Good morning. It is Matt here. In today’s newsletter, we are going over my $900k per month customer acquisition system.

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Have you ever wondered what it takes to sell an agency? Client acquisition is a big part of it. No one is going to buy a business that cannot get customers.

I sold my agency in July 2023, and had a very specific customer acquisition system that I used to grow it the entire time that I used to grow it to $900k per month in revenue at its peak, and acquire over 200 new customers per month.

Today, I am going to go over the problems most agencies face with their customer acquisition, exactly what I did to solve those problems, and then how you can solve them in your own agency.

Let’s get started.

Two YouTube and newsletter per week

The first thing I did was publish two YouTube videos and two newsletters per week. These were essentially the same thing. I would script out a YouTube video, and then repurpose that script for the newsletter.

The problem that most agencies and businesses face is that they do not have enough trust, credibility or authority. This plays out in multiple ways, but the most common way this plays out is that the leads in the market don't trust them, and are skeptical from the very start of the sales process.

Another way this plays out is when you get into the sales process with someone and they say things like "we are talking to a few more agencies before we make a decision." If you have experienced something like that before, it is because you didn't build enough authority in your niche and prospects do not believe you are different than any other service provider.

This rarely happened to me when I was growing my landing page and CRO agency and that is because I put a huge amount of time into my newsletter and consistently posted YouTube videos. Trust me, during this time, my YouTube videos were NOT any good. They are even worse than they are now. I was a lot more shy, awkward, and could barely even read off a teleprompter.

What I did was I would put myself in the shoes of my ideal client which at this time were e-commerce founders. The big problem I solved was lowering CAC for Ecom stores by making a landing page with a higher conversion rate and revenue per session.

There are many different parts of successful landing pages such as the offer, above the fold, copywriting, page speed, congruency, and another 5-10 other things. I'd make simple newsletters and videos with the problem, example, lesson framework and publish them every Monday and every Thursday. I do the same thing here with Lead Generation Academy.

So, what is the point of this? YouTube and newsletter are the two most effective platforms for building authority and differentiating yourself from your competitors. Posting twice per week is the perfect balance between frequency and giving yourself time to ensure each post is quality.

Even a 10 minute video and 5 minute read that's packed with value, solving a particular problem or teaching them how to get a particular outcome will put you in the top 1% of agencies.

25x ad creatives per week

Now, what is the next thing you need to do? You need to write, film, edit and post 25x unique ads per week. These should primarily be Meta Ads but you can use other platforms as you see fit.

The problem with content is that it is very inconsistent. You never really know if or when you're going to get new customers. You post, try to make it as good as you can, and the platform does what it does. If you only rely on content, you will have an unstable business. That is where paid ads come in.

At my agency, I had different types of ads at different periods of time. My three ad funnels were low ticket digital product where I sold landing page templates, then I had classic book a call ads, and at certain points, I had live webinar ads. Let's focus in on the book a call ads as those are the most universal.

All of my ads were VSL ads where I wrote a 30-60 second script focused on a particular problem, circumstance or outcome my target market faced. I would then read it word-for-word off a teleprompter, then put the footage through Auphonic to clean up the audio, edit a banner at the top in Canva, and then publish.

I wrote four ad scripts per day while on the treadmill in the morning, and filmed all of them on Saturday. This gave me 24-28 new ads per week depending if I did this process six or seven times. Each ad was also 100% unique, not just lazily editing a new three-second hook.

So, why would I do this? The first reason you want to do this is because it will give a level of consistency to your client acquisition that you cannot get on other platforms.

The second reason is that once you figure them out, ads are very time efficient in comparison to content and even in comparison to outreach and partnerships. Most of the work is front loaded and then all you need to do is make new creatives.

The third reason is you want 25+ new ads with new angles because that allows you to target different parts of the market. If you only have one or two angles that work, you won't reach everyone, because not everyone has the same problems or describes their problems in the same way.

The final reason is that practice makes perfect. When you commit to scripting out four ads per day, you get better and better at it over time.

