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 on optimization for your tripwire funnel.
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 on optimization for your tripwire funnel.
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
We basically want to be prepared to run ads. The most important thing for a checkout is that it's simple enough and that it's mobile optimized. Now, what are Truecore extension emails?
Speaker 2: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 Josip. Josip is our funnel strategy lead. He's worked on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that DDM is now using when working with our clients, and today we're going to be talking about how to optimize a tripwire funnel.
Speaker 2:Now, a tripwire funnel is a very powerful kind of funnel. It can completely change your business, and we've covered on this podcast before how to build one, and we're going to link to that episode to give you details about that. But today we're going to be talking about how to optimize it. So, if you've already got a tripwire funnel in place, we're going to talk about how do you actually optimize that funnel and make sure it is absolutely cranking, and then what can you do in terms of cranking up the traffic to it as well?
Speaker 2:Now, before we start learning from Yosip, if you're thinking that you would like to get help with your funnel and wonder if we could help, then please reach out. We have got two slots left at the moment for consultancy clients and they are going to get filled up, but I want to give you the chance to be one of those people who gets one of those slots, works with us and potentially massively increases your revenue. These slots are probably going to go in the next few weeks and I'm not exactly sure when there's going to be more slots opening back up again. So if you're making 10 000 a month or more from your course business, we can probably help you to two times your revenue, sometimes five times.
Speaker 2:Email me, john j-o-h-n at data driven marketingco with just some details about your course business and I will message back and help you figure out could you be a good fit? And if you could be a good fit, we'll jump on a call and discuss it in more detail. So just drop me an email and we'll have a chat about it and take it from there. Yosip, welcome to the show, happy to be here again. So remind us what is a tripwire and what is a tripwire funnel.
Speaker 1:So a tripwire is a low price, compelling offer where we want to turn our prospects or our lead into a customer, so we use it when we have a lead magnet. We then redirect people to a tripwire sales page. It's normally a product around 27 bucks, 17 bucks, and then we offer them the opportunity to buy at that stage when they are the most engaged gotcha, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So what we're going to do here is we're just going to give a quick recap on some stuff we've covered in previous episodes, but then we're going to link you to more episodes where there's much more detail about each of these stages. But I just want to give a quick recap on some stuff we've covered in previous episodes, but then we're going to link you to more episodes where there's much more detail about each of these stages. But I just want to give a quick recap to remind everybody about this. So we've got the trip that's what a tripwire is and then what is a tripwire funnel? Tripwire funnels the bit that sits right behind the lead magnet. You're saying so that's where you have that cheap product exactly, and we have a blog post about it.
Speaker 1:it's called what is a tripwire funnel? And we have a blog post about it. It's called what is a Tripwire Funnel, and we did a few episodes already on tripwire funnels so people can definitely check those out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've got two episodes that I particularly want you to go and check out. So the Highest Converting Funnel Ever from February 2024. That's an episode with Josip and that gives an overview about the tripwire funnel. Also, check out episode one Build the Trust of your audience using the tripwire funnel with alan matthews, and we're going to link both of those in the show notes. So just go to the show notes or go to the youtube description if that's where you're watching this, and you can just click the links and go straight through to those. So we've got that. Oh, in the blog post as well, that yosef just mentioned. We'll link to that too. So we've got that kind of overview. If you need that, go check out those other resources. Now talk to us about measurement. What should you be tracking? Give us a quick overview on that one sure.
Speaker 1:So there is also an episode on that. It's called exploring trip power funnels and it's from august 2023, but we'll do a quick recap of what uh to measure for a trip power funnel. Obviously, we start with the leads. We need to know what's the lead magnet conversion rate, and a good lead magnet conversion rate if you have a landing page is anywhere from 40% to 60%, and if you're looking on a page or website basis, it's about 2% to 5%. Most people will have about 0.5%, so you want to have 2% to 3, maybe 5%, opt-in rate. The next thing to measure, then, is the Tripwire conversion rate. That means, out of all of those leads, how many people are actually buying your Tripwire product, and a good number here is 3%. The way to get there is so, out of all of your leads, you want about 25% of them to click through from the Tripwire sales page to your checkout page, and then you want about 12% of them that have clicked through to your checkout page to then convert and buy your product. So 25% of the people that have signed up for your lead magnet will end up on your checkout page. 12 percent of them are going to buy. That's three. So overall, that's three percent conversion rate. That's how we came to that number. So a good trip, our conversion rate is three percent.
