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 our funnel optimization and email marketing strategy which has allowed us to make $25 Million for our clients.
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 our funnel optimization and email marketing strategy which has allowed us to make $25 Million for our clients.
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
you want to increase the average transaction value per customer. Every checkout to pay you where you're asking for someone's credit card details, that will have an order bump and an upsell behind it.
Speaker 2:He has made our clients over $25 million in revenue. 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 is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Yosip Baleena. Now, Yosip is our head of funnel strategy. He works directly with our clients and he manages a team of account managers. Over the course of the work that he's done in the last few years here, he has made our clients over $25 million in revenue, with $12 million this year alone.
Speaker 2:And what I want to do today is I want to go through what's the overall system. What is it that we actually do? So we cover lots of details. We go through order bumps and upsells and sales pages and email, promotions and Christmas promotions all this kind of thing right, but what's the overall system? So you have an overall idea of how this whole thing works.
Speaker 2:Now, before we get into that, I want to ask you do you hate this podcast? Do you find it annoying? Do you find my voice offensive? Do you hate my hair? If you're watching the YouTube videos, what is it that you don't like about this? Or do you love something about it? Do you think this podcast is fantastic and you really want to just share that information with us. Well, if either of those things is the case, just leave us a five star review with all of the details and we're going to read that out live on air. If you've got a guest that you want to promote, that you want to tell us we should be getting in touch with such and such a person a marketing guru, a course creator or somebody running a membership site then let us know in a five star review. We'll read it out and we're going to go find that person and ask them if they want to come on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Here's a recent five star review of this podcast. This podcast is a must for anyone selling online courses or memberships. Incredibly useful content and easy to understand format highly recommended. If you want your review read out live on air, just leave us a five star review and we're going to read that out right here. Yo Sip, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to be here again.
Speaker 2:So we've got this overall system that we run, and we run it consistently and it works incredibly and, on average, increases people's revenue five times. Tell people what it is. What is it that we actually do? Start the beginning with what we're doing for clients and we'll kind of work our way through the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Sounds good. So we start with an audit, and audit basically allows us to understand what the business does. We do a KPI analysis, which is the most important part. We map out people's funnels, which is the second most important part, because it gives you a visual representation of what's actually happening within the business, and then combining that with the KPI spreadsheet allows us to make informed decisions for the strategy going forward. We then also understand and do customer avatar analysis and come up with a customer language document which then long-term helps with copywriting and crafting compelling messages and stories and then, based on that, we try to figure out what is it that you actually want to do and what is the lowest hanging fruit.
Speaker 1:Based on that, we come up with a roadmap for the next three to six months, and then sometimes even about a whole year, of what needs to be done. We also map out the entire last 12-13 months of email promotions that someone did. That way, we can show that this is normally the strategy that you were implementing to get to X. This is the strategy that's going to help you to get to 5x, if implemented correctly, or the next, let's say, six months or a year.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, okay, cool. First thing, there was the KPI spreadsheet. Lots of people listening probably you, dear listeners, you're listening to this are thinking I can't be asked with that. I don't like KPI spreadsheets. It's incredibly important. It's really, really, really important. You should be doing it.
Speaker 2:If you go back and you listen to episode 76, then YOSIP spells out what the steps are, how you actually build out that KPI spreadsheet. The next thing that you said about there was a customer avatar. Here we're doing a customer avatar survey and then we're doing the analysis, creating the customer avatar document and the customer language document as well. Monika has talked about that in some of the some of the episodes that she's done before. For example, episode 12 learn how to improve your copywriting and warm up your audience. Monika is probably covering in that one some stuff about customer avatar and again in episode 104, overcoming customer objections.
Speaker 2:The next thing you said was about mapping out the current funnel, and we use a tool called funnel ethics to do this. The idea is you map out each step of the funnel, like what actually happens Someone gets to your website, then what happens next, then what happens next, then what happens next if you're sending out email promotions how often you're sending them. What's what kind of? How long are the email promotions? Where are you sending people to? All of these steps of what you've got in place at the moment? And that allows us then to have that basis of okay, now let's map out what we're going to change, what are you missing? And we're going to go through all of those tactics and show you what the actual structure is right now. Are you missing order bumps? You're missing upsells, you're missing enough email promotions, etc. Cool, so we've got all that stuff in place, right, we've gone through, we've done the audit, we've created the roadmap, we've figured out what somebody needs to be doing over the next six to twelve months. What happens next?
Speaker 1:Mostly the lowest hanging fruit after you have all the fundamentals in place. So meaning that you know your numbers, meaning that you have the avatar and everything around that, meaning that you understand your lead intake is then maximizing what you get out of your email list. So we kind of sprint towards doing the email promotions first, because that's generally what's gonna impact your revenue the most. We also then work sometimes before, sometimes after, but more or less in the first two months we will start working on lead magnet optimization. So you want more people. If you have a decent following on social media, decent traffic, you want as many people as possible to join your email list and normally people will have around 0.5, maybe 1% of people that are landing on their site joining the email list, which means that if you have a hundred people viewing your content, you'll get maybe one subscriber. If you're lucky. That's what most people have. We then tend to get that up to two or three percent.
