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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
Meet the Man Teaching 500,000 People Chinese Online
Ken Dai and his business partner started Chinese Zero to Hero with a simple problem: they couldn't find structured Chinese courses online. So they decided to create their own. What happened next is remarkable.
In just a few years, this tiny team built a language learning platform with 70,000 students (14,000 paying), 500,000+ social media followers, and consistent revenue growth - all without venture capital funding.
Ken reveals why they created over 1,000 videos in just 2 years, the surprising truth about audience size vs. actual conversions, and how aligning content with curriculum changed everything. He also shares his counter-intuitive approach to social media that actually works and why great content beats great marketing every time.
Whether you're building an online course, growing a content business, or struggling to convert your audience into customers, Ken's insights will change how you think about content strategy and student acquisition.
Get free resources mentioned in this episode: data-driven-marketing.co/resources
Learn Chinese with Ken: www.chinesezerotohero.com
We spent two years making over a thousand videos. We have, in total, 70,000 students.
Speaker 2:Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just stop a second. You did what. Ken is the co-founder of Chinese Zero to Hero. They're an online course platform that has helped tens of thousands of learners around the world master Mandarin Chinese, especially through the official HSK curriculum. But not only that. They have got millions of people watching their stuff on social media. They've got over 500,000 people following them on social media. He's got over 70,000 students. No venture capital, just marketing, consistency and solid course design. They've built a lot of trust with their learners and they've got a really smart content strategy that we're going to get into Now. Today we're going to talk about why great content beats great marketing, why audience size doesn't matter and why to align your content with your curriculum. Ken, welcome to the show. Hello, thank you for having me, so I kind of mentioned it briefly, but could you just explain to everybody what is it that you're teaching people and what's different than how they might be learning it somewhere else?
Speaker 1:So we started Chinese Zero to Hero back in 2016, end of 2016. And we were struggling to find structured Chinese courses at the time and we knew some people who were studying for the HSK. Hsk is basically like a standardized curriculum in China. It's kind of like for English there's IELTS right or TOEFL. Hsk is basically that, but for Chinese. So there's a lot of people who are learning HSK or trying to pass HSK exams. There are six exams or six levels, because they need those to pass those exams to, for example, get into a university in China or go to China to work. So those are pretty important exams to pass if you want to live in China or even visit China. So we couldn't find any structured courses like that online, so then we decided to make it ourselves. So this was back in 2017, 2018. We spent two years making over a thousand videos covering the entire.
Speaker 2:HSK curriculum Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just stop a second. You did what In two years? Yeah, we spent almost two years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there's a lot of lessons in HSK. Just think from HSK 1 to 6. If you can pass HSK 6, that's like a very high level of chinese not many people can. Not many learners can reach that level. If they do, it would take them many, many years like five to ten years to reach that level so how did you make?
Speaker 2:you said about two years and you made a thousand videos. So this is your, is the content for in the course, or this is content for, like, social media and stuff like that?
Speaker 1:this is only the course, so okay, um, you know there are. We follow the textbooks because it's just easier for us to follow a structure that's already built by the, the chinese ministry of education. So it's official. So they have these textbooks, standardized textbooks, and we just follow these textbooks and build lessons on top of that. So that took us almost two years, 2017 and 2018 500.
Speaker 1:Then again, we're a very small team we're a very small team so that took us a long time. But if we had more money back then or more people helping us, then it would take a much shorter time still that's a massive amount of content to have made.
Speaker 2:so you were doing that's more than one piece a day, and if you did like, if you're working five days a week on it, that's like two videos a day. So how was that working? What were you doing? Was it you and your business partner was splitting it? Were you doing this stuff together, Like just filming, editing, a lot of editing?
Speaker 1:because I do have a background in video work, so that's what I was mainly doing. And then my business partner he was creating those courses because he's more of the language nerd or you know, he's a polyglot and he loves languages, so that's what he's passionate in, like teaching languages, specifically Chinese.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then talk me through. One of the things that you'd said before we got started was you'd messaged us to say that your content follows your curriculum. Can you talk me through that idea? Like, what does that look like? How does that practically work? What kind of does that get you better results? Or is it just easier to create? Like what does that get you better results?
