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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
How I Made $2.5M With Only 9K Email Subscribers
🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Austin Church makes $50,000+ a year from a $99/month community, but here's the thing - he's never properly promoted it to his 9,000 email subscribers. Not once.
In this episode, Austin gets brutally honest about the mistakes that cost him money, why he initially refused to start a community (and how his own members basically forced him into it), and the LinkedIn strategy he's using to manually recruit new members one conversation at a time.
We get into the real numbers - his revenue swings from $5k to $25k months, why it's just as hard to sell a $500 course as $6,000 coaching, and that first taste of PayPal notifications that you just can't un-taste. Austin reveals why most creators get the order completely wrong when building their business, and why it's shockingly easy to stop doing what actually works.
This isn't your typical "here's my success story" interview. Austin admits where he's screwed up, what he'd do differently, and why sometimes the best business advice comes from just asking your audience what they want and giving it to them.
If you've built an audience but struggle with the selling part, this one's for you.
🤝 Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.
I got that first taste of waking up to PayPal notifications and I'm like you know you can't untaste that it's difficult to go from being an expert over here to being an amateur over here, because you're still the same person.
Speaker 2:You have to get the people from your audience that you spent ages building to buy the course that you spent ages building, and that's a whole new skill.
Speaker 1:I'll just be really candid here. That's $50,000 in recurring revenue.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Jon Ainsworth and today's guest is Austin L Church. Now, austin is a marketing advisor, a business coach and the author of Free Money. He is passionate about teaching freelancers, consultants and creators how to stack up specific advantages and find the income lifestyle sweet spot.
Speaker 1:There are proven ways of making money as a creator. It needs to be a painful problem and ideally an expensive problem, but what is the single problem that you can solve for people? It's like the fundamental that if you launch more often, you sell more often. It's just shockingly easy, john, to stop doing what works. Shockingly easy. Thank you so much for having me, john. I'm delighted to talk with you today.
Speaker 2:So how long have you been doing this? For how long have you been working helping freelancers and consultants and creators?
Speaker 1:Started coaching my peers, their freelancers and consultants in 2018. I launched my first course in 2019. Six to seven years depending on how you want to think about the business.
Speaker 2:Nice. And what were you doing before that? Were you freelancing yourself?
Speaker 1:I started freelancing in 2009. And, as happens for a lot of us, a business went through various evolutions. So you know I still do a fair amount of consulting focused on brand strategy and growth strategy, which I generally put under the umbrella of growth advisory. But I started out as a freelance writer and so all the advice I give is you know stuff I've learned kind of in the school of hard knocks, not having a business background, making lots of mistakes. And then you know, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, look at your bruises and you're like, well, I don't want to do that again. You know, like what might I try differently next time? And so, yeah, some hard won wisdom at least I hope what kind of thing are you helping people with?
Speaker 2:Is it marketing or sales or how to manage the time? Is it all of the things? What are you doing with people?
Speaker 1:So anybody who has run a service-based business knows how difficult it is to wear a bunch of different hats, because you can't possibly have background and a great deal of expertise and confidence when you put on all of them. Like some people are really comfortable with accounting, or some people are really comfortable with marketing, or some people are really comfortable with the work itself, whether that's writing, graphic design, software engineering, whatever. But I've found that a lot of us, because we are comfortable in one specific aspect of the work we do, and it usually is the craft, it's the hard skill. Because a lot of us are comfortable with that, we tend to double down on that and we improve our skills in that area. Meanwhile, there are these other aspects of the business where if you got 20% better at marketing, the material difference that would make in your business is much, much greater than if you made this 5% gain in terms of oh, now I'm a slightly better copywriter, I'm writing slightly better headlines or I'm a graphic designer creating slightly better visual identity work, right.