25,000 cold emails per week

So, after ads, what is next on the list? The next thing everyone should be doing is sending 25k cold emails per week, which is 5,000 per weekday.

The main problem with content is it is inconsistent and time consuming. The main problems with ads are they cost a lot of money and that cost usually only increases over time. Ideally, you'd have something that is very linear and cost effective to balance out your time commitment and customer acquisition cost, and you do that with cold emails.

At my agency, I sent significantly more cold emails per day than this. I exported a list of every Shopify store with 3+ employees and founder or owner keywords and absolutely blasted them. At that time, I would get one booked call per about 2,250 emails sent and I would close about 18% of them within 30 days.

So, why 5,000 per weekday and 25,000 per week? I think you want to do this because that's both manageable in terms of overall market size and no matter how bad you are at cold emails, you usually can get at least one call per 2,500 sends and if you exported your list properly, those calls will be qualified.

If you can get ten calls per week this way, you should be able to add two new clients per week. Volume here is more important than your script. When you combine this with ads and content, you will also get better results because they may have heard of you before, or they may look you up and start following you after they got your cold emails.

2,500 partner emails per week

In addition to cold emails to clients, we should also be sending cold emails to partners. This is a piece of the puzzle that most people forget.

So, we have paid ads, content and outreach and those are super, super important but they come with two things: a real sales cycle that we still have to go through, and real work that needs to be done on our end such as making ads, content, managing emails, etc.

Forming partnerships with people who sell to the same clients as us but do not sell the same service is another way to get consistent clients with almost no work. Other businesses have already gone through with their own paid ads, content and outreach and already gotten the clients. They've done the hard part already. We don't need to do that again. We can benefit from their work.

Partnerships made up over 33% of my revenue at my agency. I was doing landing pages. The purpose was to increase the conversion rate for Ecom stores so their paid ads CAC goes down. The only question I need to ask is who else benefits?

Of course, the agencies managing their paid ads. I sent emails to these offering to work either through referral or Whitelabel and I eventually had 77 ad agencies paying me a flat rate to make landing pages for their clients.

What can you do to achieve this? All you need to do is ask "who already sells to my clients?" Then, make a list of types of companies, and once you've done that, list the actual companies in each type, and then reach out to them through cold email.

Content Repurposing

As the founder, you'll have to oversee the above during the phase where you are still figuring it out. Once you've gotten it to work, then you can hire and delegate.

You may be thinking, YouTube is good but there are plenty of other social media and content platforms and if you're not on those, you will not get the benefit and will be missing out. That is absolutely true. There are platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, your blog and so on.

What I did at my agency was I had two employees who used a combination of AI and their own brains and they would repurpose my YouTube scripts to make content on every platform. In general, with one YouTube script, they could make three short posts, one long form thread, one short form script, and one graphic (working with a designer). Then, they could schedule it across all platforms so I could get the benefit without putting in any more effort than I already was.

The lesson here is that you need to focus all your time and energy on your YouTube. If you actually write good stuff, with proper structure, it's very easy to get someone to repurpose that for other platforms. However, you know what they say. Garbage in, garbage out.

Outreach repurposing

Let's stay on this thought, because just like other forms of content, there are other forms of outreach.

If you only stick to cold email, you're missing out on a lot of other outreach channels. Certain people simply never reply to cold email, and you'll never be able to reach these people.

At my agency, we replicated my cold email process with tons of outbound setters on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. We tried other things like Facebook groups too, but meh. It is reasonable to think that what works on cold email will work on social media outreach.

The main difference is you can send a lot more cold emails than messages on the platforms without getting banned or restricted. You just need to keep hiring more and more setters who use their own accounts and scale horizontally instead.

So, when you have this system, you will scale your agency as far as you could ever want to. You need to figure it out first and then you can delegate and systematize it to buy back your time. Without a system like this, you will hit a plateau and eventually burn out from the lack of growth.

If you want help building this, you know what to do.