The Art of Selling Online Courses
6,000,000 YouTube Followers Teaching English - with Vanessa
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Vanessa from Speak English With Vanessa.
Vanessa has been teaching English for over ten years to learners around the world, helping them speak confidently, naturally, and without stress. She has built an impressive community, with an email list of 400,000 people and a YouTube channel boasting 6 million followers!
Vanessa’s teaching philosophy revolves around practical communication and boosting self-confidence. For those who want to speak fluent English but don’t know where to start, or for those who have been studying for a long time without seeing improvement, Vanessa offers a refreshing approach.
Vanessa’s YouTube: @SpeakEnglishWithVanessa
Vanessa’s Website: https://speakenglishwithvanessa.com/
Vanessa’s Instagram: / englishwithvanessa
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Check out our YouTube channel for more tips, techniques, and hacks: / @theartofsellingonlinecourses
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Vanessa from Speak English With Vanessa.
Vanessa has been teaching English for over ten years to learners around the world, helping them speak confidently, naturally, and without stress. She has built an impressive community, with an email list of 400,000 people and a YouTube channel boasting 6 million followers!
Vanessa’s teaching philosophy revolves around practical communication and boosting self-confidence. For those who want to speak fluent English but don’t know where to start, or for those who have been studying for a long time without seeing improvement, Vanessa offers a refreshing approach.
Vanessa’s YouTube: @SpeakEnglishWithVanessa
Vanessa’s Website: https://speakenglishwithvanessa.com/
Vanessa’s Instagram: / englishwithvanessa
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Check out our YouTube channel for more tips, techniques, and hacks: / @theartofsellingonlinecourses
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 Vanessa. Now, vanessa is the founder of Speak English with Vanessa, an online of courses. She's selling some of her numbers and we're going to dig into anything that may be as a frustration for her at the moment and have a look and see if we can help to make some improvements. So very exciting. I'm looking forward to this one.
Speaker 1:Before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We're here to make sure that your podcast experience is as good as it can possibly be. You can help us with just a quick favor If you could take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You're going to give us priceless feedback that will shape future episodes and it's going to help spread the word. And the more people are listening, the more resources we can put into this podcast every week, which would be fantastic. So go to ratethispodcastcom slash onlinecourses and just fill it out. And so ratethispodcastcom slash onlinecourses and just fill it out. And either, depending on what kind of podcast software you're using.
Speaker 1:It's going to ask you to just put a rating or maybe to possibly put a review as well. If you put a review, that would be fantastic. I read those out live on air. You've probably heard those before. I'd love to know which was your favorite. Who else you'd like to hear as a guest? What kind of topic you want covered? Some of the topics we've covered recently have been because people have said that in the comments when they have reviewed the podcast. Or if you just want to email me a topic, you can do that as well. So go to ratethispodcastcom slash onlinecourses and let us know what you think. Vanessa, welcome to the show. So good to have you here.
Speaker 2:Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:So give us an overview. Who do you help with your courses? What kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 2:Sure Well, I help adult English as a second language learners who are wanting to improve their English skills for travel. Some are for work I don't necessarily target business related English but they feel that learning better English, especially spoken English, will help to improve their lives in some way. And I do feel like a lot of the students that come to me they stay because they feel like maybe it's the first time they could understand English. I do try to speak clearly and simply, but also in a real way. So I feel like my business does try to encourage students kind of heavy on the almost the cheerleading side that we're giving that good content and trying to help them with lessons, but also really a good heavy dose of you got this, this encouragement, and hopefully that will help lead them on their way.
