You have a funnel in place. You have an email list. You have a cutting-edge marketing plan. The question is: How do you make it better? Sitting with the same old tools and expecting them to perform just like they did, in the beginning, is irrational.

You need to upgrade, analyze and optimize constantly. The marketing world is constantly changing. You need to move with the tide and constantly stay one step ahead of the game.
 

So how do you go about doing this?

 
In this section, we’ll talk about optimization tactics such as churn rate reduction, affiliate employment, and patch testing. Each strategy aims to increase sales numbers, boost customer retention and improve your marketing plan as a whole.
 
In this section, you’ll:
 

• Understand why you need to optimize your marketing results.
• Understand how to reduce your churn rate.
• Understand how the checkout platform, Paykickstart, can help you.
• Understand why and how affiliation can help you.
• Understand what Dunning emails are and how to use them.
• Understand how to test your marketing campaign – know what to test, and how. 
• Understand how to solve common marketing issues.

 
Some key terms you’ll need for this section: 

• Churn rate – The rate at which customers stop doing business with you.
• Affiliation – Affiliates are content creators with large followings – they act as a commission-based salesperson and actively promote your product to their contact lists. 
• Patch testing – A precise method for testing the success of one part of a campaign at a time. 

Reduce your churn rate 

Churn rate is the rate at which your customers stop doing business with you. It expresses itself in a couple of ways, the first being unsubscribes from your contact list or membership area, and the other being failed payments for their payment plan or subscription service. Be careful not to let these factors get out of control.
 
A high churn rate means you are leaving money on the table by either letting your customers use your product without paying, by losing their interest, and sometimes by simply annoying them with broadcasts and emails in general.
 
Though there will always be people who stop interacting with your brand and eventually opt-out of your list, this is not always a problem since it serves as a kind of self-cleaning mechanism for your contact list, by having disinterested customers unsubscribe themselves from the list and allow your list to be populated by good customers instead of disinterested ones.
 
Of course, if you are losing customers faster than you can replace them, it is indicative of a greater problem, either with your lead generation system or general low-quality, overly salesy, or spammy emails, and content. If that is not the case, however, your high churn rate is likely due to failed subscription payments.
 
People not paying for the products and services that they are enjoying is a problem. It means that there is a hole in the system that allows them to continue using your product without completing their payments. There are a handful of solutions to this, however, the first being the use of dunning emails and the second being the use of better checkout and/or membership platforms. But what if you can get both at the same. 

Pay kickstart 

 
Pay kickstart is a checkout platform that allows for massively increased functionality, support, and data gathering and transfers when compared to Clickfunnels. Most importantly, in the present context, it provides the failed subscription rebill event that a dunning email sequence is triggered by. To be clear, the failed subscription rebills event is simply when the checkout platform attempts to charge a credit card of a customer subscribed with monthly payments, and one of those automated payments fails.  That’s when this automatic sequence will fire.
 
The other advantage of Paykickstart is that it can automatically remove customers from the membership areas if the payment is not completed a few days after the third dunning email. By kicking these freeloaders out of the membership areas until they update their billing information so that the payments go through, the churn rate will be massively reduced.
 
Keep in mind that Paykickstart is not free and will cost you from 100 USD to over 300 USD per month depending on the price plan you opt for. Considering this, we would not consider it wise to switch your checkout to Paykickstart unless your established systems are working well enough for you to be able to afford it.
 
If your business is generating over 1000$ per month in profit after all expenses and salaries are paid then you should definitely consider switching to Paykickstart.  If your course catalog is extensive, this process can take some time, but the additional revenue it can help you generate simply by reducing churn, among other things, can very rapidly pay for itself and go on to continually increase monthly recurring revenue up to an optimal peak.
 
Besides this, since Paykickstart can collect and pass additional transaction data, you can automate more processes and create a much more sophisticated and efficient sales funnel.    

