#225 - The simple ad campaign that gets a 21x ROI with Zach Spuckler

We spent a total of $200 on retargeting and generated $4,282.60 cash in hand over two and a half days.

Hey. Hey, lovely. It is Kate here from hellofunnels Co and welcome to a very special episode of the Doing It Online podcast. Now, if you've been listening to us for a while, you'll know we don't do a lot of guest episodes. In fact, I've done one ever. So today is an extra special guest, so you know to have something good that I want to share with you. So today we're talking with the lovely Zach Buckler, who is a bit of an Internet OG just like myself. He's been around the Internet spaces for a long time, and I'm actually really surprised we haven't actually had a chance to meet and chat before this. So this was a real treat. And the reason that I wanted to get Zach on was because recently he actually purchased one of our programs, our Waitlist Magic program, which is actually inside our new ecosystem society as well. And he was DMing me as he was applying it. And then as he actually had the live campaign, he was giving me, like, these live updates, which is just amazing. And as well as him being super generous doing that and sharing all the results and then saying he was happy to come on and talk about his experience and break it down for you guys so you could see behind the scenes how this works. He also, because he's really damn clever, added on a really great Facebook ad strategy on the top as an extra layer. It's actually super simple that made those results even better. Like, we're talking 21x ROI, which is just amazing. So I really can't wait to share this conversation with you. I hope you've got a pen. I've got paper. I hope you're ready to take some notes. And let me introduce you now to the very lovely Zack Spackler. Let's go.

Well, hey, Zach, welcome to Doing It Online Podcast. It's so wonderful to have you here.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here.

I'm so excited to nerd out with you on this. Just backstory for people and obviously we'll dig into all this, but Zach recently ran one of our campaigns, our Waitlist Magic campaign, and we were sort of like DMing in the background as he was going live and everything. Zach has, very generously sorry words failing me, offered to jump in today and kind of chat through how it went for him. What worked and then also a really cool little add on that he's brought in through using ads to make it work, like, even better. But before we get into the juicy stuff, can you want to just give us a little bit of a. I always like to know everyone's backstory because I'm nosy and I know that you, like me, have been floating around the Internet for a minute. So, yeah, like, how did you kind of get started in the online space?

Sure. So like you said, my name is Zach Spuckler. Uh, I run a small Facebook and Instagram ads agency, which is really isn't our primary business, but I love to get my hands dirty and see what's going on with Facebook and Instagram ads. So we retain about 8 to 10 client accounts at a time. And that is like something that I won't talk a whole lot about. But just to lay the foundation of what we do with the rest of our business, which is we have a Facebook and Instagram ads bootcamp, which is our front end product, low ticket. We have a Facebook ad centric membership. We say centric because there's so, I'm sure you know, there's so much that goes into Facebook ads that's not just click this button, run these ads. There's landing pages and email sequences. It's like, ads are great. And when somebody says my ads aren't working, I'm usually like, it's probably not your ads. And then we just rolled out a new program which we used your weightless magic process for, called the Challenge Launch Engine. Now, I've been teaching five day challenges literally for about eight years now. In some variation, I. I've had a $1200 course that we sold through Ambergreen webinar. I've had a $37 front end product. I've done live virtual trainings. I've done weekend workshops. But that's always been something we've had in our business as challenges. Because our Facebook ads bootcamp that we sell for $25, we do live three to four times a year. It's a five day challenge launch. We. It leads right into our membership very seamlessly. And so that is like the gist of what I do. Facebook ads launching, and then anything that's supported by that.

Yeah, wonderful. And how, like, you know, obviously don't. You don't need to age yourself here, but do you remember when you got started?