Speaker 1:Nice, Nice. And so how did you get into that? Were you a teacher first? It's like how did this, how did this all come about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, I used to teach English in the classroom in the US. I did that a long time ago and then my husband and I moved to South Korea for three years where we taught children. I feel like this move abroad teach English story for the language businesses is very common and I taught adults on the side. And as much as I like kids, teaching kids in the classroom is really hard. The parents want them to learn, it's not the kids that want to learn. So it's kind of this awkward business situation where you're catering to the parents because you want them to come back, but you also are trying to teach the kids and make it fun. It wasn't necessarily my jam, so I taught some adults on the side and that I felt so excited about. They were really motivated. They're lovely people and I remember one day I had finished teaching this group of Korean welders. They were going to work in Canada, so they needed to learn English to be able to survive in Canada and I was biking home from teaching them and I just felt like this explosion of enthusiasm and excitement inside me and I was like this is what I want to do. I want to teach adults. How can I do that Because I knew we weren't going to be in Korea forever.
Speaker 2:So I just started looking up how to teach English as a second language in the US and there's kind of two options. You can go the traditional route, get certified again, go through all the years of school and then work within the school system, or you could volunteer and work. There's a lot of um like a lot of churches or organizations, charities that help immigrants, you know, in the evenings try to learn English, and neither of those were really options that I wanted to do. Um, so I found this was 10 years ago now. I found a website that was teaching people yes, you can teach English online and I thought online you can do that and so I dug into that more. I'm kind of one of those people that dives first and thinks later, which has its pros and cons. So within a week I created Speak English with Vanessa, had some sort of website up and some vision of what the future possibly could hold.
Speaker 2:It has changed a lot since, but when we moved back to the US, I just spent 24-7 trying to figure out how to make this a job, because 10 years ago it existed.
Speaker 2:I did feel like almost at that time it was hard to break into the market and nowadays people say that I felt like that 10 years ago, but certainly just so much trial and error. I taught Skype lessons for a while, built some courses and that has just evolved over time, but it's always had kind of the same vision that adults know what they want, they know that they want to improve their English and they're the ones that are motivated and I felt so motivated by their motivation. It's kind of this like beautiful cycle where I feel this even now with my students when I see their dedication and motivation. It just makes me excited so it makes me want to make more lessons and feel connected to them, even though it's just the Internet. So yeah, the business has evolved a lot over the last nine or 10 years, but still kind of the same idea Nice, cool years, but still kind of the same idea Nice, cool, and so in that time, what have you been able to grow your audience to?
Speaker 1:You mentioned YouTube channel and website, like. What's your main traffic sources?
Speaker 2:Yeah, at the moment, and I guess since the very beginning, youtube has been it. I dabbled around with a couple other platforms and it's always really been YouTube. That's been the best, and by the best I mean it has brought in the most students Also, of course yes, students who purchase courses, but also students who are there, I would say, for the right reasons. On short form platforms, say like TikTok or Instagram, a lot of people are there just to kind of scan through videos and not necessarily there for a 30 minute lesson, and the lessons that have performed really well for me are some of those longer form lessons and those students are dedicated. So I think YouTube has really has been amazing for language learning in general and certainly for my business.
Speaker 1:OK, so YouTube's your main one. What size is your YouTube audience?
Speaker 2:I just hit six million, which is amazing.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fantastic you must be delighted. With growing your YouTube audience. What do you think's worked for you Like? Is it is a certain kind of video that you found, right, that's the one and you've just latched onto that and you make that, as it tend to be, search based videos. Is it discovery ones like what? What's the tactics have worked for you?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, I do feel like with youtube, because I've been on youtube for so long, partly. Whenever people ask that, I just say it's been consistency. I've been. I posted three times a week for years, which is a lot, and then at one point I started posting twice a week and then now it's once a week. It's been once a week for a while.
Speaker 2:When they came out with the live features, I was making a live lesson once or twice a week. I was really consistent and all in with that. From a language teacher perspective, I guess it's just teaching perspective. When you're doing live lessons, people feel like you're real, because you are, you're there live. And I do feel like my channel kind of had that hockey stick very slow and steady, like kind of three years was like this, and then started to go up when I did live lessons very consistently, like twice a week, and that was when the live feature was pretty new. So I don't know if that's a tried and true thing to do right now, but that really helped to connect with my audience and I would send emails out and say, hey, I'm going to be live this time and every week same thing I had a lesson, it was. It was great I mean being able to connect with students in the chat and all of that, but also they could see me and trust me, because I feel like I'm a pretty trustworthy person. But to show that on the internet is kind of hard like for people to actually feel who you are and to trust you so that really helped me.
