Experts and coaches aspire to help others AND earn a good income from their course. But it takes more than just launching a program to get more sales. In this episode, we’ll learn how to double your course income in the next 90 days with John Ainsworth.
As a coach and online course creator, you are aware of the value of what you offer but may lack the knowledge of how to properly market your program. Listen in as John guides you through some of the ways to optimise your sales funnels and promote your program to double your income.
If you’re a course creator wanting to 2X or even 5x your income, this episode is definitely for you.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- What inspired John to create funnels for course creators (01:43)
- Common issues with ineffective funnels (05:05)
- Three stages to optimize your funnel (08:20)
- What’s an order bump and why does it persuade people to buy? (09:45)
- Taking the next step through upsell (13:08)
- The outcome of sending regular emails to your list (18:30)
- The value of setting a monthly email promotion sequence (25:50)
- How to convert an organic audience (28:53)
- Recommended lead magnets for coaches (31:27)
QUOTES:
- “Don’t create anything new. Start with what you’ve already got.” -John Ainsworth
- “You need to get good at running email promotions in a way that you’re happy sending them out. People like to receive them, and it makes sales.” -John Ainsworth
- “Business isn’t easy, but it is simple.” -Samantha Riley
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Profit Increase Report
- Book: “DotCom” Secrets: How to Get 100 New Customers in 100 Days Online… for Offline Businesses
- YouTube Channel: The Intrepid Guide
WHERE TO FIND JOHN AINSWORTH
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnainsworthddm/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnainsworth
https://www.facebook.com/groups/advancedcoursecreators
SHOW SPONSOR
This episode is sponsored by Your Podcast Concierge. Affordable podcast production for coaches and speakers who want to increase their authority and generate leads from their show. You press record, and let them do the rest.
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ABOUT JOHN AINSWORTH
John is the founder and CEO at Data Driven Marketing. They help online course creators to increase their revenue by 2x – 5x through awesome marketing funnels.
He’s been building funnels for 10 years and is a digital nomad much of the time.
TRANSCRIPTION
John Ainsworth Snippet (00:00):
It works fantastically well. And obviously, you’ve got to have the right kind of product that actually does fit with it could be a workbook, or it could be a one-to-one session with you. Or it could be additional templates or something that goes with the thing you’re selling. So you’ve got the course. But if you also want the templates, or the swipe files, whatever that allows you to implement it faster then you can get that as well. The crucial thing here is, don’t make anything new. Start with anything you’ve already got.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:28):
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for experts who want to be the unapologetic leader in their industry. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing, and leadership strategies, as well as discussing how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. It’s time to take your influence, income, and impact to the level you know you’re capable of. Are you ready to make a bigger difference and scale up? This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design, I’m your host, Samantha Riley. And today we’re going to be talking about something that every coach or course creator needs to know about and that is funnels and how to increase their revenue. So today I’ve invited John Ainsworth, who is the founder and CEO at data driven marketing. They help online course creators to increase their revenue by between 2x and 5x through awesome marketing funnels. And he’s been building funnels for 10 years and is here to give us the lowdown. Welcome to the show, John.
John (01:35):
Thanks very much. Great to be here.
Samantha (01:37):
Awesome. So you’ve been creating funnels for 10 years now. What? What got you into creating funnels for course creators?
John (01:48):
So the way I got started, I used to work in the fitness space, and I read Russell Bronson’s book, you know, whenever that was 10 ish years ago, maybe not quite that long, something in that kind of ballpark. Right. And before that, I’d been doing work around this. But when I read Russell Bronson’s book.com secrets, I was like, oh, man, there are levels to this stuff aren’t there? And I started, like, really digging into it and improving the funnels that we already had. And I didn’t know the name of that name at the time, but we just been doing work to get people into activity groups into I used to work with governments and health charities and kickboxing classes in gyms, this kind of thing.
Well, what started to happen was when you build a really good funnel, and you run that for a gym, you fill-up the gym. And then when they’re full, they don’t need you anymore. I did this a number of times, and I was like, this is, this is a terrible model. I shouldn’t do this anymore. So I started looking like Who else is there who’s got unlimited capacity. Because this clearly was very powerful, as clearly as a thing that could have a massive impact on a business, but you had to have enough capacity to be able to fulfil it.
