we can do to help people stay engaged, Allison? I mean, if they don't open an email, should we send them more emails? Do we change the hook, the subject line? What are some of the things we can do there?

Allison 

Yeah, I think it's important to A/B test and send them different emails, whether it be a different angle, or maybe it's that they are clicking, but they're not doing anything else that you ask, like once they're on, they're not buying. Maybe it's sending them a different kind of page. I think that what you do is continue to just find different ways to try to hit them, whether it be through emails, or if you collected their phone numbers, sending them text messages, or if you are doing push notifications, whatever way that you could still get in front of them. Your main goal is the thing that you had them sign up for. But I definitely think, just like we had said about who is your audience and how are you talking to people, some people will respond to some subject lines, and some people won't. I think the people that are opening and engaging, that's great, but for the non-openers, you can be sending them things, you can try different subject lines. If they're opening, but not clicking, you can try different content within. I think there's a ton of things to test within emails and within the email sequence to try to get people to engage and get excited.

Aidan 

One of the easiest things that you can do is if you've got an email going out on the first day that they are part of the funnel, and the recipient doesn't open that email the very next day, you could send out another email. It could be the same email, just with a different subject line, but only to that group of people that didn't actually open the email. Just by adding that, and typically, you might go from, you know, 50%, 60% open rate up to 70%, 80% open rate, which is like hugely different. Remember, this is still fairly near the top of the funnel. So that's one tip.

Personalization is a big one, so maybe using the person's name in the subject line. "Hey, John, I think you missed this." As you know, the second email, if they didn't open, something that can help a lot as well. Again, you don't have to get too complicated here. We always come in and recommend that you build a funnel and you build out the basic structure in the most simple way first, and then you can begin to optimize. 

In terms of the sequence, could you share an example of what might work for an email sequence as part of a funnel? Obviously, there are dozens of ways that you could go here, lots of different things you could do, but just to sort of plant the seed with people and give them an idea, what's an example sequence?

Allison 

I think whether or not the subscriber attends the webinar or takes action, the action that you want them to the funnel is not complete. Once they sign up, once they attend all the time, whether they become a buyer or not, there are so many opportunities to still engage them and sell them. A lot of the things that you can do is after the webinar is over, there's encores you can send them, they can sign up for a different time, like, "Hey, we're playing an encore. Again, sign up." There's replays where you can send them a replay page and say, "Hey, you attended, but…" These are the non-buyers, so you send them a replay page and say, "Hey, check this out again." Maybe they have controls over the video now so they can kind of go through at their own pace.

What I like to do is really segment out and it gets a little bit more granular. So like Aidan mentioned, maybe this isn't something you do at first, but once you do start segmenting, you send different emails to your non-buyers, to the people who attended the entire time, to the people who only attended 20 minutes if it was an hour webinar, to the no-shows. You talk to everybody a little bit differently, because I'd love to say it's like a one-size fit all, but every single person, every group took a different action. So there's different tactics that you could take to each group. You could also remarket them, whether it's through Facebook or Google or Instagram, anywhere you can remarket to people that maybe attended but didn't buy or clicked on your product page and didn't buy. If all else fails, in the very end, after you've sent them a ton of your stuff, after you've kept them solely in the funnel for this product, try to sell them something else, whether it's this product, whether it's an affiliate offer, there are so many things out there that maybe they're not interested in that, or they're not interested in spending that much, or they didn't see the value in this, but they definitely could still be great and being interested in something else that you have to offer.

Aidan 

I'm going to definitely recommend that people head go over to The Growth Booth number 91 and download the transcript because Allison is just dropping so much value here. I think it'd be valuable for everyone to be able to download that transcript, which you can get for free by the way, and just go through it, just have a look through it, and note down these key ideas that she's mentioning here, because this is gold dust. I mean, this is decades of experience in building funnels. So again, you can do that, just like you can do with every single episode that we put out on The Growth Booth. Just head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to the page, in this case, episode number 91, and download the transcript for free so you can get all the notes, or just listen to the replay of it again.

Now, the next thing that I want us to talk about, which is really scary, I think, for some people is this idea of tracking, because we know it's vitally important. I can remember the first time I made a funnel thinking, "Oh, my God, this tracking is too complicated. I'm never going to be able to do this. How do I do this?" So maybe as a starting point, we can just share with people what are the absolutely vital things that you should be tracking. If you could only track three, four, or five different items, what would they be? And then we could talk about some of the ways that we can set this up.

Allison 

Yeah, tracking is scary, because like Aidan mentioned, if it's not all buttoned up, if your pixels aren't firing correctly, you could think something's going great and it's not. You could spend a lot of money. So the main goals, if you are running ads for this, the main goal is to not only know which ad and ad groups produce leads, but which leads from these ads and ad groups produced actual sales. Because you could think that leads are good because they're cheap, but if they don't convert to a sale, they're actually the higher priced ones are better, and you're actually spending and wasting more money. At the end of the day, it's all about the revenue and the money that you're making from it.