Speaker 2:Of course, consistency, um, and I think with YouTube, and I think with YouTube, I know some people have a scheme for I look at this analytic and then this analytic and then make that's how I make my video plan and all of that. I'm not quite so data driven, might we say, when it comes to YouTube, but I do look at which videos have performed well, which videos have brought in the most leads to the newsletter, what's kind of going on with my audience, what other videos they're watching and stuff like that. But I feel like all of that stuff maybe is pretty common for people trying to create content less content especially, but that's what's worked for me. Maybe nothing mind-blowing, but consistency. Give it the 10-year long game, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then, what's your email list size nowadays?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think at the moment it's like 400,000 or something like that. We cut big cuts every three months, sometimes as much as like 100,000 people Just try to keep it fresh and that's something that's really helped. The open rate of emails I saw a huge improvement over like the three month period Once we started to cut people consistently. It was always kind of a thing where that oh yeah, you know people who haven't clicked on an email. I should probably remind them and then delete them. But now every three months, we send out a series of emails, which is something that we do Thanks to you guys.
Speaker 2:Um, I think I listened to was it Monica, who had a podcast about the re-engagement series and all of that? So I set that up and my assistant now sends that out every three months, deletes everybody who didn't re-engage, and something about the email system is such that when you have more people engaged in your emails, they will deliver them and it will just be better for your emails in general. So that has helped a lot. Yeah, email is definitely where it's at for the business.
Speaker 1:And how often are you doing promotions then via the email list?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I send an email promo every month, once a month, but also we have a membership, so at the end of each month there's like a four day email series that goes out. That's a reminder about the membership. So, technically, twice a month. This, the promo at the end of the month, is, it was actually literally the same several emails every single month, 12 times a year for maybe like five years. It's crazy and it works so well. I just changed the month, like if you joined before June 1st, if you joined before July 1st, but all the content was the same and people continue to join the membership and it worked. So, anyway, I try to not be too fancy about that kind of stuff. Um, but yeah, twice a year, twice a month, I mean, and so that's one of them right, that's.
Speaker 1:That's the membership. What's the other promotion that you're doing? Is that for the membership as well, or is that for selling a course, or or what's that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's for other courses. So I've tried to kind of re-envision what we could sell 12 times a year, maybe six times a year, and then double it. And I found out something quite interesting last year because I joined your program January last year Not this past January, but 2023. Year, not this past January, but 2023. And that's when I kind of scheduled out monthly promotions for various products and I felt like I don't have enough products to do something for 12 times a year. And you guys kind of helped me to see that, oh, I could package these in different ways and maybe there's a intermediate and advanced course so I could sell those together or I could sell them separately or I could sell beginner, intermediate, advanced as this bundle which we just finished doing a promotion for that.
Speaker 2:And I found out over the year something that I would not have believed that these more expensive bundles of courses sold sometimes three times the amount of revenue as cheaper, smaller courses. So, for example, I have a unlimited bundle which is like all the courses and we were saying it's like a thousand selling it for generally 500. And then during the promo it was for sale for 350. So huge discount, tons of courses included that promo. I thought 350?.
Speaker 2:Usually I sell my courses for less than 100, my smaller courses, because the international audience doesn't necessarily have the money based on various currencies and stuff to spend that much. I thought it's not going to do that great, but let's just try it. That promo made three times the amount of the other promos during the year and I don't know if it was because there was a huge discount and there's a lot of content and then a huge discount trying to like parse out what happened, but that was something surprising. So certainly like trying new things, not just selling the same type of courses, but giving it a shot, seeing if students really want that. And they loved it, which was great yes, fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker 1:the, the pricing and the number of things to sell in one go makes a massive difference. Like packaging stuff up, splitting it out and packaging it back up again. Um, is a big part of like one of the early steps in our process that you're referring to, of like helping people figure out what's all the things that you could sell.
