How Jason Swenk Generated a 58% Increase In Monthly Recurring Revenue

Tim: Sometimes as marketers and entrepreneurs, we can get caught up in the end result of our marketing campaigns. We can focus all of our effort on closing the sale bringing in revenue and clearly that’s important but there are several small steps along the way that can make the process of getting to the sale much easier.

Today’s guest, Jason Swenk is back to share his take on how that make that process easier. He’s put together a system of milestones that allow you to market to the right person at the right time and in doing so, he’s generated 13x the product sales and increased his monthly recurring revenue by 58%. Sounds pretty good to me so let’s dive in.

I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Jason, welcome to ConversionCast.

Jason: What’s up Tim. Thanks for having me back.

Tim: Yeah, good to have you back. We haven’t had many repeat guests so it’s exciting to have you be one of them and today you’ve got a really interesting one for us. So tell us the results from today’s case study.

Jason: So I was able to sell 13x more products this month, 58% increase in monthly revenue and a 260% increase in opportunities.

Tim: Oh tiny little changes, I love that. [Laughs] That’s awesome Jason, cool. So just for anybody who didn’t hear us last time, just tell us a little bit about what you do.

Jason: So I work with agency owners and other killer marketer people and help them really get to the next level from you know, increasing their cashflow, helping them out with leads, converting more and I love it. Man, I have the coolest job in the world.

Tim: Nice, and when you say agencies, what do you mean?

Jason: Marketing agencies. So people that create websites and social media campaigns. So the marketers are the marketers right?

Tim: Thank you. I love that. Okay good. So those things being said, tell us a little bit about you know, kind of what led you to this discovery that you were sharing with me a few minutes ago and tell us how it works.

Jason: Yeah. So what I was doing is I was doing what everybody else is doing is putting people in a funnel. I’m only going to says funnel one more time and then I’m going to refer to that as the F word okay.

Tim: [Laughs]

Jason: So I’m going to come out and say the funnel is dead and you have to treat people differently. So I was treating everybody the same. I was treating everybody as they wanted to get to the same end goal. But what I started realizing is people wanted different things and they are going to interact with me differently. So I wanted to build campaigns that I could bolt on together and give everybody a custom experience that allowed them to get to the end goal of what they wanted.

So let me explain. So I have a couple of info products. One is a playbook and another is generate leads right? So if someone doesn’t take my engagement off one particular campaign like they didn’t watch the first couple of videos, well I’m not going to send them more crap about that right?

Tim: Yeah.

Jason: I want to send them something else. So their end goal maybe different or maybe the way they interact with that campaign is a little different. Maybe I send them to a webinar. So what I started doing is I came up with different campaigns that all intertwined and bolt on together versus treating everybody the same.

Tim: Interesting. Okay. So it’s similar to the idea of the content upgrade where somebody is reading a blog post and you know, you have some generic lead magnet. That’s not going to necessarily appeal to them because they’re looking for a particular piece of what you have to offer.

In this case you’re talking about different campaigns based on the way that people interact and based on moving away from we’ll say the F word.

Jason: That’s right. So let me kind of dive deeper so you guys can actually go do this. So let’s say someone gets on your list right and you have a couple of videos to send them. Let’s say we’re doing the Jeff Walker sideways launch right? We have three videos to show them.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Jason: Well most of the time in the F scenario right, they’re going to send a video number 1, two days later video number 2 and then so on right?

Tim: Well what we want to do is create an engagement series or an engagement sequence where we sent three different emails to them to get them engaged to watch video #1. Only after they watch video 1 then they indicated interest about that now they go into the rest of the series. Now if they don’t watch those videos and that’s why we send them three emails. Like we think people pay attention to all our emails that we send so some people are like Jason you send three emails, heck yeah and sometimes more. Because they don’t see them.

They get so many emails as it is. So if they don’t watch those videos, I have a contingency for that and I send them to the next vaulted on campaign whether it be an invent campaign like to attend my webinar. Maybe they don’t like videos. Maybe they want to attend a webinar and so on.

Tim: Okay. So it’s based on their actions and so you’ll do that and once they’ve done that. Once they have – let’s say they have taken action they watched the video the next step is to now add them to a campaign based on that video or based on what?

[0:05:07]

Jason: So now they’re going to get the video #2 and 3 but now my whole goal switched. So let’s talk about like let’s say we’re in the launch campaign. Now my whole goal is to get them on an early bird list or some kind of another offer. That’s my next milestone to move them along rather than going here’s video number 2, no caught action, here’s the video #3 no caught action and then most people go to maybe  like a video sales letter.

But I am literally trying to get them to raise their hand yet again and say hey, I’m interested in this stuff so put me into this. Then immediately they jump ahead of the line of everybody else and adding that scarcity in there is unbelievable. I mean the one other cool thing that you can do is you can you use that humanized element into your campaigns and give them a deadline saying look these videos or this video is only going to be up until Thursday or April 22^nd, the people are going to click on it about 50% more.

