Over the years, we’ve been involved in a number of growth projects for businesses. From generating leads and customers for clients, affiliating with brands to help promote their products and services as well as even building our own software projects.
We’re not afraid of challenges! We love to try new things as it helps us to learn and grow. So when we found ourselves at a loose end, we started to research some ideas that sprung to mind.
It was the 4th quarter of the year and we wanted to affiliate with a brand where we could prove that we could help a brand sell more of their product as well as allow us to build an asset that would allow us to sell complementary products.
We wanted to find a market that was going to be popular during this season and even beyond. It was important that we could find a number of popular products in the market to promote, but ultimately choose one that would fit our marketing plan.
We’d be able to do this via our own market research on the product and use a number of online resources to help us establish which product we were going to promote as an affiliate of the brand and help us earn commission, which would help us pay for our ad costs. We’d then have an email list of prospects and buyers. This could prove powerful as we could sell them other related offers. Thus increasing the revenue we’d make from this email list over time.
After spending a few hours researching products, we came to the conclusion that Sole Fitness was the brand we’d work with. The product we’d choose to promote and earn commission off was going to be one of their high ticket treadmills.
So now that we had a brand and product to promote and earn commission off…What were we going to do next?
Figure Out a Goal For The Campaign
When starting any sort of marketing campaign, there has to be a plan of action in place. We always like to aim for a goal in our marketing campaigns. Since this was more of a revenue generating campaign, our goal was to acquire 15-20 customers for the month we would run the campaign.
During our research, we figured it was going to be expensive to generate a sale. So we predicted our budget was going to acquire that many sales.
Next we were going to…
Map Out a Sales Funnel
Our next step after finding a high in-demand product to affiliate with, was to map out a sales plan that would help guide us from a cold lead to a customer of the product. Below is what it looked like…
Now that we had our goals set and our sales funnel for the campaign mapped out, we then needed to figure out a traffic source to use.
So we decided to…
Use Google Adwords as Our Traffic Source
In order to generate sales for this high ticket offer, we wanted to use a traffic source that met two objectives –
- A traffic source that showed us demand for this offer
- A traffic source that allowed us to immediately market our sales funnel & get traffic
The traffic source that met these objectives was Google Adwords. We could see that our chosen product had search demand and we also observed that we’d be able to bid on one of the top positions in Google search ads.
It wasn’t going to be cheap to advertise, but the numbers worked for us and we proceeded to move forward. We selected just a couple of keywords to target in the search engine and set up our campaign to the point where we needed an optin page to capture our lead.
With that in mind, we decided to…
Set Up Our Optin Page
As we mentioned earlier on in this case study, part of our aim for this campaign was to acquire a targeted lead that was interested in the product we promote, incentive those leads further in order to generate sales of the product and earn commission.
To capture an email lead, we setup a two step lead capture funnel.
- Optin page
- Thank you page
Optin Page
The optin page would resonate with the ads we would run on Google ads, re-affirming the marketing message from ad to optin page. We included an enticing headline, which would draw the visitor to read further down the page, where they would be met with an image of the high ticket treadmill and some bullet points on why someone should buy the treadmill and some of the pain points it resolves.
We would also include a lucrative call-to-action, offering a valuable bonus to anyone that signed up to our email list and bought from an affiliate link we would send them via email. To prove they bought from our affiliate link, they would have to email us back with their order number and we would verify that with our own affiliate sales record. If the order numbers matched, we would send them their bonus.
Thank You Page
Once one of our visitors converted from our optin page by signing up to our email list, they would be presented with our thank you page. This page was simply designed to encourage the newly converted lead to go straight to their email address, find our email and use the link in our email to make the purchase for the treadmill.
We also included a call to action to have the new lead subscribe to a simple chatbot
Setup Email & Chat Bot Sequence
Our next step in the funnel was to setup our email and chatbot sequence. We kept this relatively simple. The email sequence had a 3 part auto-responder that would welcome the new lead and continue to encourage and incentivize the purchase of the high ticket treadmill.
The chatbot itself was just one message that included the subscriber to check their email to watch out for the special bonus link. We hoped that we’d have a high percentage of chatbot subscribers that would give us two marketing channels to utilize going forward. The chatbot was more of an experiment to see how many new leads would subscribe to it based off our special bonus offer.
How Did Our Experiment Work Out?
Pretty good actually! 🙂
For the duration of the campaign, we managed to generate $33k in sales for Sole fitness. This is the data we collected below –
Campaign Stats: Optin Rate: 32%
Average Cost Per Click: $1.80
Total Clicks: 1,320
Total Cost of Ad Spend: $2,376
Optin Rate: 32%
Total Leads: 420
Sales Conversion Rate: 5.2%
Total Sales: 22
Total Revenue: $33,000
Return on Investment: 1289%
Our Commission on sales: $2640
Profit promoting this campaign: $264
They are great revenue stats for Sole Fitness! We also made a profit which we were delighted with. We now had a list of buyers and interested prospects that we could do a number of things such as –
- Segment the non buyers and continue to email them with marketing messages to purchase the same high ticket offer, or perhaps present cheaper treadmills to buy.
- Segment the buyers and upsell them on other equipment or related offers (both physical & digital)
Definitely a few options to maximize the profitability of this campaign using our email & chat bot list.
How Would We Improve This Next Time Around?
When you generate that kind of revenue for a client in the space of a month, as well as profiting from the campaign itself via affiliate commissions, you do wonder if there is any other way you could have made this better.
After some thought… to this I answer… yes!
Here’s a few things we could do next time around:
- If we had more of a budget, we would have continued with this campaign for another month, perhaps even two. After month 1, seeing the campaign data we collected and the way things went, I would have tried to add more related keywords to the campaign to increase the clicks to the optin page as well as run the campaign another month or two in this peak season.
- Run some A/B split testing on the landing page to see if we could increase the amount of leads we generated.
- Be more committed to upselling and cross selling other related offers. As this was an experiment on our behalf, we didn’t do a good job of increasing the amount of revenue we could have made via our email and chatbot list.
We could have done a better job of broadcasting more, but we didn’t because we got caught up in other, more profitable client work at the time. But it’s something we do reflect on and wonder how much more money we could have made.
So there you have it. We hope you enjoyed this case study and maybe it’s given you some ideas on how you could potentially work a marketing campaign like this online.
