Ep 21: Hometown Advantage September Launch Debrief

📊 Launch Debrief: How I Drove 1,500 Leads and 31 Sales for Hometown Advantage

Today I’m taking you behind the scenes of my most recent launch for Hometown Advantage—my local-ads program with 4 months of mentorship inside our Slack community. I’m sharing exactly what I spent, what converted, what didn’t, and the moves I made to protect (and lift) conversion rates in a “trust-recession” market.

You’ll hear:

• 🎯 Offer & price: $1,700 for 4 months of support (no payment plan upcharge)
• 📈 Results: 31 sales, ~1,500 leads, $7.42 CPL, $11,947 ad spend
• 💵 Revenue: $55,505 total; $43,557 profit after ad spend → 4.65X ROAS
• 🧪 Tripwire: $17 “Fix It Fast” mini course added $2,800 front-end revenue
• 🔁 Cold vs. warm: ~70% of tracked buyers were cold from launch ads
• 📉 Conversion reality: ~2% lead→sale (why 1% swings matter—and how I’m testing to improve)

What I tested to raise conversion:

• ✉️ Intentional launch warm-up emails that set buying criteria
• 👥 Ad Makeover Month in my free FB group (relationship + value builder)
• 📞 Limited 15-min sales calls (booked out; >50% close rate among show-ups)
• 💵 Price change: from $1,500/3 months → $1,700/4 months (and why I’ll keep it)

My next steps:

• Audit the webinar (with my coach), promote this podcast more consistently, and keep evergreen ads on to grow the list between launches.

Want me and my team to do this with you—ads, funnel, daily optimization, and numbers you can actually use to make decisions?

👉 Book a free call:
https://hello.dubsado.com/public/appointment-scheduler/6895076496905696e2549c58/schedule

🎙️ About Hometown Advantage
A complete, local-specific ads program + 4 months of mentorship so you’re never guessing. Get feedback on your ad copy, setup, targeting, and results inside Slack—weekly.

Follow → Instagram: @nicoleeldridge_ads
 Email → support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com

If this was helpful, a quick rating or review on Apple/Spotify helps more local businesses find this show. Thank you for listening—and go launch those ads. 🚀

