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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
I Made Him $100K in 7 Days with This Funnel
🔗 Download our FREE Resources: https://datadrivenmarketing.co/resources/
In this episode, funnel expert Josip Belina pulls back the curtain on the EXACT strategy that made one client a whopping $111,000 in just 7 days. No fluff, no complicated tactics – just a simple 8-email sequence that flat-out works.
Want to know why most course creators leave money on the table? Josip reveals the psychology behind his gain-logic-fear email framework that turns subscribers into eager buyers. He even shares his "controversial" secret of keeping the cart open 24 hours after the deadline (which sneakily brings in an extra 10% of sales).
From crafting emails that people actually want to read to building sales pages that convert like crazy, this episode is basically a masterclass in funnel building. If you're tired of launching to crickets and want a proven system you can copy right away, don't miss this one. The best part? It all worked with just a 27,000-person email list!
A lot of people might think that at that point they are taking advantage of you. You don't really care, you are there only to get that revenue. If I don't do the thing, what other problems am I going to have? How is that going to spiral into something that's going to be more of a burden long term than it is right now.
Speaker 2:Yosep is a funnel genius. He's in charge of funnels for all of our clients. In total, the funnels he's built have made our clients over $33 million.
Speaker 1:You start following a structure. This time next year you will have a promotion. Imagine how that's going to feel like, how that's going to change the revenue that you're getting. That's the basic thing. It's your job.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Josip Berlina. Today, we're going to be talking about a funnel we built for a client that made him $111,000 in seven days. All the steps in the funnel, how we built it and how you can copy it, Josip welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Happy to be here again.
Speaker 2:So what were the steps in this funnel?
Speaker 1:Can you talk us through it? So, standard seven-day funnel where we do email promotions. Basically, you build a funnel, it has a sales page, you have a checkout page with an order bump and an upsell behind that with a simple thank you page and then you have emails. So we sent eight emails over a period of seven days. We followed our standard gain logic, fear FAQ, future proof into going going gone strategy.
Speaker 2:Nice, okay, so can you talk us through each of those steps please? So what is the gain? Logic fear part of the sequence.
Speaker 1:So you basically start with an email promo where you announce the offer. The gain email, also called the announcement email, is the first email in a promo series where you want to introduce the offer and you want to emphasize that the promotion has started. You normally do a discount there. If people know what the offer is, they will know that this is a pretty good deal. Then the logic email follows, which is an email that aims at all the reasons why someone should buy it that are not that emotional. Generally, people buy because of emotion. However, with a logic email, you want to emphasize the fact that if, by doing the course, if by using the elements that you can learn from something, that you teach how that can benefit in the long run making money angle or having more time angle, often used Basically you steer clear from the emotional side of why people buy and you show okay, these are the hard facts.
Speaker 1:In the fear email, you often target the fear of either missing out on the offer or fear of not doing the thing, which is something that I like to do more. I'm basically focusing on what's going to happen, how your life is going to be, if you pass this offer. So you target the emotional side of people where, if I don't do the thing, what other problems am I going to have? How is that going to spiral into something that's going to be more of a burden long term than it is right now? So first one is basically an announcement. The second one is focused more on people that are logical and driven by numbers or facts, and the third one is then focused on people who are driven more by emotion or the fear of losing something rather than gaining.
Speaker 2:All right, cool. So we've got the gain email which announces it. We've got the logic email, which uses facts, statistics, data, information for people who think in that way. And then we've got the fear email, which is talking about the fear of missing out. So the fear of if I don't do this, if I don't get this course, I don't learn this skill, I don't achieve this thing, what is my life going to be like as a result? It'd be better if I went ahead and actually got this now. Is that right?
Speaker 1:yes, in a, in a simplified way, that's.
Speaker 2:That's, that's the basic concept All right, cool, All right. So which emails was next? It was future casting and FAQ, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, so we call it an FAQ and then the other one is a future proof. Faq is reasonably simple and straightforward. If you have a well-written sales page, you should already have the FAQ section on that sales page so you can just reuse that. Basically, people look for certain patterns in a sales page, faq being one of them. So they will often ask themselves so who else has done this? Is this for me? Is there going to be a refund? How much time do I have to get it? Now, all of that is explained throughout the sales page, but the FAQ kind of summarizes that into one and people can interact. If you can interact that FAQ section, people can then basically decide what they want to read by themselves at that point and then just ponder on the idea a bit more. That's basically what the email is for trying to get people to understand the offer before you send them to the main sales page and then subsequently to the checkout page and then the future proof or the future cost email.