Speaker 1:Because, nearly everybody and this includes you, dear listener, nearly everybody has more things they can sell than they believe they have. So nearly everybody who I talk with will go through they go. Well, I've only courses. And we're like, okay, don't you worry, it's gonna be fine. And then we're like, okay, now we're gonna do a brainstorming of everything you've ever made, everything that you've made that could be done, given for free. Everything you've ever done, paid, that you've never sold again. Let's go through everything from your checkout software and find what's this one, what's this one, what's this one? And you end up with like seven or eight things. It's like, okay, well, seven or eight things, or even three or four things. Like you can start to okay, well, you sell four things separately and then you bundle, you do a bundle of one lot of things and another bundle and then you've got six things and then you go there's the whole, the whole year's worth.
Speaker 1:You know you do that twice, like you say everyone's, every six months yeah um and what we've generally found is interesting what you said about the 350 working really well. We've generally found in the language learning space that most people are doing stuff for under 100 bucks and the sweet spot is normally somewhere between about 129 and 199 um. So it's really interesting to hear that you're saying it's even higher. Actually it's 350 for your one.
Speaker 2:In terms of the, the bundle that worked best yeah, I'm not sure if I sold that necessarily like in the welcome sequence, if it would do as well, because it was this once a year promo. Maybe that really attracted attention because I have the welcome sequence. That's selling something different and then doing the promos. There's different pricing, different products et cetera. But yeah, I was really surprised about that and I did another similar kind of big bundle of lots of products for a pretty big discount and that also those two were the two best promos of the entire year, which is great. It's great to sell stuff you already have and still be able to make money off it and new students who have never been part of that course are able to find it.
Speaker 1:That's just mind-blowing to me, so cool about how many students do you get when you do one of these promotions? About how many new people do you get signing up?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think it depends if it is, for example, like that 350 type of course or if I'm selling something for like $100, if, for example, we're selling something for around $100, I would say if we get 500 to 1,000 students to join, that would be great per month. And in a way I kind of see maybe this isn't the right mindset kind of see all promo sales as almost bonus sales because it's the evergreen funnel that I had been running. Before talking with you guys, I just had the evergreen funnel through my welcome sequence and that was great. That was sustaining the business plus the monthly like four email series for the membership and then adding promos to it each month. Oh, this is kind of bonus revenue. It is work Like we have to write the emails and field the emails coming back from students and all of that, but it's not that much more work and it kind of feels like, oh, this is a little extra, which is great.
Speaker 1:It's nice that's quite a lot extra isn great.
Speaker 2:it's nice that's quite a lot extra, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah a thousand people. You know that's fantastic, um. So what's any stuff that's um frustrating for you at the moment? What's any issues in your funnel that we could maybe have a little look at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I feel like my general mindset about the business is I would say I'm a really hard worker, but at this time in my life I am a get more bang for my buck. Like I work two hours a day, a couple of days a week. I have three kids busy life a couple days a week. I have three kids busy life, not much time. My baby's napping that's when I work.
Speaker 2:So trying to, I guess, find anything frivolous, get rid of it and try to not necessarily yes, there's probably some holes in the business, but not necessarily do everything. Like I remember when I first talked to joseph he said vanessa, your business is here making this much money. Why aren't you making this much money? You know a lot about running your business and I said like you know what? I am not necessarily trying to make so much more money, I'm trying to be efficient so that the business is doing amazing. But I'm not putting in. I don't have eight hours a day, for if I had eight hours a day for a couple months, I feel like I'd just be like taking over the world. I feel like I could accomplish an amazing amount, but I have to be so efficient.
Speaker 1:So yeah, finding big deal for you. The steps, yes, the steps that are not efficient taking what's taking time at the moment is it, is it writing the email series, or are you reusing ones you've done before, like what's what's taking up your time?
