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Karin Carr shares exactly how she turned things around by running Facebook & Instagram ads to a low-ticket offer when sales for her high-ticket course dropped during the real estate market slowdown.
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Karin walks us through her ad strategy, how she tests her funnel, and why her funny video ads perform better than anything else.
She also explains how she increased her average order value to over $100 and what she learned about scaling without burning out.
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Speaker 1:
Back by popular request, because you voted that you wanted to see more successful course creators who have used and are still using Facebook and Instagram ads in their business to bring in the highest quality leads, the lowest possible cost, and also successfully running launches and self-liquidating offers. And so in this episode, I’m interviewing Karen Carr and you’re going to get a front row seat at seeing what happens when somebody’s business goes south, because the market that she’s in and she’ll share more about that in a moment the real estate market has had a very tough time in these recent years, and so what did she do when sales of her main high ticket course started to falter? And hint spoiler it is developing, she developed, she tested and is running a successful self-liquidating offer powered by ads. It’s a great funnel and it’s profitable, and you’re going to get to hear her story. The mindset that she had how you know what I like about Karen is that she rolls with the punches and she’s not afraid to create new content and try new things.
Speaker 1:
So, by the way, if you don’t know her yet, karen Carr is the founder of Karen Carr Coaching and the creator of Video Boss Agent Academy. She’s a 20-year realtor. She built her business from scratch using YouTube. After relocating to a new city with no name recognition, she was frustrated by cold calling and outdated tactics, so she developed a system to attract clients without chasing them. In 2018, she launched her coaching business to help other agents do the same, and today she coaches full-time, helping agents build freedom-based businesses through video and smart digital marketing. Karen is a sought after speaker at NAR, which would be the National Association of Real Estate Agents. Right Karen?
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
All right. So she speaks at national conventions, state and local associations, and she has been a podcast guest already once on this podcast right.
Speaker 2:
I think it might even be. I think this is the third time.
Speaker 1:
It might be the third time, it might have been once before. I was the host, but you’re a best-selling author of the book YouTube for Real Estate Agents Learn how to Get Free Real Estate Leads and Never Cold Call Again, with over 20,000 copies sold. And what I like the most which is not one of your credentials, but it’s the fact that we get to talk today and you and I go back all the way to when I was coaching in that mastermind right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
That would be 2020, 2020, 2021, right in the thick of the pandemic. Welcome back to the podcast, Karen.
Speaker 2:
Thank you. Thank you, it’s so fun to be here.
Speaker 1:
I know it is. We just started catching up and hitting it off again, I know.
Speaker 2:
It was like tell me about the kids, How’s the family? Who cares about all the work stuff?
Speaker 1:
So catch the listener up with some more context please about what was going on in the real estate market, what years that was happening and what that was doing to your high ticket core sales, and then what you had to do to transition into low ticket offer. And then I’ll start peppering you with questions about what everybody wants to know the stats around your profitable self-liquidating offer funnel.
Speaker 2:
Okay. Well, even in 2020, when people thought it was a terrible year in real estate, for me, it was not. It was a great year in real estate because, after we came out of lockdown, people wanted to move. They said, like myself included, I do not want to live in this neighborhood with an HOA anymore where they have to tell me whether or not I can park my motorhome in my own driveway. Like, I want to move and I want to go live in the country where I can park my motorhome in my backyard and be all redneck if I want to and nobody’s going to say anything about it.
Speaker 2:
So 2020, 21, 22 were great years for almost everybody in real estate, and I had this program teaching agents how to find clients from YouTube. So what I did was I would just make a video and I would put it on YouTube and people would find it because of the power of SEO. They do a Google search. The video shows up on the first page of Google. It also shows up in YouTube. Get tons and tons of clients. And then all of those scandals with NAR happened and the lawsuit if you paid any attention, last year there was a class action lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors and a whole bunch of really big name brokerages where you can’t say something. Nice, don’t say anything at all, right, how did that affect?
Speaker 1:
real estate agents.
Speaker 2:
We’re going to not say something mean about what this attorney made a class action lawsuit where he gathered all of these sellers who said when we went to sell our house, we agreed to pay our agent a commission, but we didn’t understand that we were also paying the agent who represents the buyer and we feel like we were lied to. And so they did this class action lawsuit and went to court and NAR lost and they said they were going to fight it but they were going back to court and spending so much money on legal fees that eventually they decided to just settle and they said okay, fine, we will settle this argument and we will say from now on, when the seller hires an agent and says I’m going to pay you X percent, there’s all of this paperwork that says I understand that I’m only paying the agent that represents me and if another agent represents the buyer, they’re going to have to figure out how they want to get paid on their own. We’re going to decouple the commissions and that part I actually have no problem with whatsoever. It was all fine. It was just the way that this lawsuit they made it sound like we were so sneaky and underhanded and deceptive and lying and speaking for myself every time I sat down with a homeowner at the kitchen table. I explained to them exactly how this all works. There was nothing shady going on, but a couple of people were convinced like hey, you can make a whole lot of money on this class action lawsuit. So in the end it disrupted the entire real estate industry and, from what I’ve heard, each seller that was involved in the class action lawsuit made a grand total of about $17. So that was their reward for doing this and turning the entire industry on its head.
