Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with our team over at Data Driven Marketing so meet Josip Belina our Head of Delivery.
With a background in Biomedical science, Josip has transitioned into the realm of marketing funnels. Renowned for his analytical prowess and automation wizardry, he takes on the crucial role of scrutinizing customer data.
Josip excels at identifying the precise funnel type that aligns with your business goals to optimize profits. Tune in to discover how he seamlessly orchestrates the entire process, ensuring your success on autopilot!
Today we'll be focusing specifically on Black Friday promotions and how our campaign made our clients over $1,000,000 over just a week of email marketing!
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with our team over at Data Driven Marketing so meet Josip Belina our Head of Delivery.
With a background in Biomedical science, Josip has transitioned into the realm of marketing funnels. Renowned for his analytical prowess and automation wizardry, he takes on the crucial role of scrutinizing customer data.
Josip excels at identifying the precise funnel type that aligns with your business goals to optimize profits. Tune in to discover how he seamlessly orchestrates the entire process, ensuring your success on autopilot!
Today we'll be focusing specifically on Black Friday promotions and how our campaign made our clients over $1,000,000 over just a week of email marketing!
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Or, if we compare, last November to this November. It was almost nine times higher.
Speaker 2:How much revenue total did we make clients?
Speaker 1:About $1.1 million.
Speaker 2:So over a million dollars. Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Ainsworth, and today's guest is Yozip Belina. Now, yozip is our head of delivery, who works with all of our clients and helps them to make millions and millions of dollars with major clients Over 12 million dollars so far this year and one of the biggest campaigns of the year is Black Friday, and so we're going to be talking today about Black Friday, what we learned in 2023 from running that, what results we got for our clients and what you guys should be doing and learning from that for next year.
Speaker 2:So, what kind of pricing works? What kind of products should you be promoting? How many products? How do you fit Cyber Monday in there? What length of campaign should you be running? A whole debrief of what we learned and all the things that worked and what we're going to change in 2024.
Speaker 2:Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, I've got an announcement for you, if you enjoy the tips, techniques and hacks that you hear on this podcast and you want to get more of them in a straight to the point condensed version. Check out our YouTube channel. What we've started doing is really short punchy videos where we explain each of these concepts really quickly. I hired a whole professional camera crew to come and film them with me, and so they are super helpful, super short and really really great ways of just getting that bite-sized learning in so you know what to do to increase your course sales. We're also turning highlights from each of these episodes into YouTube shorts as well. Plus, we have a whole library of funnel building how-to videos. So check out the YouTube channel. Go to datadrivenmarketingco and then make sure to like and subscribe to the channel in order to get notified every time we release a new video. Yo Sip, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Happy to be here again.
Speaker 2:So let's start off with the length of campaign. When did we start running Black Friday Promotions this year?
Speaker 1:So this year we started mid month, about two weeks before Black Friday, with warm up campaigns. We always suggest doing the warm up and then we started the main campaign about a week before, and then we ran it through Cyber Monday until the end of the following week.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Black Friday this year was on, was it like the 24th?
Speaker 1:maybe I think it was 24th. Yes, okay, cool. So we were starting running warm up emails when the 13th, the week before, Some started on the 17th and ran for Friday, saturday, sunday, some started on Monday, so let's say, a week before warm up, then the main Black Friday promo and then Cyber Monday.
Speaker 2:Okay, and the Cyber Monday ones? Did they finish on the Monday?
Speaker 1:No, they started on the Monday.
Speaker 2:Okay, and how long did they run?
Speaker 1:for For an entire week.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Some clients three days, some clients five days and some clients seven days. I know that people generally want exact number but it basically depends on the audience and the client. But let's say it's a standard seven day campaign for Cyber Monday. Are you going to Cyber Monday ending on the Sunday that?
Speaker 2:week, Okay cool. So one week warm up, one week Black Friday, one week Cyber Monday Got it cool. Okay, so then, with each of those, there's two different campaigns, right? The Black Friday and the Cyber Monday we promote in the same product. Was it different products? How did that work? How did you choose what to promote?
Speaker 1:Yes, we always promote different products and we look at Cyber Monday differently than most people. So for Black Friday, our only goal is to maximize revenue. That's what everyone does. So everyone wants to sell and give their best offer of the year around, Black Friday plus. People expect it and you want to be doing that. Normally that's like a bundle or some of your best performing courses in a year. You're not reinventing the wheel for Black Friday. You're not wanting anything new.
Speaker 2:But this is interesting, right? Because what some people do is they just discount everything for Black Friday. So you're doing something different here. You're saying that you are choosing either the best performing course or some of your best performing courses and bundling them together. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Exactly Because we know that worked. And then you have this other bit of an audience that already has either a part of a Black Friday bundle or your best product already. You offer them something else, something that would benefit them in the long run. Because they are your best customers, you expect them to buy more from you. You don't want to neglect them, because they are going to be buying from you. So you sell to the majority of your audience. You sell your best performing product to your best audience. You sell something that they don't have. So you do that for Black Friday.