Speaker 1:Then you need to track your order bump take rate. Normally it's around one third. So 33 to 60% is considered pretty good. And then an upsell take rate, and upsell is a one-time offer. A good conversion rate. There is anywhere from 12 to 25%. Around 20% should be good. That's if you have one order bump and then we measure aov or the average order value. So if you combine all of that for a 27 order, for a 27 tripwire product, an order bump of the same value and maybe a 90 upsell, a good aov would be around 55 60. So those are the key components that you need to track gotcha, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So overall we had from your website traffic to lead magnet opt-ins of around two to maybe five percent.
Speaker 2:Two to three, maybe even as high as five percent of website traffic would opt in to your lead magnet. Or if you're sending people to a um, a landing page, then 40 to 60 percent of people who get there actually opting in. Now, if it's from ads, that's going to be lower. But we're not really talking about ads at the moment, we're talking about organic. If it's people coming from youtube for the landing page or from instagram to a landing page, it'll probably be higher. Um, there's more of a barrier to them moving off Instagram or off YouTube and coming to the site. So therefore it tends to be that you get only the people who are a bit more convinced, so you tend to get slightly higher, but 40 to 60 is kind of the middle average. So then we had tripwire conversion rate 25% of people who land and see the tripwire so they've opted into the lead magnet. They, the tripwire offer. 25% go from the sales page to the checkout page and 12% of those go through from the checkout page to the to actually buying, which worked out as 3%. Overall order bump take rate was between 33 and 60%. Upsell take rate is going to be between like 10 and 25% something in that range, 10 to 20 kind of thing, an average order value we're looking at.
Speaker 2:If it was a 27 product, we're probably looking at aov. If you've got all these things working for about 50 55. Was that all correct? Exactly, perfect, okay, cool. So that's our starting point. That's our kind of numbers that we need to have in place. We need to know what those numbers are at the moment. That's what we're trying to get to. So if you want more detail on how to measure it, go and check out the Exploring Tripwire Funnels episode from August 2023 that Yosef mentioned, and we're going to link that one as well. So we've got all of this figured out right. That's the basics, the overall summary. So how do you start to work on optimizing your revenue and your average order value from a tripwire funnel?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we're starting with assumptions that you have a tripwire funnel, you have the order bump, you have the upsell in place. Are you tracking your conversion rates? Well, you should. That's what we just talked about. So you have a KPI tracking spreadsheet, you know your AOV. If you have your KPI tracking spreadsheet, you will know your AOV.
Speaker 1:Now you ask a question Is your click-through rate lower than 12%? That click-through rate is from your Tripwire sales page to your checkout. So step one is making sure that all of your leads are redirected to the Tripwire sales page. Step two is knowing what the conversion rate of that Tripwire sales page is, from that page to the checkout. If it's lower than 12%, you have some work to do.
Speaker 1:There are more or less two options that might be causing a low click-through rate. First one, well, three. First one your tracking is wrong. So check that. If you're tracking it correct, then there are two. So check that. If you're tracking it correct, then there are two. So you either need to work on improving that sales page or you need a new offer. The most important thing in a tripwire funnel is that the offer after the lead magnet actually makes sense. So what does that mean? It needs to logically connect. If it's not, you need a new offer. So, testing the offer, you will probably not get it right from the start. I've seen a lot of people testing tripwires. It usually takes two, three, four iterations until you nail the offer just right.
Speaker 2:And how do you know whether it's the offer or the sales page? How do you know which one to work on?
Speaker 1:Actually you don't. You will have to test both okay uh.
Speaker 1:So at this point you pick one. Uh, okay, you should. If you know your audience and you could, you could do a survey and ask people what they want. So that should give you some reasonable uh insight into what the next step is. But more or less it's one or the other, so testing both. If you're working on the sales page which is normally easier than changing the whole trip for a funnel then there is an episode from july 2021 how to create high converting sales pages and monetize your traffic. That should help you figure out what to do to optimize your sales pages. It's very important that you have a product market fit there. Solid click-through rate will normally show you that the product market fit is there okay, so how about this then?
Speaker 2:as a hypothesis, what about if you say if you think that you've got a product that does make sense, as the next logical step, it looks like it makes sense to you, but it's still converting lower than 12 percent and you think maybe your sales page sucks? Listen to that podcast episode work on your sales page. If you still, after you've worked on the sales page and you made it better, you still aren't getting a good enough conversion rate, then it probably is your offer Now go back and work on. Okay, what other offer could you put here that makes more sense?
