The Art of Selling Online Courses

How To Use Email Marketing Automation to Sell More Courses With Josip Belina

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 150

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Josip Belina, COO and Funnel Strategy Lead at Data Driven Marketing, shares actionable insights on email marketing automation for course creators. 

In this episode, you'll discover the best tools, essential automations, and when live promotions can outperform automated campaigns.

Whether you're building a strong email list or optimizing your campaigns to drive more enrollments, this episode provides proven strategies to streamline your marketing and increase revenue. If you're ready to simplify your processes and sell more courses, this is a must-watch! 

Download our 7-Day Roadmap to increase your revenue by 30% without more sales calls or paid ads. Visit datadrivenmarketing.com/roadmap now!

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Josip Berlina. Now, josip is our funnel strategy lead. He's worked on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that we use here at Data-Driven Marketing when working with our clients, and today we're going to talk about automating marketing processes in your course business. So which email marketing software or other kind of software to use? How to avoid the most common mistakes that people make when setting up automation.

Speaker 1:

Now, before we dive into today's episode, I want to share something incredibly valuable with you. If you're looking to boost your course revenue, you've got to check out our seven day roadmap to increase your revenue. It's the same system that we've used to help countless clients achieve predictable increases in revenue without making any more sales calls, running paid ads, competing on price, anything like that. You're going to learn in there how to increase your course revenue by 30, how to identify and fix the missing parts of your phone funnels and how to optimize your funnels for maximum performance. So if you're ready to take your revenue to the next level. Go to datadrivenmarketingco slash roadmap and download it. Josip, welcome to the show. Happy to be here, so talk to us. How can course creators use email marketing automation to increase course sales? What's any of the things that they should be doing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so a few most important automations are a welcome series, potentially a content drip campaign over a longer period of time, if you can set it up. Abandoned cart emails and reminders, potentially upsells and cross sells and then, when people buy, the course, consumption emails. Those would be the five key things that you should have set up. That's one thing. The other thing is the opposite don't automate too much.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting, right. I was chatting with someone the other day about their. I don't know who it was, it was somebody. Oh yeah, we're talking about their. I don't know who it was, it was somebody. Oh yeah, we were talking about a client, that's right. And they'd had like a seven month automated sequence and it wasn't making many sales and it was just like we replaced it with some live email promotions and it like the sales went up massively. Why is that, do you think? Why is that such a big deal?

Speaker 2:

You can't really know where your audience is at any given point in time over a period of like a year. I mean you can, but it takes time, it takes years, it takes iterations, it takes very detailed KPI tracking, which is something that you know. If you're a course creator, you have a team of a few people. You know you're not running a big business with 50 or 100 people where there is a whole department dedicated to that tracking. If you're not doing that, then you're just going to get lost. We've seen some people that had successful long-term automations, but generally for course creators, it's a pain in the ass to maintain and almost impossible to track long term.

Speaker 1:

And it's interesting, right? Because when you do a promotion you can look at the results of the promotion and see what results you got and then adjust based on that. But when you're doing a long term automation it doesn't quite work that way. You know like you could hypothetically come back in six months, review how well it's done and then adjust it from there. But I don't think that people really do and it's just something about the speed of like send the promotion, make a bunch of sales, you see what works. You do something else, you know plus.

Speaker 2:

We kind of do it that way when it comes to automating stuff for our done-for-you clients long term. So we run a whole bunch of promotions. So let's say, in a year's time, maybe a year and a half, we're gonna run 30 plus promotions and we are gonna know what works. Well Now, if you do a promo A this month, the next month promo B might not be the ideal there. Maybe you need a promo D so you figure out what works best when combined month after month or a few weeks after a few weeks, and then you can use that to craft a perfect welcome journey for like the first two or three months. But even that is not bulletproof. So we preach automating first couple weeks. That's more than enough. Welcome series indoctrination, if you will, and that's it. Then figure out what your audience wants. Send them good quality content Ideally that's something interesting for them in that particular moment of their life or even in the year and then do email promotions as one-offs. There is no real need to automate too much.

Speaker 1:

Got it Okay. So we've talked a little bit about where not to do it, so now let's talk about all the steps that you mentioned about where to do it. So what was the first one on the list? Was it welcome sequence? The welcome email sequence? Yeah, all right, cool. So how long should it be? What should be included in there and how does that fit with the whole automation?

