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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
Using Pinterest To Increase Traffic And Course Sales With Heather Farris
Want to get 2 of our best email marketing templates that generated up to 6-figures in revenue for our clients in 2023? Download our FREE email template 👉🏼 http://datadrivenmarketing.co/templates
Heather began using Pinterest in 2010 when she was a newlywed and a new mother. Playfully admitting she couldn't cook beyond a Hamburger Helper box, she turned to Pinterest to teach herself how to cook, clean, parent her daughter, and eventually start her online business. Her dedication to the platform runs deep and has been a cornerstone of her personal and professional growth.
Heather believes in prioritizing her clients and customers above all else. She upholds values of boldness, leading by example, integrity, teamwork, and a continuous commitment to understanding Pinterest and its algorithm. Her mission is to support clients and customers by being the best she can be and fully dedicating herself to every project.
Heather's Website: https://heatherfarris.com/
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: https://www.youtube.com/@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's John Ainsworth and today's guest is Heather Farris. Now Heather's a Pinterest marketer. She's been managing client accounts for over eight years. She's used the platform for so long she remembers when there wasn't much to see and you could actually find the end of the feed. Now, before she got into Pinterest marketing, she was in accounting. She facilitates a membership where she helps content creators, coaches and service providers with strategy to grow the traffic and sales on Pinterest.
Speaker 1:So today we're gonna be talking about Pinterest. We're gonna be talking about who it works for, how to use it to grow your audience, case studies of success, tips of what to do if you decide to use Pinterest, and we're going to be talking a little bit about Heather's membership as well, where she's teaching people how to use Pinterest. So it's kind of a whole meta episode. So before we dive into today's episode, I want to share something incredibly valuable with you.
Speaker 1:If you're looking to boost your course revenue, you need to check out our seven-day roadmap to increase your revenue. This is the same system we've used to help countless clients achieve predictable revenue without making sales calls, running paid ads, competing on price. These are simple, tactical things that you can do in seven days. They're going to increase revenue probably by about 30%. If you do them all, you can identify and fix the missing parts of your funnels. You can optimize your funnels for maximum performance. If you're ready to take your revenue to the next level, go to datadrivenmarketingco slash roadmap that's datadrivenmarketingco slash roadmap and download it. Heather, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:John, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:This is great. I haven't talked in ages, but you did come on the summit a few years ago, which was fantastic, so I'm really excited to kind of hear how things are going now and what's working at the moment. Now we're talking about Pinterest. Obviously, One of the crucial things, for course creators is growing their email list. One of the things I want to ask you about is have you seen specific tactics of work on Pinterest to get people from the audience into someone's email list?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you can do this both with organic and paid marketing. The fastest way is with paid marketing on Pinterest. I know a lot of what you teach is without paid ads. So you can do it organically, and a lot of people don't realize that they can share links to email list opt-ins. So my favorite way to do this is landing pages directly. So we cut out all the fluff. We don't send people to the website and hope the pop-up works. We design a very strategic landing page and we make pins and we identify the keywords people would be searching for to need that opt-in. We create a bevy of different images that answer to that problem.
Speaker 3:A bevy, you say Nice yeah bevy I don't know where that word came from but with mock-ups, without mock-ups, lifestyle images, no lifestyle, you name it. We have all like a full strategy around this and, yeah, we just link them straight to the landing page. I do this with both my website landing pages and my Shopify store, and I actually put my opt-ins as free products in my Shopify store and they convert like gangbusters. So I just share all that on Pinterest and it shows up in all the different feeds the shop feed, the home feed, the related feed.
Speaker 1:So you're doing it for yourself, right, which is kind of a b2b type audience. What kind of price you're paying per lead when you're doing it through all of these different tactics with ads?
Speaker 3:yeah. So right now with ads it's actually quite funny. I'm paying a dollar 51 a lead wow that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I just shared this on instagram okay, nice, what's your uh target audience you're getting with that? That's coaches, course creators, service providers. There's like a few different niches there, right.
Speaker 3:Yep, it's obviously for sure all B2B. So in order for people to know they need me, they already need to know that Pinterest is a platform they can do marketing on. So I am in like the bottom of the funnel, almost at the bottom. They've already figured out, you know. They've gone through the awareness and consideration phases and they just have to figure out who they want to learn from at that point. So once they find me and they realize how affordable it is to learn from me and how transparent I am with everything, how easy I make it for you to leave If you want to leave I'm not tying you down to ridiculous timelines. It's an easy choice for them. So, yeah, $1.51 a lead. I was just running ads on Facebook that I stopped in May and they had climbed to close to $2 a lead.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:For the same opt-in.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it, and do you feel like it's the same audience, it's the same quality of leads, or have you? It's just cheaper with Pinterest.