Speaker 1:was it just easier to create. Like what does that mean? Yeah, one, it's. It is easier to to create something that that's already established, like a curriculum that's official, because when you want to pass an hsk exam, you have to learn, basically follow the textbook, like the official hsk textbooks. So then we just built courses, we built lessons, video lessons, on top of those, those boring textbooks right, learners, they, you can study HSK only using those textbooks, but it's, it's hard. I don't know if you, if you, learned something only through textbooks. It's, it's a little bit boring and also there's nothing. It's harder to understand things if it's only through text. So then, with our videos, we have graphics, we have a real person explaining especially those grammar rules and vocabulary, and we have a lot of worksheets and different study tools that we provide in our courses to help students navigate through those boring textbooks and help them pass these exams. So we follow this the textbooks, the curriculum and we basically, as I said, build courses on top of those existing curriculums.
Speaker 2:I think I understand. So when I thought what you meant when you said you align your content with the curriculum, you meant, like your social media content, but what you meant, I think, was your content in your courses aligns with the curriculum. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Right, that's right so actually our social media is kind of the opposite. We focus more on the general Chinese learning topics on our social media, because we're trying to attract everyone who is interested in learning Chinese. And then when they find that, oh, there's actually a standardized curriculum and maybe I'll go through study this. You know, it's easier to track and I can potentially pass these exams and go work in china or study in china, then they, they come to our courses got it okay, cool, nice, all right, and can you give people some kind of an idea of, like, the size of your business?
Speaker 2:like doesn't have to be revenue, but like number of paying students you've got, or total number of students or team size or anything that gives people some kind of an idea of the size?
Speaker 1:yeah, we have in total 70 000 students anyone who has signed up to to any of our courses. Out of that, 70 000 around 14 000 are paying paying students. And if you want to talk about social media numbers, we have 134,000 on YouTube right now. On TikTok, we recently started focusing more on Now we reached 100k very recently. I think it's at 102k right now. Instagram, under facebook, I think right now 36 000. And we also have we're on chinese social media as well, for example, this platform called billy billy, which is like a youtube equivalent in china.
Speaker 2:We have about 100k there how are you finding tiktok in terms of actually making money from it? And the reason I ask is we've got a lot of students that we're working with, a lot of people who are coaching, who have got big TikTok audiences and are just finding they're not actually converting into sales. So some people who've got millions of followers on TikTok and then they're just like, oh, I made three sales off of it, so what's it like for you? Is it working at all? Do you know? Are you tracking that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, on social media, especially when we make short form content. So we kind of group TikTok and Instagram as one because they're the same similar type of content. With those we get a lot of views and followers. But, yeah, as you said, sometimes it's hard to convert those because, especially for educational content, people tend to just, you know, scroll past. They're on TikTok, not really to learn, they're kind of just, you know, watching funny videos or, you know, looking at photos of their friends and family.
Speaker 1:So it's harder to capture those audience on these short form content platforms. So what we do is, you know, we try to get them to join our, for example, one of our, free courses. We make a lot of content and then at the end of the video we tell them to oh, if you want to see more similar content, come join our free courses. And then, you know, we make it easy for them to come into our website and sign up very easily. Once we have those leads they're like you know, we get their email right and then they join our email list and then we start marketing towards them with our emails basically. So that's social media, like you know, short form social media. It's just kind of a way for us to capture email leads, you know, trying to get them to join our courses, free courses in the beginning.
Speaker 2:I find it interesting one with that. It seems like short form is working for some people and isn't for others, and I haven't figured out exactly how come yet. So I've got this friend. He's actually been on the podcast, he's a banjo player and he's teaching banjo.
Speaker 2:Banjo player and he's teaching banjo and he's finding that it he does get like a way lower opt-in rate to his email list from tiktok than he does for sorry, from, yeah, tiktok, or from like youtube shorts than he does from like long form videos, but like it's about a tenth as much. So let's say he gets, you know, a thousand views on on short form videos. He gets a tenth as many opt-ins as he would to his email list as if he had 10 a thousand long form views, but he can make the content 10 times faster. So he's like makes 10 times as much short form. So it's like it seems to be kind of balancing out, and tiktok in particular for him. He was saying actually, for some reason I need to check with him is this still? Is this still holding true?
