Maxwell Finn discusses with Philipp Schoeffman Customer Lifetime Value: How to outbid, outspend, and outlast your competition, plus more at Affiliate World Europe in Barcelona.

Interview with Maxwell Finn| Co-founder Unicorn Innovation

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
So just coming from the stage actually, I watched the last couple of minutes. It was an amazing presentation.
Maxwell:
Thank you so much.
Phil:
Actually what you shared were ad strategies. Most of what you shared were for increasing customer lifetime value and actually, upselling, cross-selling and so forth. Maybe you can wrap up quickly what you actually covered onstage.
Maxwell:
Sure, so the big thing is everyone’s so focused on cutting CPA and acquiring customers more cost-effectively, getting that cost down. We’ve realised at scale, your costs go up and so you can always fight that for so long. I’d rather work on things that you can control and spend the same amount of time but on a much bigger impact. And for me that’s increasing customer lifetime value, that’s increase average order value, that’s increasing conversion rates.

How To Increase Conversion Rates With Facebook

And so a lot of what we talked about onstage is how can we do that with Facebook. How can we do that across multiple marketing channels to ensure that we can outbid, outspend, and outlast our competition because our competition, they’re so focused on that front end that for them it’s like, that first order is $50 between margins, I can afford it by $25 that’s it. So if my ad costs go to $26, I can’t spend any more.

Double Your Customer Lifetime Value

But people like us, we’re like, well hey what I can do is I can actually double the customer lifetime value to $100 and now I can spend $50 cause I know I’m going to make $100. And now I can spend two times more than my competition. I can outspend them. I can outbid them. I can just outlast them. And that’s where we really focus and why I think we’ve done so well with our agency, with our training, our courses, all that stuff because we’re teaching that stuff. And that’s our kind of secret weapon.

Spend More = More Chances Of Winning

Phil:
It is really the company who can spend more on marketing who will win, right?
Maxwell:
Yeah. At the end of the day that’s all that matters, is if I can spend more than you to acquire the same customer, I will win. I’ll get all the customers, you’ll get maybe the scraps, the low-quality buyers, who aren’t going to buy from you again and again and you’re going to have to keep churning in customers. I’m going to get the customers that are going to spend big money. That are going to keep coming back and buying. And I’ll take those customers all day long even while paying more.
Phil:
Exactly, exactly. Well, that is, if everybody has the same techniques and is equally qualified and actually running ads and attracting customers. So let’s cover that.
Maxwell:
Sure.

Ways To Increase The Amount of Money You Get From Customers

Phil:
What are like your top three strategies? If somebody says, “Okay, I have a working business model. I’m selling online. I’m an affiliate. I’m a business owner. I’m selling online. I’m doing alright, but I want to do what you say. I want to increase the amount of money I get from my customers, basically.” So top three strategies, what should I do?
Maxwell:
So I’ll give you three strategies in the back end but one important thing before you start there is you need to look at your customer acquisition process, your Facebook ad campaign as a connected kind of grid of pieces. Meaning that, everybody that I talk to looks at ads in an individual perspective. So they’re looking at their front end traffic campaigns, their lead generation campaigns as a closed entity.

Invest. Spend 6k to make 40k

So if I invest five grand to do lead gen for a campaign but I don’t sell anything, they’re looking at that, that’s a bad ad, I lost $5,000. For me, I’m saying, “Well, what I did is I actually got 5,000 people on this lead magnet. We did a five-day cart open on a course and we sold $40,000 on $1,000 in spend to that audience.” That has a 40x return, but that return doesn’t exist without the lead gen. So I rolled that five grand into the 1k, so that’s six grand to $40,000. And that’s still great, I’ll do that all day long. Spend six grand, make forty grand. So we look at all the pieces together instead of granular you know, “this is a loser because it didn’t make any money“. So that’s the first thing I tell anybody just getting started. You’ve got to think big picture. Look at everything being connected because you don’t get the big winners without the traffic investment.
Phil:
Yeah, I agree.

Post-Purchase Retargeting

Maxwell:
So that’s really important. Three things in the backend. So for our post-purchase retargeting, we focus on building brand loyalty and good will, increasing the customer lifetime value, the profits, and soliciting and developing assets in terms of reviews, video testimonials, that we can then use in the front end. So we’re running ads like a thank you ad, where it’s a founder running a thank you video. I started running it from like three years ago, from one of my first dropshipping companies. And didn’t have any expectations to make any money. It was me, really crappy video, said “our CEO has a message for you“, no link, no call to action. That ad, amazingly, had almost a 12x on ad spend because all my customers saw that and were like, “This is really cool, I’m going to buy more from them” or they shared it and their friends were like, “That’s pretty cool, I’m going to go and find them, Google them“.
Phil:
Sorry, can I interrupt for a bit. So you used those actually for conversion companies or that was more?
Maxwell:
So that was a video campaign, that ad was specifically to build loyalty. That was when they first bought from us. That was the first ad they see after they bought from us. It just happened to have positive ROI, which is a benefit and we see that happen time and time again with our clients who we teach our strategy to. On top of that, well obviously we’re going to make more money. So we’re going to cross-sell, we’re going to upsell, we’re going to move you up the value ladder to higher ticket products.