So it's funny, I always jokingly say I made my first dollar online when I was 12. And I know that because like in the US, you have to have a Social Security number to get a paycheck from online companies. And I'd use my dad's and be like, pretend to be him to like get my first ever online paycheck, which is like crazy. And then I've just done everything you can imagine. Since then I've done freelance writing, I've done website flipping, I've done direct sales. Like, I've done a lot of different things, but when I was in a direct sales company, I was like, you know, this would have been 14, 15 years ago. And everyone was like, add people on Facebook, DM them, start conversations. And I know that there's a lot of beliefs around direct sales and multi level marketing. All of that Aside, I was 18, I was getting started. Credit a lot to that company for teaching me some business habits. But I was like, this sounds silly. Like, why are we going out and finding people? Like, I use Facebook and like, can I just like run ads or something? Like this was when boosting was like just coming onto the scene. And I was like, I bet you you could just run ads and like people would call you to enroll in your company or buy your products. And lo and behold, I had people like stuff from me who I never met. And for about a year and a half I would be like, you guys, you gotta do this. Like, everyone should just be marketing their business. You know, you're, you're multi level marketing your direct sales business. Like, this is totally the money. This is so smart. And nobody really listened in that space. And after like two years of that, I was like, wait a second, what if I just do my own thing? And we started running ads for people. There's like some interim stuff in there, but without getting caught in the weeds. I basically was like, what if I ran ads for people? And back in 2016, Periscope was coming on the scene. And so I was just talking about what I was doing with ads and kind of how I was running ads and my thoughts on ads and even my thoughts on how we were growing an audience on Periscope. I was just talking very general. We gained like 10,000 followers in six months. And people were like, how are you doing this? And so after maybe six months on Periscope, I was like, would you guys want a course on this? Like, I don't really know what I'm doing. It's 97 bucks, I guess, if you want to buy it. Great. Literally it was a PayPal button. I dropped a PayPal link in the chat on Periscope, which For those who don't know was like the og, Instagram, Facebook Live, it just existed separate from them before Facebook and Instagram Live. And like we made 1300 bucks. And I was like, hold up, there's something here. We've obviously become a lot more professional since then. But then over the last, you know, seven, 10 years, like we've just leaned in and I've been running Facebook ads for 10 years. February 15, 2025 will be 10 years since I formed our company, our current company, which is ads management launching digital marketing. And I'm just a student of experience. I love trying different things. What I loved the most about particularly your product is I'm in like this. I like jokingly say, like I'm in my micro product era. So I really did love about your course. I know I'm gushing a little, but I love that I could like get in, get the information, implement it and just like go do it. And so that's kind of what I do now. I try to create products or content that's like, maybe it's info information heavy by nature of advertising, but it's also action oriented. So it's like, you know, even when we do our bootcamp, it's not like, here's how Facebook ads work, it's like, here's how to set them up, Go set them up. We'll talk about why and how you're doing these things as time progresses. That's kind of our X factor, I like to think, is that we get people results, we do it quickly. And because I've been doing it for 10 years, I get to make what people perceive as complicated Facebook and Instagram ads really simple. Because I always tell people they are easy and they are simple because it's a process. It's a process you could duplicate and replicate and learn from. And then the creative and the copy and the skill side of things, you just get better with that over time. So yeah, that's a little bit about how we ended up here.

I love it. I love it. I have a very similar origin story in that. Like the first product I ever, it was literally a PayPal button embedded in a blog post. And then I had to go into PayPal when people bought get their email addresses and manually email them. Like, here's a link to a Google Drive that's got some stuff in it that is what you just bought.

Totally.

Ah, things have gotten a little easier.

I think, since it's gone slightly better.

So let's talk about the Waitlist campaign. Like, I love that you said that, you know, it was very actionable. That was definitely my kind of goal for, like, when I was pulling, like, what is like a little thing that we can share. I'm like, I want something that people. And I'm not going to say something you can set up in a couple hours because, no, it's got a few moving pieces there, but it's saying that you can take it, you can implement it, and you can get it done. But I mean, for me, the reason we kind of brought this one out is because I think launching this, especially, like recently, I feel like the fund's kind of gone out of it a lot.

It's either like rolling out the same old, same old, which can just feel a little bit laborious, or it's things are just that little bit harder than they used to be, or it's just a whole lot more stressful or. So that was kind of like, the idea behind it was like, what's something you can go and do? And actually it makes it a bit fun for you guys from actually sort of like implementing it. Like, did you have sort of any hesitations with trying it out? Or like, what was kind of that initial process?

I don't know that I would say we had any, like, crazy hesitations. My biggest issue is that I'm a very impulsive person. My team will tell you I'm like, do this thing. And they're like, okay. They're not always like that. I have to give a shout out to my. My right hand, Jessica. She will be like, you do not have the time or capacity for that. But basically we had been talking about launching this program for. For quite some time. And like, the. The month rolled around. I was just like, I don't want to do a big launch. Like, I. I just don't want to. Like, we're going to. Well, I'm going to London for a week, like 10 days from now. We finished our waitlist promo a couple weeks ago, and I was like, I don't wanna do this big launch and then like, have all this back end of the launch and then have like, I call it launch fallout. Like those five days where you're just basically useless to the world, which means your calendar is busy the following week. Plus, I'm leaving. I was like, there's just gotta be an easier, simpler way. And so my biggest hesitation was, was I being really impulsive, just doing like a wait list instead of a big launch? But I was like, let's just do it. Like, it's better. It's better than me bailing on the whole launch, which is, like, really what I'm leaning towards. So if I had a hesitation that would be, like, more tactical or more relatable, I guess, than going to London for a week and be like, I've got to just do something. I think it would be that, like, is it as impactful as, like, a webinar and a video series and a challenge? Like, all these steps, like, can it work that well? And I definitely think that there's, you know, there is benefit on my side of, like, we've always talked about them, we've always hosted challenges. So, like, we had audience to work with, and we had that proof of concept that people were familiar with for sure. So I was like, let's give it a shot. You know, I know we've got a decent audience, we've got decent engagement. Like, let's see what happens. And. And it worked really, really well.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I remember when you sent through the numbers, I was like, you're like, I'm really hoping for. Was it like 18%?

