590 – The Top Conversion Tips After 1.5 Billion Dollars In Sales And Retention Tips With Scott Desgrosseilliers From Wicked Reports

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Scott Desgrosseilliers

In the episode:

01:57 – What business owners need to know
04:13 – The trouble with multiple channels
09:47 – Implementing Wicked Reports
12:19 – A relentless onboarding scheme
18:17 – Other ways of keeping customers
20:19 – What about content marketing?
21:57 – Who should use the software?
25:14 – The mistakes people make
27:02 – Where the customers come from
31:20 – From prospect to customer
33:40 – The emails that shouldn’t have sold
37:46 – How it all started
39:55 – Parting advice for Wicked users

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 590 and we’re going to be talking about actionable reporting today. And for that I’ve brought on a special guest, a new friend of mine actually, only just met, Scott Degrosseilliers from Wicked Reports. Welcome to the call.

Scott: Thanks, James. Happy to be on here and a longtime listener, and it’s fun to be on the other side today.

James: Well, I’ve heard about you from a few different sources, and we can talk about attribution in a little more depth later.

I’ve heard about you from DigitalMarketer. I think they’ve been promoting you at some point. A friend of mine and a student has also referenced you as a friend. And then finally, after getting frustrated with not being able to get a clear picture of my own reporting, we brought on, I guess, a consultant. It’s a person who specializes in data analysis and bringing, sort of figuring out what’s going on behind the scenes. His name’s Mike Gelblicht, and I got him to help me solve this problem. And he suggested I get Wicked Reports. And so basically, that was the tipping point.

What business owners need to know

So we got it, we plugged in all the bits and pieces. And finally, after a little bit of mystery, we were able to figure out where the sales come from. And that was a very important thing for me to know as a business owner, and something that I think a lot of business owners are missing out on. Would you agree with that?

Scott: Yeah, I would, because you know, the tool’s at their disposal to try to reverse engineer where their customers came from, because ideally, you want to do more of what attracts good customers, each spot you go to look has its own biased opinion. I mean, it’s based on data and facts that they know, but they’re constructed not to answer your question of, Hey, where did I find my sale, but instead just sort of answer from that report, Hey, how have I helped you? And they’re trying to answer different questions than what the business owner needs to grow.

So people tend to come to us after they fiddle around Google Analytics, Facebook tracking, AdWords tracking. Then they get frustrated and they come to us, and usually that’s a good candidate for us to help out.

James: Right, and it probably is exasperated a little bit in the situation where someone like me is doing a fairly broad marketing in terms of multimedia. I’ve got a podcast, I’ve got Facebook videos and content marketing and some ads. I’ve got SEO working in my favor with all the website rankings. We’ve published the transcriptions on our website, we’ve got YouTube videos, we post stuff to LinkedIn, we have Twitter and Instagram. It can be a bit hard to know where those sales are coming from. And of course the heavy lifting behind the scenes with emails, automations and sequences.

And then the mysterious sales source that actually popped up as my second most significant sales source wasn’t necessarily on my radar, and I’m sure almost certainly isn’t on most people’s, and that was a total surprise, but it came out from the Wicked Report as being my help desk. There you go.

Scott: Yeah. Nice. So you have a strong implementation if you can track that, because when I was hearing you list them off, I was like, Well, yeah, you can track all those – that takes a little bit of initial discipline. It sounds like you have it if you tracked your help desk as well. That’s good to hear. I’ll have to reach out to your analytics guy, see if he wants to do a little show me, tell me on our site, because that’s cool to hear.

The trouble with multiple channels

I find that, yeah, if you’re doing that much different channels, you’re going to see that they’re all kind of claiming credit for your sales, because they’re only looking at what happened on those platforms. I mean, why would they care what happened on the other ones? And so you’re going to quickly find that if you add up all the sales counts from all those different channels, you’re going to have way more than the actual sales you had for a day. And that’s what I find with most everyone that comes to us, and then we have to bring them bring them back to reality with a fair attribution to show them not only where something worked, but why it worked, because otherwise you can’t translate it into action.

James: Yeah, so just to clarify that, I think what you’re saying is that, if I go into Facebook and I see a pixel conversion on a Facebook campaign, it’s not really taking into account that maybe the person came to that Facebook page from a blog post or from a YouTube video or from a podcast or somewhere else, and we’re only seeing that little part of the journey. And then if you compound that with the other factor which I think is significant, it’s the timing. We hear about things such as self-liquidating offers where people want to invest money and then get their money straight back from a specific campaign. That’s the utopian dream, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way.

And maybe the cohort or the group of people who you advertised to last year with your campaign and didn’t convert at that time, causing you to think that that self-liquidating offer was unsuccessful. Maybe after getting hooked into your podcast or weekly news update a year and a half later, they might purchase and it might have been because of that and a few other little handshakes along the way with some different content. But you can get the full picture using proper reporting tools. And so timing is a major factor, isn’t it?