Speaker 2:
So after that was all settled and we came through it, it’s been very difficult for real estate agents, and when agents are not selling houses, they don’t spend money on coaching, which is when they need it the most. But they are like I’m not making nearly the amount of money I was making before. I got to pull back on my expenses. I got to stop selling or stop buying coaching and cut all of the expenses that I have in order to weather the storm, which means that my business started to go down significantly, because all I had were expensive programs. I had private coaching that was top tier, and then I had a group coaching program that was mid-tier, but I didn’t have anything else to offer people. So when they were struggling, like I had nothing I could do to help them because I didn’t have any offers for them.
Speaker 2:
So it was actually a blessing in disguise, because I realized that my business was very top heavy and I didn’t have anything on the low ticket side where I could offer. People that were also struggling like, as much as my business started to struggle, so were theirs, and I quickly realized I needed to have something to help those people too.
Speaker 1:
Okay, before we, before you share more, can you give the listener like a breakdown of when things were going well? How often were you like? How were you selling your course? First of all, like what mechanism was that and how often were you doing that? A year?
Speaker 2:
I did live launches. I started out doing them four times a year and then I dropped back to about three times a year. I think I tried twice a year once, but I felt like that wasn’t. I didn’t like doing it so infrequently. So it was typically around every four months or so and my mechanism of choice was a challenge. I really liked to do a challenge. I’ve tried doing a three-day, a five-day, a two-day. The best ones I ever did were usually a five-day challenge. So it would go Monday through Friday for an hour and everybody would sign up for the challenge. I tried doing it totally for free. I tried you know it’s $47 or some nominal fee and they would come and attend the challenge and then at the end of the challenge I would say okay, so now you know what to do and why to do it. If you want to learn how to do it, you should come.
Speaker 2:
Take my program and the best launch I ever did was like $350,000 in sales. So it was insane. It was extremely profitable, did very, very well and every time I did this five day challenge it just got better and better and better and better until it hit the threshold and then it was less and less and less and less, and just every successive launch I did got smaller and smaller, and so I was trying all the different do I do two days instead of five days? Do I make it paid instead of free, trying all these different strategies to try to make it work, but it just every launch that I did was successful was successively smaller, until I thought, oh boy, like do live launches not work anymore? Is my program saturated, like everybody who’s going to buy it has bought it and that’s it and there’s nobody else to buy it. I got to the point where I just didn’t know what I should do instead.
Speaker 1:
Got you and you were using paid ads as part of your traffic strategy to get leads into your launch. Yeah, yes.
Speaker 2:
Now I got to say, most of the time I was only running ads when I was doing the launch and I wasn’t very good about running ads all of the time. So I would spend a lot of money to run ads to promote that launch and then, when the launch was over, maybe nothing would. There’d be no ads at all for the next couple of months. Then we would start over again. So in retrospect that was probably not a very good strategy, but that’s what I did for a very long time because I thought, well, why do I need to run ads between the launches? They’re not like. Anybody could just go to my website and sign up for it. That was my mentality. It didn’t really make much sense, but that’s what I was doing back then.
Speaker 1:
All right. So you were using ads in conjunction with organic lead generation, maybe not list building as much as you knew you should but, you were having. This strategy was working, but there was a point where it maxed out at did you say, over $300,000?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
That sounds great. And so then, as it was declining because I forget what book, but some of the listeners surely have heard of this thing called sunken cost bias. You know, the longer that we do something, the longer we’ll wait around and hope and pray that it will turn around or work out. I’m curious then how did you, like what was the tipping point that caused you to say, all right, we’re going to well, did you stop launching completely? But what caused you to go and start doing low ticket offers and develop a self-liquidating offer funnel?
Speaker 2:
Well, I kept doing the live launches and just monkeying around with the strategy and the duration, and should it be a different topic? Should it be free instead of paid? I really liked when we charged money for people to be there because it would be a much smaller group but they would all show up. The show up rate was 50% or better, which was amazing because when I had done the biggest free challenge I ever did, I think I had 2,800 registrants and my show up rate was like 18%. So they would sign up for it because it was free, but then nobody came. So I liked charging money and having a much smaller group, but they all showed up. Plus, then I could answer everybody’s questions most of the time because the comments were not just flying by so fast that you can’t even see what people are saying.
Speaker 2:
But it got to the point where I just thought okay, I think I spent as much money on the ads as we brought in in revenue. I mean, we were profitable, but not by very much, and I just thought I don’t know if this is worth doing anymore because we’re still profitable, but every launch is getting smaller. Eventually we’re going to be in the negative. And then why am I still doing this? Does that make any sense at all?
Speaker 1:
It does. It does make sense. I’m sure there’s a listener who’s been there and maybe stopped or taken a pivot and tried a different business or tried to launch a myriad of different offers. So you ended up having to cut expenses, one of which was me, because I was your ads manager for a number of these launches.
Speaker 2:
Yes, and, by the way, when I hired you, you said you can’t only run ads during launches, you need to start running ads more frequently. And so, yes, I did hire you to run my ads for me because I didn’t know how to do it myself and you were talking me into doing this whole list building strategy. But, yeah, money got tight and it when I sat down and had to look at the purse strings and tighten those up, it was like, oh Quajo, I’m sorry.
