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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
[CASE STUDY] How Andy Made $72,000 in Coaching Revenue in 1 week WITHOUT Any Calls
In just 3 weeks, Andy Morgan made $72,000 in coaching sales by selling 16 high-ticket coaching spots at $4,500 each - without ever getting on a sales call. And not only that he won't have a single call to deliver the coaching either.
Here's the truth: Most course creators are leaving serious money on the table by not adding coaching to their business. Andy breaks down his exact process for running a profitable coaching program that doesn't eat up your time. You'll learn his controversial "no phone" policy that eliminated client headaches, the simple email sequence that filled his roster, and the exact systems he uses to deliver results without being glued to his calendar.
Want to add $72,000+ in coaching revenue without sacrificing your freedom? Andy shares the real numbers behind his recent launch, including how long clients stayed on his email list before buying (hint: it's way longer than you think), plus the costly promotion mistake he made and how he turned it around. This episode is packed with proven strategies you can steal for your own coaching business, whether you're just starting out or looking to scale without the usual coaching burnout.
This one's controversial. When people would email us from their phones. It was always sloppy communication so I banned customers from using my phone. So you have to agree to not email me from your phone if you're going to be a customer. That dramatically reduced the frequency of miscommunication with clients and these communication breakdowns were pretty much the only time when someone would leave our service unhappy. So on would leave our service unhappy.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Jon Ainsworth. Today's guest is Andy Morgan. Now Andy is a nutrition and training coach.
Speaker 2:As the founder of ripbodycom and athletebodyjp, he's helped over 2,000 clients transform their bodies in ways they didn't think possible. He's written four books, including international bestsellers, translated into five languages, and his Japanese fitness platforms considered the country's most trusted resource in the field. After experiencing firsthand the misleading practices in the fitness industry and all the bullshit on bodybuildingcom and that kind of stuff, andy then dedicated his career to providing honest, science-based guidance through coaching writing educational platforms. I have followed. A lot of the stuff that Andy has written has helped me massively in the gym and making big progress. So today we're going to be chatting about why creators shouldn't be scared to charge premium prices, how Andy went from never promoting his coaching to selling out spots within hours with an email promotion, and the interesting lessons that he learned along the way. Andy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:John, thanks for the marvelous introduction. Honored to be here.
Speaker 2:Happy to be here. So I want to start off with the coaching angle of things, because you've got courses right, but mostly what you're selling is higher ticket coaching. Yes, yes, how did you get to that? How did you get to that conclusion? And do you see, let's just start with that how did you get to that? How did you decide to be doing that kind of coaching, entirely by?
Speaker 1:accident. I'm here just purely by chance. I'm an idiot. It's not a case. It's not a case of here by design, and I started writing I'm sure many of the listeners here. They started putting out content in whatever medium it is. For me, it was blogging, because that was a thing back in 2011, and I've kept with it. I'm now a writer.
Speaker 1:I wanted to help people like myself who had been through avoid the pain that I had just gone through in figuring out how to get through the plateaus in my appearance. One of the pitfalls was believing everything that the supplement industry marketed to me. I was very naive, but there's lots of even shadier snake oil around now, so I still have plenty of content to write about in that regard. Unfortunately. I thought things would get better as the information landscape got you know, just got better, but no, it's, it's social media. The algorithm has just screwed us all. Um, it'll keep me in fresh undies, though. Um, and then I wanted to just effectively write to my 20 year old self and say look, dude, this is what you need to do. This is non-sexy, but this is what you need to do. Approach it as a bit of an engineering problem and you'll be good, this is the framework, and so I've just kind of spent my well. I've spent the last 13 years just writing guides to fill in those pieces when someone's wondering about a specific question or pain point. Okay, here's what you need to do, here's how it all fits in. There you go, it's all free.
Speaker 1:And what I found was that by writing from the heart for people like myself, just trying to help them, I ended up attracting people who enjoyed writing. They enjoyed long form blog posts and they reached out and asked me about coaching. And I wasn't coaching. I had nothing to sell. But I was like well, I know a fellow who does coaching. I've heard of that before online. Yeah, phil. That was the first comment that I got, asking me I was like Phil, can I send you an email about this? He's like yeah, sure. So then I sent him an email. I was like Phil, so my 12-week package is $899. It includes this, this, this and this. And I just based that off of when I'd help some people in the gym and outside of the gym with their nutrition. What I included there.
Speaker 1:But how could I shift that to a more online format? How does that sound? And he's like great, send me a link to pay and I'm like, oh, how do I take money in Japan? I'm British but I live in Tokyo. How do I take money in Japan from America? And then PayPal came up, so I signed up for a PayPal account and, bam away we go. I start talking about how I'm working with Phil.
