As many of you know by now, getting people to your website is relatively easy. If this was all we had to do as marketers, the digital marketing world would be an absolute free for all.
But, the trick is what comes after you get people on your sales page. What’s the best way to move your website visitors through your funnel to get conversions?
I call this, the million-dollar digital marketing question. (Feel free to send me your answers 😁.)
Here’s my answer: stagger your creative and show different ads to people at different stages of the Customer Value Journey.
What We Did
At DigitalMarketer, we have some pretty complex funnels. One of our most important conversions is getting people to start a free two-week trial of Lab. As the Paid Ads Manager (hey, nice to meet you 👋), it’s my job to make this happen in the most efficient way possible. We want to do this at the lowest cost possible so we can scale.
I was able to cut our cost per conversion in half by doing one simple thing: introducing testimonial creative to our warm audience that hadn’t converted yet.
Here’s how I set up these testimonial ads for our warm audience:
Objective: Conversions
Targeting: Everyone who has been on our website or engaged with us on social channels and is not a member of Lab
Placements: All placements except for Audience Network
Creative: We tested 3 variations of the testimonial ads for this initial test and used dynamic ad copy
Why It Works
If it sounds too easy to really have created a 50% decrease in conversion costs, I get it. But, with my right hand raised—I swear this is all we did. Here’s why this works so well.
Asking someone who isn’t familiar with DigitalMarketer or our products to sign up for a $95 per month membership is a big ask. We already knew this, which is why we offer our two-week free trial so people can get to experience all the value that Lab offers in a low risk way. Getting people to start the trial is a huge indicator of success for us.
But, it can also be a bit difficult. To start a free trial, we have them put their credit card information in…which is also a big ask for somebody that isn’t familiar with our brand or products. That’s when the testimonials work their magic.
When people see testimonials, they get the reassurance that our membership actually provides a lot of value—and they don’t have to just take our word for it. Now is a good time to shout out all of our awesome Lab members who have said such kind words about Lab. (We ♥️ you.)
Testimonials are working really well for our warm audience but it’s very important to note that they’re NOT working well for our cold audience. When I ran these ads to our cold audience they didn’t get any conversions. These ads are only being seen by our warm audience that excludes current Lab members, since we don’t need to advertise to our current customers.
How We’re Moving Forward
Our next goal is to scale these results in an efficient way. Since we are only running these ads to warm audiences, our spend level is pretty low. In warm audiences, I let my frequency dictate my spend levels. I am shooting for just enough ad spend to have a frequency of around 2.0 in a 7 day reporting window.
In order to scale these results, we need to grow the size of these audiences so we can spend more money on them while sticking to my strict frequency cap. This means that I need to optimize our top of funnel strategy next so we can bring in cheaper (but still quality) traffic that grows our warm audience pool.
Feel free to test this out for your own businesses and let us know how it goes for you.
Just remember, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to media buying so this may or may not be a useful strategy to you. The important thing is that you NEVER. STOP. TESTING.
Ever 😊.
