The secret behind making the important become urgent.
On this episode of Marketing Secrets, Russell gives a recap of some of the events for the Viral video launch from last week. He goes into some rough numbers and stats and explains why they did it. Here are some of the highlights of this episode:
So listen to this episode and find out how many views the viral video got, and what good things have come from it so far.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I’m finally giving you a chance to hear behind the scenes of what happened with the viral video launch, the bubble soccer party, and everything that’s happening on today’s episode of Marketing Secrets.
Alright everybody, welcome back. I hope you guys have been doing amazing. This whole week I’ve been in inner circle meetings, so I’ve been dropping some cool stuff on the podcast, hopefully you’ve been enjoying it. If you’ve been listening to the audio version, I gave you guys a really cool call from Frank Kern, which was awesome. Sent you my presentation of how we went from zero to a hundred million dollars without taking on any outside capital, which was cool. Hopefully you liked that. And Now I’m finally having a chance to tell you guys behind the scenes.
So it’s been a fun week afterwards. Whenever something like this happens, we have no idea what to expect. What happens if we launch this video and it gets 500 million views, what if we launch it and it gets ten views? You have no idea what’s going to happen. So for me it’s always like, I think sometimes people get so invested in the outcome, they miss the fun and joy of what you’re doing.
I know that I’ve had times in my life where I do that as well. So consciously with this, as well as any launch, I set big goals and big dreams and stuff like that, but as they get closer and closer and closer, I start, I don’t know if that’s the right word, I delete the outcome goal in my head. I just, I don’t know what it’s going to be, and if I set one and I don’t hit it, I’m going to be sad. If I set one and I surpass it, I’ll be happy. But I don’t want that, because I did the work no matter what and I want to be able to celebrate it and enjoy it.
So I try to just get rid of the outcome in my head. So going into it, I didn’t have an outcome. Again, I was looking at things like, what’s the worst case scenario. So for us, Clickfunnels worst case scenario, a lot of you guys know we spent a lot of money. Harmon brothers charge about a half a million dollars for a video, plus we threw a big party, we hired influencers to come, when all was said and done, I haven’t looked at the numbers yet. It’s been a whirlwind week. I would say probably, all in, in this party promotion we’re probably in close to a million dollars, which is kind of crazy.
I think I told you guys before, it’s the first time I just put everything on black, or everything on red. However you say that, I don’t know the terminology, the gambling thing, just kind of rolling it. Typically with any kind of marketing, we’re very direct response driven. Where we test small, put a dollar in, get two dollars back out, and if that works we scale. That’s how we’ve grown our company. That’s how everything I believe is based on that.
So this was the biggest thing. We’re like, we’re putting a lot in without knowing ahead of time, but it’s okay because we’re looking at what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario, average Clickfunnels member, lifetime average I estimate is 1200 bucks or something like that, maybe higher. In fact, I’m sure it is higher. We’ve only been in business, in fact tomorrow is our three year birthday, a lot of people have been with us three years. So that number keeps growing over time, but as far as we know now, it’s over $1200 a person.
So we’re like, worst case scenario, if this video brings us an extra thousand customers, it broke even, which is awesome. So that’s really good. But the bigger win on my side, there’s a couple of big wins. One of them is, when this video went live we needed to simplify our process. The signup process, the onboarding, all sorts of stuff like that. Because of that, I don’t know if you guys logged into Clickfunnels recently, there’s a bunch of new stuff.
There’s a Clickfunnels game, there’s new onboarding, there’s these things we call “Show me how” little walk-through’s that have video and written out explanation that show you how to do every single thing. We set up a way to get custom domains, where you click a button and get a custom domain. In fact, we gave everybody the first custom domain for free. We figured out all these things to simplify the onboarding process, so when this new onslaught of people came, we’d be prepared for it.
So one of the biggest things, that’s something we’ve known we needed to do for probably two years, we just haven’t had the time or energy to do it. This forced us to spend that time and energy. A lot of times we focus on stuff that’s urgent but not important. This one was super important, but it was never urgent so we never got it done. So by doing this, calling our shot and making this big video, it forced us to focus on the important that’s not urgent. It became urgent for us. So we, as a team, killed ourselves. You probably saw the week prior, we were here all night last week.
Our whole tech team and dev team, design team, everyone was here just killing ourselves to get prepared for it. A lot of evaluations, if we ever wanted to sell Clickfunnels in the future, one of the big things to look at is churn rate, so we knew what our churn numbers were at. For us it was like, if we could lower our churn by 2% that alone would be worth, tens if not in the future, hundreds of millions of dollars. But tens within the next 12 months.
So that was our goal was to reduce churn by 2 points. So it was a week ago today that the viral video went live. So we’re about a week. Obviously stats aren’t perfect, we don’t know the numbers, but based on the first, it’s been live a week, what’s it trending towards? I don’t know if it’s going to hold, so I don’t want to tie down to it yet, but based on the first 7 days our churn in the window and everything has dropped by more than 2%, which is amazing. More than 2%.
