How One CTA Change Doubled Conversions and Halved CPAs

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to Unqualified Leads. And it's just me again running this podcast solo today. It's going to be again another short format type pod. Uh, this is just. I really want to discuss something again that I'm seeing literally live this week with one of our existing clients. And I guess the results from what we've seen and what we've implemented has been so outstanding that I just thought it was worth mentioning and worth talking through because it is slightly different to the topics that we usually cover. Typically we're discussing paid media at length. So you know, paid search, paid social and abm, all those kind of motions that are related to paid. Whereas this is more of a user flow change that we've made and we've seen a substantial impact to kind of give some references here. The business that we're talking about as a healthcare brand. So this healthcare brand is a business to consumer brand. It's running on max volume. So it's not a super luxury or expensive or niche. It's very broad. It's a typical lead volume game where you expect to get many, many, many leads come through and then it's just a case of obviously trying to improve the quality of them and trying to get them to go all the way to purchase in the end. But by the nature of this product and the service that's on offer is typically one that people always want to know, okay, what's the price? They're always interested, but they might necessarily always go ahead with it. So you often see huge volume of leads that come in through the door, but obviously only a small percentage actually convert. So it's a very, very interesting business. It's a uh, well established sector uh, within healthcare. So there's many other businesses and we've actually worked with similar businesses in this industry before, albeit in different geographies. So we've been working with this business for quite some time, just over a year now with their paid media. We've made many, uh, many big changes over there and we've seen some huge results off the back of the changes we've made in both their meta and their Google accounts. But we've recently just expanded our scope and we now look after after their CRM management, essentially our job as paid media. Especially if it was to get people through the door and then past the point that we've got them into the door. It's the team's job to try and convert them into a closed one deal or to make a purchase. Whereas now that's also, you know, our Responsibility is to take them on from becoming leads, actually converting, to going to the in person consultation and then to actually paying the invoice and becoming a paid customer. So we now manage all of that. So we spent the first two weeks just running a very, very extensive audit. So we went in and we audited every possible route that somebody can take to enter this business. So what are the different options that a user has to become a lead in this business? And mapping out every single piece of communication that happens inside that flow. So using a Miro board and just saying, okay, user presses this button, this happens, then this happens and they sent this email, then this and mapping out that entire user flow and then, then working through and going, okay, where do we need to improve this and why do we need to improve it? But basing that off of data. So taking back the last year and sometimes even further, going back and looking at all of the different bits of data that we can, literally everything possible that we can get our hands on. We wanted to run through and we analyze that data to try and find out exactly where we're falling short and um, where we think that we can optimize based off of the biggest gaps in the data. Like in terms of where are we seeing the biggest loss in conversions in each of those stages. Because there are many stages between somebody becoming a lead and someone becoming a closed 1 customer for this business. So we ran the analysis again. It's a two week process to do this because there are just so many different data points to take into account. And we also took in every single sms, every single email that goes out, every email campaign automation flows as well as sitting down with the sales team and saying, okay, I want your feedback on if you could automate something or what is it that you're seeing and you're hearing every day that you're speaking to these leads. How would you believe that you can improve the process of a getting someone to get on a call and making sure they're prepared for it and then post that to getting them actually being paid one hearing their feedback and then overlaying that on top of all the data and all the analysis that we've just done. Um, so as I said, it's a very, very lengthy process, very resource intensive. But the outcome is so, so beneficial when you spend the time to go through and often that's why it's beneficial to bring a third party in because you do get fresh eyes on it. Now if you've been in this business for four or five years and you're seeing the flows, the same flows that you've seen for the last four or five years, you can often lose touch with it. You bring someone with a fresh set of eyes in, which is obviously us in this instance and we can see and look at these flows with completely virgin eyes. And uh, so therefore we're much more curious, much more inquisitive about, okay, well why would you do that and why have you not mentioned this and why does this not trigger there? And so it's, it always opens up the team's eyes I think, when you bring some fresh eyes in to go through and analyze all of these things. And so we figured out that there were a few holes in the journey. So we knew that we needed to improve the sum of the sales data. So there was also a part of this was that your, the reporting here needs to improved on too. So we've got all of this data and we've managed to analyze it, but actually we could analyze it better if you had XYZ pieces of data. So again, that's another kind of workbook that we then collated and built up off the back of