Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 163: How to Launch a Course in 2023
1.1k Plays2 years ago
"If want better conversion rates during your launch, you can't only focus on lead gen. You also have to qualify those leads. And that's why getting new leads to take an additional action like joining a Facebook group or watching a free video is so important before you ever put an offer in front of them."
Find it quickly:
0:00 - Intro
3:32 - What we would do before we launch a product
6:25 - Step 1: Generate Leads (instead of asking for a purchase, you ask for an email)
7:44 - How much lead gen do I need to do before actually launching a course?
9:20 - Do I need more leads for a high ticket item?
9:50 - What is a typical conversion rate for an email list?
10:51 - What if I've built trust but haven't launched yet?
13:11 - Step 2: Engage your leads
14:09 - Best ways to engage your audience
16:20 - Using Mighty Networks to qualify leads + sell
17:17 - Step 3: Beta Launch + gather testimonials
20:35 - How to avoid cannibalizing your sales
21:45 - Pre-sell to our list (at a discount)
23:10 - Are live webinars still worth it?
26:50 - Are webinar replays worth it? What are the alternate options?
29:15 - Should you run ads to your webinar?
30:25 - Should you do an open/close cart? How long should it stay open?
33:25 - What kinds of emails should you send?
37:50 - Should you run retargeting ads?
39:40 - What happens after the cart closes? How do you decide to do a downsell?
Show notes and additional resources can be found at: https://daveyandkrista.com/how-launch-course-2023/
Recommended
Transcript
Importance of Lead Qualification
00:00:05
Speaker
If you want better conversion rates during your launch, you can't only focus on lead gen, right? But you also have to qualify those leads. And that's why getting your leads to taking additional action, whether that's to join a Facebook group or watch a free video or whatever, is so important before you ever put an offer in front of them.
Introduction and Hypothetical Example
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands That Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:32
Speaker
Ryan Akins and Jesse Marchecho, my business partners over at Till Agency, joined me for a discussion about how we would launch a course in today's digital landscape. This was inspired by a conversation that we were having during a meeting recently, where we were discussing learnings from different client accounts that we manage. We discuss a lot in this episode, from what we would do before we launched the product, from lead gen to qualification, how we would launch our product, and the sorts of things that we would do post-launch to try to get as many people on the door as possible.
00:01:02
Speaker
We're big Settlers of Catan fans. Anyone else out there?
Till Agency Services and Listener Engagement
00:01:06
Speaker
So of course, our hypothetical course that we use as an example is a course teaching settler strategy. It was a fun episode to record. You can learn more about Till Agency over at till.agency. T-I-L-L dot agency.
00:01:20
Speaker
And right now, we're offering free ad and SEO audits. I'll put links to both in the show notes. But if you want some feedback on your current Facebook, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, TikTok, wherever you're running digital ads, or if you want to start focusing on SEO but don't even know where to start, you'll want to check out these audits. We don't know how long we'll be offering these, so be sure to check them out soon if you're interested.
00:01:43
Speaker
As always, you can access the show notes at DaveyandChrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you.
Course Creation Strategies
00:01:50
Speaker
Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see in the Brands that Work podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram, at DaveyandChrista. Now, on to the episode. She's just based the whole thing off of
00:02:06
Speaker
Settlers of Catan, because we're going to develop a course eventually for this. That's right. For how we launch Settlers of Catan consulting course. See, this is why I don't think the names are our courses though. I wonder if there's a market out there for Settlers of Catan course. How expensive do you think you could make a Settlers of Catan strategy course? 20 bucks.
00:02:28
Speaker
I don't know, I feel like people get way more angry than $20 when they lose at Settlers. How much would you pay to dominate everyone you played in Settlers of Catan? Yeah, and Jesse, we're asking you this question in particular because I don't know if you've ever actually won. I've won a couple games. Oh, no, but I'm talking about the tournaments, the epic tournaments that we've had. Have you come out on top yet? I won the big tournament in Flagstaff, but... So how much would you pay to replicate that feeling, Jesse? I'll probably pay 100 bucks.
00:02:56
Speaker
Dang. All right, we've got our course idea. I'll probably pay 100 bucks. Jesse will be our prime testimonial. From zero to hero, baby. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So for anybody tuning in, we're talking about our future Settlers of Catan course. No, what we're actually talking about though is course creation.
Lead Generation Essentials
00:03:14
Speaker
You know, not specifically about creating the course itself, but we had a conversation recently about basically how we would launch a course if we had a course to launch today.
00:03:23
Speaker
Lots have changed, I think, you know, since the inception of, you know, running a webinar and selling your course. And oddly, I feel like we've come full circle in some ways. But we were basically having a conversation, like, if we were launching a course today, what exactly would that look like? And we thought, that'd make a good podcast episode. So here we are. If you are interested in a Settlers Catan course, we can make that happen, though. So just write in and let us know. Because we play every time we get together.
00:03:50
Speaker
we play a lot of Sadler's Catan. And so the way that we do it, we typically keep track of who's won the most games and who scored the most points as well, with the latter being how we determine the winner of the tournament. So as you might have picked up, Ryan has quite a few wins. I've won a few. Jesse's still knocking at the door.
