How much is 2 minutes costing you?
Have you ever fallen down the rabbit hole of unfounded opinions and engagement farming that is marketing Twitter?
I do it all the time.
There are hundreds of thousands of words wasted around the topic of customer experience.
The threads all start with some version of the following:
Do your ads look too much like an ad? You should be making ads that don’t look like ads.
Make ugly ads. If your ads are too pretty and people will get suspicious and never buy from you.
Are you flooding their inbox? If you send too many emails, they’ll hate you.
Are you blowing up their phone? If you send too many texts, they’ll hate you.
If they hate you, they’ll buy from someone else, and you’ll have to live in your car, and your family will disown you, and everyone will tweet about it so you’ll never be able to show your face again.
I’m all about customer experience. I want anyone who reads one of the emails or text messages I write to be surprised and delighted and inspired to buy a product.
But the most important moment of customer experience is when that customer is ready to experience your product. If they have a bad experience, or a delayed experience, in that moment, you could lose them forever.
I wish I could give you the exact amount of time you have to get a customer to add an item to their cart, input their credit card information and confirm their purchase before you’ve lost them, but I don’t know that answer.
What I can tell you is it’s less than 2 minutes.
If it’s not broke…
I write copy and manage a list for a men’s grooming brand. We use a quiz to help customers choose between one of two bestselling products.
It’s a seven-question quiz that gathers first-party data and leads customers to a personalized landing page featuring the recommended product and how it solves the problems they highlight in the quiz.
It works the way a quiz should. It gathers essential data. It gives customers a customized experience. It converts at 5%.
(if you want to know more, book a call and we’ll talk about how that strategy could work for you.)
Over 50% of customers would opt into our email list to get a free gift and their results.
Don’t make them opt in to get their results. People hate that, FYI.
They immediately get an email with their results and the code for their free gift. That was the first email in a six email flow.
Well, because we’re marketers, we got antsy watching something work so well. So, we decided to test it to see if we could make it better. We were seeing dollar signs, podcast interviews and marketing conference invites.
It didn’t work out that way.
We shortened the quiz by one question and reworked the email flow to look a little nicer and highlight different value props based on all the data we had gathered from the tens of thousands of people who had already gone through the quiz.
We built everything, checked all our links, and turned it on.
The $10,000 2 Minute Delay
Except this time, we got timid. We had been sending a ton of emails. 3-4 weekly campaigns. Quarterly promotions. Customer surveys. Stock updates.
We decided we would be a little more “gentle” with this flow and we put a 2 minute delay between someone entering the flow and the first email sending. There was no reason for it other than fear. We didn’t want to “blow up the customer’s inbox”.
Then flow revenue fell through the floor.
the 2 minute delay from hell
We did everything but the right thing to try to fix it.
We set up and A/B test between the landing page and product page.
We tested send times.
We tested subject lines.
This flow that used to generate $10,000 to $15,000 a week, was now only bringing in a little over $6,000 a week.
From $1.15 per recipient to $0.35 per recipient.
We were stuck and frustrated and worried that we had just broken something and were ready to go back to the old, ugly flow to fix the problem.
One Tuesday the marketing director and I were staring at the flow in Klaviyo. He asked me, “Why did we put this 2-minute delay here?”
I responded, “because we didn’t want to be too aggressive with new subscribers.”
“Do you want to see what happens when we take it off?”
“It’s worth a shot. I wasn’t 100% on putting it there in the first place.”
I deleted the delay and didn’t touch anything else.
By Friday the flow was on it’s way back up.
The following Monday it was at $1.05 per recipient. For those following along that’s a $0.70 jump in less than a week. That’s a 100% increase in revenue per recipient, all because we deleted a 2 minute delay.
120 seconds had cost us tens of thousands of dollars.
Why?
Customer Intent
We missed this foundational marketing principle because we were afraid of our subscribers. We had listened to all the disembodied voices in the Twitter-sphere and missed out on thousands of dollars and customers.
Think about it, because we didn’t.
If a customer sees one of your ads, clicks on it, that ad takes them to a quiz, they answer all the questions AND gives you their email address, is that customer ready to buy?
Yes.
Their intent is higher than it might ever be again. You don’t have to sell them anymore. They’ve seen everything they need to see to buy your product in that moment.
Why would you wait two minutes to send them the thing that will help them buy?
You wouldn’t, unless you wanted to miss your moment. If you miss your moment there, you might not get another one.
You have to be aggressive. You have to send the email right then. You have to feature their quiz results (aka what they asked for) right up top. You need to show them the free gift and how to get it with their purchase right under their quiz results.
And you need to do all that in the 60 seconds after they take their quiz, because if you don’t, you might never see them again.
And you might miss out on tens of thousands of dollars.
And you might be sitting in front of your computer with your email marketing manager wondering what happened to your most profitable flow.
It’s not a fun feeling.
Don’t let it happen to you. I made this mistake so you don’t have to, and so I never have to do it again.
If you want to profit from my mistake, click here.