Speaker 2:And then when you're choosing wait a minute when you're choosing the something they don't have, are you going for something that's a similar kind of price? Are you going for something that's more expensive, like what's the ideal there if you've got all options available?
Speaker 1:If they've already spent the Eastern chunk of money with you, you can go for a more expensive offer that's an ideal here but with a best discount that they will ever see. The reason for that is that if people have paid you let's say, four or five hundred dollars they are a lot more likely to buy from you again, which means that at that point you can offer them something more expensive, and your main goal for Black Friday is to maximize revenue.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. So just imagining somebody's already bought a course from you for like three hundred four hundred dollars your best performing course, like your flagship thing. You then might offer them something else If you've got it. That's then more expensive, like a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, like what kind of what would be the ideal price point?
Speaker 1:If someone bought your flagship product for five hundred dollars, then a Black Friday specific offer just for them would be somewhere in between two fifty to five hundred dollars. At that point you don't want to go to like a thousand, it's unlikely to buy, but let's say five hundred would be a really good price point there.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Okay cool. So now let's look at Cyber Monday promotion. What's what's happening on that one?
Speaker 1:For Cyber Monday if people have not bought from you during Black Friday, or maybe they have, but this is mostly aimed at people that did not do anything for Black Friday. So we said Black Friday the deal is to maximize revenue. For Cyber Monday is to get as much money as you can, but also get as many buyers as you can because they will be buying from you later. So a smaller offer, maybe even you can look at that as a downstill period after Black Friday. So if you promoted something, let's say a bundle that was three, nine, seven for Black Friday, maybe module one from that bundle for 97 would be a good Cyber Monday offer or that and then you add a Sitewide discount the last two or three days because you don't want people to have to, people that will have to think about what they want.
Speaker 1:No one exactly knows what they want. If you tell them what they need, they will get it. So basically, you start Black Friday very targeted. You know the offer, you need this, you need that. You follow through to Cyber Monday. You start with a down-sell to the Black Friday offer, something less expensive, and then maybe in the last few days of the campaign you also give them a Sitewide option, because Some people will want you know to decide okay, I want this, I want that, I want this, and then that way you maximize both the revenue and the number of buyers that you have.
Speaker 2:Got you okay. So black Friday is your best performing product or a bundle of some of your best performing products. For the people who've already got it, you're offering them Another thing, one of your other, more expensive, not crazy price, not like double the price or quadruple, but like similar kind of price to what they already bought, maybe a little cheaper to 50 to 500, and you're giving them that at a discount. And then cyber Monday you've got a down sell, basically to a cheaper product, maybe one of the courses from the bundle or Something that's going to be like a cheaper thing for like 97 ish kind of a price point. Then towards the end of the cyber Monday week you might also add in a site wide thing. So like two or three days of you could get anything on the whole site discount. Cool, got it? Did I get all that right?
Speaker 1:exactly great.
Speaker 2:What kind of discounts are you giving? Because it's black Friday, a bigger discount than the rest of the year.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is. Normally we go from 20 30% discounts year round when we email promotions, sometimes up to 50. For black Friday it's generally 50%, maybe even more. Again, it depends on how much your courses are worth. You know, if you sell something for a hundred dollars, we need to think whether $50 would make sense here, so that you're not devaluing your product. That's not the goal. The goal is to maximize revenue. But if you're selling, if you, if you're anchoring a course at a $800 price point and you actually want to sell it for 500 for black Friday, you can sell it for 400. So you want to give them the best deal that can that they will ever get, at least that year.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, and is that the same with a cyber Monday campaign? You're tending to discount about 50% for cyber Monday. Yes where do people go wrong with this? What some of the mistakes that you see people make For, either from clients who've before they've worked with us, or coaching clients or whoever else you've talked with the biggest mistake Not doing it.
Speaker 1:We've had a lot of people over the last few years when they told us look, I just don't do black Friday. That's the biggest mistake not doing it. Whatever you do is better than not doing anything. So that's the first learning here If you're not doing a black Friday promotion, definitely start doing them. People expect a good offer from you. So if you're running a business, literally people expect to see an offer. If you're not doing an offer, I wouldn't be surprised if you get emails from people asking you hey man, what's your Black Friday deal? Why aren't you emailing me any deals?
Speaker 2:So that's the first mistake.
Speaker 1:The second one is not doing a proper warm-up and just going straight for pay. There is an offer without the proper introduction. A good introduction to an offer that you do is one of the best things you can do for an email campaign. That's sometimes even more important than the campaign itself. I was talking to Kyle, one of our copywriters, the other day and you know, a few years ago Kyle would say that the copy is what sells. Now he would tell you that the strategy is what sells, not necessarily the copy all that much. So a good strategy for selling is always going to win versus a good copy if you don't have a proper strategy in place.
