#87 – The 3 Takeaways from “Marketing Funnel Automation Live 2016”

Summary: Stephen shares top 3 takeaways he learned from his recent trip to attend the Marketing Funnel Automation Live 2016 and how it is beneficial in the long term.

[00:00:14] Stephen:  Hey guys, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move.  And right now, right this very second, I’m on the beach watching the sun come up in Fort Lauderdale.  Last day.  I’m heading off later this afternoon to fly home.  It’s going to be a super long flight, so I want to get some beach time in.  I was up at like, 5:00 a.m. this morning, 4:00 a.m. and yeah, it’s been crazy.  So, I thought I’d wake up early, stroll on the beach for a couple hours and just take it all in before I go.  And here we are.

[00:00:47] So basically, what I want to do is give you guys a little bit of a recap of the event.  I’ve only got 9 percent of my battery and I’m recording this off of my phone.  So, this could mean I’m not going to Uber back to my hotel, so I’ll have to walk.  So you guys better take note and be thankful for this episode.  It means I’m going to be doing a lot of sweat when I walk back to the hotel because it’s a bit of a distance.  But anyway, I’m going to do it for you anyway.  So, what happened with the event?  Well, let me give you the lowdown.  So basically, started at the event on Friday, Friday was day one.  Hang on a minute, am I saying that right?  Friday?  Yes.  No, it wasn’t Friday, it was Saturday.  Saturday was day one.  Sunday, Monday — no, it was Friday, Friday.  Sorry guys.  I’m getting my days mixed up.

[00:01:35] Friday was day one with the ASK intensive.  Saturday and Sunday was Marketing Funnel Automation Live, the actual event.  And then Monday, which was yesterday was the conversion hacking day, conversion hacks.  Now, that’s the day I was set up.  The two middle days, Saturday and Sunday had the most people naturally.  So that one had a couple hundred — a few hundred people, I guess probably around probably 300, at any one time, probably about 200.  That’s kind of an estimated guess.

[00:02:08] Yeah, so day one, ASK Intensive with Ryan Levesque.  Basically epic day.  Ryan is a star.  I love his content.  So he came in.  It was kind of played by — I don’t know how planned it was, but it was really good.  So what happened was first part of the day, explain about the ASK method and — forgive me, it’s a bit windy, by the way, guys.  I’m obviously on the beach, naturally it’s going to be pretty windy, but I’m trying to block it out.  So, first part of the day was just content training.  Some of the stuff — most of it, I’ve heard all before, but it was good he just kind of built on a few little bits and pieces which I didn’t know about.  And second half of the day was really good.  It was Q&A and hot seats.  So he took on a few people and then it was tied around Ryan Levesque up there critiquing the funnels play by play.  And it was really good.  The content was phenomenal.  Very, very worth the $700 and yeah, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

[00:03:01] And then day two was the first day of marketing funnel automation live.  Todd Brown is a rock star.  The energy he brings — he brought on — I think it’s Joe Schriefer from Agora Financial, awesome, $125 million of Agora.  That was phenomenal.  Todd spoke about the big idea.  Who else was there?  Laughton Charles, I think his name was, copywriter, phenomenal, some really, really strong sales funnel sessions.  So, no BS on just tactics.  This was like hardcore copywriting, hardcore funnels.  If you’re into sales funnels at all and you really want to kick that successful sales funnel off, you have to be in the room there.  The content there was great.  Some of it stuff I had heard before, but there were a lot of nuggets that I took away from it, really, really good stuff.

