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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
Secrets to Building Insanely Engaging Online Communities
🚀 Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
Emma Jakobi built mmmEnglish to 6 million YouTube subscribers. Then she stopped posting and walked away to build Hey Lady instead.
In this episode, Emma and Shah Turner break down what's actually working for them: how they're getting their CAC down to 1/10th of LTV, why their webinars stopped working (and what they did instead), and how they package the same offer differently each month without burning out their audience.
Shah also talks about the consistency problem every course creator faces: "We'd run a campaign and bring in 50 grand. Do it again, pretty good. Third time? Not so much."
If you're running a membership or selling courses, this one's packed with real numbers and tactics you can use.
Check out Hey Lady: https://www.heylady.io/
Connect with Emma and Shah:
Emma on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmajakobi/
Shah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahturner/
🤝 Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.
I have this audience on YouTube that I built over several years that were hungry for content, really enjoyed watching my videos, and I was feeling tired showing up in that space, not super excited about what I was creating there. Meanwhile, being so fully invested and excited and wanting to bring Hay Lady into the world and to help us be successful.
SPEAKER_03:We are on fire, but we're doing webinars to bring it up. And the cost of that position is what we have to pay to acquire. It's somewhere around 110 to 112.
SPEAKER_00:Another aspect of what we're doing is creative that we are focused on community as our stuff.
SPEAKER_01:We are here today winning fast. My name is John Martin. Today's guests are Emma Cody Starter. Emma and Scarf are co-founders, A. Student-led, co-supported, social learning community, designed from our women are learning that competition definitely real-world factor. It's a custom-built software platform designed to support that, like interactive, collaboration, and contribution. And we're going to talk through why Emmer and Shah think that growing community is so important, and how their approach they've got now is different to the regular course approach that we're normally talking about on this podcast. And why Emma has walked away from this six million sub YouTube channel to focus on HeyLady. So let's get into today's episode. Emmer and Char, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, John. It's super exciting to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Talk me through this. Like how does HeyLady work? What is it? What's what is uh what's kind of different about it to what MVLs is doing?
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of the um main differences, I think, from what everyone else is doing is we're actually building the platform ourselves. It's a custom-built um software platform. Um that makes it a very expensive endeavor, but it gives us a lot of freedom and flexibility to create features or to extract metrics and information about customering or member engagement, participation, things like that. Um super exciting to be able to really dive deep into what our members are doing and be able to reflect back their success and their progress to them. Um I think uh another aspect of what we're doing that's quite different to most course creation um course creators out there, um, it's probably that we are focused on community as our product, not necessarily as content and as our as a product, um, but in fact the community experience, the shared um connections, the uh collaboration, the peer-to-peer support is a big part of the the customer experience inside Hey Lady. I don't know if you'd add anything to that, Sharp.
SPEAKER_04:No, exactly. I think um everything you said is is about where it is. I think um probably one of the things that we noticed uh and why we're doing doing what we're doing is it's interesting to see how few people actually complete courses, um, how much of it they actually get through. And what we found um through community and and also through our own platform and having that insight is you can really see and follow along where people are falling off, losing interest, and you can nudge them at the right point to get to come back in in ways that are actually meaningful. For example, compared to like an automated email sequence, um, you can really trigger messages, notifications, or other things, you know, based on what someone actually did, so that when they see that, they're like, oh, uh that that's cool. Uh yeah, well, I am actually gonna take the next step because that's what makes sense for me. It's been yeah, really interesting stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So how does it how does it work? You mentioned the community side of things, but like what's the what's the the product with Hey Lady is like you'd mentioned I saw I was watching like your uh trailer video on the the homepage, and it was saying how expensive it is to have like um a tutor, but that what the the focus of it is around conversation. So is it about conversations between the members? Is that how that works?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so our whole product and our community is um it's uh student-led or member-led and coach supported. So our English coaches inside the community certainly we have um just like lots of course creators, we have recorded videos and we have PDFs and exercises and things like that. But the core value in Hey Lady is the experience of not just acquiring the information through video content or through worksheets, but actually showing up to put it to practice into use. And so our coach role in that space is to create opportunities for our members to actually put what they're learning into practice, to have the space to come and interact with our coaches about the lesson content. So there's sort of learning opportunities, um skills workshops that they run and guided conversations that our coaches run. But what makes Hey Lay Hey Lady quite unique, I think, um is that our whole platform is built around allowing our members to connect. So in fact, there are some members in our community who their main motivation is not necessarily to learn and study English. It's about having people to practice with, being able to meet people, different people, talk about different topics in different contexts. And so within the platform, there's a whole range of ways that our members can interact with each other that doesn't actually require a teacher or a coach being there to lead and to create that opportunity for them. So you'll have, you know, in our community, we have about 20% of our members who are actually contributors to the platform in terms of events being conversations or study groups or reading clubs or things that they are hosting for themselves and for their friends or the other women in the community. And what makes that really, really powerful is that at that moment where they kind of take ownership of what they want to be doing in the language that they're learning, they unlock this sort of this ability to create and the ability to also recognize themselves as taking ownership over this language that they've been learning and doing what they want with it, as opposed to being directed by or kind of led in lots of different ways by a coach or by a tutor or by someone that they're watching, you know, through a course, for example.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. Okay. And what's the you you got the YouTube channel um English, right? So what's the connection with that? I saw you haven't posted videos on there in quite a long time. Did you completely stop that when you started work on Hey Lady?
SPEAKER_00:Um, it wasn't quite as simple a transition as as that.