Speaker 1:And what we are saying here is, if we say 25% is a click-through rate that we want, if it's 20, it's fine, but if it's lower than 12, you probably want to do some work on the product and on the sales page, assuming that you have a product market fit and that your click-through rate is optimal. The next question is do you have Tripwire extension emails? Now, what are Tripwire extension emails? Every time someone buys from you, someone opts in as a lead, they will get a lead magnet delivery email. So you will have to deliver a lead magnet through email because you're redirecting them to the Tripwire sales page. Now you normally give them about half an hour to buy that Tripwire.
Speaker 1:You have a countdown timer. It might be a dummy timer. It might be a real timer, but if your CRM system does not tag them in the first 30 minutes, it's similar to cart abandonment. Start sending, send them an email that gives them another option to buy. You can extend those 30 minutes to 24 hours or 36 hours. We normally send one, two or three emails. I'd suggest starting with three emails over a period of 24 or 36 hours and just remind people that there is an option to get the Tripwire at a discounted price. It's normally a discounted price. Have a $97 offer discounted to like 27.
Speaker 2:So if you gave them 30 minutes originally and now you're giving them 36 hours, do you give them any explanation as to how come it's been extended? Do you say I saw you didn't buy, so I've decided to extend the amount of time? Or do you like give a different offer to them or like what's? How do you justify that one?
Speaker 1:it's the same offer, usually the same offer and you tell them that the reason for that was them becoming a lead. That's the easiest thing to use. So because they opted in to your list, you now give them an extension because they saw the offer but they did not buy it okay, that's relatively straightforward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, cool, and then what would you use in terms of setting up that timer?
Speaker 1:you can use deadline funnels. Uh, that's a pretty good tool. Just said that some website builders and page builders have their own built-in systems, but deadline funnels more works more or less on anything you might be using yeah, what I like about deadline funnels.
Speaker 2:It means that somebody can't then go, oh, I'm just going to walk back in again and get that offer later on. It kind of means, because it's I don't know how it works, it's some kind of magic but it like redirects people off away from that offer page after the amount of time has passed, even if they go in from a different browser on the same computer or from a uh, what's it called like an incognito mode or what have you. So deadline funnel is like definitely the the best one. And then if you don't want to pay the extra money for using that, you can use whatever's already built into your page builder.
Speaker 1:You know that'll do, that's fine so, to do a recap, here we have a lead magnet, a tripwire funnel, and then, if people don't buy that tripwire, we send them three emails over a period of 36 hours. One should go out 30 minutes, maybe an hour, after opting in the other one 12 hours later. The other one 12 hours later and you give them 12 more hours to actually buy.
Speaker 2:So after that increase in sales, would you expect to get from that?
Speaker 1:normally. Normally about 20 to 30 percent. So you're expecting about 80% of the results of a tripwire funnel to come immediately and then 20 ish percent, maybe a bit more, maybe up to 30, from those free emails that will follow Gotcha.
Speaker 2:All right, cool, that makes sense. So what's? What's the next step? So let's say, you've done that right. You've got your click-through rate up to 20% or something like that. You think you've got a good sales page and a good offer. You've put the Tripwire extension emails in place. What's next?
Speaker 1:After that. We are assuming now that you have a welcome email sequence that goes with it. So what's next? Usually, if your system allows it, add a second order bump. Adding a second order bump will increase your order bump. Take rate, assuming there is a product market set and that order bump tests a higher priced one. So let's say that you have a $27 tripwire offer and then a $37 order bump Test. What would happen if you have a $97 secondary order bump? That usually increases the AOV by quite a bit, and that's what we are really doing here. And would you do?
Speaker 2:this before optimizing the initial order bump, because what if your one order bump is only converting at 10% or something?
Speaker 1:More or less. Yes, you would, because having two order bumps in place will help you to figure out the product market fit sooner, okay, and the combined take rate of two order bumps that are optimal, optimized and optimal is around 60 to 70 percent gotcha okay cool.
Speaker 2:So first off you're going to set up a second order bump and then maybe, if your first order bump sucked or your second order bump sucks, you might then go back and optimize those to get up to that 60 to 70 percent combined take rate exactly okay, cool the next thing is then setting up an upsell, a second upsell we are assuming that you already have one, doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1:Look, if it converts 1%, 2%, 3%, then you have a problem. You need to change the upsell. Obviously you will focus on that. But if it converts at 10%, 12%, 15% as upsell number one, you want to add a second one. That one is going to convert lower. Okay, if your system allows it, every person should be able to see the second upsell and we normally do it so that it's a lot more expensive than the first one. We don't expect a high conversion rate there, but we expect that people that have bought the main product, the order bump, the upsell number one, are going to be quite likely to buy the upsell number two. So that greatly increases the AOV. I'm happy with six to 8% for upsell number two, so that greatly increases the aov. I'm happy with six to eight percent for upsell number two. When it comes to take rates, it can probably be optimized further, but it will take a lot of time. So just having the second uh upsell at that point makes sense for your aov and then, okay down so then the down.