Speaker 1:
Those were sad times indeed, but I’ve been cheering you on from behind the scenes and even like sending you emails. Like you know, I’m in your corner. I can’t wait to hear how things are going, because they’re going to turn around and that was why we spent like 20 minutes before we hit record. It’s because things have turned around for you and you put in a lot of work into the self-liquidating offer funnel, so do share, because I want to hear and then jump into the stats what are these low ticket offers that you developed now?
Speaker 2:
So they were products that I already had that I was giving to my current coaching students, the ones in the group coaching program. So what I had created were a whole bunch of downloadable PDFs that agents could put on their website, so it could be a relocation guide, a first time buyers guide, a guide to you know 10 DIY staging, home improvement projects that you could do yourself to get your house ready for the market. How do you know if you’re ready to go from being a renter to buying a home, like all that kind of stuff. And because I teach people YouTube, I would say so make a video on the topic. Let’s say that you’re talking about curb appeal and what you need to do on the outside of your house so that when the people pull up to the curb, the buyer doesn’t turn to their agent and say, yeah, we don’t even need to go inside, let’s just go to the next house. Because that happens a lot. They pull up, they look at the outside of your house and they’re like we don’t even need to go in. I’m not, nope, this one is not for me. So let’s say you’re making a video talking about curb appeal and then your call to do in your kitchen and bathroom. That will drastically increase the price that your house will sell for. Click the link below and download my free guide.
Speaker 2:
So this has worked for like gangbusters in my own business long before I became a coach, just when I was selling real estate myself. They work great, but nobody ever takes the time to make them. They know that they work, but they just don’t take the time to do it. So I made them all and I gave them to my coaching community. So I thought, what if I package those all up? I’ve already got them. What if I just put them in a little bundle and I sold them for like I don’t know 24 bucks, 24 guides for $24. And then I threw in a couple of bonuses at the end and I will just sell this as a bundle very inexpensively.
Speaker 2:
And then I thought, ok, I don’t know how to run Facebook ads. I have not run Facebook ads on my own for at least I don’t know six years at this point, and I’m sure everything has changed, but I can figure it out. And so I bought a really inexpensive little course that I just was like needed to know what the differences were, cause the last time I’d run ads myself, I think was 2019. So I was like, okay, what’s new in the world of Facebook ads and how will this work? And I use Sam cart as my checkout platform. And the guys that own Sam cart said you can’t just sell the one thing. You have to have a funnel, you need to have an order bump and upsells, because a good amount of people will buy the extra stuff.
Speaker 2:
And I showed it to my husband as I was building this out and he goes that’s so annoying, nobody loves that. And I said I know, but they buy it. I know we were like no, I don’t need that. No, I don’t need that. No, I don’t need. Oh, but you know what, I do need that one. And you add it to your cart. You did not intend to do it, but it’s human nature. We do so. I said, okay, I got to build out this whole funnel. I don’t even know what I would offer.
Speaker 2:
And one of my mentors I was on a Zoom call and I said what should I do? And she said, well, what’s the next problem that they will have? And I said, okay, after they get all of these guides and they go into Canva and they modify them, now they don’t know what to do with them, so I should teach them how to make a landing page. She said, okay. Then they build the landing page.
Speaker 2:
What’s the next problem that they have? Well, they have to write a whole email automated sequence that will connect to the landing page so that it will automatically deliver the thing they just requested and it will follow up with them. That it, uh, and they don’t know what to do. So I should just offer to like hey, copy and paste all of my emails, all of the stuff I already had, right, because I was using these emails in my own business. So it’s just a matter of putting them in a Google doc where they can copy and paste everything. And the landing page was just a matter of me filming a couple of videos of go in here, put this for the headline, put this for the description, put this on the button, put a picture of the thing that they’re downloading. Here’s how you connect it with Zapier. I mean, it was. It wasn’t stuff that took me forever to put together but it made logical sense of.
Speaker 2:
You bought the guides, okay, but what are you going to do with them? You need to put them on a landing page, okay, great, then we got to do this. And then my big finale is how are you going to go drive traffic to this? Are you going to just post about it on Instagram? Are you going to make Facebook posts? Are you going to do paid traffic?
Speaker 2:
I did YouTube. I can tell you everything you need to know about having a YouTube channel. That kills it bringing in clients. You should join my group coaching program and here’s a one-time only discount. And so by doing that, they didn’t just buy the $24 package, they bought that and then a lot more. And so, by doing that, they didn’t just buy the $24 package, they bought that and then a lot more. And so my average order value went up exponentially. Like originally when I first launched this whole thing, I think, I had the main offer and an $11 order bump, and that was all I had. And then I added a $14 upsell, and so my average order value was usually around $40, which is better than $24, but it was still only $40. And by adding different upsells and rearranging them and saying what if, instead of $11, it was $17, and just playing around with the pricing and stuff like that? Now I think my average order value is about $105.
Speaker 2:
So if I go to buy a $24 product, but the average order value is over a hundred. That is huge and so now like what that does to your ROAS, right? So I’m spending. You know, I think I spend about $2,000 a day on ads, but you’re making a lot more than that just from the front end sales, and then all of the upsells is just icing on the cake. Yeah, it’s been like. It hasn’t always been great.