Speaker 2:

It shouldn't be too long, shouldn't be too long, shouldn't be too short. But let's say we normally go for 10, 7 to 12, 14 days, so up to two weeks, and we use a system that kyle, one of our copywriters, more or less developed. He calls it a perfect welcome email sequence, where we do seven or eight emails, depending on how you look at it, and it always starts the same. So the email number one is the lead magnet delivery email. So that's the first email that you are going to send and it just does that. It delivers the lead magnet, nothing more, nothing less which is immediately followed by another welcome email that then talks about your business, your mission, your values. You introduce someone to the brand.

Speaker 2:

Email number three you want to show how you are different than the industry. You're definitely not going to talk bad about some of your competitors, but you're definitely going to show your good sides. Email number four then continues with answering the big questions. So what is your big question? Normally, your audience struggles with money, time and something else. That something else is what you should show and allow people to understand that this is something that you have a problem with and this is something we can help with, if you have a proper custom router, if have developed your customer avatar. That's a good starting point just to review what your audience wants to hear. Then we continue with showing people some of the results that we've had. We showed the benefits of some of our products and then it can transition into an into sales sequence after that. So either a couple emails with a going-on campaign or a full-on standard email promo that you've tested out and you know should work for that particular audience.

Speaker 1:

Got it, okay, cool. So that's the first step is they sign up for the lead magnet, they get the lead magnet and then they get the welcome sequence that you've just laid out and then they go into a sales sequence great, okay. So that's one email marketing automation. What were the others that you mentioned? There is one before that.

Speaker 2:

In some cases it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, so you can test that. That's the tripwire automation email assuming you have a tripwire I'm assuming you know what that. That's the Tripwire automation email Assuming you have a Tripwire, assuming you know what that is which is a relatively cheap product that you show to your audience that signed up immediately after they have opted in for your lead magnet. If they don't buy the Tripwire, you can tag them, and if they haven't done anything with it for like half an hour, maybe an hour, you can start an automation for 24 hours, let's say, where you will send one or two additional emails showing people that there is a chance for them to get that lead, that tripwire offer. So that's something that we sometimes do. Sometimes we don't. Normally, if it converts or if it gets you more than 20 plus percent of the tripwire sales, it's good to have it so you can track that 20% of the tripwire sales.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you mean as in, if you got five sales from the front-end tripwire funnel, if you get one additional sale from this additional sale from this.

Speaker 2:

So if you have 100 tripwire sales in, let's say, a month, 20 of those sales or more should be from that email automation. Mm-hmm, gotcha. That's the benchmark we go for and, yeah, that's basically the part of the welcome email sequence. You can also do consumption emails, which means that when someone buys your product, you want to acknowledge that, send them the receipt, obviously, and then give them sort of a roadmap or just nudge them every week once or twice so that they are on right track to actually completing the course, because, well, if someone completes your course, they're gonna be a lot more likely to buy something from you again gotcha, okay, cool.

Speaker 1:

So we've got the trip wire, email sequence, email automation, we've got the welcome sequence plus cell sequence, and then we've got the consumption sequence. What were the other ones that you mentioned?

Speaker 2:

we talked about content drip campaigns. Basically, if you know that there is a certain topic that's interesting to people, can automate that and send them maybe a bi-weekly or a monthly email around a particular topic and automate that Similar to how you would create a newsletter email, if you will, and then kind of automate that. We rarely do that, but it can help. Abandoned cart reminders are then the next thing. So if your CRM or if your checkout software allows that, make sure to have cart abandonment. It should get 5% of sales retrieved, or 5% of people that abandoned cart should be retrieved by that. It's a benchmark that we go for, but again, it's a lot more common with people in the e-commerce space than in info product space, even though it works quite well.

Speaker 1:

Why is that? Do you think it's just that people in info products aren't doing it, or is it that it doesn't work as well as with e-com?

Speaker 2:

Both. It doesn't work as well as with e-com, probably because people don't browse as much. So with e-com you will have a whole bunch of products. You'll have a category page that will then branch out into different products. With courses it's rarely like that, or at least it shouldn't be.