Speaker 2:You know the bigger sample size, but actually he was getting customers directly from on tiktok in a way that was seemed to be faster than from on youtube, whereas nearly everybody I've talked to in the language learning space who's using tiktok is like it's great for building an audience, it's terrible for making sales and it's like I want to keep an eye on this because it's like sometimes those things are true at one time and then they're not later on. So that's kind of why I'm asking so much to kind of see, like, how is it for you and what is it you know? Like, do you do track, like someone who goes onto your email list from tiktok? Do you track what the source was of where somebody opted in so you can then see later what original source led to the sales or is? Is that like? I know not most people do that kind of tracking.
Speaker 1:We have. We do the UTM tracking on Google Analytics, so then we can see, like, where they're coming from. And actually, even though we get a lot of views on TikTok and Instagram, we get around the same amount of traffic from, like, long form content like YouTube, even though on YouTube we don't really get as many views as short form content, but the traffic is about the same. So I don't know, I think it's we from the past years of posting on social media. I find that, especially for us for language learning, there's more serious learners on YouTube, because if you want to really learn something I think, at least for me I tend to go on YouTube.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean like we have found. So we've got people who I coach, who they've got audiences across all these different things. You know YouTube and what converts best to sales. Like Instagram works, but you can't put links to lead magnets directly and you've got to use many chat and put this keyword and what have you and fiddle around a little bit to kind of make it work.
Speaker 2:And Instagram, like you say, it's not so much long form content and TikTok is like super people are just scrolling through and looking at stuff, and even YouTube shorts same kind of thing. It's like overall, if someone's got a big youtube audience and it's not even subscribers, is it, of course? It's like how many views do you get a month of that long form content? And then, even with within long form content, nearly everybody's doing like discovery based videos, like that's the norm, right, but if someone's doing search based videos, then those views convert way better to sales than than discovery based ones, because those are people who have got an intent. They haven't just gone on and gone oh, this video about chinese looks kind of interesting. They're like oh, I want to learn how to say this word, or I want to learn to understand this bit of grammar or what have you.
Speaker 1:So they've, like they've already got a higher level of intent well, exactly and that's sorry, that's how we kind of got started on YouTube is we were uploading clips of our course content for free onto YouTube. This was back in 2018, 2019. So we uploaded a lot of our course material for free on YouTube, kind of as a preview, and these are mainly like HSK grammar lessons and those got a lot of views, are mainly like HSK grammar lessons and those got a lot of views and they're as you said, they're searched, search-based content, because people would search for these videos like how does what, what does this grammar point mean, or how do these rules work? So then they search for it and then they see our videos. So that's how we got a lot of our initial students from it's from youtube, who are studying hsk and searching for hsk videos on youtube nice, nice, okay, and do you still make those kind of videos or have you, like, saturated the market on all of those search terms?
Speaker 1:yeah, kind of. It's kind of saturated, and also recently we started focusing on not just short form content, but, you know, for youtube we also started making videos about chinese learning in general, not just hsk. We still kind of focus on hsk because that's what our courses are about and but at the same time we want to capture everyone who's interested audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's interesting one, isn't it? Because then those ones will be even less likely to convert, but the number of people is potentially much broader who will kind of be attracted to that kind of content. Does that affect? What do you use as? What do you use as lead magnets when you're trying to get somebody to opt in with any of these kind of videos? Do you have like a bespoke lead magnet for each video? Do you have one lead magnet you promote everywhere? I know you mentioned free courses as one of your things.
Speaker 1:Mainly our free courses. That's what we've been doing. We have five, I think five or six free courses right now and there's two main ones. One of them is like a pronunciation course, where you know we teach how to say certain sounds in Chinese. Like if you're a beginner, you should take that course in order to lay a good foundation of your Chinese pronunciation. So that's one of the free courses. And then another one we started recently is what we call a slow Chinese. Basically it's me talking in a very slow pace and that's more for intermediate level students, and I talk about Chinese topics like society, culture, arts, tech. You know anything that people find interesting about China. They can take this course and watch videos completely in Chinese. And then we provide PDF, downloadable worksheets, audio files and you know different tools. Like we have an annotation tool where you hover over a word and it'll give you like a dictionary annotation, so stuff like that. These are all free. These are the free courses that we have and this is our main sales magnet nice, nice, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So what size emails list have you got?
