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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
From 200K Podcast Downloads to Online Course Mastery with Charlie Baxter
How can you grow your online course business like Charlie Baxter?
Dive into this episode of "The Art of Selling Online Courses" where John Ainsworth interviews Charlie, the host of the British English Podcast. With 200,000 monthly downloads, Charlie shares his journey from traveling the world to teaching English in a humorous way.
Learn his top strategies for doubling your email list and boosting revenue. Discover how focusing on benefits over features and understanding your audience’s psychology can transform your sales page and membership plans.
What changes can you make to see similar success?
Check out Charlie's YouTube channel @realenglishwithrealteacher4777 for more insights. This episode is packed with actionable insights for course creators. Don't miss out on these expert tips to elevate your online course business.
Subscribe for more strategies on digital marketing, audience engagement, and course sales.
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 are 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 Charlie Baxter. Now Charlie is the host of the British English Podcast and he also sells a membership for people who want the upgraded version in order to learn more from him. He has travelled all over the world and really came to the conclusion that you can teach English in a more humorous way. We're going to be talking to him about that today.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get into the show, before we get into the details, I want to tell you about something that you need in order to help you to grow your course business. We have put together all of our best tips and tactics in a structured guide on how you can double your email list. So the idea is if you have a bigger email list, you are going to grow your revenue faster. You send out email promotions to a bigger email list, you make more money, you make more sales, you help more people. So if you want to get hold of this guide, you can get this for free at datadrivenmarketingco. Slash double Now, charlie. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. I need to get that. You need to get that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that, I like getting more emails. That's good. Talk us through a little bit. I kind of covered it briefly, but who do you help and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 2:So I help intermediate to advanced British English enthusiasts or learners of English in general that want to focus on British English specifically. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily in the country. They could be outside of it, just preferencing a preference towards that accent or that style of English. And they have achieved a great feat already within their journey. They're already conversational, so they're looking for I would say it's kind of like just a clean version of native speed and then that broken down to better understand the language that was ex they were exposed to in that kind of conversation. So, yeah, high level learner, I would would say of British English and you've got.
Speaker 1:I mentioned the podcast. How many people listen to the podcast? How many downloads did you get?
Speaker 2:Between 150,000 to 200,000 a month.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So how have you been able to build up to that kind of scale? Did you just put it out and that grew organically, or is there anything that you've done to grow it so much?
Speaker 2:I think the name is something to do with it the British English podcast. People will search British podcast and find me, so it's quite SEO friendly. Um, I was quite consistent from uh, from the start and before that I had a YouTube channel. Still have it there when I want to post something random. But, um, that taught me the process of producing something that I would class as a little bit higher uh quality of my version of that and the production value as well. So I think I already had that level of production going into it and then, yeah, was consistent every week.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, so I would say mainly finding it organically and just continuing to absorb it on a weekly basis and bringing in collaborations with other people is always going to help me okay, nice.
Speaker 1:Um, when you decided to work with the data-driven marketing team, what had you seen in terms of increase in results overall?
Speaker 2:um, so we worked with you guys, make most of 2023 and I'd say, after looking back on that, you had increased it by 45 percent.
Speaker 1:Around about that great, okay, yeah, yeah, well, you, you've done it, you know, but I'm glad we're able to help you to do that. So, what had you changed that led to those improvements? A lot, okay.
Speaker 2:But I think the main things that you guys were aware of straight away. The audit was great as well, really inspiring. The sales page was focusing on features versus benefits majorly. Then Monica got involved and helped me with the sales copy, the psychology of the learner's journey through the sales letter. I think that was a huge, huge turnaround for me to understand the structure of a sales letter, how to go from I don't know anything about what you're serving to me to being really excited to buy it. That's a big game changer for me, um, and in general, understanding the funnel a lot more. Before I was just kind of following a mentor that was spoon feeding me things because his business is very similar to mine, okay, um, and now I feel much more in control. I feel like I dare I say I feel like an entrepreneur oh, yes, very nice.
Speaker 1:So I think, yeah, did you put that on your twitter profile?
Speaker 2:I feel like no, I just say it whenever I meet somebody new yeah, I don't know why.
Speaker 1:The coffee shop, like when you're buying shoes, whatever it is, I haven't got. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:oh, I'm an entrepreneur yeah, I feel more comfortable admitting that because it's a very cliche cheesy thing that brits would yeah, shy away from yeah, but yeah, and like my wife is now doing her own business okay, kind of she was in corporate for 10 years.
