Bastian Ernst

Summary:

1. [Tip #1]: How Tony Robbins Built A Coaching Sales Funnel That Generates Him Millions
2. [Tip #2]: What Tony Robbins Coaching Sales Funnel Is Missing & What I Would Do Better If Tony Would Hire Me
3. [Tip #3]: How To Get Started With Your Coaching Using a Sales Funnel Template

This article is for individual life, business, or relationship coaches who want to learn how to build an automated sales funnel. I will show you how a world-class coach—Tony Robbins—attracts millions of customers and generates hundreds of millions in revenue through his online evergreen sales funnels. I will also arm you with a step-by-step process to create a high performing online coaching sales funnel (that converts even better than Tony’s ;-).

Interested? Let’s go!

But before I begin, let me say this…

I have never worked for or with Robbins Research Inc. or Tony Robbins. Everything below is based on my own experience as a Tony Robbins email subscriber. Tony Robbins is updating his marketing constantly. This means that what I share with you below might not be their most recent version.

[Tip #1]: Step-by-Step Walkthrough of Tony Robbins’ Coaching Sales Funnel Template That Generates Him Millions

Tony Robbins has many different online sales funnels. I wouldn’t be able to do justice to all with a single blog post. Which is why in this tip I am focused on two of his funnels:

1. Main squeeze sales funnel
2. Blog post sales funnel

But before we do that, let’s talk about Tony Robbins’ impressive segmentation process.

Tony Robbins Impressive Segmentation Process

Segmentation is super important to Tony Robbins business.

Just take a look at this screenshot of the ASKTony page.

He helps people in many different industries—business, relationships, performance, productivity etc. And within each of these, he has many different customer avatars with different problems.

Because of this, it is critical for Tony to know who finds their way to him online. Is it a CEO already making a million? Is it a college student just starting out? A person having love problems who wants relationship help? Someone who is insecure and wants to become a better version of himself? Without this, it would be almost impossible to give them the most relevant offer.

And Tony segments to impress. Just take a look at what happens when you click one of Tony’s email offers to start taking action:

If you choose business, you arrive at a page where he gives you an offer for business consultation:

If you click “take action” on that page, you will then be taken to this sales page:

This page has a CTA for a free consultation call with one of Tony’s people.

But if, on the other hand, you chose relationships and share that you already purchased the related online program, he offers his live event:

By the way, he also segments people through his main squeeze funnel. Let’s talk about that next.

Tony Robbins’ Main Squeeze Funnel Reverse Engineered

When visiting Tony Robbins home page, you see his main opt-in offer—a life assessment quiz:

Clicking this quiz gives you assessment questions around 7 different life areas. Here is an example of assessment question you would answer:

To get your results, you then have to opt-in:

This is doing two things for Tony Robbins. It allows him to:

1. Collect information so he can give the right offer to the right person
2. Collect email addresses so he can reach out over email to continue the conversation

After you sign up, he shows you a results page with recommendations. He also offers to help you fix your problems via a free coaching call.

This free coaching call doubles as a sales call where his coaches will sell his Unleash the Power Within Live event.

He even pre-frames this on the post-call sign up thank you page:

He also uses this thank you page to offer a frontend product—Ultimate Edge Program (totals $238):

Now that Tony has your email address, he begins sending you his main email sales sequence.

He sends you the first email 3 days after sign-up that goes to this article:

At the end of that article you get an offer for a free PDF:

Above the fold on that article is a CTA to his Unleash the Power Within Event sales call.

If you click the CTA, you will see an offer to jump on a sales call for the event.

A day later, he sends another sales email.

This email is a more aggressive sales email with a total of 6 calls to actions. That is way too many calls to actions that lead to a very bad user experience.

This includes an image that links to

(1) See Tony live, get coaching, and product deals

(2) The Tony Robbins store:

(3) Supplements (he probably gets affiliate commissions on):

(4) Unleash Power Within sales page:

(5) Another Segmentation quiz:

(6) His FB Messenger Bot:

After this, he continues his email sequence with two emails every week. Each week he focuses on a different topic.

Here is an example of one of these emails:

The second email of the week is essentially the same as the first, the only difference is the subject line.

Here’s the email I received on Thursday:

And here’s the email I received on Monday:

All these emails have 6 offers (very aggressive selling too early in the customer relationship in my opinion, but more on that in tip #2). Then after a few weeks, he sends an email offering a 25% discount to his Unleash the Power Within event.

What is unique in all these emails is Tony Robbins segments his prospects further. He does this by offering a Facebook messenger experience, a segmentation quiz, or both.

Here is an example of how he segments further using a quiz:

And here using a FB Messenger Bot:

Another thing Tony Robbins is doing is personalization. The articles and offers you see in the emails are personalized according to the area you said you need the most help in the initial segmentation quiz.

Let’s talk about his blog post funnel.

Tony Robbins Blog Post Funnel

Tony Robbins not only creates blog posts for different customer avatars. He also goes a step further by creating content upgrades to get people to opt-in.

Here is an example of what this looks like for Tony.

This relationship related blog post:

…is linked to this assessment.

Like the assessment in his main squeeze funnel, to see the results of this assessment you have to opt-in.

After signup, he then continues to give people the same main squeeze emails I showed you earlier.

Main takeaways:

1. Include a segmentation survey in your lead onboarding process (on the main squeeze page + after opt-ins to content upgrades).
2. Create blog content for your different customer avatars and then use content upgrades or assessment surveys to get them to opt-in.
3. Segment your prospects deeper after they opt-in.
4. Every time you segment your prospects, eventually present them with an offer that is most appropriate to where they are at.

[Tip #2] What Tony Robbins’ Coaching Sales Funnel Is Missing & What I Would Do Better If Tony Would Hire Me

Now imagine if Tony came to me and said: “Hey Bastian, you are awesome. I want to hire you. Please build me an awesome Relationship Funnel!” What would I do?

I would keep the focus on segmentation. Since Tony plays in so many different industries, segmentation is key to his business. And he already does an amazing job at that.

That being said, there are a lot of opportunities to increase his conversions and revenue further by improving both his segmentation and what he offers prospects after segmentation.

Here are the steps I would take to improve Tony’s sales funnel template:

1. Capture emails of leads interacting with Tony’s content
2. Segment captured leads better
3. Qualify buyers by selling a frontend offer
4. Create and send a RBS
5. Get prospects to convert
6. Continue the relationship with an evergreen newsletter
7. Execute a multi-channel approach

Let’s talk more about each of these.

Step #1: Capture Emails of Leads Interacting with Tony’s Content

Tony Robbins has a lot of phenomenal content across the internet.

The first thing we would do it take this content and distribute it to more people. A simple way to do this would be by repurposing existing content for another medium.

For example, Amy Porterfield repurposed this podcast episode:

…into this SlideShare presentation:

For Tony, we could take any of his recent great content (such as this recent blog post) and repurpose into a Youtube Video, an Instagram post, a Facebook post etc.

Next, I would capture emails of the leads interacting with the content. This would allow us to gain control over the conversation. We can do this in many ways, but it all starts with pixeling people when they interact with Tony’s content. This means pixeling people who view his Facebook content, YouTube videos, blog posts, Instagram posts, etc.

I would then retarget those people with lead magnets & assessment surveys.

Here is an example of a retargeting ad ThriveThemes shows blog visitors after their recent visit:

I would base what I retarget them with on the type of content they consumed. For example, if someone watched a video about business, we would offer them a business-related PDF.  If someone reads an article about love, I would offer them a relationship assessment survey.

Step #2: Segment Captured Leads Better

Once we capture leads, we need to segment them so we can be as relevant as possible.

There are several different ways to do this.

The first way is based on the type of content piece they opted in from. For example, if they opted-in from an article on business we tag them as interested in business. If they opted-in from an article on love & relationships, we tag them as interested in love.

Another way would be by integrating a lead bucketing question before the signup. Here is an example of how we do this on the Wild Audience blog:

Finally, we can segment them further by giving them a 3-5 question survey. This would be similar to Tony’s current segmentation app. What I would do differently is to include it on the thank you page prospects see after they opt-in. I would pair the survey with an offer for a free course. Obviously, I’d relate the free course to the problem they told us they had right before opting-in.

Step #3: Qualify Buyers by Selling a Frontend Offer

I would then offer those who sign up for the course a frontend product.

Even though Tony already does this on his current thank you page, I don’t think he uses the right product.

He offers his Ultimate Edge program (total of $235.99). This is definitely a valid option but what I would test as an alternative is to offer a low price point, high-value frontend product. This would qualify the buyers vs the non-buyer quickly. It will also allow us to make ad spend back.

Here is an example of one of our frontend products:

Notice this is a light product–a 7-page PDF. It is also a very low-price point of only $12.

Step #4: Create and Send a RBS

Currently, after Tony Robbins captures lead emails, the only thing he does via email is selling. He is leaving a lot of money on the table by doing this.

If I were to create a funnel for Tony, I would repurpose some of his existing content to create 7 Relationship Builder Sequence emails (RBS).

I’d keep 3 things in mind with these emails:

1. Be relevant based on collected dataRemember the lead bucketing question we used in step #2 to find the problem prospects need help with? I would use the data to dynamically generate different emails for each lead bucket.

For example if we learned from the lead bucketing question that they had a problem with ROI/Conversions we will show the email that speaks to that problem and gives them a solution.

2. Install beliefs to prime Tony’s audience to buy from himOur goal would be to install the beliefs that:

• Tony Robbins is a rockstar.
• He’s the best self-help guru/businessman and personal development master on the planet
• He’s the exact guy to solve my problems

This is simply a matter of repurposing some of Tony’s current testimonial content.

You probably noticed a few examples of how we do this at Wild Audience by building social proof via the RBS. Here is one example:

3. Use Respect Based Marketing to get people engaged and increase your sales funnel conversion rate

Currently Tony bombards people with sales emails right after they opt-in.

Take a look at this email for example, it has 6 sales offers!

(1) See Tony live, get coaching, and product deals.

(2) The Tony Robbins store:

(3) Supplements (he probably gets affiliate commissions on):

(4) Unleash Power Within sales page

(5) Another Segmentation quiz:

(6) His FB Messenger Bot:

After this, he continues his email sequence with two emails every week. Each week he focuses on a different topic.

Here is an example of one of these emails:

I would stop doing this.

Instead, I would do Respect-Based Marketing (RBM) to get people engaged first.

RBM is a term we coined to describe the process we use to engage people once they’ve become aware of our brand. It combines tried-and-true business elements like respect, relationship, trust and authority — with modern and advanced sales funnel automation.

