In this video posted on my YouTube channel I share the journey from how we went from $0 to over $800,000 in sales with a high ticket program in 12 months using paid advertising. I breakdown the 5 phases we went through, what we focused on, the biggest challenges, how we overcame those, and how we plan to keep scaling this up 🚀 Check it out below!
So as of right now, we’ve done just over $830,000 in sales for an online course. And if we keep going at the rate, we’re going over the next two months, we will easily cross $1 million in sales. And so what I wanna do in this video is just share with you the entire journey of how we went from getting started with this program, into getting to the point to where, you know, maybe by the time you’re watching this, we’ve crossed a million dollars in sales. We’ve done this all with paid ads and we’re consistently getting between four to $5 back for every dollar that we’re putting into the ad machine. So of course, getting here has been quite the journey. It’s taken us about 12 months to get to this point. And there’s been a lot of ups and downs. So what I wanna share with you in this video is just the phases that we went through because as you’re going through this, there’s so many things that you could focus on, but there’s only a few things that you really should focus on at any given step.
So we’re gonna break down those phases. What did we focus on? What are the challenges we experienced? How do we overcome those? And then what do we have planning coming up next? So there’s gonna be a ton of value in this video. If you either have an online course or some kind of high ticket program that you’re trying to sell, if you are trying to work with companies like this, maybe you’re trying to get online and offer services in this industry, whatever it is, I’m really just gonna break down everything that we’ve done to get to this stage really quick. If you don’t know me already, my name is Brice and I run a marketing agency where we work with companies that sell digital products. So every day I’m partnering with these types of companies and on this channel, I just share what we’re doing and how it’s working for us.
So if you have any questions, please feel free to drop me the comments below, super happy to answer and, and help out any way that I can. Also, if you like this kind of content or you’re in this industry just hit the subscribe button, uh, because I’m making more videos like this and be dropping a lot of stuff about, you know, what’s working for us, what we’re seeing, what we’re doing, what’s changing all of that stuff. Uh, so stick around and I’ll give you a ton of information in this video too. So a little bit of background about this company. They are an online education company. They sell a training program that is in like the B2B space. So they’re targeting other business professionals and helping them grow their business. When we started working with them, they already had a product that is really great and was actually already selling really well through organic traffic.
So they were doing social media, they were doing PR, they were doing SEO. They were doing all of this stuff. And that helped them get to being a company that was generating about a million dollars a year. The challenge that they ran into was they just could never get ads to work. So they had tried running ads. A bunch of times, they had not found any success. They had been trying to run ads on Facebook, on Google, all these different platforms, and they ended up just losing money every time they did it. So the price points on these, this is a program that cost $5,000. When we started working with them, they also had a down sell product that they would sell for $2,000. And then they have a continuity offer that was a hundred dollars per month for anybody who came into the program and wanted to stick around for a long period of time.
We’ve since raised the prices. So now we’re selling the product for about 7,000 bucks. That downs sale offer is now 4k. And if they continue the offer is now $150 a month. So that big challenge we were running into when we first got started was they just couldn’t get ads to work. Right. They had a ton of content they’re really doing like the HubSpot model. So they were doing webinars every month. They were doing blog posts. They were doing PR, they were doing guest posting. They were doing all these things. And again, that got them to be a million dollar company, which was really good. The problem is they didn’t have any scalable traffic sources that they really felt that they could tap into. So the business owner running a million dollar business was spending most of his time, creating content, doing webinars, editing, blog, posts, all of this stuff.
And they really wanted to figure out how they could get into paid ads so that they could have a more scalable traffic source and that they could kind of control their inbound lead flow a little better. So what we had to do was we had to come in and figure out out of all the stuff that they’ve already created, how can we take what they have, figure out how to build that for paid ads, and then get that up and running and being profitable on whatever channels we can run this on. And this is actually really common with a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with. And what we’ve seen with a lot of businesses is they have something working for organic or social media or some other traffic channel. And they’re trying to get paid ads to work and where a lot of companies struggle is they just try to take that thing that was working on social media and just run ads to it.
Or they just try to take that thing that was working with SEO, that lead magnet or that trip wire funnel, whatever it is, and just run ads to it. And that’s not how it worked with paid ads. You’ve really gotta build what you need for paid ads. And so that’s where we started. That was really like phase one was what are the front end offers that we’re gonna run? How can we take what they have and repackage that down to something that is going to work for paid ads? What is the funnel we need? Uh, what is the type of content we’re gonna use? What are the ads that we’re gonna run? And then what’s some basic targeting that we can get started with. So we can get proof of concept that yes, we can actually start to generate sales for this offer using paid ads.