Speaker 2:So okay, so we've got first of all add a second order bump and then maybe go back and optimize those, then add a second upsell and then look at maybe optimizing the first upsell on that. If your first upsell is only converting it one to three percent, then definitely you want to optimize it. You should be getting it to 10 to 20 percent. Once you're above 10, then probably the most important thing is having the second upsell. All right, so then a downsell. So do you have? How does the downsell fit if you've got upsell one, upsell two and then a downsell, or is it instead of the second upsell?
Speaker 1:depends on your system. In. In an ideal scenario it would be upsell number one, upsell number two, no matter what happens, and then a downsell. A downsell would go in if people don't buy upsell number two. Okay, if your system allows that. If your system does not allow for a second order bump, for a second upsell, at that point just add a downsell so that you have something. Basically, at this stage we are adding things that we don't already have. Gotcha, if you don't have a second order bump, add that. If you don't have a second upsell, add that. If you don't have a downsell, add that.
Speaker 2:Cool, all right, great, let's say, we've put all of those things in place.
Speaker 1:What's next? If we are happy with the conversion rates and if we are happy with the increase in ao also, all of that should increase our aov by about 30 to 50 percent. Okay, uh, if we are happy with all of that, then we can do another tactic with an exit intent pop-up. There are gonna there going to be a certain number of people that are going to be leaving your checkout page. If they are doing that, having an exit intent pop-up that gives them maybe a better discount is a good idea. Giving them extra $10 off of the tripwire. If it's $27, give it to them for 17. You need to be careful there not to kill your conversion on that page, because an exit intent pop-up, if it triggers incorrectly, might do that. But that's something to test. That's maybe a more advanced tactic used more for Facebook ads when every percent counts. I wouldn't do it until I've done all the other steps now, that's a really interesting point, right is that?
Speaker 2:why are we bothering to do all this work on the tripwire funnel? Because most of your audience is in your email list and only a small percentage are joining the email list every month and so therefore seeing the stripwire funnel. So why are we bothering to do all of this work? With the second upsell and the second order bump and the next intent pop up and all of this stuff. What's the what's the point?
Speaker 1:yeah, we want to. We basically want to be prepared to run ads and for legion, most people will start with Legion ads before they start direct to sale, mm-hmm. And with a good trip for a funnel with an optimal trip for a funnel and a solid conversion rate you can expect to get to offset your marketing costs. So if you are spending $5,000, $10,000 on ads with a tripwire funnel, I would be looking to get about 80% of that back immediately or in the first seven days of running a funnel like that. So all of those conversion rates and working on AOV allows you to do that quicker so that you can scale faster and spend more on lead gen. And when it comes to when is the right time to run ads, it very much depends on how much you are paying to acquire a lead.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it makes no sense to run a trip for a funnel or lead ad. However, if you can get leads relatively cheaply, you're then looking at around 3% tripwire funnel conversion rate. At that point it might be a good idea to test Facebook ads. So what does that mean? You want 25% of people that have reached your tripwire sales page to click through to your checkout and then about 12% of them to buy. What that means is three percent conversion rate. Yeah, at that point, start testing. Invest some money in ads and see what that brings you gotcha, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So, overall, the point of the tripwire funnel is, I mean, it does make you some money from your existing traffic resisting audience, which is great, but it gives you a funnel that you can test with your existing audience, with your existing opt-ins, that then, once it's working well enough, then you can start running ads and then, when you run ads, you make back at least 80% of the or about 80% of the money you spent on ads straight away through this funnel, and then that means you can afford to scale your audience wicked okay, cool. So that gives us a rationale for the whole process, right? What else should people then be working on? What's the next tests?
