How I generated over $100000 for a customer in 30 days with marketing automation and a WordPress website

Sounds like bullshit right?  Well, there are 3 objective facts about this headline that are indisputable.

  1. The customer had a list of email addresses of previous customers
  2. The customer WANTED to generate new leads
  3. They invested about $12 000 upfront and pay roughly $2500 per month

With that out the way, I’m going to give you the EXACT process I used to generate $100 000 in 30 days for my customer.

There’s a myth floating about that marketing automation and marketing funnels are the holy grail of infinite money.  The truth, is that they take a lot of time, focus and effort to set up.  The reason they work is because they AUTOMATE the process between a new lead and a sale.  They are also fantastic at increasing your conversion rates, because you can tweak your emails and content.

Customer’s aren’t buying WordPress websites anymore.  They want marketing funnels and marketing automation.

Smart marketers and WordPress professionals like you, they build response funnels.  Marketing funnels that respond to the needs of the subscriber, moving them towards becoming a happy customer.

The Setup

The customer that I made $100 000 for, in 30 days, with a marketing funnel.  They had 3 things:

  1. A list of current customers
  2. A desire to continue building that list
  3. An investment in their own business – spending money on me and my team to build their marketing automation.

I cannot stress how important these 3 points are.  No one can generate money out of thin air.  For the sake of privacy, I’m not going to disclose who the customer is or the product they sold.  But I will say that they sold to private individuals – so not businesses, just regular people.  And their product was a financial service.

If your customers aren’t willing to invest in their business, as in, if they aren’t willing to pay an expert like you to get them results.  Then they are not customers that you need.

Second, they don’t NEED to have a list already, but it’s one of our qualifiers.  We won’t work with anyone unless they’ve got a list of previous customers.

They do however NEED to want to continue building a list.  This is imperative as we need to keep filling the pond with fresh water.

Every new lead would be sent a specific email marketing chain, called a value stack.  A series of marketing emails sent via marketing automation with a message, a call to action and a purpose.  Each current customer would be sent a launch series of emails and EVERY lead and customer would eventually be sent a sales series of emails.

You can download the flowchart of the EXACT marketing funnel I used below, for free.

The Method

We required a few things to be able to execute our marketing funnel.

  • A website with landing pages
  • A CRM/marketing automation program
  • A series of emails (which you can see here)
  • A customer list with email addresses in database format
  • A social media page
  • A Light Bulb Moment
  • An email capturing capability (think Gravity Forms)
  • A few stock images (Unsplash)
  • A handful (3-12) pieces of content that potential customers want
  • A product sales page

The basic process is below-

  1. Current customers are sent a series of launch emails.  Launch emails are a series of emails celebrating the launch of a new business or product.  Even if your customer is not literally launching a new business or product, what you ARE launching is their new approach to engaging with customers.

  2. The launch emails send content that customer is going to be interested in.  Simple as that.  Ideally it’s content that you’ve created and written, but you can curate content.  The idea is to get the customer used to opening your emails and trusting that you’re sending them useful stuff.

  3. We created and protected Light Bulb Moment with a landing page and email capture form.  The Light Bulb Moment (read more about those here), is an offer of a free resource, download or template that solves a potential customer’s problem.  For example, if we sell flowers, a Light Bulb Moment for a flower shop could be a calendar of important dates to remember.  Or how about email reminders a week before important dates (like Valentines and anniversaries)?  That way, any new visitors to the landing pages are likely to give their email address (which we can use as a lead) in exchange for a useful resource.  If you want to learn how to create landing pages that convert like crazy – get access to our webinar recording here.

  4. The landing page (or pages) were posted out via paid traffic and social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Adwords.  We were buying traffic with adverts to landing pages.  Becuase our audience and message was so specific, we had great click and conversion rates.

  5. For example, if we had the calendar idea for a flower shop – we would target men and women with the message ‘Never Miss An Important Date Again’ or ‘Always Remember To Get Flowers For The Important Dates With This Life Hack’.  All new traffic was bought and we paid per click, driving them to our landing pages.

  6. We then send a value stack series of emails (thank you Ryan Deiss and Digital Marketer) to new leads.  Again, the idea is to send awesome content and get them used to opening our emails.  It’s also a great way to introduce your business and yourself to them.

  7. With our marketing automation software (MailChimp, SharpSpring, Marketo, Infusionsoft), we spaced out the launch emails over a series of days and weeks.

  8. New lead signups are added to the lead database and sent the indoctrination emails over a series of days and weeks (get the plan for the timing below)

  9. Our marketing software could measure how engaged customers were.  The more emails they opened and the more links they clicked on, the more ‘points’ they were assigned.  Once they reached a certain number of points, we started sending sales emails.

  10. For example, MailChimp (my favourite), uses a 5-star rating system.  The more emails a database contact (lead or customer) clicks on and the more emails they open, the more stars they get.  Once a database contact reached 5 stars, I start sending them sales emails.



  11. Smart email marketers know that they should be sending splinter products to new leads.  However, we didn’t have a splinter product and the customer had absolutely no interest in creating one (my biggest regret as splinter products have a proven record of increasing conversions.  We use them in every other funnel now).

  12. A splinter product is a low cost, low barrier to entry product that the lead or customer could buy that wouldn’t break the bank.  Something that they could buy without checking their PayPal account.  Usually around the price of 2 cups of coffee.

  13. Smart marketers also don’t call their email series’ SALES EMAILS because it isn’t sexy.  But that’s what these are.  Emails designed to make a sale.  Specifically, they’re designed to get someone to click through to a sales page (you can get the sales emails we used here).

  14. When the customer clicks on the links in the sales emails, they’re taken to a sales page.  I don’t have time to go into detail about sales pages, BUT I can tell you that we used a sales letter format but in the style of a video.

  15. We had a big CTA button saying BUY NOW on the sales page which connected them to a sales agent who closed the deal.

Boom.  We made the first sale in under 1 hour of launching.  In 30 days, we generated $100 000 of revenue and it was our customer’s most profitable month to date.

The Follow-up

We were looking to measure 3 key metrics.

  1. Sales
  2. Leads
  3. Clicks

There are hundreds of other metrics that we could look at, like email open rates, click rates, advert click rates and reach.  But in truth, the only ones we cared about were sales, leads and email clicks.

Leads told us how big our email database is, how much it’s grown and how likely a sale is.

Clicks told us how compelling our message was and how qualified our leads were (the more messages that the lead consumes, the more qualified they are.  The more qualified they are, the more likely the sale).

Finally, sales told us how good our sales pages are and how profitable we are.  It told us how much revenue we were making and how much return the customer would make on their investment.  Needless to say, we crushed that one.

If you want to download the entire plan, step by step, that we used to build this marketing funnel and run our marketing automation, sign up below.

What other steps would you like more clarification on in marketing funnels?  What have you used that works?  What else do you want to learn how to do with marketing automation?  Let me know in the comments below.

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.