Split Testing Your Way To 23,337 Email Subscribers – The Digital Marketing Superhero’s Club Volume 1 Chapter 8

What if you have a massive project targeting groups of local people across America but only a small budget to reach them?

This week’s guest Meg Brunson took an interesting approach to that problem which resulted in a massive growth in newsletter subscribers and website traffic.

How did she do it? By split testing and taking an innovative approach to lead magnets.

Superhero Tips – How To Caption Your Videos & Engage More Of Your Audience

Video can help you reach more of your audience and engage them, but if you aren’t adding captions to those videos, you are limiting their effect.

If a viewer is in a crowded room or on public transport, they will be reluctant to press the play button unless they’ve got headphones handy.

If they are hard of hearing you don’t want to eliminate them from your audience by making your video inaccessible.

If you want more people to consume your videos for longer, captioning is a must. But isn’t it complex and expensive?

If you want more people to consume your videos for longer, captioning is a must. But isn’t it complex and expensive?Click To Tweet

It doesn’t have to be. I will talk you through captaining a video and I’ll share tools that make it easier.

But first…

Closed captions, open captions, what’s the difference and which should you choose?

Closed captions are text based files you upload along with your video. YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (via Twitter media studio) all allow you to add this file at the upload stage.

Once added the viewer can be switched on and off. You can also add captions in multiple languages making them even more accessible.

Open captions become part of the video itself. If you make a typo you’re screwed, it’s stuck on your video for ever.

The pro is that you, not the social network have creative control over the captions. You can make them look pretty and keep them on brand.

How do you add captions to your video?

Start with a caption file. Where do you get one of those? There’s a simple way and a free way.

The Free Way

Upload your video to YouTube and it will auto-transcribe a caption file for you. It won’t be completely accurate so you’ll need to edit. Once you’ve finished, you can download the file and use it on other channels.

More on how to do that here.

The Simple Way

Use a service to transcribe your video. I use Rev.com for that. It costs $1 a minute for a transcription, as long as your video is short it’s cost effective.

You’ll need to do some forward planning with this as transcriptions can take up to 24 hours.

Human beings create Rev transcriptions which means the accuracy is high.

For longer videos try Temi. It’s much cheaper, just $0.10 a minute and the transcriptions are almost instant.

Because machines translate the videos rather than humans they aren’t as accurate as Rev. Editing will be required.

Most social networks, all of the ones I’ve mentioned require a .srt caption file. This is the file you’ll get from the transcription service you use. 

When uploading to Facebook you need to add a language code to your file name. More on that here.

Got a caption file, what’s next?

Now you have your file you can add it to social networks when uploading and you can add it to some editing software.

I use Camtasia for video editing and this works with .srt files. Converting them into a text layer you can style with your own branding.

You can also use your file with web-based video tool Kapwing.

Kapwing makes it easy to create those funky square videos you’ve seen popping up in your feeds. You can customise the size and style of your captions to match your branding.

Here’s one I made earlier. 

Mobile captioning

Apple Clips is a free tool for iPhone. It’s a captioning tool and editor all in one. The big downside is that you have to shoot your videos straight into Clips to get captions. You can’t do it with pre-recorded video.

I love the editing function, the stickers and filters you can add.

Here’s one I made earlier.

Similar to Apple Clips, Clipomatic has quirky caption styles. Clips only works with square formatted video whereas Clipomatic lets you create vertical video, ideal for Instagram stories or IGTV.

Android users finally have a good captioning tool. Autocap has stylish caption options and auto transcribes your video. 

It’s at least as good as the iPhone options.

Here’s one I made earlier.

Quicc is a web-based captioning tool that works well on mobile you can use this whatever platform you are on. The captioning, although done by machine is pretty accurate.

The downside is that it is in Beta at the moment. There may be some places left on the testing panel. You can apply here.

Superpower of the week – Blueprint from Facebook

Did you know that Facebook has its own Facebook ads training programme? If you are determined to learn ads the right way sign up and take the course. You can even do and exam and get certified.

Find out more here.