Speaker 2:yes, I feel like I've tried to create lots of SOPs for the business, and I think I listened to a podcast. Maybe it was your wife, I'm not sure she the SOP queen.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, where she was talking about creating all the SOPs and whatnot, deciding like, when we're redoing something, what I need to do versus what other people need to do, and does it take longer to explain it to them to do it, or should I just do it myself? And I think some of those things, some of those things work well. And sometimes I feel like, oh, I just made this tutorial four times, I could have just done it. Some of those type of efficiency things feel like, yeah, I'm not exactly sure, the best use of my time. I'm not sure if that gives you any room for.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It kind of depends, I suppose, whether it's around like email marketing and funnels, which is my expertise, or if it's around like I don't know.
Speaker 2:Making YouTube depends, I suppose, whether it's around like email marketing and funnels, which is my expertise, or if it's around like I don't know, making YouTube videos, in which case I'm, you know, would bow down to your wisdom. Youtube, we got a system going on. As far as the funnel, maybe I can work you, walk you through like what's going on at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what you think. So at the moment people are coming in through YouTube, there's a freebie, et cetera. They're going through the welcome sequence. I'm not sure when this will go out, but on July 1st I'm changing up a lot as far as the welcome sequence, where the membership is going to go back to being the primary source, the primary course, instead of one-time purchase courses.
Speaker 2:So I'm trying to envision how to create urgency and market the membership itself, especially in the welcome sequence, because that's evergreen, that's happening all the time and with those monthly four sets of emails that were going out, we could say hey, june 1st is coming up, join before June 1st, because we're going to be studying blah, blah, blah in June, don't miss that. And it felt more organic to say we're actually studying this. You're going to miss it if you join too late. But when something's evergreen with a membership, it's a little bit trickier. So I am trying to kind of envision how I can promote that in the welcome sequence with real urgency. You know, with marketing online it's kind of real urgency.
Speaker 2:But all those types of things where there's a discount that's going away or whatever it might be, um, because they'll be going, that used to be the down sell. There used to be one-time purchase courses and then the membership would be the down sell. They would get after a few days. But yeah, do you have any kind of membership? Marketing urgency advice yeah, interesting. Do you have any kind of membership?
Speaker 1:marketing urgency advice. Yeah, interesting. Do you have like teachers who work for you, who are like helping with giving feedback, answering questions, that kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:Do you ever do cohorts?
Speaker 2:You know when we launch a new course, yes, everyone's studying kind of drip each day, especially if it's like a 30 day challenge. We're all studying it together, but not necessarily for this flagship course, it's been more. You get access to the stuff and I teach a live lesson every Sunday morning based on the lessons within the course, but it's just like a 30-minute live stream. It's not necessarily we're walking you through all of the lessons together do you do any kind of a?
Speaker 1:so do you do a discount if they sign up for the membership straight away or in that?
Speaker 2:yes, yes, so that was actually one of the biggest changes to the membership. I've been doing the membership for like seven years and after the first two years I changed platforms to Teachable, and before the membership was $35 a month and then when I moved to Teachable they had the option of changing the price for the first month so you could get like a $5 for the first month offer Immediately. When I offered that, it went from having 150 people in the membership consistently like seven years ago, to all of a sudden it was like 500, then 800, then 900. It kind of like capped out. I don't think we really ever got more than a thousand, but that low entry point more than a thousand but that low entry point, just low risk.
Speaker 2:It really hit the nail on the head that students really felt like oh, I can join with low risk, especially the international audience. $5 is a lot still for a lot of people in other countries, especially for a membership. So it was nice to be able to see oh, they can join and this is actually an offer that's working. So if you go to the sales page, it's always $5 for the first month. If you click on any button, it will automatically give you that discount? Yeah, so that's what we were using before and then currently as well gotcha.
Speaker 1:So I've just gone and checked out, like if, after somebody signs up for your lead magnet, they're currently getting an offer of 80 worksheets for 27 bucks, are you going to change that page to focus on the membership as well?