Speaker 1:We focus more on the long-term benefit and how the emotional journey is going to look like over the next one day, seven days, 14 days a month, three months, six months a year, basically how your life is going to be different if you are implementing this. For example, for our course creators, it could be okay. You have an email list. You're not sure what to do with those leads that are getting onto your list If you start following a structure where you first warm them up and then regularly offer something to them. This time next year you will have done 12 promotions. If you do one a month, Imagine how that's going to feel like or how that's going to change the revenue that you're getting, so focusing basically on something that people want.
Speaker 2:Got it All right. So FAQ email is just all of the questions that somebody might ask. Now. If I'm listening to this, I would think well, that sounds like a really boring long email. So what's the answer to people who are concerned about that?
Speaker 1:Some emails are longer, some emails are shorter. Basically, you want to make sure that you give people all the information. We never assume that every person that reads our email is going to be the right person for that particular email. That's why we do eight emails over a period of seven days. Some people will connect more with a gain idea. Some people will connect more with a fear. Some people will just want straight facts. Hence the logic one. Some people will want to imagine themselves and build a picture in their mind as to what's going to happen over a period of like a lot of time. Some people just want straight facts, done in a simple way. So what if I don't like it? What's going to happen? How many people have done this before me? How do I get started? Just simple stuff like that. That's why you know it's not a single email. It's a whole promotional element that gets the people to buy. That's just one of the triggers that's going to push them over the edge.
Speaker 2:I think this is fascinating because most people, when they see long form sales pages with lots of different elements in it, or they see all of these emails that are going out over the course of a week, they're like, well, surely nobody's going to read all of those. It's like, yeah, that's right, probably almost no one is going to read all of the emails and almost nobody is going to read all of the sales page. But you're writing for an email list of thousands of people and all these people think differently and they have different things that they need to know or different ways that their brains work. And so we're trying to cover all of those angles through this email promotion and through the sales page. And so we've got here that gain.
Speaker 2:Logic, fear, I think, is a perfect example of that. You've got an announcement and then you've got logic and then you've got emotion. So it's like the people some people you know everyone uses a certain amount of logic, right, and a certain amount of emotion. But some people are much more emotional, so they need the emotion based email is that's the way they're going to think about this. And some people are much more logical and they need that. And then some people have got questions, but no one's going to read all of the answers to all of the questions, but they'll read the answer to the question that's relevant to them. They've everyone's got a question, probably, and so that answer is somewhere in that email. So is there anything that we do to make it easy for people to find the right question, because I presumably this email could be like really long, like 2000 words or something like that. So do we have like a hyperlinked within the email? Is that possible? Or if people got to go to scroll through it, how does that work?
Speaker 1:We don't. We don't do any fancy stuff there. It's a simple email. You have to scroll through it. The questions are more in your face so it's easy for you to read the question first. We make sure we emphasize that with designing the email, so the questions are very much highlighted. However, you have to scroll through the entire email.
Speaker 1:You know people often think that there is a fancy way to do I don't know what. There is no need to do that. Just give them. Give people all the information and emphasize the ones that you want them to see first, and then you are. You know, if someone is not engaged, if someone is not really into what you are selling, they're not going to buy.
Speaker 1:There is, there are tactics that can make them break the habit of either just scrolling or just being in the moment, but that's less relevant than trying to focus on the people that are actually right there in the right place in the right time, also want to give you their attention, to just make sure to explain everything properly. That should work well enough. Most people don't do the basic stuff well, so you know you don't have to start worrying about subliminal messaging and images that you use and stuff like that we had clients who wanted that stuff. What color are we going to use in the back end of this email to make it subliminally more appealing for people to read it? Like what that's going to change what? Instead of 25 people, 26 are going to read the email. That's not going to. That's not a thing to do. Make the basic stuff first, make them good, and then track your KPIs and then try to make it better. You know simple is always the best.
Speaker 2:I think the thing with. Everyone knows the 80-20 rule right. Everyone knows that you should be doing the things that think the thing with. Everyone knows the 80 20 rule right. Everyone knows that you should be doing the things that make the biggest difference. But I think people forget that the things that make the biggest difference is the basics. It's like the fundamentals. It's doing it right, like in basketball.