Speaker 1:So a lot of the work that I do is, like I said, passing on what I've learned. I had a background as a poet, a fiction writer. I parlayed that into copy and content writing, but being a good writer is not the same as being good at making money as a writer. And how do I teach other freelancers, other consultants with very valuable skill sets, other consultants with very valuable skill sets? How do I teach them the business side of things, when selling your own creativity is just a very different animal than selling a cup of coffee? And so there's a lot bundled into that positioning, pricing, all the things and so it can get complicated and I try to untangle it all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes sense. I mean, like I noticed with pretty much everyone who listens to this podcast. So, if you, if you hear this and it sounds like you, then I'm talking to you that people are. They, they're creators first and foremost. So they, they've got a thing that they know about. They are a great dog trainer or they are a great english teacher or, uh, they're really good at putting together music studios, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:And then they start creating content around that and so that's maybe youtube videos or instagram posts, whatever, and they've built up an audience. Then the audience wants to know more from them and they want courses from them. So they make courses and they're that happy with that. They feel quite comfortable with that because it's basically like making longer, more detailed videos in a structured format, and so there might not be an expert in it, but they're like they're all right with that.
Speaker 2:But then the next thing is like well, now you have to get the people from your audience that you spent ages building to buy the course that you spent ages building and that's a whole new skill, and they they generally are appallingly bad at it and just anything at it. Yes, most people I talk to are just like it's not, they couldn't learn to do it is. They're just not doing it because like well, I'll just build more of an audience and I'll build more courses, because I like those things and I don't know what this whole email marketing malarkey is about it's difficult to go from being an expert over here to being an amateur over here, because you're still the same person, and so I think a lot of folks have that sort of identity crisis.
Speaker 1:Hey, I'm really good at building out recording studios, or I'm really good at making barbecue and I'm rubbish at monetizing my course, and that's just hard, and so you know. It helps to find someone else who has actually accomplished the thing that you want to accomplish, who can untangle it and, ideally, do that in a way that is achievable for you based on where you are. So I love helping people, especially with pricing. There's so much mindset mixed up in it. There are stories from childhood mixed up in it, but I think about all of the things that get you better results with less effort as being in this category I call advantages.
Speaker 1:And so it's like whether you're selling a membership or whether you're selling courses or whether you're selling digital downloads. If you're selling your own creativity and knowledge, you have certain advantages available to you, and why wouldn't you pull on the right levers, why wouldn't you utilize the right advantages? You stack up enough of those and you can have a much better business, even if your product or your service stays about the same. It's kind of crazy if you think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how are you helping people with this? Is it through courses or a membership or coaching, or like group coaching or like what system are you using to actually help people?
Speaker 1:like group coaching or like what's? What system are you using to actually help people? So my main focus right now is a paid private community hosted with circle that I launched formally last october. That kind of grew out of group coaching and I still do one-on-one coaching. I think I mentioned earlier I started that in 2018. So, John, I feel like I've tried just about every and I launched my first course in 2019.
Speaker 1:I've done the digital downloads thing. I still have a few of those for sale, so I guess I'm like any other creator in that I'm trying to figure out the revenue model that works, yeah, for my expertise and with my target audience, I think far too many people are like that.
Speaker 2:They've chosen one and they're like I therefore can't do any of the others and you can do all of them. Like maybe you shouldn't do all of them because it's like your attention's pulled too, too thinly. But there are people within your audience who would love a membership where there's ongoing support generally depends on the on the topic right and there's people in the audience who want the one-to-one support and are willing to pay a load more for it, and I encourage people quite often to have more of these different, you know things at different price points. So we sell individual modules from our course, we sell the whole course, we sell a group coaching program, we do one-to-one coaching and we do done for you. So the price ranges from like I don't know what's the cheapest one 79 or something like that, up to some of the done for you might be 10 or 20 000 a month.
Speaker 2:There's a huge range in there and it's like um, I found that all of those are helpful and help like different people. It has the potential of distracting you because you're like okay, well, wait a minute, I've got to also do this thing and I've got to do that thing. So there is that. There's that potential downside, but from the same size audience you can massively increase revenue by having those different tiers. I agree.
Speaker 1:I think my mistake and I'll just be really candid here was I think I got the order wrong. Okay, and by that I mean I still sell the same approach or methodology that I started selling in 2018. I think it, in retrospect, it would have been easier if I had kind of gone all in on the one-on-one coaching, set aside the courses for the time being, but I was like obsessed with the idea of, like passive income. I had it. This is not worth going into, but, like 2013, thereabouts, I got that first taste of waking up to PayPal notifications and I'm like you know you can't untaste that. It was just like amazing Made like 10k over a weekend because someone else promoted this little product I had and so I was going to make is.