Speaker 2:yes, I would love to do that um and try to. I was. I don't know what your advice would be about this, but I was considering having a because I don't make I'm not making money off of the $5 per month. The $5 is just to get people in the dorm. So I thought, if the purpose is to have it be low risk and to kind of weed out people who just don't even have a credit card, what if I made it ridiculous like a dollar for the first month? I saw a couple other creators doing that and I thought for me as a consumer that would certainly be more sparkly than even $5. $5 is cheap, but if it's like $1 for the first month, so low risk, it's still kind of the same idea, but maybe after you download the free worksheet as like a really entry point offer on the thank you page offering the membership for $1 for the first month. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Are you running ads at all, or is all of your traffic from organic? Okay, cool Yep, so it's probably worth a test. Are you running?
Speaker 2:ads at all, or is all of your traffic from organic okay?
Speaker 1:cool, yep, so it's probably worth a test. Let me talk you through a little bit of context here in terms of some stuff that matters. So one of the things with this this confirmation page after your lead magnet, is that's the. That's a place where you can have like a really, really great offer that gets you some revenue in straight away. And when you're running ads it matters to get money in straight away because you need to pay for the ads in order to have the cash flow to pay for the next batch and kind of keep it running.
Speaker 1:When you're not running ads, when you're just doing everything through organic, then that doesn't really matter. Then you're just interested in customer lifetime value and how much you'll make total, because you're not spending anything, anything upfront to get that in. So we don't have to worry about that. We don't have to worry about the $27. We don't have to worry about the, even the $5. Like, even if it was free for the first month, if that converts better overall, then that's the only thing that really matters. Yeah, what is your average time that someone sticks around in the membership for?
Speaker 2:It's about four months. And how much do you make? 15% churn rate each month.
Speaker 1:Okay, gotcha About four months Cool, and so what is your? What's the price for the membership when it goes up to full price?
Speaker 2:$35.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So on average yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, go ahead. So on average you're making about one hundred and forty dollars per person who goes through that system. Gotcha, yes.
Speaker 2:The biggest drop off is after the first month, because a lot of people have, like, a prepaid card and they put five dollars on it and then they just literally don't have the money for the next month. It's not dissatisfaction with the course, it's literally a payment thing. Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Gotcha and about how many people? I suppose you don't know how many people converting on that, because you've got it as a down sell at the moment after the $27 thing.
Speaker 2:Yes, the majority of sales come at the end of the month when I have that end of the month promotion. So I think that's another thing that could be good to track, which I'm not great at tracking the data. But I do have different sales pages, one which have different coupon codes, and that's the only way to track it. But the thing is then I have to follow up and look at how many people purchased with which coupon code and whatnot. But I do have a separate sales page for the promotion at the end of the month, for I have a little blurb at the bottom of each of my newsletters. If they click on that during the month and then the downsell sequence is a different sales page. It's all the same content, it's just a different coupon code in the button. So, looking at that, that and seeing I know most of the sales come the last four days of the month, but really diving deeper into where they're coming from and when could be helpful.
Speaker 1:Do you know the numbers with your current offer? So you've got the $27 offer. You've got the welcome sequence. What's everything that you sell during the welcome sequence? Is it this $27 80 week worksheets plus the membership, or is there anything else during that sequence as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the worksheet is only on that thank you page. I did have a tripwire sequence that I'd set up thank you page. I did have a tripwire sequence that I'd set up and at some point I decided to cut that out and just do my cat walking past the screen, just just straight in and jump into the main welcome sequence. So during the welcome sequence they're sold a $199 course, dropped to $139. And that is it's kind of. It's hard to explain the backstory of it, but it was the membership.
Speaker 2:And then I took a couple courses from the membership and created these one-time payment courses in different levels, like I kind of tried to see which one seems like intermediate courses, advanced courses. It's not a science, but that was for sale during the welcome sequence at that fixed price point and it was doing really well when I first launched that about two years ago. Same with the tripwire. The tripwire was killing it a year ago and it's dropped by about half now. And it's dropped by about half now. So I would love to figure out why. I don't know why, but because I'm redoing the course system and trying to promote the membership.