I’m hoping over the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days that sticks. If it does, that alone is worth more money than I could ever have dreamt of. In fact, the thing is right now, I could talk about this for a long time and explain it all. But basically where we’re at right now, as we’ve grown, we just passed 50,000 members last week, a week ago yesterday, 50,000 members. But as soon as we get to about 60,000 members, the new members we bring in and people we lose each day become about the same, so it gets really hard to scale past 60,000 members.
If we drop our churn by 2 percentage points, our next peak is at 100. So almost instantly we get to 100,000 members. So that alone is a big reason. Another big reason why we did the viral video is unification, if that’s the right word, connection, tribe building, bringing people within the culture, closer together and building that bond. We had hundreds of people throwing viral video launch parties in their homes. We had Julia Stoilin throw a launch party and invited the whole internet and she had people driving four or five hours to her house to come watch it with her.
It just brought our tribe as a whole together. We streamed live presentations from me, from the Harmon Brothers, and Gary Vaynerchuk last minute was like, “You should stream my stuff too.” So we streamed his. And we had 20,000 people live between YouTube and Facebook that watched this whole event go down. Think what that does for community, tribe, culture building within our audience, which was amazing. So that was another big thing. How does this become a bigger win for us as a community?
Second is how does this make Clickfunnels even more fun? We’re a software product. We’re competing with all these boring software products that are faceless, nameless and boring. Now we’re interesting to talk about. This video is something that people can talk about, they can share, show their friends and family. People come there and they’re like, “oh that’s what Clickfunnels does.” It gave us the ability and the timeliness to rebuild our sales funnel.
Typically I don’t like, here’s a brand new funnel, but we kind of had to. So it gave us a chance to sit back and re-tweak things and build things really differently. You’ve probably seen some of it. Again, it’s on the weekend, so I don’t know super good conversion numbers, but as a whole the conversions and EPC’s and dollars in are up, dramatically.
So doing this thing wasn’t just, “How many times has the video been shared, how much viral? Is it actually working?” But it’s all these other pieces that are more important to us, that it forced us to do. So I just want to put it out there.
It was funny, I was watching people’s Facebook the next day, I think we had like 300,000 views the first day and people were like, “Oh this didn’t go viral, Clickfunnels burned their money.” And all these things, and I’m just on my side laughing because you guys don’t get it. People see what they understand, but they’re missing the rest of it. That was my goal with this podcast always, to let you see the magicians hands. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Why is that important? Why was I willing to gamble and risk that much money on something that was that big of a risk?
Because it forced us to take the important and make it urgent. Which most business don’t ever do that, which is why they die. Kind of like my wife’s business, you should see the video. I buried it next to my first wife’s business, and my first wife. If you haven’t watched the video yet, go to Clickfunnels.com and watch the video. That way that joke will make more sense, along with the nude squirrels and everything else.
Other good things it did for us internally. We’ve always struggled to be recruited talent. People know Clickfunnels, which is the majority of our team come in. But developers and things like that, it’s hard. Where now, they see the video and they’re like, “Oh cool, that’s the company, that’s the culture, that’s what I want to be part of.” So it’s helping us already recruit talent. And on the other side it’s bringing in customers at an incredible rate.
So prior to this launch, depending on the ad sent and the landing page and stuff like that. For us to get a new Clickfunnels member on the low end, was probably $60, on the high end $120-130, to get a free trial. And that’s kind of the window we played with. It goes up and down and bounces all around, but that’s kind of been the window. Right now, the video is getting new customers at under $40 a piece on the pay side, but don’t forget there’s also the free side that’s bringing tons of free people.
So if you take the free and the paid and mix them together, our cost to acquire a customer right now from the video is probably, I don’t know, this is off the top of my head, I’d say probably $15-20, which is insane. Insane. Most SAASes in our world are $120-150. So there’s kind of cool things.
Also, as of today, should I check it? We were almost at a million views. A million people have seen our sales video and now are aware of Clickfunnels, which is crazy. I’m pulling up the actual thing to see. We were thinking today we may pass a million views, but it’s going to be a tight one. I don’t think by now, but by tonight hopefully we will have done that. We are at 927,000 views. So we’re getting close to a million and this thing will continue to drive leads, traffic and sales today, tomorrow and forever.
We knew with launching this it wasn’t going to be like Poopourri or Squatty Potty viral. To explain what Clickfunnels is takes more. In fact, they were stressed out at first, “This is the longest video we’ve done.” I think it 4 minutes, almost 5 minutes long. I was like, “Yeah, but it’s okay because I would rather have less people, but the people who watch it understand what we are and then they come in and actually become customers and they stick.”