SPEAKER_05:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Um for a couple of years, as we were sort of just getting started with Hey Lady and um, you know, ideating, thinking about this idea, uh testing, you mentioned, I can't remember if it was on air or before we actually hit record, but you mentioned, you know, uh creating community by WordPress plugins and things like that. That's where we started with Hey Lady, um and then sort of progressed through to third-party platforms. We used Mighty Networks at first, and then um got to the point where we we were ready to build our own and and sort of fully commit to to what we were trying to create in the world. And it was probably about um maybe two years into uh building our our platform that my workload was just out of control. It was effectively like trying to lead and manage and create content uh for two separate businesses. And um, you know, there was a point where I was really struggling with how do I kind of make this choice? And the the easiest way for me to describe it is, you know, I had this, um, and in fact, I'm not gonna use hat, I have this audience on YouTube that I'd built over several years that uh, you know, were hungry for content, really enjoyed watching my videos, and I was sort of feeling tired showing up in that space. Um not super uh excited about what uh how I was showing up, what I was creating there. Meanwhile, being so fully invested and excited and um uh wanting to bring Hey Lady into the world and to to help it be successful. Um so I made that choice, you know, probably with my heart and maybe not necessarily with my head, but we're getting there.
SPEAKER_01:Um and do the two of them like connect together? Like, do you still get because I mean even though I know you're not posting videos, I assume you're still getting a bunch a certain amount of views on that channel. It was so big.
SPEAKER_00:Totally, totally.
SPEAKER_01:It's do you get leads from that into Hey Lady? Like how do the two does the two connect still?
SPEAKER_00:And during that transition, um, you know, I was talking about Hey Lady. Um, my audience knew about what I was doing and um uh what Hey Lady was, and and there were certainly opportunities to to kind of come along and see what we were doing over there. Um so there's certainly that kind of connection that still exists today. It's one of the best things about YouTube is just the longevity of that content. It's still there, people are still watching it, people are still, you know, feel people are still subscribing, it's still growing. Um, and it's we're coming up to two years of of not actually putting content onto the channel. Um, it also still brings in revenue as well, um, which helps us to fuel what we're building at Hey Lady. Um, so there was that transition period that kind of helped to sort of tell the story of where I was heading. Um, but I think the other thing that connects English and what we're doing at Hey Lady is really just that um what that channel does in terms of authority and and building trust. And, you know, for any of your creators who have a YouTube channel and, you know, whether they're at the phase of kind of feeling like I'm putting so much into this and it's not necessarily, you know, bringing the revenue that I want it to, or in fact, they've been building for a while. It is such a strong reference of credibility and personal brand for whatever you do next or wherever you go next. And I think that that's like right now, both Shah and I would say that that is the strongest um value that we have as we're building and creating something new, is that we can we can fall back on um the trust that people have when they're searching my name or looking at Hey Lady and seeing that actually it's supported by a powered by Minglish and it's a much more well-known kind of brand um and recognizable.
SPEAKER_01:From a lead point of view, I saw I know you mentioned before we got started that you've got ads running to sign-ups. What's the main source of your uh sign-ups for Hey Lady? Is it the ads or is it from M English at the moment?
SPEAKER_00:Um I'm gonna handle that to Shah because Shah looks after our ads.
SPEAKER_04:Um definitely at the moment, um, our main source of uh new members to Hey Lady is through ads. One of the amazing things that we've discovered is because of Emma's work at Menglish, um, you can do really targeted ads. Like we can target viewers of this channel, uh, as well as gender and info and um interests and so forth. Um and what we found is the biggest benefit for it is that the cost of acquisition, like what we actually pay to acquire uh a customer, is is somewhere around one tenth to one twelfth. Um so when we talk about things like um uh CAC to LTV, uh ours is somewhere around about it averages about one to ten, one to eleven, something like that. Um and so the ri and and if we were to compare ads, so when we when we when we uh A B test different um ad campaigns, and you go, let's try and make an ad where Emma doesn't have to be in the ad. Um and we're um getting Emma out to to act and uh to perform the ad um editing and all of that kind of thing, and let's try one without Emma. Uh Emma's ads just outperform the other ones hands down every time, like at least eight or nine to one uh from those times where we've been measuring, measuring that. Um and so that so we've experimented with that, uh, that's been working really well. Um probably I think increasingly, you know, organic channels take a little while to get going. I think again, because of Minglish, the pace at which that we've grown. You know, every time I look on Instagram or Facebook for Hey Lady, the number and even the YouTube channel um which we've started sort of just kind of got that out there as an in set of intention. Um, the numbers have sort of um climbed up on there relatively quickly. So we're also getting traffic from, for example, just organically through Instagram and organically through um Facebook and um the YouTube channel and things like that, uh places like that as well. Um probably the the one that is the most tricky for us at the moment is actually um referrals. So there's a very strong intention with the community, like a really good community um should grow through referrals, right? Like if you're having a great time and you know somebody else, and in the English language learning space, we'd say, like, if your English is not your first language, you sure as heck probably know somebody else whose English is not their first language, right? Probably most of your mates would be. Um, and how to encourage them over. So at the moment we're sort of trialling different initiatives like how big does the carrot need to be, or what the kind of offer or the incentive is to bring someone across to Hey Lady. Um and I think that is that's probably something where uh it we we've got room to grow there um and room to figure out kind of what might work in terms of um a referral uh acquisition. But yeah, to answer your question, currently it's predominantly paid ads, and we don't pay much for those ads because of the work that's been done uh on it in English.