Speaker 3:It has been slightly cheaper this summer and I think it's just the timeline. A lot of businesses don't promote in the summer on Pinterest because a lot of their audiences are offline. Their audiences are people like me who aren't using Pinterest as much, so that opens up a lot of opportunity for those people who are using the platform to see my ads, whereas they may have been a little more diluted in the busier seasons got it okay, cool.
Speaker 1:So, as I understood it, you want a landing page. Whatever you do, don't point people through to the website, which I'd say anytime you're ever pointing people from anywhere to try and get into your opt-in list. Do not point them straight to the website. Send them to a landing page. Um, you want to have different ads based on different kind of styles, different ways of doing it, which you kind of you listed out. I don't remember all of those, but you kind of got those different approaches you can take.
Speaker 1:And then pinterest is cheaper than than facebook at the moment, the meta for running those kind of ads and you can target a really specific niche and you can even target, like you know, bottom of the funnel, like you're doing. So you get the kind of the hottest, the, the best leads there, great, okay, cool. So that's one way of doing it. And then you can do the same thing organically and point people through to um, through to the landing page, via a pin. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, perfect, got it okay. Second thing, then, I think this is really important is what kind of businesses do you think Pinterest works best for? Is it people who are targeting hobby space, or is it like anybody can use it? And here's like, what kind of businesses should be thinking about Pinterest and which ones is it like? Maybe it's not for you.
Speaker 3:Depends on a few factors. So the first factor, I would say and your audience needs to answer this for themselves and I'm going to tell them how I want you to just go to the platform and search for your main keyword or your main pillars of what you sell. So if you sell a course on wellness coaching, for keto dieting or whatever, I want you to go search for that and see if there are topics coming up in your space. Are there pins? How many are there? How many different creators are sharing in that space? And if there are, it's a really good chance that you are going to find an audience there. If you go there and you search for your course or whatever let's say, you sell car maintenance, a car maintenance course chances are there's not going to be as many people there because you're really reliant on a very specific segment of the audience who are going to be interested in car maintenance, who are going to want to take a course. So if you go to the platform and you see a lot of garbage that isn't really targeted there aren't people creating pins with your keywords in that space chances are it's not a hit and it's not going to work. There are 24 established categories on Pinterest and one of them is cars. There's also sports and health and wellness. There's all sorts of things. There is a really good possibility. If you're listening, your audience is represented there, but it might take more time.
Speaker 3:Like me, I am a segment of a segment of a segment of an audience for Pinterest marketing. So, like I mentioned earlier, segment of a segment of an audience for Pinterest marketing. So, like I mentioned earlier, I already have to have an audience that knows Pinterest marketing as a thing in order and it might work for the business owner for them to find me. So the approach is going to vary based on the audience, but there are a number of niches that it does work for health and wellness, food, fitness, fashion, some business stuff. Some of the businesses that struggle are things like artists struggle a little bit because they're really in this like artistic mindset and they haven't really made the leap to learn marketing. So we have to connect the dots between what we're selling and why people are buying it. So if you haven't really figured that out yet, pinterest might not work for you right away and it's also a platform that takes time, john, so it's not something especially organically that you're going to turn on and immediately get a flood of cash.
Speaker 1:No, anything organic is like a slow build, isn't it? Like it kind of builds up gradually as you like it's like a slow build, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Like it kind of builds up gradually as you're like okay, now that if you've got to I don't know a million subscribers on YouTube, getting to 1.5 million, getting another 500,000 is relatively easy Still not easy, but relatively easy. But you're starting out from scratch. Getting 500,000 subscribers is this massive project, you know. So anything that's organic is going to take a long time. So that's organic is going to be um a bit, uh, take a long time. So that's like totally understandable. It's the same on pinterest, but the ad side of things, super interesting to hear, kind of how that's how that's different. So how come then that works for you? You said there's these 24 different niches. How does your audience fit in within that? How did you manage to find your audience?