Superhero Interview – Meg Brunson

Meg is a former Facebook employee who provides marketing support to parents who want to build their business without feeling guilt over the ‘balance’ of family & entrepreneurship. Her clients enjoy predictable leads/traffic and positive ROI within 3 months – and spend more time making happy memories with their kids than they do stressed over their marketing.

What if you have a massive project targeting groups of local people across America but only a small budget to reach them with?Click To Tweet

Amanda Webb:

Today’s superhero is Meg Brunson from EIEIO Marketing, which I have to say is the best name I’ve ever heard for a business. Welcome to the show, Meg.

Meg Brunson:

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Amanda Webb:

And we’ve known each other online for a little while. We met in person at Social Media Marketing World, and we got chatting over breakfast, and I thought you would just be an amazing guest to have, because you have so much knowledge and experience in using Facebook in particular. So tell me, where did that start?

Meg Brunson:

Oh boy. Well, it started when I had this entrepreneurial streak, and I wasn’t a business person, you know? And I needed to figure out how to build a business and figure out how to market it, and Facebook was the way I figured out how to build that business at the time. Fast forward a few years, I was actually hired to work at Facebook. I went there for about a year, but I missed the entrepreneurial freedom, so after a year of returning to the corporate world, I returned back to entrepreneurship, and that’s when I launched my marketing agency.

Amanda Webb:

That’s cool. And I know … it’s kind of cool that you went and worked for Facebook and kind of got the inside track, and then came back. So now you can actually apply it to what you’re doing in your own business, I’m guessing.

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. It certainly wasn’t the plan, but it did play out nicely.

Amanda Webb:

We have a really interesting case study that you’re going to share with us today for a campaign that you were running. So start off by telling me who it was for, or the type of company it was for, and what were the goals of the campaign.

Meg Brunson:

Sure. One of my clients is local, it’s here in the United States, and they have two sites in Canada, but they’re a parenting resource. So they help parents plan their weekends by finding fun things to do with the Kids Out and About in your local area. And they want to get more readers, so they want to get subscribers to the newsletter, they want to get visitors on the website, and they make money by selling advertising space to other local businesses who want to put their brand in front of local parents.

Amanda Webb:

They have how many websites? ‘Cause that was the first thing that struck me when you told me what you were going to be talking about.

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. So right now, they have 27 websites.

Amanda Webb:

Wow. And is that for each state or each region that they’re servicing?

Meg Brunson:

It’s a variety of different cities. So like Arizona only has one here in Phoenix, but some areas like New York state has multiple. I probably would get them wrong. I know they’ve got at least five, six. Some states have more than others. It started in New York state, so that’s why New York is a little more heavily populated, and then they’ve been expanding from there.

Amanda Webb:

Okay. Okay, so they launched their websites. What was your job there?

Meg Brunson:

Well, they launched actually in New York 16 years ago, and they’ve slowly built up over the years, but then last year they decided that they wanted to just really blow things out of the water. So they expanded dramatically. They added 18 new sites to their network in 2018.

So what we did is we took those 18 brand new sites, and we divided them into two. So two groups of nine. And we did this division very strategically, so we tried to pair cities that were similar to each other in that they were close to each other. So the example I used, there’s two cities in Texas, Dallas and Fort Worth, and they’re just a couple hours apart, but Fort Worth is significantly smaller.

So we paired those together, and then we put Fort Worth, the smaller city, in the paid group and Dallas in the organic group. And we did this for all of those 18 cities so that we could get a split test between the regions, and we could really see how Facebook ads impacted the growth.

Now because they had actually started so many years ago, they had a ton of data about what that growth curve would look like organically without ads, because they want these sites in multiple cities before that point.

Amanda Webb:

So the reason was very specifically to split test. It wasn’t for budget reasons? Or did that come into it as well?

Meg Brunson:

I mean, they’re definitely a small business, so budget was definitely a concern. But we also needed to prove that it was going to be cost-effective, and it was going to benefit the bottom line.

Amanda Webb:

Okay. That’s cool. So tell me, what did you run for them? What ads did you go for?

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. So we did lead ads. We went for lead ads on Facebook. We went with $5 a day, so not a huge budget, but that’s $5 per region. So remember we were running them in nine different regions, so you have to kind of multiply that up to get the big picture, I guess. But on a site-by-site basis, it was just $5 a day with a lead ad.