Scott: Oh, it’s huge! Yeah, the self-liquidating offer, I mean, there’s a couple of people that have pulled it off. And it’s newsworthy when they do, because it’s less and less common, particularly as the price per clicks are going up everywhere. That’s not common.

The lifetime value of customers can’t be understated because, you know, you have these high-value customers that will buy again and again, buy your higher level stuff. They’re not going to click and buy on the first thing they see. They’re not going to just suddenly shell out, you know, $1,000 a month for a membership or more or do a high-end service until they get comfortable with the brand or the person. And because of that, there’s a journey involved.

And furthermore, if you close them on an email, let’s say that you’ve talked to them and give a live consult and then you close them on an email for a four-figure consulting package or higher, well, if your ad happened to scroll by their Facebook newsfeed in the past 20-something days, and if they happen to visit a website with AdWords which they didn’t even click on, but they saw your ad, both those things are going to take credit. And so in those situations, that was not the driver of the sale but it would lead you to believe so, and that’s going to throw you off.

But even worse, though, is you can’t find your next best customers based on the last click of your old customers. So if you’re looking at reporting just from what the last click was, that’s ignoring this concept of time which is a big factor, and it doesn’t tell you where you first recruited that person in. And so I found that you could look at every marketing point, you can go crazy with it, which I mean, I would love to, I love this type of stuff. But what I found works best for people is just finding those, like, ROI leverage points of, where did they find new leads that ended up becoming high-value customers, or if someone was already a lead, what kind of reactivated them down the path to becoming a customer? And then ultimately, what did make them buy, taking into consideration everything someone’s trying to do? Because then you can kind of reverse engineer things based on actual stats that you can look at, and validate and trust.

Those are big commitments in people’s day-to-day online life. If I’m going to hand over my email to someone, you know, I’m not looking to get 35 emails a day from all these different marketers and all that. So now when I hand it over, it’s a big deal. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m really interested in this, and I haven’t heard of them.’ And so then if I do buy, we want to keep that point in time so that we know, hey, how did we find this person so we can go find more of them, assuming they become good customers? Or if they don’t, we can say ‘hey, don’t go here anymore. Don’t fish here anymore. There’s no fish.’

James: And it seems that one terrible indicator of how people found out about you is asking the customer themselves. I think it’s fun to ask. I especially do this when I’m doing my first onboarding call for a high-level SilverCircle customer. And sometimes, they’re very clear. They might say, “I was going to Amazon, I searched for a book on business, I found your book Work Less Make More, I bought it, I read it on the plane, I loved it. I wanted you to coach me, I went to your website, I joined SilverCircle, I applied, and now we’re speaking.” That’s a very clear path.

But it’s much harder for someone to say, “Oh, well, I’ve been stalking your podcasts for five years. I’ve seen a few of your Facebook videos, got your podcast updates when they came out. I heard about your name at some mastermind event I went to in Thailand. And then a buddy of mine is a member of SilverCircle, so he said I should join.” That’s a much harder mystery to unravel, but it’s good to have it there on a screenshot if you could have it represented there.

Scott: Yeah, you could actually, when you end up doing your next book, if you put in URLs or short URLs to go, you could redirect and have those be then tracked by Wicked as, you know, clicks coming from the book.

Implementing Wicked Reports

James: We have the capacity to do that, because I set up my own personal website just for the book. And I think it has some subpages. But to answer one of your original comments, how did we implement on the team. I do want to go into that because one fact here is, if you want to go setting up reporting software, like Wicked Reports, there’s a bit of work involved. Let’s be super open about that. It’s hardcore to set up. And what my team did, after we integrated everything, is they came up with a tracking codec, and they made that like that a codec library for each source that we use and each piece of content that we use and then they went and replaced the links in our emails and on our websites and our buttons to make sure that it includes all the correct tracking parameters. So it was a fair bit of setup, but firstly, I just wanted you to confirm that that is the case.

Scott: Yeah, that is the case. Yeah, sure. With Facebook, we auto-track. So we’ll take whatever the ad set name, ad name, campaign name is and pull it in automatically as the tracking links. So we got you covered on Facebook. And for AdWords, we have a tracking template, so we got you covered there. But depending on your email platform, there’s a couple where we can look up the email in the click for you, which is kind of sweet, but we can’t do that with all of them. So if not, yeah, you do need a UTM naming scheme.

And the same thing with, if you’re going to get true pro level, then I would agree – you’ve got to think about, ‘Okay, every time I post on LinkedIn, most of my link’s going to be the same, but that content field, I want to know which piece of content. Or the same thing with all your podcasts – you can keep most of the link the same, but the last one, you’re going to want that episode number in there so you can see if an episode really popped the revenue for you.