It starts with the thank you page people see right after opting in.

Here’s an example of how we do this at Wild Audience:

We ask people for permission to help them more with the topic they just told us they need help with. If they say yes, I will then ask them 3-5 questions to further segment them. I would then customize the emails they get after that based on their answers.

Check out some of the results respect-based marketing has gotten us and our clients here.

If you want to learn more about Respect Based Marketing check out this video I’ve recorded for you here.

Step #5: Get Prospects to Convert

As each lead engages with the RBS emails, we would score them based on how much of the content they engaged with. When the lead conversion threshold is achieved, we’d offer a core product (lead scoring can be implemented in advanced ESPs like Wild Mail).

Again, the product we offer would depend on the segmentation information we collected. How we offer the product depends on the product’s price point. So for a $200 course, we would email them a sales page or an evergreen webinar. For high tier products like Tony’s $3k event, we would set up a call. For a coaching offer, we would probably create a video sales letter.

Here is how one of our frontend funnels converts as a result of this strategy:

Step #6: Continue the Relationship With an Evergreen Newsletter

After that, we’d continue having a relationship with Tony’s audience through an evergreen newsletter.

Here is an example of an email we sent in our evergreen newsletter at Wild Audience.

Here is another recent example:

Notice how in both cases we use stories to build our relationship with our audience by sharing stories and insights to help them with their problems.

While Tony has an evergreen newsletter, currently the only thing he does there is selling. He also reuses the same sales email with a different subject line in the second email of the week.

Instead, I would repurpose existing content to maximize the exposure. Here are a couple of ideas off the top of my head that Tony could send:

• Story emails about how Tony transformed people’s lives
• Links to Youtube videos showing how awesome Tony is at helping people who had the same problem
• Link to Instagram pics so we could retarget them

As people engaged with the content, I would track their lead scores. I‘d set a lead score threshold. Once they hit the threshold, I would then send them an email every two weeks offering a related product.

I might also use the PS section of the content emails to build Tony’s social proof for his live event. For example, to those who have already purchased his Ultimate Edge Product, we might say:

“I know you purchased Ultimate Edge. Did you know around 65% people who buy Ultimate Edge then decide to come to my live event Unleash the Power Within? You should do it too. Here is what Marie thinks about it (linked to a video of Marie sharing her transformation).”

Below the video, I would link to a free coaching call offer. In this coaching call offer, we’d aim to close them for a live event.

Step #7 Execute A Multi-Channel Approach

Finally, I would execute a multi-channel approach to speak to Tony’s prospects. This means I wouldn’t just depend on email to deliver the RBS messaging or to sell. I would also sync the messaging with a bot.

Here is an example of how we have implemented this at Wild Audience:

This is one of the easiest ways to increase the open and click rate. At Wild Audience, we have seen up to 97% open and 36% click rate on the 7th bot message using this strategy.

As I mentioned earlier, Tony’s audience is huge. The nature of social algorithms is that not everyone sees all Tony’s great content all the time. Which is why I would also use ads to retarget new content to anyone who has liked and engaged with Tony’s content before.

[Tip #3] How To Use This Sales Funnel Template to Get Started With Your Own Funnel

I hope that by showing you a breakdown of Tony Robbins sales funnel template I’ve convinced you that you too can create your own coaching sales funnel.

Here are the 7-steps you would need to take to get started:

1. Define your client avatar
2. Create a 10-20 page PDF as a lead magnet for that avatar (could be a blog post turned into a PDF)
3. Set up a 5-question segmentation survey—using tools like Surveyslam or Typeform
4. Create a 7-part RBS email sequence to installs buying beliefs—you can use Wild Mail or Drip for delivery
5. Create a sale page with a video above the fold that leads to an application where people can schedule a call with you
6. Jump on that call and close the client on a paid offer
7. Keep in touch with non-buyers using one weekly email (you can turn it evergreen for leverage). Include a free coaching call as the email’s CTA

And with that, I would like to end this article.

I hope you found it valuable & educational.

If you want to move on (& go deeper), I’d suggest downloading our 8 steps sales funnel ebook here.

Know Tony Robbins or want to let him know via email or Twitter that he should check out this article? You can do that here…

1. Email Tony Robbins (Click Here!)
2. Tweet Tony Robbins (Click Here!)

Thanks!

Summary:

1. [Part 1]: Why ActiveCampaign’s SaaS Messaging & Positioning Is Awesome
2. [Part 2]: ActiveCampaign’s Conversion Funnel Strategy & Why They Are Killing It
3. [Part 3]: Where ActiveCampaign Is Missing Out & My 6 Suggestions for How They Could Improve
   

This article is for marketers and founders at SaaS startups and software firms — or anyone who works with similar companies.

Sound good?

Let’s jump in!

Quick note before I start…

I have never worked with ActiveCampaign or founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom. Everything I describe in this article is based on my own experience as an ActiveCampaign subscriber and customer (I’ve been using their service for 3 years). I expect ActiveCampaign will constantly change its tactics (just like any company). What I describe below is what ActiveCampaign is doing today, which may change in the future.

And I love ActiveCampaign so much that I actually built better analytics & reports on top of ActiveCampaign. It’s called Wildmetrics.

[Part 1]: Why ActiveCampaign’s SaaS Messaging & Positioning Is Awesome

The first thing to say about ActiveCampaign is that they’re totally killing it.

Just last month they announced they’d crossed 50,000 customers. That’s huge for a B2B SaaS company.

Before we jump into their conversion funnel (also known as a sales funnel), there are a few things I want to show you about their strategy…

ActiveCampaign Has Great Positioning

Positioning is how a company creates a perception of uniqueness.

I really like how ActiveCampaign positions itself by saying:

• “Cloud” and “integrations” = bad
• “stacks” and “deep data” = good

Here’s how they talk about the “cloud” vs. their idea of “stacks”:

As someone who pays for a ton of cloud apps, this resonates with me, especially the part about paying only for what you need.

Everyone just assumes that “the cloud” is a good thing. By showing me how the cloud isn’t automatically good, ActiveCampaign creates a unique position in my mind.

This is an example of a company that’s installing beliefs in the mind of potential customers.

That’s really smart.

They’re doing the same thing with their description of “integrations” vs. “deep data”:

This resonates with me too.

Integrations are supposed to be a good thing.

But who in marketing doesn’t know the frustration of trying to connect cloud apps through Zapier or some other integration system?

Main Takeaways:

• Positioning is how you create a perception of uniqueness in the mind of a potential customer
• A great way to position your product is to install a belief that is “against” a mainstream idea (like the cloud or integrations)

Clear Choice of Customer Avatars

ActiveCampaign knows its customer avatars.

Check out how they’ve organized the main menu of their websiteInstead of creating navigation based on features, as many SaaS companies do, ActiveCampaign’s navigation is separated by audience.

Whoever you are, you can click the link designed for you:

1. Bloggers
2. Agencies
3. eCommerce
4. SaaS
5. Higher Ed

You can also navigate the site by team, which is perfect for people working in bigger organizations:

1. Customer Success
2. Marketing
3. Sales

Once you click, you’ll land on a page designed just for you.

You can tell they’ve done their work to understand the needs of the different avatars:

Here’s the solutions page for bloggers:And here’s the one for SaaS companies:See how the messaging completely changes for the different avatars?

It speaks directly to the needs and wants of the person reading the page.

So simple. But also brilliant marketing.

Contrast that approach with what I see most companies do, like this page from AWeber.

It’s a completely generic page to anyone looking for an email marketing solution.On ActiveCampaign’s site, if I’m in one of their target markets, I feel right at home — like they know me and my needs.

I feel like they get me because they’re speaking my language and talking directly to my problems and my needs.

On AWeber’s site, I have no idea.

Main Takeaways:

• Create clear customer avatars, then design your messaging around them. It will make a huge positive impact on your marketing.
• On your website, speak directly to the problems and needs of your avatars. Let them know you get them.

[Part 2]: ActiveCampaign’s Online Conversion Funnel Strategy Broken Down & Why They Are Killing It

Now that we’ve covered ActiveCampaign’s high-level positioning, let’s dive into the specifics of their conversion funnel.

Real quick, let’s look at their pricing strategy so you have context for their sales funnel.

As you’ll see as we dive into the details, ActiveCampaign’s entire funnel strategy revolves around getting people to sign up for a trial.

Their CTAs reflect this:Their pricing strategy is built on retention.

For newbie marketers, ActiveCampaign is just $9/month, one of the cheapest options available.

As you gain subscribers and need more features, the service (and ActiveCampaign’s revenue) grows with you:See where we’re headed?

ActiveCampaign’s Value Ladder

As a refresher, the value ladder is your big-picture zoomed-out conversion funnel strategy.

As people ascend your value ladder, they’re offered more value — and that value usually comes at a price ($).

ActiveCampaign’s value ladder is actually very sophisticated.

It looks like this:

1. Lead Generation: To get people in the door

• Their blog
• Integration marketing
• Software review pages (that rank on the first page of Google)
• Events and Meetups
• AC Podcast
• Influencers and Third-Party Online Courses

2. Frontend Funnel: To qualify buyers & decrease ROI time

• None (more on this in part 3 below)

3. Core Funnel: To sell your main product/service

• ActiveCampaign’s software (with an awesome business model and pricing strategy)

4. Backend Funnel: To upsell existing customers & increase CLV

• Conference
• Certified consultant program
• Design services
• Marketplace

5. Continuity Funnel: To generate recurring revenue

• ActiveCampaign’s SaaS business model generates monthly recurring revenue

Now let me show you how each step of the sales funnel supports these goals…

1) Lead Generation:

ActiveCampaign has a ton of activity around awareness and lead generation.

Let’s jump into each piece of their strategy.

The ActiveCampaign Blog

Blogging is an awareness strategy.

It gives ActiveCampaign a way to reach people who wouldn’t search for “ActiveCampaign” in Google — and wouldn’t click an ad for the company either.

Remember earlier when I said ActiveCampaign did a great job understanding its customer avatars?

You can see it in their blog topics:

1. Marketing
2. Strategy
3. Product updates
4. General
5. Small Business
6. Insider tips

They publish a lot — 27 articles in March 2018.

These aren’t 500-word fluff articles either.

Here’s an example of a 3,000+ word in-depth resource on copywriting, written for their marketing avatar: The Secret to Writing Great Marketing Copy is Market ResearchTo be fair, not all of their blog articles are this long and detailed.

But many of them are.