Amanda Webb:

And just for anyone that doesn’t know, could you just briefly say what a lead ad is? I know both me and you know the language. Just for anyone that’s listening that’s not sure.

Meg Brunson:

Sure. So it’s a Facebook ad. It looks just like any other Facebook ad, but when you click on it, instead of bringing you to a website or a landing page, it populates basically a pop-up right on Facebook where the audience can put their email address. That’s all we asked for was email. You can ask for other things. And then we used a program called Zapier, which takes the lead and zaps it right into their email provider, which for them is MailChimp.

Amanda Webb:

Cool. Okay. That’s good. All right. Go ahead.

Meg Brunson:

So I explained to them that people aren’t going to give you their email for no reason, so we’re going to have to sweeten the pot a little bit with some sort of an opt-in. And what we did that worked the best, which kind of astonished me, is we took their most popular page. It’s just a page on their website that gets the most traffic. It’s the top 20 places to bring kids in fill-in-the-blank city, and we ran an ad to encourage people to opt-in to be directed to that website.

Amanda Webb:

All right. Cool.

Meg Brunson:

And it was crushing it. Crushing it! So it crushed it all last year. Don’t get me wrong, we tested some other things to that didn’t crush it quite as much.

Amanda Webb:

So it was basically just that web page. It wasn’t like a PDF or anything, it was just the web page you were sending them to.

Meg Brunson:

Right. And I think it was just convenience. They could have gone and Googled it and gotten there too, but it’s convenience, and we were really clear that they were also going to be getting this weekly newsletter. And once they submitted the lead ad, it took them to the thank you page of the lead ad, and it said, “Click here to visit the top 20 list in your area,” and they could go through.

Amanda Webb:

That’s really interesting, isn’t it? So instead of creating something special, you’re just going for something you know is going to be … you know that other people are loving already. I suppose that’s the thing.

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. Exactly.

Amanda Webb:

Okay. Fabulous. Right. So you’re running those two, nine of the 18 sites, and what are you doing on the other nine? Are you doing anything at all, or?

Meg Brunson:

Just the normal stuff that they were doing. They’ve got somebody who posts organic content to their Facebook pages. Periodically they are listing things on their website. They’re just kind of waiting for the Google juice to pick up, so that they start getting that SEO that usually will come, you know, within 12 to 24 months, especially because these sites were all built on sub-domains. So there’s that domain authority that they already have built in.

Amanda Webb:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So then tell me, how did we do? Did Facebook ads win, or did organic win? I feel like I know the answer.

Meg Brunson:

Facebook ads totally won. Facebook ads totally won. Kids Out and About, prior to this, they were doing a lot of outreach through local events and things like that. They used to have a publisher in each region, and the publishers would go to children’s fairs and hand out little knickknacks to kids, and try to get people to sign up and things like that. Kind of like … what am I trying to think of? Like a trade show.

Amanda Webb:

Right.

We were able to show that the Facebook ads are not only more affordable than paying somebody to go to a trade show, they're more effective.Click To Tweet

Meg Brunson:

But we were able to show that the Facebook ads are not only more affordable than paying somebody to go to a trade show, they’re more effective. I’m looking right now. I’m going to describe the numbers that I pulled up to talk to you about. We started running these ads in March of 2018, and at December of 2018, those nine regions that we left to be organic had 298 newsletter readers, so subscribers to the newsletter.

Amanda Webb:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Meg Brunson:

The regions, the nine smaller regions that we paid $5 a day for, totaled 23,337 newsletter readers.

Amanda Webb:

Wow. Wow. That is huge.

Meg Brunson:

That is a huge difference.

Amanda Webb:

So I suppose the question I wanted to ask all the way through this, but I thought we’d wait until we got the results, was how were you targeting people? Were you just building interest-based audiences, were you using lookalike audiences, were you doing something else that was magic that was making this happen for you?

Meg Brunson:

I think magic. I love it. No. I went through … ’cause they had a bunch of existing sites, and so I went through, and I took their subscribers from all of their pre-existing sites, put them into one audience, and then created a lookalike based off of that.

