I was a Social Media Manager for about two years
before I started doing the whole online thing.
I started my business as a consultant.
So I was doing a lot of consulting,
but also done three years services.
it all started really because I was doing a…
I was a social media co-ordinator for a corporate company.
We were managing some housing properties,
about seven states, 14 properties that had a very large virtual scheme.
Managing everything that was related to social media.
So we were launching Facebook Ad Campaigns
and really merging what was happening at the properties,
their physical marketing, their traditional marketing, with the online space.
So it was really fun, it was like my dream job.
It was awesome. I got hired before I even reached college.
Which was crazy, because my background was in nutrition and dietetics, so nothing to do with marketing,
but I really had a passion for social media,
and so I loved it and it was awesome.
But about six months in, I was like totally burned out.
I mean I was working 60 hours, sometimes 70 a week.
Plus I had clients on the side,
because the company was... I mean they were amazing.
They were like, "Yeah, you can have, you know, clients.
Awesome.
I told them that the long term was,
I wanted to have my own business eventually,
so they were totally cool with that.
But it was just too much, it was a very high demanding job.
And as much as I love the people that I was working with,
It was just like, I can’t, I can’t do this anymore.
I really wanna work with small businesses you know, we had...
literally, about, I really don’t wanna say a specific number,
but we had multiple 7-figure marketing projects.
So we were managing huge campaigns,
but I always had a heart for like
small businesses. - Yes.
Helping the little guy, who did not have a lot of resources.
So that’s really how I got started,
I decided to turn in my resignation letter and the president of the company was like,
“Hey, we want you to stay on board.”
We'll just become your first client,
and you can just work from home.
So that was amazing. I was... - Yeah.
very blessed in that sense. Two years and I'm still working with them,
and a bunch of other clients, I partner with the marketing agency.
And I was working with everyone who would hire me.
So lots of small businesses from like
quilting companies to hot tub retailers,
to authors and experts in the financial space as well.
So I worked with over 50 entrepreneurs in that first two years,
probably a little bit more than that,
from, you know, mid-size corporations
to really, really small businesses, like the local mom and pop coffee shop.
- Cool. So it was really great,
and I loved it, I got a lot of experience
just working in the field and marketing with teams.
I started noticing that the clients who were doing really well
with their marketing campaigns already had an established funnel.
A sales sequence, a journey.
And so I found myself really building up a lot of the back end.
A sort of customer journey for clients,
in order to make social media profitable,
because I didn’t wanna be that kind of service provider that was just like,
"Oh, I'll post you know, pretty Instagram pictures for you.”
It was like, I want them to get results and I want them
to be able to tract their sales and their revenue.
And so, I found myself doing a lot of that and I was like,
"Oh my gosh, how can I teach them
how to set this whole system up, so that they're profitable.
And I knew, you know, always like in the back of my mind,
eventually I wanted to do all my courses.
And the majority of my business was planned virtually.
So I was still offering a lot of services,
but I wasn't actually going into talking to these businesses owners; I had clients
you know, in Puerto Rico, and Mexico, and Canada.
So it was always virtual,
but I was still managing the actual platforms for them.
- Okay. - So...
2015. In 2015, my husband was like,
"It's time, you need to launch a course.
This is crazy, you have 17 clients
and I know that you are burnt out.
You need to really start pursuing what you're good at, which is teaching."
So I decided to launch my first online product
and like most people obsessed over it, for like three months.
The crazy person, instead of just launching it, involved in the idea.
Obsessed over it,
launched it with like a terrible strategy.
No idea what I was doing,
got like three people to sign up and I was like totally, totally bombed.
I was like, “Oh my gosh, I'm a total failure, this is not working."
And so, you know, I started learning
more about online marketing and building an email list,
and all that good stuff.
Fast forward, I actually started selling my course
with SamCart because a friend referred me to it.
“Hey you have to check out this new software.”
It was 2015, I was,
“Okay, cool." So I signed up, I was using active campaign,
but was having a lot of issues with the active campaign integration.
- Okay. - So they weren't really...
working very nicely with my membership site.
I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.”
I decided to go with Ontraport,
spent a lot of money with Ontraport
for the first, I think, about six or seven months. - Okay.
And I just never really understood the platform completely.
And I consider myself pretty techy.
So I hired consultants,
spent a bunch of money doing that.
It wasn’t working and I was like fed up.
I was like, well, you know, this whole... I still had clients on the side,
and still trying to launch my online business.
Wasn’t really generating much revenue at all.
Maybe like $2000 a month
from my online course,
and that wasn’t enough for me to feel like,
"Okay, l can let go of the majority of my clients." - Right.
So I was working with Ontraport, and I was like,
I just, I can't... like I'm spending $300 a month and it’s just not working.
Let me try SamCart again.
I switched over to [imaudible] and see how that goes,
and at the time, I was starting to listen a lot to
Bryan's podcast. - Ok.
And I loved it and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what I need.”
I need to learn more about upsells,
and, you know, really starting to
figure out how I want...
I was going to really leverage the traffic that I was receiving.
And so I started learning a lot about that.
And I switched over from SamCart
and I remember one day, I was driving home
and I was listening to his podcast and he was talking about upsells.
and how important they were, So I knew about up upsells frojm Ryen Deiss,
I kind of understood the concept, but I was like,
I don’t know if it’s because I'm a girl,
and my girl button pushed inside,
Didn’t wanna like stress people out
with offering them multiple products.
- Right. - I was like, so salesly.
I don’t wanna do that, which was ridiculous.
I don’t know why I felt that,
but I had a lot of issues with it,
like a lot of resistence around the idea of selling someone a product
after they purchased something from you, and sell them something else.
But he was so compelling in the podcast,
and he was like, "You need to have more than one offer."
