The Art of Selling Online Courses

$67,500 in 15 Days with This Boring Funnel

• John Ainsworth

Share episode

Send us a text

📧  Want direct help implementing this strategy? Email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.co

In this episode of The Art Of Selling Online Courses, I sit down with my brilliant funnel strategist Josip Belina to break down how we made one of our clients $67,000 from just a 7,000-person email list using a paid webinar funnel. Here's the kicker - nobody bought anything during the actual webinar, but we still got incredible results.

Josip walks you through our entire strategy for this  client, including why we charged people to attend the webinar, how we messed up the Zoom setup (and why it didn't matter), and the email sequence that did all the heavy lifting after the webinar ended. You'll see how we sold a $3,000 product without any sales calls and why sometimes a soft pitch works better than going hard.

This case study is perfect if you're in a niche market or have a premium product that needs more than just a sales page to convert. Josip also shares who shouldn't try this approach and what list size you need to make it worthwhile.

If you want the complete funnel map we used with links to all our resources, just drop me an email at john@datadrivenmarketing.co or message Josip at josip@datadrivenmarketing.co. And if you want our help implementing this for your business, reach out about working with us directly.

🔗 Check out datadrivenmarketing.co/blog for more webinar strategies we've shared over the years.

Speaker 1:

It's such a unique niche. Well, we messed up, so we had about 100 people knocking at our doors throughout the presentation. This was the first promo that went out ever since the client increased the price by about 500 euros. You will normally rarely get 3% to 4% of your list to opt in. The email list was, and is, a bit more than 7,000 people strong, and that's a pretty low number of people to be generating almost 60,000.

Speaker 2:

Very much so, yeah. So today we're going to be talking about how we made this client $59,558 in 15 days with this funnel.

Speaker 1:

We don't offer discounts, we offer special deals. That's a really, really, really good conversion rate. It's about $67,000. I am pretty sure we would be able to double or triple the result. That's what sells the product.

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 Yosip Berlina. Now, yosip and I have worked together for about eight years, something like that. I don't know, I lose track a little bit. Now it's going to be nine. No, it can't be nine. Oh my God. He is an absolute genius with this stuff. He's in charge overall of the funnels for all of our clients. He does incredible work. He manages a whole team who help people to make I think we figured out the other day over $50 million in revenue over the course of running the business. So today we're going to be talking about how we made this client $59,558 in 15 days with this funnel. Osip, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Happy to be here.

Speaker 2:

All right, talk us through what's the structure of the funnel. How did this work?

Speaker 1:

It's a webinar funnel, but a paid webinar funnel. We can call that the front end, and then on the back of that, at the end of the webinar, we focused on an email promotion selling the product. That wasn't really pitched throughout the webinar. I mean the webinar was more of a teach and pitch style, but the pitch was like five minutes. The client isn't that happy about hard selling or selling generally to people live. So what we do is we shift the strategy a bit just to make sure that people attend the webinar and on the back of that we do an email promotion. That's now helped with a more personalized touchpoint in front of that webinar and that's what sells the product.

Speaker 2:

Great, all right, cool. So where should we start in terms of taking people through this?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, let's start with the prep for the webinar itself, right? We used our standard strategy for paid webinars. We sent five emails over a period of five days inviting people to register for that webinar. Now, in order for that to be possible, what you need to do is you need to create a webinar landing page. Now, the client did that before working with us and he had only a checkout page available. So there was no sales page. There was nothing really fancy about it, just a way for people to opt in. We built a sales page, we built a proper checkout page. We introduced an order bump. Now, an order bump is a small product. In our case, it was priced four times higher than the actual webinar that's available at checkout. So we built all of that the standard infrastructure for a webinar. And then we started email promotion towards the list and we started social media campaign. Every day, we would repurpose some of the email content to get people to also go to our sales page and register for that webinar.

Speaker 2:

And how much was the webinar? €27. Okay, so that's why the order bump could be more expensive than that, because at €97, it's still cheap. It's still like a spur-of-the-moment kind of decision about whether to sign up for it. Okay, cool. What numbers can we share with people in terms of how many emails went out? Sorry, how many people did the emails go out to and how many people registered, anything like that?

Speaker 1:

We can share, I think, more or less all of those numbers. So the email list was, and is around 7,000, a bit more than 7,000 people strong.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

And that's a pretty low number of people to be generating almost 60,000. Very much so, yeah, and in dollars it's even more. That's what 70-ish thousand dollars or so, I guess.

