The Art of Selling Online Courses

500,000,000 YouTube Views Teaching English - with William Simkins

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 133

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Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with William Simkins co-founder of @EnglishwithLucy

Formerly a full-time farmer, Will has become a course industry leader, partly thanks to our coaching program. We'll discuss his expert use of data to drive business success, which is essential for boosting sales and improving service. By the end of this episode, you'll learn how transformative data tracking can be and how to utilize these strategies in your own projects.

If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/

Speaker 1:

80% of your value comes from customer data. We have about 30,000 students now in our school, and both of those things for long-term success are not the ultimate formula.

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 Will Simpkins. Now Will is half of the team who runs the multi-million dollar course business English with Lucy. Will was a part of our coaching program for a couple of years and is an absolute superstar. He went from being a full-time farmer to being an absolute wizard at running a course business. One of the things he does really, really well is tracking and using data. Now you might think that sounds a little dull, but if you do, you are wrong. This is absolutely vital. It allows you to run a much better course business, make a lot more sales and help your audience much more. It is absolutely essential. So today we're going to dive deep into the world of data tracking. We're going to talk about the importance of tracking your data, how it's been a game changer for Will and Lucy. By the end of this episode, you'll know how to implement it in your own strategy as well.

Speaker 2:

Now, before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We are here to make your podcast experience even better, and you can help us with just a quick favor by taking a moment to rate and review our podcast. You're giving us priceless feedback that helps shape future episodes and helping more people find out about the show Now. Has this show helped you make money? Has it helped you grow your business or improve your courses? If it has, please share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom slash onlinecourses. Nothing would make me happier than to hear how the show has helped you.

Speaker 2:

We've done over 100 episodes of the show today and I'm dying to know which one was your favorite, which guest you enjoyed the most. Who would you love to hear from as the next guest in the show? Make my day and let me know in a review. Go to ratethispodcastcom slash onlinecourses and let me know what you think Will welcome to the show. Man, thank you very much. What a fantastic intro. So talk to us about data. If someone listening actually I tell you what, let's start off with what English with Lucy is Can you give us a quick breakdown of who you help and what kind of courses you help them with?

Speaker 1:

Yes, so English with Lucy is an online education business. We teach people how to learn English as a second language, but we do it through two mediums really. So it's through free content that we promote on social media, but also we have online courses which we sell through our website, but that's really providing a bit more structure and helping people essentially get to whatever level they want to get to quicker.

Speaker 2:

And can you share for everybody some kind of idea of the scale of the business ballpark revenue, number of students, whatever you're happy sharing yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:

So, um, originally, the youtube channel started seven years ago, and it was just a youtube channel for five years, um, and then we started selling these online courses for the last two. We have about 30 000 students now in our school, so hopefully, from hearing that, you've got an idea.

Speaker 2:

This is someone who knows what he's talking about. There's something really serious here in terms of a great business, and so I want you, as you're listening to this, to think all right, if we're all so convinced about data, maybe I should be taking this on board as well. So if someone listening doesn't want to bother with tracking their data and thinks it sounds boring, please talk to them. Why should they bother with this?

Speaker 1:

Ultimately, if you're not tracking your data, every decision you're making for the future of your company is based on a gut instinct or you're just gambling, and both of those things, for long term success, are not the ultimate formula. To be fair, this could be the mindset of someone who is just initially starting out. They're juggling a lot of the jobs they're doing the majority of them and initially they've probably started this business because they enjoy the creative side and idea generation. So when it comes to actually tracking the numbers, that's not their strength. So they probably don't want to actually focus on that part because they don't necessarily enjoy it. But it's so vital because ultimately, you need to know your revenue, you need to know the platforms that are working best for you so you can double down on those and not pay as much attention to the ones that aren't.

Speaker 1:

But I went to a talk last year where somebody um who helps people set up for exiting their businesses. They came up with quite an interesting fact where 20 years ago the top 25 companies in the s&p 500, 80 of their company value came from tangible assets. So that might be money inventory, um. Fast forward to now. It's the opposite 80 of your value comes from customer data, website domains, trademarks, um.

Speaker 2:

So it's really flipped on its head, so it's even more vital now yeah, one of the things I see is a lot of people who start a course business are not the same kind of people who like spreadsheets no like it's just it's there seems to be like if there was a venn diagram there'd be two separate circles and they just don't cross over, like pretty much.

Speaker 2:

Right now I know I've got a friend who sells a course, sells courses about spreadsheets, but so it's like at the end it's a tiny tiny bit like it crosses over, but mostly just it totally doesn't, and I think that that not liking of them stops people from doing it because they're like oh, I don't enjoy this, I don't know how to do this, I don't understand this. I'm just going to do the thing that I know how to do and I'm not going to focus on it. What do you? Do you see anything else in terms of like when you talk to other course creators? Have you seen anything else in terms of why people don't track the data?