So we really had to figure out here in the beginning is like, what is the type of funnel that we are going to use in order to get people from the type of track we wanted running to, which is paid ads into actually converting into this program. And so what we ended up going with was a sales call funnel. So that is having a landing page. That landing page is driving people to like a VSL, a short video presentation. And then from there we’re pushing people to book a call. And what we did was we went through all of the webinars that had available and picked a few that we thought would work best. We set up a couple of landing pages. We put a couple of different videos on the back end. We started with some very basic ads and some very basic targeting.
And we started trying to get some data on like, what’s gonna work best. Where are we gonna find that we can actually book calls and start talking with people from paid ads and start talking to them about getting into the program. So that’s really like our proof of concept phase. That’s like the first 30 days of what we’re trying to do. And the good news is for us is we got it profitable right out the gate. So we started running some what, some different videos. We had a different couple of different videos in the funnel. And very quickly we found that we were able to generate calls and start generating sales. So that was awesome because that is oftentimes one of the hardest parts for a lot of companies, especially if you’re just getting started is actually getting profitable. So we were profitable right at the gate, a big reason why is just because we had a high lifetime customer value.
So when you’re selling something for 5,000, if you’re gonna afford to spend 2000 bucks to acquire a customer, makes it a lot easier for you. If you’re trying to sell something that costs a thousand bucks, all of a sudden you can spend way less money to acquire a customer. And so that high lifetime customer value made it very easy for us to be profitable right off the gate. Also, the product is awesome. So we had a very unique product and that helped a lot, but that’s really, again, that first phase of like, just getting proof of concept on this. Once we had that proof of concept and we knew which one of these video presentations that we already had available was going to work best. That’s where we really started doing a ton of testing on the ad platform. So we started just running Facebook ads, and this is where we went and created hundreds of variations of ads.
So we created tons of ad copy, tons of images, tons of videos. And we just started testing everything that we could to figure out what was really gonna move the needle on the traffic platform. Because we figured out within this first 30 days very quickly, what were the things that, what was like the funnel that was actually gonna convert? So we’re already getting sales calls and we’re already converting people. So that’s exactly where we wanted to be on the funnel side of things. The next thing was the traffic side of things. We started with some really basic ads, and then we just started creating tons of different angles. So we had, uh, a lot of different copies, a lot of different images, and we could vary all those together and come up with hundreds of variations of ads. So as we go through this testing process, the next 60 days was really trying to figure out what were the creatives that were gonna work best on the ad platform.
And that took us a little longer to figure out because there were just so many different variations we could run through. And we found that they all generally got about the same kind of results. That’s typically what we see when we test a bunch of ads is out of the 10 ads that we’ll test four or five will just totally flop and not do very good three or four will do. Okay. But we’re really trying to find that one that does exceptionally well, that one that’s like a banger. Like you send it out and all of sudden, like numbers change dramatically, double click, double the click through rates, call cost per call comes down 30%. Like that’s what you’re looking for with the ads that you’re testing. And so it took us a while to figure out what that ad was. And we actually got really lucky because we had some big news in the industry that we were running ads to.
And so once that news came out, we created some ads around that news article and that’s what ended up taking off. So we launched this ad and we went from getting like 30 sales calls a month to like 60 sales calls in a month very quickly because we just found that creative, that work and all of a sudden our, the number of sales calls that we have doubled and all of a sudden we’re able to start generating a lot more sales using the same budget that we had just cuz we figured out that key winning creative variation. So at this point we’re about 90 days into this campaign and we’ve got basically like an MVP for a funnel. We’ve got something that we know is working. It can be done better. But we’ve got something that is actually converting to sales. And we figured out what are the ads that are working, which is a really good spot that we want to be.
So then from here we started optimizing the funnel itself. So this is where we started focusing more on the funnel itself. So we wrote a new VSL so that we had, we could split test the old VSL and the new VSL. We started split testing the landing pages. So we started testing different landing page variations. We had, uh, two variations running at, at any given time, usually testing the copy, the headlines. We also had some different landing pages for different campaigns that were running. So we had a few different landing pages that were out there. And then we started really focusing very heavily on the email backend. So we wanted to figure out how could we optimize the email flow so that we could get more calls booked through this funnel without having to increase the budget at all. And so this is where we’re looking at, what are our automations, what are the broadcasts that we’re sending out?