Speaker 2:After seeing my growth with my business, she's like, oh, you've got a good lifestyle now I have to go to work every day and you're able to do three hours work sometimes if you want, and I was like, yeah, it'd be great if you could do that as well, because then we could continue to travel and be borderless pretty much. So, yeah, I've been helping her with that because of what I've understood from you guys.
Speaker 1:Great. What kind of business is she starting?
Speaker 2:then she's done a branding agency. Ok. Yeah, ok, so it is much more B2B. Yeah, but at the same time her clients are quite small at the moment in that startup phase. So it's kind of like speaking to the individual CEO of that company, gotcha.
Speaker 1:So yeah.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you improved the sales pages, improved the sales pages, anything?
Speaker 2:else that you'd yes. So we installed what you guys call the tripwire, I have been told I might want to say the welcome mat gift. Okay.
Speaker 1:Welcome mat gift.
Speaker 2:Sure, I don't mind what you call it, yeah, just put it in there, charlie, so we put that in, but you don't call it a tripwire to the customers.
Speaker 1:It's like a marketing term, you know, so it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just the psychology for me, you know. So it doesn't matter, yeah, just the psychology for me. Um, and we also, uh, upsold, yeah, upsold, the monthly subscription to the annual that was. That was one of the biggest. Okay, after the sales page copy, I'd say so, my membership is monthly or yearly. Yeah, and most people would go towards monthly before you guys got involved and now I'd say it's mostly annual. Oh, so that's a big change because on average, I think it was about three to four months and then they drop off.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm immediately increased the average revenue per customer significantly okay what do you people? How many months worth is the? How many months is the equivalent of the annual 10. 10 months, Okay.
Speaker 2:Got it, yeah, so that that's a big change. It also makes me feel like I've got a student that is willing to commit to the program, and I want to have people in there, obviously, that want to push hard and find amazing results, which I'm starting to really appreciate. Finally, that if I invest heavily in their results, that is a perfect like spin on proving that the system works. Before, I was focusing so much on the content, making sure that is good, instead of understanding how they can consume that in the most effective way. Yeah, so that's still a learning that I'm going through, but, yeah, I'm glad I'm aware of it now nice, okay, so we've got two things.
Speaker 1:Then we've got the annual upsell and we've got the sales page. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna circle back around to the sales page in a minute. But the annual upsell. So what you have is somebody's signing up and then there a minute. But the annual upsell. So what you have is somebody signing up and then there's the option of the annual. So where in the process do they see that? Do they sign up for the monthly and then the upsell is on the upsell page. Are there two options on the sales page? What exactly does it look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the exact click through is sales page copy yeah, before it was membership plans within that sales page. But the pitch of the price, yeah, now it's building up what the value of the product is. Yeah, then committing to the click of, yes, I want this. Then that goes through to the price plans and then that gives them the option to go monthly or annual. The annual is heavily promoted in the sort of Ryanair kind of way that they like to attract your eyeballs. I've got a few features that encourage them to go to the annual, like the discount. Obviously a bonus course or pronunciation lesson obviously a bonus course or pronunciation lesson I used to do. I used to do a bigger guarantee, so I used to do 30 day refund for that and a five day refund for the monthly.
Speaker 2:And then I don't know if I heard it from you, but someone alluded to me the fact that the longer the guarantee, the less likely they will be to immediately take action on that guarantee, because they're like oh, I've got ages, and then they kind of either enjoy it, learn how to like it, or kind of don't think about it imminently. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:So I've tweaked that, this campaign, which is active this week, so we'll see how that goes. But yeah, the click through to the price plans and then the action from that is to go to the cart and the monthly cart has the what you don't get kind of sidebar. If you want this upgrade to the annual, that makes sense. And then the annual is promoting with the testimonials and features on that cart, on the sidebar of the cart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay, cool. And then if someone does choose monthly, are you again trying to get them up to annual after that? Or is that just like okay, great, you're done now.
Speaker 2:I have done that. I have offered that occasionally, but I haven now. I have done that, I have offered that occasionally, but I haven't been fully committed to that. So I need to implement that. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that'd be good, Nice, okay, cool. And so what kind of percentage of people did you see before and after you made those changes, in terms of going to annual?
