Today I want to talk about techniques my former agency used to build an evergreen funnel that achieved a 405% ROI that you can use to boost your business. It was a funnel for a client who is a coach and consultant who got $4 profit for every $1 they put into Facebook ads.
This funnel also built a substantial email list that they can continue to market new products and services to and make into loyal customers and evangelists for those products, which increases their ROI even more.
Sound like something you’d want to do?
Well settle in to find out more about this funnel, why it worked, and how you can do the same for your business
Before the Evergreen Funnel
The client we’re talking about hadn’t done a lot with Facebook ads. The majority of their traffic was either organic or from affiliates. This was a whole new marketing channel for them and they weren’t quite sure how it was going to go.
They chose one product to focus on for this initial funnel. It was a product they had promoted to their list, but never to a new audience.
The funnel itself was fairly simple:
Facebook prospecting ad campaigns to drive new leads to an opt-in page.
The opt-in page collects email addresses in exchange for a lead magnet.
An email sequence follows up with new leads, taking them to the sales page.
Facebook ads remarketing campaigns to new leads that don’t respond to the emails, taking them to the sales page.
Building the Facebook Ads Campaigns
The first thing we did was take a hard look at the audience demographics for this client. There was quite a bit of information already, from the audit done prior to them becoming a client.
My team created a client avatar, based on the information they already had. We also used the information from our extensive testing in the prospecting campaigns to further optimize their ads, which helped us develop a clearer picture of the client’s audience.
This particular client’s audience demographics are:
Primarily women.
Mostly from the U.S.
More than half are college-educated and married.
More than half are iPhone users.
My team also looked at the audience’s most common job titles, and the top Facebook pages they followed.
Knowing this about the client’s current audience helped us better optimize the ads and targeting for the campaigns when it came to building new prospecting audiences.
The budget was split equally between the prospecting and remarketing campaigns. That way there was a good base to build new audiences from, but also a substantial amount to put toward converting those new leads into customers.
The Prospecting Campaign
My team used the prospecting campaign to introduce the client and their offer to new audiences and build trust with them. Each ad led to a landing page that gave away a lead magnet related to the product our client was selling.
The lead magnet was part of the trust-building exercise. It needed to show that what the client was selling was a quality product that would deliver the value we were promising.
We also ran ads to posts on the client’s blog that were relevant to, or promoted the product. Again, there was an email collection form at the blog post to make sure information was captured from as many of these visitors as possible, usually with an additional lead magnet or content upgrade.
In terms of the ad spend, we were looking for $1.20 to $1.40 per quality lead while maintaining profitable cost per sale.
Your prospecting campaign tells you some important information about your funnel.
If you’re getting lots of clicks, but not a lot of leads, you may need to work on your opt-in page or find a more compelling lead magnet.
If people are buying from your prospecting campaign, you know that your funnel is working well. It shows that your targeting, the positioning of the ads, as well as the opt-in and sales pages are compelling and work well together.
Testing Strategies
My team tested multiple ads and multiple audiences during this campaign, including:
Similar interests
Similar niches
Products and services that our known audience was interested in or used.
The cold traffic audiences were based on demographics similar to our client’s audience, including:
Locations
Gender
Age brackets
Devices
Lookalike audiences were based on:
Leads
People who purchased
Our client’s email list
Top 25% of website visitors
In terms of the ads themselves, the team tested:
Types of ads (image, video, carousel, etc.)
Different images
Different ad copy
Facebook ad settings that relate to how Facebook itself operates, in terms of ad placement and optimization.
What we found for this particular client was that copy that focused on the results and benefits of the product worked best. Images that showed our client got a better response than pictures of the product or a stock photo. The client’s picture helped build trust, showing there was a real, relatable person behind the product.
Our team was also careful to exclude all remarketing audiences, everyone who visited the client’s website or who purchased the product. That way we weren’t wasting money showing our ads to people who already knew about, or had purchased from our client. They also weren’t annoying them, which can affect future purchases.
Follow-Up
Everyone who opted into the landing page or blog posts was sent a follow-up sequence of 3-4 emails that sent them to the sales page.
(Please note: 3-4 emails is common for a follow-up sequence. However, this is something you need to test for each campaign. You may need more or fewer emails, depending on the audience and the product.)
Once my team had this list of leads, they moved on to…
The Remarketing Campaign
For this campaign, we focused on audiences who already knew about the client, and preferably knew about this product.
My team created audiences based on various remarketing options that Facebook offers, including:
Everyone who signed up for the lead magnet.
Everyone who signed up for content upgrades from blog posts we featured in the prospecting campaign.
Visitors to the sales page or website based on how many days it had been since they visited (7, 30, or 180 days).
Frequency of visits to the sales page or website. (We used the top 25% of visitors.)
Length of time people watched the video ads.
Page engagement.
Post engagement.
The remarketing ads took people who clicked straight to the sales page. Now that these audiences had been introduced to this client and this product, the goal was getting the sale.
In the remarketing campaigns, we found that ads with testimonials from happy, successful customers worked well to push leads into becoming customers themselves, along with an urgency headline, telling them the special promotion was closing soon.
As always, you will want to test different ads for your clients’ campaigns, to see what resonates with their audiences.
The Results
This client put $117,000 in ad spend into this campaign.
Within 6 months, they’ve gotten:
52,689 leads
958 sales
Just under $400,000 in revenue
This is an evergreen funnel that requires minimum maintenance. We expert iit to continue converting at the same rate.
Plus, the client continues to build their email list and learn more about their audience.
Overall, this funnel is definitely a winner. And it can be for you too. You can take what we learned here and apply it to the next evergreen funnel you build for your company. If you follow the same basic steps, you should have good results.
(Please note: While I hope it works for you, I can’t guarantee any particular results for your next campaign if you follow the same steps. There are too many variables, including your product, audience, and goals. However, this is a solid formula for an evergreen funnel and I do recommend you use it in future campaigns.)
So good luck and go for it.
