For the first 23 years of my career, I was an engineer. Then I became a marketer.

In between, during the transition, I actually did both.

On the surface, those seem like two completely different careers, but somewhere along the way I realized that the thing I was particularly good at as an engineer was also my biggest advantage as a marketer.

I have an ability to look at a collection of seemingly unrelated data, problems and strategies and see the connections between them. 

I can see where the gaps are, where one problem is creating another and, most importantly, when everyone is so focused on the individual pieces that they're missing what's happening across the entire system.

That's when I started looking at marketing very differently.

Most companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a systems problem.

Companies tend to think too highly of their products and not seriously enough about their marketing. They believe that if they build something good, put it in front of enough people and tell them why it's good, people should buy it.

When that doesn't happen, they start committing what I call "random acts of marketing."

They run some paid ads. They start posting more on social media. They build a new funnel or lead magnet. They plan another promotion. Now they're probably trying to figure out where AI fits into all of it.

None of those things are inherently wrong. The problem is that too often they're being treated as individual marketing activities rather than parts of a larger ecosystem.

And when revenue isn't growing fast enough, the default answer is usually more. More traffic. More content. More ads. More leads. More promotions.

Sometimes more is the right answer. Most of the time, it isn't.

I call what I do Revenue Engineering because great marketing is powered by data and systems. 

When those systems are built correctly, they give us dials we can turn intelligently instead of randomly trying another tactic and hoping it works.

Traffic is a dial. Conversion rate is a dial. Average order value is a dial. Retention is a dial. Email engagement, offer positioning, pricing and dozens of other variables are all dials.

The goal isn't to turn every dial as far as possible. It's to figure out which dial needs to be turned, what happens elsewhere in the system when you turn it, and whether you're even looking at the right dial in the first place.

That's the engineering part.

Sometimes one thing really is broken, but often there's a chain reaction happening across the business. 

You can't see that when you're staring at one metric, one campaign or one department in isolation.

KPIs are incredibly valuable to a business. But they can also be dangerous because they create blind spots.

Every piece of data tells a story, but I've learned that the story can change significantly when you step back and look at all of the data together.

Here's a good example.

For years, I've worked with companies that run promotions with a hard cart close. The campaign ends Sunday at midnight, the emails stop, the funnel comes down and everyone starts thinking about the next promotion.

There's an assumption built into that model: If someone hasn't bought by the deadline, they're probably not going to buy.

But with one of my clients, we started looking at what was actually happening with those people after a promotion. At cart close, we still had 15-20% of the list opening and reading our emails.

That was interesting to me because those people hadn't tuned us out. They were still paying attention to what we had to say. They just hadn't bought.

So maybe the problem wasn't that they weren't interested. Maybe we simply hadn't overcome the objection that was keeping them from buying yet.

That led us to start experimenting with what one my mentors called funnel extensions. Instead of treating cart close as the end of the opportunity, we continued marketing to those prospects using different content, formats, channels and emotional angles. 

We looked for objections the original campaign hadn't overcome and tried to continue the conversation rather than immediately moving on.

In most campaigns where we've used these extensions, they've added a minimum of 20% in additional revenue to the baseline campaign.

That's a meaningful amount of revenue, and we didn't need a giant influx of new leads to get it. We didn't need to dramatically increase ad spend or create another product.

The audience was already there. More importantly, they were still listening.

We just had to recognize what the data was actually telling us.

I believe there's an enormous amount of revenue hiding inside most businesses, especially once they've reached the point where they already have customers, an audience, products and some marketing infrastructure in place.

Sometimes the answer really is more traffic. Sometimes it's a new offer, a better story, different positioning or a change to the customer experience. And sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop chasing more of everything and take a much harder look at what you already have.

That's what we're going to do in XRO Insights.

We'll talk about marketing, AI, offers, funnels, email, positioning, customer behavior, data, automation and whatever else I think matters to growing a business. 

But I don't want to look at any of those things in isolation. I want to look for the connections between them and, hopefully, show you opportunities you haven't considered before.

In fact, that's the standard I'm setting for this newsletter.

Every week, I'm going to try to give you at least one insight that could help a business, in some niche and of some size, add a minimum of six figures in revenue over the next year.

Not every one of those ideas will apply to your business. They shouldn't.

But sooner or later, I'm going to write about something that does.

And you don't want to miss the week when that six-figure idea is yours.

Jon Stoltzfus
Chief XRO