Speaker 2:So I don't know the numbers necessarily. I would say I guess it was probably about 20%, went to annual, now it's 80%, I'd say wow yeah, that's a huge change. It is a huge change and the first sale that I did I was like oh my goodness me, that's insane. Um a year later I've acknowledged that the quarterly sales that I do means that I obviously don't have the constant revenue between those quarterly sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's still a, it's 45. But before I was like, oh my god, it's double. It's like literally double my revenue, completely right. So yeah, there's something about that that I'm a bit aware of, because I can see my iq is lower when I don't have the recurring revenue constantly I've got the highest after the sale. I'm like okay, I can be really smart here, and then, towards the end of that three month period, yeah, I'm like'm like. Oh God, what if they don't buy? What if they?
Speaker 1:buy Right. Do you sell anything else in between? I do yeah.
Speaker 2:I have a premium podcast membership which is like a lesser version of the Academy um, which I sell through the welcome sequence. But, um, yeah, my main goal now is to build more courses. Yeah, yeah, my main goal now is to build more courses that I feel really, really comfortable promoting you you and would you say that we're pitching the same product at the end of it, or is it a different thing, like the membership versus the course? Yeah, the content of those things. Are we varying that dramatically?
Speaker 1:the course is something from in the membership. Okay, right, so let's say you've got a a particular pronunciation course, or maybe you've got a c1 level course or something like that. You say, right, that's in the membership. If you pay for the membership you get access to everything. Yeah, but you can just buy this one separately. Yeah, you can even upsell people after that into the membership. Into the membership if you want to. You can say you've bought that, so that gets you your first three months free in the membership.
Speaker 1:If you want to, you can upgrade to that and then you'll just be in the in the membership from now on and have access to this permanently yeah yeah, yeah, that that's, that's good because the tricky thing, the great thing with memberships everybody loves, is this feeling of like I can just see the monies coming in month after month or year after year. In your case, the downside is what on earth do you pitch the next month?
Speaker 1:because, every month there's a new segment of the audience who's ready to buy right not everybody is ready to buy in month one, two, three, and also you've got the fact that you have different angles that appeal to different people. If you're selling the membership, you can do a pitch of the membership, as we're going to really focus on the c1 course, which is available in the membership. That is an angle you can do, but I think it's simpler to do pitching the c1 course and you're just buying the c1 course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I see it, I see it again and again that people really struggle with memberships on how to do regular promotions and therefore it's hard to get that boost yeah in the membership numbers yeah, I'd say my, my job has kind of turned into the email marketing person yeah, well, it's the bit that makes money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah um, how would you go about? Um, well, no, would you think it was a good idea to signal to your audience before pitching the sequence? Like I don't know if you've heard of Daniel Priestley, the oversubscribed author? He's very much about pitching the signal and getting a stronger and stronger response from them, whether they are ready or not to be pitched to for the actual sale. So, collecting data throughout the welcome sequence of what their level is, what their interest is, how they like to learn, are they ready to do this kind of thing, and once I've collected that kind of data, then I can implement the right email sequence for them. Do you think that's over complicating things or do you think that would actually be worthwhile?
Speaker 1:So it's a balance. So I haven't tried that exact approach, so I can't say exactly what the results are, but we've tried a number of different marketing gurus approaches of having we're only going to send emails to this segment of the audience, or we're only, or we're going gonna have different versions for this one, this group and this group, and the downside to them is because you've got so much of an extra burden of creating all these different emails, setting up all these different automations. That's then more work for you, and is that worthwhile in terms of the results you actually get from it For each individual subscriber? It's better. Is it better for the business? Is it better for the business? Is it better overall?
Speaker 3:you, you, something right, so I'm not gonna say no, that doesn't work.
Speaker 1:But I haven't actually gone through that like specific sequence from him. Where have you seen that?
Speaker 2:I think it was within the book of signaling the interest throughout onboarding a client. I think I've turned that into what I just said.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm going to read back through the book again and see, turn that into what I just said.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to read back through the book again and see. But I think that would make sense to me because I could then pitch a B2 course to the exact audience, like C1 exact audience. Instead, at the moment I have to be like, okay, it's for anyone between B1 and C2 and you always level up, yay, kind of thing. So I could be really targeted and also like focusing on their pain point. Yeah, vocabulary I've got an amazing way to increase your vocabulary. Or, if it's listening, I've got hundreds of hours of listening comprehension available for you.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that we do that works really well is give people the option to very easily opt out of that sequence. So we'll say we're promoting the c1 course. This is appropriate to people who are at b2 level, want to get to c1. Okay, if that's not, you click here and you'll still be on the list, but you just won't get any promotion about this topic, right? Yes, if this isn't relevant to you. Just click this and we'll. We'll come. You won't hear anything from us for a couple of weeks okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do that with the academy. Okay, but perfect. Yeah, I could just do that with a specified kind of because?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think you should assume you're only talking to the people that that course is particularly relevant to. Don't try and broaden it out, because it will water down your message. Yeah, but if you have that, you are going to then be reaching people who aren't at the right level. Unless you've got some way of a level test that you ask them at some point, you could tag the people who are at a certain level.