So I started looking at different online businesses configured online, much more capacity than, you know, something brick and mortar. And I worked with E-commerce. And I work with SAS businesses and online course creators. And what I found with online course creators was that there are a few things that lined up really beautifully. So one, the margins are obviously ridiculously high. Because instead of it being with ecommerce, it’s maybe two-thirds. It’s like, you know, nearly 100%. Secondly, course creators tend to be someone who’s an expert in a topic, because spent years becoming an expert in a topic, started to then figure out how do I make money from this online? How do I make this into something, but doesn’t really understand marketing.
And a lot of these guys, we work with people who’ve already built up an organic audience. So that might be YouTube, or SEO, or podcast, or something like that, right? And so these are people who’ve known you got to be an expert in something and made amazing courses. But they’ve also built up an audience by putting out great content for a number of years. And so what they’ve done is they’ve built up this incredible potential in their business, but they just don’t know the steps to actually convert the audience into buying the courses at the right kind of ratio, the right kind of percentage, how do you actually help people to go through that process? So that meant that it wasn’t just that we could get great results for them, which we were doing these people who they almost deserved to do better? Like they would do doing this thing because they were good people. And they built up the potential but they didn’t know how to do the next thing. So it’s very fulfilling, helping these this group out.
You know, like a lot of people who run certain kinds of businesses they’re doing it just because they got into it for money. And online course creators tend to be they got into it in order to help people with this particular topic. And then they kind of deserve to make more money as well.
Samantha (05:02):
I love this so much. So you help course creators to 2x to 5x to revenue? I’m guessing I’ve seen some of your case studies. I know some of them do a lot more than that. Yeah. What before we even jump in? Let’s set the context. What does a funnel that doesn’t work look like? Like? What are some of the symptoms that people are going to be experiencing? Just so they can kind of sort of opt-in or out now going, aha, that’s either me or No, no, I’m good.
John (05:34):
Yeah. So there are three things that we see overall, that people get wrong here, the standard kind of model of what people are doing is they might have a website with a bunch of traffic coming in, and I’ll have a newsletter opt-in somewhere on the site. They will have an email list that they email every so often, maybe they send out some free content, maybe they don’t. And, and very occasionally, you’ll see a spike in sales, because they’ve sent out some kind of promotion.
And they might do this two or three times a year. And it’s like Black Friday, maybe Independence Day in America, maybe it’s their birthday, something kind of like that two or three times a year, that’s the norm. But they don’t want to send out more promotions, because they don’t want to be spammy and salesy and aggressive. And that’s like the standard model of YC, for like, 95 99% people. And there’s three main problems with that three areas where people are missing out.
So one is that they’re not converting enough of their visitors into their email list. They’re not figuring out how do I get more of those people to actually opt-in and get into my email list. Second thing they’re not doing is they’re not converting the email list enough into actually buying from them. And the reason they’re not doing that, it’s because they’re not sending out regular promotions to the list. And the third thing is that they’re actually not making as much money as they could per sale. So their revenue per sale is much lower than it technically could be.
And those three things when you put those together, if someone’s got a decent sized audience to start with, at a minimum, it’s about two times revenue, you know, virtually everybody or a lot of people can get to about five, and like you said, we had, we’ve got like a client who she’s currently at 25 times increase in revenue, you know, she was making a few 1000 a month. But she got a massive YouTube audience. And she’d had done, she’d started to build an email list, but she’d done nothing with it. And then so we helped her go from like, she, she was making 3000 a month when she when I first talked to her, and she said you wanted to get to 10,000 a month. And I laughed at her.
Samantha (07:40):
And she got really upset with you.
John (07:42):
Like, what’s, what’s wrong with that? And I was like, Well, you’re not gonna get a 10 You’re gonna go at least 30,000 You know, and I was wrong. She didn’t go to 30,000 a month one, she went to 50,000 a month to she had 50 A month three, she had 60. And then it was 80. And that’s not everybody, right? Because it’s she had a massive, massive audience to start with. But it’s that’s the kind of thing that’s possible, if you just haven’t put the system in place, but you have to have the other parts around that.