Speaker 3:I made a really conscious choice when I started using Pinterest for this business, so I started this website in 2018 and I started offering services for this, though, like in 2016. So it was a few years before I even started blogging about talking about doing anything outside of just the services for this platform. In 2018, when I started this website, I made a very conscious choice because I had seen what other people were doing prior to that. I'm very observant and I'm very curious, so I saw that a lot of people were wanting to get people into their blogs and teaching people via blogging. You know how to get traffic to your blogs and all of that stuff. That's great, but I didn't want to. I didn't want to cater necessarily to people who are just blogging. There's a different myriad of ways that you can monetize, but if you're just monetizing with blogging, it's generally display ads and sponsorships, and I didn't want to do those things personally, and I feel like if I'm going to talk about those things, I need to have experience. My experience did come from blogging in the form of blogging for the business and creating YouTube content, but I want to sell digital products and serve clients, so I made a conscious choice to use different platforms for different segments of the audience.
Speaker 3:So Pinterest is my beginner audience. I create blog posts and YouTube videos and I have my email list where I get people in my small digital products and I capture them at the beginning phases of their journey. So these people generally are not making money to making their first like $5,000 to $10,000 a year very early on. Now, on YouTube, I use that platform totally differently. That's where my bread and butter clients come from and I'm showcasing people exactly my knowledge and how that works. So that's how I kind of use the two platforms differently. My business owners that hire me and pay us anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 a month for services. They just want to know I know what I'm talking about and they have usually a problem with Pinterest that they're searching for on YouTube, Whereas they're not really looking for that on Pinterest because they've already hired Pinterest out in the past or currently and they're just looking for a solution somewhere in the middle, somewhere to bridge the gap. So, generally speaking, my clients come from YouTube and my students come from Pinterest or Google, blog, social media.
Speaker 1:Got it. So is the niche on Pinterest that you're a segment of, a segment of get started making money online, okay cool. So can you talk us through, like some case studies from people who you've helped use Pinterest to grow their business, like particularly course creators? Like what is it that they've done or that you've done with them? What's worked? What kind of results have they got? So people have some kind of an idea of the scope of possibility.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So my philosophy with Pinterest is pretty I don't want to say generic, but it's pretty general. It's we even, for course creators. We create top of funnel content. So, just like you have this podcast, you need some sort of top of funnel content regularly. So if you want to write, let's do a blog. If you want to do a podcast, let's do that. If you want to do YouTube, let's do that. Those are the three main channels and then from there we need some sort of funnel into your course business. So, generally speaking, we're looking at growing the email list, either from ads or organic or both. Most all my clients will do both, especially if they have courses to sell, and we start with Legion ads. So we're not starting on Pinterest, going for the juggler of selling the courses. We're working that email list, getting people on that email list to convert, and, generally speaking, that has worked the best for me as well. If I can get people on my email list, I can sell to them, I can talk to them in a way that makes them feel like, oh, she actually knows what she's talking about. Let me just give this a try. So if we can position the email list as the place to go, then that's where we're going.
Speaker 3:I had a photographer client in the last couple of years, off and on. She was teaching people how to edit, like become a photo editor, and her leads and her sales on Pinterest were fantastic. Like her average ROAS was an eight on any given month and her leads were like 93 cents and this was like a height of COVID. People were looking for alternate jobs. That's when we started and that we kind of took that relationship through a couple of years off and on my own business I use a lot of tripwires, which that's what we did the summit on a few years ago. I do a lot of tripwires, so I will do the lead magnet to a tripwire and then I will leave it like there's an upsell on the back Most of the time they don't take it right away and then I'll leave that for the email to actually go back and convert. So there's methodology that you can use that's proven, like tripwires, upsells, downsells, order bumps, but it really all for me starts with a solid email list offer and top of funnel content, gotcha.
Speaker 1:So how's it going with the membership? Are you selling courses as well, or just the membership as your main offer?
Speaker 3:I got a whole lot of things going on. So I have my membership is where everything I sell online, digital product wise, is all in there. And then I piecemeal that out for people who don't necessarily want a recurring subscription. So my organic course I sell one off for $197. I'll occasionally run a sale to it, but you can find it in the Shopify store or through funnels for that price. But everything is in the membership if you just wanted it for one low price. So I do both.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, and how's that doing at the moment? The membership like, give us all the whole membership and course business. Give us some kind of idea of either revenue, if you're happy to share it, or number of students or whatever you're kind of happy with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so right now we have. I think my email is size and my revenue, my monthly recurring revenue, are about the same. I just checked it yesterday. Actually it was 7,600 in monthly recurring revenue for the membership and this is just like one product and there's like 14 courses inside. But it's that one thing and it's three years old. It just turned three at the end of May, nice, cool.
Speaker 1:And so what's working for you you mentioned like your email list is where people are buying from Yep. How often are you running an email promotion for the membership itself?