Speaker 2:
There have been many, many days where the ROAS was in the negative but then there have been days where, like I, was running a retargeting ad and I spent $12 on the ad that day and made $1,100.
Speaker 1:
Let’s pause. It was like an 86X ROAS.
Speaker 2:
That day it was insane 86X ROAS is phenomenal.
Speaker 1:
I need to make sure that I’m processing correctly and maybe this will help the listener too. You had me at. I’m spending $2,000 in ads a day. That just lights me up as an ads manager, but maybe the listener is like I could never. So let’s hold on and rewind.
Speaker 1:
Okay, the context here was that the real estate market was in decline and so your sales of the high ticket your high ticket sales were in decline, and because of that class action lawsuit and then the other things that we’ll just kind of state clearly, we had some different policy changes from the presidential administration. We had interest rates that were increasing and some other things that just made it really hard for real estate agents to make it, and thus your clients weren’t buying the course as much, and then you had to cut expenses. And then you came up with a low ticket offer funnel, a self-liquidating offer funnel, and what I heard you say was very telling. But you basically took something out of your main program that was doing really, really, really well and that was like this mini offer about how to create videos that had curb appeal, right.
Speaker 2:
It wasn’t even. It wasn’t even an offer, it was just a bonus when they bought the coaching program. It was a bonus that they got. I never sold it independently, it was just part of the program, but I already had it. So why not try that instead of creating something brand new from scratch?
Speaker 1:
Gotcha.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So when real estate agents were struggling and that was hurting your business quite a bit, you came up with well, you took the most popular bonus from your program. So you look at the data, basically, and the feedback from what people were saying, and you made that the first low ticket offer.
Speaker 2:
And then–, joe, I wish I could say that I was that strategic about it, it was the easiest thing for me to do. It was the thing that was already done. That was the no brainer. Let’s just sell this and see what happens. Let’s just try it.
Speaker 1:
What have I got?
Speaker 2:
to lose.
Speaker 1:
What have you got to lose, right? The next part is you thought out, because some listeners might be like well, if I were to do this, how do I decide what could be the order bump after the core offer and the upsell and the next upsell? And I heard you say that you just kind of spelled it out. Well, you had a mentor for your course or whatever your mentor was. But you kind of hash it out with them or like okay, the next logical step, the next thing that would help an agent the most would be a landing page, right?
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
And then, how do you get traffic to the landing page? Well, in that case, emails.
Speaker 2:
Well, how do you follow up with them after they’ve gone through the opt-in process? Now we have to deliver the thing that they requested and send them a whole bunch of emails to nurture the relationship. And then the last thing was how are we going to drive traffic to this entire thing? I think you should use YouTube. But at the beginning all I had was the order bump I think that was it the main offer and the order bump that was $11. And then I added upsell number one, and then I added upsell number two, and then I added upsell number three and I added a downsell and it got more elaborate over time.
Speaker 2:
And I would just test everything and see what is the rate, what’s the conversion rate on each one of these steps. And if I were to put them in a different order, would that make a difference? What if I changed the price? What if we did a split test, where here it’s $27, but here it’s $47, and we’ll just see which one works better? And you know I would look at these numbers.
Speaker 2:
I’m not, I’m a total right brain person. I don’t love all of this math. So I literally would go into my SamCart dashboard and export it and then put it in chat GPT and say please explain this to me, Like, just tell me, tell me what these, what this means, because it’s too much data and my brain does not work that way which one is the best, which one has the best conversion rate, which one is bringing us the most money? And then what do you think we should do based on all of this data and chat GPT would say even though your conversion rate is much less at the higher price point, it made you more money, so don’t freak out. It might like it went from a 50% conversion rate to a 20% conversion rate, but you still made more money because the dollar amount was higher, so don’t have a heart attack, it’s all fine.
Speaker 2:
Like Chad, GBT will talk me down from the ledge sometime and it’s great. And then we just run lots of tests to see okay, it’s working really well now, but if I changed this headline, would it be even better? Or if I reorganize things on the landing page, on the sales page, would it be better? So it’s been a whole lot of just testing and it’s actually been a lot of fun. I was very intimidated with Facebook ads at the beginning because I thought it’s been so long since I’ve done this and everything is different and I don’t know what CBO means and all of this kind of stuff, and then when I got in there and started playing with it, it was like, oh, this really, it’s not.
Speaker 2:
It’s not that scary, it’s nothing to be afraid of. And if I would just take the time to every day go in like so that’s my thing is, I get my cup of coffee in the morning and I sit down and I look at what did we spend yesterday? What did we bring in? What’s the average cart value? How is it all doing? Are we in the? Are we profitable today? Yay, okay, good. And then I started. I think I started at 50 bucks a day and then I went to a hundred dollars a day and I just gradually kept increasing my daily ad spend. As I figured this out, if I ran an ad that got nothing, I would turn the ad off and we would try something different. But I didn’t start with $2,000 a day, like we worked up to that. I started running the ads at the beginning of January I think it was January 4th, so it’s been going for about six months now.