Samantha (08:08):
Love that so much. So obviously, a successful funnel you’ve just mentioned is, is, you know, someone that’s doing 50 6070 80,000 a month, let’s talk about I’d love you to share this three stages or three, I guess areas where people can start to look at how to start optimizing their funnel. Let’s let’s start here. What’s the first stage? Actually? Actually, let me rephrase this. So there are three stages, if you can give us the three stages, and then we’ll, like people have got contexts we can go back and deep dive into those further.
John (08:51):
Sounds good? Yeah. So I said the three issues where people aren’t converting the audience into the email list, they’re not making enough from their email list, and the revenue per sale is too low. So the three stages are fixing those three things. So it’s how do we get a high percentage of your visitors to get onto your email list? How do we get your email list to buy really regularly from you? And then how do we get higher revenue per sale and the order is in reverse of that. So you start with increasing the revenue per sale.
And the reason you do that is because it’s the easiest one to do. And so then what happens is you start to make more money. And then you go, Oh, John knows what he’s talking about. Let me try some of these other tactics. Whereas if you start at the beginning, it can take quite a while to actually have that impact. So increasing revenue per sales, the first one. So there’s two things that you can do here that are relatively straightforward. It’s order bumps and upsells.
Now this works best this particular model that I’ll describe works best if somebody is making the sale online. So somebody’s just going to the checkout page, go into a sales page reading it, go into the checkout page buying, but I’ll also talk you through like a If you’re doing this by phone, how does that fit in? You know, what’s the, what’s the tweaks.
So an order bump is where you offer someone an additional thing that they can buy on the checkout page, someone’s putting their credit card details in and there’s a tick box, and it says, Would you also like to buy this additional thing it’s gonna be, it’s typically about a third of the price of the product they’re already buying. So for example, we had a client in the spirituality space. And they had an offer of a course, to go with the course we added in a workbook. And so the workbook was an additional, the cost was, I think, $79. And the workbook was an additional $27. And that added is about 50% of people bought that. And so that meant it added about another $130,000 a year for them. Got a client in the home studio recording space. So who works with musicians who are looking to set up a home recording studio, he didn’t have any of these in place, he was using Kajabi, he went into Kajabi, and was like, Oh, look, there it is, you can do order bumps in here. And yeah.
And he’s wonderful, this guy, David Vignola, he takes action better than anybody I know. Because he’s, he doesn’t really have. He’s like, I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m gonna try it. And I’m like, great, we can always we can always tweak and fix it. And whenever later. And he in four days, he went through and set up order bumps and upsells. And his revenue went up 30 to 40%. And it stayed up by that much since he was making like six grand a month, and it went up to whatever that makes it like eight, nine grand a month. So this is super, super powerful. And what people don’t understand why this is such a high percentage of people will buy an order bump is like 30 to 60% of people. And everyone’s like, give it you only written like two sentences about this thing. And they’ve got no more details about it. Why would people possibly do that? It’s because of, it’s at the right point in the checkout process. People are like they’re ready to buy and like, oh, that you’re telling me, this is an additional thing that would improve what I’m buying,
Samantha (12:05):
right? Well, I get better results. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it’s that thing to ensure that or not to ensure to promote, hey, you’re gonna get great results with this. But if you have this other thing, then you’ll get even better results.
John (12:23):
yeah. And it’s, it works fantastically well. And obviously, you’ve got to have the right kind of product that actually does fit with it, you know, and it could be a workbook, or it could be a one-to-one session with you. Or it could be additional templates or something that goes with the thing you’re selling. So you’ve got the course. But if you also want the templates, or the swipe files, whatever that allow you to implement it faster than you can get that as well. The crucial thing here is don’t make anything new. Start with anything you’ve already got. Because if you start making new stuff, you might spend months on it. And what we’re looking for here is just a quick way and just get something up, and you can always optimize it later.
Samantha (13:00):
I love that so much love that so much. So that’s your order bump, talk us through upsells.