SPEAKER_01:And what's the what's the sticking point for you guys at the moment in terms of growth? Because I know you said you kind of want to double the number of members that you've got in Hay Lady. What do you think's like getting in the way? What's stopping you from getting there at the moment?
SPEAKER_04:Well, I mean, it depends on which weight which weeks that you asked me, right? Like if you'd asked if you'd asked me what your sticking point is about October, September last year, I would have said, we are on fire. Like we're doing webinars and bringing in like 50 grand and it's been brilliant. Um And when you go to do it again, it's that it's that um I always think of refuge of vase and the office, right? Like you can do the first one's brilliant, the second one's good, but like you know, is the third one really gonna work? Um and it's sort of the same with that, and I find that's that's consistency where you go, we figured this out, this is actually working. And then you go to do it again and it and it you do very well a second time. But then after that is that's where I find that our biggest challenge kind of lies. So and that's that in in terms of running a business, that makes it really difficult to do things like forecasting, for example. Like where are we going to be in six months' time? And you want to know where you're gonna be because you want to know what you know the other projects that you've got coming on or who can you hire, or those kinds of things. And you don't get that opportunity so much if you know it's inconsistent in the way that it has been. I think that's something that we So it's not really like a kind of super specific um, you know, like a bottleneck specifically in the funnel or something like that. It's just consistency of repeating um things that you've you've experimented with and thought this is really working. Um, you know, until it doesn't.
SPEAKER_01:So wasn't it so you th you mentioned the webinar. So you'd done the webinar, it worked great. You did it again, it worked pretty well, and you did it a third time like what was the amount of time in between each of those uh webinars that you'd done?
SPEAKER_04:Well, we actually did it about what seven or eight times in total. We did two different types of webinars.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and they were monthly.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, we're doing them each month, yeah. Um I can't say for sure exactly what the sticking point was. Like so, for example, just to give like you know, some of the numbers where you can get you can get a bum on a seat in a webinar for about uh or a registration, let's say, for 25 cents. Right? And then t one in two of those.
SPEAKER_01:So you're doing that, you're using ads for it. Were you doing email promotion to your list as well? We were doing that as well. Yeah, we were doing it. Okay, cool. Yeah, so 25 cents that's remembered.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so you so you get twenty but then you've got so then you've got, okay, this is how many people registered. Then you've got how many people actually um turned up on the day. And there's a whole lot of experiment and and so the magic number for us was don't even mention the end of the webinar to anyone until exactly five days before it's happening. Don't bother with like a two-week build-up or all of that kind of thing because you just lose people's attention. Um and so that was working and that seemed to be consistent. And then you the next thing is okay, how do you get people to stay engaged so they're actually going to turn up to this thing? Because typically once you've got people in the room, so I always say this with pride, you get them in there with Emma, they're gonna buy, right? And about 10 to 15 well, say five to ten percent consistently of the people in the room would buy. So you're sort of thinking, fantastic, let's just get as many people as we can, you know, kind of in there. So then you've got so then you've got like, okay, there's registrations, then okay, now how many people are gonna attend? And then there's an interesting thing between the the relationship between p people who attend and people who don't attend, and the and often the people who don't attend buy anyway. Um they don't even come to the webinar or even watch the recording. Um, and then you've got the post-event follow-ups and the email sequence and the nurturing and all of that sort of thing. And then you sort of think, okay, that's a wrap, that's one campaign, you know, kind of done. How do we go at the end of that? Um so there so in between that, some of the things we grappled with in terms of inconsistency uh was particularly attendance. Sometimes you get so 35% attendance of registrations, I would say, is a really strong figure. And of course other people that I've listened to who've talked about, you know, like Amy Porterfield or all those kind of people who sort of agree that's a brilliant, that's a great um strong benchmark for for where you want to kind of get to. And we'd have that, and then on one of them, it would just completely drop out and just be like, is it the weather? Is it like is it when we still start saying, Oh, it's holiday season, right? So that's probably why, you know, and you just don't know. And it's like, why do they why the bum well I can't I'm just gonna swear, but you know, uh fall out of the sky, those results. So it's a bit of that, you know. That said, I think that for anyone who is whether it's webinars or um course sales, there's and and as you you specialize in and talk a lot about funnels, really just understanding like there are steps. And the empowering thing about those steps that goes on is you can put a number on each of those steps virtually, and you can figure you can at least have an educated guess about where things may or may may be going wrong or where things are going right. Um and that's it, you know, we try to make good decisions more than we make bad decisions, um, and try to keep things as consistent as we can.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so you are measuring all these steps. You were you knew that you wanted to get a 35% attendance rate, you knew that of the people who attend, it tends to be five to ten percent of people are buying. That all sound but sometimes it wasn't working. And are you still doing them? Have you stopped altogether now with the webinars?