Speaker 1:So make sure to warm people up and then send them a good campaign. Make sure that the warm-up emails are actually connected to the campaign you are doing. That's the second biggest thing. Third thing don't overcomplicate. Don't give people choices. Don't give them too many choices. If you lead with a whole bunch of choices, you will confuse people. They will have no clue what you look at. If you do that, your sales will suffer. So I think those three would be the biggest issues. So not doing it. If you are doing it, make sure you do proper warm-up and then don't overcomplicate it and be very targeted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, confused customer never buys If someone's like, oh, I don't quite know, should I get this or that I don't know, and then just move on with their life. It's already hard enough to get somebody to understand what is the benefit, what's the features, how does this kind of affect them for their life with one product? If you're trying to do it with three at the same time, it's just like I don't know how you try and do that. It sounds like madness to me, but I know that a lot of people that's kind of their approach. So what about? What have we learned from this that we're going to? It's going to affect what we're going to do in 2024?.
Speaker 1:So the biggest thing we'll learn is that Black Friday still works and it works even better than before. This year, almost all of our clients 90 plus percent of our clients had their best months ever, some by a lot, during November or in November. Main result was driven by Black Friday sales. So literally almost all of our done for you clients, all of our consultancy clients and almost all of our instant core sales students had their best months ever, which is good to know, which means that the Black Friday works. You need to do it. That's the biggest learning. And then the other thing we should start sooner. So we started mid month. A lot of other people have started earlier, in November, basically late December, early November. They've already started talking about Black Friday.
Speaker 2:So October, you mean.
Speaker 1:Yes, late October, early November. Basically, that means that there is a certain amount of people that want to have a deal early. You can call them your VIP customers. If you don't want to open the Black Friday deal to everyone, you can open it to your best customers that you know will be super interested in buying and start early. That way you might have two Black Friday promotions one before Black Friday, one that's going to culminate on Black Friday when a going going campaign, and then you continue through to Cyber Monday.
Speaker 2:Interesting Okay, so how early?
Speaker 1:Let's say you start with a warm-up in late October, so maybe early November, and then early to mid-November start the first Black Friday campaign, then go into another warm-up, slash nurture sequence and then start Black Friday number two campaign before during the week of Black Friday. That's gonna happen?
Speaker 2:What makes you think so? You've seen other people doing that, but what makes you think that's the approach that's gonna work? Like what gives you confidence in that?
Speaker 1:Because I've seen that working with a few of our consultancy clients and a few other people in the info product space. Basically they were able to have two almost exact peaks, One early late October, early November and one late November, which is a good opportunity to maybe increase your Black Friday or November revenue by maybe even 50%.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that most of our clients had their best you said their best month of the year was that Best month ever?
Speaker 1:not of the year, best month ever?
Speaker 2:okay even better. So what kind of results were people getting? Obviously, only share what you're allowed to share from what clients are happy with.
Speaker 1:So one of our most recent done for you clients had an 8 plus increase in their regular monthly rate from six months ago, which is insane because we haven't spent a dollar on ads.
Speaker 2:So they made eight times as much money in November as they'd made in May, for example.
Speaker 1:Exactly, or if we compare last November to this November, it was almost nine times higher.
Speaker 2:Wow, great. What other kind of results have people got with Black Friday?
Speaker 1:About 20 to 30% more than what they normally make. We had one client that was almost 9x. We had one client that was 4x, so 4x their regular months and what else? We had one done for you client that went from well not having a product market fit six months ago to making $40,000 for Black Friday after not being able to make more than two brands for a year.
Speaker 2:Wow, nice, okay, and what's the total? How much revenue total did we make clients? Do you know?
Speaker 1:Total for the year or total for Black Friday. For Black Friday yeah, Okay, so about 1.1 million if we combine are done for you and consult the clients just for Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Nice Over a million dollars. Anything else that people should know in terms of a debrief from Black Friday this year, I think the most important thing is let's try and start early next year.
Speaker 1:That's going to be our premise for 2024. Make sure that you don't overly confuse the audience with the offerings. They need to be super simple. We already mentioned that. And oh yeah, if you're selling memberships, memberships work really really well at that time of the year.
Speaker 2:Ah, interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay, why is that do?
Speaker 2:you think?
Speaker 1:As I said, that's the best offer of the year. If you're offering a membership for $1,000, normally you would probably give them a 50-60% off to get people to join the membership for like 500 a month, 500 a year. They're not going to get a better deal than that and people are going to jump to that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Great, all right, cool. There you go, guys. That's how we made our clients over a million dollars this year on Black Friday. All the stuff that we learned from it, what's working and what you can take and implement for next year. Thanks so much, yoastip, really appreciate your time, and if you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you are listening. And thanks so much as always for listening in and I'll see you next time.