Speaker 1:now. So basically we have all the emails from our students, everyone who signed up about 70,000. But out of those 70,000, we kind of target the really active people who actually open our emails. So that's around 20,000. Got it?
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. 20,000-ish people on the email list. Okay, and then how often are you running any kind of email promotions out to those guys?
Speaker 1:So we actually do. Before last year we were only doing maybe two, two big sales, two or three sales a year, but since last year we started doing more sales, almost nine to 10 sales a year. So two big ones Black Friday and Chinese New Year, and then there's a bunch of smaller ones across the year, especially when there's like a Chinese holiday, for example Mid-autumn festival, dragon bow festival. You know we also do like spring sale, summer sale. So, yeah, about nine or ten a year nice, nice.
Speaker 2:That's way better than most people. So my recommendation to anybody who I'm coaching is to do one a month, that's. We've run tests at one every three months and doing bigger launches. We've run tests at doing two a month and like nowadays what actually? I'm slightly simplifying we're doing one main promotion a month and then often we're doing a flash sale as well and the flash sale might be like I don't know, two days, something like that, and a smaller price product as well. So that seems to be the optimum in terms of number of sales. It's always a bit of a balance right between if you make another, do another promotion, you make more sales.
Speaker 2:But then some people in the email list, kind of uh, are like oh, there's too many sales going on and they don't want to get the email so much. So one thing that we started doing is every promotion that we do with uh, with any anybody selling courses is, we will put in the email a way for them to opt out of that particular promotion. So if someone's like I don't want to hear any more about this product, but they don't want to get off your email list, normally there's no in-between right, so somebody either receives all the emails about that particular product and the whole promotional sequence in order to sell your list, or they just opt out completely and they never hear from you again. And so we put this one in and it just tags them to say doesn, and they never hear from you again. And so we put this one in and it just tags them to say doesn't want to hear about this promotion.
Speaker 2:And then they don't hear from us for like a week or so while we're doing the promotion and then they go back into receiving all the content and they'll get the next promotional email after that. That's really helped because that's allowed us to do promotions more often without annoying the people who don't want to hear about them, which is like the kind of really nice sweet spot. I could talk you through afterwards, if you like, about like how, how technically you do it. It's like it's not terribly complicated. It's basically just add that, adds a tag and that tag anybody with that tag during that campaign is marked as if they have this tag. Don't send that email promotion to them, don't send this email.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah it's, it's a little. It's a little complicated sometimes. You know the email funnels. We hired somebody to do that. Like years ago we hired somebody and then now I'm trying to do it myself and I'm kind of like seeing what he's done. Yeah, it's like there's so many steps and a little complicated, so I'm still learning and, yeah, these are very useful tips.
Speaker 2:We had somebody who's been on the podcast before I won't say who, but he runs a very successful music uh course business and he messaged me the other day. He's in one of a. I run like some whatsapp groups for people who are, um, successful course creators. I'll give you the details after and he messaged me and he was just like my active campaign is such a fucking wire like rat's tail of like of tags and it's like I've been running this business in active campaign for like 12 years or something like this and I've got every single tag we've ever created. I've got every single automation we've ever created. Some of them aren't running anymore, but I don't know which ones.
Speaker 2:Do you know anybody who could sort that out? And I was like, oh, you want martina? Martina on my team, she loves this kind of stuff. And, um, she, I messaged her about it and she was like, oh, thank goodness, this is the kind of work I want to be doing. And most people would look at this and be like, no, this is so painful, martina is like, it's like a happy place yeah, she loves it and I'm like, thank goodness there's people like martina in the world.
Speaker 2:It's so good, okay, cool. So we've talked through a little bit about how you, um, how you've been growing the audience, the kind of content you've created over the years and how that's changed, the kind of lead magnets you got, the size of your email list, how often you're doing email promotions. Talk to us a little bit about, like some of the funnel stuff like are you using. You mentioned that you're doing an order bump, but it's like a coupon code. Could you talk us through, like, what that looks like to the student when they're buying?
Speaker 1:yeah, so the platform that we use is called teachable. It's uh, you know it's a decent, decent, uh platform.
Speaker 2:There's it's got pros and cons. Yeah, it's one of the better ones. It's not perfect by a long way.