SPEAKER_04:Or um that's a really good question. So here's the thing that we we it's a I don't know, have you done um have you done many webinars like when there's like this yeah, right? So there's thousands of things. It's brilliant, it is a great tactic. Um and it's super exciting on the night or at the time of the webinar, right? Because the comments feed's going so fast you can barely read anything, trying to get messages to Emma because people have got questions, like it's going off and everyone's a thumbs up and the emoji rap things going all over the screen. Like it's super exciting. It's also really exhausting. And so what we did, we happened upon this as well. So the webinars sort of like had that kind of decaying feeling, like it's not maybe we should take a break, maybe we're not, we're not sure. Is it too much to do? Um, shall we do them again in this one particular month? And we were looking at some of the numbers of people who bought. Uh, we were selling a three-month, let's say, like it's not let's say an order bump as such, but let's say a packaged offer. Uh the packaged offer was a um a 12-week course that's going to help you um double your fluency and your confidence with by giving you the the basic, the foundations of really good fluency practice. And then on top of that, we're going to provide three months of membership to Hey Lady, this place where you just go in there, there's all these people, blah, blah, blah. That's going to be great for us. So we were promoting that at the end of the webinar. It had been selling very well. And then we just kind of got into a state, we were so exhausted from doing them, and we had a chat as a team and just said, uh, what if we like didn't do the webinar? What if we just spent the next five days putting something together where we just sell the program just as it is, no webinar. Or link to the webinar content. And so that then tripped over into the next thing, then also we felt, well, this is fantastic. We're actually now um making more sales um without the use of the webinar at that time. Um and so that and and that was like the next kind of for us to go, okay, maybe this is what's going to work for us for the next little period of time. And it's certainly a lot less exhausting and all of those kinds of things from actually running that many uh webinars as we were. So has that worked better or is that like just less exhausting? No, I think I so A, it's less so one thing is like um it's absolutely been less exhausting in some ways, I would say, for the team. And and and look, the good thing about the webinar is like you have a presentation, you know that it works. It's you're you've been improving it with each iteration based on the real-time feedback that you're getting from the audience while the webinar is actually in progress. And that's been super empowering. We love being able to do that. Um, and but there is it there is a lot of planning and there's and there's a lot of like we're doing all this other stuff, but hey Lady as well, by the way, because we're a very small team. So it does get to be a lot. The then we're getting exactly the same results or or better in terms of like actual sign-ups and and sales of that program on its own, that bundled offer on its own. Um, and so then we proceeded with that for I think better part of like five months, six months. Um and that was doing relatively well. And again, and I think I put some of this consistency in this case down to um probably our lack of finesse around acquiring or like promoting that offer. And the way that we've been doing that again has been more so reliant on I would say by this time it would be more so reliant on direct paid advertising because it's just basically um we have a budget for how much it costs per a result uh and how much would we get in return for that sale at the return on that ad spend, if it made sense, just continue with that. Uh and that has also worked for a period of time. Um, at which point my relationship with Meta and Facebook ads has started sort of going on a slightly downward hill. Um again, because it does. Yeah, it's tricky.
SPEAKER_01:I've heard I've heard this from others, yes.
SPEAKER_04:Yes. Um, and so I guess you know, to to bring it full round, I just sort of think like where we're at, and in terms of the challenges that we've got, as I've seen a lot of other course creators go through, is like um you probably don't really want to be continually ever relying on these ads, even though they are um satisfying and they can absolutely work and we've that we've done really well with them, it's been great. Um the sort of long-term, sustainable, reliable, repeatable, um, I think I absolutely think there's a better way to do that. Um yeah, that's that that meta uh machine is hungry for it's like YouTube actually, in a way. Hungry for the content. Keep feeding it, keep feeding it, keep feeding it. It's it's much it it's a s sort of similar vibe, I guess.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I got a friend who's doing like uh I think about three million a year, he's doing uh selling uh parenting courses. He was talking me through like the num and he's doing it all through ads. He's doing it all through through meta-ads. I think it's just through meta-ads. It's certainly mostly through meta-ads. And he was talking me through the amount of creative that he has to to create for that. And he's doing like I d I I the numbers he told me were just staggering. I forget exactly what it was, but it was certainly in the like thousands of creatives that he's made over the last you know, year or two, whatever, possibly in tens of thousands. And he was like, I'm he's like, I'll make a hundred, and out of a hundred, ten will be good, and ninety will be like, no, tested it, didn't really work. And out of those ten, one will be the standout success. And it's like, whew, that is that's a lot of content to be creating. That's a lot of like, you know, and some of them are like the it's the same ad, but just different hooks in the con in the copy. You know, it's not like everything completely from scratch, but still, it's a lot to be creating, which is it's funny, isn't it? Because the idea everyone has, everyone who does organic, the idea they have about ads is oh, I wish I could do it through ads, because then I could just scale it. You know, you come up with the the ads and then you just scale it. It's like, no, no. It's its own content machine where you have to create all these different ads in order to try and scale the ad campaigns, you know, because each ad will tire with that audience and it'll the the you know the frequency will get too high, and ads just stop working for some reason after some period of time or whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_00:So it's like on the other.