Speaker 1:
All right, I can just hear the questions bouncing around the listeners’ mind, the questions bouncing around the listeners, the listeners mind, and so I’m going to ask a few of them. I really want to know, though actually no, I should. I should kind of piggyback on what you said about chat GPT. I last year had the same thing where I was on a coaching call with a client and we were going through the math of the ads running to their membership, and it can be complicated. But what you want to know is I’m running out to this membership, how long until I’m breaking even as in for like per purchase, how many months does that person need to stay into the stay in the membership until I break even? And this client had a membership. They had a email sequence that went out automatically right at the end of the first month that upgraded a member into an annual membership, and so they had all the numbers.
Speaker 1:
And after trying on my own, it just hit me I can’t crunch these numbers, I’m just going to give chat all the data. And it was able to say actually, this math works out. You just have to wait until month two before you break even on ad spend. So basically you just have to float the ad, spend until month two. There you go. The reason I’m sharing this is one. Dear listener, please use ChatGPT to crunch numbers. Sometimes you have to question it and then it will come back and say oh yeah, I forgot that it’s so weird, but I also If it doesn’t know the answer, it’ll just make something up.
Speaker 2:
And I have to say that If you do not know the answer, please do not invent something, Just say I need more data from you.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you got to call it out. Don’t take everything as gospel. The first response. But this is leading me to the next question, though, Karen, which is did you just have a bunch of money sitting around? Or how long did it take you to break even back when you started, at whatever the initial daily ad spend was? And just walk us through one of the hardest moments, if you will too, where you almost threw in the towel.
Speaker 2:
Oh my gosh, that was last week. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Okay, budget and I did that dynamic creative option where I think I had 10 different creatives and five different headlines and five different primary text options and five different descriptions and the ad was profitable immediately. I think I was doing. I did one to a lookalike audience and one to an interest-based audience and for some reason the interest-based audience did way better always than my lookalike audience. So I just turned the lookalike audience off and put all of the money into the interest-based audience and it always did really well.
Speaker 2:
But the thing that I hated was I could not tell which creative was working. Like you can’t tell when you do the dynamic and then you go in and you’re trying to look at all your data, you have no idea what combination of headline, creative, primary text was the one that somebody clicked on. And so when people would leave comments, I was taking a screenshot of the Facebook ad and like trying to jot down okay, it was this one and this and this and this. And it was super annoying to me that I couldn’t track that because I thought if I just knew that three out of the 10 creatives were getting all of the clicks, I would shut the other seven off.
Speaker 2:
But for some reason Meta is not sharing that right Unless. I just don’t know how to do it.
Speaker 1:
Let me insert something here for context too.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
With dynamic creative when it would. You just give it a bunch of ad copy, a bunch of visuals and a bunch of headlines and it would combine them as it chose you used. Well, first of all, you’re listening to this episode right now and you might be, if you’re running ads, going into your ad manager to see it About half of my client accounts, as of today that we’re recording this June 16th 2025, do not have dynamic creative as an option anymore. Meta is getting rid of that option, which is sad and also I will share that in the accounts that still have it.
Speaker 1:
We used to be able to look in, to peer into the black box of dynamic creative and, with a couple of settings, we’ll say be able to see which of the visuals were leading to sales, and then you could click something else and see which of the text the main ad text was converting. And then you could click another button and see separately which headlines were converting, and then you could piece that together and pick oh, these were, but that went away. You can only see, as of right now, if the account even has it you can only see the ad copy that’s converting and the headlines that are converting, but you can no longer look at the visual. So all that is just to say. If you’re having trouble testing and looking at that, head down to the description below. There is a link and you can get some coaching time with me one-on-one, and I can look at your ads for you. Now back to what you were saying, karen. Please continue.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
So that was what I started with and it was always very, it was always profitable. It was always doing very well. I just it annoyed me that I couldn’t figure out how to scale it. I couldn’t really like I’d heard all these things about don’t just go in and double the budget, you can only increase it by so much per day and every three days and all that kind of stuff. So I was trying to scale these ads but I never could get past about $500 a day and have it still have a positive ROAS. Nothing that I tried. I just couldn’t ever really make it happen. And that went on for months and months and months.
Speaker 2:
And then I decided well, I’m all about video, right, my primary platform is YouTube for crying out loud. Why are all of these just graphics? Why are all of my ads images? None of them are. They’re not carousels, they’re not animated graphics. There’s there’s no video. Why shouldn’t I try a video?
Speaker 2:
And I remembered that I had recorded a video nine months earlier that I put on my Facebook business page and I did absolutely nothing with it and it was funny. It was to promote a lead magnet. So go, download the first 10 steps to a lead generating YouTube channel and I made the silly video and posted it, never did anything with it and I thought, well, what if I make that an ad all on its own and just see what happens? And, oh my gosh, people loved that video, I guess because it was funny. It was funny, it was silly, I was dressing up in characters and doing accents and all the stupid things, and they loved it. And I got so many people that were opting in for that lead magnet. And then I’ve got a whole back end email sequence that follows up and made sales from people that were receiving the email sequence. So there was no money making immediately because I was optimizing for leads, not sales. But in the end it did. It did make money from selling it through the email sequence. So I thought, okay, people like the funny ad. What if I make a video that is a funny ad for this purpose, not something that I just made forever ago and forgot about? Like I’m going to optimize for sales, not for leads.