00:04:12
Speaker
I could really use that course. But we've worked with a number of course creators across a variety of industries now. So that's why this conversation is top of mind. It's a question that we get asked very regularly from clients saying, you know, especially if they're coming to us with results that are less than they'd like, or they're really looking to scale that, you know, they ask us like, what would you do if, you know, you were in our shoes or this was your course?
00:04:38
Speaker
how would you do this differently? And so a lot of conversations that we have with clients or potential clients revolve around this as well. And rightly so, there are some things where we tell clients, this is what we do and they don't like that. And so they still do something, a variation of that, which is okay. Every business owner is going to have their own spin on how the advice that we talk about today is going to affect their business or it's going to relate to their audience. Every audience, every brand is going to react a little bit differently to any marketing that we potentially do.
00:05:05
Speaker
So, with all that to say, I think we came up with some good stuff to point you in a very good direction that's going to give you the best results that we believe you can have possible.
Building Trust with Leads
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm excited to talk about we have some data to go along with the points that we have today. So it's not purely hypothetical. I mean, this is based on, you know, I mean, I don't know how much we've managed in ad spend at this point, but it's got to be in the millions. So lots of learning from that. And then we've all, I think, launched our own courses. We've launched courses over at Dave and Krista. And Jesse, I know you've launched courses before. Ryan, I don't know if you've launched courses before, but you've launched more products than any of us, I think.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, no courses, but lots of launching of lots of different things. Yeah, yeah. So plenty of experience coming here. And like Jesse said, you know, I wouldn't say that this is, you know, the only way that you can do it. But I think these principles are pretty true. And this is just how we would do it if we had a course and for our forthcoming course on Settlers of Catan. And I'll just put it out there. If anybody thinks they could beat us in Settlers, you know, we're game, we play each week, we play on the Oculus, it's pretty fun. But anyways,
00:06:08
Speaker
Sports book or betting like a betting site for sellers. Can you can we maybe that's the product we need to go for? That's right. Well, let's dive in here because we have quite a few things to go through. Ryan, you want to kick us off? Like what's the very first thing that we would recommend doing for somebody who is planning on launching a course?
00:06:26
Speaker
Yes, step number one and this kind of assumes that you're starting maybe a little bit fresher and don't have a big list to launch to already and you need to develop that. So, step one is definitely just beginning off with lead gen and especially with incorporating paid ads into it, this is a great launching point especially if you've never run ads before because you're not asking for that purchase right away, you're just asking for
00:06:48
Speaker
an email and maybe a little bit more information. So it's a much lower barrier to get someone to commit to giving you this information. And then you can hopefully engage them a little bit more between once you get their email and when you're finally ready to launch your course.
Beta Launch Benefits
00:07:01
Speaker
But we've got a few steps in between there too. But yes, step one is just starting off with some lead gen.
00:07:06
Speaker
And one of the things i like about lead gen is that it's never wasted whereas if your first foray into ads and running digital ads is running an ad straight to a product and it doesn't work well it just doesn't work right you have no way of necessarily following up with that person you know sure you might season your pixel a little bit in the sense that you might be getting hits to that product page but with lead gen.
00:07:27
Speaker
you know, even if you're not moving a lot of product immediately, right? What you are doing is getting leads that you can sell to for, you know, however long that person is on, whatever list that you're adding them to. I think one question though, that we often get, and Jesse, maybe you could speak to this, is how much lead gen do I need to do before I actually launch the course?
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that some of that depends on some of your goals that you want to hit on that. And it's kind of a little bit of a tricky question because you could do an infinite amount of lead gen to give you like, quote unquote, the best results possible. But I think that at a minimum, you know, you want to get a decent amount of people in there that's going to give you the opportunity to
00:08:07
Speaker
warm people up to create like a solid group of people that you can use to like kind of springboard your launch to make sure that you're not just launching to this, you know, like Ryan mentioned, these cold audiences asking for this big sale right up front. So I would say like, you know, if you're brand new and you're just launching a course, you don't have a big audience. I would say like we'd probably want to get in the ballpark of 500 to a thousand leads on like an average end of what you'd want to hit.
00:08:31
Speaker
You know, it could be a little bit less than that, just depending on how much budget you had to push towards that, but that would be like the numbers that I would be looking for. That would feel confident in looking at getting a good sample size for moving forward.
Pre-launch Strategies and Scarcity
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say, I mean, would you agree, Ryan and Jesse, that maybe like the more high ticket the product, maybe the less leads that you need to bring in as a baseline, you know, to get to launch. Whereas if you're launching maybe a lower ticket item and high ticket, I mean, something that's going to cost in the thousands per purchase and low ticket could range from something that's, you know, 1999 to a few hundred dollars. Would you agree with that?
00:09:08
Speaker
Explain the logic to that Camilla because I guess my first thought would be the inverse of that. If I want to sell something that's way more expensive, my conversion rates throughout my funnel are going to be lower. So I need to have an even bigger pool of leads to be pitching to initially. Sure. I guess I was thinking from the perspective of what your goal amount is to sell. And I think like
00:09:26
Speaker
let's say $10,000 is a good goal for a first launch for people who maybe haven't launched something before. And so you would need less of a high ticket item, but I totally see your point too, where because conversion rates are going to be lower for a high ticket item, so you might want to get more people on that list first. And Jesse, speaking of conversion rate, what's the conversion rate that we're typically seeing from selling to your list?
