I’ve been running Facebook ads for myself and clients for over 3 years now. And here’s a classic mistake that I see over and over again. This mistake can cost you a lot of money. This mistake might make you say, “Facebook ads don’t work.” This mistake is HUGE. And it’s totally avoidable. Ready to hear what it is?
When you're first learning Facebook ads, you might feel like you have to learn a whole new language to understand what's going on!
Don't worry. I've got you covered.
Here are 6 of the most important terms that you need to know, use and understand as you set up your Facebook ads.
Understanding these terms and using these components in your ads will help you to grow your audience and make more sales!
I just finished launching my brand new program, Attract Your Tribe. I opened it for the first time in mid-April and had 6 new members join. Then I promoted for another 10 days in late April and found 10 more members. Currently, we have a total of 16 people.
And I feel pretty awesome about it. Some of the strategies that I used to grow Attract Your Tribe might surprise you, so I wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how I got my program started and began attracting my very own tribe!
By the way, I live journaled this inside a closed Facebook group and all of my posts and videos are still there!
If you like this post and want even more details about my launch, how I handled the up-and-down emotions and my favorite woo woo tools to stay sane, you can join my group here.
First, a little about the program itself. Attract Your Tribe is a monthly membership program where I give Facebook ads training, support, accountability and some fun magical stuff like meditations and full moon energy clearing.
I explain this because I’m going to share some numbers with you and you’ll want to keep in mind that my members are going to pay me monthly. Which is a win-win for everyone. I get recurring monthly income (as long as they like and want the program) and they have a lower cost to get started.
Starting in April 2018, this was a brand new program.
I’m still in my first year of business as a Facebook Ads Specialist.
I don’t have a huge list or Facebook page. In fact, these are both pretty tiny compared to more established marketers.
I also don’t have a big budget to run my own Facebook ads yet.
And, I don’t know if you’ve tried, but it’s hard to get many people to join a group program when you don’t have a very big audience!
Here’s how the numbers typically go:
When you launch a group program, you might expect 2-5% of your email list to join.
This could be higher if your offer is really great. But if it’s your very first time launching, you might be closer to 2% or even less if you’ve missed the mark with your offer. (I know! It’s happened to me in the past!)
If that were the case, I would only have 4-6 people in my program right now, based on the size of my email list at the time.
So how did I manage to get 16 members?
To get my first 6 members, I sent 1 email to my list and did 0 Facebook ads. I wanted to get my first members through more personal interactions and then reinvest some of that revenue into some ads in Phase 2 of my launch.
On April 8, I sent an email to my list, which was 251 subscribers at the time.
I teased the new program just a bit and asked people to reply to me to hear more.
This worked really well! I had 7 replies and 3 of those people ended up joining within a few days.
Then I sent out personal emails to all the people who had been beta testers for my first Facebook ads course. That didn’t work quite as well as I expected. I had 1 member join from almost 50 personal emails that I sent out.
1 more joined from a post in my Facebook group and 1 more joined from a face-to-face conversation (she’s my acupuncturist!).
After my first 6 joined, I took a little break for a little over a week. #selfcareissexy
Then, I started Phase 2 of my launch plan which was to get the word out on a bigger scale. I wanted to send more emails to my list, run Facebook ads and post in Facebook groups.
On April 26, I started running some Facebook ads to build awareness of my new program. I targeted my warm audiences with a traffic ad to get people to click through to the sales page.
On the surface, these did well. I spent about $20, had 44 people click through and paid an average of $.45/click.
However, when I ran my report inside Ads Manager, I didn’t see any purchases attributed to these ads. Which means that no one who clicked to the sales page actually joined Attract Your Tribe. At least not yet.
From April 28 - May 5, I sent a few emails to my list and mentioned the program.
I also ran another ad to my warm audiences that talked about the full moon energy clearing in Attract Your Tribe. I spent about $12 and didn’t have any new members join directly from those ads.
Then, I had the idea to do a free live workshop called “Are You Ready for Facebook Ads?”