As a guy who has spent weeks writing one piece of epic content for a blog post, I can tell you that it takes a tremendous investment of time and effort to produce 27 quality articles in a month.

Once you get into an article, you’re met with two persistent floating CTAs, both inviting you to sign up for the newsletter.When I entered my email to subscribe, I found it was really just another version of their main CTA: a trial signup.

To get on the “newsletter” it seems, you have to sign up for a trial account.

I couldn’t find content upgrades on any of their posts, only invitations to receive content from ActiveCampaign weekly.

(More on that later in the “missed opportunities” section.)

At the bottom of the blog posts, you see ActiveCampaign’s traditional “sign up for a trial” CTA.

Integration Marketing

Integration marketing is a way to reach users of other apps.

It’s big for ActiveCampaign. I found over 150 integrations listed on their site.These are direct integration partners too, not just integrations through services like Zapier or If This Then That.

Software Review Pages (That Rank on the First Page of Google)

Check this out.Customer reviews are a huge part of online marketing.

Reviews are social proof.

People want to know:

• Does your product work?
• Do you treat your customers well?
• Are people who use your product happy with it?

Notice that every listing is from a third-party review sites.

Google doesn’t return anything from ActiveCampaign’s website for the search term “ActiveCampaign review.”

That means ActiveCampaign must:

1. Do a good job providing the value it promises
2. Treat its customers well
3. Monitor the review sites to respond to negative reviews

As you can tell when you click through to the reviews, ActiveCampaign is very active in these forums:Side note: if you haven’t done a Google search for “[your company] + reviews”, you should do that.

Like, now.

Events and Meetups

Conferences and meetups are a blend of marketing strategies.

They support lead generation by giving a company a way to talk to prospects.

As I’ll describe in a bit, they also support the core funnel and backend funnel.

The challenge with in-person events for lead generation is that they’re expensive and time-consuming.

Despite the cost, however, they can be a very effective way to reach clients — especially enterprise clients.

ActiveCampaign has a variety of event-marketing activities to achieve this.

They have booths at conferences all over the world to engage with people from their target markets.They also have a brand-new 2-day conference this year in Chicago called ACTIVATE. They’re bringing in Ann Handley and other well-known marketers as featured speakers to attract people to the event.A 2-day conference like this is not meant to draw in the $9/month target audience.

This is for enterprise clients. ActiveCampaign target the high-dollar audience by charging $650 per ticket.

A company would need a significant marketing budget to send a manager or an employee to a conference with that high of a price tag.

And that’s exactly who ActiveCampaign is trying to attract.

For smaller businesses, ActiveCampaign also hosts meetups as another way to connect with its customer personas. Why do events?

Because they work. Even with all the online marketing tools we have, there’s nothing quite like talking to someone face to face.

The question is just whether the ROI justifies the cost, something that will be different for every company.

The ActiveCampaign Podcast

Podcasting is usually for cultivation.

It’s a high-engagement channel, one that lets people feel like they get to know you and your company through the stories you tell.

A podcast is very different than a blog article — where readers often just skim down the page and read over the headlines.

The trick — of course — is creating a podcast people actually enjoy.

ActiveCampaign publishes its podcast “The ActiveCampaign Podcast,” weekly.

If the reviews are any indication, people really like it.If you’re wondering how a podcast is part of lead generation, it’s because people who like podcasts search for new podcasts that match their interests.

It can lead to discoveries like this one:Here’s a customer who was using a different email service, wasn’t happy with it, and switched because he found the ActiveCampaign podcast.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

Influencers and Third-Party Online Courses

This one’s important.

If you think that lead generation is only done by people directly employed by your company, you’re wrong.

Influencers and third-party sources are a huge part of modern lead generation.

As an example, look at me!

Here’s a screenshot from a Wild Audience sales page promoting our Relationship Funnel.That’s us at Wild Audience driving people to sign up for the AC service — with no direct instruction from ActiveCampaign.

This is the impact of influencers.

Influencers are also on places like Udemy, teaching courses about how to get the most out of ActiveCampaign.And on Facebook, running groups with thousands of members talking about the product.None of these people are employees of ActiveCampaign.

But they are all driving leads to ActiveCampaign’s service.

How does ActiveCampaign get influencers to become advocates for its service?

Well, first by having an awesome product.

Second, by running a strong affiliate programAnd third, by offering a certification program for consultants who want to help companies get the most from their ActiveCampaign subscription.Taken together, ActiveCampaign is encouraging people to become more than just customers.

They’re creating a network of brand advocates.

Main Takeaways:

• Lead generation strategies are a direct result of knowing your audience and defining clear customer avatars.
• Employees are not the only people who influence purchase decisions. Influencers and reviews have a huge impact on sales, especially for SaaS companies.

2) Frontend Funnel:

The goal of a frontend funnel is to qualify buyers and decrease ROI time.

As far as I can tell, ActiveCampaign completely skips this step. And I find that extremely interesting.

They don’t have paid frontend products or services.

Instead, they direct all their lead generation efforts directly to their core funnel.

We’ll talk more about what they could do with a frontend funnel later in this article.

I think ActiveCampaign is definitely missing out on some things by skipping this step.

Main Takeaways:

• Don’t skip the frontend funnel!

3) Core Funnel:

All the lead generation efforts ActiveCampaign point here, to the core funnel.

An Awesome Business Model and Pricing Strategy

The first thing I want to point out is that ActiveCampaign has an extremely smart pricing strategy.

I’ve read tons of resources on pricing and seen countless debates about “what should I charge” in various forums online.

The debate comes down to an argument between:

1. Setting a low price to attract lots of new users
2. Setting a high price so you only attract people who will be committed

ActiveCampaign does both.

The $9/month starting price is low enough for solopreneurs and anyone just looking to get a feel for the system.

As you grow, the price goes up, jumping to $49/month and above, levels where you’d need regular revenue from your email marketing efforts to make it worth it.These are relatively high prices for these higher levels of service.

In other words, ActiveCampaign has a pricing strategy that allows both things to happen.

The low-price intro offer is cheap enough to attract anyone with interest.

The higher tiers are for people who are committed to the service and understand the value it delivers for their business.

Educational Content

If blogging is about awareness, educational content is about engaging people once you have their attention.

That’s why educational content is awesome for SaaS businesses.

It’s meant to help business owners and marketers understand:

1. The problems they face
2. Solutions to those problems

These are resources for customer success, not directly for lead generation. It’s a next step people can take if they’re interested in learning more — even before they sign up for a trial.

After they sign up and start using the product, that’s where educational content really fills a need, helping people answer specific questions they have about using the product.

ActiveCampaign gets this, providing a huge library of guides, videos, and webinars.

If you hear about ActiveCampaign and want to hear or see more, there’s a resource for anything you want to know.I really like their webinars — they have this idea of “success webinars” — where they talk about a specific story of how someone has used ActiveCampaign successfully.

Customer Communities

People are going to talk about your product online.

Why not own the forum or community where those conversations happen so you can be involved?

ActiveCampaign has several active communities where they cultivate these conversations. Just to show you a few of them…

There’s a support forum hosted on the ActiveCampaign website.A closed Facebook group with almost 3,000 members.There’s also a Slack chat group, meetups, and the events and the ACTIVATE conference we mentioned earlier.

These all provide channels to engage existing users in addition to prospects.

The Sales Follow-up Sequence

The most important part of ActiveCampaign’s core funnel is its professional sales force.

Using professional salespeople is expensive, but it’s also a great way to increase conversions. There’s really no substitute for one-on-one conversations with a real human being.

It’s been a long time since I signed up for ActiveCampaign, which made me wonder…

What does their sales process look like today? If I signed up for a new trial, what emails or phone calls would I get?

I decided to find out.

I signed up for an account with an email different than the one I already have with ActiveCampaign.

Since I already have an account, I also asked my friend Nathan — who’s based in the U.S. — to sign up for a trial account.

We both kept track of every call and email we received.

The Follow-up Sequence: 4 Phone Calls & 9 Emails Over 14 Days

Let’s take a look at what happened after Nathan signed up for an ActiveCampaign trial.

Day 1

On April 23 around noon, Nathan signed up. He immediately received a welcome email.20 minutes later, he got another welcome message — this one from Jason VandeBoom’s account.10 minutes after that, Nathan’s phone rang with a number from Chicago, where ActiveCampaign is based.

It was Ernie from the ActiveCampaign sales team, who left a voicemail wanting to know if Nathan needed any help with the new account.

Days 2–14

Over the two weeks of the trial, Nathan received a total of 17 emails & 4 phone calls from ActiveCampaign.

Here’s what Nathan’s inbox looked on the last day of the ActiveCampaign trial:When we looked at all the emails and phone calls in detail, they broke down like this:

• 8 drip emails
• 4 broadcast emails (announcement, new content, etc.)
• 4 sales phone calls
• 3 sales emails
• 1 confirmation email
• 1 welcome message

Drip Emails: One Every Other Day

I was expecting something a little more creative in their drip campaign, but honestly it looks like ActiveCampaign is just going with the straightforward “every-other-day” sales messages.

The drip emails started on day 2 of Nathan’s trial. They came every other day after that. Most were topical, encouraging Nathan to take action with his account.There is so much more ActiveCampaign could be doing with this drip campaign. The big miss — in my eyes — is that these emails mostly just cover features — they don’t seek to install buying beliefs that get people engaged and keep them active until they convert.

In part 3, I’ll talk more about what they could do to install these beliefs.

If you’re interested, here are all 11 of the automated emails I received in my account:

1. Email 1: Welcome to ActiveCampaign
2. Email 2: Welcome to ActiveCampaign (from Jason VandeBoom)
3. Email 3: Don’t forget your ActiveCampaign trial…
4. Email 4: How can we help you?
5. Email 5: Why not send a message?
6. Email 6: What can automations do for you?
7. Email 7: Need some help setting up an automation?
8. Email 8: Avoid making this mistake with your marketing & sales solution
9. Email 9: Unleash event-triggered messaging with the ActiveCampaign WordPress plugin
10. Email 10: Let’s “stack” some apps…
11. Email 11: Want to keep going with ActiveCampaign?

Broadcast Emails

The broadcast emails were ActiveCampaign’s “standard” newsletter emails — with topics ranging from product announcements to information about GDPR.

Sales Phone Calls

Ernie called Nathan four times in total, leaving similar messages offering help each time he called.

We were impressed that his first call came less than an hour after Nathan’s signup — a sign ActiveCampaign has a strong lead-follow-up sequence in place.

In sequence, Ernie’s calls came on:

• Day 1
• Day 4
• Day 9
• Day 12

Here are recordings of two of those voicemails (these are actually the third and fourth calls in the sequence).