Speaker 2:It's like your footwork and how well can you shoot? It's like, but footwork boring, like who wants to work on your footwork? Nobody wants to work on that. You want to do clever, interesting, fun, exciting things. It's like you know what works in? Like boxing is a jab, like in mixed martial arts. I've been watching a lot of ufc recently and it's like, just if you've got a really good jab that makes a massive difference. It's just like, well, that's not exciting. What about the spinning hook kick, I want to catch someone with a spinning. It's like, ah, well, you know, bad luck, that's not the thing that really works. And here it's like it's not. What color is the button? It's not, what color is the background color? It's not. It's like this stuff that we're going through. This is the fundamentals.
Speaker 1:This is the basics we get a lot of clients that come to us and are like so I have this email list of 34 000 people. I've gathered it over the last year or so. Uh, okay, so how many emails are you sending to them? Oh, I've never sent an email. That's the basic thing. If you were to send an email that says, hey guys, I have this offer here, it's about x, click here to buy it, you would get buyers. That's better than trying to reinvent the the wheel of how the email is the basics first.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's get back to the next one was the. That you mentioned was the future proofing. So I think this one's super interesting because it's about trying to help someone imagine what their future is emotional future is going to be like if they make this decision to get this thing or if they don't. Do we talk to people actually in that email about if you don't get it, here's where you might be, or do we just talk about if you get this, here's where you might be and what you might be feeling?
Speaker 1:We don't focus on the negative element and the fear in that email. We just focus on them imagining the positive aspect of the outcome can you give like to bring this to life for people?
Speaker 2:can you give any kind of example of like? Three months later you might be feeling this about you.
Speaker 1:Know course, topic of your choice yeah, so for us people that's also often sending email promotions that's I think the easiest one for us.
Speaker 1:People are either afraid that they're gonna, that their list is going to want to unsubscribe, that they're going to hate them because they are super salesy and spammy and I don't know what. So imagining a different outcome, where you keep emailing your list every month and then they actually wait for the next promo to happen, is where you want them to be at and then you to them to understand why they think which is a false belief why they think you know their email list is gonna want to unsubscribe and people are gonna hate them. A lot of people have social media followings. If you put content out on social media, that's basically free content. So if someone doesn't like if they're already in your email list, if they don't like it, then they can learn a lot from your free content on social media. Anyway, they might as well unsubscribe. Nothing is going to happen. But the people that stay on the list imagine how much you're helping them with sending those promotions out, offering them Basically we talked about this a few times it's almost like it's your job to put good quality content and offers in front of them, because they are looking at you for inspiration and for guidance.
Speaker 1:You need to teach them what they want to learn. Yes, you have to be running a business. Obviously you want them to pay for it as well, but if you get into that rhythm, you make more money. Your audience loves you more because you are giving them more value than you used to and you're happier because of it. Beautiful.
Speaker 2:All right, cool, so let's move on. We've still got the funnel pages coming up, so the sales page and the checkout page, but let's carry on with the emails We've got.
Speaker 1:The next ones were going, going, gone Is that right, and that's the only very heavy sales element in this entire email promotion. Now John and I have this saying that your free content should help more people than your paid content ever will. I don't think it's ours, I think we heard it somewhere, but basically the goal is to help a lot of people. Your content, even your warm-up content or your promotional content, should also be helpful. It's not just supposed to be salesy and pushy. It's not like you go there and tell people, hey, go there, buy my stuff.
Speaker 1:The logic email gives them value. The fear email gives them value. Whether it's breaking an emotional barrier or a false belief or something like a small tip that you give them, everything has value. So at the end of a lifecycle of a lead that might be six months a year, who knows how long they might buy because of an email promo that happened three months ago, because they learned a useful tip, implemented it. Now you hit them again with a promo and now they buy, but basically, basically the only sales a bit is the going going on afterwards, right, so that's the last two days of a campaign going email number one that emphasizes the idea of a countdown timer running out, or this much today, this much tomorrow, if you have a discount, $97 today, $297 tomorrow.
Speaker 1:A subject line. So those two emails, those three emails, focus on the urgency and scarcity of the offer going away, emphasize the countdown timer. And then we often send two emails on the last day going and gone, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The last chance email is super simple and straightforward Just a reminder, a couple sentences with a call to action, but then a countdown timer, just reminding people that the offer is going to go away. Now, when that ends, there is another strategy that I'm going to talk about a bit later. But yeah, what's next?