James: Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Scott: That’s phenomenal, then. I’m elated that you’re doing that. I am, I mean, that means great data.

James: I’ve been craving it. I don’t mind having the good data, but I was going without it for a while there. I wasn’t exactly sure. I did know that there were some major themes. If I publish more podcasts, then my waiting list fills up and then when we open I make more sales. One of the things we track in our business is how many emails we send each month. There’s a direct relationship between the volume of emails that we send to the number of orders that we take.

The next logical step for me was to know which emails are causing those sales. And I found it. I found the email that makes the most sales in our entire ecosystem and the goal after finding that email was then to fill the funnel that leads people to that email. So that was a lot of fun.

A relentless onboarding scheme

But my main question centers around this: as a business owner – you’re a business owner, I’m a business owner – I was in awe of your relentless onboarding scheme. It was quite clear to me that if your customer does not set up their reporting tool that they’ve just subscribed to, they’re probably going to cancel. And I was getting a feeling around that because there’s quite a lot of heavy onboarding happening when you purchase Wicked Reports. There is emails, there’s the system knows exactly how much you’ve put into the setup or not. And they’re very keen to get phone calls and responses so that it’s set up. Has that been something you’ve worked on for a while to get to that point?

Scott: Oh, yeah. I mean, we released the new, I don’t know if you’re on the latest one, that checklist now. Well, first to answer your question, we worked on it relentlessly, because if people use the data and login and make or save money, they never leave. And if they don’t, they always leave.

So it’s very binary to my business. I need you using the data and making money because you’re otherwise, why are you going to pay me just to come and look at a pie chart? You’re not going to. You’re going to do that with Google Analytics all day, stare at data you’re not going to use. So that’s the, you know, it’s a keen thing. And so we implemented that takeover, where there’s a set of steps that you have to complete until you can even see the reports. Because otherwise, people start poking around and they skip steps. Then they’re like, oh, then their initial experience was unpleasant. “Hey, I don’t see my Facebook costs.” Well, you never actually authorized Facebook. Or Hey, I don’t see this or that. You know?

So we have alerts and we have this even much more sophisticated customer health scoring going on behind the scenes to proactively reach out to people if they’re dipping into the red because something bad we detects occurred, like spending $100 and no leads. That sounds like there’s no tracking on the page. We better reach out and make sure we’re at least putting an alert there if you’re looking at the data.

But we’ve actually added one even bigger thing. I don’t think you were there for that piece. I think it came in right after you. I mean, we’ve released so much new stuff. We’re bribing people. So when you sign up now, you mean you pay to get started but if you can submit a data-driven decision in 14 days, we PayPal you $100. Just whoever’s on the team submits the decision gets $100 for using this software as it was intended. Because you’ve likely turned off something that you were wasting money on, that’s a general thing, because there’s no way you could have known otherwise. So we say, “Hey, look, you’re not making any money here, and you’re hemorrhaging however much dollars a day or a week or a month” that people will actually turn that ad off, then they’ve slowly got the hang of Wicked Reports. “Hey, I’m not making money so I stopped spending here.” Or vice versa, hopefully. “Hey, this email just made me $4,000. This is great news. I want to make sure this is going on to every new person on my list, not just a broadcast.”

I got a couple of stories around email, fascinating emails that look terrible but make money or are beautiful and expensive copywriters that were like, horrid. You know?

James: Oh, I’ve done a lot of fixing. In SilverCircle, one of the things that I’m able to do for my customers is look at their webinars, check their emails, etc. And often an email sequence will have been written by a professional copywriter, and they’re awful. And I make changes, and I can out-convert the copywriter pretty much every time by removing things that are just killing their sales.

But once I joined Wicked Reports, I was constantly forwarding emails to my webmaster, saying, “Check these guys out. I mean, they’re just relentless.” And I’ve taken some inspiration from that. I’ve identified with my own coaching, if someone doesn’t start a private discussion and start getting access to my help, that diminishes their chance of being able to renew.

So we’ve set up, aside from the weekly news that we send out, we’ve recently added a banner to people who have never started that post. We’ve also set up automation so that I can make a personal video for people who don’t do that post. As of yesterday, we now automatically do the first post on their behalf so that I have to simply respond to their first post that we did on their behalf. And then we still send out triggered emails if they’re not interacting with that, because my entire mission is to have someone using what they’re paying for so they can get the result. Because the results they can get are phenomenal. They’ll double, triple, quadruple their business, if they just use the thing that they purchase. So I was inspired and fascinated with your onboarding process.

Scott: Thanks. It’s really worked out pretty well. Because now, I mean, software companies have all kinds of creative ways they measure retention. I’ve seen, you know, as many models as companies, it almost seems, but for my SaaS, what I like to use is how many people stay past, once they’ve made it 30 days, what’s our retention?