Speaker 1:I wish I had fine-tuned the content and the approach, working one-on-one with people until I had identified the one problem that I cared about solving again and again and again and again, so that then I could kind of go downstream in terms of price tier and build the course around just one problem. Let me help my customers solve one discrete, well-defined problem and let me believe that I'm helping them solve that problem better than just about anybody else. Believe that I'm helping them solve that problem better than just about anybody else. But I kind of got the order wrong in the sense that I got really jazzed again about getting more passive income. Courses are great for that if you have some sort of evergreen funnel, right. But what I discovered is that when you have a small audience or at least I'll just speak from my own experience it was just as hard for me to sell someone who didn't have a whole lot of money to invest in themselves, just as hard to persuade them to buy a course for 500 bucks as it was to persuade someone to buy coaching for 6,000 bucks. To persuade someone to buy coaching for 6,000 bucks.
Speaker 1:And also my first course was just too big and too ambitious and I was trying to solve too many problems for students going through the course. And even though I go back and I look at the material and I'm like all of the same principles are there, all of the same ideas it's, you know, some of it's more refined now. So it wasn't the course per se, and maybe that's what I would say to people who have courses and are thinking about coaching or memberships or whatever it's like. What is the single smallest problem that you can. Now it needs to be a painful problem and ideally an expensive problem, but what is the single problem that you can solve for people that you can package either in a membership or in a course or something like that? So I was just kind of all over the place, which I don't think is unusual. Hindsight is 20-20, but my first course tried to do too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one thing that I've made a lot of mistakes, but that's one thing that I think that I got right was the order that I'd done things in. We started with for you, and then we went to one-to-one consulting, and then we went to group coaching and then we made the course out of that, Because it's so hard If you make the course straight away, even if you are right about all of the things, you don't necessarily know how to teach it yet.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, it's very different doing it for someone else as opposed to facilitating this process of self-discovery and teaching them how to do it for themselves.
Speaker 2:And, oh yeah, I think that you took the much better path themselves and, oh yeah, I think that you took the much better path. Um, we had to close at one point. Our group can't have to. We chose to close our group coaching program for nine months because I had discovered that, even though what we were teaching about email marketing was right, when we were doing it in a group setting, lots of people were not managing to then write their email promotions.
Speaker 2:Just go write the email Right, so we teach them the principles. But we didn't have a tight enough system for like here is exactly how to do it, step by step. And so then we went away and we picked apart all the emails that we'd ever written for clients that had worked really well, and we're like what worked the best in here? What is a common framework that we can extract? How can we teach that to somebody?
Speaker 2:So then we went back through it again. We started doing that one-to-one with people, coaching them on how to do it, and then doing it a group setting. And then we're like right now we're ready to make the course again and so now we can start up the whole group thing, because it's hard to like people, especially in a group or in a course where you're not talking to them at all, and get it right and then actually get the result from it. So talk me through with your membership that you you said you kind of focused on that more. Now what's the price point on that? How much do you charge for that?
Speaker 1:so right now the price point is 99 a month. Okay, I ask members to commit to six months, so they typically pay $5.94 instead of $99. That was because early members asked for that. And that is still.
Speaker 1:The single most surprising thing to me about the last 12 months of my journey is I had no desire to start a community. I remember telling people outright I will not start a community. And yet I kind of had this process last fall. That sounds kind of similar to what you were talking about with analyzing emails that worked for your clients breaking it down. But I applied that same kind of analytical process to my own market research because I took a step back and I said I've never had a single offer achieve what I would call escape velocity. You have this gravity, well, escape velocity. You have this gravity, well you know. And then you're like trying to get this rocket ship of an offer outside the pull of that gravity. You need escape velocity and in my mind that meant someone who didn't have a prior relationship with me could read a landing page and be so struck by the value or the appeal that they would buy the thing, whether or not they'd ever read my newsletter or read any of my LinkedIn posts or anything else. And anyway, I'll try to be more succinct.