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah. So whenever you're having a launch, like the kind of golden rule that a lot of people like to use is, you know, you want to be shooting for converting 2% of your entire list. So, you know, if you have 500 people on your list, when you launch a new course, this is not including like new people that you get in throughout the launch period, but just, you know, your total overall total list, about 2% of that. So you're looking at 10 sales at 500 people. So, I mean, granted,
00:10:18
Speaker
You could do better than that. You could potentially do worse. Obviously, at higher price points, that number goes down. At lower price points, that number goes up. So really can depend, but the 2% is kind of the industry standard of what people typically go for, like what their average conversion rates are.
Live Webinars for Engagement
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, we would all agree that LeadGen is an indispensable piece of launching a course and we've seen results that maybe one of you can speak to in a second here. One thing I'll say to launching a new product or if you've been around before or for a while and now you're just launching your first product but you've already built a fair amount of trust, it's not crazy to see much higher conversion rates in the beginning.
00:10:57
Speaker
So that's something that should be encouraging. You know, for your first thousand people on your list, you'll typically see a higher conversion rate than when, you know, your list is eventually a hundred thousand and you've been selling products a lot. And of course, there's exceptions to that rule too. And Ryan maybe can fact check me along the way.
00:11:14
Speaker
I think that for the point, Davey, we've seen clients that launch, that see 10% to 15%, especially if they don't have 100,000 people on their list when they launch, they have anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people on their list and they sell really, really well to those people because they did that lead gen early.
00:11:34
Speaker
they poured into those people and those people were really warm when it came time to buy. So there's definitely room, wiggle room in that 2% number because like you mentioned, it really just depends on how warm of the audience is. Obviously at a 100,000 person list, you know, there's going to be a subset of that that are very cold versus a subset that's very warm. Absolutely.
00:11:55
Speaker
A big factor in doing Legion 2 is, again, that it's that more incremental step that's easier for people to take. But the benefit of that is that you get to kind of weigh in and see what is working, especially in terms of the creative front on ads. Because if you're, again, if you're going straight for purchase, let's say, you might get one purchase attributed to one ad, which is not statistically significant at all in terms of results. Whereas if you're getting
00:12:16
Speaker
a thousand leads and you can see that the video of you talking to camera worked way better than the still image that's a snapshot of your course or something like that that can guide your future creative decisions when you are running ads for the webinar when you are putting graphics and things like that in your email there's a lot of data that you can gather from the process so.
00:12:36
Speaker
And we've seen ROAS as high as almost, and when we say ROAS, when we mean return on ad spend, as high as almost 30 times or 30X when running lead gen. And that would be hard to come by if you were just not running lead gen, like if you were just running cold ads, or ads to a cold audience rather.
Post-launch Strategies
00:12:55
Speaker
I would say, unless it's like a super scammy ad, just like promising everything for nothing, then I would say that's next to impossible for sure. All right, awesome. Well, let's move on from lead gen here to what we feel like the next step is because it's actually not selling the course yet, right? So Ryan, what's the next step here in what we would do? Yeah, so the next part is really just engaging those leads, depending on what sort of lead gen you use, like if you're just using a simple
00:13:22
Speaker
Here's an email for a download. You're going to get a lot of unqualified leads in that process. And so our next step is to really just engage those leads and try to qualify those leads. And the method that we landed on for our settlers of Catan course would be a Facebook group. So just start funneling people into that group. That's kind of the next step that you want to get people to convert from giving you their email to now opting into this group.
00:13:44
Speaker
where then you can get them engaged. You can have your face in front of them. You can be interacting with them. They start building that trust with you. So it could be a Facebook group. It could be even videos that you're sending them to your email. It's just something to build that trust between you and them. And I think really having your face in front of them, if you're doing a course that features you, is definitely a critical piece here too. Jesse, what do you think the best ways are to basically engage people and qualify them?
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah. So I mean, for smaller products, like I'm talking $500 or less courses, it's probably not gonna be worth your time to be like trying to get a bunch of people on the phone and to have them fill out all these lengthy applications or, you know, whatever. I think that, you know, qualifying them is just getting them to engage consistently on a
00:14:28
Speaker
topic that is relevant to whatever you want them to sell the more time educational products so you know those info products on a specific topic is creating content for them that is getting them to engage in those things. Or at bare minimum starting to talk about those pain points again to engage on like no solution can i would you know maybe write a post that's like.
00:14:46
Speaker
Man, I keep making the same mistake. Have you guys ever done this too? You know, which would basically be probably losing constantly. But, you know, like have you ever been there? Being able to get people to engage, qualify themselves, kind of raise their hand more or less, given the opportunity to connect to the content that you want to be getting. You know, if we're talking in the Facebook like group specifically, that kind of conversation is great. Otherwise, and you can do this via email and you're kind of qualifying them again by using open rates, click through rates and things like that.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, I like the Facebook group method because it's another way you get to see people build trust kind of in your place, right? And sometimes it doesn't take a lot of effort on your part, right? So if you have an active Facebook group and you've gotten people to engage, you know, people will comment on each other's posts. And so we'll find value in that community. And to a certain extent, some trust is transferred to you as just being the host or the leader of that community.