Because in my mind, if we’ve onboarded them, and they’ve used it, because there’s going to be people that just want to do paid trials and leave or, you know, bought and changed their mind, but after 30 days, thanks to that onboarding, making everyone set everything up right and being relentless, our retention is 96.4 percent, which is really high for SMB. And for analytics, as far as I can tell, it’s the best I’ve seen. And that was before the bribes. And now with the bribe, I want to try to get it up to 98 and then then you can get into some real fun net negative churn numbers, which can really start to catapult a subscription business.

James: Well, a lot of people in our world are doing memberships and subscriptions. And I’m a huge fan of subscription. And it absolutely is about retention, and the bulk of my activities are on keeping a customer and serving that customer well. So it’s definitely the name of the game with software. A lot of software companies hit the plateau where the number of people they’re bringing in is very similar to the number of people who leave and they just can’t move the needle on that. So focusing on retention is critical.

Other ways of keeping customers

So onboarding is one factor. I know that the customer can do things to help themselves, like they could have a team to help them implement, they could take an annual subscription so that they’re locked in and can’t escape. They don’t just bail out when the trial ends because they didn’t do anything. So they’re all good factors.

What other things do you do as a business to keep a customer after they’ve set up and after the onboarding?

Scott: Yeah. So we have an alert set off. If someone hasn’t logged in in a month, we’re going to email, text and call them, because we’re at the point where you know, someone cancels is not going to be a disaster, but at the same time we hate to have it happen.

But then again, if someone is just going to keep paying us, there’s that strain. Like, I don’t want to harass someone into canceling. The recurring is nice, but I want to do our best effort to try to say, “Hey, you’re paying for this, will you use it?” So we try to reach out monthly in three ways to say, “Hey, come check this out.”

Another thing is when people log in, if there’s new stuff, we have screen takeovers, to keep them up to date on what’s new. And if there’s errors, because like, they let something lapse, which usually means they’re not using it as well, there’s be a big red bar over the top, so that they are going to see, hey, there’s an alert, you need to do X, and they click on it and then it updates them on what they need to take care of.

So those are some of the things. And then, a lot of times, if it’s a valuable customer that suddenly went quiet, it could just be, you know, something come up for a couple of weeks, and they’re not in there every day. And it’s fair, I mean, we have people who have logged in over 1000 times, so that’s not generally the case. But when that happens, I’ll have someone on my team cut a vid – well, they already know this, I don’t talk to them about it – they’ll cut a video showing what they should do. Like, “Hey, look at this and this.” And that was kind of the inspiration for our home screen was, what are the questions I want people asking and how can we already answer and tell them, here’s what the answer is, and here’s why it’s important and what to do with it? So if nobody even wants to log in and look around, they just go to the homepage and scroll around, we can help them out. So those are some of the things that we’ve done to this day.

What about content marketing?

James: And how have you incorporated content marketing to your prospects and customers? Is it the same content? And how frequently do you send it?

Scott: So, we’ve been overhauling our marketing because I’ve had a couple of different marketing people come in and help me and it kind of got away from my voice. So I got rewrote a lot of things. I wanted to sound like me. Because if I go to like, a live event, I speak at it, and then I’m hanging out in the booth with my sales crew. We generally close a fair amount of business at these events from 10 to 50,000 at the booth, which is higher than what our booth mates tell us in some cases. I mean, I’m sure some have done better. We’re not like the God’s gift of selling, but it goes well when we’re doing the content and all excited and in person.

So for my funnel, what I like to do in the in the middle is product marketing. So once they’re on the list, and they’ve heard some of the pain points and challenges, then it’s more about product marketing and/or trying to get them to do a live demo with someone on my team. Because once they’ve seen it in action, we can generally close one out of four. And that one out of four is a historical number, because we used to only integrate with certain tech stack combinations.

And we’ve only recently had some breakthroughs, where we now have a Zapier integration and HTTP POST and a bunch of other, WooCommerce and Click Funnels orders, and all these other tricky scenarios for us in the past. Now, when someone says, Hey, I want to buy Wicked Reports, we can say, great, we don’t even have to talk about integrations almost ever because we have, like 95 percent of the known ecosphere is covered.

Who should use the software?

James: Nice. So who should be getting software like Wicked Reports? Like, who do you actually target?

Scott: So the optimal is to be spending at least $100 a day, so three grand a month. Because let’s say you come into Wicked Reports and it costs about 300 bucks, give or take, we’re going to save you, you know, if you’re spending three grand, we’re going to find $1500 in waste even before we tend to optimize what’s working. And so that alone means you’re going to make five to one on your investment right away each month, even before we get into some of the bigger gains you can get with some of the things you’re doing, like finding out which email. And then that’s not to mention even finding out which email is working or not can be a big thing because they’re generally not the pretty. It’s surprising what works or doesn’t work in email.