And then, yeah, I was like, I really want 15%. I'll. I'll lose it if we hit 18% conversion on the list.

Yeah, yeah. So for anyone who's sort of not familiar with the strategy overall, go into the nitty gritty. But basically, the strategy is designed so that you make sales the minute your cart opens. And that's what makes it really fun, is that you, like, rather than having that, okay, it's launch day. Let's sit around and send an email and hope somebody buys at some point like that. Which, for me, I like that anxiety of those, like, if it's an hour or a couple of hours or whatever, how long it takes you just like, no one is ever going to buy. I'm a terrible person. I should shut down my business. So this kind of removes that because literally, car open. So what was how many people bought when your cart first opened?

Yeah, so we did something. And full transparency. I'm such an experimenter, so I will be the first to admit that, like, I would say 80 to 90% of our strategy was weightless magic. Right. Like, we absolutely used your strategy. There was. I don't want to give away the secrets, but one thing that we did that was a little different was, you know, I think it's okay to share this. Cut this out if you need to. But, like, because I know you just did this for your wait list is like, the first person who buys gets it free. And just to Be totally blunt. I didn't want to do that. Like, no bones about it, it's not a bad strategy. But I was like, I feel like with my audience, people are gonna, just because of my, I mean, knowing my audience, that people are gonna be like emailing me to be like, am I first? Am I for I did it to you so I know my audience will do it.

Yeah. I was like, no, you were 11.

I know, I was way too slow, but I didn't wanna like deal with that and I didn't wanna deal with people emailing me. And I didn't want, I didn't wanna have to basically overcome an objection of like, well, I missed the free thing, should I still buy it? And I cater to a different level of audience. Like most of them are just getting started, some of them are still ideating. And so I was like, it just didn't feel like the best for me. Right. And we still leverage your strategy. Which we said, okay, well then what we're going to do is the first 15 people who buy get entered into a raffle for one on one time with me. Because, little tongue in cheek, my audience loves me and so they want time with me. Like, I'm a, I'm a really valuable asset to my audience and I do hear that from them. So I was like, okay, what if I gave it to the first 15 people? And so we were like, that'll probably get us through the first day. We'll get our first 15 sales and then if we need to like address how to keep the sales moving, we'll do that. Well, basically within 20 minutes we had sold the first 15 spots. And within the first day we decided, and this is just me knowing this is not something that you've necessarily recommended, but I was like, we're totally going to leverage your strategy. We. Which is. I was like, well, if the first 15 people got excited, I bet the first 35 people would be excited. And so we said, the first 35 people who buy, like, we sent an email an hour out. We were like, Sorry, it's been 20 minutes, all those spots are gone. And we're gonna open up to the first 35 people. If you already bought, you're gonna get a double dip entry. Which was just like a super. Kept it fun, kept it light. And then we sold those 35 spots before the end of the first day. We opened at 11am and I think at 10:45ish p.m. we had sold our first 35 spots. For context, there were only 290 people on our wait list. So by the end of the first day we had already converted over 10% of our wait list to our product, which was like crazy to me.

That's so great. Like I think a standard wait list, you would expect maybe a 5 to 10% conversion. But usually you've also got other stuff over several days. Yeah, yeah. Not like right up front.

Yeah. So I was like this is crazy. And what was funny, like little fun anecdote. We did like a discount which is something you recommend. Like we took a hundred dollars off the retail price of the product and we messed up the coupon cuz we added an upsell and so the coupon like applied to the upsell which it wasn't supposed to. And so like we ended up having like, I don't know, something crazy. Like 10 people bought and, and my team is messaging me and they're like, why are people coming in spending like 2 or $380 and 81 cents? I was like, I have no idea, I don't know what's going on. But the sales were happening so fast. We caught the first one and we were like, I was like, oh, what do we do? We let those people keep their money. We did not email them to ask for the extra 25 bucks or whatever on our upsell. But it was really cool because like it was happening so fast. That pro tip really check your tech which we did not clearly do a good job of. But then we did get sales. We did a 48 hour card open plus the first day and you know, by the end of the second day we had sold 55 spots which was a 18.97% conversion on the wait list.