00:15:39
Speaker
Additionally, it's just nice to show up in a lot of different spots. Facebook page is pretty much irrelevant these days, right? Just the amount of engagement it's going to get, even if you follow a Facebook page. I would say Facebook groups aren't excellent in that regard, but I'm more likely to see a Facebook group or a conversation happening in a Facebook group that I'm a part of than I am any pages that I'm following.
00:16:01
Speaker
So I really like that in particular. You can also stream live to Facebook groups. You can stream live, of course, Facebook pages as well. But I think that there's a little extra buy-in for a Facebook group where if you can get somebody from your list over to that group, you can tell, okay, they're actually really interested in whatever content it is that you're offering. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else to add for qualifying?
00:16:23
Speaker
I think that as far as data goes to, you know, we have a handful of clients that run Facebook groups. We don't necessarily have before and after data from not using groups and having groups, but you know, there are other options as well. We have a client that kind of uses Mighty Networks as an option for qualification and trust building during that process as well.
00:16:40
Speaker
And they find that to be pretty effective in not only being able to qualify, but also being able to gather information about how to sell to people when that time comes as well. Because you're able to have those conversations where you're being able to use that language again when you're putting together sales emails or webinars or whatever.
00:17:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think anytime you can get somebody to follow you from one platform to the other, you know, that's a signal of trust right there. So I think that's the key thing. All right, so we're still not at launching. Now we're sort of getting a little bit closer to launching. What's the next step in what we do in our planned launcher?
Downselling Techniques
00:17:18
Speaker
So those can course.
00:17:19
Speaker
The next step is going to be to put together a beta launch, get some beta testers in there. So for our Settlers of Catan course, I would probably take that course and see how much I can improve. And then I would have a glowing testimonial to be able to give. But yeah, the next step is really that.
00:17:35
Speaker
you know, proof of concept, especially if it's a new course, especially if you've never done courses or a course before the beta launch is really, really important. It doesn't have to be this like huge launch necessarily. You can just, you know, pick out, you know, send an email that says, Hey, I'm looking for 10, 20 people to take this course and give me feedback on that in exchange for, you know, testimonial or whatever. And, you know, it's pretty straightforward, you know, beyond that the goal of this is simply proof of concept testimonials. Anything else you think that
00:18:05
Speaker
Any other reasons why people do that? If that wasn't enough. So go back into like the product world, you know, you do a beta test to really test and flush out the product and make sure it's fully functional and not broken yet. Cause you haven't had any users going through your course, you know, your systems and everything like that. The dependencies on your email system and your course and everything being connected well and working well.
00:18:25
Speaker
So it's definitely a secondary to probably everything that you're saying, but just being able to make sure your system's working and it isn't broke and people aren't going to be dropping off anywhere. I think it's definitely a critical piece too. I definitely think there's product improvement to come, but I think in terms of just thinking through the marketing plan that the real value in the beta launch is really what you can do with that, you know, those materials, that feedback as you actually launch the course. And I think there's, you know, two ways we've seen this done where people are kind of like,
00:18:53
Speaker
who wants to take this course and give me some feedback and it's just kind of free and casual and there's not really any follow up there. And then there's people that we've worked with that are very methodical about exactly why they're doing the beta launch. They want testimonials, but in addition to testimonials, there's an obligation for those people to share about their experience with the course on the day of launch.
00:19:15
Speaker
so that any ads that are run have some social proof built in. In general, as people are considering purchasing from this launch, any organic posts they see, just add to that social proof. It's really for that big marketing push that you'll make when you launch the course. Then to me, the feedback on the product and working out any potential problems with integrations and systems is
00:19:41
Speaker
sort of bonus alright but then again you know that's just I tend to overthink about I guess maybe the marketing side of things but I think you can be really methodical about that aspect of things and I wouldn't recommend just being like hey who wants to you know who wants to test it out
00:19:56
Speaker
I would make sure that they understand, okay, well, you're going to get this course for free, but in return, this is exactly what I need from you. And that
Settlers of Catan Course Ideas and Banter
00:20:03
Speaker
can make a big difference, especially around launch, especially for a product, you know, if it's your first product and you don't have a lot of real results from people in the past.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah. And this group of people is, or say this step here is basically not possible if you haven't done lead gen. And the longer you've been able to do lead gen for something like this, I mean, granted, you know, you may have some like social followings that you could potentially pull from here as well. But in general, the longer you're able to do that, those lead gens build that trust, continue to pour in these people, the more excited people are going to be about doing something like this.
00:20:38
Speaker
I will say that there's a caveat here that there's a balance between doing something like this and getting a lot of people in the door to beta launch and cannibalizing your sales. We don't want to give away so much or so many of these things that all like the people that would have bought your course automatically are just getting it for free. So just something to keep in mind there. You don't want necessarily like, you know, if your goal is to have a hundred people buy, you don't want to give away 10% of those things to that, you know, maybe have five people do that or something. So anyways, just something to throw out there.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I think this is one of the benefits, not only of lead gen, but then also having something like a Facebook group of people that you can go to and ask this question. And to your point, Jesse, I would, you know, I mean, it's relative to, I think maybe how many sales you think you're going to do, how many people you need to beta launch it that maybe cover different, you know, types of avatars of people that you want in the course, you know, people who might be taking the course for different reasons, right?