 

Affiliation

 
The use of affiliates as traffic sources for your product has massive advantages over paid traffic like Facebook or Google ads. Mainly, the advantage is that you don’t need to pay those affiliates until they produce conversions for you as opposed to paid ads which require you to pay to simply post an ad. An affiliate on the other hand will act as a commission-based salesperson and actively promote your product to their contact lists.
 
Affiliates are simply content creators with large followings. Whether it’s someone’s YouTube channel, Instagram page, or website, their goal is to affiliate their content with products and services that they can sell to their contact lists for a cut of the profit thereby allowing them to monetize their content.
 
In addition to driving traffic directly to your sales pages, having a link to your page on an affiliate’s platform will increase the number of backlinks to your website thereby organically increasing its search engine ranking. This means that affiliates help drive traffic to your sites both directly and indirectly.
 
A strong enough team of affiliates will likely perform as well if not better than a Facebook ads account, which can often be difficult to optimize and requires attention to grow and maintain either by you or someone you’ll have to pay. Affiliates however are happy to be allowed to sell your high-quality product to their contact lists for commission.
 
Make sure that you stay in communication with your affiliates to be able to coordinate promotions, and that you create the proper infrastructure on your websites for potential affiliates to be able to apply to sell your products and services. That way you can spend less time looking for affiliates and you’ll have an easier time qualifying them when they find you.

Toolbox – Affiliate Infrastructure

This toolbox will provide you with the funnel you’ll need to get affiliated to join your team a well as the types of emails you’ll want to send them when coordinating a promotion

Template : Affiliate funnel 
Template : Affiliate emails 

Testing

Get ready to test these key parts of your marketing campaign: 

• Copywriting 
• Design

 
Metrics you will measure:
 

• Traffic: Cost per click for ads
• Sales page: Conversion rate, bounce rate, percentage of the page your customers read
• Checkout: Conversion rate
• One-time offers: Conversion rate 
• Remarketing: Email open rate, cost per email open

 
Testing is the key to scaling because it allows you to identify what works and what doesn’t. The most common things you’ll likely be testing is your copywriting and your design. You can also find yourself testing different lead gen products by unbundling your main product in different ways and seeing which part of your main product is most likely to warm up your traffic.
 
You might test different times of the day or of the week or year to launch your promotions. There is actually no limit to what you can hypothetically test because you can always find slightly different ways of doing things.
 
So if we can literally test anything why are we focusing primarily on design and copywriting?
 
Because what you are presenting and how you present it are the absolute fundamentals of sales. If you cannot communicate the benefits of your product to your customer then there is no sale.
 
If we figure out exactly what your customer wants to hear and present it to them exactly as they like it, then all your other testing will be on finding more/better channels to communicate to more/better customers.
 
This part would include testing new traffic sources, promotions, and prices. But before you start testing these secondary strategic elements, be sure you have found the way your ideal client best likes things presented to them. 

Toolbox – Testing Copy and design

This toolbox both explains how to test your copy and design with Clickfunnels and the order of importance of testing various elements. 

Explanation: How to test

Testing two different pages in Clickfunnels is as simple as selecting a funnel step and in the overview, tab click on “create a variation”. The variation will be a duplicate of the original page on which you can perform the alterations you are trying to test.  After creating a variation you can adjust the toggle bar to choose the percentage of traffic directed to each variant.
 
Testing two different ads or ad sets on Facebook Ads simply requires you to make a copy of that ad or ad set and perform the desired alterations in the copied versions.
 
To properly test two elements against each other it is essential to confirm the following criteria: 

• Your two test versions are identical besides the single element you are trying to test.
• Your test has lasted for at least two days. If you don’t give your test enough time to gather data it may be skewed in one direction or another, making it hard to make the right decision
• The version that you choose to keep is the version with the higher key performance indicator. This is usually the conversion rate, whether you define a conversion to be opting into a list or actually making a sale. 