[00:03:50] Day two was also really good.  Who was day two?  So day two we had Justin Brook speaking.  I think Todd again spoke.  There were a couple others.  I can’t remember their names, but the quality of the content was extremely good.  He had a really good range of speakers that build on what a sales funnel really is and how to get one successful.  A lot of people think it’s sunshine and rainbows.  You get ClickFunnels, put up a page and you’re good to go.  It goes so much deeper than that.  ClickFunnels is a tool.  You get all these tools.  The traffic is just traffic.  But to built a funnel, you’ve got to go deep.  You’ve got to figure out your market sophistication.  You got to have your big idea, you know, what’s your lead?  What’s a unique mechanism?  All these things are what get a funnel successful.  If you can’t do that, it’s not easy.  It is not easy to get a funnel to break even or better.  It’s so hard to get it at that level, but once you do, literally — and what he was saying was so true, one funnel could literally change your business in life, one successful funnel.  It’s all it takes.  It doesn’t take 10, it doesn’t take 50.  You just need one.  And you’ve got to focus on them.  It’s not going to be right out of the gate.  It’s going to be negative.  It’s going to take a lot of testing, change the offer, change the audience targeting, split testing, add this, add that, add this, add that, keep tweaking it until you get it to that breakeven.  It’s going to cost money to test.  People get scared, they go, “Shit, $100 a day, $50 a day.  I can’t do that for more than a week.  I’ll go out of business.  I don’t have the money.  I don’t have the budget.”  Get a job.  Put the money in.  Keep split testing.  Learn from people that actually know what they’re doing.  Don’t just do it because you hear some guy talking about it in a blog on a Facebook ad.  You’ve got to go deeper than that.  You’ve really got to find people that know what they’re talking about, and this event had those people.

[00:05:29] So, blessed to have been here and actually learn from the horse’s mouth that the guy knows sales funnels inside out, knows what he’s doing, was here teaching.  So, I highly recommend that.  And then the last day, which was conversion hacks, that day was phenomenal as well.  That day basically was all — is all tactics essentially.  I think we went through over like, a hundred tactics and with the audience inputs.  There were like a hundred people there and we’re talking about tactics that can literally — hacks that can really increase your conversions; things like timers, things like retargeting this page without that page.  I shared a few of them on my Snapchat from the day.  I’ve got a whole lost.  So, I’m pumped to execute — there are at least 10 or 15 there that I could implement on the plane home and I think that would give it a boost.  So, super, super pumped to do that.

[00:06:23] And then the network.  So, that was the content.  And then the networking there was great as well.  I met guys that were absolutely ninjas in Google Analytics, guys that had run $10 million a year companies in the health and wellness space, people that were agencies that were building campaigns for some of the biggest marketers, Jay Abraham, Bin Rashad, doing absolute phenomenal stuff.  And guys that were completely out of the internet marketing world.  There were people there that were doing things in the pet space, in the health space, in the gardening space.  They were crushing it.  They had offers on ClickBank for 12 years and sharing their insights just as a guest.  I was sitting in the last day of conversion hacks, the guy behind me had 18 offers on ClickBank running for over 10 years or 8 years or something.  Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.  The guy has got more insights in split testing than anyone else.  So I asked him, I go, “Look, what are the three biggest takeaways you’ve had over that time that split test?”  You know, if this guy has been running it, he knows we have a split test.  And then he gave them to me and I wrote them down.

[00:07:24] So, the value of coming to these events is so high.  I caught up with my friend Charles who’s based in Miami.  And Thanh — I just met him this week and he runs Asian Efficiency.  Thanh, I think it is, Thanh from Asian Efficiency.  He’s a machine when it comes to systems.  So, I’m going to try to bring him on for an interview on the website.  Yeah, some people that you meet here, they just bring so much to the table.  And if you’re not at this event and your competitor is, you just got no way to keep up.  You got to pick your event wisely, but at the same time, you’ve also got to be to places where your market is, where you’re going to learn things.

[00:08:05] So between all of these, three of the biggest takeaways that I’ve got — let me give you three conversion hacks.  I think the conversions hacks are the things that you can implement right away and I’ll give you three of those.  So, first one is in your auto page.  I want to see everyone start doing this, and I don’t really want to give it away, but I’m going to give it away to you guys, the Marketing on the Move listeners.  Conversion hack number 1, on the checkout page, you add a little code.  So, what you do is just add like an element, add some text, put like “coupon code..abc354j2” just put that, anything.  It doesn’t have to do anything, it doesn’t have to mean anything, just put it on the auto form page and it freaking converts.  It just boosts conversions.  It’s not like 20 percent conversion to 80 percent, but it will boost it by a few percent for doing literally nothing.  That’s all you have to do.