John (13:08):
So upsells is a very similar concept, but it’s on the confirmation page. So someone’s already put the credit card details in there click to pay, and the order is going through and then on the confirmation page, you offer them something else. And this tends to be rather than something going with what they bought, this tends to be the next step. So they’ve bought course a now you’re sending them course b You’ve sold them a monthly membership now offer them an annual upgrade, you’ve got, you know, in the eCommerce space, you know, you’re selling one bottle of supplements the upsell might be now buy three bottles, you know, get some more of what you’ve just got. You’ve just solved a problem, a win-win, that’s solved. That’s going to bring up a problem b Right? Well, we’ve got a course to help you with that as well.
And so that tends to be about the same price as the thing they just bought, if they just bought something for $99, then the upsell is going to be 79 or 99 or 129 or something kind of like that. Now you can have let’s say you’ve got to I got a friend who didn’t have anything else the same kind of price point, his main course is $1,000. He’d reduced it in price to 600. For the promotion. And then his upsell was like 3000. And he’s like, Well, I don’t know if people will buy that. And I said, Well, what else have you got is like that’s, that’s what else I have. I’m like great, we’ll put it up and see.
And only a small percentage of people bought it. But it’s $3,000 it’s a lot more money. So as like at that, that even a small percentage brought in an additional, I think 10 15% in revenue. All it’s done is just put that up at that stage, and it’s just about making it really easy for people to understand this is what else you should get next. And some of them are like, I’ve got my credit card out. I’m ready just spend let’s go what do you got? And if you hide that away and don’t tell them about it till later, then you know they’re not ready for it later. They’re ready for it. Now they want to make sure You want to go buy something
Samantha (15:01):
Totally, this is something that I was just chatting to someone about the other day, the offer that you don’t make is the chance that you’re not going to be able to serve that person. Because if you don’t make that offer, you’ll miss out be chances they’ll go and buy it from someone else. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to be making these offers.
John (15:23):
Yeah, yeah. And the same thing works. If you’re doing this by phone, you know, you don’t have to do it on the confirmation page, if you’re talking to people every week, but have something more expensive that they can buy, because some of them will want to get that. So on average, 10% of people are willing to spend 10 times as much money, what have you got this available for 10 times as much money, and then let people know that’s available.
So not in the course space at all. But I’ve got a friend who runs a job site, and it’s for hiring from Eastern Europe. And he was selling job ads for $149 per ad that you posted up on the site, and people would just do the whole process themselves. And I said to him, you really you’ve got to have something more expensive. And they’re like, what, how can someone spend a lot more money with you. And the owner then had done with your service for like about $2,000. And about 20% of people bought it? And that increases revenue? Like what does that take you to 10 Double tripled his business. So this stuff really good, you know, if you
Samantha (16:27):
Take that, thanks.
John (16:31):
If you’ve got one to one coaching that you want to sell, okay, great. Add that on. Or if you’ve got if you’re selling a low ticket course, and you’ve got a group coaching program that you want to offer that as the upgrade, you know, whatever you’ve got, that’s more expensive that you could put there can be something ideally similar price, but it could be something five times 10 times as much and some people will get it.
Samantha (16:54):
Perfect. Now you did mention that, that you’ve got a way to do this for people that are selling their courses through sales calls rather than online and automated. Yeah. How would you generally do that? If you’re having a conversation with someone?
John (17:14):
Yeah, so there’s, there are a couple of things you can do here, one of them is you actually do it on the call. And the other one is as you have the upsell come later on in the process. So if you’re going to do it on the call, just explain it to people as they say, yes, that’s great, I want to go ahead. And then you say, awesome, I’m going to put that through, get your credit card details. And I just want to let you know, there are some of our clients want to have the suit, you know, super premium deluxe package, whatever it is that you’ve got, right? That allows you to get the results fast, or it gets you one to one coaching with me. And that’s an additional this much. Is that something that’s of interest to you? And then some of those people are going to say, Great, let’s go ahead, let’s do that. And some of them are going to say no, and it doesn’t matter.