Speaker 1:I now create a coaching button on the menu of my WordPress blog and I talk about the coaching there. It's horrible. Honestly, the website is absolutely terrible. If you want to have a laugh, go to the Wayback Machine for 2011 for rippedbodyjp. That was the old domain and it just looks absolutely horrible. But people could see, I guess, the earnestness of it and it was fairly unique in that I was just giving everything away, there wasn't behind a paywall and a certain small percentage wanted to hire me.
Speaker 1:Now, I've always kept with the coaching. I have done some courses, but I haven't taken it to a level that many of your listeners will have taken it to a level that many of your listeners will have. I like the coaching. I like it as a business. If you think of it.
Speaker 1:Let's say, you have a $500 course to make half a million dollars. You need to sell a thousand people on that. But if you want to coach people over the course of a year for $5,000, then you only need 100 people on that and that in certain industries, with certain pain points that you're addressing, that can be much easier to get than a thousand people to do $500. Obviously, it depends. Obviously, you thousand people to do the $500. Obviously, it depends. Obviously, you're going to have thoughts on that. But yeah, I think the coaching is just a. It can be a pretty good business model as long as you approach in the right way, where you're giving lots of value but you're setting it up in a way where it can still be efficient for your time as well any time that we have somebody sign up for a call with us, we ask them to fill out some information.
Speaker 2:You know how much your email this size, what's your audience size, what revenue you're making. And any time that we look at it and see that they're making more money than seems to make sense for a course business like, oh, they're selling coaching I bet it's always the case, because you can make much more money with the same size audience selling coaching than you can selling courses like way more money. And uh, our friend, uh, shane hummus, did some a lot of research into this and went through and found people who were sharing on the internet how much money they were making from their course or coaching business and what size was their youtube audience, where youtube was their main traffic source, and he found that the amount you could make was about 10 times more something in that kind of ballpark when you're selling coaching versus when you're selling, um, just courses on their own. And yet lots and lots of people who are selling courses don't add coaching on. And I think it's coming because people are realizing it's getting harder to sell courses like the.
Speaker 2:Probably the peak of selling just courses was about 2021 and it's kind of got harder, since most people can still make way more than they are doing at the moment because they're not doing lots of the fundamentals. They're not doing email promotions we'll come back to that right but that is one thing you can do that massively increases the revenue in the business. Now, one of the reasons, though, that people sometimes don't want to do it is like oh, that sounds like a real hassle, that sounds like a real pain. I don't think I'd enjoy all that time on calls, but I think people have a belief that there is one way of doing business coaching, which is Zoom calls for an hour every week or every other week that they don't particularly want to do. But it's not true. You can do it in lots of ways, as long as you find something that works for your audience and works for you and it fits at the price point. Can you talk everybody through your model of how you've done coaching for the last, however many years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's how I've done it for the last last, say, 12 years, yeah, 13 years, and then what we're going to be adding in and changing, moving forward, right, let's hear about it. We've kind of like ratcheted it up for 2025, um, so I always wanted to keep it low tech. I also wanted to keep it async, so it was always for me email and spreadsheets. This way, my business is not dependent on somebody else's business succeeding or failing. So what I mean was, back in the day, I used to be approached by quite a lot of companies as, hey, we've got an app, we're getting other coaches to join it. Please join and run your coaching through our app. It's like, well, now I'm putting the success of my business in their business's hands, because if they go under now I've got a problem right, I've now got to swap everyone out, and so I just wanted to keep it simple with spreadsheets and email very detailed emails. So the way I did it was it would be an application form on the coaching page that would then kick over to a separate inbox for me. I would then respond with a quick Loom video saying oh hey, john, thank you for your interesting coaching. Below you'll see some questions and I look forward to reading through and seeing how we can help. Right, and you'll get that. It's obviously personal. You're more likely to then answer the questions, because I do have quite a lot of questions. I never used a type form or a google form before. I just kept it in the email because it was just me, and then I would respond with what I used to call the most marvelous reply, which was effectively a roadmap, a troubleshooting like a summary of where they're at and a few key things I think they're missing, and a roadmap of how we're going to get to their goal and if I even think that's realistic and what that will look like over, say, 3, 6, 12, 24 months.
Speaker 1:And the reason I call it that marvelous response, marvelous email, is because I'm aiming to reply to them in a level of detail that they've never seen, ever before from anyone in my industry, and yet they haven't paid me a dime yet. And so now they're thinking, well, shit, this guy, if he's that good and I haven't paid him yet, he's got to be pretty damn good when I'm a client, right, and yeah, we are. And at the same time, because I'm writing very detailed emails but I'm wowing people with them. They're not fast responses but they're very thoughtful and detailed responses. So then the cadence of the responses will be every maybe every day, or maybe there'll be a two day gap, but that's okay. And I'm not replying over the weekends and I'm never replying fast, so that people then don't get into the mindset that they will get a fast response. So even if I see their email now, I won't respond to it until tomorrow because I want there to be a gap there, because otherwise you end up in this kind of text message like back and forth, and then that just becomes really hard to navigate. And so then if they said at the end of that email, I'd be like how does that sound? If good, I'll send over pricing information which I've given them a ballpark figure for on the coaching page itself. I'll send that over of what I need from them, what we will deliver, and then the pricing options and if that's good, I'll send a payment link with contracts and we're good to go. And you know, a certain portion of people drop off at each stage, but that's how it is. And then the delivery from there.