That's awesome. I was so excited when you sent through those numbers. Yeah, that's very cool. So on top of like the emails and the, the pricing structure and stuff like that, you also added another layer which I think definitely helped to get you those amazing numbers. So do you want to talk us through the other piece that you added in?

Absolutely. So just for the the art of transparency and disclosure, we have an email list of about 16,000. So we totally emailed our list. We weren't crazy aggressive. We sent most of the emails that you recommended sending. And then I am a copywriter at heart, so I added some stories and some content. I love copywriting. It's like my secret love language. But what we also did was we ran an ad to our entire warm audience basically saying like, come get on the wait list. But we did two things. One, we tried different content of like testimonials and product mockups. But we also did like Instagram reels that we ran as engagement ads through the ads manager with many chat that was like, send us a message and we'll get you on the wait list. Um, and it's funny, we still get people requesting to be on the wait list. So like, we've got to fix our many chat too. But we did that. And then that added, we estimate, about 30 people to our wait list. Which the reason we estimate is because Zach set up the tracking wrong. Even the experts mess up from time to time. And I was so in the weeds about doing everything else that I was like, oh, yeah, it's not showing any sales, but it will, it'll show conversions. Just be patient. It never did, but it did track our purchases because I set that up right. And so you'd end up on just ads getting people on our wait list directly reported back to Facebook. A 5x return on ad spend. So we spent about 4.68 to be really exact, but we spent about 200 bucks and we generated about 1100. Um, so 240 to 1100 is around that 5x just from the ads to get people warmed up. Then we also ran retargeting ads. And retargeting ads are basically, we said, if you joined our wait list, we're going to add you to this ad that basically just encourages you to buy. And that one did really, really well. We ended up with like a 10x + return on ad spend, driving people back to the Waitlist sales page. And it was just really, really effective. And I think the reason it worked so well is like, you know, well, it's a retargeting ad, right? Like, we've all seen them. We look at something and then it follows us around the Internet. And then we're like, I need that. I need that thing. Right?

Yeah, like, I gave in.

Exactly. So we ended up running that. That did really, really well. I was super happy with that one. And then, I mean, those were the really big things that we did with ads. We also, just as a side note, like, run general awareness ads where we're always just kind of like encouraging people to like, interact with our content or our reels. And so I throw that in there. Cause that's not really part of the launch strategy. But it is, I think one of the reasons that people were so eager to opt into our content, eager to engage with the waitlist. And you know, our waitlist was relatively small. Like, it's not crazy big. Okay, so now I have numbers. We paid, our product was $297. We had a $100 upsell. We paid $12.50 per buyer. So every time we spent $12.50 on ad, somebody bought a $300 course payment plan was available. Cash collected was a 21.4x return on ad spend. So we spent a total of $200 on retargeting and generated $4,282 and 60 cents cash in hand over two and a half days.

That's amazing. So did you find because Facebook ads, it's one of those things I know enough to be dangerous and I can get in there and play and potentially break things. But I do have someone on my team who does does it for me because after Meta made a few too many changes, I was like, I can't drive you anymore. But what I know there's obviously there's so many different formats, different placements, things like that. Was there a particular style of ad or placement that you found for the retargeting worked better or.

Great question. So I am a lazy marketer at heart, is what I tell people. And so our ads were stupid, simple. We did nothing out of the box, nothing creative. Literally one ad, I know I'm going to describe them, you're going to be like, like you can't see them. But one was just the mockup. So, you know, the fan out of the PDFs and the picture of the, the. The computer with the logo on the screen and it said save $100 through Thursday. That was one ad. One ad was just the logo of the program which we made in Canva. I used a Canva template. I was feeling really lazy. And then one was logo the box under it that said get early access and save a hundred dollars through Thursday. That was it. The copy, if I recall, was like so bad. And I share that because I think so many people feel like they need this really strong copy and really strong images. But it was like we literally were like, do you want to launch a program with a five dollar challenge? Get early access to this program. Like four emoji bullet points with features. Click the link below to claim it now. Doors close Thursday. That was it. And it worked really well. I like to keep things simple. Maybe it would have done better if we gotten like creative and had fun. But like a 21 return on ad spend 21x, I'm totally fine with that. I'll survive.