Amanda Webb:

Right. Yes.

Meg Brunson:

And we narrowed it down to women only, because moms are just more likely to opt-in to this stuff than dads are. So we made a couple little tweaks to the targeting that way, but other than that, we just let it go.

Amanda Webb:

And did you … ’cause this is something I’ve been discussing with a lot of Facebook ads people, so just to get geeky for anyone that’s listening, this is just me. Did you add any additional targeting apart from demographics? Did you add any interest targeting to that lookalike audience, ’cause … well, I’ll let you say what you’ve experienced first.

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. I didn’t. I want to say that, now thinking back, I want to say there might have been a couple that we saw some higher prices, and then I went back and I added parents to them to just try to find. So I think at the end of the day, there ended up being a little bit of a split. Some of them performed just fine without that additional bit, and some of them needed a little additional tightening up by just targeting parents with kids between the ages of zero and 18.

Amanda Webb:

So that’s really interesting, because I’d be the same. I tend not to use the targeting. When I first used lookalike audiences, I’d use targeting on the lookalike audiences, but I found that they didn’t perform as well. So I tend to just let them roam free, even though Facebook sends you a message like ten times a day saying, “Why don’t you want some targeting to this audience?” And it’s kind of, “I did, and it didn’t work.” So it was just from a geeky perspective, interested to know how that worked. But definitely that’s something I hadn’t considered now, because I’d kind of gone all gung ho on, “I don’t need to add targeting.” Maybe that’s something, if I find an ad isn’t working, I could do.

Meg Brunson:

Yeah. It’s worth testing just to see if maybe it needs a little extra nudge in the right direction.

Amanda Webb:

So obviously your client was delighted with you.

Meg Brunson:

Well, yeah, and there’s actually one more thing I really wanted to share was super unexpected and super exciting. We were running these lead ads to get subscribers, right? I’m a huge fan of building email lists, because you own those emails and if something happens, you can always email people.

So I love email lists. But we also were tracking website visitors. Using Google Analytics, how many unique people are coming to the website to view content. And during this same time frame, those unpaid, the ones that were in the unpaid group, they got about 64,000 page views. So I mean, people were going to the website, they just weren’t subscribing, which is a whole other issue that could be addressed separately. But 64,000. When we look at the paid group, how many unique people came in that time range, it was 105,000.

Amanda Webb:

Oh, wow.

Meg Brunson:

If you do the math, like if we flip back to the newsletter readers, there was like about 23,000 more email subscribers that opted in, but when we look at the website visitors, there’s over 40,000 new visitors. So there’s 17,000 more people that came to the website than those people that signed up for the newsletters.

So even though we were optimizing to get emails, we got those people, or at least a comparable amount of those people, plus 17,000 more to hit the website. So I’m not an SEO person, but my guess is that all of that increased traffic from social gave it just a little boost in SEO, or it’s possible that people were sharing it with their friends. But we got way more website visitors even though that’s not what we were optimizing for.

Amanda Webb:

That is really interesting, and I know the SEO world is split on … I know there have been updates to Google that do allow some sort of social signaling in, or there is some lock on effect. I feel like we’re going to get murdered in our sleep by an SEO person now, but that is really interesting data. I mean, it can’t be overlooked, because you were split testing.

Meg Brunson:

Right. And the smaller sites. That’s the other thing, is that these were all the smaller sites. We’re comparing the little guys who have the higher numbers now to the big guys that are stuck in the lower numbers.

Amanda Webb:

That’s fascinating. And there has to be a reason behind it. I’d really want to dig deeper and see what we thought was going on. That’s brilliant, Meg. Thank you so much for sharing that. You really are a digital superhero, and welcome to the club!

Meg Brunson:

Thank you! It was fun.

Amanda Webb:

Before we go, do let us know where we can find you online.

Meg Brunson:

Sure. You can visit my personally branded website at megbrunson.com, or my marketing agency at eieiomarketing.com.

Amanda Webb:

And you really should go visit her website, because you have to experience Meg’s wonderful hair. I have to say.

Find Meg Online

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FamilyPreneur Community

EIEIO Marketing