00:21:31
Speaker
but I would say probably no more than 10 people. That'd be a lot of testimonials and help sharing the day of. I think that would be plenty. Between the beta launch and actually launching it, and we'll get into actually the big launch here, one of the things that I've done in the past that I've had success with is some sort of pre-launch and pre-sale. This is basically before you do, and what we're going to recommend here is going to be a live webinar. We'll talk about that in a minute.
00:21:57
Speaker
But one thing I just kind of want to stick in here as an option and something that we might consider doing if we get enough leads in the door, right? Selling our hypothetical Settler's exam course is pre-selling to our list, to our leads. One of the big benefits of doing that is you can offer some sort of discount for people who are ready to buy right then and there. And this can be a short window like, we're going to be doing a webinar about this on Wednesday, it's Monday now, you have until then to purchase at this special rate.
00:22:25
Speaker
So one of the things that helps with, I think, is one, gauging interest. Two, I think it gets some revenue in the door that you could then potentially pull from to start running retargeting ads when you're actually launching. So that's something that I've had success with in the past that I've, you know, I think is worth at least considering. I don't know what you two think about it.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. I mean, anytime you can add that element of scarcity or even urgency to a sale, it's great. And you're collecting again, you're collecting more data along the way before you're getting to your main launch. So I love it.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's one of those things where it's, this is before you have to go through the heavy lifting of the launch and the webinar and things like that. But getting to the webinar and getting to the actual launch and what that looks like, one of the things that we settled on after maybe a little debate was a live webinar. And this is something that I think, I'm really interested in hearing what you two think about this, but this is something I feel like this was the way to sell, right? And then maybe there was sort of a drop off
00:23:25
Speaker
I don't know as people got used to it more but now we see you know a little bit more success with at least live webinars and I think that's an important caveat to make but I don't know if you all have any thoughts about that.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was live webinars hit the scene right when, you know, Facebook ads were easy ads in general online were easy. And so then ads made the sales great. So let's make the webinars a little less stressful. Let's go evergreen with them. You know, there's definitely other benefits to it as well. But because the rest of the funnel was relatively easy, it was easy to switch it over to evergreen. Whereas now we're just seeing in this post iOS 14 environment, the ads are not easy anymore. And so anywhere where you can.
00:24:06
Speaker
help the conversion rates along your funnel is going to be great. And I think live has always performed better than Evergreen. Evergreen just has some other benefits to it just in terms of the workload to do it long-term. But yeah, if you can get that higher conversion rate through a live webinar, it's totally worth it.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think just looking at actual data from this, you're looking at webinar signup rates for Evergreen are usually going to be a little bit cheaper because they just have more options. It's not something they have to commit to a specific time. They have three or four different options every single day that people can sign up for. So typically, we see lower costs for that.
00:24:42
Speaker
But we also see better show up rates because there are more options there for the Evergreen. But the conversion rate on the actual webinar is significantly higher sometimes, sometimes up to 20% higher on live versus Nevergreen with the exact same content simply because people are engaging with someone live. They're not talking to what feels like a robot essentially.
00:25:06
Speaker
People could be tricked and I don't necessarily advocate or say that that was a good thing to do previously, make people feel like it's live when it's not. But those days are long gone where people know, people aren't dumb. If you're pretending like, hey, we're here live and you have comments popping up, yes, it's a recording, people get that, but people know it's not live.
00:25:28
Speaker
Well, I think what gives it away too is the options, like the signup options. People will be like, it's a live webinar that apparently starts every 10 minutes. Yep, absolutely. And so there's pros and cons to both. But one of the things that we see over and over again is higher conversion rates, not only from basically the higher conversion rates on the live webinar equate to higher conversion rates across the entire funnel from registration all the way to sale.
00:25:55
Speaker
I think I should modify my initial statement about webinars too and make that more true of Evergreen, where we used to see a lot more success with Evergreen webinars than we have in the recent past. But I do think webinars has still been a strong way to sell live video in general. There's something about webinar too, as opposed to like a Facebook live. And again, if you have a really active, engaged Facebook group, then this might work for you as well. Just doing a Facebook live instead of going through like a webinar
00:26:25
Speaker
Solution, you know, but I think we see a lot of success people using an actual webinar solution where people can comment and engage that way and maybe you can more strategically like introduce offers and Do some other marketing stuff during the webinar then maybe you could do with a Facebook live
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if there's much else to say about the webinar outside of, you know, we would do a live webinar versus something recorded. What about replay or no replay? I could be convinced either way. Ryan, what do you think? I would do it. I mean, there's no downside to it, right? Would you say there's a replay beforehand? No, I wouldn't. I don't think I would say that there's gonna be a replay. I would definitely hold that out till after the fact.
00:27:08
Speaker
Well, let me run this by you, Ryan, cause saying there's no downside, which may be the case, but I typically see replay conversion rates at like a quarter of what we'd see on a live webinar. So we kind of had a look at it from a perspective of do at this point, they didn't show up for the, for the first webinar.