Speaker 1:

I think the number one reason is probably they think it's too complex. They think you need to be an expert when it comes to tracking data and analytics and, as you said in my intro, two years ago I was a full-time farmer and since then I've learned a lot, but I haven't needed necessarily to spend 10 years trying to play catch up. What you really need to do is simplify it and just follow a lot of the key metrics, like I said revenue, um, your best performing platforms, um, and then really just go from there and then, once you have a really good understanding on that, then you can do a deeper dive into um, some things like customer language or um. You know surveys asking about you know what are the main things that you're struggling with when it comes to learning English? Yeah, in our case, and what?

Speaker 2:

yeah, yeah, if you're selling a course about self-development, then you probably don't want to know about that, but I know, I mean you still need surveys of go on.

Speaker 1:

It's really easy to go off on a tangent One minute you can be looking into the majority of where your sales are coming from, country-wise, and the next you're thinking, oh I wonder what pets they have and what their favorite sports teams are okay, so for those people who aren't tracking data, what problems do you think it causes for them?

Speaker 1:

I think the biggest issue is them not knowing their audience. The sooner you know, the sooner you know your audience, the sooner you can work out your customer avatar. And when you work out your customer avatar, you can start promoting things, whether it's videos for social media or the courses you're making them, um, into stuff they actually want. Because as soon as they're engaged and they stay engaged, they will start to give you feedback on what they want next and in the long run. That really takes a lot of weight off your shoulders when it comes to idea generation, because if you're not getting that engagement, you're thinking, oh, you know what's the next thing, but generally, if you don't ask, they won't tell you. So just ask your audience and they will say right, this is what I'm struggling with. And once you spot trends, just double down on that and it's.

Speaker 2:

You know what it's. I think it's so easy with this to just think, well, I know my audience, to think why already I've talked to people from this group I, they're my customers, that the people I email with, and what have you? And to a certain extent, that's obviously true, like you obviously know your audience way better than someone who doesn't work with them. But it's still so important to do those customer avatar surveys and actually gather the data from people, like it just adds such a layer to it. We're working on it for ourselves at the moment and we haven't done that process in a couple of years and I'm like man, this is bad. We need to. We need to actually be tracking that data and like asking people what they need help with and and making sure that we're creating the products that people actually want rather than what we think they need. And, yeah, it's so easy to fall into that trap. So when you started working with Lucy on this, was she already tracking the data?

Speaker 1:

I can't remember when you started versus when she'd started in the in our coaching program so when we started working together, we almost immediately joined your program, I think um, okay, so you joined right at the beginning of that, okay, yeah right at the beginning and it was a really good um segue for us to start learning about, uh, you know, tripwire products and how to structure promotions. But when it came to actual tracking, yes, lucy um, through youtube, I mean, they provide every key metric you could want on a video. So she was always very interested in that um. But even before we started working together, generally I was always interested in analytics and, yeah, I used the odd spreadsheet in my spare time.

Speaker 2:

Did you have any call for that on the farm?

Speaker 1:

A little bit when it came to discussions just about budgeting or how the year went, but I wasn't as involved as I really am now.

Speaker 2:

Okay, gotcha, so you already had an interest in it. Lucy already had, like she was used to having data from in youtube, so was there anything else that made you decide? Yes, we should be on it with this. We should be tracking everything properly.

Speaker 1:

I think, yosip, probably yeah, I, um, I think in all honesty, our success is because of Yosip.

Speaker 2:

And that's not just tracking.

Speaker 1:

It's the whole business. Yeah, so I think when joining your program, I think we already had the data. We just didn't have it in a particularly structured way. I think by joining your program, it was able to let us know benchmarks how are we doing compared to other people, possibly in our industry or in others areas which we were doing well and where we could possibly optimize? That was really where it changed for us. Yeah, we were already tracking, but we weren't necessarily necessarily analyzing gotcha.

Speaker 2:

And so how has it been useful, apart from like learning what kind of pets your your audience?

Speaker 1:

have like what specific things.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned a couple of things in there. Right, you said about being able to identify what areas are doing well and what areas are doing less well. Why did that matter? Why was it actually a big deal for you? How did it help you make more money? Let's try and get it down to that.

Speaker 1:

It helped us connect with our audience.