Speaker 2:You could do that right. Yeah, I have that test as an email grabber, and so I could link that up. That could be cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what you could do, if you haven't already, is set it so that what someone puts as their answer what, yeah. So what you could do if you haven't already, is set it so that what someone puts as their answer, what someone gets from you as their answer, is put as a tag in ConvertKit or Back to Campaign, whatever you're using, and you could do an extra promotion of that level test to your email list to everyone who hasn't taken it before you send the campaign, or to everyone who hasn't taken it within the last six months or however long it takes to go up a level yes, and say let's you know. So that way not, obviously not everybody would take it, yeah, but the ones who do, you could be like this is definitely for you, yeah, because you took that, and the ones who it's definitely not for you could choose to not send them that campaign yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, nice. I did the oversubscribe, this um active campaign that I'm doing right now. A week ago I said we're almost at max capacity so I'm only taking those that are genuinely serious about their studies. So I'm going through a process of applying getting you to apply for the process of joining the academy and I was amazed with the uptake of applicants. Like yeah, I got hundreds of applicants with detailed, like struggle pain points that I can use in my sales letters.
Speaker 2:So it's a great way to get the data from them and build anticipation, which was nice to see.
Speaker 1:It's great. One of the crucial things with it is you have to choose. You can only talk about being at capacity if you're actually at capacity. Otherwise you're lying to people.
Speaker 2:Well, which is tricky on some, you know, depending with online courses, right, there's often a lot of yes, that's capacity yeah, that's true, but with my uh teachers in the in the zoom classes each week, like I don't want to be finding new teachers, right, right, right, yeah, so I could say that confidently, because I don't like that part of my job. Yeah, so I'm like we're currently at capacity with these teachers yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we've actually got a group um that we're launching next month where we're using that exact oversubscribed uh tactic again with the whatsapp group. So what we're doing at the moment is we have been developing a system or yosef has been developing a system to help people live on workshops to write email marketing campaigns.
Speaker 1:So we've got that structure right our 11 email structure that you would have seen during time working with us, but the problem people have with it is it's hard to write the emails and it's hard to write them. Well, yeah, so we've been developing the the emails into instead of explaining it. We've got outlines for each of them and then, within each of the outlines we've we've been working on how do we actually help people to be able to write that part of the email and then write the next part, and then write the next part, then write the next part then great, now your email's done.
Speaker 1:So there's a whole process and we've been running that live in one-to-one workshops and the next step is going to be doing it in group setting, which obviously we can then work with more, but our first time doing it we can only work with five people because we need to test it in a group setting. So we're currently letting everybody know there's this WhatsApp group that you can join if you're interested in hearing more about this. So we're writing an email sequence at the moment to promote the WhatsApp group, which then will let people in the WhatsApp group know there's five spaces coming available in a week's time, two days time, a day's time, so that whoever's the most interested can definitely get their spot.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:So I'm thinking I'm wanting to do a pronunciation course, but I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with the size of the task and I'm thinking if I do it tailor made to individuals, gradually, and groups, then it could almost be that it becomes a tailor made course or bundle of courses for the individual at the end of this whole process. So if I take one person, I'm like, okay, what, what are your pronunciation problems? Then I build tasks for that person right, got it. And I take more, more, and then I've got a whole library of ways to um attack that kind of problem, yeah, yeah. Then a new person it's like, okay, I'll give them an audit of their pronunciation errors. And then I'll be like this is your perfect bundle. Yeah, so it could be a customized kind of course for them. But that that, what you just said is quite cool. So I could maybe take individuals and then groups, yeah to build it.
Speaker 1:It's my favorite way to build a course right is it's very hard to teach something in a course if you haven't taught it to a group. Yeah, because if you teach something to someone individually, you can kind of pull out from your head just whatever. Ah, this is what we're going to try. This angle, this angle, this angle yeah, but you can't do that in a group. Really, you kind of can, but it's much harder. So you have to be more structured, yeah, but if you go straight to a course, you've missed out the step of how do I structure this properly?