00:27:30
Speaker
What are the chances of them going to a replay of a recorded webinar and then going on to purchase versus either just sending them to a sales page and giving the opportunity to buy without seeing the webinar or running a live encore webinar. I mean a live encore that would definitely be the gold standard but I think the blend would probably be because I get what you're saying that
00:27:51
Speaker
you know, how many people maybe they just want to go see the sales page. So just send them there. But maybe you give them that chance. If you have a, what do we say, like a 72 hour, we'll get to that, I guess, but the closed cart period, give them a chance to buy first. But there may be people out there that need to see that webinar to build that trust before they're going to buy to give them that option, but maybe not just write it. You know, they're not getting the automated email 15 minutes after the webinars done saying, Hey, go.
00:28:17
Speaker
You missed it, go watch it now. Hold it out for a little bit. I'm gonna combine your ideas because one thing that I really, I think we've seen, we have actually at least one client who does this but I think has been effective in the past. I mean just funnels that I end up going down is having the replay at the top of the sales page. So when you're sent the replay link, you go to the replay, the video's embedded at the top but then when you scroll down, it scrolls down into whatever product they're selling.
00:28:43
Speaker
And I think that's an, you know, effective way of like, you know, maybe if somebody has to watch something, you know, that they end up watching it and, you know, hopefully somewhere along the way that they decide to buy. But if most of us know like what's coming right, we can also just get down and see the offer as well. So. One other big question for the webinar is are we running ads to cold audience for the webinar or are we just relying on the leads that we generated in step one?
00:29:08
Speaker
I think it kind of depends on how lead gen went and how, if you're doing a pre-sell, like how that went as well. I think if you try to do an email, sell your email list right before the webinar and that doesn't go well, then maybe I'd be more hesitant to run ads to the webinar itself. See, I disagree.
00:29:28
Speaker
I think you do regardless because it's a completely different mechanism for that sale. Your audience just may not be super engaged via email. Maybe you're not the best trust builder via email, but you're super animated on video, for example. So I would say one of the biggest strengths of webinars is turning cold leads into warm.
00:29:47
Speaker
And so if you can get people at a reasonable cost, I would say like at least test it, see what you can do to get people to sign up. And if you can get them for like a decent cost, I'd say in the ballpark of $3 to $8 depending on your industry and market, then we really have nothing to lose in my opinion.
00:30:05
Speaker
You know what, I'm gonna agree with you. All right, so I'm changing my mind. Fortunately, you're better at marketing than you are, said Liz. All right, so I think we've covered a lot of webinar questions. If you're listening and you have more questions, comment on the show notes, send us a DM, send us an email, happy to answer those, and who knows, maybe it turns into another episode altogether. So let's talk about post webinar. How long do we keep our cart open?
00:30:32
Speaker
I guess the first question though, but even before that is do we do open cart close car? I think that was one of the conversations we had as well. Or is the cart open and it kind of stays open forever? If I remember correctly, we all agreed that it should be open and closed. Yeah, I agree with that. I think the only potential is if you're going to keep it open, it would have some sort of webinar offer the ends. So basically the same thing. Just, you know, if you can buy a $600 course all the time versus a $400 course today.
00:31:01
Speaker
I think what we also landed on was if we're going to go live webinar, let's go all the way there. Let's do a one-time webinar, one-time product that's hopefully going to allow us to see the best conversion rates for our product. Because if we have a cart that stays open longer, if we have an evergreen webinar, anything that's going more longer running is going to have lower conversion rates. So we can at least start at the optimal scenario in terms of conversion rates and then go from there in the future.
00:31:25
Speaker
That's one of the things that I think we have been having a conversation at least me and Ryan have on the regular these days that comes back to like marketing got like fancy for a little bit there as like, you know, all these like SAS companies and like cool features, like whether it was like chat bots or messenger bots or evergreen webinars, like all of these things that were so cool to be able to do. And they could use all these really cool things.
00:31:50
Speaker
when I feel like a lot of marketing, just going back to the basics of looking at how we can just keep it simple and be able to do what we know works as opposed to overcomplicating things unnecessarily, especially if you're just doing this for the first time.
00:32:08
Speaker
I do agree that simplicity I think wins and especially if you're doing this for the first time that there's a lot of benefit in doing open cart close cart and then kind of reassessing where you go from there even if it's something that you plan to offer on the regular and at the very least to I forget Ryan or Jesse whoever said this
00:32:26
Speaker
having some sort of very clear webinar related launch. So product might be available forever from now on, but for the next five days, this is the best deal you're going to get on it in the near future. I think Jesse you'd initially said three days. I was thinking more along the line of five days. I think anything longer than five days is probably too long. You know, there's not enough of a sense of urgency there and you just risk losing people's attention.
00:32:51
Speaker
unless you have a big list, then I think you can extend that a little bit, but assuming that this is somebody just getting started, I mean, majority of the people who are going to be warmer leads are either people that have seen the webinar or, you know, we're on your list from your, you know, pre-webinar lead gen, you know, you may not need a ton of time to get people to buy. And beyond that five day window, let's say like people just start falling off and to start losing subscribers. Ryan, any thoughts on timeline?