Speaker 2:
That video is ridiculous, it is, it’s killing it, it is doing so, so, so well it when I go into chat GPT and I say here’s all of my stats and now I have, you know UTM tracking links so I can see which actual ad did they click on in order to make the purchase. And they’re all coming from that silly video they’re all coming from not all, but more than 50% are coming from that one ad. And then all of the other ads are splitting how much money they’re making. So this one video is making so much. I’m like okay, I got to start making funnier videos, because apparently people love this and not only like. They get the comments, they get the likes, they share. It gets so much engagement. And then I guess meta just shows it more and more and more, because that’s where all the engagement is. But then they actually click on the link and they buy the program too. It’s pretty cool.
Speaker 1:
That’s very cool, so you decided to show this video the light of day. It was doing great as a lead magnet as a lead magnet, basically, or connected to your lead magnet, and then you remade it or you just recorded another funny one and that took off for your SLO funnel ads.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was a different, like the. The topic of the video was totally different, but it was the same idea where it was meant to be over the top silly. It’s kind of sarcastic and every person except for one person has left an extremely positive comment. One person was like but everybody else thinks it’s funny.
Speaker 1:
So there’s always those folks.
Speaker 2:
There’s always that one.
Speaker 1:
There always are for some accounts, like I have one account where we have to go in daily because I don’t know but this niche, they’re just super skeptical and there’s so many negative comments.
Speaker 1:
We just show up Like we went through having the like my client actually respond to the comments. But no matter how my client would respond, whether it was like a snarky kind of like hey, I’m calling you out for like complete BS, like being a troll, you know. So trolling the trolls, if you will or just giving a genuine answer it’s like the comments just would be neutral at best or the replies would be neutral at best or just attacking at worst. And so then we just went to hiding the comments and then we went to like just launching new ads every couple of days, so there would be no comments. So, listener, if that’s happening to you, respond to your comments, because people love to see that the creator is actually responding and then meta sees your responses as engagement. But if there’s something you just don’t want to respond, hide it or relaunch your ad and you can delete the comments.
Speaker 1:
If you launch your ad and make a change to it, it deletes all that social proof.
Speaker 2:
Can I ask your opinion on this? Sure, so in one of the videos that I made I said click learn more to get all the details. There’s a button and the call to action on the button is learn more. Everybody types learn more in the comments and I spend half of my day going. I guess I wasn’t very clear. I this is not a many chat thing. You don’t type learn more and it’s going to automatically DM. You have to click the button that says learn more, like should I just turn that ad off or should I just keep responding because now it’s more engagement?
Speaker 1:
What’s the profitability? What’s the ROAS return on ad spend on that ad?
Speaker 2:
Let me think it’s probably not so great on that particular one, because that’s not the funny ad. So maybe it’s not even worth doing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, if the ROAS is negative, like less than one, then sure turn it off, because it’s sucking your time. If it’s higher, though, and it’s actually generating you money, then keep it on. So what’s going on, Karen, is mini. Chat is everywhere, and we have been we all have been trained to comment and then get something DM’d.
Speaker 1:
So, what this could mean is maybe you want to test it and actually hook up mini chat to an ad and see how that works. The good news is that you can run ads pretty cheap to like. It’s the equivalent of boosting a post but not boosting it through the cell phone.
Speaker 1:
It’s doing the equivalent of boosting it post but not boosting it through the cell phone. It’s doing the equivalent of boosting it in Ad Manager. Or just be ultra clear that you know they shouldn’t have, they shouldn’t click learn more, or they should click learn more instead of typing it. But that’s what’s going on. But yeah, just the decision depends on what the ROAS is.
Speaker 2:
All right, I’ll go look at it. I ran all of those numbers about a week ago and I haven’t looked at it since then for that specific one. But it was like lesson learned. If I’m going to say click learn more, like click the learn more button, right, I wish I could say it only happened once or twice and so it was a them problem. No, it’s happened like 20 times.
Speaker 1:
All right, I don’t think we ever went over. What are your? What are the offers inside of your self liquidating offer funnel priced at.
Speaker 2:
Cause you have four now.
Speaker 1:
That’s the final magic four, right Okay.
Speaker 2:
So the front end offers $24. The upsell is $11. Sorry, the order bump, Yep, the order bump is $11. And that one is, it’s like a little, it’s not well. Basically copy and paste prompts for chat GPT. So I’ve made all of these 24 guides. If you want to make something that is custom to your market and your target audience, but you don’t really know what it would be, Use these copy and paste prompts and go into chat GPT and then you can make something that nobody else will have. It’s specifically custom for you. Then the landing page blueprint is it was originally $14, and then I changed it to $97. And so the conversion rate went down quite a bit, but it makes so much more money that it doesn’t matter. So it’s at $97 right now, and then the next one with the copy and paste emails is 97. And then my group coaching program is roughly $1,000.
Speaker 1:
Okay, that’s with the one-time discount.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Cool. So you got 24 as the main offer. $11 is the order bump, and then you have two subsequent upsells at $97.
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
Each, and then you have a final upsell, which is a one-time. How much discount off of your program?