They’ve already committed you want to do this after they’ve already committed to Yes, I’m definitely buying the first thing, but you don’t want to confuse them. But it’s like you also can get this additional thing. It’s not terribly complicated. You know, it’s not, it’s just about always making the additional offer.
Samantha (18:12):
It’s nice to have the clarity of where it comes in the process. Sometimes things are so simple that, well, they’re simple to ask if we understand. But if you’re not quite sure how the process works, it’s like, what do I do next? Yeah, awesome. So the second, the second stage that you had, or the middle stage was around email conversions.
John (18:39):
Yeah. Yeah. So the crucial thing here is about sending out regular email promotions. So in the course space, urgency and scarcity are really important. So people need to know I should take action now. And people don’t send out enough email promotions, they’ll do it maybe two, three times a year. Now, what happens is, every time that you do it, a percentage of people will buy. But that percentage doesn’t go up if you do the promotions less often.
Because certain people are ready to buy in January and certain people are ready to buy in February and in March. However, if you only send out the January promotion and the June promotion, you don’t get all the February, March, April, May ones building up going on when it comes out, I’ll buy it doesn’t tend to work that way. Especially with the low-ticket stuff that we work on. Like we tend to work with people who are selling stuff up to about $500. And what we find is about naught point 3% of the email list will buy each time if you’ve got a totally new offer that nobody’s ever seen before and your email list is super hot. Then maybe you’re looking at 2% of people buying it maybe if you do an absolutely bang up job, massive launch all this kind of thing. But an average one is about naught point 3% that you can send those out twice a month.
And so if you do that twice a month, then one month you’ve got naught point 6% After three months, you’re up to that 2% After six months, and you’re up to more like about 4% of people, so it’s, it’s about having them go out regularly. Now the problem that people have with this is I think when I send out promotions twice a month, everyone’s going to unsubscribe, it’s going to be really annoying for them. So what do you do to avoid that? What we’re trying to do is get that email promotions to be such high quality that people enjoy receiving them, they’ve got to be incredibly valuable, and move people towards the sale at the same time.
So it’s about how do we line those two things up together so that people are enjoying getting the emails, even if they’re not going to buy, and 90% of your email list is probably never going to buy, but the 10%, who will, we want to always have the opportunity every month that they can buy something now. So the model for this that we use is gain logic, fear going, going gone. And it’s a sequence of six emails that you send out over the course of a week. And it’s a way of including huge amount of value in there.
So the gain email is about how is their life going to be different. After they’ve implemented this, they’ve solved this problem, they fix this thing. And that isn’t necessarily talking about your course. It’s talking about solving the problem. And what’s it going to be like in a week in a month in six months? What is going to change? How is our life going to be better? The logic is much more about logically, why this problem need solving statistics data, examples of people who’ve done it
The fear one is about what is going to go what’s going to be worse than their life if they don’t fix this, or what’s the problem they’re currently dealing with and bringing that to life. And so we’re not, it’s called fear, but it’s not trying to scare people. It’s more about empathizing with them and saying, I get that this is hard. But let’s imagine that your course is about dog training you like you’ve got a puppy, and the puppy is peeing everywhere, and it’s bothering you, and it’s rubbish. And then neighbours come around, and you’re embarrassed about the smell. It’s like saying, showing people that you understand that giving examples of other people who’ve been through that and saying it, this is solvable, you can fix this.
And, but, but showing them that you understand the fear, and the concern and the worries have already got. So the three of those are really about the problem and their life rather than about your course. But within those emails, you are saying, if you want help solving this by the course, it’s got 30% off this week. And then the going going gone, emails are much more about, they’re much more like a regular promotional what someone might think of as being promotional, but you’re still trying to do it in a way that is useful to those who aren’t ready to buy yet. So they want to stay on your list. So it’s things like case studies, or here’s somebody who bought the course. And they went through, and they implemented it and the result that they got.
And then with that you could have testimonials as well. It’s frequently asked questions that people might ask if they’re interested in this course, what’s what’s currently wrong, you know, what’s currently do they not understand what’s the issues that they’re facing? Why might not they buy, and then the Golmaal is very, very quick. At the end, it’s just like saying, the offer this offer closes in three hours.