Speaker 1:We've been with them since the beginning. So it's very hard to switch at this point. But you know they're pretty good, so they have a feature of. You know they have these marketing features. So I can put an order bump at the checkout page where I can say, if they're you know, for example, they're buying our HSK4 course, I can put a bump of oh, why not add HSK5 and 6, the bundle, and then now you have 4, 5, and 6. So then it's discounted a 15 off one click, and then they add that to their cart and they buy all of them, right? So that's one order bump. We also have another one in the thank you page. So after they buy something on the thank you page, I give them a little coupon code in case they want to buy another course right away or sometime in the future.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, I think those are the the order bumps have you tried offering something as a one-click upsell on that confirmation page rather than the coupon code? Have you tried it before?
Speaker 1:I was thinking, since I'm doing that on the checkout page, is that what you're talking about, like a one-click upsell? I have that on the checkout page, so I don't have that on the thank you page. I can add that too, but I don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it works really well. So we do, we always do both and what we find is if you get the order bump right on the checkout page, then about 40 to 60 percent of people will buy. I normally tell people like an okay number to aim for is like 20 to 50 percent, but if you nail it then it's normally about 40 to 60 percent. Now you're using teachable, so bad news is that percentage is going to be lower because the Teachable checkout page is absolutely atrocious. It makes me, it upsets me, because I look at it and I'm like if I just redesigned this template checkout page for Teachable, I could probably triple the revenue of all Teachable course creators everywhere because it's so it just follow. It does not follow best practice for checkout pages at all. I just did a session, actually um, a podcast episode with boris. It's probably out by now. So if you're listening and you want to, you want to go find that one with boris. Check it out on the um, on the podcast. Let me see if I can find the date for it. No, it doesn't look like it's live yet, but it's probably coming coming out. This is going to be some point in July, maybe July 10th, maybe July 17th it'll go live.
Speaker 2:Boris went through someone's checkout page and made all the optimizations I think he did it in ClickFunnels rather than Teachable in order to make it work better and five times the number of sales they were getting just by changing the checkout page just from that one page. We did a whole episode where he broke down every single thing that you should have to make the checkout page convert better. I was just like, oh my God, it's such a big deal. So Teachable's checkout page is not great. You won't get 40% to 60% on the order bump, but you get something decent. So that was me in slightly on a tangent mode.
Speaker 2:If you then put the upsell as well, normally about 10 to 20 percent of people will then buy whatever you have on the upsell page too. And the upsell page on teachable is okay, it's. I don't don't think it's great. I'm trying to remember they made some changes recently but it says better than it was. But I think it's still got a ways to go. I believe the upsell page there is just a vsl. You can just have a video and then one button. You can't have the full sales page, which would be better. So you might get with that kind of a page you might get like six to eight percent conversion rate, some something in that kind of ballpark, but that's still a whole bunch more like, because you're generally selling something for the same price as what you had your main course, as on the upsell page.
Speaker 1:So so it's like that's a decent increase in revenue, a decent increase in sales by having something yeah, so like I think that makes sense, like the upsell on the checkout page or on the thank you page, because they're it's still like warm right, they're still thinking about your courses instead of giving them a coupon code which they might not use and probably won't use in the future you don't know if they're going to come back to you. So I think that's a really good idea. I should definitely implement that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's one of the easiest tweaks to make to increase revenue. All the bumps you've already got, that's probably the easiest one, and then upsells is probably the next one after that. You mentioned before to me that you also have upsells within your courses. What does that look like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so especially for our free courses. We have tens of thousands of students enrolled in those free courses, so obviously we want to convert them into our paying customers. So in those courses we have lessons that are basically upsell lessons. You go through the lessons and then you click next and there's like an upsell page, you know, giving telling more about what we offer, what the HSK is, the structure courses that we have, and then maybe offer a little coupon code as well. So that's what I mean by like upsell lessons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really like that. I think one of the things that people miss as an opportunity I probably don't talk about it enough is that you can do upsells within courses themselves and it not be too salesy. I think people either haven't ever thought of this idea or they think well, if someone's just paid for this course, you're mentioning the free ones. But if someone's just paid for this course, you're mentioning the free ones. But if someone's just paid for this course, how can I then have something selling them on something else? That's like feels really awkward, but it doesn't have to. And uh, I learned this I took. My girlfriend at the time was taking a course on, uh, marketing for coaches. She was a coach, she wanted to build out her coaching business and this course that she'd bought was, let's say, it was about how to run webinars to sell coaching, something like that. Well, at the end of the course, she said right, so you finished that. Hopefully you've now managed to build out your webinar to sell your coaching program, but you're going to need to have some traffic that you drive into your webinar. So how are you going to do that? Well, there's three different ways that you could do it. It might be that you've already got an email list, in which case you're going to need to know how do you run an email promotion to promote your webinar, or you might need to run like some Facebook ads or something cold in order to get people in. So there's these two options of what you could go do.
