‘When you accept life as it is, you’re free.’
RICHARD CARLSON
Here’s a marketing truth that will either be depressing as hell, or the most liberating thing you’ve ever heard. Don’t start marketing anything until you ‘get’ this: Not everyone is going to buy.
Yeah, I know. Revolutionary right? Totally worth the cost of this book! But do you know, on average, how many people will actually buy from you during your next marketing campaign, or are you just hoping for the best?
When I see people depressed over their failed launch or crying because their event didn’t sell out, I ask, ‘What were your conversion statistics? How many people viewed your sales page?’ Yeah, okay, I may have failed Statistics 101 in college, but in business I finally realized the power of knowing this stuff. It’s helped me be incredibly chill about my results and, in most cases, to be able to predict exactly how many sales (and even refunds) we’ll see during a launch.
Mark once asked me to guess the sales figures from our latest marketing campaign, and all I asked was how many people we’d emailed. Knowing that our average email open rate is around 25 percent, our average click-through rate is 10 percent, and the sales conversion is around 1 to 2 percent, I guessed it almost exactly. It’s predictable, but Mark was amazed. It was like a party trick! I’m not psychic; I’m just realistic about my sales conversions stats!
This is probably a vast generalization, but I’ve found that many women have a huge mental block around learning about sales conversions. I don’t know if it sounds scary, if they think it’s too complicated, or something else. But sales conversions, like gravity, are a truth that you just can’t ignore. Not everyone will buy, and your sales results will follow a regular statistical pattern. Don’t believe me? Track your next marketing campaign, and then read this section of the book again. Virgos are rarely wrong!
Once I overcame my own resistance to tracking statistics, it was simple: just calculate how many people visited the sales page versus how many people bought from you. Once you know, it’s not scary, it’s actually fun, because you can set goals that you can achieve and have actual data you can use (instead of a vague, unexplained feeling that you’re a loser).
On average, only 1 to 2 percent of people who see your sales page will buy. So, if you get 100 visitors to your page and only one sale, you’re actually right on track. The bigger your numbers get, the more that statistic will play out. You might get 100 visitors, no sales, and be like, ‘Hey Denise, where’s my money?’ But that 1 percent conversion might not kick in until you’ve had at least 1,000 people view your sales page. Either way, it’s not personal: it’s just the numbers playing out.
Now, 1 percent conversion is a good rule of thumb for a regular marketing campaign, but you can get higher conversions depending on how you’re selling. Using a more high-touch approach like selling over the phone (for example, converting prospective clients from a free consult to a paid package), you could convert anything from 25 to 75 percent, depending on your skill and how well you pre-screen your potential clients. Selling from the stage to a cold audience could lead to an average conversion rate of 5 to 15 percent of the room. I have friends who’ve achieved a 60 to 80 percent conversion rate because of how well they pre-screened their audience.
But for any mass marketing campaign such as advertising (online and in print), email marketing, or direct response (such as letters or postcards), you’re looking at 1 to 2 percent of customers who will buy.
Is that sobering? Scary? Daunting? I’m sorry about that, but I honestly hope it feels empowering because it gives you actual information about what it will take to hit your sales targets. Even though it sounds like more work to be aware of it, having a realistic barometer of success helps you be more chill and accepting of reality (and to take that reality less personally).
I’m often asked: can you beat the stats by being better than your competitors – for example, by having a sexier sales page, killer bonuses, or launching when Mercury isn’t retrograde? Yes and no. Look at these list-size/conversion-rate numbers for some of my first few launches:
| List size | Sales | Conversion rate |
| 2,466 | 14 | 0.57 percent |
| 3,461 | 42 | 1.21 percent |
| 4,436 | 44 | 0.99 percent |
| 5,275 | 42 | 0.80 percent |
| 7,236 | 76 | 1.05 percent |
Remember: 1 percent is a good conversion rate. I didn’t always make it. You might think that because I’m a fancy internet millionaire with a massive newsletter list, my statistics must be better, but they aren’t. My last launch converted at 1.12 percent with a list of around 100,000 people. You could argue that I’m way smarter about marketing now than when I started out, but I can’t beat the stats! In fact, my sales conversion rate actually went down when I made my sales page ‘too sexy’ and professional. Simple is best.
In your journal, or in a conversation with an entrepreneurial friend, answer these questions:
Be thankful for the 1 percent conversion rule: the universe is giving you what you can handle right now. That’s why only a handful of people tend to buy your first product, which is exactly what happened with my Raw Brides Transformation Plan wedding weight-loss course back in 2009. I had one customer.
Like most people starting out, you probably don’t have robust procedures in place to deal with a massive influx of new customers who have a million questions, who inevitably lose their passwords (more than once), need hand-holding to access your materials, and find broken links or typos in them when they do (been there!)
As your potential customer base grows, so does your ability to handle volume. New things, like your first refund request or a customer who defaults on a payment, can send you into a tizzy because you don’t have procedures in place to deal with them. And you make mistakes because you’re learning on the job. I’ve seen unicorns (very rare outliers) somehow beat the statistics and smash their sales targets, then crash and burn because they don’t have the capacity, team, or systems to realistically serve that many people.
Have you heard of the Passion Planners, founded by Angelia Trinidad? In 2014, Angelia was shipping and packing planners out of her garage, printing out labels, and driving to the post office herself. That year, she shipped 2,147 planners, which was an incredible achievement. The following year, her crowdfunding campaign went viral and raised more than $650,000 from more than 23,000 customers (her goal was $10,000). That’s suddenly a lot of planners for one person to fulfill.
Angelia just wasn’t equipped to pack and ship 3,000 planners a day by herself, especially when port strikes that were entirely out of her control held up shipping, making her customers furious. Suddenly, she was handling thousands of customer service complaints, tweets, texts and bad nationwide P.R.,1 not to mention dealing with suppliers, finding a new warehouse, hiring (and training) new staff to do the physical packing, and buying a van to deal with deliveries to the post office.
Talk about firefighting! She was making up procedures and policies minute by minute in response to all the problems and requests for refunds. She barely slept for months. Most people would crumble after such an experience, but Angelia survived and is still going strong. (I buy a planner whenever they issue one in turquoise!)
Here’s the lesson: it’s okay to build your company steadily and consciously, so don’t feel bad if your first (or last) campaign wasn’t as successful as you wanted. As you can see, growing too fast can bring trouble. Seriously, if you only got a couple of customers in your first marketing launch, you are a huge success. You overcame all that resistance, tech problems, and money blocks, and someone paid you to do it. Even if you had no customers, you still created something, and it can be refined and improved for next time.
Trust me: you don’t always want a ton of customers when you’re not ready to handle them. There will be times when you have to grow faster than others (like for example when Sara Blakely got a call saying that her new product, Spanx, was going to be on Oprah’s Favorite Things show), but it’s better to make your mistakes when there aren’t too many people watching. Build a secure container, so you can handle more people in the future. I believe the 1 percent conversion rule saves us from massive stress by pacing our success so it’s more manageable. Thanks universe!
Having a 1 percent conversion rate isn’t
failure. It’s success, so celebrate!