The Simple Funnel That Generated $3.64m Revenue (Facebook Ads Case Study)

Facebook ads case study

Looking to generate more leads through Facebook ads?

Well, you’re in the right place…

So buckle up, because I’m gonna share the exact steps we took to generate $3.64m revenue from $300,000 in Facebook advertising spend for one of our stem cell therapy practice clients.

That’s a 12-times return on their investment! 

Who IS their customer?

When we start working with a new client, we always begin with a deep-dive: a bit of fact-finding with regards to who they are. We need to understand what they do, how they do it, their list of services, their general price points, and who might be their ideal customer.

Without understanding these essentials, we wouldn’t know how to penetrate their market. 

So, we carry out an intensive fact-finding mission so that we can ascertain the type of sales funnel and lead-generation approach that’s going to best suit their business and the people they’re trying to reach. 

We ask them:

What’s the LifeTime Value (LTV) of your customer? 

One of the essential questions we ask is: what is the LTV of your average customer?

In the case of this particular company, we were looking at a figure of between $4500 and $9500 (but obviously, just apply this same principle to your own business).

We needed to understand the “buying journey” of the customer – what does the customer have to do to engage with the services?

 

The Buying Journey

This may vary for your particular business, but chances are it’s going to be relatively similar. 

Our stem cell company told us that they turn a lead into a customer like this:

  1. The customer enquires – they may have had a recommendation, or they may have seen an advert on Facebook. Or they may have noticed details of their services through Google or another internet channel.
  2. They book an appointment
  3. And they buy a service

Simple so far, and it might sound very familiar. 

So, it was our job to mimic that process in an online environment. We needed to try and get the RIGHT people to come and buy from them, but we also needed to reassess HOW we got people to go from enquiry to conversion.

 

Our Approach and Our Findings

We started by creating a basic exploratory funnel to see how their leads engage with Facebook ads. 

We used our ad to drive the lead to the point of enquiry (i.e., Stage 1 of their previous 3-step buying journey). 

And we started to get lots of leads which led to lots of appointments. 

However: 

There was a problem. 

The leads that were making their way through the funnel to the appointment stage were not high-quality leads. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t ever going to buy, but they lacked the education required to understand how stem cell therapies might help them. 

And, as a result, they didn’t progress to the buying stage of the journey because they didn’t really understand what it was all about. 

 

Understanding How To Sell Your Own Product

This might all sound rather familiar!

If you’re trying to sell something online, you need to have an understanding of the LTV of your products or services. And the higher the financial cost of your product, the more informed your lead needs to be.

Because:

You’re asking a complete stranger to part with substantial amounts of their hard-earned cash.

So: 

The more expensive your product, the more education is required to develop the trust needed for that stranger to become a customer.  Because nobody’s going to hand over substantial handfuls of cash without first trusting you. 

We have to do MORE in terms of education in cases of high LTV services.

Otherwise, we get lots of enquiries and appointments, but we don’t draw those leads through to the purchase stage. 

Which is what was happening.

 

Going Back To The Drawing Board

Our client was experiencing a lot of low-quality leads.  

And we discovered that the stumbling block was a lack of education: people just weren’t informed enough about the complex therapies that were on offer. 

Think about it: a lead costs money to generate, and an appointment costs money to fulfil – this is ALL wasted money if you’re attracting the wrong people to your sales funnel. 

We started to think about what we could do as an agency to increase education in the services that our client was offering. 

This is a useful stage in your own process – how might you increase understanding of your products or services

 

Our Solution

In this case, we had a range of options. We could offer:

    • A webinar – a free lecture about the stem cell process
    • In-person seminars – group meetings to address personal questions
    • Online Q&As 
    • Case studies – examples of how the services have helped other people
    • Ebooks – offering access to a learning programme that addresses the pain points for customers on their buying journey. 

We had already determined that the average customer of our client was aged 60+. 

So, we considered what approach might be most attractive to them; the most accessible way of driving knowledge their way. 

We figured that case studies and webinars probably weren’t going to attract this demographic — this age-group values face-to-face consultation; not reams of data and video lectures.

An ebook COULD be an option, but you’re putting the impetus of THEM to learn, and that requires a considerable level of commitment on their behalf. 

So:

We opted for in-person seminars. We would get people together into a room. And we would answer common queries, address the usual pain points, and get people educated BEFORE they even booked a consultation.