Speaker 1:Now you can work with somebody who will help you to put that whole thing together, or you can try and do that yourself, like we've got someone we point people to, um, mariana pena, who works with a lot of our clients, okay, and um she, uh, will help people to kind of create the core structure and figure out the bonuses and the whole learning journey that somebody's going through. And, uh, if anybody's interested in in hearing from mariana she's been on the podcast before have a search in the podcast for that episode and that's great for me. I definitely like the approach of let's do an individual, then group, then bigger group, and then call You've had to make a course for the group, but you get to have the feedback from the group is where did they get stuck? Yes, and you get to improve it gradually.
Speaker 2:That's really good, yeah, I'm excited to do that now, and it also gives you the social interaction and the pressure to continue going rather than just a mammoth task that's put aside when you've got a million other small tasks to deal with in the immediate. Yeah, okay, that's nice. Would you worry about pricing for the individual at a point where it's profitable, or do you feel?
Speaker 1:like it's a loss. No, that's just a development thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, individual at a point where it's profitable, or do you feel like it's a that's just a development thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we did. When we did the individual workshops for the uh writing the email sequences, we were charging 950, which is way less than what we would normally charge for working with someone one-to-one for that many hours. Yeah, yeah, much less. But, um, but it's fine because it showed the person was interested enough to spend some money. We got some money. So that's always nice, right. But crucially, we were just mostly taking it as a loss because we're like, okay, fine, we just need to figure out how to get good at doing this.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's good. Yeah, can I approach a different topic? Okay?
Speaker 1:Still relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but earlier in the year, I got contacted by Spotify's hosting platform, megaphone, and they were like you're using Buzzsprout at the moment, we can offer you ads within our platform and, looking at your audience size, you'd be looking at like 20,000 to 30 000 uh pounds of revenue each year. So do you want to sign up? I was like, uh, yeah, all right, so I did and, um, I knew that there was like something that would you know, give and take right ads means that I don't have enough space for email capture, kind of ads
Speaker 2:but it really, really, really hit my model and um. I've seen a slight plateau in the last couple of months and it was it was based on emails. Drop it the email like intake dropped yeah. So yeah, just wanted to let people know. So I I'm now getting about, I think, about 6,000 pounds in revenue for those ads um annually. So yeah, quick lesson learned there that if you've got a product, in my opinion if you've got a product, that's the most effective way to make revenue and the ads can be sprinkled on top but definitely not invested in heavily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think basically what you're doing is you're sifting off some of your leads and giving them to somebody else yeah because people are running ads in order to sell their thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and you want to be selling your thing because with your thing, you keep 100% of the profit yeah and with their thing, you keep a percentage of the profit, because if they, if you got 100% of their profit, they wouldn't yeah, wouldn't be worth it to them, right, exactly? So basically, I think it's the wrong way around to do it. I think anybody who's running I even try and convince people who are running ads as their primary business model yeah, to stop and gradually move over to to putting lead magnets for courses. Now that's a much harder journey because if someone's just doing ads and they don't even have courses yet, they have to give up some of the course money, the ad money, in order to get the potential course money. Yes, but I think when you're already selling courses, just yeah. I think ads is just a distraction, anything that takes people away from getting onto your email list.
Speaker 2:So would you remove it completely? Yeah but almost definitely yeah yeah, because now I've gone to them getting the the the worst ad slots throughout the podcast okay I get the primary ad slots. I get to pitch the for the free okay thing yeah I get emails and I get a bit of revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah do you feel like it's easy to do the sums right. If you look at before and after, what was the number of opt-ins that you're getting per episode or per month or whatever? Yeah, if that's gone down, how much has it gone down by then? How much is an email subscriber worth to you?
Speaker 1:yeah look at, okay, when I had an email campaign of this size go out, I made this many sales per month, so therefore, an email subscriber is worth about this much to me you'll have to average it out over a few months, whatever, and then you can go which number's higher, because if it's like, well, you know what, it's not cannibalizing it by that much, and the six thousand pounds is actually more than that. You know well, sorry, how much was it?
Speaker 1:yeah, yes, six thousand a year okay then, fine, you know, but I would be surprised if the sums worked out that way, and if they do, it probably means that you need to go back and work more on your email marketing and sales pages and opt-ins, because because it shouldn't do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, a thing that I've learned from you guys is, once you get somebody, wherever you want them, you should have no leaks at all, and the primary, only option really is to take them through to the next step that you want them to. So, for example, take away the taskbar at the top of your website yeah, if it's a sales page kind of thing and the footer, get rid of that. Um, so I I ask you, within each episode of my podcast I have, at the moment I have a pre, mid and post role ad and that at the moment I have a pre, mid and post role ad.