Speaker 1:I think trying this new offer on the thank you page could be a good test. Okay, so, without diving into everything, it's hard to say for sure, right, but here's some initial kind of thoughts about something that could work here. Oh no, I've got one more question that Shayla's realized what is? Why do you want to switch to the membership rather than selling these different offers? Is it because the others have stopped doing so well and so you're like well, let me test out some different offers? Or is there like, is it you just like the idea of the membership? Like, what is it for you?
Speaker 2:so I do like the idea of the membership, especially if I'm not creating new content every month. Um, we were making new content for five years. My husband was working with me. It was a lot of effort and but it was great. Students loved it. And then when we decided to stop that, it was because I was tired of making new stuff and we had so much new, we had so much content that I figured we could try to sell it in some way.
Speaker 2:But I do feel like when I listened actually to your episode with Shona, I got so excited because she has a membership. I chatted with her a bit after the episode about her business and the kind of Netflix style membership where you get access to everything. But me, as the teacher has created this plan to say you study this first, then this first, then this first, and that's what we're doing, kind of together, the community group, we're studying those things together. To me, I just felt like this is the best use of the material that I have, not necessarily in the levels. In the levels, I do think at least this is from my perspective the best way to make the most revenue from that is to really sell the next level.
Speaker 2:Well like to get them in that ecosystem from one level to the next, and I wasn't necessarily doing that. It was more here's your levels, choose your level. I wasn't using that level system to help people go from one course to the next. People were using the material. But I feel like with the membership, the way the content is, it's not necessarily in levels and students can use that material best in a membership style format. I'm not sure if I explained that well, but I would like to dive in and test out, just to be all in on the membership, um, for a bit.
Speaker 1:So okay, so here's my thoughts then on how that, on something that might work there. So on the confirmation page you have the great offer on the membership for the um monthly offer, maybe so. So you go right. Instead of $35 a month it's $5 or it's $1 or whatever. That number is right To try, and that's a relatively easy test to do. Right.
Speaker 1:If all you're comparing is $5 versus $1, run it at five for a while, run it at one for a while, or do an A-B test with half the traffic getting one half the other, or do it one month one way, one the other, and know an a b test with half the traffic getting one half the other, or do it one month one way, one the other. I'm just going to see what your numbers are. That's kind of relatively straightforward. But then some people won't convert on that offer, but it's still the thing you want to get them into. So then the next thing I would probably do is do a another offer for a free trial, but for a shorter time period. So instead of five dollars for a, maybe it's a week for free.
Speaker 1:And some people will respond to that instead, and the place where we've seen this work really well is we do sometimes, as part of a big launch, we'll do an annual membership sale, so it's like great, you could buy the whole year's worth for this bargain price whatever nine months, 10 months of the normal price, something like that and you could do great with that. Right, people are very happy with the deal and you make more because people have signed up for a whole year's worth. Even if they only paid nine months, you're normally getting four months on average, and then we'll do a downsell to a monthly membership and then we'll do a downsell to a free trial for it. So I think something like that could work here, and what you find is a decent proportion of people will convert on that next stage into a free trial. Now, obviously, you don't want to give a better deal as the second deal, because you don't want to train people. Just wait around, there'll be something better coming up, so it's got to be less in some way. So a shorter time period, like a week, might be a really good way of doing that. So another thing that I would think about adding in is what could you do to make this deal so ridiculously good that people would feel stupid saying no.