You can go as low as $1000 a month spend, if you’re a disciplined type, and you’re actually going to have the time to get in there. The thing is, when people are only spending 1000 a month, that might mean they’re too small and have too much going on and they’re not going to diligently follow the onboarding, or they’re just still testing out what their message even is, is there any message that works?

So I would say you would want to already have, be able to spend a few thousand a month and you have at least one message that you know works somewhat to bring in customers. Because if you’re like, I’m a brand new business owner, I want to have great data, I love that attitude, but in that case, just start testing paid messages, to find something that’s going to work in your funnel to begin with, and then come in with Wicked Reports. So I wouldn’t want brand new entrepreneurs. You know, there’s so many things to worry about. I wouldn’t suggest it for them.

And what else? Another thing is that offline, online, we used to only be able to track online. But now, as of a week ago, my video going out tomorrow is how to track offline using your CRM. So like, I track the guys, a winemaker is a Wicked Reports user. There’s a couple of wine guys that use us, and one of them was coming to Boston for a day before he went to Nantucket for a wine festival. And he said, “Hey Scott, I’m coming to town, I use Wicked Reports, you got any ideas? I want to throw a wine event, if you have an idea.” I go. “Yeah, I got an idea, come to my house. I got, like, 30 friends that will come here and just drain all of it.” But then I only invited people who like wine, not just people who were going to just drink his wine and run.

And we were able to track using just a simple HTTP POST from his Infusionsoft, you know, which I mean Ontraport and a lot of others do that as well. Anyone that was at my house, he got their email, and then like, next week, he punched it in and he set the date of the wine festival and pushed it up. We were able to track that live event, just like it was a click. And so we were able to show that he made 700 percent on the wine event. Spent 600 bucks on his wine, and people bought like, $4700 worth of wine. So he made you know, he made out pretty well.

James: Does that mean there’s another wine night at Scott’s place again?

Scott: It does. It’s an annual thing now, he said. It’s awesome.

James: Is that the Wicked Reports user convention?

Scott: Modus operandi – wine. It’s my favorite wine on earth. I mean, I’m not the world’s greatest expert on wine, but I’ve been out to Napa maybe five times. And that’s, that’s my favorite on earth. So I was excited just to have more miles anyway, so it turned out great.

The mistakes people make

James: What do you think are the big mistakes people make when they’re approaching setting up reporting for the first time?

Scott: Trying to have it match other systems, if they’re using pixels, is a big mistake. That’s really hard to get set up right. You need like, an expert to go in there and do that. There’s people that can do that but then it has to be babysat. And it has to be, you know, pros have to set it up. The other thing I find is people come in and then they say, Hey, I came into Wicked Reports and it doesn’t match what Facebook said. And I’m like, “Well, I hope not. Otherwise, why are you paying us?” So usually that’s a great question, because now we can send them to the video I shot on it, Why. And then they’re usually like, Oh, great. Otherwise, if they’re still like frustrated or puzzled why it doesn’t match, then that’s not going to end well.

But the big thing is, if you looking at reports, you got to figure out ahead of time, what’s my goal? Like, what’s my framework? What questions am I trying to get answered? And what report or data am I going to look at that’s going to give me the answer? And I don’t think a lot of people do that. But if they did, it would save them a lot of frustration, because they’d either find out, hey, this isn’t going to help me, it’s going to take me hours of setup, or they get excited and motivated, hey, this is why I’m buying the software and great it can help me.

James: Right. So I mean, this software is a relative expense for the business. I agree with you that the price alone will filter out the people who shouldn’t be going to that step yet. And for people who it is a good fit for, it’s going to be a small investment for a huge return. And I love the thing about what question you’re trying to answer. For me, it was like, where do my sales come from? I know I do this activity, and I know I make this amount of sales. There’s a bit of a gray area in between, especially in my case, because we don’t really do a lot of paid traffic. And we have a fairly big ecosystem now with our machine, so it was good to laser cut.

Where the customers come from

But it does sort of make me curious, having seen all of your customers, and no doubt with your team so closely involved in helping people get the best from their reports – after all of that, where do you go to get your customers? What traffic sources or channels have you seen constantly perform better than others?

Scott: Well, I’ve seen people make money in a lot of strange ways. I mean, we had one person, I think it was like learn how to be a proofreader or something like that, some job that sounded brutal to me. All kinds of strange ones. Usually people have to diversify, but one thing that never fails is good old email still closes some sales. It may not be the thing that gets people excited to talk about, you know, people want to talk about bots, and other things, which are all cool. I like all those. It’s cutting edge things. But good old email still sells well.

Particularly what happens is, you might excite them with your ads, and then they go search through their emails and start reading them. Like, the paid ads compliment and boost up the other things that you do, even if they’re not always the prime driver. We had to introduce a stat call sales assist because it was such a phenomenon. You know, you run ads and then maybe they don’t get the last click because email will get the last click, but Facebook would support email. So I see a lot of Facebook combined with email being a strong thing.