Speaker 2:And that, at the moment, is focusing on one thing, the same thing, just pitching it in a slightly different language. Do you think that's the best way, or do you think I should be pitching three different freebies throughout that episode?
Speaker 1:It's a really interesting question and I don't know that we've done enough tests to give a really concrete answer. The approach that we know that we've done enough tests to give a really concrete answer the approach that we take is we will pitch the same thing multiple times and so, if you look at the way that we work with people who've got high SEO traffic on their blog post, we'll do top, middle and bottom different promotions, different ads for the same lead magnet. But I do want to run tests on this, because the person that I've seen with the highest opt-in rate ever had like 20 different lead magnets in her sidebar and so there was on the blog, okay, and therefore every angle was kind of covered. It was really messy and it looked disorganized, whatever, but it actually led to she had a 10 option rate and I've never seen anybody else get above uh, seven and a half, right. So that's made me think I wonder maybe we should have these different angles, but we haven't.
Speaker 1:we haven't tried that out yeah, so for now I would say my suggestion would be the same thing multiple ways, but there's a bit of a caveat there on that one yeah. Okay. But you were mentioning about the sales page and I wanted to circle back around to that. So what is the things that you changed on the sales page? You'd mentioned a couple earlier. You talked about improving the kind of sales psychology. Yeah, you'd mentioned removing the header, removing the footer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You'd added more about the benefits and not just the features. What else did you change? Because I want the person listening to this to be able to think, oh, I could change that so they could do those things. You know they can. They can remove the header, remove the footer, add more stuff about benefits, but what else did you change? And like, how could somebody learn from that?
Speaker 2:um, so your 15 sections that you have in the in the course that I was um able to use was really helpful. So it kind of broke each section of the web page down, teaching me what that section is for and how to move on to the next one. So it kind of flows now. So I would say, understanding the headline needs to get that. It's all funnels like the headline needs to get them to the next section, the next section needs to get them to the next one. So if that doesn't lead to that next one, then you need to rewrite it or need to figure out a way that encourages them to keep going down the page. Um, I was tackling it from okay, I've now got like hundreds of episodes, thousands of phrases shoving that in their face like right, so many things, yeah, yeah and someone's like that's overwhelming.
Speaker 2:yeah, like I'm stressed. I was like, oh, so's overwhelming, yeah, like I'm stressed. I was like, oh so, you don't want 6,000 phrases immediately. They're like no that's scary. I don't want that. I've got tasks to do, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I kind of figured. I need to figure out the psychology of the person reading it. I'm not sure if I can immediately tell them to go and do something without looking at their page.
Speaker 1:So the 15 crucial elements, so that was a really big thing. Yes. And if anybody wants to get hold of the 15 crucial elements, they can go to datadrivenmarketingcouk, slash resources and there's the 15 crucial elements download. It's going to explain to everybody what all the 15 are, so you don't have to remember all of them now. Perfect.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Done, Okay, cool, so we've got covered. The sales pages, the change to focus on annual People if they've got a membership, can go make that change as well. We've also talked about the idea, if people are open to it, of selling individual courses in between doing promotions of the memberships. And what else did we have there? We had one more thing, I think as well email promotions. So you'd started doing those kind of more regularly.
Speaker 2:More regularly. Yeah, yeah, well, I don't think we said this in this conversation. Yeah, I used to do once every three months Now. I do once every month. I was trying once every three months. Now I do once every month. I I was trying once every two to three weeks. That felt overwhelming for me. Yes, to write them. Yeah, um, the warm-up part. So, yeah, I've kind of gone back to one a month. I'm enjoying that process yeah, and we found that for most people.
Speaker 1:We used to say to everybody two a month right we're like because that's the ideal in terms of like revenue, in terms of it still doesn't need to that high of an unsubscribe rate. But the problem was the people writing it would get overwhelmed with it and exhausted. It's like okay, let's do one a month, because that's way, way better than one every three months. Yeah, and then you can just keep that up continually and you don't get double the results to a month. You get like 1.5 times the results, something kind of like that.
Speaker 1:Yes, so one a month's really good. And then, what kind of structure do you use?
Speaker 2:Are you still using the 11 email structure that we have? The three email warmup, the gain logic fear FAQ going, going gone.
Speaker 1:Perfect, yeah, okay, yes, future casting Did you?
Speaker 2:do that one? I going gone, perfect, yeah, okay, yes, future casting. Did you do that one?
