From Two Dead Ad Accounts to 35¢ Leads in 3 Months
This client is a credentialed expert in a health niche with a real audience and an online course. All the important information has been changed to protect her privacy. The numbers are real.
The money is in the email list.
Whether you already have a converting funnel or are trying to get your course to convert… success and ROI will be made on (1) how efficiently you can gain attention (2) get those people into your ecosystem and (3) have them look at your offer.
She came to me after spending somewhere around $90k on marketing and training over the past three years to get her course selling (agencies, programs, people hired along the way).
The first thing I did was look inside her Business Manager.
Spotted two dead ad accounts.
Her team’s explanation was that the old marketing made health claims the platform doesn’t allow. That’s how you lose an ad account in a health niche every time.
The email side was no better. The open rate was 8-9% but the bounce rate came at way above industry average (this means people you work hard to get on the list are not getting emails at all). Whoever was sending before us had burned the domain.
~$90k
already spent
2
dead ad accounts
8-9%
email opens
Where we started.
I often tell potential clients there is a reason I barely choose to take on a course to market. If you are selling hype, are not an expert and want results now, I’m the wrong guy (not how this works). In this niche that’s how you lose the next account too. I could see she wanted to make this a real business that scales.
Why more ads was the wrong move
Most marketers when they see an account all recommend the same stuff. More budget, more ads, push harder.
The ads are what killed the last two accounts. Pushing more of the same through the one account she had left was the fastest way to make it three.
So we did it the other way around. Every ad had to get through (a compliance) review before we worried about whether it sold.
What we did
Two things had to get fixed. The ads, and the email list they went into.
For the ads, we decided to test statics vs her on camera. Talking the way she talks to a client one on one. Only things she could put her name and license behind. No big promises.
I checked every ad before it went live. Is it allowed on the platform, and will she put her name behind it. If either was a no, the ad didn’t run.
For email we didn’t bother trying to save the old domain. We set up a new sending domain and warmed it up slow over 12 emails across 30 days. The ads were about to start sending in new subscribers and they couldn’t go onto a burned domain.
Month 1
Ran a ton of split tests.
-
Video vs static
-
Angle vs angle
-
Age bands
-
Feed placements
etc…
A lot failed. A couple showed real promise.
The first ad set launched on June 17 (ran for two weeks).
417 leads at $1.42 each.
$1.42
a lead, first ad set, June 15 to 30
417
leads from that ad set in the same window
It was a good start. Leads were coming in at below the industry average. I kept testing.
Month 3
By August the best ad set in the account was pulling leads at 35¢.
41¢
the campaign July
→
35¢
best ad set in the account August
Within 2+ months we got the leads down from around $1.5 a piece to an average of 41 cents (in August the best ad set was at 35 cents). This is in a health niche where her competition is thrilled to get leads at anything below $3.
2,220 leads that month from that one ad set. We had a week where the entire account (with new ads being tested) was averaging below a $1 a lead.
2,220
leads in August, that one ad set
Disapproved ads
Cheap leads on an account that gets shut off would have been worth nothing.
So the workflow made sure if we did get a disapproved ad (which counts towards a ban) we would rework the way these are made.
0
disapproved ads throughout the testing.
The account stayed on the whole way through.
Email went from 8-9% opens to 33%
Remember the 8-9% opens?
We had two sequences running on this new domain.
The 12-email warm-up everyone goes through: 33% opens, 3.5% clicks.
The second one is remarketing. Anyone who got to the sales page and didn’t buy, for whatever reason, goes into a short 4-email sequence that brings them back. 60% opens, 11% clicks.
Old list, inherited 8-9% opens
8-9%
New domain, 12-email warm-up, opens 33%
33%
New domain, 12-email warm-up, clicks 3.5%
3.5%
Remarketing, saw the sales page, opens 60%
60%
Remarketing, saw the sales page, clicks 11%
11%
Can you see why this worked when $90k of agencies and programs didn’t?
The people before us ran her account like a supplement brand. They led with the biggest claim they could write and pushed the budget behind it.
I stopped that nonsense.
What she had to accept…
If you push a shifty ad to review, every rejection counts against the account. In a health niche… you either know how to follow the rules and get results OR you get accounts banned.
If you change everything at once, you can’t tell what worked. We changed the ads and the email list, nothing else.
Were the leads cheap from the start?
No. The first ad set was $1.42 in June.
All I knew is if we stopped testing we’d be stuck at $1.42. I didn’t, and by August it was 35¢ and the account was still going strong.
This client is still with me.
In the three years before me she was barely able to get 10k subscribers on the list (throwing random things at the wall) and it cost her almost $100k.
Three months with me and the list is over 17,600. These are all targeted people who (A) open and read her emails (B) and can be presented with offers for no additional cost.
Whenever you’re ready…
Want an expert to take over or help you with your marketing?
Check out what we do, our case studies and book a free consultation