I ran some Facebook ads for the workshop. But only for a couple of days because it was a last-minute inspiration. 6 subscribers came from spending $17. The cost per subscriber was $2.81, which is pretty average.
At first I felt like those ads weren’t worth it. Then I pulled my report and looked closer. It looks like 1 of those 6 subscribers ended up becoming a member a couple of days later. So, spending $17 to get 6 subscribers and 1 new member was totally worth it!
The main place that I got people signed up for the workshop was Facebook groups! I posted about it in a few groups but most of them came from just one group.
I ended up having 52 people sign up for the workshop! That was huge list growth considering I only had 251 people when I started.
So, then I did the free live workshop and sent out the replay.
I had 5 people join Attract Your Tribe who joined my list from the workshop promo.
5 people out of 52 signups is almost a 10% conversion rate! Whoa! I just calculated that and didn’t even realize how effective that was. I’m DEFINITELY doing more of those workshops in the future.
I ran more ads for the last 2 days before I closed enrollment.
I spent $20 and had 2 people join on the very last day it was open. Finally, my ads worked like I hoped!
In those last few emails before I closed Attract Your Tribe, I had 3 more people join who had been on my list for a few months and decided to jump in while it was still open.
And then, I had 2 more people join who weren’t on my list originally or signed up for the workshop.
These came from a referral from a business coach who I met in a Facebook group.
Ok, so that was an idea of where my 16 came from.
My last 10 members came in at the last possible moment!
I did all these ads and ran the workshop and posted in Facebook groups from April 26 - May 4, and I didn’t even get one new member. I started to get worried.
But then, it all turned around! Suddenly, I had 10 new members join from those efforts and it all turned out to be totally worth it!
16 new members
52 new email subscribers
$68 in Facebook ad spend
$1,282 in revenue + future monthly recurring payments
Many emails, posts and conversations in Facebook groups, my business page, my personal page and messenger
Keep connecting in Facebook groups! Most of my new email subscribers and the majority of my new members came through relationships that I developed in Facebook groups over the last 3 years.
Keep doing those live workshops! That workshop was fun, easy and had a great conversion rate. I’m definitely going to do more of those in my next launch.
Keep testing Facebook ads. My ads were worth it in the end, but didn’t convert to buyers until the very last day. I worried that I wasted that money and wouldn’t make anything back! But I just needed to be patient.
I invested $68 and had 3 people join after clicking on an ad for a total of $165 in revenue. My Return On Ad Spend was 2.43, which means I made just over double what I spent. And, that’s ok. I usually try to shoot for a 4+ on ROAS, meaning that I want to earn back 4 times what I spend on my ads.
However, the news gets better when we consider that this is an ongoing program. I’ll make $165 each month as long as those 3 people stick around. So, then my ROAS is pretty phenomenal!
If they all stay for one more month, my ROAS will be 4.85. If they stay for 6 months, my ROAS will be 14.5!
Since this is a new program, I don’t know how long people will stay and remain monthly paying members.
Of course, I hope they’ll stay forever! But I know that life happens and people grow and change so I know that some of them will move on eventually and cancel their subscriptions.
In the coming months, I’ll be tracking my membership renewal rate to figure out the average number of months that a new member stays in the program. Then, I’ll be able to use these numbers to better analyze my results and ROAS from future ad campaigns.
Whew! That was a lot of numbers! Did you follow all of that? I hope so because these are the important numbers to track with your marketing so that you have clarity on what works and what’s worth your time and money.
Remember that live workshop that converted so well for me? That was an inspired idea. It just popped into my mind during that last week of the launch. That came because I’d been doing a TON of meditation, journaling, tapping and listening to hours of Abraham Hicks videos on YouTube.
Also, the ability to focus, keep going and not give up when no one joined for the first 9 days of my Phase 2 promotion. That came from all of the Woo Woo practices that I do on the regular.
Inside my Facebook group, I posted links to many of the YouTube videos and guided meditations that I used during my launch. You can join the group and check them out here. It’s totally free!
I always say this and I’ll say it again. The magical mindset stuff is the X factor. There’s no way I could have had a great launch without it.
Did you like this story?
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