 
The more often you test and swap your less effective structures for more effective ones, the more quickly your business will grow. For this reason, we recommend that you run a minimum of two tests per week, this way you can guarantee that your business will be improving week to week by at least two small but significant increments. As you get better at testing and growing your team you’ll be able to test more rapidly and scale your business at an incredible rate.
 
To put things in perspective, if you can run two tests per week that increase your conversion rate by 2% each, then in three weeks you’ll have grown your business by 12%, by 17% in four weeks. That is almost 20% growth in one month by changing little copy and design elements here. However, not all elements are equally significant. Some will have greater impacts on your KPIs than others. The following is a list of elements to test in order of their importance and impact on conversion rates. 

1. Headlines
2. Prices
3. Call to action 
4. Copy
5. Page layout
6. Colors 
7. Font

 
Final Note: Keep in mind that you’ll want to be testing at four different levels
 

• Traffic: At this level, we are looking at the quality of the content on your paid ads like Facebook ads and google ads and the ability of these ads to get clicks. 

 
Your KPI here will be the cost per click of these ads
 

• Sales page: At this level, we are looking at the ability of your sales page to get people to click on your call to action buttons. 

 
Your KPIs here will be your Conversion rate, the bounce rate (how often people leave your page without taking action), and the percentage of your page read (how much of your page do your customers scroll through). This last one is particularly useful as it can indicate at what point in your sales letter people are becoming disinterested.
 
If your page is usually read in its entirety but people are still not converting, your problem is likely with your CTA button. Either because it can’t be properly seen or it’s not particularly enticing to your customers.
 

1. Checkout: At this level, we are looking at the ability of your checkout page to convert the customer to a buyer. You want your customers to be reassured that they are making the right choice in purchasing the product. 

 
The KPIs you’ll be looking at here are your conversion rates. If people are getting to your checkout page but not completing their purchase, try testing the various testing elements in order of importance to see how it can improve this conversion rate.
 

1. One-time offers: At this level we are looking at the ability of your upsell and downsell pages to convert customers that have already purchased the lead product. 

 
The KPI here is simply conversion rate. How often do clients who bought the main product also buy the upsell offer and/ or the downsell offer?
 
Besides the regular testing elements it can be very useful to experiment with different offerings entirely. An upsell that is better matched to the lead product is far more likely to convert than one that is mismatched. Therefore if changing design and sales copy on these pages does not seem to have a big effect on conversion rates then try changing the offering all together.
 

1. Purchase to remarketing: This is the last level of testing and it’s a measure of how effective your remarketing campaigns are in both your email broadcasts and your paid advertising. 

 
The KPI you’ll need to measure the success of these campaigns is the open rate and the cost per click of the emails. Since conversions for your sales pages are already measured at another level, all we care about here is how good the emails and ads are at getting people to click and land on our sales page. 

Dunning Emails 

 
Dunning emails are essentially emails that remind your customer of the status of their account and provide them with directions to update or finalize their information or payments so that they can continue using your info-product.
 
Dunning emails cannot be set-up in clickfunnels or other common web page builders that lack events for failed subscription rebills.
 
To get around this, all you need to do is set up a Zapier account and create the zaps you’ll need to automate you dunning emails. Since Zapier provides the failed subscription events, it can extract the data for failed subscription rebills from clickfunnels and pass it on to the customer in an automated email.
 
Keep in mind that if you want all the emails in the sequence to be automated in a single zap, you’ll need to upgrade zapier to a paid version to extend the number of events you can have in a single zap and also be able to create unlimited zaps. In other words, if you need more than a single event to be automated through Zapier, you ought to opt for a paid version.
 
Toolbox – Dunning sequence
 
In this toolbox you’ll be provided with dunning email templates that you can simply fill out and
 
Templates: Dunning email sequence
Templates: Shared Dunning Zaps 

How To test Ads – Walkthrough

 
Step One: The best way to test Facebook ads is by split testing and comparing. First decide which format you are going to use. Is it an image ad, a carousel, a slideshow, a canvas or a video?
 