Speaker 2:
It’s 50 discount, so it’s 11. 11 is the the total price and if they say no to that, it has a downsell and the downsell is 67 dollars what was the downsell? 67 dollars or what it’s a little mini course on how to create a youtube channel in a weekend. Okay, so it’s not the full-blown YouTube program, but it’s at least create a YouTube channel that could bring you business if you started making videos.
Speaker 1:
That is impressive. To date that is the longest SLO funnel of series of offers that I have seen. That’s six if I was counting.
Speaker 1:
It is. You know what I saw recently and I have no idea how well this works because I saw it on a course that I purchased. But this lady, she had the about, so it would be about as far into the funnel as your main 50% discount is, but literally the downsell off of that was the same exact program just at an even bigger discount. And all she says is I saw that you didn’t get this on the previous page but I basically I believe you need to have this and it will make the difference in your business, so I’m going to discount it again so that you get it. Like she’s very direct and I was like I had never seen a downsell. That was just a steeper discount on the previous one, but I bought it at the cheaper point. And again, I’m not saying this is a great strategy. I just saw it and I ended up buying it. But maybe that’s something that you end up testing because clearly you like to look at the data and see what’s working.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, In fact I just went into my dashboard and I was looking at it now going okay, so like, how many views, how many conversions, how many people have declined, how many people have abandoned? So, out of 352 total people in the last seven days that looked at it, 138 abandoned it altogether. But that means that the other 200 and whatever it is, 50 people went through the whole thing and either said yes, no, yes, no. But the customer, the average customer value, it says is that right? That can’t be right. It’s saying like $1,300. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:
I’m not sure if that’s correct. I don’t think that’s correct.
Speaker 2:
What is my? So my average order value is $80 for this week from a $24 product. So, yes, it may like some of the people might be going through the upsell funnel and they might be annoyed and they just close out the whole thing and they leave it and that’s fine. But there are a lot of people that they come through my email of they just bought the guides. Oh, they just bought the order bomb. Oh, they just bought the guides. Oh, they just bought the order bump. Oh, they just bought the upsell.
Speaker 2:
And so when I see those people that are buying three, four or five things in rapid succession, it’s like, okay, there are a lot of people that just enjoy buying the stuff and they need the help and even if they add all of it together, the grand total is like 150. They they can afford that if they are in real estate and they need the help and they need to figure out a way to grow their database and build a pipeline. That’s not an unreasonable amount of money to spend on themselves and they’re doing it every day, which is really exciting.
Speaker 1:
And selling is serving, and it’s what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing on your face is that you confidently believe that, like the more things that people get in that funnel, the better off they are or the higher the chances of success that they’ll have in their real estate business.
Speaker 2:
I really do Nice, because I get it. People will buy the 24 guides and then they go back to the Facebook ad and they leave a comment and they’re like so what should I do with them? Now I’m like, well, you need to put them on your website. You need to have an opt-in page so that they can give you their contact information, because if you just I don’t know you just one guy, oh, bless his heart he put it in Google drive and then he copied the public share link and he went to his YouTube channel and he put that in a link below the video. So I’m watching your video and it’s like this is great. I click on it goes right to the Google Drive where I can download that document. He’s not getting my contact information because he gave it away for free, and so I made a joke video about that one too, and I was like I remember when I was in high school and my mom sat me down and had the talk why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Speaker 1:
That’s what you’re doing.
Speaker 2:
You’re giving them the milk for free. You’ve got to put it behind an opt-in page. You can’t follow up with someone if you don’t know their name and you don’t have their email. This is how you build a relationship and you nurture these people over time until they’re finally ready to buy or sell a house. So yeah, they need this stuff. I’m just trying to convince them that they do.
Speaker 1:
Final question Looking back over your journey of making the pivot to low ticket offers in light of your declining sales because of the real estate market, of your high ticket offer, and then going through the testing of the low ticket offer and actually testing, like you said, different orders or like different orders of offers in that low ticket offer funnel and even different price points, what is one final word of encouragement that you would leave the listener, who needs more money in their business, possibly wants the benefit of not being tied down to a launch and wants like steady revenue coming in instead of like launch revenue and then nothing and then launch revenue. But maybe they’ve tried to do a low ticket offer funnel and it’s been tough going. Like what’s that final word of encouragement you’d leave for them?
Speaker 2:
It’s taken a lot of testing to get to the point where it’s working this well and it’d be so easy to get discouraged, like last week I turned on a brand new ad and it was working so well. It had like a 14 X row ads that I just said I’m just going to like quadruple the budget right now because why not? And then completely went into the negative for the next three days and I was having heart failure of like, oh my gosh, like I’m just flushing this money down the toilet. So it really does. It takes a lot of testing. You’re going to launch this thing and maybe hardly anybody buys it and then you have to decide okay, is anyone even clicking? If they’re not clicking, then it’s my ad. I got to go fix my ad. If they click, they go to the landing page, but they don’t buy. It’s the landing page. Is it the headline? Is it the image? Like, just focus on one thing at a time. Are you getting the click? If not, work on the ad. If you’re getting the click, but then they don’t convert, work on the landing page. And then, once you get that working, just say, okay, let’s, let’s try it at two different price points and we’ll run a split test and say do more people buy it at $11 or more people buy it at $17? Let’s run it for a week and see what happens. And then you go, you export all your data and go to chat GPT and say please put this in English for me. And it says pick this one. Okay, got it. And you don’t have to have the entire upsell funnel at the beginning, literally just start with the main offer and one order bump and then, a week or two later, add an up bump and then, a week or two later, add an upsell and then a week or two later, add another upsell. So I mean, I spent a lot of time working on this over the course of a couple of months to build it all out. But then, once it started working and I could see that it was profitable, and then people will go leave reviews, they go back to the Facebook ad and they’re like I bought this two months ago. These are amazing. And they leave this spontaneously wonderful testimonial. It’s like oh my gosh, this is just fantastic.