Speaker 1:I get halfway through this market research process. I'm keeping a journal because I'm like I have to test my assumptions. What are my blind spots? And no joke, I was wrapping up the latest cohort of my group coaching program and some members were like, yeah, could we keep this going? And I was like what do you mean? They're like well, you know, we have gone through the program together and now we've kind of become friends. And I'm like OK, so why don't you just sort of stay connected? And they're like well, we want you to be the one to keep us connected. And I'm like, well, what would that look like? And they're like well, maybe we just keep hanging out in circle and then maybe we still just like do something, live once a week. And I was growing very suspicious that they were talking about a community.
Speaker 1:And they finally like wore me down and I was like, fine, fine, but sure enough, it's like communities are great because it's monthly, or at least annual, it's recurring revenue, and so, yeah, the price that you asked about came directly from. What do people I'm already serving want? What if I were to listen closely and let them tell me what they want and then give it to them? What they want and then give it to them? And that has generally been like my best decisions have been, when I asked my audience what they wanted and gave it to them and then, rather than just assuming that I knew better than they did, what they wanted or needed and I know that sounds super obvious, but it is shockingly easy to out clever yourself as a creator have you seen those memes where it's got like the, the idiot and the genius and the?
Speaker 1:the guy in the middle trying so hard, you know and the author, but particularly is the.
Speaker 2:the idiot and the genius, are both saying make something people want. You know, it's just like yeah, it's very easy to like come up with a thousand ideas and think your ideas are so good. You know, every time I come up with a new idea, which is I don't know five times a day, then I'm like I'm always convinced that that idea is brilliant.
Speaker 1:So rarely Well you brought it up, like you just alluded to this, that we think that ideas are silver bullets, and I think creators are especially susceptible to this idea that if I find the right product idea, then building a creator business will cease to be difficult.
Speaker 2:It will be easy.
Speaker 1:And then meanwhile, there are proven ways of making money as a creator, a course, templates, a community, some sort of like membership. You can pick one of those that is proven and then go talk to your people. What do you want, how do you want me to deliver it, what will you pay? And so you match all those insights with a proven model. It doesn't have to be that complicated, unless you keep believing that if you only find the right idea, suddenly it's all going to be easy. I just that hasn't been true for me.
Speaker 2:So what's your kind of revenue split at the moment between the membership and courses and coaching and what have you? How does that kind of revenue split at the moment between the membership and courses and coaching and what have you? How does that kind of break down?
Speaker 1:So it's coaching is probably still 50%. So when I onboard a new one-on-one coaching client, they pay $2,500 for what I call a custom business roadmap. That $2,500 also covers the first month of coaching. After that they pay $1,500 a month for five months. So it's a six-month long engagement that costs $10,000. So that's still probably 50% of my revenue is those engagements. 50% of my revenue is those engagements.
Speaker 1:Or I also take that custom business roadmap that I mentioned and I've splintered that off and I offer that as a standalone offer, kind of as a downsell, to people who they can't afford the one-on-one help across six months, but they really do want a plan they believe in and they'll, they're willing to at least pay me to help them create that plan.
Speaker 1:I do the occasional one-off coaching session, which I just call clarity sessions. But coaching makes up 50%, memberships make up the other 50%. I know this is a show primarily focused on courses and selling courses and so maybe I shouldn't say this. But like my course right now, I have not put a lot of marketing effort into it, in part because my problem in the past was and we already talked about this spreading my focus and kind of fracturing my focus across no joke, like 10 to 15 different products, yeah, and so part of my commitment last fall was I'm picking one offer, and that was the membership, one funnel, one primary strategy for getting people into the funnel, which was linkedin, and then seeing if I could achieve growth through subtraction. And so, my course, it's still there, I still sell it multiple times a month, but I don't even think about it most of the time I'm just focused on the membership.
Speaker 2:So about what is your kind of average monthly revenue at the moment.
Speaker 1:Man, it's been really volatile this year, like I've had $25,000 a month and I've had a $5,000 month, oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:Well no, not that low. Probably the lowest was $10,000. So, yeah, some pretty big swings. I still do some consulting work, and so I'd have to go back and actually look at my spreadsheet to see, okay, what percentage of revenue was attributable to consulting. I also did a virtual summit back in May called Growth Without Burnout Summit, which I think I grossed 42,000. After expenses, I netted 28,000. So, yeah, it's sometimes hard. How do you keep your own numbers honest? It's like if you have one big event, is that product revenue?