Speaker 1:It will again be some onboarding emails which will be customized to them around their nutrition training, different target training program, nutrition targets and things and then in that first week they will ask me. They will email me as often as they want, but ask them to please put them in one email at a time and I will respond. You know, obviously, to all of your questions that you've got, but I try and have. They will email me as often as they want, but I ask them to please put them in one email at a time and I will respond. You know, obviously, to all of your questions that you've got. But I try and have those onboarding emails like very, very detailed and you know there to reference against, so that I'm not so that most of their questions are going to be covered. And then after that point they will then check in one week later so it's near the end of the second week and I'll have a look over their data. I will bring up the spreadsheet I will have my head in a little bubble in the corner on a loom or Vidyard video. I'll go over their data, I'll put that in an email response, I will type up a little summary and I'll send that back to them.
Speaker 1:So basically the process is every two weeks on a Saturday. The client will send over the answers to five set questions that remain the same every time. Rate your motivation. What do you think went really well? What do you think's gone bad? What do you think you should do differently? And do you think went really well? What do you think's gone bad? What do you think you should do differently and do you need any help with that? These kinds of questions, right? Then I've got the spreadsheet data. They've already filled that out for me and that will link to it used to be either an attachment or a Google sheet and I'll go over that for them and then I'll respond. They'll send that on the Saturday. I'll go over that for them and then I'll respond. They will send that on the Saturday. I'll respond on the Monday. Then I'll have to be emailing them on a Tuesday, with catching up with any remaining questions they may have, and then I won't be speaking to them again for another couple of weeks.
Speaker 1:Usually, sure, something may come up, but I say to them look, nothing's really an emergency. But you know, if something does come up, of course, reach out to me and the clients that I attract. They're okay with that level of infrequent contact because they're they're not total newbies. They're looking for someone to be managing things. They already kind of know what they're doing, but they're really looking for a director here to tell them exactly what to do so they can just focus on executing the plan. They know how to execute as long as they're given the instructions, and that's how we've always done it. Now the average customer will stay about six and a half seven months, even though there's a 12 week minimum. So that's, I believe from what I know. That's pretty good in my industry. So people are happy and, yeah, that's how we've always done things.
Speaker 2:And what does that work out? As for customer lifetime value, that's six and a half seven months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's about four and a half thousand.
Speaker 2:Okay, so 4,500 per person, when most people selling courses are probably looking at a few hundred, something like that. So we're looking at about 10 times the amount. Obviously, less people will pay 4,500 than will pay a couple of hundred, but I don't think it's dramatically less as a percentage, I think that's right.
Speaker 1:If it's not 10, you win, or or or maybe. If it's anything above seven percent, you win potentially. But obviously you've got to give some of your time for that. You've got to do a bit of the math on that. But yeah let's say it's a third. Let's say it drops down to 30 of the people.
Speaker 2:But as long as you're an efficient in the way that you can coach, then you, you, win yeah, I'm assuming that nearly all of the questions anybody has are questions that you've had a hundred times before, so you can be relatively efficient in terms of answering a lot of these things you know like copy yeah, yeah, the previous answer.
Speaker 1:You know yeah, and, and the way that that works is and I'm not shy about, um, explaining this to anyone, like anyone who's listening um, if I mean, maybe someone listening to this might become a client of mine at some point, and that's okay um, we use uh snippets. The snippets feature in Superhuman, the email app, the Gmail skin. It is and this is like TextExpander. It allows us to use a semicolon and then type a word and then bam, it's going to pop up an email template, or it could be one sentence. It could be many, many paragraphs sentence. It could be many, many paragraphs.
Speaker 1:So what that allows us to do is, anytime we answer a question to a customer that we think may be useful for another customer in the future, we'll save it as a template, I'll share that across the team, and then our jobs as coaches is to recall that and then customize that to the specific situation. So the fact that this advice has been used for a previous customer, the current customer doesn't care. They're getting a much better standard of response and more detailed response and thoughtful response than they otherwise possibly could, because the coach is not now relying on their memory and their energy levels at that particular time. So it's a win all around. And yeah, we've developed some snippets like that, for we've probably got about 200 of them, um, for all all manner of things, um, and that's. That's a superpower.
Speaker 2:So talk us through what you're changing it to now.
