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Growth Models

How to scale customer acquisition

Published 3 months ago • 1 min read

For a while, I got sucked into the shiny world of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

And hey, it can be magic... for the right brand... with the right traffic.

Who wouldn’t want a 6-figure bump from tweaking a headline or rewriting a page?

But here’s the truth:

Those CRO wins?

They’re rare.

That stuff only really works once you ALREADY got traffic and a system that works.

Yet I see entrepreneurs with 100 visitors/month spending weeks optimising landing pages that, let's face it, barely anyone is gonna see.

It’s like trying to start a bonfire by rearranging the twigs, when what you really need is more logs.

If you’re not getting enough traffic, fix that first.

It’s the biggest lever you’ve got.

You’ve got two options:

  1. Sacrifice your life to the algorithm gods and pray for organic reach
  2. Run ads and get in front of your audience now

Yes, ads can be scary.

No one wants to lose money.

But scaling ads is simple:

👉 Make more per customer than you spend
👉 Make it happen fast

Right now, I’m paying £23 to acquire a customer — and making £65 back.

How?

By stacking value. In the funnel I mentioned above, I have...

  • A $27 product
  • A $47 bump
  • An $97 upsell
  • A $99 upsell

Total potential order value is around $275. Each step is only there to boost the average order value (AoV) so I can throw that money back into ads.

For a long time I was using boring old text upsell pages with a decent but not great upsell take rate of around 9%.

I recently swapped the text on those bump/upsell pages for ~10-minute video sales letters.

Conversions jumped — now 16%+ take them (and I think this will climb a little before stabilising).

That one tweak lets me spend more, reach more, and scale faster.

The secret here is all in the VSL format.

I took the framework I use for these and tuerned them into a couple fo Custom GPTs AI agents inside GM+.

These things will ask a few Qs and then spit out a full 10 minute script for you in about 2 minutes flat.

Want access?

​Grab a $1 trial of GM+ here and take these bad boys for a run. ​

Got questions? Hit reply.

Pete "VSL man" Boyle

Vagrants, Vagabonds, and Villains Ltd, Unit 16535, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Road, Poole, Dorset BH16 6FA
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Growth Models

Analysing and experimenting with growth marketing

I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.

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