Speaker 2:I don't know, but yeah, to answer your question, my revenue has really been doing this, and so I've had a lot of mindset work to do this year and is that is that when you mention that number, the kind of 10 to 30 000 ish, is that when you mentioned that number the kind of 10 to 30,000-ish, is that the combination of the one-to-one coaching and the membership, that's all mixed, it's all jumbled in together. And what's the process that you're using in terms of specifically around the membership? What's the funnel that you've got? You said you've got something with LinkedIn that's kind of driving people into the how's that work?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my approach right now is I post and then I look at people who visit my profile and then I look at people who have engaged with the posts. Then I filter those folks based on three criteria. It's actually a few more, but I'm trying to narrow it down. Do they have a thousand followers? And I don't care how many followers people have, except my community is for more established, advanced freelancers and consultants. So I'm trying to find some signal that shows me these folks have spent some time building authority online, and so a thousand is sort of the cutoff for me, or I should say, the floor for me. The next thing is how long have they been freelancing? So I identify folks based on criteria that I've decided. Signal to me hey, this person is more advanced. Then I DM them and those DMs are I'm not even talking about the community. I'm saying, hey, thanks so much for engaging with my post, and then I'll provide the link to the post they engaged with at the bottom of the message and then I'll ask questions and ideally a question. I'm sincerely interested in their answer to right. So most recently it's been hey, do you have any big business moves in store in the second half of 2025? Or what are you learning right now? Again, if someone else can teach me something awesome. So if I'm like, hey, what are you learning? And someone causes that aha moment, that's great. So I do show up to DMs just trying to build relationships with people, get to know them. Sometimes, as a conversation progresses, I may point them to like a podcast episode or a blog post or say you might want to think about this. Not really coaching, but just hey, let me share an observation right. Then eventually I'll say if it's appropriate and let's say this is maybe 40% of the time If it's appropriate I'll say I like the way you think I've enjoyed interacting with you. Are you a part of a private online community that you love? If not, I think you'd be a great fit for the freelance cake community. Any interest?
Speaker 1:While I'm starting these conversations, I'm also tracking all of this in Notion just a really simple Notion database that has different database views. So one of them is like a Kanban board where I can kind of advance people through it. So it's very manual. It's not super scalable in terms of I can't do this 10,000 times a month because I still need to manage the community and write content and do all the things. But I just was thinking okay, what strategy can I employ to start conversations that puts all of the control, like brings all the control to me? Now I've got the weekly email newsletter. I should mention that that gets people to apply, because I'm always trying to mention the community at least once in the newsletter. But that's still very much like people opt in to talk about it or they select themselves to go apply. Even if I mention it every week, I don't have control over how many people. So LinkedIn has given me that control.
Speaker 1:If I can start five conversations a day, that's 25 conversations a week, that's 100 conversations a month. That may mean like 40 invitations a month. Let me track all that and then see if that's effective. And let me compare that to the virtual summit I did. 15 people joined the community on the back end of the virtual summit. Now, the virtual summit made money itself. But I'm like, okay, if I just look at the virtual summit as a legion experiment for the community, can I put the same amount of time into this linkedin strategy? Hold those side by side, yeah, which produces better results? So that's kind of where I am now and what kind of so.
Speaker 2:You've got your 100 people 40 invitations. What kind of so. You've got your hundred people 40 invitations. What kind of percentage of those people then are interested or become a member?
Speaker 1:So with the current numbers I've got, it's like if I start 50 conversations then maybe seven people will end up joining.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So it is time consuming and it's like, hey, if somebody out there is like Austin, you're doing things the hard way, like, reach out to me and let me know the easier way, please. I am interested in slower growth with the community because we've got a really good culture in there right now and everybody I've talked to like I'm in Jay Klaus's creator science lab and Jay and I were catching up earlier this month we grabbed breakfast and he was just like man, you just don't want fast growth because it can really hurt culture and really hurt the vibe. So, but maybe this is just me making excuses for my slow growth me making excuses for my slow growth.
Speaker 2:I don't know what's um. What's it been like with promotion to your email list to get people into? Because that's our main tactic is. Like you know, most of our audience have got big following somewhere or a following somewhere on social media, often youtube. Yeah, our system is like how do we help you get more of those people from your audience into your email list and then from your email list into buying and then some of those people upselling into something else? What's your results been like so far from your email list?