Speaker 2:Next, take one of those two courses in order to do it. And if you do want to do that, because you've bought this course, you're going to get 20 off that. So here's the code now, go, now, go grab whichever one of those courses is going to make sense for you. And I watched that and I was like that's so smart, because it's like it's the perfect point when someone's just finished the course, you can actually have the video and they're just going to keep watching because they've already watched all the other videos and it's helpful.
Speaker 2:It's not even, like you know, trying to convince somebody of something else that they should need that. They never really want to say no, this is just the next step. So it's like at the end of an intermediate course, you can have a sales video that is just telling them right, well, the next video is the. The next course, if you finish this, is the advanced one, um, or your case like uh, hsk2 or I don't know if I've got the terminology, but they're quite right. But like whatever, the next level is uh. So now, now, go take that one and you get your, your discount. If you go grab that, now, here's the coupon code, go get it.
Speaker 1:That's like oh, that's the, that's actually perfect, it's really nice, doesn't it is that, is that the kind of thing you're already doing, or is that, like, not quite where?
Speaker 1:you went yeah. That to us, was a natural step, because we want them to continue learning the language and progressing. So when they finish HSK 3, we guide them towards HSK 4. And then, oh okay, we upsell. Here's a coupon code if you want to continue learning with us, sign up for HSK 4. Or better, sign up for one of our bundles hsk five and six bundle yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 2:I love it. Okay, talk to me a little bit about what's next for you guys. What are you excited about? What are you working on that you think might uh take you to the next level?
Speaker 1:so the one of the things that, marketing wise, I'm working on right now is doing more tripwire offers.
Speaker 1:So, right now we don't really have any. We do, but I'm trying to make like a cheaper course, something like an entry level to our HSK full offering, because it's hard for someone to go straight into buying the entire bundle, right, that's sometimes it's a little too big of an investment. So right now I'm trying to plan and make a smaller course getting started, something like getting started with chinese or getting started with hsk, something like that a lot cheaper and then they can come into our courses and then and then we can, you know, market towards them nice, yeah, I'm a big fan of tripwires.
Speaker 2:It's just so good to have like a really easy step for someone to get started. Something small, just kind of take that first little step. So where did you say you have got those? Where do those offers show for them?
Speaker 1:This would be, I'm thinking, the beginning of our email funnel, or it could be on our social media, on instagram or tiktok just gonna go and sign up for one of your lead magnets and just have a little look at something.
Speaker 2:Right now I'm gonna share screen, so this will show for anybody watching the video, but not for apologies if you're just listening. I'll try to describe it as best as I can as we go right, share screen. Okay, can you see this? Yes, your website, perfect, okay, cool. So, uh, where would I see one of your uh lead magnets if I click browser courses?
Speaker 1:does that include the free ones or uh, if you scroll to the top, it's right below, right under under the stats. So just a little below here you'll see a list of our free courses. Free courses perfect. So we have five right now. So these are our main lead magnets. Where someone joins one of these free courses, we get their email and then they become one of the leads in our email list.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is basically. I filled in the form and it sent me a code. Enter the code we sent to your email. So what's the idea with that one, with getting the code from people?
Speaker 1:I think this is just a default thing on Teachable right.