Speaker 2:

This was euros, was it?

Speaker 1:

That's euros.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

Now, with that, we were getting a lot of people to opt in, so we had 238 people that actually opted in to watch that webinar. That's a really, really, really good conversion rate. Normally you will not get close to that on a 7,200 people person email list, right? So that's a conversion rate of 3.3%. 3.3% of that list ended up converting. And why is that? How come that's so high?

Speaker 1:

Because of the niche where the client is in, it's a niche where he doesn't really get a lot of competitors and it's a high paying market People who want to learn about that, and we can say what it is. It's the vet dentistry, and there isn't that many vet dentists out there who teach this stuff, so you can allow to charge $3,000, $4,000 for products that are really, really good.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, there's not that many vet dentists who are like doing internet marketing. Like that's like that's different, isn't it? You know that is very niche, okay, cool. So that's like that's different, isn't it? You know, that's that is very niche, okay, cool. So there's not that much competition. People are kind of quite desperate for this. This thing is not a massive audience, but converts great in terms of opt-ins. So how many opt-ins was it again? 238, okay, cool, great. So this many people have opted in. We've had these five emails go out. Can you give people a little bit of an idea of, like, what kind of things are covered in those five emails? We won't have enough time to go into detail, but like, just how have you? How are we promoting the webinar?

Speaker 1:

the first email generally is a, an announcement email, the one way that you would use for announcing pretty much anything that's going to be happening live over the next x amount of time. The second one is generally a sales pitch for the actual event and what the benefits and the features of that event are, and then you circle through that for the next two or three emails, the last email or the last two emails. We actually our plan was to send five On the last day. We ended up sending one more, so we sent six. That's a going going on style. The last 24 hours are generally focused on the urgency and scarcity, so we send six. That's a going going on style. The last 24 hours are generally focused on the urgency and scarcity. So you have a countdown timer on the website and in the emails and you focus on the fact that the time is running out.

Speaker 2:

Got it All right cool, so we've had these people register for the webinar. What's next? What's the next step that happens.

Speaker 1:

The next step is a follow-up towards people that have done so, that have registered. So we had three follow-up emails. One would be a confirmation email and then that's separate. Basically, so we would have a confirmation email and then three follow-up emails 24 hours, one hour and 15 minutes before the webinar took place to get to attend just to remind people it's happening and get them along.

Speaker 2:

Is there anything clever in there? Is it just saying don't forget, the webinar is in 24 hours, or is it more detailed than that?

Speaker 1:

It can be more detailed, but we opted in for a simple strategy of just reminding people, because it's so niche and people wanted to learn from it. Plus it's paid. The attendance rate is going to be generally higher than 75% anyway.

Speaker 2:

Okay, nice, and so how much time did it take to prep for the webinar? Was that something that he's already used to teaching, or was this a take a lot of work to build out the webinar? How'd this go?

Speaker 1:

So the client is already familiar with the topic and he presented it on a couple occasions prior to this. However, the only change was us helping him with the pitch, and it was a very soft pitch five to ten minutes depending on the version that he wanted to do with a very soft call to action button followed by a q? A with a final pitch at the end gotcha.

Speaker 2:

Then how many people bought straight away? How'd that kind of go? Unfortunately no one.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so no, so soft pitch and then no one bought straight away okay and no one bought straight away, and the reason for that was probably because, uh, the client didn't really want to push people to do the action right there. And then, at the end of that process, 16 people bought out of 100 people who attended. Now, why 100 people? And I said that there was 238 registrants. Well, we messed up. We did not upgrade the Zoom room to accommodate all almost 250 people, so it was capped at 100. So we had about 100 people knocking at our doors throughout the presentation and in order to offset that, we did another webinar a week after and after all of that, we got 16 sales, got it okay, cool how many of the sales came from the webinars.

Speaker 2:

I know you said nobody straight away. Did many come from the second webinar, or was it all from the email follow-up or like how did that all kind of go everything?

Speaker 1:

came from the email follow-up hmm, and we used our standard approach for email promotions. So gain logic, fear FAQ, future proof, followed by going going on to focus on the urgency and scarcity and was that just going out to the 230 people?

Speaker 2:

was that going out to the whole list?

Speaker 1:

That was only to the 238 people.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. Got it. And why is that? Why not run the promo to the whole list?

Speaker 1:

Because we focused on the webinar replay as well, and since it was paid, we didn't want people to get the option to see that for free. And offering both things at the same time might be too confusing.