Speaker 1:

So I think the big thing was at the end of all of our courses, once we had sent emails to those that had watched the YouTube videos, but then they'd actually subscribed to join our email list and know a little bit more about us. Once we'd engaged with those students to ask you know, what would you like next, those that signed up to the courses, we would always send out a survey saying how did you find it? Did it meet your expectations, what would you like to know next? And then from there, we were able to either create the next course to meet those needs or we could optimize the course that they originally bought. When they gave a couple of tips on to you know what they expected, and maybe we didn't meet those expectations. So we're constantly updating our courses as well. So everyone's a winner in that situation. Nice, um, as well. So everyone's a winner in that situation. Um, nice. It also probably allowed us to work out which platforms worked best for us, um how do you mean which platforms?

Speaker 1:

so obviously our biggest platform is youtube, so we always get really engaged students from there. But in recent years obviously tiktok has been massive. So you jump on that bandwagon and think, right, I'm going to put quite a bit of effort into promoting on there, hopefully we'll get some good growth. But in our case, we got lots and lots of views. But when it actually came to course, sales, I think since we started it we probably only received about eight sales, which is absolutely minute considering it's a channel that has over 2 million followers.

Speaker 2:

How about when you're running an email promotion? Can you talk everybody through what data you're tracking during an email promotion and then how that information helps?

Speaker 1:

So during an email promotion, the way we structure it is we don't just go into selling the course straight away or the new course that we're about to launch. We work on warming up our audience. So what we do there is we basically teach them a little bit about the topic of whatever the course is around. So, let's say we're teaching people to expand their vocabulary, we will. Or let's say business, we will speak to them about why business is so relevant in the modern day world, whether that is what's happening in the world at the minute, how to appear more confident in the workplace and what sort of benefits you will get from that.

Speaker 1:

So once we've started doing that and then we start to promote the course through what you're going to gain from it these are the friction points in which you can overcome. We start to work out how many people are actually opening those emails, how many people are actually clicking on the link to the sales page, and from there we can work out right so that email really resonated with our audience. Um, this one not so much. Maybe we won't use that next time, maybe we'll use a different angle yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So some of the things that when we're doing it, obviously you've got the, you've got the data that you pull in for, like, okay, what angle are we actually going to focus on? We've got lots of episodes about, about that. I've done one recently with monica and then you've got okay, what's the open rate? Is it good enough? If not, it probably means the subject line's an issue. And then on the next stage, how many people are actually clicking and that's going to be well how good is the email and how good is the call to action in there? And then how many people who get to the sales page then go as far as the checkout page. Is that conversion good? If it's not, that means you've probably got a problem with your sales page.

Speaker 2:

And then how many people get to the checkout page, then check out and if you've got, if that's not high enough, if we're normally looking at like 12 to 18 percent from the checkout page to completion, then that means there's a problem with the checkout page itself. And then how many people buy the order bump. If that's below benchmark, then we're looking at okay, right, that means that the order bump wasn't good, so we need to change the order bump next time we run the promotion. It's all of those numbers, isn't it, that you can really look at and break down and say, ah, this was a problem, we're going to fix that one. If it's below benchmark, then that's the one to sort out, whereas if this other one is heating benchmark, then you know, oh, that's fine.

Speaker 1:

That's great. That works really well. Keep that. Yeah, completely agree. Unfortunately, uh, you could really overthink it and just think oh, maybe it's because we started promoting on in an afternoon when really we should have should have did it um in the morning or um you know we did.

Speaker 1:

We started on a thursday when really we should have started on monday. Um, those metrics are important, but, um, yeah, it's good to almost take a step back sometimes and just look at it as face value, rather than thinking about it five times and getting a completely different answer.

Speaker 2:

So talk to people about how are you tracking your data, like, what tools are you using to actually collect that data from the first place? Is it Google Analytics and the data from? I think you guys use ConvertKit, or have you got anything else? Have you got like Hyros or anything clever like that in place or what?

Speaker 1:

So, hyros, we haven't used Hyros. We started going into Facebook ads just over a year ago. That was a big learning curve for us, but fundamentally, our tracking process is actually very manual. We are able to see exactly where everyone's coming from through coupon codes, and those coupon codes are automatically applied at the checkout, so students don't have to do it. Um, and within the code there is some sort of reference into the platform they've come from, but also the course they are buying. So later on, when we can start to do a bit of analysis, we can start to compare different trends. You could also do UTM tracking, which is much less labor intensive, but unfortunately we found that it's not as accurate when it comes to showing up these results on Google Analytics. Yeah, so we normally stick to the coupon codes because we feel that's given us the best data. Okay, cool, so you've got coupon codes.

Speaker 2:

So Google Analytics, and then data about the emails from ConvertKit. Is there anywhere else? Anything else you click the data in from.