Speaker 2:Okay, might be. Yeah, yeah, um, this is probably hurting your opt-ins quite a lot. I think I think I could, I can see how to about triple your number of opt-ins um a month. So I'll talk you through that a little bit now and then, oh, okay, cool, this is good, right? So you see this page. I'm on the confirmation page here. It says says for everybody listening thanks for enrolling in this course. It says the order id number and email confirmation. This page is really really valuable for your tripwire offer, um, so if you, if you take that page and you put your tripwire offer on that page, then you will find you'll get about three to ten percent of people will buy at that point and I think you're currently getting like 800 opt-ins a month. So if we just do some back of the envelope maths here, 800 times three percent let's take the lower end that'd be 24 sales. What kind of price are you thinking for your tripwire offer?
Speaker 2:hopefully ten dollars, okay cool I'd say probably you could do something a bit more than that we start. Our standard starting point is about 27, but it depends obviously on what product you've got there and what have you so at ten dollars, at three percent, that would be like 250 bucks a month just from that not all that exciting.
Speaker 2:At 10 that would be 800. But if it was 27, and then you add in an order bump and then upsell and you get up to like 50 as the average, and it was 10%, then that would be $4,000. And if I'm right, and you could triple your opt-ins per month to 2,500, and it was 10% and it was $50, then that's $12,500 a month you could make from it. So then it starts to be like oh, that's quite fun, okay. So, um, I can. I'll give you some details after of like what that looks like kind of technically, how that works, what you need to have on that page for that to kind of make sense. I'll give you some examples of it as well. If you are listening to the episode and you're like what about me, john, I want to know about tripwire funnels as well? Let me find the previous episodes we have done where I've covered about tripwire funnels and any resources we've got about them as well. I'm searching and just like. So I've done four episodes where we've talked about tripwire funnels. So episode one I talked to alan matthews, who's a great guy. He runs classical guitar shed and he talked about how he's got his tripwire funnel in place. That's episode one from march, the 2021. And then I explored tripwire funnels with yosip, august 25th 2023, 302. And then I also talked I think this might be with yosip, I'm not sure february 27th 2024, so 125, that's just a very short one. And then how to optimize your tripwire funnel was april 11th 2024, so 132. So if you go through those, you'll know all about tripwire. Funnel was April 11th 2024, episode 132. So if you go through those, you'll know all about tripwire funnels and everything that you kind of need to have in place.
Speaker 2:But yeah, if you set up your tripwire funnel, you put it on that page. It's like that upsell when we're talking earlier. Right, if you have the upsell be the default page, as they're in the buying mentality, then they're more likely to see it than if it's just that they get it through an email. The same thing with the tripwire. They've just signed up for the free course. They are a bunch of those people are ready to get something straight away.
Speaker 2:So, as an example, we had a client who's selling courses in the spirituality space and she had five free meditations as her lead magnet. And so we put on the confirmation page as the tripwire, 27 more meditations. So buy the meditation bundle and they could get that for $27. And I think about 10 to 12% of people bought on that confirmation page. And then some of them also bought an order bump and some of them bought an upsell. And what have you? And that does two things One, it makes you a bunch of money straight away, which is great, and two, it means that what we found is buyers are about 20 times more likely to buy again Now some of those people.
Speaker 2:That's because they are buyers. They are people who are more likely to spend money. So it's not like if you sell somebody something, then every person in that list is 20 times more likely. But it gives you an idea of how much more valuable somebody is once they've bought something from you, because they bought it it was really good. Then they're like, oh cool, I trust these people. Now I'm more likely to buy something else. And they got used to buying from you and they kind of just you know they're part of that whole world now and they they go in and they check out your paid products and they pay more attention to you and all of that. All of that kind of thing. So that's really cool. Is there anything? We've talked through a load of a load of different elements here. This has been amazing. I absolutely love this. Is there anything that you want to ask me about? Is there anything that you like? Or how would I change? You know what should I change here or there? Anything like this?
Speaker 1:I guess sticking with the email funnel topic. We I especially. Since the beginning we've been focusing a lot on social media marketing and only in recent years I've started focusing more on emails. So I'm still kind of new at email marketing. I guess my question is how much is too many emails to send? Is there like a recommended limit?