Speaker 3:There are several that go on autopilot. So I use this methodology from a couple of guys in the UK the email marketing hero guy Kennedy. Marketing hero guy Kennedy. I've been in his membership since last fall and I'm a big memberships for membership gal. So I joined a membership to learn how to launch a membership and now I'm because they have a membership or he has a membership I think there's a few of them. I wanted to learn from him because he's doing emails on autopilot for memberships. So that's who I learned from and I think right now I've got seven train carriages going, so seven email sequences.
Speaker 3:So when someone joins they go through my welcome sequence and that sucker is like the highest converting sequence I have is the welcome sequence and it doesn't sell anything. It's just a four email sequence with no links and people will respond and I'll respond back to them and then they'll join. So about six to seven train carriages or email sequences total. Within that we have content led. I obviously have the welcome sequence. We have sales sequences. There's invites to come on a membership call for free, like within the community. If you want to get a question answered, I have survey sequences in there. So there's all sorts of different types of sequences, but the entire goal for each is to sell. So there's always something going on and then, a couple of times a year, I'll do a launch or a sale. So for the 4th of July I just finished doing it last night. It took me about two hours to set up because I'm using what I previously had. I'm doing a flash sale for four days for the membership.
Speaker 1:Right. So you've got the welcome sequence, the seven promotions or train carriages. You've got flash sales that you do. How often are you doing flash sales for like the course, or for courses, or for the membership?
Speaker 3:Once a month I'll do a flash sale for something and it's usually a one-day email. One or two days uh, very, very small. And I'm actually taking pieces of the membership out and selling those one-off in my Shopify store and that's where I do my flash sales. So last month it was my UTM workshop. I'm not doing one for July, so next month it'll be my Pinterest for affiliate marketing workshop and it's like a one hour to 90 minute workshop. I take that out. It's a really great standalone lesson and I'll sell it for like 37 bucks.
Speaker 1:And what kind of numbers of people will buy when you're doing a flash sale like that.
Speaker 3:Last month I got. It was very low because UTM codes are boring. I got 10 sales.
Speaker 3:People don't even know what UTM codes are. They're like what is that? I don't know it's a late, but the month before and I think it was a workflow one I had like 47 sales. I send these to very smaller, like smaller segments of my list, not not really large segments. I don't send it to people who were formerly in the membership. I reserve all my automated marketing for anyone in the membership or previously there and then my one-off emails will go to people who are active on the email list but they're not brand new. So no one with no one in the welcome sequences are getting new like flashy flash sale emails. They're not getting newsletters. Yeah, I kind of quarantine them off because I really want them only to focus on that one welcome sequence yeah, yeah, that makes sense, cool, okay.
Speaker 1:And so how many new people you getting a month into that welcome sequence through all of your organic and everything?
Speaker 3:that's a really great question. So I'm only running the pinterest ads right now as a test. They I turned those off in may so I didn't run any ads at all most of june. I just turned those ads on on pinterest like two weeks ago, um, but right now, 175 new leads a week and a lot of my efforts have I've actually been able to turn like remove ads because I've put in place a PR effort. It's why I'm on your show. We pitched you to be on your show. So I'm doing a lot of these. I'm doing more summits, more bundle offers and things like that. So I've actually been able to replace my ad spend getting the same amount of members by just doing visibility.
Speaker 1:But if the ads are so cheap, why not do both?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. I don't know I should turn them back on.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean as long as there's a good pro-ass on it right.
Speaker 3:I'll be honest with you, those ads on Facebook that I just turned off in June.
Speaker 3:They fatigued and I hadn't changed the images or spent time changing the images in quite a long time and I spent about a week like fiddling around with the images, trying to get new ones, to get the lead cost down, changing audiences, and I did all of that over the course of a week and I still didn't see the ad costs go down. It had gone from a pretty substantial like 90 cents a lead to almost $2 lead. It was like $1.97 a lead by the beginning of June. So I had just told myself you know what I'm going to turn these off for now. I had a whole bunch of new clients come on board, I got a new, a couple of new VIP months and then just all of the media things I'm doing over the summer. I decided not to continue running the ads because it's not something I can manage right now and I don't want to hire someone to do it for me when I know how to do it. It's just a time commitment for me at the moment.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's the amount of time that you need to spend on managing ads, rather than necessarily the return on ad spend. Okay, cool. Do you know what your return on ad spend is on those Like you're getting? You're spending $2 or $1.51 to get a lead. Do you know how much you're making back from them?