Transcript

0:00

Hello, hello. Welcome to the Hometown Advantage Podcast. I'm so excited because today I am going to be doing a full debrief on my most recent launch of my local ads program, hometown Advantage, taking you behind the scenes on how much I spent, things I did to try and raise my conversion rates, all of that stuff. So if you're new, here I am a Facebook and Instagram ads expert, and I help. Businesses run their ads, but I also teach ads specifically to local businesses through my program Hometown Advantage. So Hometown Advantage is a full course that teaches local specific ads, and it comes with four months of mentorship and support from me so that you're not just going through the course wondering how to apply the material to you, even though it's laid out very well for that. You get to get specific feedback on your ads, on your ad data, ideas of how to turn things around if they're not performing well. All of that fun stuff. So the course is actually open all the time. People can join whenever they want. We're always running the calls. We are always active in the Slack channel. Another note, we moved from Facebook to a Slack channel and it has been amazing, so exciting. But anyways, it's always open, but I do these big launches and promotions of it four to five times a year to get a big boost to bring a bunch of new people into my world and bring a bunch of new people into the program. So let's dive into it. I have my full debrief document here. So the price of the program during the launch is$1,700. Now you could split that up into four payments or six payments, but I'm not someone who charges more for having a payment plan. So no matter what plan you bought on, in total, the revenue for me would be$1,700 per sale. This launch, I made 31 sales. And during the time I was running ads for my free workshop, I was also selling a mini course called the Fix It Fast Mini course for$17. And from that I made$2,800. So let me talk about that for a second. When you're running ads for a freebie, and this is for online businesses. So I am your girl that can really do both. I teach my local businesses through my program because I saw a gap in the market and I have a passion for supporting local small businesses. So that's what my program's about. And then I also run ads for scaling local businesses, but also online businesses. Right? So this episode's gonna be really diving into the online side of things. Because that's the kind of business I run and the kind of business that I am running ads for myself. Now, if you're running ads for something free to grow your list or to fill your launch like I was, you can do a strategy called a tripwire strategy, where when someone opts in for the free thing, it takes them directly to a page where they can buy something that will also help them solve their problems. So there are a lot of things you can do there. There are upsells you can put on there to make even more money back. I like to use it to one, sell a product that I know is gonna help people who are coming in for the free workshop to make some of my ad spend back. Three gauge the warmth of my audience. So if a lot of people are buying the product, I know that a lot of people who are coming into my world for this launch are willing to spend money to solve the problem that they have, which is usually like their local visibility or their local ads not working. So I made$2,800 from my Tripwire sales, and my total revenue I made was$55,505 to be exact. Now I spent almost$12,000 in ad spend, so it's$11,947 to be exact. So my profit after ad spend, it's 557 from this launch that comes out to a 4.65 return on ad spend. I was so happy and excited with the results of this launch, even though my lead to sale conversion rate was only 2%. So that's the big thing I'm gonna talk about here is this conversion rate, because I spend a lot of time on threads. There's a lot of online business owners there. And I see a lot of people talking about how great their lead cost is. They're getting leads for a dollar,$2,$3, and how they're so excited about that. But from my experience running my own ads and running ads for clients, a lot of times the strategies that it takes to get cheaper leads end up resulting in way less sales. So my lead cost was$7 and 42 cents. And I ended up with just over 1500 leads. So if you do the math on 31 sales divided by 1500 leads, we're at about a 2% lead to sale conversion rate, which has been a very consistent average for me. I did a lot of things in this launch to try and increase my lead to sale conversion rate, but I'm actually quite happy with the number it came out to now that I've done my full debrief and full reflections. So let's talk about that. Starting with the things I did differently in an attempt to raise my lead to sale conversion rate, because I actually have all the numbers for my past launches here. So my last launch converted at 1.9%. So lower the launch before that converted at. 2.4% so higher. So I'm right in the middle with my 2%. I was really shooting for the 3% because you guys, it is crazy how much of a 1% conversion rate can change your ad results. So mine was 2%. I'm just gonna do the math on my phone. With 1500 leads, if I could get that up to 3%, I would have had 45 sales instead of 31. That is such a crazy difference, especially at a$1,700 price point. So that is something that I am always working on as the ads person. I know what I can do on the ads side of things to bring in a lot of leads, to bring in as qualified leads as possible ones that are most likely to convert. But a lot of that conversion rate depends on so many different things that don't have to do with the ads. So here's a couple things I did. One was I was very intentional with my launch warmup content. So my launch warmup content is the emails I'm sending to my list ahead of the workshop where I'm making sure they know the information they need to know in order to see my offer as a must buy. The second thing I did was that I opened up my free Facebook group that I have been building on and off over the past couple years of my business, and I ran an event that I called Ad Makeover Month where I offered free ad consulting and feedback and answering questions to anyone inside that group that asked for it. This is my way of. Getting more content in front of people, giving more value to my people, forming relationships with people all ahead of the workshop and when the cart was opening for the big promo. The other thing I did was that I took sales calls for the first time for this program. So I've never taken sales calls before for this, but as I'm gonna talk about in a second, I did raise the price a little bit and I wanted to give people an opportunity to speak with me one-on-one to speak to any objections that they may have or any. Trepidation that they might have. So a lot of people online are talking about this trust recession that we're in and how people are much more wary to buy something from someone on the internet. And I feel like, especially in my niche of marketing, people have seen it all at this point. And I need to work extra hard to build trust with my audience. And make sure they know that I am here to help and support them, and I'm legit and I actually get people results, so I did. I opened up my calendar where two days of the open cart, I just opened it up for two hours, 15 minute calls people could book. I booked those out, but I did have some no shows. So I'm thinking about doing that again next time. Maybe opening up even more spots, but being super clear in the intention behind it and making sure that. The people who are hopping on the calls are very serious about buying. I don't