Speaker 1:And so we did this a little while ago with another guy who's been on the podcast and it worked really well. While ago with um, another guy who's been on the podcast, and it worked really well, and it was adding in a course, or it might even mean a couple of courses, that if they cancelled the trial, if they said no, I don't want that anymore, they still got to keep the courses. So this is like it's the kind of thing if it makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable in your gut because you're like I might get taken advantage of here, that's good, because that means that that that person who's buying doesn't have that feeling is less likely to have that feeling and therefore is people are more likely to buy. So what we did with him, I think, was you signed up for the membership and it was like two or three courses that if you, if you cancelled, you didn't like it, you weren't completely happy, you'd get your money back and you got to keep these courses as well, and so it was a risk, what's known in marketing as a risk reversal.
Speaker 1:So instead of a risk reduction, which is your normal thing, like you know, 100% money back, guarantee, um, or you know, doing a cheap trial instead of full price monthly membership. Instead of that, you actually take on a bunch of risk and lots of people aren't willing to do this because it's just like, oh, someone's going to buy it and then just cancel straight away and then they'll get the courses and that's true, right, a bunch of people are going to do that, but it's digital, it doesn't matter. It's like you don't really lose anything from that um. But if it gets more people to sign up and it makes it gets you a higher number of members paying a full price, then it's totally worth it. If it doesn't do that, well, it's not a good. It doesn't work out well, right, but overall, that's what I've seen to happen. What's your thoughts about that?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, no, that sounds really interesting because when you I feel like when you have the membership, like you said there's you have to be creative about different ways to when you have one product, how can you split it up and try to sell it in different ways and maybe selling it, testing, selling it with an extra course that you get, and then you get to keep it. Keep it even if you cancel, like that could be one way to market it, um, and test out to see who likes that offer compared to just the discount or other various ways to sell the membership. So, yeah, I took some notes while you were speaking.
Speaker 1:Great, it is the challenge with memberships. It's the big challenge, right, because they're they're a lot of people like memberships and shona falls into this camp because it feels like the right thing to do. It makes it very easy in terms of what you're offering. I'm offering everything, you get everything. It means if somebody's going through the program and you're like, oh, you should go to this next, they're already paying for it. You don't have to. You're not trying to upsell them something else.
Speaker 1:But the downside is, how do you package it? How do you sell that 12 times a year? How do you sell that in different ways that make people interested in it, when it's just the same thing every time? And shona and I talk about this a lot um, she's trying out various bonuses, various different discounts at different times. It's like how, what else can you do? I've been discussing with her the idea of like doing cohorts. I don't know that she's like gonna do that, but like that's one other way of doing it. Like we had pat flynn on the on the podcast and he was saying that's one of the things they do. Um, and that's like a different offer. It's still the membership, but it's a different offer. It's like we're all going to go through this thing together. Um, another way is you sell. Let's say you've got a b1 course. You sell the b1 course in terms of promotion, but you're actually the product is.
Speaker 1:You're selling the membership so you're speaking particularly the people at the b1 level or who want to be at the b1 level, and they're going to get that if they sign up for the membership. But they'll still get everything else the same way they normally do. So that's like a way of promoting it in different ways. But another one is yeah, what else can you do to make a ridiculously good offer? Um, I love alex harmosi's book. The 100 million dollar offer.
Speaker 1:I think that's really really good in terms of brainstorming like how can you make this so stupidly good? Um, we keep working on how do we make our offers, how do we make our offers better with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that sounds like great advice. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:You're very welcome.
Speaker 2:Always trying to brainstorm new ways to make things that I've already created work still.
Speaker 1:Nice. So if somebody wants to go check out your site, have a little look at your funnels, your YouTube videos. Where do they need to go to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, speakenglishwithvanessacom. Or go to the Speak English with Vanessa YouTube channel. How simple, yeah Well you speak English, great John, so I don't know if you're going to need it, but, aw, thanks.
Speaker 1:If you found this interview useful, then then, and you want to get future episodes, then please subscribe. Wherever you've been listening, um, thank you so much as always for listening, really appreciate your time. I get lovely feedback about the podcast and it warms my heart and makes it worthwhile doing every time I hear that. So thank you so much for everybody listening. Um, vanessa, thank you so much for coming on today and and giving your time and talking about how this has all worked for you yeah, thank you so much for having me.