Speaker 3:I don't right off the bat because they they need to go through the email sequences in order to convert. Average conversion timeline for me is about four weeks. And because of Facebook ads, the way that they report in their dashboards. I don't see it Like I'm going to have to do mental manual math.
Speaker 1:I don't want to do it Does that also sound boring, Heather you?
Speaker 3:know what you you said in my intro you told your audience that I was an informer accountant and this is why why you're a former accountant, not a current accountant.
Speaker 1:So here's how we, here's how we do it right when we do it with, when we're running ads, the only way that we figured out how to really tell what the conversion is, and it doesn't involve spreadsheets and maths and what have you if? You set up a separate funnel but the people doesn't have to be a whole funnel.
Speaker 1:You set up a separate landing page for the people who are coming in from the ads okay and then you take all of the email addresses you get and you're putting them off in a separate place so that you can compare who bought against who actually came from the ads. Because if you look at any tracking system, this is still not perfect, but it's better than any other tracking system we figured out because every tracking system is going to be using cookies or some way of figuring out is this person, that person? And if you look at facebook ad manager, you're basically letting zuckerberg mark his own work, which is like, of course they're going to tell you they're making more money than they actually are. Or the same thing with any system, right, and every tracking system is like oh, we've got everybody else tries to figure it out but they can't. But we figured it out, so this is our system for it and so we'll take everybody, we put them in a separate list and then we can actually go through and someone does the like not manual comparison, but like there's an automated way of like going okay, that person bought this many things you know you can do like a um export from your um, you know your cart system and then you look at, okay, which of those people match which of these emails and therefore which? Or you can tag them. That's another way of doing it. So you tag the person in the in the email marketing. Right, this one is from these ads and therefore we're going to mark anything that comes as a sale as being from them.
Speaker 1:And what we're looking for is what is the timeframe when we make that money back? Because ideally, like ideal world, you make a profit on day one, right? It's rare, it doesn't normally happen. You're talking about four weeks on yours. So it's like OK, you've got a four week turnaround for the ad spend to cancel itself out, so you've now got the money back that you spent on the ads. Everything after that is profit. Cool. That means you've got to have an amount of money that you're willing to lose for four weeks in order to then be able to reinvest it, and so every four weeks you get that back and you can kind of start again.
Speaker 1:As long as those people are buying something afterwards, that's all profit. That's great. But of course you've got to add on top of that how much time did you spend on managing it? Did you pay anybody else to manage it? All of that you've got to kind of include in your, in your sums as well. But the good thing with ads, if they work really well, is you scale up the ad spend right, you go okay, cool, that was great at a thousand a month. Now I'm going to spend five thousand a month and see, does it still work if I always it? No, no, five thousand a month is no longer effective because that's the audience I was going after was so tiny and you just got to kind of let it run at a thousand and be happy with it. Or I know some people who they scale to like 50 000 a month and it's fantastic because they're getting so much money coming back in, you know.
Speaker 3:But that would be fantastic. Yes, yeah, I will say for my zuckerberg marking up his own papers. According to facebook I pulled it up really quick in may my return on ad spend for the month because I have that tripwire behind my free lead magnet was 1.12. So break even.
Speaker 3:According to facebook, according to facebook got it for the tripwire and then beyond that if they join the membership. See, the way I have it set up is if they get the freebie, they they're going to see the tripwire and the upsell to the membership all in one day. If they go through all the pages and then once they open their freebie which that open rate is like 80-something percent, it's like 86% is what I checked it last month for my freebie so when they open that freebie the last page is an offer to join my membership again. So I'm mentioning it there again. And then they go into the welcome sequence and then the first sales sequence right after. So within the first like nine days of seeing me and hearing from me, they have close to seven touch points for the membership. And if they took the tripwire, it speeds that up. That process actually speeds up.
Speaker 1:Got it and tell me about. Do you know the numbers for the percentage of people who opt in, who then buy the tripwire?
Speaker 3:It's lower. I don't know the exact percentage, but it's much lower.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're normally looking for kind of three to maybe 10%. Like 10% is right at the upper end in terms of what we've ever seen with tripwire sales.
Speaker 3:I would say it's probably closer to three if I had to guess Just because of the numbers. When I run my numbers at the end of every month the people who buy that I look at a few main products the membership, the tripwire product, a couple of other one-off products that go through Thrivecart, and Thrivecart tells me that they're based on the number of people that join the email list. It's a two and a half to 3% of people have bought the tripwire Now, the system which is the tripwire, the way I pull the report now and I'm thinking I need to pull the report differently because of the way you mentioned it earlier I lump them together full price and half price.
