What do we measure in our business to ensure that we are growing every single year? I’m going to tell you in this episode.

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Big Ideas

The Only Way To Grow Your Business [2:00]

I got asked a question by my friend Dez, “If you were starting over and you had to keep things super simple, what do you measure in your business?” And this is a great question!

This basically falls in line with Episode #1 of the Marketing Your Business Podcast, where I talk about how simple marketing is. The reality of this is we do need to measure certain things in our business because we want to make sure that we’re making forward progress. And the only way that we can experience continuous growth is if we track and measure.

As your company begins to grow, it requires even more need for you to keep it simple so that more and more of your team are all on the same page. There are so many things that you and I can do to grow our business. And there are so many new things coming at us, every single day, week, and month, yet you should only focus on one thing at a time. But what’s that one thing that you should be focusing on? We’re going to break it down by focusing on my three big rocks for long-term success.

Traffic [4:30]

Every year, as we gear up and plan for the upcoming year, our team looks at the big rocks and we ask ourselves, which one are we going to focus on this year? It’s not to say that we’re not going to do some other things, but this is the priority. At the end of the day, this is the only thing that matters. Let’s break down each of these big rocks. Number one, traffic. Are people seeing your offer? If you don’t have people coming and seeing your offer, it doesn’t matter how good your offer is, doesn’t matter how good your product is, doesn’t matter how good your membership service or anything that you’re offering is. If people aren’t seeing it, the business ain’t going to grow.

Traffic comes in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and forms. You’ve got your paid traffic with paid ads – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google ads, blog, or any type of ads. Another form of traffic is organic traffic. This is all the free traffic you can get from blogging, podcasting, from the content that you publish on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and all the different platforms that you can utilize to create organic traffic. Traffic is important for your business, it’s the lifeblood of what we do because if we don’t get traffic, the business will not grow.

Conversion [06:26]

Big Rock number two, conversion. Are people buying? Let’s assume that you’ve got tons of traffic coming all day long. But if nobody’s buying, the business isn’t going to grow. It’s like if you are selling dog products but the only people who are seeing the offer are people who hate animals. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you’re going to get, you’re not going to sell anything. So, traffic by itself won’t grow the business. You’ve got to have a combination of traffic and conversion.

Conversion looks at a whole variety of different elements. You can look at the conversion of people landing on your opt-in page, people signing up for your webinar, people actually joining your webinar, people buying on the webinar, people buying from your sales page, people opening your emails, people clicking on links in your email. There’s all kinds of different conversion points but that’s what you have to drill into. If you’ve identified that the traffic is coming but the people aren’t buying, then you’ve got a conversion problem. You have to start digging a little bit deeper to identify where the breakage is happening. Many times people will make the mistake of assuming that the whole offer is a write-off, but it’s not necessarily true. It just might be one part that is off.

For example, let’s take a webinar funnel. There’s multiple conversion points here, one being the email that you send to your list inviting people to come and join you for the webinar. If the email sucks and nobody’s reading it, or worse, nobody’s even opening it, nobody’s going to sign up for the webinar. You can falsely assume that the offer sucks and that’s why people aren’t buying, but it has nothing to do with the offer. It has everything to do with the email. Now, let’s say the emails are decent and you got people landing on the webinar registration page but they’re not registering. Again, it doesn’t mean that the whole offer gets thrown out the window, it just means that your opt-in page sucks and you have to improve that. Finally, let’s say you improve the opt-in page, but people aren’t showing up live. Then that’s what we focus on. Or people are showing up live but not buying – now we can fix that presentation.

Retention [9:58]

Big rock number three especially for those of us in the membership or subscription business is retention. Are people staying and paying? What I know to be true after being in this industry for more than a decade, helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with their memberships – if they aren’t happy, they aren’t going to stay. Your job is to keep people happy, keep them moving forward and making progress. If they’re not staying, we have to identify that because retention is a huge goldmine of an opportunity. If you get all the traffic in the world and you convert that traffic into a paying subscriber, that’s great for that initial sale. But if you’re losing people just as fast as you’re gaining them, that membership or that subscription business is not going to grow. The only way you and I can successfully, continuously, year-after-year grow our membership or subscription business is if people are staying and paying.

How We’ve Been Growing TRIBE [12:44]

This year, as we were leading up to our TRIBE Launch, our team identified that across the board, everything was rock solid. But if we really wanted to grow and scale this launch, we needed more traffic. So we doubled down our efforts on building our list and generating more traffic, and there came a point when we had spent our budget but had about four weeks to go. Investing money in ads can be nerve-wracking, because you’re seeing tens of thousands of dollars being spent, and when you’re doing it for a launch, there’s no immediate return. So you have to do it based on a track record, and we have a track record, we know what things are going to convert like. So at that point, even though it was nerve-wracking, we kept doubling down on our traffic and as a result, we had our biggest launch by a landslide!

The year before that, we focused on conversion. Particularly on one page that impacts the entire launch – the opt-in page for our TRIBE Workshop series. If we can improve that one page, we would significantly improve the overall conversions. So we took that one opt-in page from a roughly 45% opt-in rate to just shy of 70% opt-in rate. And that meant for every thousand people that landed on that page, we had roughly 300 more people opting in. If 300 more people opted in and everything else stayed the same, we increased the business.

Here’s an example for when it comes to improving retention. We just finished a launch for our new membership, and in doing that, we had a focus on improving our retention and payment recovery. We set up a system whereby the moment a card failed, that person’s info was sent to a spreadsheet that we were able to track and immediately follow up with people many times within the hour of the payment failing. And of the $24,000 that failed during this promotion, we have already recovered $21,000 almost immediately. The people who we were able to touch base with were blown away by the level of service.

Memorable Quote

“The only way you and I can successfully, continuously, year-after-year grow our membership or subscription business is if people are staying and paying.” – Stu McLaren

Resources

Episode #1 – Marketing Is Simple

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