• Sales Voicemail No. 1
• Sales Voicemail No. 2

Sales Emails

Ernie followed up with a voicemail after the first three emails, giving a very professional feel to the interactions.

That was true even though Ernie’s messages are almost certainly templates he uses over and over with new trial signups.Here are copies of all three messages:

1. Sales Email No. 1
2. Sales Email No. 2
3. Sales Email No. 3

Main Takeaways:

• It’s super powerful to combine an effective drip email campaign with a direct sales approach.
• A professional sales force is a major help in driving conversions — if you can afford the labor cost.
• SaaS companies can create pricing models that “grow with you” to give anyone a chance to sign up.
• Active customer communities = engagement = better retention.

4) Backend:

The point of the backend funnel is to upsell existing customers and increase customer lifetime value.

For SaaS companies, that often means keeping customers activated, using the software and seeing the value of the service.

In a way, reducing churn is part of the backend funnel for SaaS companies.

The support team has as much to do with this as the marketing and sales teams.

Even so, ActiveCampaign has several backend offers to upsell existing customers.

Conference

We talked about ActiveCampaign’s new ACTIVATE conference in the frontend funnel.

It costs $650 per ticket to attend, turning events marketing — usually a pure expense — into a revenue-generating activity.

Certified Consultant

Want to become a certified ActiveCampaign consultant?

It’s a great way to zero in on ActiveCampaign users as potential clients.

Cost: $2,000 (one-time fee).

Design Services

Need help with the design of your emails? ActiveCampaign has design services offering to help for $395.

Marketplace

ActiveCampaign also maintains a marketplace for third-party sellers who’ve created add-ons for the service.

This generates revenue for both the third-party seller and for ActiveCampaign.

Main Takeaways:

• Conferences, training, consulting, and add-ons are other ways to increase revenue and LTV for SaaS companies. They can also help improve retention.

5) Continuity

In almost every SaaS business, continuity comes from the month-to-month structure of the core offer — and ActiveCampaign is no different.

Even so, what I really like about ActiveCampaign is what we mentioned before about its business model.

As you grow and gain more subscribers, your business is probably doing well and making more revenue.

Which means when you need a bigger ActiveCampaign account, it won’t be difficult to justify the new $49/month fee.

Or the $129/month, or higher.

Main Takeaways:

• In SaaS, continuity comes from the month-to-month structure of the business model.
• Retention is the ultimate goal of continuity for SaaS companies.

[Part 3] Where ActiveCampaign Is Missing Out & My 6 Suggestions For How They Could Improve Their Conversion Funnel

With all that ActiveCampaign gets right, I still think they have room to improve.

All you have to do is look at what some of their competitors are doing to see what’s working in a similar space.

Specifically, I looked at:

1. InfusionSoft
2. MailChimp
3. ClickFunnels
4. Drip
5. ConvertKit

I also have a few suggestions from my own funnel-building experience working with SaaS companies and online course businesses.

Here are 6 conversion funnel changes I would make if I were to work with ActiveCampaign…

Change #1: Content Upgrades

I love content upgrades.

They’re a simple, effective way to double, triple, or quadruple (or more!) opt-in rates from content marketing (blogs, guides, etc.).

I use them in almost every piece of content I create (including this one!).

Here’s one from one of Wild Audience’s most popular blog posts on sales funnels:

The fact that ActiveCampaign isn’t using content upgrades at all was one of the first things I noticed when I started looking at their strategy.

Blog posts should have the main goal to get people to sign up with their email. The best way to do that is a content upgrade.

That doesn’t mean ActiveCampaign has to take away its trial offer. It could still include a trial sign-up in the top navigation or in the right banner.

Reason is that people are in different stages. Some are ready to try a new ESP like AC and this will sign-up for the trial. Others are not in the need of a new ESP as they use a different one or are just not there yet in their business journey.

Regardless of where a person, you want to start building a relationship so that once the person starts to consider ESPs, ActiveCampaign is top of mind.

A content upgrade extends the blog post with further educational content and acts as the entry point to a sales funnel. Once someone signs-up for the content upgrade, the marketing funnel kicks in and starts installing beliefs.

Change #2: Original Research

Original research is both rare and valuable.

Done right, it’s the kind of thing that gets covered in the press and linked to over and over again by people in your target market.

They’re great for lead generation, authority building, and backlinks.

One of my favorite resources is MailChimp’s annual report on email marketing benchmarks.

It’s a huge report with benchmarks for email open and click-through rates across dozens of industries — making it a fantastic resource for marketers.

It’s one of four deeply-researched resources currently available for free on the MailChimp website.

Drip uses a similar strategy with its reports on entrepreneurship and small business marketing.

As far as I can tell, ActiveCampaign isn’t currently doing original research — or at least nothing close to the scale of MailChimp and Drift.

It means they lack the big, substantive resources MailChimp and Drift have to collect email addresses and earn backlinks.

Change #3: Respect-Based Marketing (RBM)

Respect-Based Marketing (RBM) is a term we coined to describe the process we use to engage people once they’ve become aware of our brand.

It combines tried-and-true business elements like respect, relationship, trust and authority — with modern and advanced sales funnel automation to increase conversion rate. 

It looks like this:

1. Segment new leads into buckets by asking them 5 questions during the sign-up process.
2. Use this data to personalize and customize your emails, website and bot messages (and any other channels you might use)
3. As you are more personal, people will perceive you as more relevant.
4. If you’re more relevant, people will engage more.
5. Getting the right people engaged will always result in higher sales conversions and more revenue.
6. Automate the whole process and turn it evergreen.

Here’s an article that was just published on Forbes that describes Respect Based Marketing and I was also interviewed by more than 20 podcasts to talk about Respect-Based Marketing. Here’s one interview I did with Ash from Productive Insights.

I have also recorded a video to walk you through the process..

To do RBM effectively, we’d need new ways to increase email signups…

Change #4: Relationship Funnel

Something ActiveCampaign is completely missing right now is any kind of content that is focused on installing buying beliefs.

All of their lead-generation work drives people directly to a 14-day trial. Once someone signs up for a trial, the email and phone call follow-up sequence kicks in.

If you look closely, the messaging in those drip emails is almost totally product focused.

See how this is all about what ActiveCampaign can do?

A Relationship Funnel is different, and — I believe — would have a big positive impact on ActiveCampaign’s results.

Relationship Funnels are based on a belief system (you can learn more about this here). We buy stuff based on beliefs… and that’s how we decide between right & wrong.

For that reason, when I help SaaS companies build Relationship Funnels, we spend a lot of time teaching those beliefs to their marketing leads, trial leads & paying customers. If we do that well, conversions go up in all stages of the process.

Here’s a simple example of how I would build a Relationship Funnel for ActiveCampaign optimized for organic traffic:

1) Create Content:

Create blog posts with content upgrades (targeted at their customer avatar) and distribute them to drive organic traffic.

2) Get Them To Sign-Up:

ActiveCampaign should be interested in two things at this point:

1. Getting marketing leads (people who are not ready yet for the trial)
2. Getting trial leads

I would use two different call-to-actions to get people to sign-up. I would always place the call-to-action for the trial visible on any page of the website.

What I would add is a content upgrade to drive marketing leads. We can then start an email sequence to install beliefs to move them towards marketing qualified and then sales qualified. See next steps..

They could also use personalization software like RightMessage to personalize the call-to-action on their blog based on what they already know about the website visitors.

Example: Show a trial CTA if visitor is marketing qualified but show a lead magnet if visitor is a first time visitor.

3) Retarget Non-Sign-Ups:

The majority of people won’t sign-up at the first time. That’s not a problem if you have a retargeting funnel installed. Two simple ways to retarget blog post readers & website visitors is through Facebook & Adwords (GDN they already do).They can drive visitors to their trial and to lead magnets. Currently, they only drive leads to the trial as far as I saw. Lead magnets can easily be created by turning blog posts into PDFs & guides and is a great way to capture people who are not ready yet for the trial but are interested in marketing automation.

4) Relationship Building & Installing Buying Beliefs:

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Marketing Qualified: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe before she can sign-up for an ActiveCampaign trial?
2. Sales Qualified: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe before she can become a paying customer?
3. Customer Success: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe to stay an ActiveCampaign customer?

See how beliefs are part of every part of the sales cycle?

Pretty interesting, I know.

Now, how do you get people to believe certain things? You need to communicate the beliefs to them.

At Wild Audience, we build multi-channel Relationship Funnels to install beliefs. Here are some of the channels you can choose from:

1. Evergreen Email Sequences
2. Evergreen Ad Retargeting Funnels (Facebook, GDN, YouTube..)
3. Bot Sequences
4. Communities (like Facebook groups)
5. Phone calls
6. Customer Success Webinars
7. Etc..

Pick your channels and start communicating your beliefs to move people towards your desired outcome (marketing qualified, sales qualified, NPS scores, CLV etc..)

Installing beliefs is not about selling per se. It’s about setting the stage. Establishing a relationship, creating trust, establishing yourself as the authority and getting people to accept the desire or need of ActiveCampaign’s marekting automation software.

The bottom line: You prepare leads for the conversion event.

5) Conversion Event:

The conversion event is all about monetization. The better you do your job during the relationship builder stage (4), the higher your conversions will be on sales calls, sales pages and webinars.

What we have seen work really well, is to use evergreen conversion methods as your foundation and spice them up with timely promotions.

You could run an evergreen webinar and have a regular sales page. You jump on calls with qualified leads. And every quarter you could run a promotion (discount, free product, free onboarding coaching sessions etc..) to qualified leads (use lead scoring).

This is Relationship Funnel in a nutshell.

There is way more to it (especially in the relationship builder stage or what you do with leads who don’t initially convert) ..

But enough for now 🙂

Change #5: Frontend Product

This point builds on the Respect-Based Marketing step (change #3 above).

I’d create a $10 educational product and promote it to attract buyers. I would attach an upsell funnel to increase average order value:

• Frontend offer: $10
• Upsell 1: $50
• Upsell 2: $150

For Wild Audience’s funnel, I did a quick check on how our frontend product is doing. For today, our average order value is $42. That means I can spend $42 to acquire one single customer. I can then send them over to my core offer at zero cost.

If my cost to acquire one single lead (lead CAC) is below $42, I would even get paid for people just testing out my core offer. If my lead CAC is $20, I make $22 for people just giving my core a try.

That’s the magic of frontend funnels. And ActiveCampaign could do the same. They could produce educational products on how to use marketing automation to drive more revenue.