Speaker 1:Oh, ok, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I have one product that I sell for full price and then that same product I sell for half price for the tripwire, and I haven't been breaking that report out and I think I need to.
Speaker 1:Because that's the like. If you want to scale with ads, this is like the crucial thing. Right Is yeah, how well does that front end funnel convert? It's the front end plus the welcome sequence, plus the all the other train carriages you're talking about is like the. The better they convert, the more money you make straight away, the easier ads is. Everything else gets easier after that because you've got a great funnel, which is why it's the only place that I ever bother with doing a second upsell and a second order bump and a follow-up welcome email sequence and a retargeting, because it's like if you can make that 10% better, you might be able to double your ad spend, because it's not when you're doing ad spend. It's really interesting.
Speaker 1:I'm not an ads guy, but I talk to a lot of them and the thing that they talk about is in order to make, let's say, to double your, your ad budget to go after the next segment of people who are less hot, less warm, who are less likely to buy you could you need to be able to make a bit more money. If you make a bit more money back then to get to break even, you can double, you can go off to a much wider segment, which then broadens things out a lot, which is, I tell a lot of people do not bother with tripwire finance until you've got all this other stuff in place. You're doing email promotions, you've got good sales pages, you've got your order bumps, your upsells, you optimized your opt-ins, all of this stuff. But once you've got that, all of that that's kind of the fundamentals then the tripwire funnel allows you to have something you can run ads into, which is like you've got that. You know you've got all this stuff in place.
Speaker 3:It's so cool I just pulled up for you. I just pulled up my thrive cart dashboard and. I opened last month and it says I brought in uh 414 new customers, 42 new subscribers to the academy because I only have the one subscription and um a total of 445 orders. So some people actually ordered more than once nice, nice yeah, so that that's there you go. Average daily revenues um right in that in that month was 201 dollars and one cent.
Speaker 1:I'll take the one cent all adds up right, and so what's the? What's the? Can you see in there the number of your half price tripwire sales?
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 3:It's not broken down at a quick view. I can see that 1,363 people hit the checkout pages and we converted 32.6%. Oh, nice Great. That's strong, that's better than six months ago.
Speaker 1:I look at this every quarter, and six months ago it was 27.5 or something I am obsessed with checkout pages because it's like one of the easiest things to improve in most people's funnels. I am convinced that if Teachable let me redesign their checkout their default checkout page, I could increase their revenue as a business by about 10 or 20%.
Speaker 3:That's insane.
Speaker 1:Their revenue as a business by about 10 or 20 percent. That's insane. It sucks so badly and I know there's like six elements. If you get them right on the checkout page they increase conversions, because we've done them multiple times again and again.
Speaker 3:Well, now I'm going to be going through your funnels later john, and it really upsets me.
Speaker 1:Like you look at the teachable sales pages, it's just like, oh, my goodness, anyway, I'll stop before I get off on a rant about that. Um, no, I can't stop myself. So I I was on a um someone's sales page of the day, right looking through, trying to do we're doing like a workshop. We've got this whatsapp group for, for course, creators and um, we do these workshops for them once a month and we were going through and reviewing a sales page that my copywriter had rewritten and it had five times their sales by have, by rewriting the sales page, but the rewritten one is in, it's still in teachable, and this and the headline, which is one of the most important elements for sales page, was terrible and I was like, oh god, monica, have you like dropped the ball? Like what's going on here?
Speaker 1:And she explained in teachable the headline of the page has to be the product name, which is not what headlines should be. That that's insane, like it's, it's mind-bogglingly stupid. And so she's actually got one product where she changed the name of the product to be what she wanted the headline to be. So if anybody comes across the product in the back to be what she wanted the headline to be. So if anybody comes across the product in the back end or, like you know, just on the regular, regular sales page, it's got a weird name of the product because she had to do that to make a good headline for the sales page. It's just like what is wrong with you guys, have you? Do you have no anything about conversion rate optimization at all? Clearly not know. They don't care. I don't understand it I use.