Speaker 2:
So now I’m at the point, now that I know the funny ads are really working for me I’m thinking how, how, how often can I make more ads. How, like the other day, I grabbed my husband and I said what are you doing? He said nothing. I’m like, good, you’re my cameraman. Come on, we’re filming some videos. And all I did was record five new opening hooks. And then I just used the same video that I had before and all I did was replace the opening, and so now it’s like I have five brand new videos, but they’re not. It was only the first five seconds were different, and then the rest of the video was exactly the same. So I’ve got all those running right now so that I can test them and see which is the hook that grabs people’s attention the most.
Speaker 2:
And then just testing, testing testing and then going to chat, gpt and saying like this is the ad that’s working so well. Give me some ideas for other funny ads.
Speaker 1:
Testing, testing, testing, testing. The interesting thing is, I say a quote which is a Thomas Edison quote, that we miss out on opportunity because it’s dressed up in overalls and looks like work and it sounds like you’ve put in the work.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I even consider it work. It’s kind of fun, right. You get to be creative and you get to go in and look at, all right, what is working and how can I make this just a tiny bit better? What if I could increase the conversion rate just a little tiny bit? And so I do spend a lot of time looking at the stuff and tweaking it and playing with it, but in the end it’s been profitable.
Speaker 2:
But since I started running these ads at the beginning of January, it’s been profitable, and so I almost feel like I’m getting paid to grow my email list. If I spend a dollar, but I make $1.50, and I do that every day for months on end I am getting these names into my database, where then when I say I’m having a flash sale, we’re going to run this Christmas, in July sale, buy something else, and here’s the bonus that you get with it or whatever, and all these people end up buying it because I’m getting thousands and thousands of names into my database that were not there before. It’s great, it’s a win-win-win for everybody. That’s the holy grail.
Speaker 1:
I mean the best kind of list growth is growing your list with buyers.
Speaker 2:
Right, because I’ve always offered these lead magnets and they’ll go in and they’ll read all of my emails and they’ll reply to the emails. But they don’t always buy and that’s fine, except if you end up with what I had was a database where they charge you per name that you have in your database and they say, oh, your annual bill is coming due and it’s $6,000. They say, oh, your annual bill is coming due and it’s $6,000. And you realize that the vast majority of those people don’t even open half of your emails anymore because they’ve been on your list for so long they just stop opening them. But if we get buyers into your database now, like all of the people that bought in the last week, have started on a new automated campaign and, like, email number one has a 56% open rate.
Speaker 2:
Email number two, I think, is 52%. Email number four was like 54%. That’s great, like when you’re getting over 50% open rates from people that just gave you money and now you’re going to say, by the way, I have this other stuff you should buy too. And of course we’re doing it because I genuinely know that it will help their business and so I don’t feel gross about trying to sell them anything. It’s like. This was how I built my business. I can tell you exactly what I did and why it will work for you too. Just let me help you will work for you too.
Speaker 1:
Just let me help you. That is very soundbiteable. I’m going to chop it up and put it in the intro. I think I don’t think I know that when you talked about testing step-by-step and this is a self-promo ad for the listener, but that’s why I have the course called the Ad Testing Che cheat code. That takes you through the exact same four steps that I use when I first start a client account, so that you can systematically make sure that you’re getting your leads or sales for the best cost possible, while also reaching a highly qualified person, and that’s important. I heard from you, karen, that you you didn’t settle for just one ad or two ads, and you didn’t even settle for only testing the ads, but you went and tested the landing page too, and then prices, so to speak, by split testing, and Bravo. Well, you deserve all of the sales and all of the peace of mind and maybe even the dopamine hits that you get daily from looking at the notifications that go up on your lock screen.
Speaker 2:
I love them. I used to have all of the sales would come into my inbox and just go straight to a folder so that it wasn’t filling up my inbox. And now it’s like bring into my inbox, baby, I want to see all of those sales. Because when I go to my inbox and it’s like bring into my inbox, baby, I want to see all of those sales. Because when I go to my inbox and it’s like SamCart, samcart, all the way down it’s like yes, this is working and it just makes me that much more motivated.
Speaker 1:
Well, shoot, we’re going to end with that. Thank you very much for sharing all this with the listener, and if they happen to be a real estate agent then, or just want to get in touch with you, where is the best place for them to do that?
Speaker 2:
Well, my website is videobossagentcom and my YouTube channel is where I am most active, so that is youtubecom. Forward slash, karen Carr.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for being here and sharing this, karen, and it was really lovely connecting with you again.
Speaker 2:
It was great to see you, Kwejo. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
All right, dear listener, until the next time that you hear or see me, see me or hear from me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