Anyway, it’s funny, the people that….it’s just funny. I see all the trolls that are in, all be like, “The video’s too long, that’s why it’s not going viral.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t need it to go viral. That was the campaign we did to unite the community and get people excited so that people cared when this came out.” All the other things is why we did and why it’s already….it paid for itself in the first 30 hours. That part is done, now it’s this tool, asset that’s becoming huge for us.
So that’s what I want people to understand, in case they don’t. Because I know a lot of people don’t quite get all the pieces. So hopefully this kind of helps. Sorry I’m watching the video again, it’s so fun.
Alright so, what else what else was I going to share with you? So that’s some of the core things. A lot of people have been asking me about it. The last thing I want to talk about, it gave us the ability to throw a party. Why do I like throwing parties? Because we’re marketers and we should make an event out of everything. We had inner circle last week and we had James Malinchak, who if you know who James is, if you Google “Secret Millionaire” he was on secret millionaire 7 or 8 years ago. And I remember when he was on Secret Millionaire, most people would be like you’re on TV and it’s like, “Hey I’m on TV.” And that’s it.
But James is really strategic about it and he actually threw a big party at his house. He invited me and a bunch of other people out to his house and then did a whole launch around it. He had what’s his name, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? Robin Leach come to it. And he threw a big event around it and it made it fun for people like me to come to it and talk and share it. And it made me become friends with James and connect with him and care about him and his mission. Because he threw this big event around it. That’ why we did this as well.
It gave us the ability to throw an event that people, whether they could come to Boise or not, could watch it streaming live and see me and Gary and all these people. So many cool tribe building, culture building things that came from it.
Anyway, throw an event. I tell people if you’re going to launch a Facebook ad, throw an event around it. If it’s going to be good, invite ten other influencers to come to your house, launch the event together, launch the ad together. Whatever it is, make a party out of it and they have a vested interest in your success. They’re going to walk, talk, all those amazing things come from it. Everyone in my office is out clapping. We got some weird people over there. Sorry, if you’re wondering what’s happening over there.
I hope that helps you guys because everyone keeps asking me what happened? Has it been good, bad? And I just wanted to give you a recap, it’s been freaking amazing for us. Again, it forced the important to become urgent, it’s reduced our churn, it’s increased our….dropped our cost to acquire a customer, increased our conversions, our average cart sales, so many good things have come from it. We’ve built some amazing relationships, people who never would have known what Clickfunnels were, sat in a room for 5 hours with us and then played bubble soccer with us. We went in the Guinness book of world record playing bubble soccer.
We build connection, community, relationships, so many good things came from this thing. It’s been amazing. So yes it was good, financially as well as all the other things, and it keeps continuing to grow. I don’t know how many software companies have a sales video that has been seen a million times in the first 7 days. That’s rare. And it was the sales video that pitched the product really, really hard. You know what I mean? Sometimes they have these ones that are fancy. I don’t know if you remember Grasshopper, they had a really cool viral video about being an entrepreneur, it’s a big entrepreneur thing and everyone’s like, “Grasshopper.” And that was it. Yeah, it did that. But it didn’t sell the product. What’s Grasshopper. I go to Grasshopper.com, oh it’s phone systems for entrepreneurs. I didn’t know that.
This one is like a million people watched it and it’s pitching our product, you know what I mean. We got 5,397 shares, 19,000 emojis, a ton of comments, 1870 comments. It’s all good from a lot of different angles. So I hope that helps. I hope that gives you guys some visibility on what we did and why we did it. One of the big reasons why we do launched, as much as I hate them and the stress that goes into them, again is it forces important to become urgent.
So I recommend for you guys to look at, what are the important things that you have that you need to do? That you’re like, “I know I need to do that.” And how do you make it urgent? How do you tie in a launch or something, or an event or something that forces the important, that you know you need to do to become urgent.
For us the urgent was always launch a new funnel, launch a new thing, drive more sales, those things were urgent so we were always doing them. But it was like, if I can reduce churn by 3 percentage points, that’s worth more than 10,000 new customers to me. But I never did it because it wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t in front of my face all the time. So as soon as I made the important become urgent through this process, it became urgent and it’s been huge since then.
So there you guys go, it’s been 7 days. Like I said, I’ll probably do another recap when it’s been 30 days or so and kind of keep giving you more stats as I get clearer numbers on things. Like I said, I’m in the Inner Circle the last 4 days, so today’s my first day back and half the team’s gone. But I’ll get deeper into the numbers and stuff and share more as we keep going on.
But I hope that helps. Appreciate you all, thanks again for watching the video. If you haven’t watched it, go watch it, go share it, go comment, go like, have some fun, because that’s what we do. And tomorrow, by the time you guys listen to this, will be Clickfunnels 3rd birthday. Yes, we’ve only been in business 3 years. We passed 50,000 members, we’re going to change the world thanks to you guys. So thanks for everything. I hope this helped, appreciate you guys and we’ll talk soon. Bye everybody.