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🧠 July Project: Paid Growth Flywheel

We’ve mostly used organic channels and partnerships to get new subscribers for Why We Buy 🧠, but it was time to up our game.

So my goal for July was to build a paid growth flywheel that would allow us to rapidly grow subscribers while offsetting costs by selling our digital products.

People would view an ad and get sent to our new opt-in page.

Then these new subscribers would be WOW’d by a personalized welcome sequence, maybe buy a digital product, and ideally refer a friend to read Why We Buy 🧠.

We’d reinvest money from digital product sales into ads. This way the flywheel would spin on and on like a merry-go-round—or so I’d hoped. 😅

😭 Big Wobbles

Alright, so what mistakes and f*ck-ups should you avoid like the plague?

Email automation​
​Open rates for our new email sequence… plummeted 😬

We spent an ENTIRE MONTH crafting our new personalized welcome sequence.

I said a little prayer when we finally launched it: “Please let this work!” A few days later I checked the stats…

And my heart sank.

The open rate for our first email was a measly 30%—down from 67% for our previous welcome sequence.

​

I freaked the F out.

Thankfully, ConvertKit’s deliverability team helped me diagnose the problem quickly: We were victims of a bot-subscriber attack.

One of the forms on our website wasn’t using ReCaptcha and, due to a WordPress vulnerability, we got 1,000+ bot subscribers. Fak!

The good news? Our open rate didn’t *actually* plunge into an abyss. Bots just don’t open emails, so it messed up all our data. Phew!

​
​Ads​
​Paid social subscriber growth isn’t scalable—yet

With so many Everest-sized projects happening internally, I hoped to outsource paid social to an ad agency. They’d handle the whole she-bang—strategy, copywriting, design, ads management, etc.

But the messaging and ad creative wasn’t a fit for our brand. So we’re changing course in August, and I’ll take a more hands-on role in ad creative.

We’ll also invest more in Sparkloop’s Paid Partner program.

​
🤩 Big Wins

Alright, so what worked and how can you use it right now to sell more?

Landing pages​
​Designed a pretty *and* smart newsletter opt-in page—stat

We needed a new opt-in page to WOW leads coming in from paid social ads. And with Project Flywheel moving at the speed of light, we needed it pronto.

​Superside delivered not just one but TWO jaw-dropping designs in less than 72 hours thanks to their AI-assisted creative service. (Don’t worry—world-class human talent drives it.)

But this wasn’t just any ol’ pretty opt-in page.

We seamlessly blended a kicka*s design with social proof, the Halo Effect, credibility, Authority Bias, linking, memes, rhyming, and the Bandwagon Effect.

Smart, huh?

Email automation​
​Open rates for our new email sequence… plummeted 😬

We spent an ENTIRE MONTH crafting our new personalized welcome sequence.

I said a little prayer when we finally launched it: “Please let this work!” A few days later I checked the stats…

And my heart sank.

The open rate for our first email was a measly 30%—down from 67% for our previous welcome sequence.

​

Email marketing
​Created a personalized welcome sequence designed to delight

About 76% of customers are more likely to buy from you *if* you use personalization in the buyer’s journey.

We wanted to create a personalized welcome sequence for months. Luckily, ConvertKit→Soon to be Kit released a new tool in their app store that makes it easy: polling.

​

Now, we can easily segment new readers based on their goals. Then we WOW them with a free gift and email sequence designed to help them overcome their current top challenge.

The best part? We can easily suggest our digital products that’ll help them hit their goals even sooner.

The new sequence has only been live for a few weeks, but feedback has been stellar.

​

​Websites​
​Building a binge-worthy new website

Did you know Why We Buy 🧠 has been around for four years but *doesn’t* have a website? As you can imagine with my ambitious goals… that’s a wee bit of a problem.

And of course, we couldn’t have just *any* website. We needed a site that was binge-worthy.

​Studio—the design team trusted by Alice + Olivia, Tony Robbins, Fahlo, and QVC—understood the assignment.

It’s not ready to be launched *just yet,* but here’s a sneak peek of what’s currently going on behind the scenes:

While Studio is putting the finishing touches on the new Why We Buy 🧠 website, we need you to help us settle another big debate.

When you picture a “founder” who comes to mind? Steve Jobs? Sarah Blakely? Zuck?

Cast your vote below!

Why are we asking you to vote on our design?

When people feel involved in creating something, they tend to like and value that product more. That’s the IKEA Effect in action. And we really hope you’ll like our new website because you’re helping us design it!

​

🤓 Your Takeaways

If you want to build growth flywheels in your business, there’s lots to learn from our f*ck-ups and big wins.

Ask yourself…

​
Q: Is your landing page wowing visitors?

If you’re driving people to a crappy opt-in page then you’re burning money.

If your opt-in rate is hovering at 15% or lower, it can be better. Try revamping it by making a clear promise, sprinkling in social proof, and speaking to the visitor’s *ouchiest* problems. After all, you want to sell painkillers (not vitamins).​
​

Q: Is your data telling the whole story?

As the old saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. Make sure to keep a close eye on your marketing campaign’s performance so you can diagnose problems quickly (and lessen the length of any resulting panic attacks).
​

Q: Are you personalizing your emails?

And no, we’re not talking about sprinkling “you” or [FIRST NAME] into them (though you should probably be doing that). People have specific problems they want help solving. If you can tailor your emails to deliver solutions, they’ll like you more (and buy more)

​ConvertKit makes it easy to create simple—or incredibly complex—personalizations.
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🔎 Sneak peek into August’s flywheel

In August we’re building a sales growth flywheel for Wallet-Opening Words.

Goal: 2X our monthly sales *without* running a promotion.

How? Stay tuned.

Until next time, happy selling!