One of the amazing blogs I read regularly is Kim Garst’s Boom! Social Blog. Recently, Terry Williamson wrote a very interesting post about the cost of sales leads. This actual case study will show you the real cost of generating leads online. It is pretty rare to find the exact data for a study like this because most people are not tracking their data very well and if they are really good at tracking, they typically don’t like to share it.
Enjoy this awesome case study:
In January, Boom! Social ran Facebook Ads to our 27 Killer Facebook Post Ideas for Small Business Owners lead magnet/free offer. We paid $1.61 in advertising fees for each of the 4,707 people who traded us their email address for this great little guide.
Of the 4,707 people who took the offer, 653, or 13.87%, of them took the $9 upsell that was offered directly after they opted in.
You can do the math a number of different ways, but long and short of it we spent $7,578 in Facebook Ads costs to earn $5,877 in digital product sales. Add the time it took to the write the lead magnet, develop the mini-course, produce the Facebook Ads and manage the whole process and the damage looks even worse.
That’s a net loss of $1,701…in one month, for just ONE of the four different free offers we are running!
That’s a HORRIBLE business move, right? Think about it. We just paid $1,701 to give something away for free!
Nope, it’s actually the best money our company could have spent. We invested $1,701 to add 4,707 qualified sales leads and 653 buyers to our email subscriber list. That’s 36 cents for every opt-in and just $2.60 for each buyer!
Source: KimGarst.com