Speaker 1:Sure. So let's think about what were the not so good things about our coaching before. So people would let me stop. Let me stop. I want to change this into not what we're doing now, but what we've ruled out over the years as being a bad idea for coaching, because I think people get into this trap. So, single communication channel if someone approaches us in Instagram DMs, for example, we'll immediately push them to the coaching page, where that will tell them about the coaching, which will then kick over into our email inboxes and then we'll continue on email. So we're only having a conversation in one place and that is in email.
Speaker 1:A lot of coaches in my industry for sure they don't do that. They're not strict about that. They'll be chatting over WhatsApp. They'll be chatting in Instagram DMs. Maybe they'll have some email. There may be another app that they're logging into where their client can. There may be another app that they're logging into where their client can ping them there.
Speaker 1:Well, that is fine for certain things, but coaching generally involves a lot of strategy. You need context and you need to have one thread, because you can't be relying on memory when you've got clients at scale. You don't want to be you. You want to make sure that you have all of the figures right there. You have all the information right there. So we keep it all in email so we can quickly scroll back and forth through the thread or ctrl f to find something if we're looking for any specific piece of information. So only one means of communication for us method of communication and for us it's email is a primary base. We do do video, like I said, but we have a bullet pointed summary again, so it's searchable and so it can be quickly scanned by the client and us.
Speaker 1:No calls we don't do. We want it to be async. This is so that there is low stress in our schedules. I didn't want to build a business where it would rule me out of travel or make travel very, very stressful. This isn't going to be possible for all people, but I've developed a system where this will work very well. Um, developed a system where this will work very well and for the type of client that we work with, the busy working dads, um, they don't want, generally speaking, they don't want to have another call commitment in their calendars by weekly, weekly, whatever it is. So it's it's actually we can do our standard, our rip body standard of coaching without needing you to commit to a call. This can actually be a plus point for some people that I think a lot of people don't think about.
Speaker 1:I'd say those are the two main ones. We tried group coaching. That didn't work well. I don't think you get. You have to charge a lot less. The advice isn't, as advice can't be tailored, so the results aren't as good. And for my demographic specifically, these late 30s to mid-50s guys, they don't want to have a chat in a group. So a new cohort comes in, they start off all bubbly happy and then it dies off within a few weeks. So that group element just didn't work for us specifically. So those are things to watch out for. I'd say specifically question whether you actually need to do live calls and think about the medium with which you're going to communicate with and keep to that one medium.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think there's so many things within coaching that can be adapted and varied and tweaked depending on your audience and what they need and what kind of business you want to run and what kind of price point you're going to do it at and you have. You can kind of dial stuff up and down or whatever. If you're going to do one-to-one calls where you're going to need to be charging more. But do you need to do one-to-one calls? Do people want it? Do you want it? Maybe, maybe not. You know like all of these things can be like tweaked and adapted based on what is it that you're, what kind of business do you want to run and what kind of. You know what's product market fit with with your audience. So, what have you? That's the stuff that you decided not to have or kind of to be really strict on. Yeah, what are you? What are you changing now? Cause I don't know anything about this. We haven't talked about this.
Speaker 1:One other thing. Oh sorry, um, yeah, no, no, no, um, you were right, I was wrong, I should have said it. Um, we put clear requirements on the coaching page. So we um, you need to be male and you need to be over 20. Um, over 20 legal requirement. But frankly, we don't want kids anyway. Um, the, because my company's incorporated in japan, 20 is like adult age. Male because we don't know anything about working with women. Um, coaching is not just telling people what to do, but it's telling them, getting them to do it, and the psychology is different. So we're not going to do an inferior job with women. So we got that there. No steroid users, because we just don't know about drugs. Because someone has decided to take drugs. Frankly, the solution to your plateau is take more drugs. You've already decided is take more drugs. Yeah Right, you know you've already decided to take the shortcut.
Speaker 2:Why would you consider more trend. What are you going to do?
Speaker 1:Maybe, Dear God, that stuff sounds awful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sorry, carry on no no fine.
Speaker 1:We found that when people would try and communicate, this one's controversial. When people would email us from their phones, it was very obvious it was always sloppy communication, so I banned customers from using their phones. So you have to agree to not email me from your phone if you're going to be a customer. The frequency of miscommunication with clients and these communication breakdowns were pretty much the only time when someone would leave our service unhappy, and so this was a hedge for happy coaching, but also a hedge against having a bad reputation out there because of communication breakdowns that weren't really our fault. It was because people become incompetent when they're trying to respond to very detailed emails on their phones. So we should put that boundary in there and insisted on it. So the lesson here is when you see a pattern of who you work well with and who you don't, put that as a requirement and don't be afraid to lean in.
Speaker 1:One thing that people say when they go to the coaching page if you want to have a look, ripbodycom slash coaching. Um, if you go on that page, it's. It's not really a sales page, maybe it is, but it's like a look. Thank you for coming, let's see if we're a good fit. We might not be, but probably not actually have a read. This is us. If you're not, no worries, the website, it's all free. Like, have at it. All. Good, um, yeah, uh. And people will say that when they come to the coaching page those who it is a fit for they say it really speaks to them because they're like, oh, I totally get it about the phones. Ah, I deal with this at work all the time, right, you know, they love it, right, um, so, yeah, that that's another thing that I'd suggest to people now in terms of what we're doing different.