What are the types of emails that people are responding well with and how can we optimize that whole back end of the funnel? So we can increase the conversion rates on the funnel, which would inevitably bring down our cost to acquire a customer without adjusting the budget on the front end at all. Now of course, while all this is going on, we’re testing different ads, we’re trying to roll out different variations. Oftentimes what we see on the ad platform, especially with Facebook is you can find a winning hook, a winning angle that works well and you can run that for months, but you’re gonna have to run variations of that. So at any given time we’ve got ads that are working really well. The copy’s pretty much the same, but maybe the headline’s a little different or the first couple of sentences, a little different, the images are similar, but we’ve got different variations.
We’ve got that ad with images. We’ve got that ad with videos. So we might have six or seven variations of the exact same ad. It’s just look, you know, it looks different when it shows up on somebody’s newsfeed, but it’s the same angle. It’s that same message. So we had found that winning message in phase two. Now what we’re doing is just creating slight variations of that, where we’re really focused on the backend. And that’s where we’re really looking at again, email marketing landing pages. VSLs how can we increase the conversion rate on the funnel so that we’re getting better results with the ad dollars we’re putting in. Now at this point we’re consistently generating between like 45,000 and $50,000 in sales every single month through this funnel. Now keep in mind that’s revenue. That’s not profit, but given the fact that it is an information product, we don’t have any cost of goods.
There’s no physical products to sell. The big thing is our cost of ad spend, which we’re spending about 10k a month. At this point, we’ve got the cost of advertising. We’ve got the cost of the agency running it. So that’s us. And then we have the cost for the team that’s delivering it. So those are the people on the team. Any coaches, anyone that’s inside the program, all that stuff. Uh, it’s not a hundred percent margins, but it’s pretty good margins. And we’re running consistently about a four to five return on ad spents. We’re getting four to $5 back for every dollar that we put in as we’re going through this process and scaling this up. The big thing that we unlocked as we were kind of going through this phase three was the email marketing. That’s what we found made the biggest difference.
So landing pages, when we can increase the conversion rate on the landing page, of course, that brings down our cost per lead. That’s good. That’s what we wanna see the VSLs we were testing and some would do a little bit better than the other ones. We never really found one that was doing exceptionally well at this stage. But email marketing was where we started driving way more results before we had just had some basic email sequences that were going out. Uh, these were actually set up by the company beforehand. We hadn’t gone into ’em yet, but at this point we just took over their email marketing for them. And what we started doing was sending out two emails a week. We started improving their optimization, automations and we started going through and just figuring out what are the types of emails that people are engaging with and just ultimately sending way more emails to their list, trying to add value, but also get people to book calls.
And that’s where we started to see a big increase in calls. So we got about a 30% increase in the number of people that were booking calls through emails, just by going through and beefing up the automations and sending out more weekly emails. Hey, so actually just a really quick editor’s note while I’m going through and, uh, reviewing this video is I’ve actually got a really good video that I made about the email marketing strategy that we use for my clients. So we’ve used this to generate over $40,000 in sales in just a few weeks. We’ve done multiple six figures in sales with this simple email marketing strategy. So I’ll put the link, I think right here in this corner or maybe that one, but probably this one. And, uh, if you wanna check it out, it it’s good stuff. And now back to the video, the biggest thing I would say to anybody who’s trying to run ads, especially right now, one of the challenges that people face is the cost of advertising is just going up and that cost to acquire customers, getting higher.
One of the best things you can do. And one of the things that we’re doing now with every new client, even sooner is starting to work on that backend and that email marketing, because if we can convert more people that come through the funnel, we can ultimately bring down our cost to acquire a customer. And that’s what we wanna do at the end of the day is we just wanna make as much money as we can with the advertising dollars we’re spending, instead of just trying to spend more money, why don’t we spend the same money and make more money by increasing that backend conversion rate. And so that’s been a big focus for us, and that would, would always be something that I would be looking at, how we can do better in the future is how can we just continually get better at the way that we’re converting customers that are coming through the funnel so that we ultimately need less people to come through the funnel to make more money.
That’s pretty much what we wanna be going for anyways. So now we’re getting into phase four here. So at this point we have figured out what were we went through all of their content. And we figured out what were the webinars and, and the video presentations that we had available to us that we could use for paid ads. Then we built a funnel for paid ads. And what we were doing is using a sales call funnel so that we could gather leads on a landing page, get them into a video presentation and then use email marketing in that landing page, uh, on the, or that video delivery page to get people, to book a call. And then we went through and optimized that funnel. So we started split testing that video, trying different, different leads on that video, trying different variations of that video. We started doing email marketing.