SPEAKER_04:It's like one in a thousand. So if you want to get to a to get to spending a thousand a day on one ad set, the one winning ad that you can you that really hits home, the rule is it's one in a thousand. So exactly what your mate said is about right, right? So like out of a hundred, there was ten, and then out of the ten, there'd be one. Does that make that one in a thousand chance of winning? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. One in a hundred, that would be.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:One in a hundred. Okay. Well, that's even better because I've heard it's one as a golden rule, it's one in a thousand to hit it out of the park.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so maybe he's maybe with his one in a hundred, he's smashing it.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:You know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think it's true across all of the like the strategies that we were just talking about there, like there is this point where whether it's content, whether it's like the process where you want to run through a webinar, whether it's a, you know, freebie or a giveaway or whatever, like there is a point where like you saturate your audience or you kind of go out to your email list with the same thing so many times that actually no one's really taking any action anymore, and you've got to kind of come up with something else. And it's like as much as the the sort of theory of like set and forget, like create this amazing thing, and then just like walk away, and forever it will just bring customers to you. Like it doesn't actually, you know, exist in any of these sort of tactics that we've been talking about. They all have their own kind of challenge, I guess.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and like that's basically like nearly everybody that I know who sells courses, digital products, whatever, they they have this idea, they've they've read something online, you know, the passive income kind of dream, whatever, and they've set they want to set up a long automated sequence that goes out to the email list. So you get leads in, automatically these things come out. And just consistent, forever, like and I've been doing this for eight years in this this market, it does not work as well as doing an a different thing live each month.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Like for various different reasons. Sometimes one is if you're doing it live, you can adapt it to the market, to the time, to you can have a different hook for a re reason people signing up. Secondly, because if you try and set it and forget it, stuff breaks and it's very hard to spot what it is. Whereas if you're doing it live, you kind of can see with the the whole audience at one point, it's very easy to see when something goes wrong. Um and yeah, like you're saying, like things just don't the same thing doesn't keep working. You need to keep kind of tweaking it and changing it, what have you. So like our approach is a a big part of the work that we're doing with people is every month we're going to be promoting something. Now, if it's a um a membership, it's generally okay, it's the same thing we're promoting in terms of the core offer, but you've got to make it seem different. It's like, okay, what's the the the product is the same, but how are we changing the the offer? What are we doing? You mentioned earlier, Shah, I think, something about like, okay, we're gonna put together this work on creating this additional freebie or this additional thing that's like the front end for this month. It's like, how are we gonna we have the same course that we promoted once 10 months in a row to the same audience and we managed to improve the sales every single month because we could figure out, oh, what if we do it this way? What if we change this angle? And so even though it's the same audience, you could just keep increasing sales after month after month after month. After 10 months, we were like, we ran out of ideas. We're like, okay guys, we need we need another product from you because we're gonna this is getting tough to keep selling this again and again. But um I think that's like one of the that's one of the things that like we're spending a lot of time on with clients is like how do we make this offer a little different? Do we make the hook different? So the offer's the same, but the hook's different. Do you make the offer different? Do you have a completely new product? Like, what is it that you're doing differently? So what's the what's the current system that you're running? What is what's the kind of current uh offers you?
SPEAKER_04:So we just um simplified everything down to one offer and just trying to, I guess, double down on that. So Hey Ladies and membership. Yeah. Behind the scenes, our focus is on onboarding. So behind the scenes, what we're trying to do for all other reasons we could also talk about if you like, but thus from the first moment they engage with our brand, the sign-up flow as they step inside the first, seconds, minutes, day, week, all of that, right? So that's all going on the background. The other thing though is um there's a gap in our um in English language learning. People are very familiar with you buy a course, you open it up, there's a screen with a menu on the left, and or you can see the table of contents. You click through the content as a video, and it's they're familiar with that. They're familiar with YouTube videos, and they're familiar with what happens like in a language school. What they're not familiar with is a place that you go and you're expected to talk with other people who are learning English, and somehow that's going to be a good thing. But on the other side, right? But on the other side, on the inside of that community, there's all these people showering each other with love and traveling across the world and buying airplane tickets to visit each other and all this amazing connection that happens here. The difference between those in between those two things is onboarding. And the main thing which we're improving overall is what we call is the free motion. So in product-led growth, if you've ever gotten like deep dived or geeked out on this concept of product-led growth, the free motion is the important part. So our current free motion is a seven-day free trial. Why is it seven? Because we've done 14, 30, and 10. And seven is the number of days that you need, and we'll convert anywhere up to 60% of people who sign up for a free trial uh after seven days. Uh compared to the others. And 30 was the worst. Um, way too long of a free period. Uh just don't tried shorter. We've not tried sh we've not tried shorter than seven because we've also observed in our current, let's just say, getting started onboarding steps, it can take it was at that time before we improved it, taking three to four days. Now, that's a good question, and we actually possibly could reduce that. But here's the thing these time-based trials are kind of pointless because you've got a mate's birthday you've got to go to tomorrow, you've got the kids playing something on the weekend, like you get excited in the moment in the darkness of night while you're up late and every and you've got quiet time and you sign up for something. But then when you actually get around to engaging with that thing is anybody's guess. So what we're moving towards is engagement-based trials. Some people might call it usage-based trials. So let's say, hey lady, the core value of what we do is it's in the conversation. It's in the video called That's Where the Magic Happens. So let's say I say, well, um, John, you can sign up and you get seven conversations. Now we've got all these other things which will nudge you through that process. Um and anyway, I'm I'm diverging, but but that's what's going on in in the background is we're trying to nurture people through a a trial period that will change from a time-based to an engagement-based trial. And so all of our focus in our current funnels, let's say, are all pointing towards this seven-day free trial. The first way that we're doing that is with paid ads, and they've been super successful in in in in a in a consistent, as long as we don't try to scale them and try to get to like the actual target number of signups per day that we'd really like, and we just keep it at a manageable level for meta to handle, um, it's fine. Then we've also got a nurture sequence that begins with a quiz. That's another been another um, I wouldn't say it's been a fantastic thing yet for converting people because we haven't had a a really solid nurture sequence afterwards. Um, but people love quizzes. They love assessing themselves about you know what's wrong with them. Um and then you can provide them with a solution um as also a chance to educate them. So that that's basically where we're where we're down to, but all roads need to lead towards just this single offer of the seven-day uh free trial. And then we let the platform and the community do the heavy lifting of turning that prospect into a customer uh after. Okay. Maybe add as well. So go on, Emma.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I might just also add as well, although right now our focus is on bringing everyone through the free trial, we have also at times turned on and off a like a short course that we use to particularly to help uh customers who are sort of feeling a bit anxious about jumping into a space where they've just got to speak and uh helping to nurture them through what's it like, what are the kind of skills that you need, like this is you know your opportunity to sort of practice your introduction and this is how to ask great questions and this is sort of what to expect in the community. So we have a a like a short course product that, as Shah said earlier, comes with three months of membership with the community. Um that although we're not pushing that at the moment, that's also another way that we sort of bring members into the community.