Speaker 2:Sorry, yeah, sorry, go on yeah, just one of the things that that I found super interesting. So I've read a bunch of your stuff. Some of what I learned from you I learned through Steph, our mutual friend, who reads it obsessively and really studies everything. And then I'm like Steph, what should I do here? He says, well, what Andy says is, and then I know kind of what to do. But one of the things I think is great is you've and of course I think this, I run a business called data-driven marketing.
Speaker 2:You've got the spreadsheet in which you track like what's your main. You know vertical pull, horizontal pull, whatever and you can actually track from week to week more, more analytically. Is this improving? And I was recently, so I I used that and then I recently was going through it and be like oh, I can see that I've not been making progress here, and it stopped when I changed my workouts in this way.
Speaker 2:So let me go back to this kind of workout and improve the rest here and it's like and then straight away start getting increases again, which is just like oh, and obviously, if you're looking at that, with all that experience, that allows you to make so many more to get these insights for people about, like you know what it is they need to do, whereas a lot of times I've found with calls with people and doing coaching calls, it's like you say something, they respond. You say something else, they respond to that. It's not like the thoughtful, careful right. How do we really make sure this actually adds up and makes sense? And obviously that's only going to work for a certain type of person who will respond to that, but for those people it's perfect yeah, you've got to be ready.
Speaker 1:Like um, we're the opposite of the typical um decisions based on emotion. Um, like, everyone has pretty much gone through that and they might have another layer of. They've been dicked around by the fitness industry for a long time as well, I feel that they have. So they have a similar background to myself and they've got to a certain point and now they're struggling. Now they're ready to actually look and delve into data and use data to make decisions rather than their emotions at any one given moment, because they realize the value in it, because it's not.
Speaker 1:It's not fun, right, it's more fun to pick up a bodybuilding magazine and go, ah, six weeks of gigantic arms, right, oh, that that program looks amazing and then they'll do that and they're all hyped for it. But looking at your spreadsheet and being like, okay, well, where? How are my bicep, how's my arm growth trending right now? Where's my diet been at? How have my stress, sleep, hunger and fatigue levels been? And where's my nutrition? Am I in a calorie surplus? And putting all of that together, do I actually need to change my workout? Or is it just I need to sleep a bit more? I need to eat more protein, because I've been slacking on that recently. I need. I haven't been in a calorie surplus as I was planning, so I have to have that if I'm going to grow. You know it's, it's. It's exactly what you do for funnels, yeah, and courses but for but for physique. It's just. You know what.
Speaker 2:It's not going about it it's not fun going through all of that stuff, unless you're like a data geek, like like me or maybe you. But I'll tell you, what is fun is when your one arm row goes up four weeks in a row dramatically and you're like, oh, this is brilliant. You know, when your back starts getting bigger and you start getting a better shape, like that's fun. But the process of getting there doesn't need to be, you know.
Speaker 1:So for your stuff and my stuff, right, your stuff for everyone listening. You're going to be in business regardless, you're going to put in eight hours tomorrow, eight hours the next day, You're going to have two days off, at your weekend probably and then you're going to repeat the process. If you're going to be sat at your computer anyway, why not spend the four, five, eight, a couple of days to sit down and really dig into the data so that you are confident that you're rowing in the right direction, rather than being slightly off? Because the differences in where you end up is absolutely massive? And it's and and I say that because it's similar for people who hit the gym they, they'll hit the gym five days a week, religiously, for two hours, and then, if you add up the time that they're cooking, getting to and from the gym, show, showering, washing their extra laundry, right, this is a lot of time they're putting into it.
Speaker 1:But the number of people that are actually prepared to sit down and read, right, read the website and be like okay, well, here's what you should track. That'll only take you 10 minutes a week, but no one can be bothered to do it, or very few people. And then here's how you're going to interpret that data and here's like a flow chart slash checklist on how you would interpret that. The number of people that are prepared to do that is really really low, and that's because they have to either be of that engineering mindset or have gone through. They're at the point where their pain of not seeing any progress is now higher than their pain of like ah, I'm going to have to do the boring but necessary thing, right yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, definitely All right, cool. So what's the changes? What's the things that you're trying out now? Are these things that you've tried and they're working, or they're just kind of ideas that you're giving a go at the moment?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've just run a six-week beta test, okay, and so we've got a very good idea of yeah, we're 99, they're on the changes now. Okay, and one of the things that wasn't very good, um, or was a little bit clunky for clients is that they had to at the end of the week, they would enter into their spreadsheet their average weight, their sleep stress, hunger, fatigue levels, their calorie adherence as a percentage. Now, what we're doing, we're switching over to an app and we're pinging them every day to ask them okay, what was your calorie intake today? What's your weight today? How would you rate your sleep stress, hunger, fatigue? So then we can just calculate an average and then put that on a nice series like a dashboard of charts and graphs so that when we're doing their updates for them, we can point out on kind of sloping lines, we can more easily explain their data to them, which is then going to give them more confidence in the decisions that we're saying. It's also going to make it easier for me and the other coaches. So it's a smoother data collection process for the client, which means we get more accurate data, because, let's be real, I'm sure some clients just fudge it when they get to the end of the week and they're like fuck, I haven't done the data Shit, andy's going to be upset, right. But now you know they're pinged every day on their phone. They're on their phone anyway. They're probably going to enter it accurately, right, so that, and the better dashboard so that we can see and show them how they are progressing. Those are the two big things.