We started doing landing page optimization. The big thing that we figured out was email was where it was at. That was where we found the biggest impact on this entire funnel. Now that we had the funnel really cranking, what we started doing is scaling out to other traffic sources. So we didn’t want to be 100% percent dependent on one traffic source. And the one traffic source that had been working for us up until this point was Facebook. Now, of course, Facebook is just kind of a finicky platform and it’s not a consistent growth, right? Our sales are looking pretty much like this every month, some months are a little higher. Some months are a little lower, some months it’s more consistent some months it’s not, but we’re able to continually get things tested out while we’re doing Facebook. Then what we started doing is running these ads on YouTube.
So we took the messaging that we saw working really well on Facebook. And we started running that exact same messaging on YouTube. So this is where we’re able to start really scaling up our budget. And at this point we’ve got ads running on Facebook. That means we’ve got Facebook and Instagram. We’ve also got ads running on YouTube. We’ve got Google search going, and then we’ve got Google for all the retargeting. So we’ve got Google display network, uh, Google discovery ads. We’ve also got LinkedIn ads. So pretty much anyone that comes into our funnel is going to see this business on any platform they go to because we’ve got retargeting set up everywhere. Uh, and then where main traffic sources are Facebook and YouTube. Once you start building out another traffic source, what you will find is that traffic source does not convert the exact same way as the other one.
So if you are running something on Facebook, you can’t just take that and run that exact same thing on YouTube all the time. There’s gonna be some nuances. So what we found was we needed a different landing page. So we’re just taking that same funnel. We’re cloning it. And we’re now running a different landing page on YouTube. And we’re optimizing that landing page for that traffic source. And then what we’re really trying to figure out is, again, what is the creative that’s gonna work best? I feel like on Facebook and YouTube, any platform you’re on, it’s all about the ads that you’re running. That’s, what’s gonna give you the biggest difference. And so we had to go through a bunch of variations of videos in order to find the one that was really gonna work. The good news was we had all this data from Facebook about like what hooks have been working, what was engaging people, all of that stuff.
But when we took that to YouTube, we still need to figure out, well, how are we gonna package that? And actually get that into a good video script? How are we gonna film it, get it edited down, create a video and then figure out what targeting’s gonna work best. So again, that’s just a process and we just take that process like we’re testing out any new traffic source, right? So we start with some small budgets, small campaigns, and we start scaling those up. Once we start seeing sales, come in again, lucky for us. We’ve got a really good offer. We’ve got a good funnel. Uh, the product is really great. So once we started running ads on YouTube, we quickly saw that we were able to get sales. It was a little tougher to dial in the YouTube side. So it took a couple of months before we got it really figured out.
But then we were able to start spending almost about as much money on YouTube as we were on Facebook. So that gets us to where we are at now. We’re about 12 months into this process. We’re doing about a hundred thousand dollars a month in sales plus or minus just on this product that doesn’t include their back in continuity. So they’re constantly building up new members on their continuity program as well. Uh, and we’re spending about 60% of our budget on Facebook. We’re spending the other 40% on YouTube. We’ve got a little bit of retargeting in there and we’re really focusing on, okay, we’re still looking at how do we beef up the email marketing? How do we make the conversions better back there? Uh, we’re starting to work on a new VSL, so we’re gonna try to see how we can split test this VSL and get that working better.
And then going forward, we’re looking at how can we build a bigger backend? And that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve seen in pretty much all of the companies that we work with. And all of my friends that I know in this industry that are being really successful is let’s focus on how do we get as many people in the front end as possible while that’s definitely still important. And we’re definitely still spending a lot of time on that. We’re starting to look at how do we build bigger back end? So what we’re looking at doing is having a mastermind or some kind of bigger high ticket thing on the end, on the other end. So we can take these people who have already spent five, $7,000 and get them to spend 10, 15, $20,000 on a higher ticket program. Now, of course, that means we have to build something that is that valuable, but what we can do is what we’re working on is, you know, building a mastermind community that will be super valuable for anyone that comes in there.
The other thing that we’re looking at doing is building up a bigger sales team. So all of these calls are being closed over the phone. And so what would be a way to improve what we’re doing and what we’re looking at is how can we get more people on the sales team to help set up appointments? So even actually just proactively reaching out to anybody who opts into our stuff, seeing where they’re at having a conversation with them, trying to get them on the phone with the sales team, and then figuring out how we can improve that process on the back end on the sales side. And so we’re looking at getting some setters who can either talk to people through email messenger, chat, whatever that is, start conversations, and then set them up with people on the sales team. And then the very last thing is like where we’re looking to get a lot more scale on the traffic side of things is YouTube.