Speaker 2:So I just want to let everybody know. If you want to get hold of a copy of this, you want to see what actually goes out in these emails, the structure of it. Go to datadrivenmark, marketingco slash resources and download the it says two secret, high performing email templates and that's going to give you the structure of this whole. Um, all these emails, data driven, marketingco slash resources, and you can download that. All right, cool. So what's, uh? What's next step? Where do we just get to?
Speaker 1:So going on, when that ends, the countdown timer usually hits zero around midnight.
Speaker 1:There is a strategy we implement at the end of a promo, which is we'll leave the cart open for an additional 24 hours and what's going to happen is, if you close the cart on a Sunday at midnight, a lot of people will have read the emails on Monday morning and when they click through they will see the countdown timer being at zero, but they will still be able to opt in and get the offer.
Speaker 1:A lot of people might think that at that point they are taking advantage of you. We usually get about 10% of the results happening in the 24 hours after the promo ends and you don't really care. You are there only to get that revenue with that promo. So you'll see a big spike at the end of a campaign with a going going on email sequence. Maybe even 50, 60% of the results are going to come in those last two days and then 10% extra is going to come if you leave that cart open and you allow people to buy. So don't, if you're using something like deadline funnels, don't ever redirect to the offer expired. Just leave the countdown timer at zero and allow people to buy and then manually switch it to the following day I had something the other day I bought that there'd been an email.
Speaker 2:I couldn't find the link to buy it and there'd been an email in my inbox. I went back and searched through my emails and I found it and it linked to an option to buy this thing and it was at a discount. On the page with from the email and I felt really naughty like because it was from ages ago. Right, it was from like three months ago, but they'd never like closed that page that it linked to. So I bought this offer at a discount and I was fucking delighted to be going and getting it Now. Would I have paid full price? And did they miss out there? I guess so, but it's like it gives you that just like little frisson of danger just buying something when it's like, oh, oh, I'm not meant to be doing this, but I got it at a special discount right here. All right, cool.
Speaker 2:So we've gone through the email campaign, right, we've got to go and go and go on. We've got the deadline has run out. We've got the 24 hours still going after that. What's the pages in the funnel? You mentioned these right at the beginning, but can you explain the first one, the sales page?
Speaker 1:So the main sales page, following all the important elements that a sales page has to have. I'm not going to name all of them. There is a separate episode on that.
Speaker 2:But do you think you could on top of my head?
Speaker 1:yeah, how many things you could do from the top of your head, let's see. So you need to have a good headline, obviously. Then you need to have a good vsl and a sub headline. That's top three elements, and then there is an eyebrow headline on top of that, above the fold section. You want to have urgency and scarcity available as well, which is like a countdown timer. Then you want to have a money bag guarantee and then about your instructor and then a pain agitate solution element to the copy. Then you want to have an FAQ section where you'll make sure that people can see everything that there is. Then you want testimonials and then features and then benefits, so explaining those features and benefits when it comes to design, it needs to be super clear, but it's not one of those 15 things. And then what else? Like a summary at the very bottom of that. You need to make sure that everything is clearly listed, and I probably missed a couple CTA, couple cta.
Speaker 2:Yeah, main cta definitely, yeah, so we're missing that. That's 14. Now we've got one left. Oh, my god, yeah, we have the summary. The faqs guarantee, uh, features, benefits, meet the instructor. Oh, a summary, like a summary about the whole. Uh, what's actually in the course?
Speaker 1:Yeah, module sections basically, and I think that's it.
Speaker 2:There you go. That's the 15 elements. All right, cool, if you want that listed out, we actually have that in a free PDF. If you go to datadrivenmarketingcouk resources, it's called 15 elements Every optimized sales page must have. You can download it from that page.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we've got all that. Sounds like a lot. It's like, who's going to read all of that? Nobody, but everybody wants to read. Some needs some of that information.