Speaker 1:There's one more element to it and that's the ongoing educational content. This is the third prong of the improvements. This is where it used to be onboarding. They would get a series of emails about different areas of what we're going to do, and then it would all be reactive. A client had a question, we'd react. A client had a question, we'd react.
Speaker 1:And what we're now switching to is, once they join, they will get emails throughout the week and the weeks, not every day, but they'll be dripped over time timed with when they start teaching them about the things that they can expect to happen. Telling them about oh, if you've been wondering about this, then you know this just educating them on what they need to expect problems that are likely to arise. But because we've got so much experience, we can time these emails to be freakily um, uh, freakily well timed, let's say so. They think I'm nostradamus, um, because they're like I was just thinking about that and I'm like, yeah, I know you were. I've worked with so many thousands of people. Now I know you were thinking about that that exact time and that's why I put that email in the sequence at that time. Um, so that's also something I'm quite excited about because I know it's it's going to help the customer and also it will help the coaches, because that lifts some of the burden um from them as well nice, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things I noticed in terms of like convenience, of like data collection, is I got a Bluetooth scales and they connect to Apple Health and they also connect to macro factor and so, uh, I use macro factor for tracking my calories and setting my like how much.
Speaker 2:You know how much calories should be eating each week, and because the Bluetooth scales connect with that and I weigh myself every day, then at the end of the week it's like oh, you should be eating this many more calories or this many fewer calories, whatever, automatically. And if I had to weigh myself and then go to my phone and add it, I'm sure I'd do it, but I definitely wouldn't do it every day, and I know this cause I, I measure my waist every day and I forget to enter it about a third of the time at least. So even though I'm like, okay, I went to the effort of measuring and then I forgot to actually go and add it in. So, just that, I love that you're kind of making that easier for people like, how can they get the data to you? Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah. Is there any way for you to get it directly from like macro factor or my fitnessPal or whatever they're using.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so we could do the Apple Health thing via the scaled Bluetooth and then pull that in. We can't pull the Macrofactor data in currently. Myfitnesspal we can, but it's an inferior app. But what we just say to them is have a look at your Macrofactor from yesterday, type in your calories from yesterday, okay, and then we'll do the calculations on.
Speaker 2:You know, we'll then enter that into our own charts and yeah, gotcha All right, I want to change tack a little bit and talk about some of the stuff that you've started doing from a funnel point of view. So you hadn't been doing regular email promotions for promoting coaching and this we had many conversations about and this upset me that you weren't doing this, and I informed you as politely as I was able to. This was upsetting to me and that it was mad that you weren't doing it. And then you sent that you did send an email promotion. So talk me through like what was stopping you before from doing it?
Speaker 1:And then what convinced you eventually to give it a try being super real? It was that I didn't need to, because I had enough people applying for coaching always.
Speaker 1:However, if I wanted to grow the business, which I decided that I did a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, because you know, the first 10 years of this uh, you know, the money that we were making was just and still is. It's. It's it's silly, it's. It's of a level that I don't know if anyone in my family has ever experienced and like. It's more than enough. And so the desire to grow wasn't there.
Speaker 1:But then I think it's a gradual thing, plus being around the right people who are doing good things in business and kind of showing me the way, or being an example of how you can grow without dropping your standards, without betraying your principles train your principles. That plus seeing that and learning that over time, plus a feeling of, okay, well, maybe a fear of if I don't take advantage of this opportunity that's presented before me, when I clearly could grow the business, but I'm not, will I then regret that me? When I clearly could grow the business, but I'm not, will I then regret that? And then, on, I ratchet it up a notch with my guilt and I'll be like would my granddad be proud of that? Would he support that decision, or would he be? Listen, son. I spent every fucking day down a coal mine, which eventually put you in this position.
Speaker 1:Work a little bit harder right now I have no idea if that was true. I never met him.
Speaker 2:Uh, his lungs did him in before he did work in a coal mine though.