it. This, which was how can you actually improve your own reporting so that you can better measure and better understand about optimize your website, your user flows, your communication, all of these different things. So we then built a playbook to give to the dev team to say, hey, this is what you need to do to improve the reporting. You're missing these metrics, these dimensions and so on. So that's also a really cool internal bit that we did of that audit. I think one of the things that's worth noting here as well is when you run an extensive audit like we've just done here, two week audit, where you're looking at an entire business's model essentially, you know, the only thing we're not taking into account is the initial acquisition, which we handle and we report on anyway. But when you're at it from start to finish and you're analyzing all of this data, uh, there are typically going to be so many different things that you could implement and that you'd want to improve, to dial up and to obviously make those improvements and prove to the team that it's worthwhile. But there's often so many that I think it can become overwhelming and you have to be very, very careful with feeding that back to the team. Because what you don't want to do is I don't personally want to feed back to the team and say, you know, there's A hundred things that you need to change and here's the 100 because it's entirely overwhelming. They don't know what to prioritize, what should go first, what do we need to focus on? So uh, what we've done is we've gone, okay, here are the things that we think like earliest on in the journey are going to move the needle the most. These are the things that we're losing the most amount of volume here at the start and we need to improve on this first. If we do that then that's also, that's going to have a knock on effect of what we do later. But this is where we're losing the biggest. Like this is where all the leads are coming in and we're losing too many there. And that's because of lack of communication and lack of CTAs and we're basically not giving our customers enough options. And so we need to fix that first and then that will improve everything else down the line. And so once we've implemented that then we can start to look to improve when a, uh, client gets invoiced and what the communication flows look like from there. That's something that we can do later down the line. But first of all we need to do the things that are going to move the needle the quickest and the most effectively. And so that's how we kind of break it down. And so therefore we come in and we go, right, this is the one stage that we're going to work on and we're going to fix that. Once that's fixed, then we'll move on to the second piece and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Obviously this depends on the size of the team. If you've obviously got a huge, huge team, um, of developers and operators, obviously you can implement more than one thing at a time. But in this instance it's not a huge team. It's a fairly big business, but it's not a huge team. So we have to be lean as well with the recommendations that we give. So it's not overwhelming. And also it means that we maintain focus, um, and clear efficiency on the single task at hand. And so the bit that I kind of wanted to talk through today was for a customer to become a lead in this business. There's essentially two ways that they can do that. One is that they can just book a call directly with the sales team to discuss the product and the services in more detail. The other is very, very light touch and low friction, which is they can essentially complete an online form quiz. And then at the end of that, they were basically told that they would get a call back from the sales team to talk through the results of their quiz assessment form. Now for us, this was the biggest eye opener because you've got thousands of users that are coming through a month and completing this assessment. And at the end of assessment they just told, hey, okay, we'll give you a call back at some point. Now I know for me, I think that's very ambiguous. And it also means that when the sales team then reaches out and cold calls you, you have no idea what that number is, you have no idea who's calling you. So your chances of picking up are slim to none. You know, I often don't call a number if I don't recognize it. If it's important enough, they'll leave me a voice message. So we were seeing a very, very high no answer rate and we were also seeing a low number of people that were booking in directly. So for us the answer was, well, okay, this lead's come in. They've taken the time to complete their assessment. At that point of completing their assessment, they are at, uh, the highest. That lead is hot there. And then they are very, very hot. And if you can strike whilst they're hot in that time element when they've just completed the assessment, that's the most efficient time that you can reach that person because they've completed their assessment and they want to see the results. So it's a very, very simple fix. We literally just said, okay, great, you've completed the assessment. If you'd like to walk through the results, you can book a call with our team here and just have the book now. And within implementing it, within hours we had seen our number of scheduled calls completely skyrocket and that is just scheduled calls. So this is still the very, very first part of the funnel. The second part of the funnel is that people actually then go to a consultation with their healthcare provider and, and immediately, even though we've just literally changed the book now to get the sales team to call them, um, within the first half a week of implementing that simple change there and striking whilst the iron was hot, we've already seen a record week and we're only halfway through the week, we've seen a record week of actual in person consultations simply because we're striking them whilst they're hot, whilst they've got maximum intent, they've just given up their information. They want to know if they're eligible for this product, for this service. So