Speaker 2:Yes, you don't want to be too salesy right, yeah, there's a recommended limit and it's higher than most people think that it is, but there is a limit. So we tested this because we've pushed as far as we could to see what if you did two full promotions a month and we found that was just like no, it led to burnout of the list and people were unsubscribing or what have you. So here's what we found works the best for overall increasing sales long term it's one full email promotion a month, and so that means a week of content that is relevant to that topic. We have a really specific system that we use. Where we do pain, agitation solution emails not mentioning the product, not mentioning anything else, but talking about the topic that the course is about, so that you're kind of getting people in the right mindset and providing value at the same time. And then one week of promotion or, like I think we do, five days, and over those five days you'll have like six emails that go out. So an email a day and two on the last day, and so that full promotion. What I'm doing, that once a month, but, like I mentioned, having the links in every single one of those promotional emails giving people the option to opt out of receiving any more. So if they're like, no, I don't want to hear about this, they could just click no, I don't want to receive any more emails from you this week and they go off that list again.
Speaker 2:Now we've tried doing less and we've tried doing more and that seems to be the sweet spot. And then for some people sometimes this depends a little bit, actually also having a flash sale every month as well. I don't know if I have enough data, because we've done that, we started that again more recently. Then I have enough data to say for definite how that works out long term in terms of like what if you? Does that lead to more burnout gradually of the list long term? But it doesn't seem to from all the data I've seen from the team so far.
Speaker 2:Now we have tried it with people of like what if we just don't do a promotion this month, do we make more sales the next month? No, not really. It doesn't seem to work that way. We've tried doing two full promotions a month. We had a client who was like I need cash. I've made some mistakes. This this person had bought a venue for doing meditation retreats in I don't know, in the caribbean or something like this, and she just, and then covid happened. That was it she had no much.
Speaker 2:She's like oh my god, I just spent millions of dollars on this thing and nobody can go there and I'm bleeding cash. I got to have money coming in and so we did two full promotions a month and it made more money, but long term it was leading to burnout of the list, so that's definitely too much much. So, like I said, there is a maximum. It's just much higher than everybody thinks it is. It's like one full promotion and maybe also a flash sale every month as well, so it's still more than what you're doing To absolutely be sure with your stuff. You know we'd need to run tests and analyze it over time, but that's what we found across multiple clients, and so I would yeah, I mean just looking at the stats on our email marketing, our unsubscribing rate is actually very low.
Speaker 1:So I think definitely we can up the amount of emails we send out. So that'll definitely have to work on more funnels.
Speaker 2:Nice, nice, love that Well. Ken, thanks so much for coming on. More funnels Nice, nice, love that Well. Ken. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. I really really appreciate your time. This was awesome, and where could people go if they want to check you out? What's the website?
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you want to learn Chinese, you can come to our website ChineseZeroToHerocom, or you can find us on social media.
Speaker 2:Our handle is the same ChineseZeroToHero, chinesezerotoherocom or ChineseZeroToHero. On all social media we had TikTok, instagram, youtube, dilly.
Speaker 1:Dally.
Speaker 2:No, what was it called the?
Speaker 1:Chinese one. The Chinese one is Billy Billy, billy, billy. Yeah, but that one is actually retargeting English learners, okay, okay, retargeting the opposite.
Speaker 2:Got it. We're targeting english learners, okay, okay, so that's the opposite. Yeah, got it. And if you want any, let me see I'm going to find some resources that could be useful that would go with some of the topics that we've covered in this episode. So if you go to data driven marketingco resources, then you are going to have like access to all of them there and I'm going to give you links for, uh, what we've got that's relevant.
Speaker 2:So we talked about the emails and like email promotions and there is a, uh, a download called two secret high performing email templates and we also talked about tripwires and there is the tripwire product ideas you can download there, or the order bump blueprint. We talked about that as well. So, anybody, if you're listening and you're like, oh, those, those were interesting, I wanted to work on those, go to data-drivenmarketingco resources and you can download those resources that go with what we've talked about in this episode. And if there was any of the topics that you want to know more about through podcast episodes, just search through the podcast feed and we have episodes about tripwires and definitely about order bumps I've covered that a bunch and then checkout pages, like I mentioned with boris, we cover that in detail, and there's also a checkout page episode with yosip which I'm going to just find for you.
Speaker 2:It's called the must-have elements of a successful checkout page with yosip balina, and that was may 24th 2023, so 89 um. So there's that one, and the one with Boris as well, and again, thanks so much for coming on. Really really appreciate it and, as always, thank you so much to you for listening. See you next time.