Speaker 1:uh, we can then talk about split tests. And how do you actually split tests? Let's above the fold of a tripwire funnel. Sales page.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:There is a few elements you want to have. Headline is probably the most important one. Pricing. Second, one Subheadline explanation of what the offer is. Third, and then images and video basically creative and video basically creative. Uh, sometime, having a most of the time a video on a tripwire funnel sales page should convert better than a simple image. However, that's not always the case and it's very dependent on your audience. So, testing that out, um, and then adding as many testimonials as you can on that page, people will want to know what other people in a similar situation to theirs have been going through. So definitely focus on adding good testimonials and, if you can, run split tests all the time One headline against another headline, an image against a video and stuff like that Just run split tests until you reach it's possible to reach a lot more than three percent. So we've had uh and we have clients that are up at about nine percent uh. So it's possible. Some audiences are better than others, of course, but always split tests gotcha, all right cool.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of some of the advanced stuff. So you've worked on the sales page, you've put the 15 crucial elements in, you've listened to the other episode, you've got all that stuff in place and then you want to go right, how could we make it better? Well, then you would do split tests and you might split test different headlines or different pricing or the sub headline, or having a video instead of an image gotcha, all right cool. So let's say you've done those split tests and you're happy with your conversion rate in the sales page. What's what's next?
Speaker 1:uh, checkout page and checkout page improvement. The most important thing for a checkout is that it's simple enough and that it's mobile optimized, depending on the audience, but 80 percent or more of the people buying now are going to be buying and paying through mobile, so make sure it's mobile optimized. Remove all unnecessary areas where you need to enter more information. So if you have buttons and places to add address, shipping address, stuff like that, you're probably selling a digital product. You don't need that in 90 of cases. So just simplify, uh, those fields and then work on the creative.
Speaker 1:Make sure that the price is visible, make sure that the people know what they are buying and add a few testimonials and trust elements trust badges, banners, banners, money back guarantee. You should always have a money back guarantee. A good tactic for tripwires is that if they don't want it, you will give them their money back and they can keep the product. It's a cheap product, normally so, and people don't really ask for refunds If the product is good, of course. So, basically, most of the time you will first focus on the sales page and then on the checkout, uh, but after that you are more or less done all right, cool.
Speaker 2:So we've gone through all of these things. We've got the whole thing cranking out. We've got a high aov good conversion rate. We start running ads. This then allows us to scale the business and make a lot more revenue overall, because we've got a much bigger email, even if we've only made back 80% of the revenue that we spent on ads. So we've lost 20%. Next time we run an email promotion, we've now got a bigger email list, so we'll make more sales, and the time after that it's even bigger, and the time after that it's even bigger. So the whole thing scales up. All right, cool. So let's go back and summarize the whole thing.
Speaker 2:So tripwire funnel very important helps you to scale your business. The basic things you want to be tracking are the opt-in rate, the tripwire conversion rate, order bump take rate and upsell take rate and the average order value. To optimize it. We want to check if we got all the basic elements in place. First of all we assume that you probably do, and then we're going to start working on increasing or. The first thing to check is then is your click-through rate from sales page to check up page less than 12%? If it is, you're going to work on improving that through improving the sales page or the offer.
Speaker 2:If that's all sorted, then the next thing is adding in the tripwire extension emails three emails over 36 hours. If that's in place, then we're going to add in the second order bump and the second upsell and then go back and optimize the order bumps and upsells that we've already got and then add a downsell as well and an exit intent pop-up. If you're trying to figure out what split tests run at this point on your headlines, if you go back and go right, I want to improve my sales page and you want to run split test and work on the headline, the pricing, the sub headline and the videos images and then optimize the checkout page. The checkout page should be converting at about what kind of percentage?
Speaker 1:12 to 18. That's what we aim for.
Speaker 2:However, you might have more so if it's under 12, then the checkout page is definitely on your list. And then joseph just took us through some of the crucial things that we want to have there one of a picture of the course creator, money back guarantee, testimonials, reminder of the benefits, trust badges, and keep the form simple take out the address if you don't need it, for example, and then, once all that's running, you're probably in good shape. And now you start running ads into this. Boom, sweet, I love it.
Speaker 2:Now, this episode um, I forgot to mention was asked for by a listener. This was from lee noto, from lenotocom. Um, so thank you very much, lee, for asking us for this episode. Um, this is l-e-e-n-o-t-o. If you want to go check it out, and what we've been asked for is how could lee help to optimize her funnel and make sure that was, uh, really cranking, because she's already got one in place?
Speaker 2:If there's an episode that you would like from us, if there's anything that you want to hear from from us about and how to how to put something in place, then drop me an email, john at data driven marketingco, and maybe we are going to cover the topic that you're interested in in a future episode. Thank you so much for listening today. Really appreciate your time. If you found this interview useful, then subscribe wherever you have listened in order to get future episodes. If you need help with your funnel, then drop me an email, john at datadrivenmarketingco. And all that remains is to say thank you very much, yosip, for coming on and sharing your wisdom today. Happy to be here.