And then I also see podcasts do quite well also. A lot of people, and I mean, you’re a perfect example, people listen to podcasts, they love them. And if you can find a way to track your podcast, then you usually, it’ll support that pretty heavily. Man, these podcasts, I got to keep checking out episodes, they’re working great.

Those are the three that stand out. I guess, on a more macro level, though, I had done a presentation, because I had looked at, we attract about one and a half billion in sales as of January of this year on like 400 million Facebook ad spend. And the three things that stood out to me was that the app, first of all, new leads can take a long time to buy. And the average across all those one and a half billion in sales was 43 days from the first click to the first order. So you just can’t find, you know, 43 days is that’s the average of all those. So that mean 750 million took longer than 43 days. And so that was mind-blowing to me, because I mean, I knew like our software, it validated that our software is valuable, but I mean, Jesus, no wonder.

And I’ve seen that Wicked Reports, people can take about a month till they’re ready to actually belly up to the bar and pay, you know, they want to try redirect links and Google and everything, and they finally bite the bullet, fortunately.

And the difference in what new leads and old leads, there was, like, a 2,000 percent variance in what makes them buy. What attracts the new leads versus if someone’s on your list, and then is going to opt in for your webinar or your download or whatever, every client had massive differences. Almost all of them had massive differences in what worked on cold pre-email list traffic to get them on the list versus on the list, what makes them actually get engaged and activated to be a buyer.

And then the lifetime value of customers, the top tier customers for everyone are worth an average of 30 times more than the whole bottom 50 percent. So if you have 100 customers, your top customer would be worth your bottom 50 combined. I mean, that might not play out mathematically with 100, but you get to like 1000 customers, it’ll hold up.

James: Yeah. I’ve seen data to support all of these things. In fact, I had this product called TrafficGrab, and I remember one of the findings that I had in there was from my own analytics, that a significant portion of people would buy that product after several weeks, even after a month. And 43 days is exactly what I would expect. It’s really where I was going with that self-liquidating offer, that the old run a Facebook ad and bank it in the next day or two trip wire mentality is one way, but it’s not the only way. And I know some people listen to my podcast for years before they make a purchase, and it could be could be just that they read a book or there was this one episode that caused them to take action.

From prospect to customer

So I’m really interested in what sort of devices you found good at moving people from a prospect to a customer. You’ve certainly said email.

Scott: Yeah. So we’ve tried personally Wicked Reports. The recorded demo works not bad, but the live demo for us. So we’re an online tracking company and it’s clear that people want to tie, you know, before they’re going to plunk down 500 bucks for an analytics platform, they want to talk to someone and just make sure their burning questions are answered. Because you know, I can only email about so many topics. And so they miss one, they want to know hey, what about, is this going to track my LinkedIn profile? Which we do. But I mean, they would be, someone would want to know, have a list of questions they usually grill one of my guys with before they’re ready to buy. So for us, I tried group selling, group webinars. I tried just webinar only, and for me one-on-one demos definitely are the highest converting thing we do, bar none.

James: Yeah, that is good to know. For SilverCircle, they have to go through an application call with me to be approved for the program, and that’s where a qualified person on that call is definitely going to join. That is the conversion event. And it’s interesting to track the path that led to that conversion event, and I try and keep it as short as possible because the person who’s going to invest $10,000 today wants a short path – that’s the nature of the beast.

The other thing that’s interesting is the email is my number one traffic or conversion device, the one thing that turns people from prospect to customer is definitely email. We were talking about that with Ryan Levesque, actually, two episodes ago, how important email still is and how the unsexy is where the power band is. And it’s really refreshing to hear that. So it’s hard to beat face-to-face or one-on-one for conversions. Email is still super solid. And in our case, our support desk showed up as number two, which sits really well with your live demo. It’s the customer who’s asking questions and get answers is ready to move forward.

Scott: Exactly. I got one interesting email story. So one thing with your emails, what you want to do, we have something coming out called Benchmarks, where we’ll have your averages and then we’ll tell you whenever you’re looking at something, is this better or worse than average for all of Wicked, for businesses of your size, or against your own data? And you can, like, kind of pick and compare.

The emails that shouldn’t have sold

And I bring that up because what got me fascinated about email marketing was my friend Mark at Get Maine Lobster, my initial first client that I hacked this thing on, four years ago or whatever it was. He would send out emails and there’d be a big debate. Like, his mother, my brother is a minority owner in his company, me that was helping with Infusionsoft, everyone has an opinion about an email and it was rarely an agreement. His mother loved everything he wrote, me and my brother would howl sometimes, think it’s funny or sometimes disagree.

