Episode #055: From $25 Workshop to $11k Launch
From $25 Workshop to $11k Launch
In this week's episode of the podcast Zach talks about how he turned a $25 live workshop into a successful $11,000 launch - and how you can too!
When you tune in you'll learn...
How we launched a $25 class and filled it up with nearly 200 students
Our secret weapon for getting people okay (and excited for) our pitch
The value of giving first
And so much more...
Tune in, listen up, and enjoy!
Links Mentioned:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 55. And in this episode we're talking about how we turned a $25 workshop into a five-figure launch. So if you're looking to host more live trainings in 2023, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I am so excited for this week's episode because this is one of the episodes where I get to take you behind the scenes of what works well in our business. When we talk to our audience, when we talk to you guys, we hear from you pretty regularly that you really enjoy hearing us talk about how we've done things in our business and giving you insights, and lessons, and numbers, and metrics and things that you can take and run in your own business.
So today, I want to talk about a recent promotion that we did with a $25 workshop. So on February 23rd, we hosted a live two-hour training called the Profitable Membership Plan. It was $25 to join. And we basically said, "Hey, if you come join us for 25 bucks, we're going to teach you what you need to know to map out a membership, create a pre-launch plan, find your first members, use Facebook ads to sell your membership, understand how we plan content for our membership and some of the things that we do for our referral program. You can come join us for 25 bucks and we're going to basically teach you how to start and grow a membership just like we have."
Now, what's been really cool about this is that we also tested building the full sales page over on ThriveCart. So if you want to see the full sales page, you can go to heartsoulhustle.com/membership and it'll take you to the full sales page. Now, just to note, the sales page will look a little bit different than it did when we were live because this one is for a pre-recorded version of the workshop, whereas on this sales page, it now says like, "Oh, pre-recorded." And it used to say, "A live workshop." But you can see the basic structure and foundation of this membership workshop. And if you want, you can also buy a copy of it for, you guessed it, $25.
Now, what ended up happening was we sold 193 tickets to this workshop, and I think it's worth noting that five to 10 of them came in after the workshop had started because people were telling friends or seeing stuff after the fact and being like, "Oh my gosh, can I buy a recording?" And we said, "Yeah, if you snag it, you can have the recording. No big deal." So we did get a handful of sales that came in after the workshop happened, but in total, we had 193 people snag a ticket for the workshop.
Now, if you're doing the math in your head, which I would be impressed, but maybe you are, you're going to figure out that if we had 193 tickets, then we did $4,825 in workshop sales. And if you're sitting there doing that, you're saying, "Hey, that's good and well, but you told us you had a five figure promotion." Well, we did because on the class we made an offer. Just like you would with a standard webinar with some caveats and we're going to talk about those. But we ended up selling what we call the membership template pack.
And the membership template pack is essentially this pack of eight templates that we put together based on how we've launched our membership. Things like warming up your email list with templates, a sales page template, a checkout page template, sales emails templates, social media promotion, Facebook ads templates, trackers that you can use to track the results of your launches, and an evergreen email sequence you could use after your launch.
So we put those eight templates together and we charged 197 for it if you enrolled during this promotion. Just worth noting, we also had an order bump that you could add onto your order, which was our challenge launch toolkit because if you want to launch with a challenge, you may want to have that toolkit. And then we also had an upsell, which was $50 for a paid boot camp masterclass. So how we've been running paid boot camps to fill up some of our memberships. Right?
So in total you could have spent 197, $234, $247, or $284 depending on the combination that you put together. Now, for those who are wondering, we did have a payment plan, two payments of 107, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about those payment plans in just a second. But if you're anything like me, you like the numbers. So let me give you the numbers. In total, we generated $10,840 cash in hand. We project meaning on payment plans eventually, we'll collect $11,482. And our expenses, we're finalizing because we had some affiliates, which I'll talk about in a second, but we had some affiliate payout.
We also had the expense of running Facebook ads, and we donated some of the money that came in to this workshop from the template pack to an organization that I care about, which I'll talk about as well today. But in total, our profit was between 8,000 and $8,500. Like I said, I know that's a broad range. We're just finalizing some payments from affiliates.
Now, one thing I want to point out is that all 193 sales came from our Facebook ads, our email list, our promotion. But what we do is if somebody has been referred to us from an affiliate partner in the past and that cookie still exists for them, then we give them commission on our workshop. So we gave them 50% commission on the workshop and we gave 30% commission on the template pack. Okay?
So if for example, somebody had been referred to our bootcamp back in January through an affiliate, and then that boot camper then bought the template pack, the person who referred them would get 50% for the workshop and 30% for the template pack. Okay? So we did have some affiliate payouts, but we didn't have affiliates promote the workshop.
I try to be as transparent as possible on this show. You guys know that. So I like to give you all the details. Now, couple of things that we did just for reference. So number one, we had a conversion rate of 16%. 16% of people that bought the workshop bought the template pack that was 31 people out of 193. We profited between 8,080 and $8,500. We projected $11,482 in sales, and we're donating $600 to the Trevor Project.
Now, one of the things that I love about doing these live classes is that sometimes we use them to also raise money for an organization that we really care about. And the Trevor Project is an organization that supports LGBTQ+ youth who may be in crisis or need support. They have a support phone line that I personally used when I was younger, and it's really near and dear to my heart.