remember exactly the conversion rate of people who were on sales calls to who bought, but I know a lot of them did. Like it's definitely over 50% of the people who I got on calls with ended up buying. So I do think that that was helpful. I was very cautious in the marketing of those because like I said, I had 1500 leads and I only opened up. What, like 16 spots for sales calls? I didn't really hear from anyone saying that there weren't any spots left and they were interested, so who knows if people were looking and saw that they were booked and then just didn't bother. But I'm definitely gonna keep iterating that because I do think that that was helpful. I also think that the Facebook group was helpful, but I'm wondering if I can find a different strategy with that as well, because my Facebook group reach wasn't great. Like I have 500 people in my Facebook group and I was still only reaching like 60 people a post, which actually isn't terrible. What's the conversion rate on that? That's 12%. So eh, not great, not terrible. But anyways, the concepts are there and I'm not launching again till January. So I have time to sit with these reflections and think about what I can do next time to hopefully keep building those bonds, keep building trust, and possibly raise my conversion rate next time. Now something that could definitely have hurt my conversion rate is that I raised the price of the course. I did also increase the timeframe that people get support inside the course. So it used to be three months and$1,500. I raised it to four months and$1,700. This is something I've been playing with and changing. Trying to find the best price, obviously for me and the time that I have to put into it, but also that happy middle price where it's not super cheap, but it's also not way over the top expensive. It's doable for a lot of local businesses. I do think that the price that I'm at now, I will stay here for a while because this price feels really good for me personally. I feel I'm able to still put money back in the business to keep scaling it, keep improving the program at this price, yet it's still not one of those crazy high ticket. Multiple thousands of dollar courses that you see a lot of people selling. Now, here's something that's so interesting about my sales data that has happened every launch and what we do is we. Pull everyone's email who bought from the launch, and then we crosscheck it in my email software to see when they got on my list, how they got on my list, like what ad they came from, or what traffic source they came from. And we will figure out how many people have been on my list for a while, who now bought versus how many came onto my list just during this launch. So what happens with most people is they will build their list. They will build their audience a lot during a launch, but most of the people who buy are still people who've been on their list for a while. Again, for that trust factor. But for me, I actually find the opposite happens. I was able to confidently track back 24 of the people who bought. So there's some people who, used a different email when they signed up for the free workshop than they used when they bought the program. And I'm not able to tell when they actually got on my list. But 24 of the 31 sales I was able to find and 70% or 17 of those people were completely cold leads from my live launch ads. So they saw my ad. I signed up for my free workshop and then bought within 10 days of the live workshop'cause that's when the promo ended versus 30% of them or seven of them were already on my list. Most of them were added during the evergreen summer ads that I was running. Some had been on for like over a year. So I always find this really interesting, and this is actually a very good metric to know and to have because it means that I can grow my list with all new people and still make sales even if my warm people aren't buying, which just goes to show that my offer is a highly converting cold offer. Like people can come into my world and want what I'm selling even if they haven't been around for long. All in all, I did have way more leads than I usually have. Like I've never broke a thousand of leads going into a workshop, and I had 1500 this time. And so when you get into high volume numbers like that, your conversion rate is naturally going to drop a bit. So between that and raising the price, I think that my extra things that I focused on, like the pre-launch content, the Facebook group and the sales calls, helped keep my conversion rate at my 2% average, even though I was really shooting for that 3%. But that's okay. Conversion just remains my toughest metric to improve as it does for a lot of people. Versus that audience growth and lead volume, that's obviously a no brainer for me with my Facebook ads. I can bring in a thousand leads like that. But like I said before, that's not the end all be all. You have to be able to convert those people. So I need to be strategic in continuing to build trust. Another way that I know I should be doing that is. Taking this podcast more seriously and promoting this podcast more because I do get a lot of people reaching out to me saying they've listened to my podcast, they wanna join my program. So that's definitely something I'm focused on from now until my January launch. I am also going to be picking through my webinar with a fine tooth comb, especially with my business coach, so that we can find any gaps or holes that I might be missing there. And I am gonna be continuing to run my Evergreen ads. To continue building my list and my audience between now and the next launch. One long-term kind of question that I'm sitting with and exploring is my best kind of growth lever to do more launches like this. Or to just focus on those strategies of making my launches higher. Converting, of course, I am so happy with these results. If I could duplicate these results again and again, I would, but it's not in my nature to not want to just keep doing it better. These are all such great insights that I'm able to learn through spending my own money that I can bring to my clients. Whether you're launching or running evergreen ads, or you wanna do low ticket ads. I have learned the nitty gritty of what it takes, not only to bring in the leads, but to actually get them to convert through just throwing myself into the fire. So if you are interested and having me and my team run your ads for you, I am taking two new clients. In the month of November and I would love to support you on your ads. I will put the link to book a call with me in the show notes. It's also in the link in my bio on Instagram, which is Nicole Eldridge ads. You need someone who knows how to run good ads, how to bring in qualified leads, and what holes to patch up in your funnel in order to make sure that those leads are converting. That's exactly what I've been doing in my own launches and exactly what I can help you do. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Oh, and if you've been enjoying the podcast, I never ask this. I always forget when I tell you I'm a type B podcaster, type B business owner. I'm not lying. I don't have a fancy intro or outro for this podcast. I don't have any fancy scripts. I just hop on the mic and talk about what I've been seeing. And what I need my fellow business owners to know about ads. So thank you so much for being here. But if you could ever so kindly leave a review, whether it's on Apple or Spotify, it would help so much help more people find my podcast, which like I mentioned, is a great way for me to grow my business. So thank you again so much for listening, and until next week, I'm rooting for you. Go get those ads launched.