 

Our Funnel

This is what our funnel looked like:

  • Facebook ad – by targeting the right people, we managed to funnel people through to the landing page of our client’s site. 
  • Landing page – the single-purpose landing page got people to sign up to the in-person seminar. The aim was for the lead to leave their contact details: their name, email, phone number, etc.
  • Thank You page – a Thank You page is essential in a funnel because it helps you track the progress of your conversion. Getting someone to a landing page is not a conversion on its own – the Thank You page is the indication that the lead has stepped into the conversion stage of the funnel. 
  • We telephoned the leads to make sure that they were going to come along to the in-person seminar.  
  • Seminar – by this stage, we’d already sifted out the low-quality leads. We had already ascertained that the people in the room were more likely to convert. 
  • Appointment/consultation – the stage where our client gets the opportunity to tailor their sales approach to the individual
  • Sale – hitting the jackpot. 

 

So, what were the outcomes of this refined sales funnel?

The average LTV of these customers were $7000 (an average of $4,500 and $9000). 

We analysed:

  • How much could we spend on Facebook to get people to come to the seminar?
  • How much could we spend on each seminar to ensure a decent ROI?
  • How many people who attended the seminar could we convert into paying customers?

We ascertained that we could spend around $3000 per seminar. 

And we discovered that we had a 40% show-up rate (40% of the people who booked in for the seminar showed up).  

50% of the people who attended the seminar booked an appointment. And 50% of those who booked an appointment would buy the service. 

So, based on these initial figures, we ran their campaign for a year. 

And over that year, we spent $300,774.82 on Facebook ads. 

 

Here’s how it panned out…

  • We generated 5205 leads – that’s 5205 people who went to the landing page and then filled in the contact form, triggering the Thank You page. 
  • 40% of those 5205 leads came to the seminar: 2082 seminar attendees. 
  • 50% of those attendees booked an appointment: 1041 consultations.
  • 50% of those consultations converted into a sales: 520 customers. 

To calculate our overall revenue, we take our number of customers (520) and multiply those by our average LTV ($7000). 

And we come to $3.64million: that’s 12x ROI. 

Of course, this is top-line revenue. There are costs involved in running the seminars, but this represents a straightforward model. 

It demonstrates how you can put money into Facebook advertising and hone your campaign to maximise your returns. 

 

What We Learned

Principally, we learned that this approach works: the sifting out of low-quality leads before they cost you any money – it works. 

And it meant that we could replicate the approach. 

And we started to recognise that something:

 

Authority

People started seeing our client as an authority in the space. They attended our seminars, and they began to see our client as experts – and if they had friends with similar issues, they now knew where to recommend them.  

We proved that our system works, and – as a result – other brands began to see our client as an authority.

High Lead Spend 

We were able to spend a lot on our leads. 

Often, people worry about the cost per lead without actually looking at the back-end tracking that helps you calculate your actual cost per lead. 

In this case, we could comfortably spend a higher amount on each lead because we knew that the LTV of those customers justified the spend. 

Not every lead is equal – we needed to differentiate between the clickers and the buyers. 

 

Bring A Friend

There was another approach that worked for this particular campaign: when we phoned the customer, we asked them if they wanted to bring a friend. Often people aren’t comfortable turning up to new places on their own, after all. 

This approach meant that we could glean more benefit and, potentially, more customers. It also meant that each seminar felt fuller – which gives the attendees the sense that they were onto something. 

 

Travel

Once we had staged the seminars in the local area, there was a feeling that we had saturated the market. So we decided to broaden our net and travel a little further out. 

We began to travel around other local towns, delivering seminars that meant that we could reach more potential customers. 

We learned along the way, and we developed a hugely successful funnel that works for other clients.

 

Some Take-Aways

There’s no reason why you can’t have similar results for your campaigns. 

Perhaps you don’t have the same kind of budget or the capacity to take on that many new customers. 

But the principles are the same. 

Some things to consider:

  • Understand the LTV of your customer. This helps you calculate how much you can spend in acquiring new customers. 
  • Recognise HOW your customers buy. What is their buying journey? 
  • Ascertain how is your demographic is likely to respond to your approach? Would a webinar work for your customers? Do you have the capacity to run in-person seminars? 
  • Give yourself time. You need to learn what works and what doesn’t. 

When it comes to building your funnels, make sure that you ask the relevant questions and allow there to be a period of learning to optimise your campaign. 

 

Achieve results like this

Looking to generate revenue (and profits) like the above example? Get in touch with the team at Yatter today. Or if you’d prefer, read our case studies which show lots of other examples.

Thanks for reading! 

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