Speaker 3:I use third party tool. I will not. I'm not a teachable fan. I never have been. I didn't like in the beginning where they kept your money for like 30 days or whatever. No, I want my money so I use lead pages and then for the membership I use elementor okay on a website, that's its website. It's a dedicated sales page and membership site.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think sales pages yeah, the sales pages are much better done on, like on wordpress, or in click funnels or something that is special specialty tool for making the sales, even if your checkout page is then in teachable or whatever else. Or, yeah, thrive cart for you, great thrive cart, much, much better than these other systems, because that's their shtick, right. Okay, so let's dive back in then. So you've got the courses, you've got the membership. What for you? What kind of percentage of your revenue comes from each of those?
Speaker 3:Oh gosh, okay. So when I filled out your form, which I have pulled up for this episode, 25,000 in monthly revenue, so I don't know what the breakdown is. 7, 7,500 last month came from the membership. Okay.
Speaker 3:But that's the memberships, recurring revenue and then whatever sales we have on top of that because I sell one-off products and things like that through thrive cart. That's not counted in that $7,500 recurring bucket but 25,000 total for the agency slash slash membership, like just for ferris and company 25 000 and then 7500 recurring monthly for the membership. So whatever that breakdown is, I'm not going to try to do the math, I'm not an accountant anymore don't make me do accountancy things.
Speaker 1:I don't want it. I don't like it.
Speaker 1:I'm not doing it um, one of my best friends in uh university was studying to become an accountant and she was like barmy, she was like super odd, she'd wear like cricket jumpers everywhere and she, um, was in the juggling society and she just did all kinds of kooky, weird, like strange things all the time at an uh, you know, odd haircuts movie. And we're like, really you're gonna become an accountant, like that doesn't seem like what you'd kind of expect. And I saw her a few years after university and she went off and she became an accountant and she was like, no, you guys were right, the stereotype was true. I didn't want to do it anymore, I didn't like it.
Speaker 3:No, no, I have. I took zero marketing courses during my accounting degree. Four and a half years in college, no marketing courses. And here I am running a marketing company. I don't know what happened, but I'm much happier so talk to us about.
Speaker 1:We've gone through kind of some of the stuff that's working, some of the stuff you've got that's really clever how you're driving traffic and driving new subscribers. What's any of the stuff that's like a challenge for you at the moment with the courses and membership side of things.
Speaker 3:The biggest challenge for me is A time management which I'm always working on. But outside of time management, which we can always improve on is retention. So membership retention averages anywhere. Like people who come through ads will generally only stay for a month. So if they buy the tripwire and then stay for a month in the membership, great, I'm definitely profiting there, depending on the cost per lead. If I'm running ads, I still profit. If they join the membership for a month, just my cost per lead is so low. If I can keep it lower than $2, I'm great. But generally speaking, if people come and join and they're perfect fit for the membership, it's about eight months of retention. I'd love to get that up to a year, I just don't know how. So a few months ago and by a few I mean probably closer to seven months ago, I no, it was October of last year I added workshops, so it gives people a reason to stay longer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I do one of those deep dives, or monthly workshops that I sell in my Shopify stores a one-off. I do those once a month, and so I've only missed two months since October.
Speaker 1:And so what does that look like? What are you going through in those workshops?
Speaker 3:I do deeper dives on topics that aren't like a focus of the membership. So the membership is wholly speaking. It's Pinterest marketing. There's one course in there that's content strategy. So that's blogging, seo, youtube stuff. And then the workshops are things like how to create a lead magnet. Next month we're doing Pinterest for affiliate marketing. You would think that would already be in the coursework, but I haven't added it so far. So that's, I'm going to add a deep dive topic on that and then build it out into like a mini course. So we're going to start with a workshop, though, so it gives people a reason to join new if they have never been, and then also a reason to stay if they've been in there for a while nice, I like that.
Speaker 1:So you've got kind of an angle to promote for people to join the membership, even though the membership's basically the same as it was last month, so it's kind of it's harder to find a new angle on it. But you've got but you can join for this particular workshop and you'll get everything else as well. Nice, how's those been going?
Speaker 3:go on, sorry um, just aside from that, I also pay speakers to come in occasionally and speak, so I just secured a speaker that's going to talk on market research right and I pay speakers whatever their fee that they ask for up to.
Speaker 3:I like I have a budget set aside that I don't I don't like to go over, which I haven't hit it yet. But yeah, I have someone come in to chat about market research. I've had people in to talk about Facebook ads, instagram ads, you know, branding and things like that. So there's, I like to invite people outside of myself as well to talk to my audience, because my audience has more needs than what I can fill nice, and so what is?
Speaker 1:how's that going? How many people attend? What's the kind of feedback you've got about those workshops?