Speaker 1:Yes, he did, okay, right and his dad, yeah, um, so I wouldn't know, probably not heard. He was very, very sweet man, um. But I use that as a way of motivating myself and I'm like, okay, we're in disneyland right now. When's disneyland gonna end? Well, let's make the most of disneyland while it's here, let's help more people, let's learn about this stuff. And so I decided to try.
Speaker 1:But it's not just a case now of saying, hey, I've got more coaching spaces because the demand was high enough to fill me up, but it wasn't high enough to fill me, plus another coach up full time. And so now I have to do something different. What I'd previously done was basically have the website and wait wasn't enough and I needed to get smarter with email automations and email campaigns. And so then that brings us to when I ran that promotion, um, this year, um, in in july, really, I took the heart, your system, your pain, agitation, solution, week one, and then gain logic, fear going, going, last chance gone, all with real urgency and real scarcity. The urgency because I ain't taking anyone on after August 1st, and I didn't, and people know that I'm someone who keeps his word. And then scarcity because, well, we do only have a certain number of spots we will be full. We can't take on any more.
Speaker 1:I cap it because otherwise quality could potentially deteriorate. Frankly, it wouldn't, we would just do the work, but it would take away from the other areas my time spent in other areas of the business. So I purposefully cap it at a very comfortable level. Um, so yeah, I, I got all of this from. It wasn't even your website, it was from a podcast conversation that you had um with uh, zach swinehart I think I'm pronouncing that right and I've just listened. I rewound and rewound. I pressed the back 10 seconds so many times.
Speaker 2:Right, I was trying to explain. Uh, there's a girl I'm dating who's in her 20s and I was trying to explain tapes to her and she's just like no, but really no, come on, you weren't around when there were tapes. I'm just like no, seriously, that was like she's like I had one of the old school walkmans, but she meant a cd one, and I'm like yeah, that's not an old school walkman. An old school walkman is a tape. Where it gets chewed up you have to put the barrow in to try and wind the tape back in again. But anyway, sorry, you went back, you rewound.
Speaker 1:Good old days. Your family was flush if you had a Walkman man.
Speaker 2:I had a paper amp.
Speaker 1:So I did it and I followed it and it worked really, really well. I can tell you the numbers. We had 493 coaching page clicks. We had 33 applications. We had 16 sales um evenly split across myself and matt um at the average price point in ltv. So that that's $5,160 per customer On average. It will bring in the sorry, that would be $5,160. It will bring in every two weeks. Ignore that 5,000 number.
Speaker 1:I'm actually not quite sure and I'm not going to do the math now. I'm actually not not quite sure and I'm not going to do the math now, I'm going to carry on talking. So it took three weeks post close to convert everyone who had applied Um cause some people you know they're kind of dragged the heels a little bit, but we want to make sure they're right Um the with an average client retention of 14 billing periods. Um, so that's um cause we bill every two weeks. So that's $72,240. Um, interestingly, the average length of time that people are on the way on the email list of people who came to the coaching was five years. None of those people were new. Two of them were returning clients.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating, isn't it? Because that means that they're on the list, they're thinking about signing up for coaching, or they're considering, or they're open to it, or they're ready for it, and yet they didn't get round to it, even though they could have gone and done it at any point. Right, yeah, because you sent the email and they were like oh shit, yes, I should get around to doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the best part of this is the urgency was real, because I wanted to focus on other things, like I've had a lot to do over the last six months, five months. The scarcity was real. We do have a limited number of spots. A limited number of spots, um, and the clients get better results because they feel more delighted that they have a coaching space and they want to make more of it. Right, yeah, they don't want to waste their time. They're like, oh shit, yeah, I got one great, let's go right yeah, it's just a win like all around.
Speaker 1:Um, so that worked really nicely. Um, what page on your website? If I want to tell people about this? Currently I just link people to my googlecom where I've got it all listed out. What page on your website is the best place to send people to for that to learn about this pain agitation solution?
Speaker 2:it's probably one of our podcast episodes. I'll find the right one and link you to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, put it in the description.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, so that's what we did. And then would you like to know how I made a colossal cock up? Oh, I'd love to Hit me. Wonderful sequence. Okay, all right. So we're coming into the new year, aren't we John?
Speaker 2:So we're coming into the new year, aren't we, John Mm-hmm?
Speaker 1:What do people want to do in the new year, John?
Speaker 2:They want to get fit. New year, new me.