[00:08:54] Another thing, adding guarantee seals.  You’ve got to add a big-ass golden guarantee seal.  Some of the big guys of split tested guarantees add those on there.  Also verification badges, add at least three or four verification badges, you know, how you see like McAfee scanned and approved and there’s big ticks and seals and this and that.  Same thing with SSL certificates, the green bar at the top of that boost conversions.  Having a timer on a checkout page, which redirects after it counts down.  And then this one was super, super ninja.  So, what you do is undisclosed bonuses.  This is something I’m going to be rolling out in a lot of funnels of mine and this is super ninja.  I really love this.  You can take it pretty far.  You can get pretty advanced, but I’ll just give you the basics of it.

[00:09:39] So what you do is — you want to over-deliver, right?  So, let’s say you’ve got this — and this is the best example that I thought would make it really good.  This is the way I thought this undisclosed bonuses would work really well.  So what you do is, basically have — let’s say you got a membership site because I think this is going to work best with a membership site and that’s kind of where I had a lot.  You have a membership site as part of your funnel, so it could be the core product, it could be whatever.  And then you have these bonuses which help people stick.  So, you don’t tell them about the bonus.  Obviously, you might have bonuses in your offer and whatnot.  But what you’re going to do is, let’s say you’ve got a membership, a recurring part of your business.  Send them into the membership site.  After say, day 3, you send them an email and you say, “One of four bonuses, here it is,” blah, blah, blah.  That bonus, make sure it’s epic, it’s really high value.  And then you start counting down and pre-framing bonus number 2 within your 30 days of them joining.  And then you do that again, bonus number 2, you make it even better than the first one and you pre-frame and talk about it in the orders on the emails that are leading up to that bonus.  And then you do it again, bonus number three, it’s coming, three or four.

[00:10:50] And the thing is, you can’t just package a bonus with shit that you found in your desktop.  You’ve got to actually put effort into making it.  And that’s what Todd was forcing, actually.  He was saying, there’s a difference between just making bonuses up and just creating something you’ve already got there.  Same thing goes with your auto bump.  If you’re going to have an auto bump on a sales funnel on a free plus shipping funnel, for example, your auto bump has to convert like hell.  Put effort into your offers.  That was one thing that he was stressing.  He’s like, a lot of guys, they just try whip shit up and they think it doesn’t work, it doesn’t convert.  It’s because you’ve put no effort into it.  These guys, for an auto bump, you really want to build $199 and sell it for $37 because it’s going to convert that well.  And that’s when you see the conversion rate, like be confident in your products, put effort in there, over deliver.

[00:11:30] So, going back to the bonuses, you’ve got bonus number 3.  You start counting it down, bank, you deliver it and it’s crazy.  And by then, your 30-day money back guarantee, you’re already 27 days in.  And that fourth bonus which is coming out, what you do is you put that after your 30-day money back guarantee.  So you do it on day 35 or day 40, after that rebuild.  It’s undisclosed, number one, it gets people excited about these bonuses coming.  Again, make sure that there are awesome bonuses.  You could just do three.  It doesn’t have to be four, it could be three.  Two, I think, is too little.  It could be just three.  And make sure that they’re super, super valuable.  Obviously, if you’ve got bonuses, you got other content on the sales page.  That’s cool as well.  Make sure you deliver on that.  But this over delivers and reduces churn.  It’s got massive retention, which I really like.

[00:12:21] So, I think that’s awesome, guys.  One more hack with bonuses — and this one, Ryan Levesque shared on day one, was, if you’ve got different buckets — so you’re segmenting your audience through a survey funnel when you sell them.  Or this actually could work on a webinar as well if you’ve got different buckets.  What you do, it’s kind of the same thing.  So on your final sales page, you say, look, right now, this isn’t listen on the sales page, this isn’t listed anywhere else.  I’ve got this bonus to give you.  It could be anything.  Now, this bonus isn’t on the sales page.  It’s nowhere else.  The only time you’re going to get it is on this video right now.

[00:12:53] And for that specific bucket, you basically say, your only opportunity is to get it on this video right now.  It’s on the sales page.  You’re not going to see this again.  If you leave this page, it’s going to disappear.  Get it right now.  And that’s probably what you’re doing.  It increases that urgency.  And then once they get in there, let’s say you’ve got three different buckets and you’ve done three unique bonuses for each bucket because you want to tailor it.  It converts higher if you’re segmenting probably.  Then what you do is you roll out all of those bonuses into the members’ area for all the members.  So, you just over deliver.  And people are just surprised by being in there.