If you’ve only got one course, then you might think, well, this is impossible, I can’t possibly do a different promotion every month, that’s just basically following that same thing. What you can do is a couple of things, you can include bonuses that are different each time. So instead of a discount, this month, you also get our partners course that’s going to cover this different topic, or this month, you should solve this because it’s the new year and you decided you needed to improve or because you know some business thing it’s to do with taxes, right? Well, tax season is coming up. That’s why you need to be fixing this now. Or black, you know, if let’s say you’re selling a course about Google ads, well, black Friday’s coming up, you need to solve this. And so you focus on how, how is Black Friday promotions going to be a really big deal for you and your business using Google ads.
And by the way, our course is gonna be able to help you to do that, you know, so it’s what is it that’s in their life that’s different. So we don’t do these promotions. And we don’t automate these, we do a new one each. We write them and send them out manually each month, because you have to have the promotion tie into what’s going on in their life and in their world and feedback that you’ve had from customers, that kind of thing.
So we had this for example, with a I mentioned the Google Shopping ads guy, there was Dennis and our program. He was selling a course for E commerce businesses about Google Shopping ads, and his best month he’d ever had was $7,000. And he implemented the system. And in month three, he did two more promotions. And he had seven made $17,000 And not only that, while he was making that $17,000 He was on holiday.
Samantha (24:48):
That’s the best part. That is the best part of the story. Just that I mean what a beautiful case study not only can you earn more money, but look you don’t even have to be married to your business, you can take some time out.
John (25:03):
Yeah, yeah, it’s a it’s a really like email promotions are the fundamental way that course businesses work. So you need to get good at running your email promotions in a way that you’re happy with sending them out. And the people like to receive them, and it makes sales.
Samantha (25:19):
I know that I’ve had people, and I’m sure you have to hurt a million times. I’m nervous to send out regular emails, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to, you know, be spammy, pushy, or you did you mentioned before, but there are people that I received their emails, and they send me emails daily, and I actually look forward to them. And instead of sending them straight to the archive, like some of them do, I read every single one of them. So it is about adding value. Now, when you talk about regular emails, what do you mean is that you know, is it two a week? Is it three week is it every day, like what is regular?
John (25:58):
Yeah, we’re doing it pretty much every day. What I suggest people start with is to do one of these sequences per month. So I’ve got a friend Michelle. And she runs I think it’s called the intrepid traveller, the intrepid traveller, the intrepid guide, she teaches people about Italian and she travels out to Italy, and she’s got his lovely, wonderful YouTube channel, she’s incredibly bubbly, so friendly, goes out and tries all these things and kind of gets you on the journey with her and like, Okay, I’m gonna learn this Italian in order to go to this place, it’s going to be fabulous. And we went out for cocktails, and she said to me how she wasn’t making as much money as she’d like to for my business. And I was like, You need to send out email promotions. And she’s like, I’m nervous about it, and I’m uncomfortable and what have you. And so I was like, I talked her through the model, and she started putting together her emails, and she made sure they’re really good quality. And she made she had her best month ever, that month from sending them out.
But what she did was she made sure that the emails were really good. And they weren’t perfect, right? They weren’t like the perfect promotional emails, but they were emails that she felt like they include a promotion. And they give a lot of value to her audience. And so she was happy with the right so the trick with this is, if you do a bad, unpleasant promotion, then it’s going to feel spammy and salesy and aggressive and most people when they do send a promotion, most people when they send one out, it is aggressive and salesy, but that’s not the idea. That’s just that’s all it you know how to do. It’s like, if you imagine somebody and whatever topic it is that you’re teaching people about, it’s not you, Sam, like the listener, like, whoever, whatever it is, you’re teaching people.