Speaker 1:Hell yeah, hell yeah. It's the best time of year for us, unfortunately, because New Year is actually the biggest. New Year is like Christmas in Japan, so everyone's on holiday. I can't do that, or can I? No, I can't do that, or can I? So what I thought was I'll run this campaign from now until literally this Friday. It was from last week until this Friday, so that would let's put some numbers on this something like the 4th until the 13th of December. I will then close the applications. We'll then vet the applications. We'll then send them a payment link and be like okay, there's 100 of you, there's only 20 spots Go. If you want a security place, go.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, that's not what happened. People applied how many? Eight people applied, oh my god. Okay, over the weekend, and and so I'm like, okay, well, sent two, two warm-up emails now and then like this okay, now you can apply. Eight people applied and I was like what do we carry on with the campaign? Do we send it over monday? What the hell is going on? Oh, my goodness, I've just taken on the coo like he's brilliant posting from another company, but it's like a big, expensive salary. I've totally screwed the pooch here. What have I done. What did I do, john? What did I do wrong?
Speaker 2:well, the thing that strikes me is people want new year new me in january because they've just finished christmas and they're too heavy, and they look in the mirror and they go oh shit, they don't want it in December. They want to think about going to Christmas parties. That's my guess. Is there anything else? That's exactly it, okay.
Speaker 1:It's exactly it, because when I looked at the data of when the sales had been for the new year, it's's in the week before new year, I, right after christmas and the two weeks after new year, they all come in that cluster there and I was trying to lock, I was trying to get people excited before that, when right now, they don't care, they don't care, they're not planning ahead, they're not thinking ahead. They haven't had that moment of looking in the mirror and be like shit, right, they're not thinking about the new year's resolutions. It's just human psychology. I was trying to set up a system that was convenient for us, but swimming uphill because of it, rather than just being like, well, we're gonna have to work New Year. There's a lot that we can still set up, but we're going to have to work over New Year and that's just how it is.
Speaker 1:But if we want to set our business up well for 2025 and help these people when they're ready to be helped, then that's what we need to do. So I shifted. I sent an email to them and said hey, a lot of people have said that they are interested, but they just don't have time right now. So we're going to reopen the coaching applications on the 27th of december. I'll let you know about it then. And then my focus for these next two and a half weeks is just here's how you can binge drink throughout, um, here's how you can drink these next few weeks without gaining fat.
Speaker 1:Right, here's how you can handle these parties.
Speaker 2:Just vomit it back up afterwards and you'll be fine. Two fingers down the throat, no problem at all.
Speaker 1:Oh, no on the 27th, or send them an email oh no, did. Did you get fat? Oh no, well, we can help with that. Um, so, yeah, that just the point being there, like really, though, helpful content, um, pushing out helpful, helpful, helpful content.
Speaker 2:And then, on the 27th thing, going and, by the way, we're open for coaching if you want to lock in your space, nice nice, all right, I think I'm just trying to think through if there's anything else we should cover but I think we might call it a day there um, anything else that you want to provide as like wisdom to people about this, any kind of last thoughts on it?
Speaker 1:when you're doing coaching, think through very carefully what you're going to offer before you offer it. Start with less and you can always build up. But trying to take something away is very hard for people to swallow, because when you do take something away, even if they weren't using it, they didn't really want it. As soon as you take it away, they're like ah, I wanted that, they'll suddenly want that. So when you think of your service that you're putting together for the coaching, just think of all those things that we're talking about regarding communication boundaries, one way of communicating how are you going to set things up? Don't set things up in a way for your ideal week. Set things up in a way where your week is total shit. It's hell. How are you still going to be able to get through that hell week and still service your clients? Well, have redundancies, and if you can do things like that, then you can. Yeah, you can cruise like me for a few years until you decide to build a bit more.
Speaker 2:Let's say that and if someone wants to get ripped and they want your advice, they want some coaching. They're a guy who was what? From 20 to like normally in this kind of 50s, sick of the bodybuilding industry and the supplements. Where do they need to go?
Speaker 1:rippedbodycom right yeah, that's it, rippedbodycom. Um, you'll see, you can click on the coaching button. It's big, you won't miss it. Um, but again, as I say, that's not for everyone, um, and uh, well, it won't be for you for five years. I'll have to nurture you for five years on my email list. Yeah, you might need to work on that. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, please, years on my email list.
Speaker 2:I'm that bad at building trust you might need to work on that bit, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:so yeah, please get on the email list. You'll see that we've got a transformation kickstart bundle there which is free, training programs, nutrition plan and a 15-day course on dialing things in and how not to make the most common scripts that people make. So, yeah, and that's all free, of course.
Speaker 2:Fab, and if you want help with how do you start selling more through email, or you want to get help with how do you figure out whether coaching could be a good add-on for with your business, then hit me up, get in touch with me or someone from my team. You can go to datadrivenmarketingco slash call to book a call. We've helped a bunch of people who've added coaching into their business helped somebody like go from 10,000 a month to 20,000 a month by adding a group coaching program in. Helped dozens of people reach six figures a year. Five to reach seven figures a year. So help dozens of people reach six figures a year. Five to reach seven figures a year. So if you want help with it, just hit us up. Data driven marketingco slash cool. Thanks, andy. So much coming on today. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, john, it's been fun. Thanks, as always, for listening and we'll catch you guys next time.