Once a prospect becomes a frontend buyer for one of ActiveCampaign’s educational products, then I’d offer them an ActiveCampaign software trial.

They could even create a frontend product that incorporates ActiveCampaign to help solve the problem the frontend product solves.

If you do this well, you breakeven on your frontend product (or even make a profit). This means you’re getting paid for people to sign up for the trial.

This is the opposite of what normally happens — where SaaS companies pay to get people to try the trial product.

Educational products work extremely well when used together with software trial signups.

Want an example?

Let’s look at ClickFunnels, which does an amazing job at this.

This is a page that offers their book — Expert Secrets — for free if you pay $7.95 shipping and handling. It’s a physical book, not just an eBook download, so the perceived value is extremely high.

That $7.95 is the first “level” of ClickFunnel’s frontend offer.

The next offer is a $37 upsell that appears after you enter your contact information, email, and address.

At this point, if you get the book or one of the three upsells, you’ll be added to their funnel to get you to try ClickFunnels’ 14-day trial.

In that way, ClickFunnels has turned its trial sign-up process (usually a money loser for SaaS companies) into a profitable step in its funnel!

Change #6: Email Sequence to Install Beliefs (Respect-Based Marketing Style)

By using tactics like content upgrades and epic research reports, I’d start collecting emails from people who like ActiveCampaign, but who aren’t yet ready to sign up for a trial. (I’d also pixel them and retarget them with ads to get as many email signups as possible.)

I’d segment people who signed up by using the same interview ActiveCampaign already has in place. We use a similar segmentation survey here at Wild Audience.Based on that data, I’d send them customized emails based on their answers. It would look similar to this, which is a zoomed out view of our email sequence at Wild Audience.

I’d also personalize the emails based on customer responses.

The secret to an email sequence built in the respect-based marketing style?

It doesn’t try to sell a product.

Instead, it seeks to install beliefs.

When you do this well, you create an audience of readers who are crazy-engaged.

Here are a few real-life examples showing the results people have seen using this approach.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

For ActiveCampaign, I would create an email sequence to install beliefs such as:

• Belief 1: “Email is proven to have the highest ROI”
• Belief 2: “Email automation doesn’t require computer science knowledge”
• Belief 3: ..
• Belief 4 ..
• etc.

With those beliefs installed, people would be much more likely to accept an offer for a trial — when I finally offered it to them.

If you combine that with email engagement hooks like I describe in this article you will have a winning email sequence.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

I could say a lot more about ActiveCampaign, but to respect your time, I’ll bring this article to its end.

If you want to move on (& go deeper), take a moment to download all the resources that come with this article…Know Jason VandeBoom or want to let him know via email or Twitter that he should check out this article? You can do that here…

If you use ActiveCampaign and you want improved analytics as well as use Relationship Funnels, then I suggest to check out Wild Mail (built on top of AC).

1. Email Jason VandeBoom from ActiveCampaign (Click Here!)
2. Tweet Jason VandeBoom from ActiveCampaign (Click Here!)

Thanks!

Welcome back to our monthly Transparency Report series. All our past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: April 2020, May 2020, June 2020.

This month we are gonna kick off our report by sharing a little bit of what we do outside work so you get to know us a little bit more.  🙂

We are pretty much all water babies at Wild Audience but we love nature in general so we have been enjoying the outdoors as much as possible lately.

Here is a little sneak peek for you:

I’ll share more about this later on, let’s get back to business for now.

We really enjoy taking you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR via this transparency report and we hope you love reading it as much as we love creating it.

As mentioned in our last report, July was a big and important month for us and we can not wait to tell you all about it.

The first thing we can share with you is that we are now at €17,056 MRR (last month was €14,701) which is an awesome progression!

By the way, if you’re new to Wild Audience, here’s what we do in one sentence: At Wild Audience we help companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.

Let’s dive in and see what happened in July.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

July was our 4th biggest month in WM history in terms of MRR growth (in %). We grew our MRR a whooping +14,38% 😏

We added a total of €2,215 in new MRR which is great. This month was interesting because the majority of our new MRR came from existing accounts meaning upgrades. Last month it mainly came from new accounts.

€1,187 has been our 2020 average for MRR coming from new accounts. This month it was €857 which is slightly below our average. This is due to the fact that we only had 2 new accounts of +100 MRR. To give you a little bit of context, last month we had 9 new accounts of +100 MRR.

This is also reflected in our average sales price which went down from €95,33 to €42,84.

In terms of MRR coming from existing customers, this month was pretty good as it went up from €308 to €1,745 with one major expansion aka upgrade of +€1000 this month.

ARR

We’ve got more good news! In July, we also passed 200k in ARR which is awesome!  😎

Churn:

We decreased our Net MRR Churn rate even further down this month, from -1.12% to -9.11% which is obviously awesome and is due to the big expansion we had in July.

Just in case you don’t remember: Having a net negative MRR churn rate means that we keep growing through expansion MRR and reactivation MRR even if we don’t add any new business.  😉

Some thoughts for next month:

For August, I do predict a slower month as most of our marketing campaigns will come to an end. We will obviously launch new campaigns but they will only show results later in the year around September and October.

Enough about revenue now, let’s talk about you 🙂

Customer Success

Looks like it’s that time again when I give you some customer success insights.

So in July we had a total of 116 new conversations (151 in June) with 90 customers (113 in June). It’s the summer and you’re all pretty quiet which totally makes sense. Things will pick up in September for sure.

Do you remember last month when we told you about our goal to reply within one hour? Well, we are getting closer!  😌

If you’re new, our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket is kind of a”sacred” metric when it comes to Customer Support. On average, our “First Response Time” is between 3-4 hours and we are trying to get to 1h.

Last month it was at 3h23.
This month it is at 1h50.

Pretty cool, heh? Alright, we know Customer Support is very quiet during the summer so it’s easy but we still feel like celebrating!  🥳

Customer Support System Update

This month we also spent some time cleaning and organising our customer support system inside HelpScout:

1. We created a tag system which will allow us to have more accurate data and know exactly what you guys contact us for. This will help us know what we need to improve and what we need to focus on.
2. We cleaned our “Saved Replies” section to be faster and more efficient when we reply to you guys. The saved replied feature of HelpScout is great for repetitive requests, follow-ups and reminders.

Testimonials

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In July we received 1 new video testimonial 🙂. You can watch it by clicking on the video down below.

Product

Our product range currently includes Wild Mail, Automation University and very soon Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics (WMX)

As you know, in June we completed the alpha version of WMX and our next steps were:

• To gather feedback from our first alpha users via zoom calls or loom videos to identify our next use cases & improve our UX.
• To add Facebook as our third integration to cover ROI-based use cases.

Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned.

We did not add any new features or use cases due to some infrastructure problems we experienced while onboarding our first alpha users.

Basically WMX started to crash all the time, typical early product experience you could say ..  😅

In order to really test WMX with users live during a zoom call, we had to fix our infrastructure and that’s what we did:

• We moved everything to AWS and then implemented pooling which allows us to queue connection requests so that the app doesn’t crash when there are a lot of connection requests at the same time (which happens quite easily).

• We automated the data import process. To give you some context here – depending on the account size – we usually deal with half a million of data points per account at this time so manual data import was not an option anymore.

• We also moved our login process to auth.

These three things took us the whole month of July to resolve but we now have a stable alpha version (yay!) and we can do user calls again to gather feedback and move on with the next features.

Hopefully we can give you a demo soon 🙂

Wild Mail

In July, CXA Customer (Experience Automation) for Marketing was released.

CXA for Marketing is a complete set of marketing tools that help businesses orchestrate connected customer experiences across channels like web, social, email, chat, and text. 

You’ve now got new marketing channels and integrations, and the ability to personalize web pages using customer data collected from touchpoints throughout the customer journey. With the new functionality, you can now: 

• Create high-converting, interactive landing pages in minutes, with simple set up and easy-to-use templates. In an ongoing commitment to value, we’re now offering landing pages for free to all current customers.
• Personalize any web page using data stored in tags, such as past purchases, shopping preferences, interests, demographics, and engagement data (coming soon)
• Automatically trigger push notifications and SMS messages based on any action taken during the customer journey via Twilio.
• Automatically trigger Slack notifications based on customer behavior (like when a customer subscribes to email, creates a support ticket, or writes a review).

You can read it all about it in this article but how exciting?  😏

If you’re new, Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits. Learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

Oh and we also fixed 4 bugs this month 🤖 but it’s time to talk marketing now.

Marketing

Traffic Data:

We added 217 new contacts to our list this month against 156 last month. There is definitely an improvement this time which is good as we were still working behind the scene this month, focusing on strategy and creating a new game plan for our growth phase. I’ll tell you more about this in a minute.

You can also see that our traffic is still mainly organic inbound traffic (50%) and direct (30%) which means that we get very high quality leads at the moment and we like that! 🙂

Let’s have a quick look at the funnel data now.

Relationship Funnel Data:

Breakdown for July 2020:

Traffic: 3162
Leads: 217 (6,86%)
Trials: 45 (20,74%)
Customers: 17 (37,78%)

What can we say about those numbers?

1. Our traffic is usually three times higher than this number when we publish content and for now we don’t.
2. Our benchmark numbers are 30% conversion rate for lead to trial and a 15% conversion rate for trial to customer so overall it’s not too bad.
3. Remember that our data is not accurate but we are making great progress with our software Wildmetrics (which will be using a tag-based approach and will finally provide real & accurate data in real-time) so we are happy.

So our Relationship Funnel seems to be working and that’s music to my ears. 🙂

Also this month we launched our brand new funnel!  🎉

Growth Strategy

As mentioned above, we spent a lot of time this month putting our new growth strategy together which means:

• Creating a growth plan (with strategy and implementation phases).
• Defining our main channels and the goals for each of them.

We just started the implementation and for now, our focus will be on this three channels: Youtube, Blog and PPC.

Here is our plan for the next three months:

1. YouTube:
   – Produce 1 video in Spanish each week.
   – Rank Youtube videos.
2. PPC:
   – Retarget website visitors on Google Display & YouTube to increase conversions & do low-cost branding
3. Blog:
   – Translate articles into Spanish.
   – Rank first Spanish articles in Google.

Everything we do is quite organic-based and focusing on these three channels makes sense for us because:

• We do organic YouTube videos and also run ads to grow the channel and help as many people as possible with our tutorials.
• We use Google display because we want to create a branding experience with a low budget
• We translate our existing content in spanish which is an easy way to rank first in Google for spanish.

And the focus on spanish content leads me to the other project.