Speaker 2:Is that first? Are you doing that first, or is first thing to actually send the email promotion?
Speaker 1:First thing is ideally sending the email promotion. Depending on the audit, it could be optimizing lead intake, but generally let's focus on email promotion for the sake.
Speaker 2:Alright cool, let's start with that one. Then let's take people through in the order that we normally do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll do an email promotion, and then the email promotion follows our strategy of eight emails within a week, with a warm-up before that, sending people to a funnel that has an at least one upsell and at least one order bump. So that part never changes. We start with the best performing products. We figure out what the best performing products are in the audit and we go from there so we know what we love and then we try to get that to at least one email promotion a month. Ideally two, but start with one email promotion a month and do them every month.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, okay, cool. So the first thing, the thing that makes the biggest difference there is run these email promotions and get these started and run them every month, maybe two, but at least one promotion every month, and we've got this email sequence that goes out what is the structure? Talk people through what's the structure of the warm up and then give just a very, very high level overview of, like, what kind of emails are we sending in that promotion.
Speaker 1:So three warm up emails before one week before the email promo starts. They need to talk about certain things that you will have as part of your course that you will be promoting.
Speaker 2:So three emails there during the promotion.
Speaker 1:We normally send eight emails from Monday to Sunday, following a copyrighting strategy that's called gain logic, fear gain is the announcement email.
Speaker 1:So gain logic, fear. Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday and Friday. We send the FAQ email, which is similar to an FAQ section on your website, and then a future proof email basically telling them if you use my course, this is what your life is going to look like over the next three or six months, and then we end with a going going, gone campaign that's focused heavily on scarcity and urgency, with countdown timers where we send a going number one email on Saturday, going number two email on Sunday and then a gone email on Sunday, basically focusing on the campaign ending at midnight. There is one tactic that we always use, which is we leave the cart open on Monday because some people will not be looking at their email inbox during the weekend, and then on Monday you will get about 10% of overall number of sales. You can expect to get the most sales when you start a campaign, when you announce it, and then at the very end of the campaign, when you focus on the scarcity and urgency.
Speaker 2:Cool. Okay. So we've got the warm up emails, which is the pain, agitation, solution ones. And then we've got eight emails over seven days, which is gain, logic, fear, frequently asked questions, future casting, going, going, gone, great, okay. So that's the overall structure. And if you want to get into the details of that and see, like, how do you actually write that whole email process, the warm up emails is episode 93. Emails for different decision makers, episode 84. And then other ones would be learn how to improve your copywriting and warm up your audience, episode 12. Listen to those three episodes and you're going to understand more about the overall structure of those email sequences. Cool, so what's next? You've got the email promotion written. What's the next thing you need to work on for a client to have a good, successful promotion?
Speaker 1:You want to increase the average and section value per customer, which means that at this point you need to start focusing on episodes in order Bumps. Ideally, every place, every checkout page where you're asking for some of credit card details, that will have an order bump and an upsell behind it. So you then make sure that all of your offers have that Great Okay, an episode 95.
Speaker 2:I cover the order bump advantage. Increase your online course earnings, and that's going to show you some more information about order bumps. Talk to me, then, about the sales page, because that's an important part of this process, as well as optimizing the sales page.
Speaker 1:Exactly Most. Optimizing the sales pages is the next step, after you have upsells and order bumps and after you start doing email promotions. We assume that the lead magnet optimization is being done in the back end, during all of that, because you can do that. So now you start optimizing the sales page. There are 15 elements that you need to focus on. I'm not going to go through all 15. I'm just going to mention a few things about above the fold. 80% of the clicks were rate. Mostly that you'll have from the sales page to a checkout page will happen above the fold. So you need to have a compelling headline that makes people understand what you're offering them.
Speaker 1:You need to have, ideally, a good video or a mock up of your product, but the video generally works a lot better Two, three minutes tops. You don't need to have a VSL of 15 minutes there. You know a simple video explaining what the offer is, getting them to click through the checkout page and the call to action button. A clear call to action button without any distractions. Some trust elements like trust badges, and ideally you would have a countdown timer on there. One thing to note is that you don't want to have any other distractions on the sales page. So there are two things that someone can do on a sales page. One click the call to action button, go to your checkout page. The other one close the checkout page, close the sales page. There are no more info here. Learn more there? No, so just those two things. If they are on a sales page, they either buy or they do not.