So I was like, "Okay, I already have
an intro offer, a small splinter product with a tripwire funnel.
Let me just try having something else."
And so, I put together a pre-sale order for a branding course,
it's now called “Secrets of Branding.”
And didn’t even create a sales page,
I just followed his like one page formula thing,
and I was like, “Okay, let’s just try it out and see how it goes.”
It went really well, we got our first 40 Beta testers
and I upsold them to a second, like my bigger product.
And it worked, and I was like,
“Oh, I got my first upsale and they don’t hate me."
So it was really great.
And then, from there on, I started growing
the online course outside of the business slowly but steadily.
I started offering more upsells, playing with downsells.
Like just experimenting a lot in terms of the platform,
fell in love with upsells.
Now most of our funnels include upsells for sure.
I absolutely loved it; I purchased one of his upsell templates.
- Sure. - And dug in; the video was absolutely horrible...
the first time we did it, but it worked… somehow.
And so after that, SamCart introduced
the off offer bumps? - Yep.
...in their [inaudible]. Tried doing that; it was awesome.
And so after a couple of months, I think that was in the summer,
September of last year, we decided
to launch a membership site. - Okay.
And now most of our revenue just comes in through our tripwire funnels
and upsells from an intro product to a membership.
- Beautiful. And so, it’s been awesome.
I doubled my income, which was phenomenal.
Now I only have about two clients that I still work with,
making six figures, which was always a big kind of milestone for me.
And so we’re still working on it.
We're excited about what’s happening,
Actually, we started running downsells this past week.
- Cool. - Consistently more...
in like a strategic way of doing it, and it went really well.
- Good. - So I was always afraid, like per usual.
I have one upsale, but if I do two upsells, it’s too much,
so maybe I’ll do a downsale.
And it was like perfect, it worked out really, really well.
So I'm super, super grateful for everything that I’ve learned.
Not just the platform itself, which was so easy to setup.
Something that I could never accomplished with Ontraport,
which was just a nightmare
in terms of setting up upsells and figuring out
how I was going to make sure that my checkout pages were mobile friendly.
And people were just having issues with the entire checkout process.
It was just not profitable at all.
But not just the software, I love how you guys also teach us
how to implement the strategies,
and that’s what's really made a difference in my business.
Lots of split testing; not as much now,
but specifically in the beginning,
I've tested out tons of different designs
to figure out what converted better for us.
Colors, buttons, all that good stuff.
And yeah, it did make a difference. We saw about a 10% increase
from one design to the other just based on the overall product.
And now I kind stick to that one template
that has worked for us... - Cool.
you know, across the board. So we did that.
I have tested... split tested different funnels,
just to see which upsale people kind of gravitate towards.
We have a new one that we just started last week and we’re split testing that.
But that’s a feature that I absolutely love,
and you know what’s really, really helped us a lot?
It's just the automatic,
i don't know what it's called. Like the doning area?
- Oh, yeah. - Where you guys send out automatic emails.
That is so helpful.
Especially with having a membership site,
where I know every month a couple of payments are gonna fail.
That helps us so much, and it takes so much work out of like my team.
Because they don’t have to chase people around constantly.
So that’s been really helpful.
I think we got about $1,200 so far
in saved, you know, payments that we recovered
via the platform. Your dashboard is beautiful,
you can see like exactly how much money you're making,
the live stream is super helpful.
That is something I could never get on Ontraport to work properly.
- Okay. - They have reporting sections that are okay,
and I don’t... like I don’t mean to,
you know, hate on anyone. Because I do think that they have a good platform,
but it’s not as good as it should be
in terms of how much money you are generating.
I would have to dig through report after report,
and then correlate that with my [inaudible] account
to make sure that I knew how much money we were making.
- Right. - I don’t have to worry about that ever.
I can go in there every single day
from my mobile phone, from my tablet.
I check it multiple times to see, you know, how the day is going.
And then we can see, you know, everything from like all the historical data
from the first month when we joined back in June.
So that’s been extremely valuable for us,
just that alone,
is one of my favorite features.
SamCart is, I would say, at least 50% responsible for doubling our revenue.
- For sure. So... - Right. That's awesome.
...honestly, I wouldn’t... first of all,
I wouldn’t have had the confidence
to actually setup upsells in a way that felt natural and authentic,
if I hadn’t, you know, listened to what Bryan was saying,
but used the platform as well and then involved in the actual Facebook group,
which is super valuable as well.
I go in there, I'm not super active, but I love going in there
and kind of reading what people are experimenting with,
It's really encouraging. - Cool.
So definitely, just the data alone,
and being able to have that information,
has helped me strategically figure out,
"Okay, what are we gonna do this month
and how are we gonna be sure that we have a funnel
that works on autopilot, you know.
The optimization of the checkout page itself is huge.
When I was using Ontraport,
I followed... because I was still listening to Bryan’s advice,
I though it was so great. So I was like,
"Okay, let me see if we can figure out how much traffic we're actually generating
to our checkout page, and what’s that...
I guess what was the percentage of people who are actually converting.
- Yeah. - So we [inaudible] Google Analitycs
in there and about only 15% of the people
who were hitting the checkout page, were actually purchasing.
- Okay. - When we made the switch, we had 30% to 40%.
So that alone increases our revenue significantly,
especially now that we have recurring membership,
which means that our lifetime value
is way higher than if we were just doing a one time purchase.
So that is a very big...
that’s a very big feature for us and for our business.
Honestly, I tell people all the time
like if I have three tools that I could use,
and that would be it for my business,
CamCart would definitely be number one.
Because I mean, it's the lifeblood of my business.
If I don’t have a tool that's really helping us convert traffic,
we don’t have a business.
- I mean, it's that important. - Yes.