Speaker 1:I haven't got that one down yet. Okay, remind me of that one. So it normally comes after frequently asked questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the idea is it's helping people to see what could their future be like if they do this in an hour a day, a week, months, six months, and we sometimes combine it with the idea of speed to result so, as in, if you do the minimum amount, you don't do the perfect amount of work on this you don't take every single course and do every single homework, but you put in this small amount.
Speaker 1:Let's say it's 20 minutes a day. Right, the ideal might be an hour a day and you're just going to do 20 minutes a day. Could you commit to that? Could you commit to 10? Whatever?
Speaker 1:You think people would feel like, okay, I could do this much. And you think, okay, they could get some results from that. And then you lay out, okay, what results could you expect in these amounts of time, so that someone can see how much better their future can be. You're not talking about benefits. You're talking about a potential new reality and the the huge thing is as a creator, as the person who've taught all these people, you know what their future can be because you've seen it in a thousand people before. People have sent you their testimonials and said how it? They don't know that, they don't fully believe that, they don't believe in themselves, maybe enough to do it, and they don't believe that they can achieve it and they don't necessarily see what it even looks like. But if you can show them that potential future of how much better their life can be, they can start to think, oh, man I want to be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's those piano lesson um videos on youtube have you seen these like? Someone playing pirates of the caribbean. After a day a week I just got piano because of it, did you really? And it's very, it brings it to life a lot. Yeah, you know in terms of being like, oh, I can see how you get there I can see that progression yes or maybe I could do that then, yeah, you can see yourself in them.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, yeah, that's really nice. So is that one email, your one email? Okay nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll put that in okay, yeah, and if you want to get hold of the um, the outlines I was mentioning earlier, I can just send those over to you okay, um and anybody else can just get those at.
Speaker 1:I think we've got those for free at datadrivenmarketingco resources. We've definitely got an email guide there that breaks down the 11 emails and what's included in them. Um, I don't know if it's got that overview of the um, the actual outlines of each individual email, but, um, yeah, it's very powerful and what we found is that we used to have a big spike at the beginning of the sequence and a big spike at the end, and when we put the future casting one in, we got a spike in the middle.
Speaker 2:It's very powerful email, okay yeah, so that goes after the faq before yeah, we do it either way around, okay, right before the frequently asked questions or just after. Yeah, otherwise fine yeah, have you you played around with video at all within the emails? Do you keep it to just copy?
Speaker 1:We just keep it a copy, and it's a very important reason why, which is that most people won't record the videos. So let me give you a little bit of background as to how we developed the way that our system works.
Speaker 1:Okay, we went through and we took every technique from every marketing guru that we could find Ryan Dice and the product launch formula and all kinds of different people, andre Chaperon everybody we could find and we tested out all of their different approaches Russell Brunson, webinars, video sales letters, all this kind of thing and we were testing for a few different things.
Speaker 1:One was what percentage of people did it work for? Did it work? Oh, this one works for these guys, but not for them, and so it's kind of like we wanted stuff that worked for everybody and we wanted something that didn't take that long to do and got really good results, didn't take that long to do and got really good results. So, like what's the full 80 20 in terms of like it's definitely going to work and it doesn't take that long and it definitely makes you a lot more money, and that's how we develop the system that we have. Now. The problem with doing videos is that a lot of people just don't record them, or it takes a lot of cajoling and encouragement and what have you? And if we were taking on a done for you client, we couldn't do it for them.
Speaker 1:So that didn't fit with that sequence right, yes, yes, so what I'm now looking at actually is like we've got this 11 email sequence. I'm like, okay, could we find an 80, 20 of that, because that's incredibly effective, but could we find a? Could we get a six email sequence that got 70 of the results? Yeah, maybe, because that would be easier to write. Yeah, I don't know if we can right, but I'm trying to, because I'm just constantly like how do we make this easier? How do we make this easier? How do we make this easy?
Speaker 1:right, okay, so no, we haven't included videos yeah, but I'm sure they'd work okay, but it's, it's just a an extra step to do. That's a bit harder. Yeah, have.
Speaker 2:Have you heard of Video? Ask? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've used that in the last couple of months. It's getting a lot of engagement. Yeah, I don't know how much it's improving conversions, but it's interesting at least to have that interactive process for them, especially considering like the benefit of teaching English and promoting courses is that the whole way through the marketing journey. It can be a lesson.
Speaker 2:so I feel like the video it can be there listening for the for the day, if I kind of speak to that part of it, so I don't feel like I've got to be cramming every bit of marketing tip into, or like um, the benefits or something like that, into the the message, yeah so yeah, I'm enjoying that part at the moment, playing around with it, okay.