Translation Project

This month, we hired a spanish translator which means that besides our YouTube tutorials we will now also be able to publish more articles and case studies in spanish. As mentioned above, translating our existing content is an easy way for us to get rank in Google for Spanish with a low budget and it makes sense as well since our overall strategy is quite organic-based.

Here is a little sneak peek on our translation pipe with all our articles (case studies, breakdown, sales funnel, marketing guide):

Founder Talk

The last few months made us rethink our situation a little bit. We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on who we are, who we want to be and how we want to do it.

And this month, we took the decision to go fully remote as a team inside the European region. We’ve all been working fully remote for the last five months and it’s been working really well.

While work is important to all of us and we are all very committed, we also appreciate and value life outside work. And this decision gives us the freedom and flexibility that we all want.

Having a European remote setup allows us to:

• Create a European team & culture.
• Work in same/similar time zones with the freedom of living where-ever you want.
• Work with like minded people who help us learn and grow as individuals.
• Slow down and spend more time outside work doing what we love.
• Reduce our impact on the environment by travelling by train (vs flying) for our team retreats.
• And so much more ..

For us, it’s about working smart, with ease and be relaxed while being challenged. We want to keep it simple, no fancy offices and no big expenses. We want to focus on profit, not revenue.

At the moment we have two people in Spain, one in the UK and one in Argentina moving to Europe in the next few months. And we are looking for a new developer within the European region.

On my side, I rented my flat in Barcelona to a Swedish guy and moved down south to follow the wind and the waves.

Who knows where we will be next but that’s the solution we found that works best for us to work and live at the same time. I hope you find yours and I guess we will see you in the water! 🏄

• 

• 

• 

Outlook

Let’s see what’s in the pipe for August now!

Check out our public roadmap to see the progress of our team in real time.

In August, we will work on the projects circled in red color.

We are back on track and excited for another month.

Emilie will be working on cleaning and organising all the articles of the blog section of our website in preparation for our new website which I am working on at the moment aside from Wildmetrics.

Benji on his side, will be working on growth. He will continue to implement our new strategy by recording new Youtube tutorials, publishing new articles in spanish and creating a new MasterClass for Automation University.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our August 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

You are reading our monthly Transparency Report series. Past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: Q1 2020, April 2020, May 2020.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

As of June 30th 2020 we are dangerously approaching the €15k with €14,701 MRR which is great!

If you’re new to Wild Audience, here’s what we do in one sentence: At Wild Audience we help companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.

June was a pretty good month. While we are still not actively growing our MRR, the numbers are going up and we are about to jump into our growth phase.

This month every team member felt that their hard work paid off which is very exciting.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

June 2020 was a good month in terms of MRR growth. We grew a whooping +15.84% compared to a month ago.

MRR:

That’s our second biggest month after January 2020 were we achieved +19.48% in growth. But in terms of added new business, June 2020 has definitely been our biggest month. We added €1,990 in new business to our MRR.

Great 😎

The main reason for that was that we acquired a few bigger accounts as customers. We closed two €400 MRR accounts as well as 5 +100 MRR accounts. Just to put this into perspective, in May 2020 we did not add any account with more than €100 in MRR, which was also the reason why our MRR growth in May 2020 was only at +4.48%.

This can also be seen by looking at our average sales price.

We increased our ASP from around €30 in May to €90 in June which can be explained through the bigger accounts we closed this month.

Churn:

We managed to decrease our Net MRR Churn rate a little more from -0.89% in May 2020 to -1.12% in June 2020. As long as we keep it below 0% for now, we are pretty happy.

For the people who don’t know what it means to have a net negative MRR churn rate..

..We keep growing through expansion MRR and reactivation MRR even if we would not add any new business.

Customer Success

It’s time to talk about you guys (yes, you!), because you are and will always be the most important people in our business.

In June we had a total of 151 conversations (218 in May) with 113 customers (185 in May).

June is the beginning of the summer and things usually tend to slow down a little.

But the fact that these numbers continue to go down also means that our onboarding process is on point and that all the knowledge you need is available in our Help Center for you to consult at any time.

You gave us a 100% happiness score for this month and we are very happy to see you happy! 😍

Our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket is still one of the most important metrics for us when it comes to Customer Support. Our “First Response Time” on average is between 4-5 hours and we keep monitoring it every month.

This month it was at 3h23.

To give you an idea, our First Response Time for the last two months was:

April: 4h58.

May: 3h46.

Not bad, heh? 🙂

Two things we are currently working on:

(A) The way we answer our support tickets.
We are trying to answer your email with loom videos as often as possible. It is more personal and usually easier (for you and for us) especially when it comes to technical questions or to show you how a feature works. It’s definitely quicker and seems to make everyone happier 🙂

(B) “Our First Time Response”.
While some emails require more time as we need to investigate further to find the best answer or solution, we are currently trying to reply to your emails within an hour. Let’s keep an eye on our First Time Response during the next few months and see how we’re doing.

Product

Our product range currently includes Wild Mail, Automation University and very soon Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics

We spend the whole month of June building our first tangible MVP. And it’s ready!

Quick reminder before I jump into it: 
We believe that accurate data is the key for growth but we struggle to get accurate data ourselves so we decided to find a solution for this that is called Wildmetrics. 

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking for marketing campaigns, funnels and channels. It integrates with your marketing tools natively & uses a tag-based tracking approach as your source of truth to not rely on in-accurate cookies, pixels or UTM tracking links.

Alright! Now that things are clear, let me tell you more about our MVP and the approach we took to build it.

It’s pretty simple, we have followed a use case based approach and have identified a number of use cases which Wildmetrics will be able to cover. Here are a few examples:

• Use Case #1: How much revenue generated lead magnet A in May 2019 compared to lead magnet B?
• Use Case #2: What channel generated the most revenue in Q2 2020?
• Use Case #3: What is the ROI of funnel X in the last week?
• Use Case #4: What is the sales cycle length of funnel Z in the last year?
• Use Case #5: What is the CAC for customers for funnel Y in May 2020?
• Use Case #6: How long does it take until FB ad campaign X breaks even?
• Use Case #7: What is the ROAS of each of my FB ads campaign in the last 30 days?

These are just 7 out of 68 use cases we have identified. You can see them all here.

By working out use cases together with our alpha users, we want to prove our hypothesis right or wrong.

At the moment, our MVP is purely functional and has no real design on purpose. Here are our first 4 use cases WMX supports (see screenshot below).

In summary:

• We have completed infrastructure and user research.
• We have identified the most common use cases.
• We have built the first version of Wildmetrics which covers 4 use cases.
• We are about to onboard our 10 first alpha users.

Next steps:

• Gather feedback from our first alpha users via zoom calls or loom videos to identify our next use cases & improve our UX
• Add Facebook as our third integration to cover ROI-based use cases

More about this in our next transparency report and we might also share some screenshots of WMX to give you a little sneak peek but that’s all for today regarding WMX 😋

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Free ROI analytics features (Wildmetrics)
• One month paid by us (click here to learn more about this)
• Our unique method & templates
• Automation University discount (link)

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

In June, a new integration with Salesforce was released. You can read it all about it in this article.

We also fixed 10 bugs this month 🤖

Ok let’s move on to marketing now ..

Marketing

Traffic Data:

We added 156 new contacts to our list this month against 154 last month. As you can see there isn’t a big difference from last month and the reason behind this is simply that we got less traffic this month. This is because we stopped publishing content like blog posts and YouTube videos to focus our time on our big Funnel Update Project.

But more about this later.

When it comes to the origin of our traffic, you can see down below that our entire traffic is still mainly organic inbound traffic.

More about data in the next section.

Relationship Funnel Data:

I am gonna break down our funnel for June 2020 now, so let’s have a look at the numbers:

• Traffic: 3,108 uniques
• Leads: 156 (5,02%)
• Trials: 43 (27,6%)
• Customers: 22 (51,2%)

These numbers don’t look too bad at first sight but the problem is that they are not accurate. The 43 trials could come from the 156 leads which we collected this mont h but they could also come from any month previous to June or it could be people who registered for a trial but without becoming a lead first.

The solution to the problem?

Wildmetrics 😎

Our benchmark numbers are 30% conversion rate for lead to trial and a 15% conversion rate for trial to customer. So we are not doing too bad.

Funnel Update Project

For the last two months we have been working hard on building a whole new funnel for Wild Mail (in English and in Spanish). This project involved all team members and took us a lot of time (see screenshot from Everhour below).

For this project we’ve had to take some time to reflect and analyze the status quo aka our current funnel. We needed to have a clear idea of what was working well and what was not.

Our WM funnel includes 43 automations, which gives you an idea about the complexity & volume of this project.

We re-wrote 24 new emails for our different sequences such as our RBS, Sales Sequence, Onboarding and Customer Success Sequences.

We also created a new lead magnet. We updated every single aspect of our funnel and there are two reasons for this:

1. We needed to update our messaging to be in-line with our new positioning in order to communicate “Grow your business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.” everywhere in our messaging.
2. We wanted to focus more on user experience, customer journey and success as well as on bringing you more value.  

We are pretty happy about the result and can’t wait to see our Relationship Funnel live.

Founder Talk

As a SaaS business, June has been an amazing month. It’s been our best month in terms of growth and once again we have made enormous progress in our journey from 10k MRR to 50k MRR. After all the hard work that every team member has put into the foundational phase for the last 6 months, it’s an incredible feeling to finally see some results.

In this founder talk section, there are two things I would like to highlight today:

1. Slowing down over the summer and connect with life and with ourselves.
2. Celebrating the achievements and the work we have done so far and continue doing every day.

It’s important to work but it’s also important to have fun at work and outside of work everyday. We encourage everyone and ourselves to slow down because we don’t want to wait for the weekend or the holidays to live. We want to live and connect with life every single day especially now over the summer months.

We all have interests and passions outside work that we want to nurture, enjoy and now is the time. And it’s also a great way to celebrate the work and everything we have achieved so far.

Of course, as a business, we do want to grow, we do have goals and we do work hard to achieve everything we want to achieve every single month but one doesn’t exclude the other.

We want to make sure that we combine both (work and hobbies/passions) and that we find a balance if such thing exists.

So if I had to give you a little advice for the next two months, slow down and live your life whatever that means to you.

Success is really not everything.

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in July!

Check out our public roadmap to see the progress of our team in real time.

In July we will work on the projects circled in red color.

As you can see, we got a little behind and we will be wrapping up foundational projects beginning of July, finally!