Speaker 2:Alright cool. So we've got the 15 crucial elements to a high-performing sales page. We've covered a few of them here. If you want to hear what the rest of the elements for sales page are, then listen to episode 16 with Monica about how to create high-converting sales pages. So that's the sales page, and then the next step is the checkout page. So what's do we do? Work on that? Do we generally find that makes a difference.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You want to minimize distractions there. Focus on the forms that people need to fill. Ideally, they fill as little as possible, so ideally their basic information, their email and their credit card details. You're selling info products, so generally you don't have to ask them for where they live and their shipping address and stuff like that, so that eliminates some traction there. You also want to explain what the next steps are when they purchase. So enter your credit card information here. This is what the next steps are going to be. You can show them with one step, one step, two steps free. You want to have some social proof there, trust badges as well, and the most important thing as part of that is a checkout page would be having order bumps.
Speaker 2:If you want to know about checkout pages, check out episode 88, which, YoSip, covers the whole episode about how to improve your checkout pages. So here's what we've got so far Every month you're running these email promotions. There's 11 emails, three warm-up emails, 80 emails over the course of the week. You're sending people through to a sales page, which you optimized We've talked a bit about that Then to a checkout page that's optimized. Then you have an order bump and you have an upsell. That's what you do. And then what happens the next month? Yosip?
Speaker 1:The same thing.
Speaker 2:Do it again, do it again the next month and the month after that, and the month after that, and you repeat until rich. Now what's some of the things that, then, are stopping people from doing that every month? What's some of the issues? I'm guessing we've got mindset issues about sending this and then the fact that people don't have enough courses to promote to do this every month.
Speaker 1:There is also not having enough time. If you are a one-man band or if you have a VA, it's not easy to pull that off. However creating a system around. That is super important. Being able to do this regularly will make you more money, which means you should have enough money to invest in basically building a system for that to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Mindset issues are also as you said, things that happen, however, when you start making money, when you see that first month being your best month ever which normally happens with our clients I think all of our clients in the last year when they started working with us they had their best month ever the following month.
Speaker 2:All right, cool, so we've got that happening every month. And then you mentioned about optimizing the lead intake. What does that mean? Like high-level overview of that?
Speaker 1:Adding pop-ups with your lead magnets on scroll percentage. Adding pop-ups on exit intent, showing the lead magnet on your most visited pages, which is normally a home page and then some block pages that are generating traffic and making sure that you have good landing pages for your lead magnet. And, if you have social media, linking from social media regularly, if you have a YouTube channel pinning that top comment with a lead magnet regularly.
Speaker 2:Brilliant, okay. Episode 10, how to increase your option rates in just four steps, with our final strategy lead, yozip Belina. So that's another one to go check out. If that's the step that you're going to work on next, cool, okay, what happens after that? So someone's got the customer avatar. They've got the customer avatar. They've got the KPI spreadsheet. They've got their funnel map. They've mapped out what they're going to do in terms of promotions for the next six to 12 months. They're running their email promotions. They're optimizing the sales pages, checkout pages, order bumps, upsells. They're doing that every month. They're optimizing their lead intake. Is there anything else? Is there any more to the system than that, or do they just need to keep doing those things?
Speaker 1:They keep doing those things. But there is one thing that we also need to mention, which is what happens if you don't have enough courses to run an email promotion for six to 12 months, you can splinter content from your best performing courses or from your pillar content pieces and then send those email promotions out so smaller. If you have a $500 course that has 10 modules, you can probably splinter two of them and sell them for $97. So you do that. And there is one other thing that people often overlook making the offers better, offer optimization, adding guarantees and bonuses. That's where the customer avatar comes in handy making sure that they use testimonials, customer language and social proof in basically everything that they do. So, as you are doing these email promotions, you're also gradually making your offers better, which then, long term, gets you more and more people to buy.
Speaker 2:All right, and then where does the Tripwire funnel fit in? When does that start getting worked on?
Speaker 1:So if you talked to us, let's say, three years ago, we would tell you it's the first thing to do. However, it's not. It's actually the last thing to do, because all of these are online business fundamentals if you're selling in for products. So if you know you have a steady source of leads, you want to make sure that you maximize the output that those leads get you. With email promotions, regular email promotions, ups and order bumps, you will get there. The next thing is then the tripwire funnel. So, as the last thing, you set up a tripwire funnel. So basically, you have a lead intake. All of those leads get redirected to a tripwire sales page, which is a page that is selling low and product, low ticket product. So something for 17, 27 bucks.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be the entry point to your world, cool, okay, and then that has that whole, all those steps we just covered in, doesn't it? The sales page checkout, page order, bump, upsell, all of these kinds of things. Exactly, and you're there Now why do we do it last? What's the rationale for doing that last rather than first?
