Vince Reed recounts nearly quitting digital marketing after spending thousands on ads that generated leads but few purchases. Using AWeber in ~2008 he achieved surprisingly high email open rates (>50%) but was only selling low-ticket affiliate products (around $7), making modest monthly income ($1,200–$1,500). He pivoted by creating a demo/show-and-tell video that taught how he got high open rates, which increased sales. He realized the issue was the broader sales process and margins, not just pages, and describes offering a high-ticket, hands-on program he priced conceptually at $25,000 (discounted to $10,000 for a 3-day in-person engagement) to make the economics work and justify reinvesting in ads.
Chapters
I was about to quit digital marketing. I was running out of money. Nobody was buying. I had spent like at that point several thousands of dollars on ads, had a bunch of leads. I was able to get leads, but nobody would buy. People would open up my email and nobody would buy and what I was doing. And this again is the process which if I go back to my notes, I said this was for the AWeber. This is when I made that first AWeber sale. So it's the sales process. Okay, Right. So that's the page process. Like we're. I wrote down obviously the challenge funnel, but the sales process is how you're getting them to buy. Right, right. Like what are you saying? What are you doing? Throughout that process, the way my funnel worked was I was sending traffic to a brick wall page. They had opt in and I was selling affiliate products. I was an affiliate of all these different tools I was using back then. I was using AWeber, which was my CRM, to email my, my leads. And believe it or not, not knowing what I was doing, my open rate was pretty good. Now mind you, this was way back in 2008. What was your percentage back then? You remember? It was, it was over 50%. Definitely over 50%. But mind you, I was very good at mirroring. A lot of my messaging was very similar to my mentor, which is another whole topic of finding the right mentor to know you're even mirroring someone you should be mirroring.
Even though I was mirroring, I was still missing a whole bunch. Right, right, exactly. I was mirroring at least the forward facing things in terms of messaging. But I would email out like, hey, this, this is the tool I'm using to get leads, buy it. And it was just like an affiliate link to aweber and it just took you to their website to sign up. Yeah, right. So for whatever reason this particular time I made a video and it goes back to what I teach today, which is to play show and tell. And it goes back to like when you were a kid when you would show off different toys at school and you know, here's my toy. You'd show it off in front of the class and you would have, you know, everyone's favorite that day. So I just showed them how I was getting, you know, 50% plus open rates with AWeber. Oh, okay. I made a demo video and someone signed up and then I ended up making a ton of other sales.
So I emailed out this demo video of how I was getting high open rates to generate more sales. Okay. So I was playing show and tell. So my message changed to more of a demonstration of how I was actually using it to get results. Okay. But the key to that, you know, we can kind of go back and forth and say it was the show and tell aspect of it, but I think it was more the teaching aspect of it. Kind of like what we're talking about now. Like, you know, at the end of the day, people want to get results. Like, if people are watching this, they want to make multiple six figures. Right? Right. So at some point in this video, I have to get to like, the point of, like, how do I make six figures? So we're narrowing it down to you realizing it's not the pages. Right. It's the entire process. Understanding that it's the margins. Right, margins. So the reason why I started making more sales but still was not making any money. I didn't have the back end. So I was starting to sell these little $7 affiliate commission things. And, you know, there was months where I'd make, you know, twelve hundred dollars, I started making fifteen hundred dollars, but nothing like what people were saying. Yeah. And I was getting leads, I'd get more and more leads and my, my income would go up just a bit. Okay. And then it was. And it was because I had this belief that everybody was broke as me. Huh. And it was. I had this belief that I could only sell these low because that's what people would buy. So it kind of kept you. But at a level, an example would be if someone's still watching this right now, they want to make six figures a month. And if I had a program that I said, hey, I'm going to walk you through the steps, we're going to help execute these steps properly in your business. And your funnel to ensure you make six figures in your business. We're going to write your webinar, we're going to write your vsl, we're going to set up your ads, we're going to make sure all the processes in between are correct. All right? So typically for me to spend this time, to take me 3, 4 days to set this up with you, you're gonna come to my office, we're gonna do it right. So I'm building the. I'm building the value, right. People in that little list that I had back then, right. Who were looking at, you know, making money online. Cause a lot of my opt in pages were, how do you make money online? Yeah. They clearly wanna make money online. And if I position the offer, remember I said in the beginning, it's messaging if I position my offer the same way I just did what I just said, and I was getting them in. I was selling these, you know, little products. And then I made this offer, and I said I was going to do it for 25,000, but you can come down for three days with me, and it's 10,000, and I have a list of, you know, 2, 300 people. Yeah, I might just get one buyer, but it'll make up for everything. Right? So let's say I get one buyer at list, and then I go, okay, this works. So what do I do? I invest all that money back into ads to grow my list and continue to make that offer. And then I let the margins work. I let the math work so I know that I can close my eyes and spend the money and be confident that it would work.