Facebook’s been really good and we’ve been able to generate the majority of our sales with Facebook, but we just see a lot of opportunity on YouTube going forward. And so that’s where we’re gonna have a big focus over the next couple of months is figuring out how do we build the backend and how do we scale up YouTube? And we’re gonna build on the backend by adding higher ticket products and building out the sales team. And then we’re gonna see how we can scale out YouTube as much as possible, because I think that’s just gonna be a bigger traffic source going forward. So that’s pretty much like the four phases that we’ve been through and what we’ve got coming next. Now will this exact strategy work for you? I have no idea cuz the reality is every business is different. Um, if you are trying to sell through paid ads, this has been something that I have seen consistently work for.
A lot of the businesses that we work with, which is, you know, start with a high ticket product, selling it over the phone is much easier than selling it through like a sales page or anything like that these days, unless you’ve got something that’s really low ticket challenge with low ticket is it can be very hard to get profitable if you don’t have that backend. So again, this is something I’ve seen with a bunch of the business that I work with. You know, we’re using sales calls, funnels, we’re generating leads online and we are closing them over the phone. If you decide to go down this route of selling your online programs with paid ads, the thing is you can’t figure out the entire process, uh, from the very beginning you just have to get started. And so that’s why I wanna make those videos kind of show you the different phases that we went through so that what you can see here’s how we get started.
Here’s what we focus on in the very beginning. And then once we get that figured out, what do we focus on next? And so again for us, that was like first, how do we just get proof of concept? We need to know that we can set up a funnel and that we can run ads to that’s gonna help us generate calls. Uh, and we can actually close those people into what we’re selling. Once we do that, then we really figure out the creatives. And that’s what we’re really trying to figure out. We’ve got this funnel, that’s working, let’s figure out what is the creative thing. That’s really gonna resonate with people. Once we do that, we can go back to the funnel because we started with kind of a funnel that we knew was gonna get us working kind of an MVP version of a funnel, but now we can really go back and beef up the back end.
So this is where we can really start to look at the emails, the VSLs, the landing pages, all that stuff start to improve everything that’s going on there. And that what you’re doing is bringing down your CA costs on the ad platform and increasing your conversions on the back end, which is how you get more profitable. Overall. Once we did that, then we started looking at scaling out to other traffic sources. It’s really difficult to run ads on two traffic sources if you don’t know if anything’s working, but it’s great to start with one traffic source, get everything dialed in. Once everything dialed in scale out to two Facebook and YouTube are the big players right now. So if you’re running ads on Facebook and YouTube, you’re doing pretty good. Um, a lot of people are running TikTok with success as well. It just really depends on like, where’s your market at what type of funnel do you have all of that stuff.
So those are questions that you can kind of ask yourself, but start with one traffic source. Once you get it working and you’re profitable, then you can start looking at scaling out to other ones. And then the biggest thing I see across this industry is, you know, really focusing on the back end. So instead of being super obsessed with how do we get as many cheap customers in the front door as possible? How can we maximize that lifetime customer value? How can we get more people coming in the back end? And how can we add a bigger back end to our service so that we can just ascend people through different products and just create a more valuable, basically more high touch offer that people would be interested in joining as you go through this process. The next step always really gets pretty obvious once you see it, you know, once you’ve got real customers coming in the door, you’ve got real data coming from your funnel and your ad platform and all that stuff.
You can look at that and the next step becomes pretty obvious. You can just see where the gaps are. So if you just get started and you start with that very beginning part of like, let’s get an MVP up, let’s get proof of concept with this. You know, we wanna sell this program with paid ads, let’s find the traffic source, let’s get it set up. Once you do that, the data will show you everything you need to do next. And the good thing is once you get started on this process, you’re never starting over, right? You’re always just the next, you’re always just building on what you know, and the next step kind of comes naturally with once you see what’s working and what’s not. So I hope this helps you get an idea of what you could do if you want to sell your programs with paid ads.
And if you have any questions again, please just drop them down in the comments below. I’ve also got a bunch of other videos on this channel about like what’s working for us. What types of funnels, what traffic sources, how do we set them up? How do we run them, all of that good stuff. So you can check those all out on the channel. I would love to hear any questions you have. And again, I’ll jump in there and help out as much as I can. One thing I would say for sure is if you’re trying to run ads or you wanna run better ads for your online programs, uh, check out these next videos that I’ve got coming up because some of those have a bunch of really good stuff in them. And other than that have a great day and I’ll catch you next time.
0 Comments