by telling them they can book now with the team immediately, the sales team can call them, they can then speak to them, you know, the day after the same day, usually it's fairly quick that they want to book in. So they book in the same day or the next day after. And because they're already, they've got high intent, they've completed their assessment, the sales team walks them through and they've got a better chance of converting them into an in person consultation, which we've already seen. So as I said, by the end of Wednesday we had already broken the week record of the number of in person consultations and we haven't changed anything else during this time period. Just that very, very simple change there. It just goes to show that the smallest of changes can generally have a huge impact and that is just the first change of many, like hundreds of different things that we wanted to change. And so there's also a number of emails and SMS's that go out after that, which again we're going to alter and we're going to change. But just from that single step, it's already been a game changer for the business. And I woke up this morning to answer, uh, to WhatsApp from the founder saying literally word for word, I had a text saying bookings are fucking steaming. And when you wake up and you see messages like that, that comes from uh, a founder, it makes you realize why you do your job. And it's just, you know, you jump in, you look at the numbers and you see, you know, the week on week improvement. You're like, wow, okay, that's, that's actually moved the needle more than what we had expected and so quickly too. So you know, for us it's an incredibly exciting. And then the founding team are extremely excited because, well, that's the first fix of, you know, all of the rest of the fixes that we're going to implement. So for them it's just incredibly exciting because there's so much potential to be unlocked just from thinking about the customer first and understanding and putting yourself in their shoes to go, okay, I've just done X and I've received Y, but I expected to do this or I wish I could have done that or this message should be saying this instead of that. Uh, and it's just going through logically and breaking down each step. And I think it's very, very important as paid media specialists to spend time and to focus on this as well. Because what it obviously then does is it makes every dollar and every pound that you spend in your paid media work way more effectively. You know, it's not necessarily going to change the lead volume, but it's certainly going to change your conversion rate. And we're already seeing that. You know, we're seeing our, uh, cost per, uh, actual consultation already dropping. Our job as an agency is to walk into a business and to optimize their paid media setups to make them get the most out of every dollar that they spend in those channels. But for me personally, obviously, one of the ways in which we can do that is by optimizing the actual user experience and the flows and the sequences and the experience that they have that gets them to the point of closing that deal. And so for me, it's like, well, I could, we could optimize our ads to the nth degree. But if you're still lacking communication, if you're lacking the correct CTAs, or the your flow is broken or isn't fully optimized, or you haven't tested this or that, then there's only so much we can do from an ad perspective. And that's where you see, obviously the numbers then give you that insight. You know, having, looking at your conversion rates and looking at your conversion rates between each step to go, okay, we're actually seeing a huge number drop off here. You know, another example, one of the parts of the business that again, we're now looking to optimize is the point of a customer being invoiced to then paying. And at the moment, again, we're seeing a 40% drop off there. Again, this is something that hasn't been analyzed before because nobody's taken the time to look at the data over a longer period of time and sat down and gone, okay, where are we losing people at each stage? And we're like, great, from consult to invoice, perfect invoice to paid though, you know, 6 out of 10 are paying, but you're still losing 4 out of 10. So what communication is being sent out there? We're actually missing out a fair bit of comms there. Great, let's get an automated setup in there that talks through X, Y and Z. Let's handle their friction, let's handle their pain points. So it's just understanding exactly where you're losing people in that funnel and spending the time to analyze that. And then once you've got the data, then you go on and then you explore and you go, great, so our conversion rate is really poor here. Why is that? And then looking at all the communications all of the setups, the user flows for that stage and then understanding, okay, great, we need to change that because of this. And it's just going through step by step using logic and it's very easy. I think also when you go through and you're trying to change these user flows, you can often get wrapped up and you can make them complex very, very quickly. Well, if this user does X and also does Y, then this needs to happen, then that needs to happen and you can end up coming up with so many edge cases and then that becomes a huge headache for not just the developer, uh, but also when something breaks or something changes, you've then got 10 different workflows you need to change. Trying to keep things as simple as possible is very, very effective, both for reporting for the internal team, but also for understanding what's working and what's not. It's just another kind of piece of advice I think in there is it's very easy to get overwhelmed. It's very easy to make things more complex than what they need to be. So I think it's understanding where the issues are, what's going on there at the moment, what do we need to optimize and how can we do that as effectively as without making an overly complicated solution. And just to also give you some context, obviously I know that I've mentioned that it's been very, very impactful, but