Tim: Uh-hum. So now basically the goals have changed. The goals have become more of getting somebody to say this is what I want or this is what I’m interested in in a sense.

Jason: Yeah. So what we’re doing is we’re basically breaking up your whole goal into different milestones. So once you get past milestone 1, now the whole goal is to get in milestone 2. So like for example let’s say we were in just like another different campaign where we wanted to get free consults right? So maybe the first milestone is then just to reply or indicate interest that they wanted to chat with you.

So then the next milestone would be to watch the video then after they watch the video the next one would be for them to apply to chat with you. And then the next milestone after applying would be you saying yes they’re interested or they qualify, they don’t and then get them on the free consultation and then after that to sell them and then upsell. So you can kind of see how you can keep thinking of your campaigns and milestones and it’s so much easier to look at a complex campaign and break it down and to see where people are leaving off.

So then later on Tim, you can do a remarketing to wherever anybody left off. So if someone only made it to milestone 3 and you had seven milestones, you can start them right at milestone 3.

Tim: Yeah I love that and how are you automating this process? Is it all based on actions they take in InfusionSoft or wherever you know automation software people are using?

Jason: Yeah, so I’m using a lot of different tools. InfusionSoft is the brain or the hub of it but then there’s a lot of bolt on technologies that I’m using like Parsley or not Parsey, Parsley. I would say that they’re the vegetable software right? Maybe they should change their name. So I use them and then I use plus this to indicate how long people watch my videos. Right? So I can tell how long people are watching my videos and then I do different actions based on what they – how long watched which is Ninja stuff.

Tim: Got you. Okay. So it’s all automated. It all allows you to see where people are, you know, where they’re stopping or what their interest level is and different things. It allows you to have different milestones that they have hit so that you can then say okay here’s the next step to move them further along in the sequence.

Jason: Yeah, yeah. Just break it down into simple chunks rather than just focusing on I got to sell this person. You have to build trust and authority over time and there’s different stages that you have to take them through. When you understand that, and then you have in each milestone like maybe three emails or three text messages or three calls and it doesn’t just have to be email marketing. It could be anything. Just think about until I move this person to the next milestone my whole goal is to just keep pushing this one part. And then if they don’t get to that milestone, no sweat. Have a backup. Have a contingency plan that you can send them to a different campaign whether it be a different way to interact with it, whether it be a webinar, a video series, or something totally different.

Tim: Like it’s the same kind of mindset where a lot of people focus on when they send out an email they just want the end goal. I Just want the person to buy but really need to keep in mind, you know, the goal of each thing, the goal of the subject line is to get them to open the email. The goal of the email is to get them to click on the link. The goal you know, if that link takes them to landing pages, the goal of the landing page is to get –you know, to get to take whatever action the landing page is designed for. So to think about instead of just thinking about you know, that you think about it the entire process each thing and it allows you to make it so that oh crap if somebody didn’t get all the way into the end, now I can say alright, so now how can I put them into a different sequence to try to somehow move them further down the line.

Jason: Exactly and then a couple of months later, you can look at it and say how many people reached the certain milestone but didn’t move on?

[0:10:04]

Because you know, as we all know, you know, as time goes on your business keeps growing so maybe they’re ready for it now.

Tim: Right.

Jason: So you can try to do in a reengagement campaign to them at that particular point where they left off.

Tim: Very cool. Is there anything about this that we missed that you think people need to know to implement this.

Jason: The biggest thing is think of the contingencies and then break up your campaigns into separate milestones. And then the last thing is bolt on all your campaigns together. Right? I mean the results I told you, I’m still there’s two campaigns people haven’t even run through that I’m so excited right? I mean I’m in the earlry stages. I mean this is like I started walking people through this and they’re like oh my gosh, this is and I hope all of you start looking at it just differently rather than the typical F word right?

Tim: Yeah I love it. Well this has been awesome Jason. Thanks for bringing value as always. I’m looking forward to hearing people’s reactions.

Jason: Well thanks Tim and if they want to know any more about it just go to milestoneMRK. MRK  stands for marketing results kickass.

Tim: Nice, I like it. Thanks so much.

If you found this episode of Conversion Cast, valuable, you’ll love the free Webinar that Tim is hosting this Thursday at 3:00 p.m. eastern. It’s called 4 Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List Without Spending All of Your Time on Marketing and it’s designed to do just that. This has been one of our most popular webinars and the event fills up quickly so make sure you don’t miss out. Head over to LeadPagesWebinar.com and register now. Once more the webinar is called 4 Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List Without Spending All of Your Time on Marketing. It’s happening this Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time and you can reserve your spot at LeadPagesWebinar.com. We hope to see you there and of course we’ll see you on the next episode of Conversion Cast.