[00:13:28] So, that’s it, you just over deliver.  The name of the game is over delivering, creating amazing content when you’re building your funnel.  You can’t cheap out on this stuff if you want to get it to work.  And all these SAS companies, the same thing with SAS companies, they all need a funnel.  Every single business needs a funnel, regardless of what you’re selling, whether it’s kitchen knives, whether you’re a hobbyist or anything you’ve got.  Whether it’s the iPhone or whatever, everything has got that big idea, that unique mechanism.  All the concepts of building a funnel are there.  So, hopefully, that gives you a little bit of an insight into just some of the little takeaways, little tricks that I learned.  There’s a whole lot more.  These are the ones I can just remember off the top of my head.  It’s been a long four days.

[00:14:07] Yeah, so wrapping up now, I just thought I’d come to the beach, backyard here.  I’m going to say Fort Lauderdale’s beach is pretty amazing.  It’s a lot more chill than Miami is.  So, I’m coming out here just to relax and freshen up before the flight.  One thing I hate about airports is the airport smell and the air is a bit stale and everything like that.  So, I love just getting out and about before the flight, before everything else.  It’s almost 8 o’clock here now actually.  So, I’m going to have to head back, start packing and have a shower, get ready to fly home.  I’m super pumped to be back.  It’s going to be a long flight and I’ve got a lot to do even as soon as I land.  So hopefully you guys got a little bit from this podcast episode.  I promise I’d be podcasting while I’m here for this event, so I’m glad I did not forget, so that was good.  But aside from that, hopefully you guys have an amazing day.  I’ll try to fit in another podcast sometime soon when I get back into the swing of things back to the office.  But if you have any questions, please do let me know.  Hopefully you guys have been having an amazing time.  I hope I see you at the next event.

[00:15:14] In terms of events, my next one is going to be Traffic and Conversion Summit 2017.  That’s the next big one on the agenda.  There’s going to be a lot of people there.  I highly recommend you come.  If you come to almost any event, that has to be it.  That’s where everybody is.  And then — well, actually no.  I think Funnel Hacking Live is first, and that’s a great event too.  That’s going to be phenomenal.  I’ll be there with the ClickFunnels team and smashing that out.  That’s going to be phenomenal.  Tony Robbins is even keynoting that one.  So, yeah, definitely get there.  That’s in Dallas.  And then I think about two weeks later is Traffic and Conversion Summit.  And then I’m pretty sure, don’t quote me, but James Schramko’s event is going to be up there as well.  So, that’s it guys.  It’s going to be a great, great, great 2017.  Hopefully you guys have been crushing it.  Close out 2016 with a bang.  It’s going to be Q4 now, lot to do, plenty of work to be done.  So hopefully I’ll see you guys soon.  And shoutout if you’ve seen me at the event.  It was great to see some people that were just following my content, following the blog.  Every single time someone comes up to me, I’m super appreciative.  And it’s great just to see stuff is impacting it.  Don’t ever thing that whatever you’re putting out, no one is reading.  There’s always someone.  That’s one thing I’ve learned, is there’s literally always someone reading, always someone who knows what you’re doing and it’s changing their lives.  This one podcast could change someone’s life.  And it’s not going to happen overnight.  Obviously, it takes time to build up some content.  It takes time to put in stuff, but I have to do this.  It will literally change people’s lives.  The amount of times people came up just at this event, I was so surprised because I was like, you know, I do this just to do this and I love doing it.  I’m passionate.  But the impact it makes on people, their businesses, their families, just little things.  And I’m not super woo-woo like that.  I’m not like, oh yeah, it’s all about the impact and the manifestation of this and that, all that kind of crap.  It’s just when you see it there and you see people — I saw people walk up to Todd, like in droves.  The business that I’ve got, which is funnel marketing automation and you see people walk up in droves, I see it all the time with these marketers, impacting people’s lives is phenomenal.

[00:17:22] So, getting a little off-track there, but all I can say is just keep hustling and keep grinding away.  Whether you’ve got money in the bank or you don’t at the moment, just keep pushing.  Eventually, you’ll get through to the other side.  So, that’s my two cents.  Hopefully you guys have an awesome day and I’ll speak to you soon.