SPEAKER_01:Nice. Okay, so you've got like a main funnel, which is free trial, and then you've got a secondary one, which is this. Okay, if they didn't get through that, let's try this different approach of this course as like another way to kind of get them into it as well. Nice, okay. Yeah, I'm working with somebody who's doing like um it's like a uh friend of mine, Jody, she runs a business called Coach Fox AI, and they basically run AI, uh they'll create like an AI version of you as a coach. So she's the clients are coaches, and then they'll create an AI version of the coach, which is either a lead magnet and like people can kind of interact with it for free, or they're people that are selling it on. And so I keep I'm keeping on working with her on like well, what angle are we using for like how are you managing to get people into this? You know, what's the what's the approach? And they're just doing webinars, and the webinars are working great, and they've got the free trial, but then they've also got like a a boot camp. So the boot camp is two hours we're gonna get everything set up together, and they've got a done with you programme, which is like six weeks, which is kind of the same thing, but just like spread out over a longer period, and like just all these ways of like how do we get people in? And it's the same thing at the end, right? It's the same product that they've got afterwards, but it's like how do we just get people through kind of what you're talking about, that that onboarding process. Like, how do we get them into the point? How do we get them to do the whatever the the the like the idea with product like growth is you you've not actually sorry, not product like growth, but like onboarding is like generally you've got multiple things that people need to do, and when they've done oh, if someone's done these six things, they're gonna now they're very likely to become a member, right? And so it sounds like for you, it's if they do the seven lessons, if they do the seven lessons, they're very likely to convert to the next stage. I don't know if I've got that right, but that that's how it sounds like.
SPEAKER_04:You've got exactly right, yeah. And they sometimes they call that like the magic number, you know, like um there's magic numbers in other platforms, like say for example, Slack. Slack knows that if you are a team and you send 10,000 messages between the people in your team within X period of time, I think it's three months or something like that. Slack basically knows they've 95% chance got you as a as a customer. Right? That and that that 10,000 for them is like their magic number. And hey later, we have a kind of similar one which is around which essentially is as close to I could say if if somebody joins a community and they go into one conversation per day for seven consecutive days, they're staying. And they're probably gonna stay, you know, for some period of time. Going back to what you said as well, was thinking about like the angle of of producing something new like newness each month and being really excited about that. And we can I we always talk about it like packaging, right? It's sort of like how can you have the exact same Christmas present for everybody, but it's in a different package, so that when they look at it, they think like, oh my gosh, I've got something special that's just for me. Not realizing when they open the package, and that's just the trick of the onboarding as well, the the art to it, is that that thing that inside is inside there is actually really perfectly well suited to you. And so like like what you were saying before is is helped me to um one of the things we've talked been talking about in our team recently is there's so many different reasons why somebody is either a struggling with whatever whatever course or or solution that you or skill that you're teaching, or in our case, struggling with speaking English. And there's also so many different reasons why they want to solve that problem for themselves. Like they might be about to move to the UK, um, they might be uh about to have relatives visit them, uh they might be crapping themselves because they've got a job interview coming up. Our product is that's the packaging, right? The wrapper that goes around those things, and you can be inventive with that month after month after nothing. Probably never I I'd say most course creators might never run out of ideas there for like how could you package up what you're actually offering just to solve those different little nuanced differences about someone's pain that they've got their problem trying to solve or the outcome they're trying to that that they desire, you know, at the end of that. I think that could be super helpful for us as well. Um you know, bringing a month's worth of people who are just all there because they're into want to prepare for a job interview. And that's top of mind, that intention is so strong for them. Yeah, and then another one which is all different campaigns. Right, but exactly the same solution because guess what? If you practice speaking English English every single day, you're gonna be way more confident in that job interview. If you practice speaking English every single day, when your relatives come and visit you from the US to where you live in Croatia, you're gonna be able to talk to the grandkids. You know, like it's the same solution. Um different outcome and and and intent is the other thing.
SPEAKER_01:Um we've done a lot of research in this because we we do a lot of work with people who are teaching English. Like that's like a probably our most common type of uh uh client. Um so we've done research into this, and um, by chance it's seven different segments we found, like the main seven. So you mentioned a couple of them there, right? So one is jobs, one is your family coming to visit, another one is you're moving to another country, another one is your partner's from another country and you want to speak to the the family. And it's like I forget for definite what the others were. Oh, one is you're one of those people who just likes learning languages. Learning languages because we're definite segment, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Another one is completely different. Yeah, another one is also being able to travel independently, which is certainly something that I think native English speakers take very much for granted. Um as well.
SPEAKER_01:We're lucky, hey. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Do is that something that you do do you run separate campaigns around those, all those different approaches, like to your email list or in your ads?
SPEAKER_04:Um No, we don't currently do that. Oh, go ahead, Emma, sorry.