Step Two: Choose 4-6  different images (if you are using an image format) or 2-3 videos (if you are using a video format) to be the mainframe of each ad. The purpose to this is to work out which image/video gets the most clicks.
 
Step Three: Go to Facebook Ads Manager. Click ‘Create New Campaign’. A popup will appear identical to the image below. Click the ‘Traffic’ option.
 
Step Four: A new popup will appear. Make sure to name your test appropriately then click ‘Continue’.
 
Step Five: Now click on the button that says, ‘New Ad Set’ or ‘1 Ad Set’. Name your ad set accordingly. This is the collection of all the different ads you are going to run.
 
Now click ‘website’ and create your audience depending on the demographics/location/interests you want to target. Also make sure to budget accordingly.
Around 10% of your total market budget should be invested in testing, so make sure you don’t exceed this. We recommend using only $3-5/day for each ad.
Step six: Click ‘Manual Placements’ and ensure that only ‘Facebook Newsfeed’ is ticked. In the case you are testing video ads, its best you keep ‘Facebook Video Feeds’ ticked too. Only Facebook should ticked on the platform dropdown too.
Step Seven: Make sure to do the following:

• Optimize For Ad Delivery: Click ‘Impressions’.
• Make Sure The Schedule Is Logged As ‘Ongoing’.
• Click ‘Continue’.

Step Eight: Name each separate ad accordingly. For clarity, ‘Image Ad One’ etc. will suffice. Make sure to attach the correct Facebook business page if you haven’t already, although this should be done automatically.

Step Nine: Make sure to use the correct format depending on the ad type you are testing.
 
Step Ten: Upload your respective image/video. This will be different for each ad.
 
Step Eleven: Input your course website URL. This can take them to the homepage/sales page/blog post. Whatever feels relevant with the ad in question.
 
Step Twelve: Keep the headline, subheading, and body text the same for the ad. Remember, the only thing we are changing is the main image/video. Everything else must stay fixed.
 
Step Thirteen: Make sure your Pixel is turned on so you can monitor the traffic and their activity. This should just be a case of turning on a slider that says, ‘Facebook Pixel’.
 
Step Fourteen: Click ‘Confirm’. Congratulations! Your ad is now running.
 
Step Fifteen: Repeat for each new ad, choosing a new image/video each time. For clarity, make sure each ad is placed within the same ad-set. This makes it easier for you to compare and contrast results.
 
Step Sixteen: Let the ads run for 2-3 days. Once this time window is up, you need to analyze each ad’s performance. Key performance indicators include: Impressions, reach and results (link clicks). A good way of understanding an ad’s success is by dividing impressions by results. This is the number of impressions it takes to trigger a single link click. The lower it is, the better the ad is.
 
Step Seventeen: Choose the top two best performing ads within the set. These will be your templates for following tests.
 
Step eighteen: Repeat the previous seventeen steps, this time varying something other than the main image/video. You might want to change the audience location, the body text, the headline or even the audience interests.
 
By doing this over and over again, you can combine all your results to get the ‘perfect’ ad. This will be a mixture of all the best performing ads within each respective ad set i.e. the best image, the best text, the best audience demographics.
 
To verify it is the best performing, compare them against other ad combinations and analyze the results. If you are unsure about the validity of the results, just let the test run for longer than usual.
 
Step nineteen: Consistently re-test to make sure the ad you are running offers the maximal results.
Well done for making it this far – testing may not be the most fun part of marketing, but stick it out and you’ll see results.
 

How to Solve Common Marketing Issues

 
A great marketer is defined by their resilience and resolve. Throughout your marketing experience, you will encounter a swathe of different problems and challenges. It’s your job to overcome them if you want to be successful.
 
You don’t need to do it alone. Use our helpful tips to guide you along the way.
 