Aidan 

So being able to identify which leads, which traffic that comes in, turns into a paying customer, which traffic actually makes you money. That's the key thing to be working on.

Allison 

I think so. And you can be doing that just through Google Analytics, if you set up your correct goals, which is free to use. You could track the specific landing page URLs in there, and that's something that could simply do that for you. Or there's bigger tracking platforms like TUNE Marketing and things like that, where you could track your funnel more, but for just getting started, Google Analytics is perfect. You could be tracking the user that comes on if they become a lead, what they're doing on your list, and like Aidan said, if they become a sale. If not, you could track opens and clicks and things in their engagement through your autoresponder. A huge thing is you want to know exactly where they're coming from and what those leads are doing.

Aidan 

Yeah, I know that when I first got into tracking funnels, I was using Google Analytics. It's a great tool. There's also a lot of people that know how to use Google Analytics, so if you're not familiar with how to do it, then just get someone else to do it for you, probably for $10, $15, hiring someone on fiverr.com or on upwork.com. You can just get someone come in and have it all set up for you. So again, if this is something that does seem a little bit complicated, then seek some help or just try to set things up in the most simple way possible.

What are some of the other KPIs then that we like to look at in our funnels with the tracking?

Allison 

Well, a lot of things could be determined, like what you should be testing next. I like to look at open rates and click through rates as well. That tells you how engaged the leads in that you're actually bringing, because if they're opening like 5%, you're not really going to expect them to buy anything, or maybe they're opening and not clicking, so that tells you the different things that you should test.

As far as ads go, you're going to be looking at click through rate, and you're going to be looking at conversion rate. Obviously, that's big, because different metrics that you're looking at. Like for ads, for example, that's going to tell you if you should change the copy on your ads, if it's the landing pages that's the issue, like we're getting a huge, crazy high click through rate. Is it not linking well with the copy that you have on the landing page? There's something wrong with the landing page, is tracking wrong? Or is it just not resonating with people? And if you're not getting a high click through rate to actually get people to the landing page, then it's probably the copy that you're promoting for the ads. So it's interesting because you can look at so many things, and that will help you determine the issue and what you should be working on next in terms of testing.

Aidan 

Yeah, I think tracking is just absolutely vital for any kind of marketing that you're doing. Even if you're doing search engine optimization, for example, if you've got tracking in place, you can do forensic analysis as to why something is working or something isn't working. It's just a great way to keep your finger on the pulse. You can start out by just sort of dipping your toes in the water kind of thing and tracking some core metrics, and then you can get much, much more granular in the optimization phase. But typically, with funnels, you're starting off slowly, for the most part. If you're spending money or spending a small amount of money so you can make sure things are working, if you've got a budget of $5 a day or $10 a day or something, you're going to get traffic and you're going to be able to see if that's working, and then you can start learning a little bit more.

I've always found the best way to learn and get interested in something is when you're actually doing it. When you've got skin in the game, so to speak, that sort of forces you to learn. If you're spending a little bit of money or doing things with search engine optimization, you're going to be able to see traffic. Again, keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually happening there. So, again, I think we could probably do an entire episode on tracking. I'll note that down.

Allison 

I feel like there's a whole topic about that.

Aidan 

Yeah. I think to wrap up, I would like to leave people with a little bit of motivation and just encourage people to build out a funnel. It doesn't have to be complicated. You can do it in a simple way. You can lean on a lot of these different AI tools out there, like I mentioned, SendPad has got AI built into it. Already got ChatGPT, which you can use for free, obviously. Keep it super, super simple.

How about you, Allison, last minute thoughts, anything that we've missed that we should be adding in here for now?

Allison 

I think that just, evergreen funnels are so powerful. It takes a lot of testing, and like Aidan said, you don't have to start with a huge budget, you don't have to start with a crazy funnel, but just outline it, make sure everything's clear, your goals are in mind, and test and find the exact combination of emails and frequency and offers. I think that you'll find that it can create like an automated passive income for you, something that you spend time on that you get to just keep running and see how it works.

Aidan 

Yeah, fantastic. So there you have it, guys. If you want to learn more about funnels, and in fact, multimillion dollar funnels that we've set up in the past, and you can always go back in time to episode number 39 and 40 of The Growth Booth, which Allison and I put together around about a year ago, and get more good information there. And like I said, make sure you download the transcript as well. We will be coming back to some of these topics to dive into them more in the future, such as tracking and product design, and there's much more that we could talk about there. So thanks for tuning in.

Allison, thanks for coming in and just dropping so much value here today. It's always great to get you on the show.

Allison 

Thanks for having me.

Aidan 

All right, guys. That's a wrap. Head over to thegrowthbooth.com, find episode number 91. We'll make sure we include all the links to different products, tools, and of course, you can download the free transcript. If you want to watch the video version, you can watch it at thegrowthbooth.com or you can see it on YouTube, and of course you can listen to it wherever you like to listen to your podcasts. That's a wrap for this episode. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.