Speaker 2:

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So we've got five emails that go out pointing people to a landing page. The landing page has got an order bump. How much money came in from just the paid webinar? Then it was 238 people for $37 or $27 or something like that. You said right, $27,.

Speaker 1:

Let's say about 7,500.

Speaker 2:

Okay, cool. And then the other 52,000 is from or there's a little bit from the order bump, and then the other 52,000 is from the main product. So, okay, so that must have been quite expensive then. How much was that?

Speaker 1:

3,000 euro, Got it Okay, and this was the first promo that went out ever since the client increased the price by about 500 euro. So we don't offer discounts, we offer special deals and in this instance, there was a physical kit for vet dentistry that the client introduced as a thing that people can get that's valued at around 500 euro and, yeah, people liked that idea quite a bit now normally.

Speaker 2:

So this wasn't with sales calls or personal follow-up or anything right. People just buy and direct. Normally we might say to people you can't go above maybe $1,500 or $2,000 as a price point for selling without a sales call. Just from the webinar it sounds like this niche is a little bit different. First of all, would you say that's still fair For most people if they're selling stuff via webinar. Is that fair as a maximum price point?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, especially without sales calls. It's almost impossible these days now. The reason why it's possible here is because it's such a unique niche. If you are in a niche market where you don't get that much competition and you actually provide a lot of value and people like you, like what you do, like what you tell them, if you share free content with them and that free content is good, you are gonna get a certain number of people. If they have money that they're gonna buy from you because this is a.

Speaker 1:

This is a niche where people spend five thousand euro to travel from one part of Europe to another part of Europe learn from someone in person for three days. They also have to plan the trip, pay for accommodation, so they are no strangers to spending money on career advancement. This because it's unique. You can allow yourself to do that. Now what that means for potential results at this stage the client doesn't want to do a lot of the calls or sell by chat at all, but if we were to do that, I am pretty sure we would be able to double or triple the results the next time we do something similar like that.

Speaker 2:

If you added in sales calls and sell by chat.

Speaker 1:

Yes. So if we were to reach out to all 238 registrants or if we focused on attendees alone let's say there is 1800, there is 180 attendees if we reached out to them individually, personally, via loom video or outreach or any sort of sales outreach, I'm pretty sure we would be able to double the result.

Speaker 2:

Interesting, and is he interested in that? Or is that like no, that's too much, like hard work, or you know what's the balance for him.

Speaker 1:

For now maybe a bit too much.

Speaker 2:

But long term we might do it for him. Interesting, okay, cool. So let's say somebody wants to duplicate this. What kind of people would, and what kind of email list size and what kind of price products would it make sense for different people to duplicate this model and who shouldn't be doing this?

Speaker 1:

So if you are in a B2C market offering inexpensive products, this is not for you.

Speaker 2:

What if you were in B2C offering something inexpensive, but you had a premium offer that you wanted to upsell people Like? I don't know. Maybe there's a package that includes coaching or there's a bundle of all of your stuff together. Could that work?

Speaker 1:

Yes, but in my experience, people that are offering stuff for maybe up to $100, $150 tend to take a lot of time to prep a product like that. So that's probably not the first thing someone in that position would do. However, if you already have something, then definitely yes, this would work.

Speaker 2:

Okay, cool. So if you've got a premium product that needs you've already got that and it needs a bit more selling than you can do through just email and a sales page, then having a paid webinar in there as well could make sense and could be a good fit. Is that fair?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I generally suggest, if not a webinar, then a live on social media. That increases the results, especially during announcement or closeout stages of a promo.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha, okay cool, who else? Who else would it be a good fit for? You mentioned that's inexpensive B2C, so who's the other ones you're thinking about?

Speaker 1:

If you have a niche market. Definitely that would be one of my first priorities to have in place A webinar. If you can be in front of a niche audience that already likes you and looks at you as sort of an authority figure in the space, whatever that space might be, whether it's digital marketing or vet dentistry or carpentry if you have the authority being in front of people, allowing them to interact with you and ask you questions, goes a long way okay then.

Speaker 2:

So niche market there's definitely a plus to it, is definitely a possibility to it. There's definitely a possibility. If you have a more premium product rather than trying to sell just something cheaper, then this potentially is a big fit. Email list size is that a consideration? This guy only had 7,000, you said as the whole email list, which is fascinating, right, but I guess other times that might be a factor as to how big the email list is. Other times that might be a factor as to how big the email list is yes, definitely.