The first two weeks of July will be an “integration sprint” where we ship our last big projects (WM Funnel Update Project and Wildmanual Update) and jump into a new cycle (3 sprints) where we kick-off our growth phase (yay!).

Benji will work on creating our new growth strategy focusing on YouTube, PPC and Partners while Emilie will focus on Customer Success (meaning you guys).

Besides that I will continue to work on Wildmetrics (with the feedback of our first users) and with our new UI designer & illustrator to create a new look and feel for our brand Wild Audience. And I will also be looking for a full time developer to join our team so if you know anyone, reach out to me via bastian at wildaudience dot com.

July will definitely be another big month for us and to say that we are excited is an understatement.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our July 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

You are reading our monthly Transparency Report series. Past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: Q1 2020, April 2020.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

As of May 31st 2020 we are at €12,667. That’s 25% of our target revenue. Great!

If you’re new to Wild Audience, here’s what we do in one sentence: At Wild Audience we help companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.

This month has definitely been an interesting one.

In terms of growth, it was slow and frustrating (for reasons I’ll explain later). But as a team, we achieved so much and reflected a lot too. 🙂

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

Our MRR at the end of May 2020 was €12,677 which is a 4.29% increase over April 2020.

May was definitely a slower month for us and to be honest it was not as good as we hoped for. Let’s put the 4.29% in comparison to previous months:

1. January growth: +19.47%
2. February growth: +12.37%
3. March growth: +7.31%
4. April growth: +11.03%
5. May growth: +4.29%

That’s an average month to month MRR growth rate of 10.89%.

Meaning our May growth rate was well below average. Here are two reasons why I believe our growth performance was below average:

(A) In May we had smaller deal sizes compared to April. The difference in ASP (average sales price) was almost €20 per account less. Even though we onboarded in May only 5 customers less than in April, due to the smaller account sizes our New Business MRR in May was 50% less compared to the previous month.

In other words, we usually close a few bigger accounts – €250 MRR and up – per month but this month we did not close any big accounts. That explains our lower ASP and also smaller MRR growth.

(B) We are sill not actively growing our MRR as we don’t engage in any type of growth activities until July 2020. That means no PPC, no retargeting, no outreach, no new articles, no new YouTube videos.

Everything we do currently is 100% organic & inbound. This will change from July 2020 onwards when we launch our growth campaigns 🙂 (first real results to be expected in autumn 2020..)

Churn:

We are trying to improve our Transparency Reports every month and become a more real & transparent team. And that is why this report covers a new metric: Churn 🙂

At Wild Audience we are looking at Net MRR Churn Rate which is the rate at which you are losing MRR through downgrades and cancellations, offset by expansion and reactivation MRR.

In the screenshot below you can see that the first 3 months of 2020 we still had a positive Net MRR Churn Rate – which was not so good. That was mostly due to missing features which customers wanted. We built them and shipped them at the end of Q1 and you can see the results 🙂

We are now at a negative Net MRR Churn Rate which means that even if we would stop adding new business every month we would still slightly grow.

A negative Net MRR Churn Rate is a great foundation for our growth campaigns coming soon 🙂

Customer Success

Here, we talk about you guys because you are the most important people in our business (always!).

In May we had a total of 218 conversations (313 in April) with 185 customers (212 in April).

As you can see that these numbers have decreased since last month and that can be explained by two things:

(A) We have recently been working on the content of our Help Center (design is a work in progress ..) improving our existing articles and creating new ones to make sure you are as independent as possible.

(B) We have shipped a lot of new features (discount, cancellation, .. etc) and improved our billing system in Wild Mail last month to make your life easier.

You seemed pretty happy in May as you guys gave us a 91% happiness score so thank you! 😍

As you know, one of the most important metrics for us when it comes to Customer Support is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. We aim to have a “First Response Time” between 4-5 hours and we constantly monitor it.

The main factor that seems to influence this metric are holidays, as reflected by the data.

With no holidays in the last two months combined with our efforts to help you succeed, I am happy to say that in May 2020 our “First Response Time” was at 3h46.

To give you an idea, our First Response Time for the last two months was:

March: 7h13.

April: 4h58.

This is amazing! 🙂

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In May we received 2 new video testimonials 🙂. You can watch them if you’d like (trust me, you want to watch them!), just click on the videos down below.

Product

May 2020 has been a fascinating month in terms of product. While April marked an important month for Wild Mail, May was all about Wildmetrics.

Here’s a quick introduction to both products..

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking software that enables companies to grow their business more profitably by showing them what campaigns, funnels & channels generate higher ROI and which don’t.

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

While Wildmetrics (WMX) is currently under development and not available yet, Wild Mail (WM) can be checked out here.

Wildmetrics (WMX)

Let’s start out with WMX. The new kid on the block 😉

This project is especially fun & cool for our team because we are building a new software product 100% from scratch. I have a never done this before and I am happy like a kid about all the new things I am learning 🙂

A challenging element is the novelty of the approach of our solution. Compared to standard analytic tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics, we integrate with your marketing tools natively & use a tag-based tracking approach as our source of truth to not rely on in-accurate cookies or UTM tracking links.

That’s one of the main differences.

We do this because we believe that accurate data is a foundational necessity for growth. And your current data – coming from all kinds of tools like Google Analytics, Stripe, Accounting, Calendly, ActiveCampign, Facebook Ads, Google Ads etc, are all painting a different picture.

How frustrating and difficult to work with..

Here’s what our developer (Leo) and myself have completed this month..

(1) Research:

I did a lot of different kind of research: Customer, Problem, Solution, Infrastructure, Competitor, Market, MVP & Product research.

Here’s an overview of my notes in Notion to give you an idea how I organize this project & my thoughts.

(2) MVP:

After defining our problem hypothesis and doing all the research, I defined our MVP.

The MVP (WMX V1.0) can be described in two words: Tag Analytics.

Here’s what you can do and what it solves: Integrate your Wild Mail account and Stripe account. Then see your revenue data per tag.

Here are a bunch of fun use cases:

• See collected revenue per lead magnet for a specific time period
• See revenue per Facebook ad campaign for a specific time period
• Learn about the probability of people who purchased product A, to also purchase product B
• Know how many leads within a specific time period schedule a sales call
• Know how many customers you get from lead magnet A within a certain time period and compare that result to customers generated through lead magnet B
• Know the sales cycle length of one of your products

Remember: WMX does not use UTM links or pixels to show results. But instead, we rely on a way more accurate data point – tags.

WMX V1.0 will be invite only. There are three requirmets to start using WMX:

1. You need to have a Wild Mail account
2. You need to have a Stripe account
3. You need to be willing to share feedback with us (so that we can build WMX V2.0)

If you’re interested in WMX & you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can start using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here (it also includes 4 additional benefits which you can check on that page).

(3) Roadmap:

Here’s how & in which order we add things to WMX (at the time I write this):

• WMX V1.0 (Alpha): Tag Analytics with Wild Mail & Stripe
• WMX V2.0 (Beta): ROI Analytics with Wild Mail, Stripe & Facebook Ads
• WMX V3.0 (Public): We will add ESP Analytics as well as an ActiveCampaign integration
• WMX V4.0: We will add Funnel Analytics and Google Ads integration

The above is obviously subject to change and will be updated as we learn.

(4) Infrastructure:

Our technology stack for WMX will be based on the Jumpstack philosophy. We will also be using a cutting edge framework called RedwoodJS.

Redwood is an opinionated, full-stack, serverless web application framework that works with React, GraphQL, and Prisma.

I kept this overview quite general on purpose. I am little unsure how much you guys are interested in the details of this 😉

Alright! That’s all about WMX. Let’s continue with WM now.

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Free ROI analytics features (Wildmetrics)
• One month paid by us (click here to learn more about this)
• Our unique method & templates
• Automation University discount (link)

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

Here’s a list of new WM features added in May:

• Freshly re-designed & added new functionality of iOS and Android apps (article)
• New integrations added: Slack, Twilio, Nimble CRM, Google Contacts
• New Marketplace to find automation templates (article)

Remember: Wild Mail is powered by ActiveCampaign but offers added functionality like ROI tracking.

Automation University

In May, we launched Automation University! Juhuu!

Automation University is an online university that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

Here’s what’s included for €25/month:

The launch was super fun and we took a slightly different approach. Here’s what we did..

We sent two pre-launch emails to identify interested people (based on clicking and replying). People who engaged, received another 3 emails within 4 days.

Results of the launch:

• 351 people took part in the launch (identified as highly interested).
• We got 46 new customers.
• So our sales conversion was 13.11%.

That’s €13,800 in ARR added every year. A good foundation now to start growing AU in an evergreen way as a supportive educational product to Wild Mail and Wildmetrics.

Our goal with AU is not to make money per se but to help our customers grow their business (because we make our money with WM & WMX).

Ok let’s move on to marketing now ..

Marketing

Traffic Data:

Safe to say that things haven’t really changed as we added 154 new leads to our list this month which is pretty much the same as last month.

As you can see down below, our entire traffic is organic inbound traffic:

Relationship Funnel Data:

Let’s break down our funnel for May 2020. Remember this data is not 100% accurate because in order to get this data accurately you either need to pay for a REALLY expensive custom solution implemented by a big data agency (and the data will still be in-accurate because they use pixels & UTMs) or you use Wildmetrics (which will be using a tag-based approach and will finally provide real & accurate data in real-time).

Breakdown:

• Traffic: 4,173 uniques
• Leads: 154 (3.69%)
• Trials: 44 (28.58%)
• Customers: 15 (34.10%)

Interesting huh?

Which other marketing company shares that kind of data publicly? 😉

But keep in mind that this data is not accurate because it’s not a cohort analysis. For example, the 44 new trials could come from the 154 new leads we added in May but they could also come from leads from previous months. In order to get accurate data, we and you need Wildmetrics 😉

Let’s talk about the improvements we will have to make soon. Clearly our weakest point is our ability to capture leads. The conversion rate from website visitor to lead is low (3.69%). This is due to three reasons:

• We don’t have any type of retargeting in place to re-engage visitors
• Our blog post content upgrades are still “under construction” as we switched from SurveySlam to ConvertBox recently
• Our whole blog will be re-designed and our CTA approach will be different (more about this in a future report)

Lead to trial & trial to customer conversion rates are great. Our benchmark for both KPIs is 15% and we doubled this. Our Relationship Funnel is clearly working.

Nothing to complain 🙂

Founder Talk

In summary, the month of May was not our biggest growth month but still a great month in so many other ways. We launched Automation University, which will be a great education vehicle for our customer base, as well started the development of Wildmetrics which is super exciting.