00:33:18
Speaker
No, I like three. Sounds better than five. Let's go with it. All right. I'm still going to argue for five here. But with that said, one of the reasons I was going to argue for five is just the kinds of emails that I think I would want time to send in those next, whatever we decide, three to five days. And there's a few emails that I have in mind. With that said, I think we'd all agree, certainly on the last day, on the cart close, there should be no less than three emails sent out, right?
00:33:46
Speaker
So, you know, maybe it is better to think about it in terms of the amount of emails that you want to send in how often than exactly how many days you want that to last. But point being is for me, there's a few emails that stick out. FAQs, I just think is like one of the strongest ways to
00:34:03
Speaker
Overcome objections you know and make them sound like benefits so good faq email that addresses you know just the objections that you think people are going to have not just like how many modules is included in this course you know or you know will this work for a you know insert whatever that's more along the lines of what i'm thinking of.
00:34:24
Speaker
testimonials, of course, and more so than just testimonials, but like a strong testimonial email. So I'm thinking of one person in particular, I don't know if I should say out loud who they are, but we're friends with them, so you guys probably know, but one thing they do really well, I think, is they tell a story about how somebody's life was changed through using their product, right? And so it's not like, they definitely send an email out where there's screenshots of all the people kind of raving about the product,
00:34:52
Speaker
But there's also, you know, maybe it's like bookend with the story of like one person and it kind of gets, you know, you tell more of their story, I don't know. But what else? I mean, what else should we include in this email follow-up? Well, I think that depending on the price point, I think also depends on how many of these emails we're sending, for example. I think one of the benefits of giving yourself a little bit more time is it gives you some time to tweak things if you're not seeing the sales that you want to see. I've personally run campaigns or, you know, products launches that
00:35:22
Speaker
We ended up extending because we just needed more time to be able to look at like, hey, how can we, how can we get the people to buy? We know it's something that would be helpful for them. And you know, one of them, I just, I was like, Hey, I want to figure out what's wrong here. So I just try to get people on the phone. I offered people like a free,
00:35:37
Speaker
you know, 15 minute and I sold that call as a value add. So being able to, you know, think through like, what are the things that we need to do to move products or get the courses moving if they're not getting that extra day or two can really help with some of those things. But I think that coming back to like the price point, like, you know, I'm probably not going to get a lot of fun with people for a $42 course when, you know, I may not convert
00:36:00
Speaker
you know, one every three or four calls. And so looking at that aspect or from that angle, looking at a few 500-hour course, maybe you do send it out a little bit so you can include more of those emails, the FAQ, the testimonials, case studies potentially, looking at like the kinds of people kind of like elaborating a little bit more on the FAQs there. And then one of the things, Davey, that you had mentioned in addition to that cart close is adding some sort of payment plan, you know, but I don't know if that comes after the cart closes. We like, you know, open it back up for a day, you know, you can get like
00:36:29
Speaker
you know, looking at quote-unquote getting fancy or, you know, just adding that in at some point during the funnel as well. Yeah, I would say that payment plans, I think for anything over $350, $400, some sort of payment plan can be helpful in convincing the last, you know, that last group of people. I wanted to open that up until the very last day or, you know, quote-unquote closed cart and then, you know, open it up the next day as a last chance with the payment plan. I think that's an option.
00:36:58
Speaker
I also think a free module helps if you can give people a glimpse of the course or share a lesson that you think is just one of the best from the course just to show people the value that they're going to get out of it. I think that can be really helpful in moving people from being on the fence deciding to make that purchase.
00:37:15
Speaker
And when you decide on what kind of content you're going to give there, you want to look at what's going to give people the quickest win or that biggest light bulb moment that's like, oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way. We've all been to hear speakers talk, give some sort of presentation. You're like, oh my goodness, this mindset shift or the way to think about this totally blew my mind or whatever. And you instantly built so much trust. If that's what they're giving away for free, I can't imagine what's in the paid version of the course. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
00:37:44
Speaker
So anything else to say about the, I mean, I'm sure there is in general, but kind of post-email follow-up of a launch? Our original thought process, we said we wouldn't run ads post-webinar, but that's another factor that you could play into this too, is potential retargeting ads to this as well. I know you've already got through email, you've had them watch the webinar, but even these emails are, you're not going to have a hundred percent open rates on these emails. So there is opportunity to incorporate some retargeting ads there as well if your budget allows it.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. I feel like we've always had some success running. It's hard to say, you know, the hard thing about retargeting ads afterwards is like how much Facebook is getting attributed to people who are going to buy anyways, you know, but I agree. I mean, just to the point that not everybody is going to get the email. It's going to go to Spain. They put the wrong email address in or whatever, you know, so it can be helpful.
00:38:35
Speaker
or they planning on buying and forgot and then, you know, got buried in their email and then they see the ad. And, you know, one other big thing is like, let's say you have a retarget audience of thousand, let's even say 5,000 people, you know, you're talking about $50 an ad spend, $100 an ad spend to get in front of all of those people again. So, you know, we're talking very minimal spend with a potentially big upside.