Speaker 3:they're really great. So we have more people obviously watch the replay than attend live. But I like the biggest attendance that I had to one of my workshops. It wasn't the utm one again, that was probably the lowest attendance, so boring but the workflow one. I had like 45 people there live. So nice between the live watching on the facebook group and in the zoom room. Um, yeah, it's pretty decent turnout for me to get people I'm gonna do people all over the world, not just in the us.
Speaker 3:So a lot of people are outside of time zones that it's like 3 am for them, but they still come can you do a quick pitch for why utMs aren't boring?
Speaker 3:Because, yes, so your UTMs are not boring, because they help you to properly track and see where your traffic is coming from and how they're converting. I use UTM codes for every Pinterest pin I create for myself and clients, because I can't trust that Google is going to bucket my data correctly. In fact, in a lot of cases with Google Analytics 4, my data correctly. In fact, in a lot of cases with google analytics 4, pinterest traffic is being bucketed as direct and not as pinterest in social. So if we're using utm codes, we can actually see in the campaign data exactly where traffic's coming in at and they're pretty straightforward to do.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're not exciting to do, right right, but you can get it done quickly.
Speaker 3:I actually created a spreadsheet that pumps them out for you and you just choose your source and medium, you put your URL and it automatically does it for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super straightforward, like if you've got an assistant, they can do that part for you or whatever. But it's like if you don't use them, then you go to Google Analytics. You go, oh, direct, direct. There's a lot of people who come direct. It's like you don't know how, you don't know anything about what's working without, without having them. I think they're fantastic.
Speaker 3:They're so simple one of our clients is running ads right now and we're running their organic marketing. So they're running their own pinterest ads. They had agency set them up for them prior to hiring me for organic and I was just pulling their report. For the last 45 days of us working together there was no Pinterest traffic, but they've had like 3,200 people actually land on their website from Pinterest from their ads alone, and it's not even being categorized from Google Analytics, from Pinterest to Google Analytics correctly. So I don't know if their web developers set up their Google Analytics incorrectly. I don't really know. There's data but their Pinterest is not tracking at all in the social tab. So if you're not using UTMs, you really there's a lot of loss there. Okay, so we've covered a lot of loss there.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've covered a lot of stuff today. This was fantastic. We've talked through about your business and kind of how you've got everything set up, the benefits of running Pinterest ads and why that might work and who that might work for. We've gone over the importance of tripwire funnels and how you can use those to try and get money back from the money you spent on ads. We've talked a little bit about like kind of what's working in Pinterest, like some of the kind of case studies and successes you've seen for yourself. If someone's like I like this, but I want to know more about the Pinterest side of things, I want to learn from Heather's wisdom. Where can they go? Where can they get any kind of free resources from you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if they want my freebie, it's just in the show notes you're going to put it there. It's my Pinterest strategy guide. It's the number one place to start and I break out exactly what Pinterest is, the components of your Pinterest strategy. I included a new resource over the spring that's a worksheet for creating your Pinterest strategy and there's a YouTube video that pairs with it and all my content. I don't like to gatekeep, so if you see a YouTube video, it's what I'm also teaching in my membership. I just go deeper in strategy for membership members because they're paying me and then I give you pretty much everything you need to get to the finish line on YouTube. So watch that, consume that. That's the place to get started. And then, obviously, if you just want to find me, heatherfarriscom beautiful.
Speaker 1:So heatherfarriscom, heather, f-a-r-r-i-scom, and we'll put the link in the show notes, but the the freebie is heatherfarriscom slash pinterest, dash strategy, dash guide. If you want to go check that out, heather, this was great. I really appreciate your time coming on today and uh, talking with us um anywhere else that people, anywhere else. You want to point people um if they want to, um come find you, or is that everything?
Speaker 3:you can just find me on the website, that's every. You'll find any other place you want to chat with me or like watch youtube or whatever from the main website, and I just want to say, john, thanks for having me and you've given me homework to do. I'm gonna be adding that to my 12-week year of like working on my data.
Speaker 1:Well, if you figure out about your tripwire funnel and you're like okay, this is the numbers I've got, feel free to message it over and I'll have a and be like oh, change this and you'll make more money, you know.
Speaker 1:OK, I'll do it Wicked, all right, perfect. Thanks so much today and for coming on today and, of course, as always, thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate your time and your attention listening in. Um, if you've got ideas of things you want to hear about in future episodes, drop me an email. John at data driven marketingco and uh, we look forward to um hearing or to seeing you on the next episode. Um, if you found it useful, you want to get future episodes subscribe wherever you listened. Catch you next time.