$1 Million in the First 9 Months

So for example, with our Facebook course, we did very, very well on our Facebook course. We did over $1 million in our first nine months with it but wanted to do more. So Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we’re like, “What can we do? We only have one course.” We said, “I have an idea, let’s bundle all of our future courses and pre-sell them.” At that time, we had no plans. We didn’t know who was going to make them but we wanted to just do it and see if people would buy.
Phil:
Well you can always do them..
Maxwell:
Down the road.
Phil:
Exactly.
Maxwell:
And so we set a high price on it and we ran that ad to our customers and we brought in about $35,000 on less than a grand in ad spend to our customers. So those type of ads we run on the back end. And then lastly, we’re running ads asking for video testimonials, review the product, share a photo that can make our funnel more effective.

Keep Track Of Your Campaigns

Phil:
That’s amazing. Coming back to your first point. How do you actually keep track of everything that you do in your campaigns? So let’s take Facebook specifically but at the price of every other real traffic source, as well. As you say, most people run like one conversion campaign, maybe a traffic campaign on top of that, maybe a third campaign and that’s about it. If we’re speaking scale campaigns and running it the way that you suggest, and you’re obviously right with that approach. I find it kind of challenging keeping track and I’ve used like a lot of tools, but once you work with a team, you have to have clear processes and clear systems. How do you do it?
Maxwell:
Definitely so, there are so many tools out there. There are lots of software out there. I’m kind of a purist. So people always ask me that question like, “Hey, what tools do you use? What platforms do you use?” Well I kind of just use Power Editor back in the day, now they changed it.

Business Intelligence Dashboard

We have a single BI dashboard, business intelligence dashboard, we use Grow, which is a great tool because we can sync everything. We can pull on everything, we can combine data sources, pivot tables, all kinds of cool stuff in there. So that’s our home base, all of our team members have access to that, our account, everyone has access to that. So we know all the revenue coming in, we can contribute it back to all the ads, but when it comes to individual ad accounts, we just build out our reports and data manager. We build out our reports. We build out multiple attribution windows. We have our website purchases, conversion values, cost per purchase, cost per all of our key conversion metrics. So we have those reports saved, so I know every day we can log-in, we can check, we can see what we’ve been doing the last day, 7 days, 28 days, keep track of it back there.

Keep It Simple

We try to keep it as simple as possible, I find that when you add a lot of tools it gets clunky, people get confused, and then we use Slack for communication. Slack has been a godsend for us. It makes it so easy. We have our clients, our vendors, our users, everybody in there.
Phil:
So you have your clients on Slack as well? ‘Cause sometimes that can be tricky.
Maxwell:
Yeah. We have individual channels for our clients. We put in the right people, so we know, “Hey our Google ad buyers, we’re going to put them in there. Our SEO people we’re going to put them in there. This person doesn’t need to be in there, so they’re not going to be.” And the client can communicate with them. We have clear communication policies, everybody knows that when you’re tagged, you have 24 hours on a week day to get back to them. Makes it super easy.

Recommended Tools

Phil:
That is very true. Since you mentioned tools, any other tool that you would recommend?
Maxwell:
Sure, so from a Facebook perspective, CompanionLabs is great. I know everybody loves CompanionLabs. Ryan and the guys there. It makes manual bidding a lot easier. So it really helps you scale.
Phil:
Do you do manual bidding a lot?
Maxwell:
Yeah, at scale because I want to take control of as many variables as possible. It’s one of the three variables in the auction. I want to take control of that.
Phil:
Okay.
Maxwell:
ManyChat we use for our messenger marketing. We use Drip for our email marketing. Grow for obviously, our business dashboard. Slack for our internal communication.
Phil:
Do you have any project management tools you use or you just go super lean?
Maxwell:
Asana. We’ve used…
Phil:
Okay we’re with Asana.
Maxwell:
So Asana and Jira. We’ve tried both of them. We honestly haven’t found something that we’ve really been super thrilled with. Also one last thing, so Connectio from Wilco de Kreij. Wilco is incredible, brilliant marketer, and his tools are amazing. ConnectRetarget, ConnectLeads, all that good stuff. It’s great.
Phil:
Thank you for listening.
Maxwell:
Thanks man, appreciate it.