just to give you some actual data to back up what we've seen here. So we've made these changes and within. So this is just looking at, since we've actually implemented this change, what have we seen from our paid channels in terms of a change in the actual number of people actually booking to go to their health care provider. So they've actually converted all the way through. Obviously the next step is just to be invoiced, but they've gone through to have an actual paid consultation with a healthcare provider and we've seen a 120% increase already based off of the previous period of people who have made those in person consultations. On Meta and then um, on TikTok we've also seen 150% increase as well. And so the knock on effect obviously therefore is that you see a huge drop in your CPAs for that consultation as well. So again in Meta, So we've seen 120% increase in the number of people booking their consultations and then we've seen a 54% decrease in the cost per consult as well. TikTok 150% increase in the number of consults that people have booked and we've seen a 60% decrease in the cost per consult as well. So huge changes. You know, we're not just talking like a 5% shift. This is 100 plus percent in terms of the volume and also 50% decrease, you know, with half the CPAs here, that is absolutely huge. And making a change like that, if that sustains, obviously, you know, the next part is to make sure that this sustains over a longer period of time. And looking at it over three, four, five, six months, not just obviously the week that we've implemented it, but the early signs are there that can be game changing for a business. If you can reduce a CPA by half and you're also, you're increasing volume of that by over 100%, those numbers aren't nothing. They are very, very meaningful and impactful changes to a business. Which means if that sustains, they can then spend much, much more in terms of their paid, their paid channels in order to continue scaling. So another thing that I just wanted to finish up on, uh, which is kind of going back to, going back to paid for a moment is I mentioned before that we handle the paid acquisition for this business. We had basically we've been unable to produce new creatives for a while. There's been a lot in the pipeline. They work with many, many influencers, um, and they had also been working on a new internal team, uh, structure for their creative. So we basically had to kind of put new uh, creative on pause for a while. And so what we saw whilst that creative was on pause because again this is a big spending account, is we saw the CPAs in terms of the cost per lead, we saw that start to gradually increase obviously over time as we saw some creative fatigue. Um, and the moment that we managed to get our new creative and we launched that new creative. And again this just really, really highlights the importance of continually refreshing your creative on Meta, especially when you're a high spending account, is the impact of creative fatigue and then launching New Creative. So since we've launched this new creative again, we've changed nothing else. We just simply launched New Creative into the same ad sets into the same campaigns and we've already seen a 75% increase in the number of leads compared to the previous period and a 42% decrease in our cost per lead as well. And that's across both Meta and in TikTok. The TikTok numbers are slightly less because we do spend less over there. But again it's a substantial shift in numbers. And again, that then helps with the growth. And it's also just a reminder also to the team to say, hey, this really is the importance of good creative and ensuring that we have consistent creative to launch as well. Often creative gets overlooked by teams. You know, the amount of times we jump into account and you see the same creative that's been running for many, many months, uh, and it never gets refreshed, it never gets updated. And creative fatigue is a real, real thing. And so the more creative that you can launch and you can be consistent, especially as you spend more, you need to be launching more creative. So again, these numbers just really highlights the importance of that. So that was just one other thing that I wanted to close out on. But again, super exciting time to be working with this business. Just wanted to share it. I'm hopefully there'll be much more to share in terms of the outcomes that we're seeing with the other additional changes that we're going to make. But the early signs from these small changes that we've made initially are, ah, huge. And just wanted to share that with you guys, um, because it has been so, so impactful and obviously again it's, you know, it really hammers home why we do what we do. So thank you very much for listening to today's podcast. Again, super excited to share more with you on this. Hopefully in the future. We're hopefully going to be launching another podcast soon. Walking through our Google Ads Playbook. I know that's something that we haven't done yet. We've obviously done a podcast on AI Max for Google and some of the changes that we impact that we've seen running AI Max campaigns with some of our other clients. So, uh, Google Ads Playbook is something that we've had on our minds for quite some time and it's something that we wanted to walk you through. So for our next podcast, I'll likely be bringing Dan in and we'll be walking through our, uh, Google Ads Playbook which will be, it will work, uh, for both B2B and um, B2C. Obviously we run both, uh, so we can walk through some of the changes that we see in both of those different types of businesses. But I hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. And if you're ever interested in running an audit or analysis on either your paid media setup or looking at the deeper funnel and going just past the paid media and past the acquisition and looking more at your retention and your life cycle, um, and your CRM, then please just get in touch with us through our website, mayfairmediagroup.com and we're happy to jump in and have a call with you and help you guys out. Awesome. Thanks, everyone.