SPEAKER_00:Um It's often based on what we're actually teaching around inside the community at the time. So um unlike uh a standard course that's sort of like a pronunciation course or uh a grammar course, we teach around, we teach fluency around different topics or different themes. So each month, you know, we're focused on something different. And many of the topics that we just went through there, they are core topics within the Hey Lady community that you'll often find us talking about in lots of different ways in lots of different contexts. And so it might also be that topic that's kind of triggering a certain campaign if um we have a topic that focuses on interview skills, and we'll be doing that for an entire month. And so at that point, we'll be targeting and talking about and inviting people in who have that goal or skill set. So there's a lot of variety in the way that we are talking to our wider audience based on what's actually happening inside at the same time.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. Okay. And how often are you like running a promotion out to your email list about, okay, this month we're focusing on interview skills? That's the would you do that like once every month if you've got that as a theme for the month, or is it because you'd mentioned before, I think, in the notes you sent me through in advance that you're doing a promotion about every couple of months to your email list.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um so when it comes to um communicating with our list about what's happening in the community, we do that every month. And we have sort of like a like a roundup, or here's what you know, what's coming up. We have a newsletter called The Loop, and it's got you know everything that's sort of planned for the month ahead. But that's not necessarily a campaign, that's just uh us communicating with our you know, prospective customers list, for example. Um, sorry, Shar, I'll let you jump in.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, I was gonna say, so we do um absolutely what Emma's saying, and uh and I would uh one of the things is when we were talking about this newsletter that we send out, I was like, oh God, we're not doing a newsletter. Like who reads newsletters? But these ones that we're doing have got really strong engagement, high open rates, they're like super long form, in-depth, and like I think it's because there's actually genuinely so much stuff going on. We're not kind of like clutching at straws trying to make up something that's exciting that's happening in Hey Lady. So I think that's been a plus, and the newsletter works really well. Um, but in every sec so we do a promotion every month, but we cycle between external um promotions. So for example, like a webinar or another product that we've got. Um this is it like um what we have been doing. And then in alternating months, we're promoting internally to our community. So we have these sort of like, let's say, upsells other programs that we have to the community that we do. So it's alternating months. So we're not like you know, sort of hitting our audience um too hard, in our opinion, uh every single month with another thing to think about and another thing to buy as such. Um, but rather sort of having that breathing space in between and yet always promoting once per month, inside, outside, inside, outside.
SPEAKER_01:What we found, we've done a lot of testing, as you can imagine, with this, is that the the sweet spot for an email list in terms of promotion is is once a month. Like we've tried twice a month, we've tried every two months, and like and we've done this for like multiple months or years, whatever, so you have a big enough sample size you can see, well, did it just work for a short while and then it started to kind of fall off, or was it like, no, this actually works long time? In fact, the the best approach that we've found, if you can do it, is is one full promotion and then one small flash sale that might be like two days, something like that. And that is like the the sweet spot in terms of long term doesn't burn the list out too much and leads to the greatest amount of of revenue that you bring in. Now, obviously there's a cost to that in terms of you've actually got to write those promotions, put that whole thing together, plan it out, etc. But in terms of revenue from your audience, that's like the um the the sweet spot we found. The crucial thing there is you've got to make sure that the promotion that you're running is in itself providing value. We do something we call nurture promos, which is like where you're trying to make the promotion useful itself. You're trying to nurture the list through the promotion that you're sending so that the emails in there, people actually like receiving them, they want to read them, they're useful even if they don't buy. Because in any promotion, like 99% of people aren't going to buy from that particular promotion. So you want them to stick around so they might buy from the next one or the next one or the next one. But you also do want to run something so that they might buy now as well. So it's like, how do you balance? You have to try and balance those those two, right? And then we always include a link as well, so that if somebody is uh not wanting to hear about the promotion this time, they can opt out from that promotion without opting out from the whole email list. And that gives a really kind of nice in-between level. So it's like, no, I'm not interested in hearing about this product right now, but I do like your emails and I would like to stick around. And someone might hit that, you know, if they want to, they can hit that 10, 20 times, and then eventually they might be like, oh, actually, I'm kind of interested in in the the you know, hearing more about how I could go a little bit further this time.
SPEAKER_04:Would you say is like your what would be your like lifespan of a list, right? Like let's say you did that what you're talking about for like 12 months. Yeah. Could you or have you like could you just start that again in January next year and all that work you put in for this year? And by that time, either they've forgotten about it or they weren't interested then, but now they are, but they don't feel like, hold on, what you're just talking about?
SPEAKER_01:That like is a year about right? So six months is long enough? Year is absolutely plenty. Yes. Like so obviously you've got some people who will have joined the list who weren't on the list before. So in which case they haven't heard about it ever before. And then you've got the people who were on the list but they didn't open those emails. And then you've got the ones who did open the emails, but they weren't paying that much attention. Then you've got the ones who were paying attention, they did read it, but they've forgotten about it. And then you've got the ones who were paying attention, they read it, they remember it, and they didn't buy. And it's like, well, they probably need to hear it again then. You know, so it's like you might tweak it. So what we'll find is we'll reuse the campaign, but we will go back through every campaign and look at every email and go, what was the open rate on this? What was the click-through rate on this? What percentage of those people actually bought or started a trial or what have you? These four emails were great. These three emails here need a bit of work. Okay, let's redo those and kind of change that around a little bit. Or we're gonna have most of it the same, but we're gonna change this in the the hook at the beginning of the first email to make it more appropriate to the modern economy, to the the what's going on in the world today, to whatever it is that we think is relevant. We're gonna tweak it based on we've got these new features, these new testimonials, etc., that kind of thing as well. But overall, so you can't, I mean you can just reuse it a year later, but generally we'll we'll kind of, when we're doing it, we'll be tweaking it and refining it to see can we can we make it better than last year's one rather than just reusing it. But but as a simple answer, yes. Like I know someone who's been you running the same campaign that we built for him. I think the first time we did it it made him$200,000. And then uh he's been redoing it every three to four months forever since then. And every time it's done a little bit worse, but it's still making him a very nice lifestyle.