Speaker 1:

You will normally rarely get 3% to 4% of your list to opt in, and this was a paid webinar. So if you're doing a free or a paid webinar, aim at getting 0.5% to maybe 1% of that list to sign up. I generally say if you can get 30 people to register and 10 people to attend, it's worth doing, because if it's such a niche market and you are smaller, those five sales that you can make up all of that generally help quite a bit in your uh flow yeah, I think it's like.

Speaker 2:

I think it's a kind of balance, isn't it, between a few things, because it's more work to do the webinar but it's providing loads of value. If you're doing a pay, you have to look at well how many people you're going to have registered for. It's going to feel depressing if you have like four people register and like one attend and they drop out partway through. Like that might be oh God, is that worth it? But then maybe if you're doing it as a something for free that you're going to share with more people. So there of a balancing act there between a couple of things.

Speaker 2:

But I'm a massive fan of doing webinars like they hugely increase the engagement you have for the audience. When someone's spending an hour listening to you, like how much time do people spend reading your emails? Like I don't know. Two or three minutes, then they move on to the next one if you're lucky, right. Whereas with the webinar you've got someone's attention for an hour to like take them through stuff, explain things, get their trust, show, show your authority and then actually have them paying attention to your pitch as well at the end of it. Okay, so if somebody is like yeah, I'm on board. I want to do this. I think this seems like a good fit. What would be like the next step for them? Is there other resources we should be pointing them to that we've got, or like any other podcast episodes or what? Where should someone get started with this?

Speaker 1:

and we have a lot of blog posts about webinars. Okay, we have at least three or four blog posts about webinars we have pushed over the last couple years, so that's definitely a go-to place. And then, and you know, there are a lot of models that you can base your webinar on. You can go to Laura Way or Russell Brunson or Amy Porterfield and a lot of other people. I suggest a simple teach and pitch. Teach them a concept. You're already a course creator, you're already a teacher. Teach them a concept that you are familiar with. And then the pitch doesn't have to be perfect. Just tell them that there is an offer at the back of this. It's not going to be perfect. You're not going to maximize your conversions, but you're going to get into the mindset of of okay, it is okay for me to spend an hour talking about a concept and then pitching something.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people struggle with that selling bit, so that eases you into the idea of, okay, I can sell shit. That's where you start Nice, and sell shit. That's where we start.

Speaker 2:

Nice, okay, cool. We have got quite a few. I'm looking through the blog now and there actually is quite a lot about webinars. We've got one called Five Tips to Promote Webinar and Increase Attendance. Twelve Webinar Metrics to Measure and Improve your ROI. How to Write a Webinar Script and Webinar Outline Template. That's probably too complex for this, isn't it? Because we just want the teach and pitch webinar, which is teach a topic you already know, rather than having to have the full, perfect webinar system. Uh, the best time for webinars. And then I think there's probably some others as well. So if you go to data-drivenmarketingco slash blogs, then you're going to be able to search through there and find all of that info about about webinars. So that's cool. Okay, is that it? Is that the next step for people to take if that, if they think this sounds like a good fit for them?

Speaker 1:

I think. So well, you can always email us, yeah yeah, I tell you what.

Speaker 2:

Actually, if you email me, if you want like a funnel map of everything that we've just laid out for you with links to different resources from in that, just drop me an email, john at data driven marketingco. Or you could message yosip yosip is j-o-s-i-p at data driven marketingco and ask us for that and we will put that together and send that over to you, and so that would be like a funnel map showing each of the steps that we've just gone through, describing it and then linking to different resources that we've got. That will help you with those different setting up, those different steps. And if you just want to help with it, if you're like, oh no, that's still too complicated, can you guys just help me with this more directly, then that's what we're here for. Just drop us an email and we'll be happy to talk to you about how we can kind of coach you through it and give you resources in our paid program as well. All right, cool, cool.

Speaker 2:

Anything else we need to leave people with on this one and that should be it sweet, all right, thank you very much, yosip for coming on. Appreciate you saying your wisdom. This is an awesome case study. I absolutely love this and I loved as well that I found out part way through that we actually made them an extra 20 more than I thought we had done. Um, because it's actually that's in euros rather than, uh, I'm just doing that in usd. It's about 67 000. If you enjoyed the episode and you want to get more like this, then hit subscribe wherever you have been listening or watching and drop me an email or go check out those other blog posts in order to get those other resources. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you next time.