Speaker 1:I wish I had exact numbers for you. This conversation is making me realize just how loosey goosey I've been with my own numbers, my own data. I mean I've got 9000 subscribers, so that's pretty good, you know, it's not terrible. And the way that my newsletter, which I send out every Friday, is structured, I've already, with the format, with the structure, created opportunities for myself to just talk about what's going on in the community. So that's the primary way I do that right now.
Speaker 1:When I say do that, I mean encourage people to apply. I talk about a win that a community member got. I talk about something that I'm building for the community because they asked for it. I talk about like a conversation that's happening in the community that has been really interesting and helpful for people. So showing that the community is a vital place where really energizing and insightful conversations are happening, where people are having personal best selling, biggest or best ever projects, so on, so forth. Like I try to do more showing than telling.
Speaker 1:Um, that being said, one thing that I definitely could do a better job of is creating a standalone like nurture sequence. So if people ever clicked on a link that was tagged or tied to any mention of the community to automatically just send them a drip and say hey, by the way, I would just encourage you to apply even if you aren't sure you qualify right, that kind of thing. So I'm glad we talked about this. Thank you for the advice, john, but I love writing emails. I 100% believe that email is the best way to get people to buy things, bar none so have you done any like promotional campaigns of the memberships, the emailer?
Speaker 1:so I did one at on the back end of the summit. Um, it's probably not a bad idea to go ahead and do one to my entire list and you know, it's not that this is a fear of mine, it's and I'm sure you've encountered this both with your customers and with other guests and just people in your audience. You build this audience and you have a kind of contract with them that when they hear from you, it's going to be really valuable, right? And the challenge, I think, is honestly retraining and I've been doing this this year, retraining my audience to actually expect more overtly promotional emails from me, and it's going really well so far. Like I don't see these massive unsubscribe rates when I'm like, hey, I really want you to consider buying this, and there's always a more artful way to say it but, um, so yeah, I, I think I probably just need to put that the forefront.
Speaker 1:The other thing I've been thinking about is a linkedin challenge so I have all the ideas but should probably just launch to my launch, to my list, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, and what I? What I heard there was that, no, you haven't done a promotion to your whole list of the the membership. Was that right? That's correct? Yeah, I would do that.
Speaker 1:I feel you did not make me feel like an idiot, but I think I've made of myself a bit of an idiot here Because, like part of it was the membership was still so new at the beginning of the year. I'm like, what is the offer? Yeah, but now that we're nearly nine months in, yeah, you know what it is.
Speaker 2:You've got to figure it out and it's just now it's time to go back and do that like so I would say, with memberships. My experience is you can promote a membership to your email list three to four times a year. More often is tricky because it's like, well, it's the same thing that it was the previous month. It works best if you do it with a discount and some bonuses and the whole, you know, do the full promotion thing. If you do it without like, I've got clients who they tried to promote the membership every month in a slightly different way with just a bonus, no discount whatever, and it's like slightly lackluster results from that which I think would probably describe the results I've been getting right.
Speaker 1:Um, what advice do you give when it comes to okay, my community is technically evergreen as an offer, meaning people can join anytime. How do you hold intention, that idea that people can join anytime with a launch?
Speaker 2:so two things I think, maybe three. One is, I think, do a discount. A lot of people are against the idea of that philosophically or whatever, but it works. It works really well. Second one is to have some bonuses that if they buy, if they sign up now, they're going to get this thing and figure out what is that. And the third one you tie this with the bonuses. What is different about this time of year? So you could do a launch around New Year.
Speaker 1:Oh, going back to school. There are so many people like myself who are parents who, when they're kids, they're like I'm holding my breath until we get the kids back in school in August and then I'll finally be able to work again. But sorry I interrupted you. You were in the middle of giving good advice.