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah, it could be less than 10%, less than 5% of your overall ads budget. Just save it for retargeting if you have the budget to do it. One thing I'd add for some of the best performing retargeting ads especially are just introducing something new, whether it's a payment plan, potentially cart closing, just reminding people to give yourself a reason. It's not just like, oh, the cart's open, buy it. But giving some extra oomph, whether it's some sort of bonus that got added, maybe
00:39:26
Speaker
You're adding unlimited email support or something like that. That could also go very well in an ad because it's just setting yourself apart, introducing something new, getting people's attention there, which I think can help that be more effective.
00:39:38
Speaker
Absolutely. So last part of this is, you know, what happens after the car closes? And I think in our plan, what we do is have some sort of downsell offer. I don't know. This is something I think we went back and forth on a little bit as well. You know, I mean, just going back to keeping things simple, I think this is definitely an optional part of it. But let's say, you know, I'm thinking of the Settlers to Catan course, right? Maybe this is a really good example because, you know, we really like Settlers. There's a lot of people out there who we know really like Settlers to Catan.
00:40:05
Speaker
And again, you can apply the same principle to any industry, right? But at the end of the day, like, would people find it valuable to purchase a course on Sadler's Catan? Like, I think we'd all have, you know, some doubts about that in general, but maybe we came up with this course, it's like $299 or something like that, right? Especially if it doesn't go well, if we could split it off into like,
00:40:27
Speaker
We can take a piece of it and downsell it to people who skipped on the main offer, I think can be a really good way to get people in the door who are willing to spend because they want, they're obviously interested in something, right? But maybe either don't have the budget or don't see the value in kind of the main product. What do you guys think?
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think in our example of Catan, like if it was a course about Catan strategy, but our main offer also included, you know, four hours of live gameplay and coaching with Ryan and Davey and maybe Jesse. But maybe you stripped that part out for your cart clothes offer and it's just the core, you know, module of the course itself. It's not any of the live elements, any of the more one-time elements to it.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I'm just thinking about in other industries what that might look like if you have a shooting and editing course. Maybe it's not the shooting part and it's just the editing or whatever that looks like. I'm trying to think of some examples recently. Maybe if you have some sort of sleep course, right? And the course is actually all ages. You have this big course. It's $1,000 covering from newborn all the way to five years old or something like that.
00:41:41
Speaker
you could maybe split that off and downsell just the pieces that would be relevant to somebody right now. But always good way to think through how you can optimize the launch.
00:41:53
Speaker
You can get creative here too. I just saw an ad for something where it was a downsell from a course that was like kind of like turning into a tripwire offer a little bit, but it was like, I want to say it was $9. And the course was, I want to say $300 or $400, $9 for 24 hours access to the course, basically like, Hey, you get through in 24 hours. Good for you. I'm glad for you doing this. But then after you get through that course, you kind of have to add time on.
00:42:16
Speaker
To be able to access it so like there are a lot of kind of cool ways you could go about doing that i'm just giving people the opportunity to still consume the content again huge trust building opportunity there especially if they eventually will have to buy the whole thing anyways to get all the content but again there's gonna be people there just skeptical me just want every reason to be able to say i want to take the risk away from me.
00:42:38
Speaker
Yeah. And just to be clear to a downsell, I mean, it is what it sounds like you're selling down, but this happens after the car is closed. So you're not putting this option in front of people who have already bought from you. So anyways, we're going to end it there because we're already coming up on 50 minutes.
00:42:53
Speaker
We're all, you know, whenever we're doing this, like, oh yeah, that's 20 minutes to 30 minutes, you know, whenever we outline, here we are 50 minutes. But if you have questions about this, feel free to reach out over at a till dot agency, T I L L dot agency. And you can find us over in the show notes as well. We're doing a lot of exciting things.
00:43:10
Speaker
I think over at TIL, one of the things that we've been focusing on a lot lately is SEO. And so we have our current offer right now, we actually doing free audits for people. So you can fill out that audit application. If you head on over to TIL.agency, you can find out more information about that. If you're interested in SEO and if you are launching something, whether it's your first launch or it's, you know, a second or third or fourth launch and you're trying to scale, reach out and we can talk to you about how we might be able to help you. But Jesse, Ryan, it's always a pleasure. Definitely.
00:43:40
Speaker
Do you have any tips for Jesse with his Catan game? I'm all ears. All ears. I mean, Ryan, real quick, can you identify like if you had to give Jesse some coaching right now, just as an example of the kind of coaching that we would give in the course, what do you think is the mistake that Jesse just traditionally makes?
00:43:58
Speaker
Jesse needs to take his own advice with marketing that simple is better. You know, if you see the five, nine, 10 rock wheat sheep, you just take it. You don't have to look at the rest of the board. You know, one thing I'll say about Jesse too, just while we're kind of unloading on him right now is Jesse has just like, if Ryan's been winning a bunch and Jesse might start the game and be like, all right, we got to take Ryan down, but then he'll do something just absolutely.
00:44:26
Speaker
Vicious to me during the game. It's like you have the unique ability to have people turn on you like alliances that are going strong and then all of a sudden you do something so vicious that we're like, okay, Jesse, we can't let sometimes you just can't resist. Okay. If someone's just offering their backup to you in a game like attend, you take it. You say, cut them off the knees. And this is why Jesse has limited success in content. But anyways, thank you all for joining me and until next time.
00:44:58
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.