Speaker 2:

I've seen people that have courses selling them as they were pans, but that's not optimal. I think the biggest reason is technical inability. Not all software allows you to do that, which is unfortunate. For example, teachable. Teachable's cart abandonment system is shit. There is no other way of saying that. It's just not good. Plus, you need to code in an email and it just looks weird. It almost doesn't work. I mean, it's obviously better to have it than not to have it, but the results are almost meaningless on a large scale. So I think the biggest thing there is not. Many people have also two-step opt-ins and checkouts, where you would first enter your email and then checkout, which is a good thing, because with courses it's better to have the checkout available immediately. It eliminates friction, so you generally get more sales.

Speaker 1:

Great, okay, so that was Abandoned Cart. So are there any other automations people should have in place?

Speaker 2:

I actually forgot one that could be used, which is for generating testimonials. If someone enrolls in your course, it's pretty good practice to follow up with them after a period of time when you expect them to have finished the course and ask them for a testimonial. You can automate that. We do it differently. We like to do testimonial campaigns where we hunt for testimonials once every six months probably, and we do this as campaigns, but you can automate.

Speaker 1:

All right, cool. So let's say someone's on board. They want to set up all these automations. There's a bunch of different marketing automation tools. There's a bunch of different email marketing software. Can you share any tips on how a course creator can pick the right one without feeling too overwhelmed by the options? Is there one perfect one? They should be leaving their current email marketing system for and swapping over to no, they're all shit.

Speaker 2:

But if you have to pick one, go with the simplest one. Probably Pulse there is. I don't like CRMs and I love CRMs at the same time, so we preached ActiveCampaign for years. And then ConvertKit is simpler, but it's not the best for deliverability, but neither. There is not a single one that is perfect. Convertkit is the simplest one, even though it's a bit janky with all of the tagging and automations that you have set up. But the tagging is a bit weird, but you know it works for what we need it to. A lot of course creators that have millions of people on their email list use it. It's reasonably simple to use and learn, but if you know one, you know more or less all of them. Hubspot is probably the best one, but then again, most online course creators don't really need all of the functionalities that.

Speaker 1:

HubSpot provides. It's super complicated to use HubSpot, it really is.

Speaker 2:

Just as a CRM. It's fine, but you don't need 80 of it. It has good analytics, so I like it for that. So that's good. You have active campaign that has amazing on-site tracking. But almost no one uses that functionality, or at least not well with scoring, which you can do top spot as well. So you know clavio good, but it synchronizes well with Shopify, so it's mostly used by e-com businesses rather than courses. We've used it with courses a couple of times. It's pretty good, I like it. And then you have others like Constant Contact, mailgun, mailerlite, trip. We've used a thousand thousand.

Speaker 1:

I mean a hundred so if someone's was what I normally say to put someone, most people when they're thinking of changing systems is what you've got is probably fine. Don't spend the time changing to anything else, because that's time that you could have been spending writing emails or writing sales pages. What have you? Would you agree with that? Or are there some tools where you're like you should definitely leave this one and go to and then insert your favorite one?

Speaker 2:

uh, I don't like entreport, so I generally suggest switching from entreport. But you are right, we never suggest our land for your clients or consultancy clients to change, at least not yet. So there is a certain benchmark, revenue-wise, which is probably around a million a year or more, where it might make sense for you to start optimizing your tech stack. But before that, everything that you can do whether it's MailChimp, whether it's MailGgun, drip, convertkit, hubspot, doesn't matter, it's gonna work. It's more important to send the emails than to worry about which platform to send them from.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, great. What about segmentation? Is that a useful thing to run in the automation in your email marketing software to personalize stuff to you know? Have different emails go out to different segments. Use that at all?

Speaker 2:

yeah, absolutely. We normally segment people in three stages. So previous buyers, engaged audiences and unengaged audiences or we often refer to that as red, amber, green, and that's not exactly that. So previous buyers are just that people that have spent money with you. Ideally, you can tag them per product. That shouldn't be a problem. We like to combine that and have a list of people that bought from us. That should be your VIP list. Those are your best customers. You can make by far the most money off of them long-term. Then you have your engaged audience.