Problem: Struggling with a smaller budget

 
Solution: Get an idea of what is essential, and how to properly portion your budget. Important things to consider are website hosting, website design, testing, affiliate software, ad campaigns and course creation.
 

Problem: Lots of clicks but no sales

 
Solution: This could be down to a multitude of issues. It’s just a case of troubleshooting and sourcing the problem/s. Common reasons for this are:

• Poor audience demographics/targeting the wrong audience. You may need to alter your ad campaigns or think about changing the target audience of your course. 
• Your ad campaigns lack quality. Running ad sets and comparing performance is the best way to find the perfect ad.
• Poor landing pages. Split testing software can help you find the page that packs the most punch.
• Inconsistent theme and branding.

Problem: Struggling to rank even though all SEO checklist has been ticked off

 
Solution: You may be targeting keywords with high competition rates. In order to rank for quality keywords, you need to work from the ground up. Try targeting longtail keywords with high search volume and low competition. Software such as Longtail Pro is excellent for finding these.
 

Problem: Social media is struggling to obtain followers

 
Solution: Be extremely unique in your approach. Apply your main theme into your posts. Offer something in return for engagement. Do giveaways. Prioritize customer experience. Join engagement groups. Post consistently (1-2 per day, especially on Instagram). Post quality content. Focus on viral videos on your Instagram page. Post original content, not just reposts. Respond to comments and direct messages.
 

Problem: The product is not selling enough even after testing

 
Solution: Invest in an affiliate program. Offer mouth-watering commissions and extra bonuses for your affiliates. You may even need to create a customer support team to look answer any queries they may have about promoting your course. You have to treat your affiliates with the utmost care, they may just be the reason your product goes viral.
 

Problem: Struggling to get natural views on your website

 
Solution: Focus on SEO and start a blog on your website. Create articles that answer questions and queries within your niche. For example, if I was selling a course that taught people about writing a short story, I might publish an article titled ‘Top Ten Tips For Character Development In Horror Fiction.
 

Problem: Struggling to think of blog content

 
Solution: Go to ‘AnswerThePublic.com’ and type in a relevant keyword within your niche. The search page spits out all the relevant search queries related to your keyword of interest. So, for example, if I searched ‘Running Shoes’, the website would show me all the different things people had been searching for that were related to my search term. Take a look at the image below to see what it would look like.
Note: If something goes wrong on your website/ad campaign that is outside your level of expertise, it’s best to just contact the relevant support team. They are there to help and you should never shy away from getting them to fix your problems.

 

Summary 

 
In this section, you learned:
 

• Why you need to optimize your marketing results.
• How to reduce your churn rate.
• How Paykickstart can help you through failed subscription rebilling and removing customers from membership areas if payment is not completed after the third Dunning email.
• Why and how affiliation can help you – we looked at affiliate structures, 
• Understand what Dunning email are and how to use them.
• Understand how to test the design and copy within your marketing campaign. 
• You know which metrics you need to test for each section: 

• Traffic: Cost per click for ads
• Sales page: Conversion rate, bounce rate, percentage of the page your customers read
• Checkout: Conversion rate
• One-time offers: Conversion rate 
• Remarketing: Email open rate, cost per email open

• How to solve common marketing issues, including low conversion rates despite a high number of clicks, SEO problems, and getting ideas for content. 

Congratulations

 
You’ve completed the whole course.
 
You’ve done more for yourself by taking this course than most other e-learning entrepreneurs, and you’ve set yourself up for the absolute best chances of success. Remember, if you find anything difficult to understand, contact us on EMAIL so we can walk you through it. And also remember, testing, honing, and refining is the key.
 
You’re no longer hoping for the best. No longer hoping that you’ll find techniques that get results. You have a clear blueprint and have started taking steps towards realizing your dreams.
 
Celebrate, reward yourself, be proud and make some serious profits!