We talk a whole lot about the FIRST steps of putting a program in evergreen because honestly, that’s when most people either get it wrong or get stuck.

Like when we talked about easy funnels you can create (and why you need them in the first place 🙂 Or when we talked about the foundations of a successful evergreen funnel (yep, it starts way before you set up Deadline Funnels)

Not today friend!!!

Let’s fast-forward a few months into your perfectly-crafted evergreen funnel and dive into the topic of making EVEN MORE sales in evergreen.

What does ‘SCALING’ even mean?

In general terms, ‘scaling’ means growing your product or business.

When it comes to scaling your evergreen offer, it also implies you are selling more without ‘breaking’ the funnel (not making money or losing money)

In addition, we talk about ‘scaling ads’ in combination with scaling your evergreen offer, since it is one of the best ways to scale.

There are many ways to grow your program in evergreen (specially after you tested your funnel the right way) so let me show you a few of the best ones.

1. Increase Traffic (more people see your program)

The easiest way (and the first one we focus on) to scale your evergreen funnel is to get more people to go through it.

There are many ways to get more people to see your offer in evergreen so I recommend you make a quick list of all the audiences you have access to (social media channels, professional groups, ads audiences you tried, etc) to kickstart the expansion.

• Paid Advertising: Increase or start ads to reach new audiences. Meta, YouTube, LInkedIn, Google, Pinterest and TikTok all offer paid ads options that work amazingly well for course creators (I tried almost all of them and it works!)
• Podcast or YouTube: Creating a podcast or youtube channel that focuses on driving people to your funnel is a great way to get people that are legitimately interested in the problem you solve. I don’t know the first thing about becoming a ‘podcaster’ or ‘youtuber’ but I recommend to my clients to build one of those channels as soon as they validate an evergreen offer to host their evergreen content and drive sales.
• Social Media Channels: just because your Instagram hasn’t grown in the past year, it doesn’t mean it won’t bring new people to your funnel. Creating or doubling-down on one social media outlet will help you send people through your funnel.
• Strategic Partnerships: affiliates, guest training and interviews, summits, bundles, etc all work really well to put your message in front of new audiences that are already pre-selected by you.
• Search Engine: ranking on Google and Pinterest (SEO). To establish results you’ll need some solid work for a few months so start early.
• Expert Events: writing a book, getting published on media outlets, PR, etc. Those are more advanced techniques but great for scaling way past your social media and ads reach.

When you are scaling with traffic, Profitability and Customer Support are special concerns at this phase. Ads can get more expensive and you might experience diminishing returns.

It is important to create a holistic and balanced strategy to scale and do it progressively so you don’t cash out.

2. Add offers to the funnel (increase LTV or CLV)

Not every funnel will grow if you just ‘pump in’ more money on ads, period! For offers with smaller online audiences, we find that paid advertising or growing organically becomes challenging very quickly.

When that’s the case, I may advise clients to implement a strategically aligned offer suite (downsells, upsells) to increase the Customer Lifetime Value since acquiring new students is expensive.

Despite that those are ‘fancy words’ for adding other offers to the same audience, I want to emphasize that if not done ‘strategically’ it can be a huge burden on you and your business.

Quick checks to see if you should scale with additional OFFERS:

• Have you tried other sources of traffic like social media and broader audiences for your ads?
• Do you have a unique and transformational offer that your paid clients absolutely need? (just slapping extra group calls and calling it a ‘VIP’ is just not flying anymore).
• Do you have the time and resources to create and run another offer without losing focus?

If you have a solid yes to all those questions, creating an upsell or downsell could be a great way to scale your funnel profitably.

How to Scale Your Ad Campaigns (without losing money!)

Now that we talked about all the different ways to scale, let’s dive deeper into scaling paid ads on Meta (different platforms will have different ways by the way).

I usually approach it from 2 ‘fronts’:

• Increasing budget for existing campaigns
• Testing new campaigns

Scale EXISTING Ad Campaigns

Every funnel (or client) is a bit different but if I had to pick just one strategy to work more often, it would be to increase the budget by 20% (or less) every week after evaluating results from the prior weeks.

There is a REAL THING called ‘diminishing returns’ when it comes to ads and we see it happening often – when you reach it, it’s time to re-evaluate and that’s why we increase the budget sloooowly.

You will reach a point where the existing campaigns will either crash (not convert at all) or become less profitable at certain daily budgets so I recommend you start testing new campaigns/audiences as soon as you are ready to scale.

***Inside Scale with Evergreen we create additional organic traffic sources to offset increasing ad costs and we create custom dashboards for the clients to track performance – It's amazing!

Test NEW Ad Campaigns

As soon as we are ready to scale the ads that are working, we also start testing new campaigns.

The first focus is to find new AUDIENCES that we can put our ads in front of. Again, this is a case-by-case decision but the most common route is to create new interest-based audiences and split test them side-by-side.

I hate losing money (mine or clients’) so I test with a minimum possible – usually enough budget to get at least ONE SALE from the test.

So if your Cost Per Lead is $3 and your funnel CONVERSION RATE is 1%, you’ll need to invest at least $300 or get 100 leads to enter the funnel to test if an audience/ads campaign works.

You can literally test any parameter you want (audience conversion, cost per lead, lifetime value, ascension rate, etc) when testing new ads but I recommend testing 1 at a time and keeping only the campaigns that work the best in your ‘portfolio’.

Week by week take a look at all your data to spot trends and opportunities to test!

Alright, if you realized that scaling your ads is a lot more complicated than a simple ‘do this’ – you’re not alone and honestly you are ahead of most 🙂

Evergreen is absolutely a numbers-game that takes some time and practice but don’t be afraid to start small and go from there.

If you have any burning questions about scaling, reply to this email and we can chat some more – split-testing is my favorite ‘geek out’ topic!

Your numbers buddy,

Roberta

PS: If you are planning to create a successful evergreen program in 2023, SCALE WITH EVERGREEN is the all-in-one program you need to get! The new wave starts January 09th and you get not only the framework but my team’s eyes on your metrics, message, funnel, you name it! Take a Look and Apply Today