Virtual Team Retreat:

We also did our mid-year team retreat – this time it was virtually due to corona times. It was shorter than normal and 100% focused on strategy, reflection & future.

We usually start out by beaming us back to our last quarterly team retreat. We go over the goals we set out for ourselves and see what we accomplished and what changed. We then continue to reflect over all the lessons learned before we start planning the next quarter. We always do our quarterly retreats in the 2nd month of the quarter so that we still have one month to change directions – if needed – before the next quarter begins.

Deep-Dive 1:1s:

After the retreat I also did 2.5 hour 1:1s with each team member to really go deep into their purpose, goals, feedback, dreams, team, company strategy and ideas to make sure we as a team are super aligned and happy.

For me as the CEO of the company, this is really important to me and close to my heart. Without the team Wild Audience would not exist. I get a lot of joy seing team members develop their characters and learn new things. I, myself, also learn so much through each team member.

For us, emotion check-ins, feelings check-outs, sharing circles and reflection is really core to our culture. And I am happy to share that we as the Wild Audience team are super focused, healthy and work with great motivation towards helping our customers grow their business with marketing automation 🙂

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in June!

June will be our last month working on foundational projects. And we are so excited about this! You can look at our public roadmap to follow along in real time on how we as a team progress.

In June we will work on the projects circled in green color.

After our team retreat we came to release that our emails to sell Wild Mail did not reflect our most recent messaging and positioning (“building authentic relationship with marketing”) so we decided to re-do our funnel from scratch (new lead magnet, new lead to trial RBS, new trial to customer RBS, new customer onboarding experience and new customer success experience).

We will ship all of this by the end of June 🙂

We should also be able to go live with the first version of Wildmetrics and get the first users to play around.

Benji will be looking for a new translator to make more of our English content available in Spanish while Emilie will finally update our Wildmanual (the place with all our knowledge) and I will record 8 new YouTube tutorials which will be published in July & August.

Besides that I will also look for a new UX designer & illustrator to work on a new look and feel for our brand Wild Audience. If you know anyone, reach out to me via bastian at wildaudience dot com.

Things we will design over the summer:

• New Brandbook (identity)
• UX Mockups for Wildmetrics
• New graphics for our website
• New page designs for a few key pages on our website

Another big month ahead of us. We are definitely going into the right direction so we are pretty excited for what’s to come.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our June 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

Welcome to our second Transparency Report by Wild Audience. We have published our first ever Transparency Report about Q1 of 2020 last month.

I got a lot of messages and emails from people congratulating us about our new transparency initiative 😍 Which shows us once again that people want businesses to be more real, open & authentic.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

The monthly Transparency Report talks about what we do in order to grow and how we progress on our journey (including the good & the bad).

At Wild Audience we are helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.

We do that through our suite of products:

1. Wild Mail [marketing automation software]
2. Wildmetrics [ROI tracking for campaigns, funnels & acquisition channels]
3. Automation University [membership to learn about marketing automation]
4. Accelerator [consulting program to implement marketing automation]

All our products have the same goal: Helping you build authentic relationships to grow your business.

Let’s dive in now.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Sales
6. Founder Talk
7. Outlook

Revenue

Our MRR at the end of April 2020 was €12,194 which is a 11% increase over March 2020.

In regards to business, April was an interesting month. The corona pandemic was spreading around the world and we did not really know yet if or how bad our business would be impacted.

Our MRR growth rate in January 2020 was 20%.

Our MRR growth rate in February 2020 was 12.31%.

In March 2020 our MRR grew by 7.28%.

Our average MRR growth rate in 2020 so far is 12.64% which would mean that our April performance was in line with our average and the corona pandemic did not really have a negative or positive impact on our business.

In April our ARR got dangerously close to €150,000. Our milestones are:

• €100,000 ✅
• €250,000 (probably Q3 of 2020)
• €500,000
• €1,000000

The entire team is still in set-up phase. We are not yet in growth modus. This essentially means that each team member is currently spending most of her/his time on working on foundational projects rather than growth projects.

Foundational projects include stuff like backend cleaning, improving our funnel, re-branding etc.. These projects are scheduled to complete by the end of June or earlier.

Once we enter growth phase, we will be launching PPC lead generation campaigns, publish more YouTube tutorials and connect with more partners. This should then also have an effect on our month-to-month growth rate 😋

Customer Success

In this chapter we usually talk about you guys because you are the most important people in our business.

Thank you so much for believing in us and trusting us with helping you grow your business. We are very grateful!

In April we had a total of 313 conversations with 212 customers.

Our customers (you!) are giving us a 89% happiness score which is pretty good! 🙂

As mentioned in our previous report, the metric we are always working to improve is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. Our normal “First Response Time” is usually between 4-5 hours. After being above 7h on avg. during Q1 of 2020, we managed to get back on track in April despite Easter weekend which is great! 🙂

To give you an idea, our First Response Time in April 2020 was at 4h58.

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In April we received 3 new video testimonials 🙂. You can click on the videos below and watch them if you like.

Product

Our transparency reports cover the journey of growing our software products from €10k to €50k MRR. That is why I will focus on Wild Mail in the product section. In the future I will also cover Wildmetrics once it’s launched.

What is Wild Mail?

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Analytics Features (Wildmetrics)
• Welcome Gift (click here to see what this is)
• Our Unique Method & Templates
• Automation University Discount

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

In April, we shipped 4 new features:

• Cancelation feature
• New customer hub
• Automatic discount feature
• Spanish trial accounts

We also fixed 13 bugs 🤖

April marks an important milestone for the development of Wild Mail! We have completed all Wild Mail related development projects. The rest of Q2 and Q3 will now focus on the development of Wildmetrics. More about this in the May Transparency Report.

Marketing

Traffic Data:

In April, we added 208 new leads to our list. That’s not much. We also did some heavy list cleaning and unsubscribed a bunch of in-active contacts.

As a comparison: When we run paid acquisition we collect 100-150 leads per day. So that’s in two days what we do in only one month right now.

This may sound like a huge problem, but check this out below..

What are our current lead acquisition channels?

• Blog
• Partners
• Recommendations

Our entire traffic is organic inbound traffic.

And that also translates to the performance of our Relationship Funnel.

Relationship Funnel Data:

Now it gets a little more interesting.

To collect accurate funnel data is really difficult. It’s so difficult that we at Wild Audience are actually building a new product called Wildmetrics (WMX) to solve that problem.

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking for marketing campaigns, funnels and acquisition channels. We plan to launch the MVP of WMX in Q3 of 2020.

This Transparency Report will cover two main parts of our Wild Mail funnel:

• Lead to trial RBS
• Trial to Customer RBS

RBS stands for Relationship Builder Sequence and is part of our Relationship Funnel.

Let’s look at the stats now:

In April 2020, 78.22% of our leads also get a Wild Mail trial. That’s huge.

I get this data from our funnel dashboard build with Google Sheets. But this data is not 100% accurate.

Let me explain: It’s not 78.22% of the leads that signed-up in April (which was 208 people). Our dashboard considers all leads – regardless of when they signed-up – and therefore the numbers are not really accurate.

But it gives you an idea in which direction you’re heading. And we are definitely heading towards high conversion rates.

This is happening for two reasons:

1. Our Relationship Funnel is working well
2. The quality of traffic we were getting in April

Obviously the quality of traffic determines your performance. Quality input = great output.

Organic traffic is one of the best types of traffic you can get in terms of quality.

Our trial to customer conversion rate for April was 25.32%. Not too bad.

Data is great. And accurate data is even better. But there are lot of different problems when it comes to data accuracy and I honestly don’t trust our data at all. That’s also why we build Wildmetrics, mainly for ourselves first.

YouTube:

We were busy recording new tutorials for you guys! In April we published three English tutorials and one Spanish tutorial.

You can check the tutorials out below or visit the Wild Audience YouTube Channel.

Sales

We did 19 sales calls in April. Benji is responsible for sales at Wild Audience. He does sales calls only Tuesday & Thursday which means on a sales day he had on average 2 sales calls scheduled.

Considering that we don’t do any type of paid traffic acquisition like Facebook ads at this moment, 19 calls is not too bad. Our traffic and inquiries are 100% organic and inbound at this very moment.

Founder Talk

In the end, April 2020 turned out to be better than I thought 😊 That’s awesome!

In April we completed 2.5 sprints. At the end of each sprint, each team member documents her/his lessons learned and then we reflect over them during our Sprint Reflection Meetings & Sharing Circles.

This helps a lot to grow as a team and avoid making the same mistakes. Here are some of our lessons learned from April 2020..

1) Branding:

Throughout the last few months we shipped a ton of new features for Wild Mail as well as build an entire new website from scratch. We also launch new products like Automation University or Wildmetrics in the near future. The problem we keep running into is that we don’t know which design guidelines to follow when building new products or features. We don’t have a professional brand manual or brand identity.

That is why in May we will start to work with a branding professional, a graphic designer for our website and an illustrator to create mockups for Wildmetrics so that we can build an easy to use design system for our software products and web assets. This should solve our problem.

2) SOPs:

Another biggie for the team was to prioritize SOPs again. We have a ton of SOPs and but during April we could feel that there was quality issues for internal projects which could have been avoided by consulting our Wildmanual first. We have now changed our project management process and start all new projects with an SOP check. This should solve our problem.

3) Feedback Loop:

We changed the way feedback works at our company! The problem we ran into was that as soon as a team member completed a (sub-)task in Asana, I often pro-actively provided feedback before team members could complete their quality control.

We will change from pro-active feedbacking to being asked to provide feedback. That allows for the team member to own the outcome of the task 100% and the responsibility also lies 100% with the team member. Only when a team member is sure he/she did a great job and is happy with his/her results she/he will invite Bastian to provide feedback. Less work for Bastian. Better work experience for everyone else.

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in May!

In early May, we launch Automation University which means in May’s Transparency Report we will share the results of that launch.

I will be doing customer research to validate some of our problem hypothesis for our new software product Wildmetrics. Super excited about this 😎

I will also work closely with our developer to prepare the development of our MVP for Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics things we will be doing:

• Turning customer research into user stories
• Doing user story mapping
• Writing development specs
• Doing infrastructure research
• And start writing some code for our MVP!

Benji will be leading a project to update & improve our core funnel to sell Wild Mail (huge project!).

Emilie is improving our customer support infrastructure & systems as well as moving all our clients and customers to Thinkific.

That’s a wrap!

See you in our May 2020 Transparency Report.

If you have feedback or questions, email me at bastian at wildaudience dot com.