Speaker 2:You choose that as your moment and then the whole campaign is based around that, and that is why we're doing this now. So there's going to be a whole load of people who are starting, whose kids are going to go back to school. I've got all of these, these extra things they're going to specifically designed to help you, mr or mrs, parent, um, to be able to implement this program the best, because the kids are going back to school. We're going to do this thing together and this thing together and this thing together, and we're going to have like sessions that are based around like, okay, how are you going to plan around the kids or how are you going to whatever it is? I don't know, I don't know your audience, I don't know the offer, but like anything that can help that audience that fits around that that time of year. So, one of the things we've learned with email campaigns um, we do, we do a lot you're like, how do I put this?
Speaker 1:We do a lot of email campaigns A lot.
Speaker 2:This is like our thing, you know, and it really helps if you've got a hook, you've got a thing, you've got one specific thing, and so we will typically choose a pain point that our audience has, or our client's audience has. Out of all of the lists of problems they have that this is going to help them to solve, we'll choose one, and we're like this promotion is based entirely around that one thing. I love that. We do warm-up emails around that, we do the bonuses around that, we do the promotion around that, we do the urgency around that, and it won't appeal to every single person in the audience, but that's okay, because you're going to do another promotion in a few months.
Speaker 1:So it's fine, you know you do a different angle that time. I think that would do great for you. I think the odds are very high, at least. Well, and I'll, just like I said, I'll be candid again and that is I think I was too precious about my email list for too long. Right, I think when you've worked so hard to build an email list, you've worked so hard to build an email list, every single subscriber feels precious and but my email list is now large enough that I really can afford to get on.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing the way I write my emails, I'm very rarely going to get on anybody's nerves, unless they just decide I just don't want emails from this guy anymore. But I really ought to launch more often. It's like the fundamental that if you launch more often, you sell more often. And, judging by what's happening in the community, people love being in the community. So it's like, who am I to not launch and therefore stand between people and the experience and value they could be having? How dare you Austin, how dare I John? But we have to like.
Speaker 1:We have to like psych ourselves up to do this kind of stuff sometimes because you're like well, I don't want to get on anybody's nerves by sending more emails, don't want to get on anybody's nerves by sending more emails and one of the things no joke, the more emails that you send, typically, the more people take action and then you get more transformations.
Speaker 2:But what were you going to say? One of the things that we do for our own promotions and for clients to make that a little easier is every promotional email we include a link where someone can unsubscribe from that promotional campaign, particular campaign.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice so all it does.
Speaker 2:If they click it it adds a tag in ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or what have you, and the whole campaign is set up. Those whatever 11 emails that we're sending, all of those are set up to not go to anybody with that tag. So if they click that link, they won't get any of those promotions. And then they'll, immediately that it's finished, they'll go back on the list and they'll get the next promotion and they'll get the next content email, whatever, but they won't get any more on that. And that gives an easy in between from uh, getting all of the promotion they didn't want and unsubscribing from the list. And it also helps you as the creator to feel okay about sending these out Like, oh, if you don't want these, just click this link. It's easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sort of damaging my primary marketing asset and also, this is the thing I do think I have going for me right is the thing I do think I have going for me right, because I have spent years faithfully emailing people every Friday and putting a ton of time into creating emails that I know are valuable. I think there's some goodwill stored up.
Speaker 2:I hope so yeah.
Speaker 1:And I mean I don't remember the last time I did a list-wide I've never done it for the membership, and again coming into the year, I'm like I don't know what the offer is, and then all of my focus was going into the summit, which I do think was the right move. But the summit ended in May and it's like all right, buddy.
Speaker 2:It's July now it's July, now, yeah, Like.
Speaker 1:I even have those emails that I wrote to launch the community to the segment of folks who attended the summit and expressed interest in the community. I even have most of the assets. So while talking to you, I'm like Austin. You're acting like a crazy person. It's hard to read the label inside the bottle right, yeah, for definite.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I think could work for you, um is you're you're using linkedin as a way to start conversations with people. Your email list is filled with people who are loyal fans, and if you started conversations with them, those conversations would be a lot easier.
Speaker 1:The ones that trust has accumulated over time.
Speaker 2:They know who you are. They like your stuff, they like your style. Oh, if you're going to do those kinds of conversations and I'm not, I'm not 100 sure it's worthwhile when it's 99 a month to be selling through individual conversations. But, like, if you are going to do it, it would be easier to use your email list to start conversation. So it's a separate thing from your promotional campaign. Have stuff going like.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't know some way to to let people raise their hand to say, oh, I'm kind of interested in this topic or whatever it is, you know well, to your point, when I first launched the community and I was very careful about who I was letting in because it's like I mean, I think I launched with like 10 members- and we're at 55 now, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it's like, well, that's $50,000 in recurring revenue every year, you know. So that's something, but I was.