SPEAKER_04:So he's just gonna he's just happy, like, yeah, that's fine, that'll do. That's alright. Yeah, but don't break, don't fix it. Um also what do you also say? Um would you also say this is a question I've got actually about email nurtures, right? Let's say you've got lead magnets everywhere, um, or or different off ways. You've got to grow your email list, presumably, because people are joining this list. So you've got ways for people to opt into that. Um for each uh for each uh landing for each lead magnet, would people just then this goes a bit back to the automated emails, would you put them onto a relevant email nurture sequence for that one? Or everybody comes in and there's actually no nurture sequence, there's just once a month or whatever your or once a week, whatever your cadence is of emailing, you email everybody regardless with the same uh email.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we found the sweet spot there is about two weeks. So the normal thing is there's one nurture sequence that goes out to everybody and it lasts about two weeks. And the idea with it is it's the best um the best converting campaign that you possibly can make it. And we have tried what if we do like a different version for different segments within the market, and there's pros and cons to it. So the advantage, and this kind of seems obvious, is oh well, if you have like your the these seven segments in learning English like you guys have have got, right? If you had a different campaign for each segment based on what lead magnet they signed up for, that would seem obvious that that would convert better. And to an extent that's true if you have unlimited resources, but it uses time to write those campaigns and it uses time to review them and tweak them and check, oh, is this one converting? Is that one converting? And you've got now seven things that could go wrong. Whereas before if it's just one, you've got one thing that can that could go wrong and you can kind of review it more easily. So sometimes that's worth it, but generally we have found that it's better to have one main nurture sequence that's going out to everybody and make it about two weeks and make it like absolutely fantastic. So you'll have like an initial offer. So someone initially signs up to the lead magnet, the confirmation page is showing them an offer. We're like immediately trying to get them to sign up, and then we'll have like a follow-up about that for like a couple of days, maybe. And then it goes into nurture, like full go, okay, you're not buying right now, full nurture, like here's about us, here's our philosophy. We've got something we call the perfect welcome email sequence. And I think it's like five or seven emails, something like that. And it's like really nurture and bring them into your world, your philosophy, your way of thinking, trying to explain why you're doing things the way you are, getting them to kind of change their worldview, and then you make another offer at the end of that two weeks, and you have like a deadline on that offer as well, so they've got a higher chance of them signing up. And so after that, they'll go into the main the main email list and they'll get the same kind of emails as everybody else is getting the same campaigns.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I yeah, you go, Dana.
SPEAKER_00:No, you go.
SPEAKER_04:I was just gonna say if you um if you've got the with that welcome sequence as well, I presume that the CRM is going to exclude people who've already received it, but are like, you know, we've got people who are like serial lead magnet um downloaders, right? So they're always going to be like everything.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, you don't want to go to the same thing and reintroducing yourself. No, I was asking because I um I literally just copied, I just sat down over a week long period and and just completely copied Russell Bronson's perfect webinar script, right? When we're writing that webinar. So he works a treat. It's brilliant. Um and I just like one of the things that he was talking about with webinar with uh emails, which is like he just kind of has these emails where he's just touching base with everybody. And I think he calls them Seinfeld emails, but they're not really about anything. They're just about him reaching out and having a chat with them, just like you're writing to a friend. Um and so that's what he sends out, and it's not any it's not actually it requires work because it's only once a week, but it goes out to everybody on all of the lists all of the time. They all get that. And then he'll have these promotional things that come along from time to time. So there's he doesn't support at the time of when I was looking into it, paying attention to him. He wasn't doing the long uh email um natural sequence that was on some sort of uh time delay between emails or anything like that. I thought that was pretty cool. Um interesting approach to each of the years.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, his perfect webinar his perfect webinar script is fantastic. Like that's what we use with every client. It's basically like I mean, obviously, every single little detail of it is different for every person for every client, but the outline, the structure of it, it's it's genius. And basically, I don't know if you ever saw him talk about like how he developed it, but he basically went to see all these people who are running seminars, who are doing webinars, what have you. And every time he found a trick that worked from somebody else, he included it. So it's every single trick that everybody was doing all put together into one place. So if you go to it, so it's got the best possible offer, it's got the best possible structure, it's got the best possible storytelling, it's got the best possible clothes, it's like every single bit that he found from anyone. And it's like it works in a conversation. That's basically what you should do.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I agree. I agree. We were having a chat with a friend who's a naturopath, and I literally just said, You should do a webinar. She's like, What should be in it? And I just like literally just follow the script and follow the structure in a conversation to her right then. She's like, Oh my god, I want to buy this. What is this? I'm like, It's your coaching program. I've been sold about.
SPEAKER_01:Nice. Well, guys, this has been amazing. I really, really appreciate your time coming on the on the podcast today. Um, if people want to go check out your uh what you're up to, where should they go?
SPEAKER_00:They should definitely definitely come to the the Hey Lady website um to check out what we're what we're building. It's um heylady.io. And yeah, certainly reach out to Shar and I on LinkedIn or you can find me on Instagram. So um we'd love to hear from from your audience and to hear about what they're building as well. Um so yeah, feel free to reach out.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. Thanks so much, guys. I really, really appreciate your time coming on today. Um, and best of luck with everything. Sounds like you're building something amazing.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:It's been fun.