Imagine somebody came along and did it horrifically badly. And then said to you, this thing doesn’t work. I don’t like doing it. You’d be like, No, of course, you don’t like doing that. That was awful. Let me show you how to do it properly, right? Yes. Like, let’s let’s do it. Well, it’s like I’m, I’m starting to learn to sing at the moment I, I lost the ability to sing in tune when I was when my voice broke when I was a teenager. And I’m like, right, I’m going to learn that again. And so at the moment when I sing, it’s not so good. Right? Yeah. But when I but like, then you listen to someone who could sing well, and you’re like, Oh, I would enjoy that. Yeah, who wouldn’t enjoy doing that thing, it’s like, so do it well, and so the trick, then is learning how to do it? Well, it’s like, just make sure that the emails are wonderful, and that people love them. And there’s value when it’s helpful if they don’t buy from you, because 99% of them are not gonna buy from you this time. But also make them get those people who want to buy who are interested who are up for it, to realize there’s an offer, and they can go buy it now. And they’ll do really well from it.
Samantha (28:48):
I love this. I love this so much. So monthly offers. Let’s talk about converting your organic audience, because that’s the first stage. And I think that a lot of people want to know about this.
John (29:03):
So most people with their traffic to their website, get about naught point five to 1% of them to opt-in to their email list per month. And a good opt in rate is about 2%. And a great one’s about five and the best we’ve had is 9.3. So there is an opportunity for most people to about five to 10 times their opt-in rate and therefore grow their list five to 10 times as fast. The stages of this are quite straightforward. And just most people haven’t realized it, or they haven’t got round to it or whatever. So the first thing is don’t have a newsletter with your OPT-in have a lead magnet.
Samantha (29:45):
Please say that again for the people at the back. Because I tear my hair out with this one all the time. Do not have your OPT-in as a newsletter, who wants to receive a newsletter in their inbox? Like none of us are sitting here going, Oh, we wish we could have more emails in our inbox.
John (30:01):
Yeah. So there’s got to be something that you’re telling people they’re getting onto your newsletter list, but you’re giving them a bonus, a better thing that’s useful right now, as like an ethical bribe a thing to get them and some of them can unsubscribe later, that’s fine, there’s an unsubscribe button in every single email, that’s all right, you know, and you’re telling people they’re opting in, so that’s fine. But give them a lead magnet. And so a good lead magnet should be something that gets them a benefit almost immediately.
So the best one I’ve ever seen is we had a client who was in the digital painting space. And so he would teach people how to have a, you know, paint on their iPad. And his opt-in was 15, free brushes. And so they didn’t have to do anything in order to get the benefit, they just had to opt in, they got them, they upload them into whatever it was, he was using Photoshop or something. And now they’ve got the brushes. And so that’s the ideal, that’s the version, that we’re aiming for something where they don’t have to do any work, and they get a benefit almost immediately, something within 15 minutes.
Samantha (31:05):
So there are a lot of people that are listening. And this is a question that I get asked all the time, a lot of people that are in the coaching space that give, you know, like success coaching, or you know, like in the life coaching, I guess, area. And for them, it’s very hard to get a very, very quick win, what are some of the some of the lead magnets that you’ve seen in this space that come under that bracket of getting a quick win?
John (31:36):
So we’ve got clients in the personal development space and personal development is a, you know, it’s a long road, right? There’s lots of stuff to unpick and figure out and how you’re going to improve yourself. And it’s not easy. But their opt-in is five free meditations. And so you, you download those, and now you’ve got them, and you can do the meditation, there’s, you know, it’s the kind of people here already meditating. But now it’s got five free guided meditations that are of high quality. So that’s something that works really well for us, we’re helping people to increase their revenue and, you know, implement this whole system, it’s like, it takes at least days to implement that even the order bumps, which is the quickest one, right?
So we can’t do that instantly, we can’t do that, where they get the result without having to do anything. So what we do is we have a profit increase report where people fill in this survey, and then we will figure out for them how much more money they could make. And we’ll give them a list of what tactics they should be using. And we’ll give links to training about it. So they’re straight away, they’ve got that benefit of understanding what the potential is. And they’ve also got this other useful resources without having to do anything themselves.
Samantha (32:45):
So we’ve we’ve shared a lead magnet, that’s a quick win. So we’ve got more people opting in. What else can you tell us about converting that organic audience?