Speaker 1:I was yeah, I was meeting one on one with people, okay, on a call. So what you just recommended, I think, even if it isn't scalable, what it did, I think, was form a deeper connection between me and that person. So when I was inviting them into the community afterwards, most people I got on calls with joined. It's just shockingly easy, John, to stop doing what works.
Speaker 2:Shockingly easy. Our head of delivery, joseph, and he is eminently sensible and very, uh, very smart, and a decent proportion of his job is to make sure that we keep doing all of the things that worked, whereas my job apparently, as far as I could tell, is crazy idea, new direction, a thousand try to break the things that may actually be working just fine.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it kind of goes back to like the irony of this whole community direction I'm going is the things that I was best at all along were creating safe space, leading with vulnerability, hearing deeply and sincerely about the well-being of my customers and coaching clients. If I just listed it all out for you, it'd be like oh yeah, you're talking about the sort of person who would have a community, so I don't know what the perfect antidote is for how do you again not out-clever yourself?
Speaker 1:I'm just like no, I have no idea, have no idea olympian level at out clevering myself and then maybe that's the benefit of being a coach, because I say things to my coaching clients all the time where I'm like I need to write that down because I've basically been coaching myself at the same time, you know yeah, I'm much, much better at doing this for other people than I am for myself.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, six or ten or something times better at it. I don't know, it's very funny. Um, okay, so are you gonna do that?
Speaker 1:the email, okay, yes and I'm happy to report. I'll email you afterwards and let you know, and I know it's gonna go well. I already know it's gonna to go well. I already know it's going to go well. I'm acting like a crazy person.
Speaker 2:What do you think will be your guess in terms of new members that you might get from doing that?
Speaker 1:My guess is it would be more than 15, right? So I mentioned that after the summit. I had I forget how many like prospects. I've got the numbers in Notion but 15 new members definitely joined as a direct result of the summit. I think 15 is realistic here because, again, some of these people have heard me, you know, championing the benefits of being in the community for months now, championing the benefits of being in the community for months now. So if they've been on the edge and then to use that strategy you mentioned, if I talk about getting back to school, recommitting to your growth roadmap, maybe kickstarting your morning marketing habit, again I think there's going to be some people.
Speaker 2:So 15 would be my goal depending on the engagement level your email list I I would think that more is realistic, uh, based on what we've always seen, what we've seen before, with different promotions of memberships to engaged email lists with that kind of price point. Um, but we'll see right, you know that's the great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited to see and it's nice to have come out of my fog. I appreciate the impromptu coaching that happened here.
Speaker 2:I think a lot on this, on this podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was supposed to, like just you know, dispense all of this glorious wisdom to other course creators and like community leaders, and instead it was like hey, austin, you might reconsider committing to working on what works.
Speaker 2:Anyway, fabulous. Well, really appreciate you coming on. If people want to go check out freelance cake community, where can they go?
Speaker 1:Freelancecakecom forward slash community and come find me on LinkedInin too. I'm there a lot austin elchurch.
Speaker 2:Thank you very, very much, really appreciate it thank you, john, for your time and your expertise in the space nice and if you're listening to this and you are thinking I'd love to get details of how I could run an email promotion, go to our resources page. Go to datadrivenmarketingco slash resources and there's downloads on there about exactly how to be running your promotions yourself. I'm also going to find a couple of previous episodes of the podcast that are specifically about email promotions, because we've done a lot about that today. So we had one that I did with a client of ours who doubled his revenue with email. That was from may 8th 2025, that's with joe from 90 day, korean, and then, using email marketing automation, I did an episode with yosip, october 25th 2024, episode 150, and how to send more emails without sounding too salesy was with Monica from April 4th 2024.
Speaker 2:That's episode 131. So any of those would be really good to follow up to this episode. So if you like those, go check those out. Thanks very much, guys. I really, really appreciate you and thanks so much for listening.