And so when he started using Wicked Reports, we knew his average email would make $2,000 if he broadcast. He was a big broadcaster. Because he was selling live lobster and fish, you know, sometimes you get different prices and so you could broadcast different deals. So he sends this one out about the marathon, he ran a half marathon. And the title, this is the guy, you know, pure ecommerce. He sells lobster for a living. And it said, “I ran a half marathon”, in the subject, and the email was starting to get into his marathon running. And then he had a code, “marathon”, or something. And you click to the link, and it didn’t even go to a page to buy. It went to a blog post about his marathon.

And so I’m reading this, and I thought he had just sent it out to a group of friends. And I’m like, oh, wait a minute, I think this came from his Lobster account. And I look and it was an actual marketing email. And oh, me and my brother howl on how terrible it was. We thought it was like the dumbest thing ever. Well, lo and behold, he made $10,000 on that email, five times his normal amount. So that was an inkling, it doesn’t mean everyone should go run off and do big long blogs to their lists to buy stuff. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it.

James: Well, I was going to say, I hope it doesn’t mean I have to do a marathon to make five times more sales. That’s not going to happen.

Scott: And then he did the similar thing with his birthday. It was this big confusing thing. “It’s my birthday”, and then you had, it was like, “I’m going to start a 55 percent off, and then every hour it’s going to go down one percent…” You know, it wasn’t the typical, hey, go to a squeeze page, there’s only one thing to do, there’s a deadline funnel… No, he had a made-up deadline in his email, which I didn’t even know if he was refreshing the percent off in his Infusionsoft or whatever. And it was complicated, and the link just went to his category page where you still have to click around to find something to buy.

So he sends it out, and he does 9500 bucks in the morning. He re-sends the exact same email at four o’clock to anyone that didn’t open the first one. He did another $9500. So he did $19,000 on his birthday, which was like, nine X on his normal email, with a confusing thing about his birthday, versus the polished emails that he sometimes says that can get a ton of clicks and can sell like, you know, eight, $900, under his thing.

So I would just bring these up as stories to always just test to see what’s going to work. I mean, everyone says, yeah, test test test but here’s how to do it. Even if you don’t get Wicked Reports, just send an email different from normal and put UTM codes on it, and then go into Google Analytics and deduce what happened on that one email, and try to see, is it better or worse than what you’ve usually done? Because then you can iteratively grow your email that way, at least by clicks, with Google Analytics or possibly with a goal, you could figure out a purchase goal. Not going to help you with the revenue, but it’s going to be something better than nothing. And furthermore, you’ll be shocked at the messages that work versus the ones that don’t. They’re hard to predict. It’s just better to have a framework or a process that can get you the answer than try to pretend like you know for sure what some copywriter guru tells you is going to be the answer.

James: Yeah, so like a scientific environment, and then if you find one that works particularly well, make sure that that becomes a system and then you create a way of directing more people into that email.

Scott: Exactly, exactly.

James: Well, this has been an interesting discussion. We’ve talked about quite a few things. I really like the data set that you’ve got access to there to be able to come up with some definitive answers. I didn’t bore everyone with the sort of backstory, but I think you just revealed it, how you started out this reporting tool, you’re basically helping a friend and then it went from there.

How it all started

Scott: Well, 2014 February, Mark from Get Maine Lobster came to me and said, “Facebook sucks for lobster.” I said, “Oh, yeah, why is that?” He said, “I spent four grand, I got a ton of clicks, like 12,000 clicks. But I only got one sale. I can’t believe it. I lost my shirt.” That was his budget for the month, it was $4000.

I was like, well, I go, ‘I can’t believe someone actually bought from this random lobster guy they saw on their feed. I mean, you’ve never advertised before. What do you expect?’ I go, “Why don’t you try and get them on your list and see if they’re going to buy?” He’s like, “Well, yeah, I could try and do this or that, but how am I really going to know who it was and know for sure, was it from Facebook and who I was advertising to and all this good stuff?” And I said, “Oh, there’s going to be something around.” And there wasn’t anything around that was under like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at the time for attribution.

And so I went out and I hacked up this way with him and we were able to determine that, you may or may not know this in Australia, but in Massachusetts we’re New England Patriot fans in football, which is, you know, everyone hates the Patriots unless you love the Patriots because they win a lot as a regional team. And so his theory was, people that like the Patriots or any local Boston team, but don’t live in the area, they probably moved away, because there’s no other reason they like us. And so let’s try to sell to them and see if they missed where they live and they’d buy some lobster.

We were able to show that women, 40 or older, that met that criteria were worth 10 to one after three months. And that just blew his mind. And it blew Infusionsoft’s mind. So I got on an Infusionsoft webinar and the next thing I knew, I had a business, had a lot of demand. And so I decided to create a business around it because it was my natural talent and I loved doing it anyway. I love piecing together puzzles with data. So it’s right up my alley.