Speaker 2:

We look at an engaged audience as people that have opened at least one email in the last 30 days. Now, if you talk to people that are now more involved in email metrics, for example, email Smart if you were to talk to Adrian from Email Smart about that, he'd tell you that you should actually consider people that have clicked some of your emails as the engaged audience. Due to all of the Google changes and Yahoo changes that were implemented a few months back, however, we still look at this as opens. It's not a perfect metric, but it's a good enough metric. So people that opened the email over the last 30 days are engaged.

Speaker 2:

There is an amber list, so that's a green list. An amber list would be people that have opened an email late, after 30 days or 60 days, so in between 30 and 60 days. So they haven't opened the email in the last 30 days, but they have in the last 60. You shouldn't really email them. It's unlikely that they will open. That can just harm your email deliverability overall. And then red list is everyone else, people that are just not opening your emails. We suggest doing re-engagement campaigns there. There is a YouTube video on our channel how to run effective re-engagement. I think Martina did that and, yeah, I highly recommend watching that if you're interested in re-engagement?

Speaker 1:

And should course creators be personalizing their email campaigns using any of these automation tools so it kind of resonates more with their audience? Is that?

Speaker 2:

worthwhile. Yes and no Again, depends on where you are with your business. So if it's a well-established business, you are making millions and everything is running smoothly. Yes, thinking about automation would probably be a good thing. However, for most I would say 99% of people listening to this personalizing it more than just using a hello first name with a fallback. There is more or less not needed.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so most people just don't use shouldn't be using the personalization. It's too complicated, there's not enough benefits from it.

Speaker 2:

Yep.

Speaker 1:

Cool, okay. So what about when launching a new course or program? Can email marketing automation be integrated to the marketing strategy there to maximize enrollment and engagement?

Speaker 2:

Not sure about enrollment. Well, depends on how you launch it. If you're launching it following something like Jeff Walker's product launch formula, definitely having some sort of automation for people that have enrolled in or have shown interest in a product is a good strategy because you want to stay on top of people's minds. But that's like a consumption email sequence, more or less. It's more important to do good launches and focus on what's currently happening than to focus on email automations. At that stage At least, not a lot of focus. I think the most essential automation workflows are, as we said, welcome series, cart abandonment, maybe post-purchase workflows definitely, and that's more or less it.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha All right cool, just workflow. Workflows definitely, and that's more or less it. Gotcha all right cool. So most automation is overkill for most people listening to this. They should be doing the ones you mentioned, like maybe the tripwire funnel emails, the welcome sequence. If it's a two-step checkout, which it probably shouldn't be then, uh, cart abandonment emails, consumption emails, and I think there was one more as well, wasn't there?

Speaker 2:

uh, yes, we initially talked about, uh, content drip campaigns, oh, content drip campaigns as well.

Speaker 1:

Okay, cool, so those are the ones that worth doing. Most of the rest of it isn't really necessary. People can use whatever email marketing software they're already using. Almost definitely don't even worry about it. Don't worry about personalization. Segmentation, yes, but only into who's bought, who's engaged and who's not engaged, and then different kind of emails for them. Either they get the emails, they don't get the emails, or they get the VIP ones, and that sounds like it's about it so relatively straightforward, hopefully for everybody listening in terms of knowing what it is they're supposed to do now. Yes, thank you very much for that.

Speaker 1:

Really appreciate your time coming on and and sharing your wisdom with everybody of course, anytime if you found the interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever it is that you listen to this and if you want to know about what you can be doing. That isn't automation, but it's about actually sending out your email promotions every month, which is the crucial thing, like the most important thing you could be doing and you want to get on the, the wait list or learn more about, like the new workshops we're running around. That is datadrivenmarketingco slash promotion, and if you go to that link, you're going to sign up to our waitlist and we'll send you through information as and when it becomes available about those workshops. The first batch of those are probably going to be sold out very quickly, but future ones you'll be able to get onto.

Speaker 1:

So those have been having amazing results. People have been having their best months ever. Maybe I think one client had the best month apart from Black Friday apart from a couple of Black Fridays. Otherwise, it was his best month ever and it makes it super easy to write those emails in your style without feeling salesy, write them really quickly, get it done and then make those sales. So if you want to know more about that, go to datadrivenmarketingco slash promotion. Thanks so much as always for listening to the show.