Speaker 2:So each of those sections has its own subheadings. To kind of stop somebody like frequently asked questions, right, if I've got a question, I'm going to go to that, I'm going to scroll, I'm going to see that section Everybody needs to know about, either maybe the features or the benefits or like and probably they want a bit of both, and there's like obviously a lot of nuance to each element of this. But this is not a terribly complicated funnel, right. It's just like people sometimes think that to make a lot of money you have to have this really complex funnel with all these moving parts. This is emails, and every one of those emails you mentioned is pointing people to this sales page and it's got this standard kind of structure to it and then there's the checkout page and then that's like there is an order bump, there is an upsell, but like this is the bulk of it, these two pages here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and particularly during this promo, our order bumps and upsells didn't actually perform that well. It was one of the first promos we did for the client, so we made maybe 7% or 8% of revenue from upsells and order bumps. We normally expect 30%. So you know the basic bit a good email promotion and a good sales page is more than enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great, okay, cool. So we've got the sales page. We've mentioned the checkout page. What details do people need to know about the checkout page?
Speaker 1:I have a summary of the offer. If you can make sure to have trust badges, make sure to have a simple enough process with not a lot of moving parts, not a lot of a lot of areas to fill and not a lot of forms. In an ideal world, name, email and card information is more than enough, and then obviously have an order bump, is it?
Speaker 2:that a lot of checkout pages like ask for your address and they want to know the name of your favorite ice cream, and you know like they ask all of these ridiculous extra questions what? What is that for? Why they do that?
Speaker 1:how do you address?
Speaker 2:bit is important for taxes, but everything else is more or less not necessary I saw something the other day where I wanted to check out and they asked me to set up a password, like to buy a thing. And I'm like that, why? Like some people will definitely give up at this point because it's just like, oh, it's a pain, that's a pain. Why do you need this? Why do you need me to set this up? I had one where you had to set up a password and then go to your email and check the email and get, click the link to verify it before you're allowed to give them money, and I was like, are you guys against making money? You know it's like what is this? Why?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we recently had a client that had like a seven or eight step process, a survey process, before they got to the final checkout and then before that you had to create an account. So it's like nine steps where people fall off Brutal.
Speaker 2:All right, cool. So we've got the sales page. We've got this 15 elements. If people want the list of those again, they can either rewind back and listen to that bit again or go to datadrivenmarketingcosources. We've got the checkout page, and on the checkout page and on the checkout page, we actually did have an order bump. Can you explain to everybody what an order bump is, even though in this case it didn't actually make that much money?
Speaker 1:yeah, so an order bump is a lower priced offer that you can tick in order to add it to your checkout to make the cart value a bit higher. You normally expect about one third of people to take you up on that offer got it.
Speaker 2:And then what's an upsell?
Speaker 1:And then upsell is then what happens immediately after you've already checked out.
Speaker 1:So for the order bump you still did not enter your credit card information, but for the upsell we have your card and file. Basically, with just one click we can charge your card again to sell you something else. So an upsell is a continuation offer, a logical next step that can make the main offer that you bought either better or an extra thing to that offer that goes well with it. So the most important thing is that those two offers are aligned and there is a tactic as to how to create that upsell page. But in a nutshell, have a good headline, have a good VSL and a call to action button. You don't even have to have all the other elements below that. A good headline, a callback to the step before basically saying hey, thank you for buying the thing that you bought before Because you did that. Here is a special offer and then a call to action button that has a timely, so you have 15 minutes, half an hour, to take you up on that to the offer that's.
Speaker 2:It also increases the average order value one thing I realized we didn't explain for anybody who doesn't know what's a vsl short video three to five minutes explaining the offer. Yeah, fab, all right, cool and that's basically it. That that's the funnel we built for this client and that made him like $111,000 in seven days. Size was his email list.
Speaker 1:I actually have that here in the KPIs. The email list at that point was 27,704 people strong.
Speaker 2:And what price was the product that he was selling.
Speaker 1:The price of the product was around $250, I think $247.
Speaker 2:When it was discounted. When it was discounted, yes, correct, got it All right, cool, perfect, all right. So there you go. That is the funnel that we built built very simple, straightforward, fun. You just have to do the apps, the basics of it, incredibly well or as well as you can, and that's what made this client 111 000 from an email list of what did you say?
Speaker 2:27 000 people 27 and a half yeah yeah, perfect, all right, and if you want to get hold of any of the resources that I mentioned, go to datadrivenmarketingco slash resources. You can download the summary of those email promotions and you can get the outline of the sales page as well. Yosef, thanks so much for coming on and explaining all of this to the audience. Sure happy to do so Great stuff. Thanks so much for coming on and explaining all of this to the audience. Sure Happy to do so, great stuff. Thanks, as always, for listening. We really appreciate you and we will see you next time.