James: Well, I’m glad you did. Turns out you can make more than gooseberry wine, hey?

Scott: Right.

James: We were just chatting before about what Degrosseilliers translates to: “maker of the king’s gooseberry wine”. At least it stands for something. I have no idea what Schramko stands for. Some people say it means “direct”, but I’m not sure.

Parting advice for Wicked users

So there you go. What would be your advice if someone’s listened to this entire podcast up to this point, the quick summary? You might be considering reporting if you’re at a certain size in business where you actually want to know where the sales come from, and you’d like to make smarter decisions. The setup process is a little bit intensive up front, but you do get a lot of support in getting it set up properly, because everyone wants it to be able to report accurately and to work in your favor. And you get the tool on board. You set it up, you start seeing what works, and then you can tune your business accordingly. That’s sort of the synopsis of it.

It’s an online tool, so it’s relatively easy to access. It’s not inexpensive. It’s not like you going out to Fiverr, and getting a $5 gig on something. It’s a serious piece of gear as you would with Infusionsoft or professional-level hosting sort of solutions. But we’ve sort of onboard the idea that we need it, we were ready to set it up, we’ve got it ticking along – what would be your parting advice for someone at this point now who’s sort of at this stage?

Scott: At the stage of already having Wicked Reports set up?

James: Yeah, like me.

Scott: Yeah, like you. Oh, so you’re looking for some free consulting, James. That’s a good one.

James: Well, I’d like to think I’ve earned it. And in full disclosure, I’ve paid for the software. I wasn’t given it or anything like that. I’m a paying customer and I thought the tool was useful for my business, and that’s why I was happy to talk about it. And I know that my listeners do place a lot of trust in my opinion, because I’m definitely not foolish with my purchases and I do some research beforehand and I think this has been a successful decision for our business. But what would you say for someone like me?

Scott: So for someone like you who is now starting to really put the pedal to the metal of understanding the customer journey and figuring out where are you finding cold traffic leads that get on your list that become great customers and starting to spend more there and watching it to show that it’s still ROI-ing positive over time… Because you might find you could spend a lot more in acquisition and really start to get to a whole other level. And furthermore be watching for where things aren’t working and turning them off. That’s like a, probably a biweekly discipline or a weekly discipline to do.

Additionally, continue to, as you see… Oh, here’s the other thing, I guess I don’t have a great like, Scott buzzword phrase for it, I guess cross-pollinate data is what I call it, which is not sexy at all. But when you find a great email that works or a great podcast episode that works, you want to test that on your other channels. They may or may not work on the other channels, but sometimes a great podcast episode becomes a great email that you want to send to everyone. Or a great email is something you should test out as ad copy, or at least use the theme.

Because if you get a general theme or intent that’s working, you can start using it all over the place. And it may not work, it probably won’t work all over the place, but it could work in more than one channel and that saved you all that legwork because you’re like, hey, look at this great email. Let’s try running it as a Facebook content ad to get people in and then listen to the podcast. Or you know, something similar.

James: Yeah, that’s a great idea. I do a live training each month in SuperFastBusiness. And the training I did this week generated the most number of support queries and emails making sure that we record this training for people who couldn’t make it live. Because it’s five or 600 members in there, not everyone can show up live.

And so I know the topic was of immense interest, to the point where I’ve sent it off to the lady who helps me write my book, Kelly Exeter, and we’re working on book number two around this particular topic because it’s hot. And I Instagrammed it as well and got a great response. So that’s good validation, and now I would use that to tune up my emails and then I can test it. And now I can log into the reporting and I can know if my theory is validated or not. And then if it’s validated, I can tip some more advertising budget towards that particular campaign and see if it scales and holds true with the ROI I’m on track.

Scott: Exactly. That’s exactly what to do.

James: I’m sure everyone’s looking forward to the next book. It’ll be somewhere around the theme of how to make $100,000 per month consistently.

Scott: Nice.

James: Yeah, that’s a good one. It was a two-hour long training and I’ve tipped it inside SuperFastBusiness membership and they’re very excited about it. I was pleased with it, too. It’s like the summary of lessons I’ve learned over the last decade coaching high-level people and building a good business for myself. And no doubt you’re doing quite a lot of those things in your business, Scott, because you’re doing quite well.

So, with that in mind, and conscious of the time, I’m sure it’s lobster and wine time around your joint about now, so I might let you go.

I’ve been speaking with Scott Degrosseilliers from Wicked Reports, sharing generously on how to get more accuracy from your reporting. Some really good tips on onboarding if you’re a business owner, or if you have any kind of software or subscription. We got some great stats, like the 1.5 billion data set that we talked about, and some really useful implementation tips. So thanks so much for joining us and sharing so generously.

Scott: Thanks, James, I had a blast. I really appreciate you having me on. Have a great week.

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