Speaker 1:Because we want to maximize the revenue first and we want to make sure that we are utilizing enough of the email list that people currently have. And the last, the tripwire funnel is basically last, because when you have a steady source of income, when you have doubled or tripled your revenue, the next thing you want to do because the way you go from one, from where you are now, to five X is not gonna be the same as going from that five X to then two X thing, all of that at you where you are now right. So let's say you go from 20 to 100,000. Doing that is gonna be different. Well, going from 100,000 now to 200,000 is gonna be different than what you did to get to those 100,000.
Speaker 1:With a tripwire funnel. Longterm, when you get to a point where the KPIs make sense which means you get three, four percent to keep conversion rates on the tripwire funnel you get solid conversion rates on the order bumps and the upsells. At that point you can start scaling with ads. That's the main thing. So a tripwire funnel is not gonna make you a millionaire right away. However, it's gonna pay for the leads. So basically, it's an almost infinite number of almost infinite free leads If you're.
Speaker 2:Okay. So let me give another reason why you do the tripwire funnel. Last Cause a lot of some people get really tempted by working on this earlier. So let's say you get 10,000 leads per month onto your email list and you put up a tripwire funnel, that means that every month 10,000 people are seeing that funnel. If you have already, from your 10,000 leads a month, got 200,000 people in your email list, that means that every month there's 200,000 people who are seeing the email promotion. So the email promotion is in front of a lot more people than the tripwire funnel. So it makes you a lot more money. So that's where the bulk of the money is in your business.
Speaker 2:The point of the tripwire funnel you set that up, you might make let's say, you got 10,000 people seeing that a month. You might make like 10,000, 20,000, maybe more per month from that, but it's not gonna be anywhere near what you're making from your email promotions. The real thing, the real point that Yosip just said of the tripwire funnel, is, yes, you make some money from the organic leads that come through that 10,000, 20,000, whatever per month. But the real point of doing it is you then get the chance to optimize that funnel, make it work really, really well and then you can start running ads into it and that allows you to have this new traffic source that allows you to scale the business way further. And that's something that's difficult. It takes a whole bunch of time.
Speaker 2:Building the tripwire funnel is a bunch of work. Optimizing it is a bunch of work. Running ads and testing that until that works is a bunch of work. You don't wanna do that first. First of all, do the fundamentals. Run the email promotions every month. Get the hang of doing that. Optimize the lead intake. Then build the tripwire funnel. Then look at scaling it with ads. Like, how long, typically, do you find with our clients is it taking before we're starting to get to that point of scaling with ads with the tripwire funnel?
Speaker 1:About nine months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's with us. Doing it Like this is our job, this is the only thing that we do, and we're working on that for the client. If you're doing this as like a one-man band or you've got a small team or something like that, it's gonna be way down the line. You know there's a whole bunch of stuff you need to get the hang of doing first and then you get onto this. So that's basically it right? That's the whole system as it currently stands, exactly now. Why isn't it more complicated? Why are we not doing seven other things? Why are we not doing webinars? Why are we not doing video sales letters? Why are we not got launches and challenges? And why have we not got all these other stuff that people can do?
Speaker 1:Because this was the 80-20 of it all. We have tested all of that over the last five and a half years. We've tested a lot and we've cut that down to the simplest way or a roadmap that you can have to scale your business. If you don't have this in place, there is no reason why we would have a webinar. More or less Some people might, but you know nine out of 10 people will not need a webinar here. Launches it's super time consuming. An email promotion generally does 80% of what the launch would do in 10% of time. So this is. It has been tested. We have tracked APIs on about 100 clients or so and this is the simplest roadmap that we can have in order for you to 5x your revenue.
Speaker 2:Perfect. So, basically, what we've done, we've tested everything, we've done all those things and we found these are the ones that work the best. So why would you do anything that isn't the stuff that works the best? Just do the stuff that works the best and then just ignore everything else. There are times when webinars make sense, there are times when launches make sense, but it's relatively rare.
Speaker 2:This is the system that works like the USIP second fund 90% of people, 90% of the time. This is what we always do for all of our clients and, as you can see, it works fantastically. Don't overcomplicate it. This is already a bunch of work. Don't overcomplicate by doing more stuff. Don't expand out further than that. Just do these things consistently.
Speaker 2:I work with a personal trainer and he constantly reminds me. It's like just do the workouts and eat the amount of calories you're supposed to and the amount of protein you're supposed to, and it's like man, that's difficult. I'll watch some article on YouTube, video on YouTube or whatever, and have some new idea, and he's like no, john, just do the fundamentals that we already talked about it, but just do it every single week, every single day. So that's the overall system. If you want to see another representation of that, another way of trying to understand that. Then you can watch our webinar, go to datadrivenmarketingco and that's going to go through what I basically take you through that whole system in a visual format or in the webinar, mapping it out on funnels, making lots of bad jokes, all that kind of stuff. So if you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened. Thanks so much as always for listening and, yozip, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:I'm sure happy to be here always.