Speaker 1:That's not how it goes. Nice, okay, cool. Are there any other things that you'd learned from the process of working with the team that you want to share with the listener, to kind of help them in their journey?
Speaker 2:The cart is very important. Um, the cart is very important. I I thought the template that I had with my um website builder was obviously going to be the right kind of minimal kind of need.
Speaker 2:yeah, and when yosip showed me the ideal one, it seemed quite confusing to me. First off I was, wow, there's a lot of information here but it works. Yeah, Like having a reminder of the benefits, a reminder of maybe some of the features and the reason why you're buying that deal there and then and like a refund policy is really useful. So I think the cart I had as a last minute thought I was like do the sales page and then, yeah, there's the cart. But really hone in on the cart. I think that's quite a good.
Speaker 1:It's staggering how many people can be lost at that last step.
Speaker 1:And mostly because they don't track their statistics. They don't realize how bad it is. Yeah, but for quite a few people 90% of people drop out on the cart. Wow, they have like maybe a 10 conversion rate. People have got all the way through. They got to your website, they opted into your email list. They got the emails. They they didn't unsubscribe. They read the email, they clicked on the link. They got to the sales page. They clicked to get through to the checkout page and then they bailed because the checkout page sucked. They got nervous. They're like, oh what if I'm making the wrong decision and then they're just not going to do?
Speaker 2:it. Yeah, that's hard.
Speaker 1:So if you get that working really well, you can get it. It's still not everybody, but you can get to about 50 percent. Yeah right, people who will actually check out, but that's a lot more than yeah 10. Yeah that is.
Speaker 2:I would say, like a year on from having implemented some of the things, I would say that it's good to check what I value as worth the revenue gain. Like a tripwire, it could be conceived as a bit annoying for the customer. So I'm like do I want that as part of my brand and the user's experience? So I'm just checking with that before I was going in like, yeah, more money, great, do everything, yeah. But now I'm kind of thinking, okay, just be aware of what that revenue means to the non-buyers as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the important things to remember about the tripwire is the point of a tripwire funnel is not the money that you make from your organic audience. That's not why you build it you build it because you want to have a funnel that you can send ads to. Right, that's the. That's the purpose of it, because it does bring in some money. Right, because about three to ten percent of people who are from your organic opt-ins will then buy something from that. Yeah, because the price low, the amount of revenue is relatively low.
Speaker 1:It's going to be smaller than what you get from doing a better email promotion, because the email promotion goes to everybody on your email list instead of just the new people. But it does convert higher because people are super warm. They've just opted in. So it's kind of this pros and cons there. If someone buys the Tripwire, they are more likely to buy from you later on as well, because, as long as they've had a good experience, they now trust you more than if they hadn't ever bought anything. So buyers are 20 times more likely to buy no-transcript work, because just because something works with warm doesn't mean it'll definitely work with cold, but if it doesn't work with warm it definitely won't work with cold yes, okay, yes, that makes sense, okay, all right, yeah, good, yeah, well, this has been Thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 1:I really, really appreciate it. Absolute pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:If you want to get any of those resources that we mentioned during the episode, then go to datadrivenmarketingco slash resources and there's the 15 elements of a high-performing sales page. There's not anything about a checkout page, but I'll give you details of that in a sec, and then there's the details of writing a great email sequence as well. If you want to learn about the checkout page, we've done a separate episode with Yosip just about that. So if you search for checkout page in the podcast feed, you're going to find that come up. It's going to be with Yosip Belina and you'll be able to have the whole, all the details about exactly how to do a great checkout page. Because it is not intuitive and most providers do a horrible job. You have to do your best to kind of fight them to do it, make it actually convert better. I've said to quite a few people I think, that if I was able to redo Teachable's checkout page, I could increase the entire Teachable revenue by like 10 or 20% for the whole company, for every person using it for the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the same same, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Two or three days work probably the same with like learn, well done with them. Like loads of course, creators, they're the development team behind that.
Speaker 1:Just don't know what you know no, you need to tell them yeah, maybe I should go on a mission and like you know, so I'm gonna. Here's six things I'm not gonna tell you unless, unless you give me $50,000, you know.
Speaker 2:It'd be well worth it for them, oh 100%. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just don't know if they'd really kind of understand that If you've enjoyed listening to the show, then please subscribe so you can get future episodes. Thank you, as always. So much for listening for your attention. I hope this has been useful and, Charlie, again thanks so much for coming on.