Speaker 1:

Yes. So, like I mentioned earlier at the end of all of our courses, through the surveys and testimonials we're able to gather, we do all of that through Google Forms. We've been doing that for two years now, so we've got a lot of data coming through there which we can then apply to either customer language that's in the email copy or sales page copy um, yeah, and then, and then generally through um, whichever course hosting platform, they have their own um, they have their own custom dashboards now so they're able to give you a good oversight of what is happening.

Speaker 1:

But uh, google analytics is really where we delve into it a little bit deeper and then all of those results we then analyze through either power bi, excel or google sheets gotcha all right, cool.

Speaker 2:

So what I think's really interesting is I think a lot of people, when they hear data, they assume numbers, which is part of it right, which is totally like you know the numbers about what the open rate was, the click-through rate, et cetera. But one of the things you've been talking about I think we haven't addressed yet is that actually a lot of the data is written. It's like customer survey data and people telling you what kind of other courses they want, how much.

Speaker 1:

What do you think is the split for you guys between that, like, how much is about the numbers and how much is about what people have written or said back to you, I would say 50, 50, possibly 60, 40 edging the way of um, probably numbers because because I would say, at the end of the day, when it comes to creating these courses, you do have to have a profitable business where you're able to have a team of editors or teachers who are actually able to create these things to the best of their ability, which ultimately then goes on to the students in our case, or customers, so they then get the best product.

Speaker 2:

And how often are you, are you reviewing the data? Is this like every day you're going through stuff? Is it once a week, once a month?

Speaker 1:

what are you findings working for you? So for different metrics um, there are some where you really don't need to be looking at them every day. Um, sorry one minute we.

Speaker 1:

We have spreadsheets where, for weekly stats, we will be looking at all of the views that we're getting from our social media platforms in one column. We'll be having a column where it comes down to how many people visited our website, how many of those people visited a sales page and then the checkout page and then ultimately, how many people bought and how many people or how much revenue you received. I don't think when it comes to weekly, you really need to track too much more than that, especially monthly. I think if you start to go a little bit deeper, you might struggle. If you were doing it on your own, you'd probably have to spread that amongst a team. Then obviously you'd be able to find out a lot more at a quicker rate yeah, yeah, I think that's it.

Speaker 2:

I think that's basically whenever you're running. So if you've got um email promotion running, it's number of people that were sent to, number of opens, clicks and the percent and the percentage of each of these, as well as like a click-through rate, number of people who bought the sales page, number of people who bought the checkout page, number of people who bought the order bump, number of people who bought the upsell, total revenue from each of those and then total revenue altogether, and that basically gives you everything you need to know about an email promo. And then, if you've got a front-end funnel or something like that, then everything you need to know about an email promo. And then, if you've got a front end funnel or something like that, then you might need to collect the same kind of stuff for that. So like, okay, number of people who saw the sales page, checkout page, et cetera, et cetera, and that's like kind of it really like that. There's lots of other stuff you can get into, but if you just do that, that's the huge majority right.

Speaker 1:

Is there anything else you can think of that people should like someone's like I? Just I want to know what's the absolute minimum'd want to increase, so to pay a little bit more attention to the pricing of your products and especially when you start implementing order bumps and upsells, that could be something that you really start to see an increase in your revenue. Possibly something else that you could start to look into is if you were doing facebook ads, you start to pay a bit more attention into your return on ad spend, or how much, how much you're actually spending on a lead if you're running a lead generation campaign, um, yeah, but outside of that, um, that's probably a very good place to start well, that was awesome.

Speaker 2:

Hopefully we've managed to convince everybody listening that they absolutely need to have this spreadsheet. They need to be have this spreadsheet. They need to be tracking their data. They need to collect the data from through those customer avatar surveys for the making their customer avatar and their customer language document and then using all that data in order to run their business. If, as you're listening to this, you're thinking man you didn't answer x, y and z question. I wish you told me about this then just drop me an email, john, at data driven marketing dot co. And we'll record that in a future episode. If people heard this and they want to know more of your wisdom is really where people should get in touch or check you out or what have you yeah, so I mean the company is English.

Speaker 1:

With Lucy. You can just go on to englishwithlucycom and find us there. But if you want to reach, reach out to me specifically. My email address is will at englishwithlucycouk. Um, happy to help anyone who wants to show the commitment to finding out more info.

Speaker 2:

Nice, thank you very much if, um, if you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, please subscribe wherever you listened and don't and don't forget to leave us that review. Here is a review from somebody who listened to the podcast. We did an episode about Christmas promotions and she said in one of the episodes John talks about doing a Christmas promo. I applied what he said and made a nice bonus of $13,000 in five days while I was eating turkey Smiley face and hopefully you've got a story like that you can share as well if you've applied some of the stuff from in this podcast. Thanks so much for listening, as always, and Will, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you very much, john.