And the thing is, like, if you'd gone out and it hardened, beat you're like, oh, these aren't performing. Then you go, you try and make things more complex. But if you. The simple works, like, do that every day of the week. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I feel like over the last 17 years or however long, you've written so many different ads and so much copy and stuff, and you kind of get to like, it all sounds.

The same and it all works.

Yeah, I'm like, go through my Google Drive. Let's say, have we got to run an ad anytime in the last 10 years? Is it sort of about this topic? Copy paste. That'll do.

We do the same thing. Repurpose, reuse, recycle.

Yeah, wonderful. And my other question with the ads, just because I know people listening be going like, oh, I want to try this is when you said you retargeted your warm audience. What do you classify as a warm audience? Like, who's in that?

This one specifically. People who opted in for the wait list had been to the wait list. Thank you. Page had been to the waiting room, which is like secret little. Can't give away all the details, but it's part of the process. And people who had been to the sales page. So basically, the moment you interacted with the wait list, you were going to get this ad. Um, we had 290 people on our wait list. And there's limitations with Facebook tracking, but we reached 225 of them with our ads. So keep in mind, we had. What would that be? 20 purchases? Yeah, 20 purchases on an audience of 225 people on Facebook. Like, almost 10% of people who saw our ad ended up buying our product.

Yeah. That's awesome. And apologies. We said they're. Were they awareness ads or were they.

These were traffic ads. So the ads to grow the wait list were lead ads, but the ads to retarget. I always do traffic if my list is under 500.

Awesome. That's so cool. So now that you sort of done this and you've had a little bit of time to process, would you run it again?

Yeah, like, I would do it in a year if I rolled out a new program. Honestly, the biggest pushback we got is, like, I had mentioned we had this $37 challenge toolkit nowhere near as robust as the program we created. Like, literally, you could get through it in like an hour. And this whole process is like every email, every Facebook ad, how to run the fate. Like, it's just way more in depth. But it was a huge eye opener for us. Because a lot of consumers were like, well, I have this product that says challenge, and you're launching a product that says challenge. So, like, do I already have this? So all of that to say, I would 100% do this again and I would be mindful about the positioning of the product. I think that was our fatal flaw, if there was one. I mean, I'm happy to share, like, final revenue numbers and all that with you, but, like, it did really well. But I think it would have done even better if we'd have thought about that more proactively instead of reactively. Because we did send marketing emails that were like, how is this different? But that was our number one email is, I already have this. Do I need to buy that? So I would do it again. I also would say if, if I did it again, I would make a, like a brand new product or angle or marketing message. But yeah, I would totally do this again for a product in the future. And it was super fun. We loved it. And, like, we even chose our winner, like, because we did the giveaways, we do, like, it's called wheelofnames.com we use it for our launches too. And we put everybody's name on, like a little prize wheel and then we record a video spinning it and email the whole, you know, all 35 people, like, oh, come watch and see who won. So, like, it's fun, it's interactive. People love that. And it's fun to do, you know, that's the best part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think in 2024, we need to embrace any part of business that can be a bit more fun. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this, Zach. I'm sure that there's people writing a ton of notes and if people want to learn more from you and your awesome ad strategies, where is the best place to find you? Yeah.

So if you want to learn more about me, heartsoulhustle.com or at ZachSpuckler Z A C H S P U C K L E R On Instagram, we do that really annoying thing. I think it's annoying, but we do it. So maybe it's not that annoying. The little thing where you can, like, start here and you can read what we offer on our Instagram and comment and you'll get the many chat flows. If you want to learn, like, our overall ad strategy, our biggest thing is you can go to the adsbootcamp.com I do feel obligated to share this disclaimer is that it's not the same strategy we used for the Waitlist Magic. That's the strategy we're using year round to grow our list. Because when we did Waitlist Magic, we had a massive audience to promote to, which is always a benefit when you're trying to grow a waitlist. You could grow the waitlist with our strategy, but if you're looking for, like, our general strategy, the adsbootcamp.com is like the primer. If you're like, all right, this guy's trying to sell me on ads. What's. What's the situation? That's where you would go?

Yeah. Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link all of those below as well, so if anyone's feeling lazy, they should be able to just find those things. But thank you so much. It's been so wonderful chatting with you. And, yeah, if you ever have any other good ads tips, we'll have to get you back on another time.

I can geek out about ads anytime, so don't tempt me with a good time.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Zach.

Thank you.