John (32:56):
Yeah, so the next thing is put that lead magnet everywhere. So most people have, it may be on their homepage, or maybe they’ve got it in their sidebar, or maybe they’ve got a pop-up, it’s like put all the things. So have a pop-up that comes up after someone’s been on your site for whatever it is 30 seconds, and have it in the sidebar, and have it on the homepage and have it in every blog post multiple times. So if someone’s reading through, so you’ve got a 2000 word, blog post, then have a link to your lead magnet top, middle and bottom of that meat of that blog post. So whenever it is, somebody’s ready to like, right, this is what I’m supposed to do next.
And what we do is we’ll get a few different graphics designed to promote that same thing. So it looks different every time someone see us like our own advert for our own product. And when someone clicks on that little graphic, then it brings up the pop-up. And that that’s a slight that has a slight increase in opt in rate. Because if you have the form within the blog post, then people are less likely to opt-in, then if there’s the graphic, they click it, and then it brings the pop-up.
Now you’ve reduced distractions because you fade all the background out. And they’ve already made a micro commitment by clicking on the first thing to get the lead magnet, and then it brings up that guy now I have my email address. And that’s like a small step one tiny step at a time. So that helps as well. So what we had as a client in that one I was mentioning earlier in the personal development space, they were getting 100 opt-ins a week. And we went through, they’re getting lots of traffic to their blog posts. And the lead magnet wasn’t mentioned on the blog posts. So we went through and put it in every post there, and we put an exit intent pop up as well. And they went to 800 opt ins a week instantly. Why eight times their opt-in rate.
Samantha (34:42):
Yeah, that’s a huge increase.
John (34:45):
So then the next thing that you do is pointing to lead magnet from off site if you’ve got YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or a podcast or what have you point to the lead magnet from there as well. Most people don’t realize that they don’t know what they’re supposed to do next. Want to take the next step with you, you need to be telling them.
So that same personal development organization, they had now got 800 opt-ins a week that they had a really big social media following on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. So what we started doing was linking from their Facebook page, every 10th post would now be to their lead magnet, which have different graphics promoting the lead magnet each time. And same thing on Instagram and on YouTube. They started mentioning it in the videos as well. And we’ll link to it from the notes underneath the videos. And that took them from 800 a week to 5000 a week. I know, right? So they’re the highest we’ve ever had. That’s a 50 times increase in opt-in rate.
Samantha (35:46):
Shows you what’s possible. That’s just massive. Awesome. So I know that people have been listening to this, they’ve heard the three stages. And they’d kind of love to know where they should focus first. And I know that you’ve got a report that you can provide people, can you please just walk us through the report and how people can get a copy of theirs?
John (36:10):
Yeah, so then go to courseprofitreport.com. And fill out a quick profit increase survey takes about three minutes to complete. It’s like 10 questions. And what my team will do is they’ll go through personally for you, and benchmark your numbers against what we’re seeing from our clients what’s possible. And they’ll create this free personalized report gives an action plan.
Most people can increase revenue by like I said about by doubling. So it shows you what you need to do and in what order to do it. If my team thinks that we’re a good fit to work with you, because we only we’re very selective who we work with, we only work based on a percentage of increase in profit. So someone worked with us, and we help them make more money than we get paid based on how much more money they made.
If they didn’t make any more money, we don’t work with that we don’t make any money either. So if they think that’s possible, they’ll also go through and do a review for you of your existing funnel. So they’ll go through and record a video of here’s your homepage. Here’s what your blog posts look like, here’s what needs tweaking in terms of your opt-ins. Here’s your sales page, here’s what could be improved on that here’s what could be improved on your checkout page, that whole kind of process, and record a video for them about that. But everybody gets a personalized report from filling that in. So it’s courseprofitreport.com
Samantha (37:29):
Awesome. And of course, we’ll put those in the show notes over at influenced by design podcast.com. John has been an absolute pleasure talking with you today you’ve provided so much value. And I know that just from listening to this episode, people can put so many different pieces into action. And I hope that if you’re listening that you do and maybe go back and listen, put some of these things into action because business isn’t easy, but it is simple and just popping spending some time and getting some of these things into place will have a massive impact in your business. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
John (38:07):
Thank you.
Samantha (38:08):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to Influence By Design podcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at Influence By Design podcast.com
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