I like doing this because number one, it's nice to give back with our business. I like doing that. Number two is an organization that I have personal connection with and is really dear to my heart. But the other reason I really like doing this is it speaks to our values as a company. Not the fact that we're donating, but that we're donating to an LGBTQ plus organization. It really speaks to what we believe in, what we stand for, that we are here for equity, diversity, connection. We care about these things and it's important to us. So featuring an organization within our promotions has been really, really cool.
I really enjoy doing it, and I can honestly say it feels really good to cut them that check. So let's rewind just a little bit and talk about how we got people to sign up for the event because you might be sitting here thinking, "This is great. I love that you got 193, Zach, but how did you do it? Well, in a previous episode of the podcast, I talked to you about the sphere of influence and the sphere of influence is basically just to really quickly sum it up, is your entire warm audience, people on your list, people who have been to your website, people who engage with you on Instagram. It's all of your kind of assets on the internet that facilitate the growth of each other.
I'll link up in the show notes, our complete episode of the Sphere of Influence. It's episode number 52 of the podcast if you want to listen to it. But what we do is we run ads to our sphere of influence, our warm audience. So first thing is first is we ran ads directly to the membership workshop and we ended up getting sales of the membership workshop for about $25 a piece. And so I've talked about this in previous episodes, but sometimes you say like, "Hey, that's great. You got sales for $25, but it cost $25 to get people to the workshop." So we technically didn't make any money on the membership workshop ads getting people to the membership, but then we about 2X'd our money on people that came through a Facebook ad, bought the workshop, and then went on to buy the template pack.
And that's just 2X that we can track. We actually suspect it's a little bit higher. So we basically to really be super specific, we run ads to our email list, our website traffic, our warm audience, encouraging them to sign up for the membership workshop. And that was really effective. We also did one other thing, which is we had a membership freebie that we created on how to start and grow a membership. Our membership plan kind of process.
We put together a free PDF that you could download. And in that PDF we had a thank you page that was the membership workshop. Come sign up for the workshop. We also had a series of emails where within a sequence we said, "Hey, because you signed up for this freebie, we know you might be interested in joining a workshop." We ran that as well. And that grew our list, but it also got people into the class.
So for us, that is a strategic play about growing our list and selling things for our business, and it worked really, really well. So that was number one, the way we filled up the event. Number two, we sent out an email pretty much daily. We sent out an email every single day leading up to the workshop for about 15 to 17 days out.
Now, if I was to do this again, I might push it back more to 10 to 14 days, but what ended up happening in full honest transparency is about three days before the workshop, we didn't send a ton of emails, and that was because we had a personal thing happen. For those of you who are familiar with Heart, Soul, and Hustle and have been with us for a while, you may know my dear dog, Teddy, unfortunately he passed away. We had to put him to sleep, which was really, really hard on me.
I had to do that Monday, which completely threw off my whole day Monday. It threw off my entire day Tuesday, and then I was playing catch on Wednesday, and then Thursday was the class, and I had to really keep it together, and it was tough. I'm not going to lie. That was really, really tough.
So I really would've liked to push the membership workshop a little harder, those four days leading up to. But the nice thing about this business is we get to honor ourselves when we need to. And this was a time where I had to move client calls and not send emails and just honor myself and be with my dog for his last day.
It is what it is, which I know sounds really tough and mean, but I promise you, I took that Monday off. We took a nap on the couch together, which was our last nap together. And then Tuesday, I took the day to myself. So that was tough. That was really tough, and that really threw me off a little bit. So we sent all these emails every single day except for those few days.
The other thing that we did to fill up the workshop was we did posts on Instagram and Facebook. So we are finding that our Instagram has been growing. The one thing that I will say that kind of drives me crazy about my Instagram is we've grown it so slowly over the past years. We officially hit a hundred posts and we have 9,500 followers, but our average post gets 40 to 50 likes.
But then every once in a while we do a post and it does really, really well. So we had a post that we did for our membership site that got almost a hundred. We just started posting about understanding how we've grown our membership. So one post was how we grew our membership. One post was, should you start a membership? One post was why I shut down my previous membership. One was an Instagram reel where I just talked about it.
But what I will say is that all of these posts got comments and people commented saying, "Send me more details. I'd love to sign up." And of course, we linked up the membership workshop in our bio. So we sent daily emails. We ran Facebook ads. We posted on social. Basically the trifecta of getting people to sign up for a live workshop, that's what we did.
Now, for the workshop itself, we did a couple things that I want to talk about. And the first thing I want to talk about is how we offered up at the beginning, the price of the offer that we were going to make at the end. So generally people say like, "Oh, don't tell people your offer. Don't tell them the price. Don't tell them anything about it until after they've gone through the presentation." But here's my thing. People paid $25 to be there. And for me, the most important thing is that people don't get to a pitch for an offer at the end and then go, "So you basically charge me for a free webinar." That is 100% not what I want.
So at the beginning of the class I said, "Look, here's how we make money. Number one, we share affiliate links in this training. Number two, some of you will join our membership because of this training. And number three, we have an offer at the end. It's $197 or two payments of 107, and it's only if you want to keep going. Everything that we set on this sales page, we were going to give you, you will get. We have a complete workbook that goes with this training. Everything that we have promised up to this point, you will get. The offer at the end, you do not have to take to get value from this class. You are not required to take to get results, it's just for those of you that wanted to take the next step and add a little more ease to the process, but it's absolutely not required."
So now that that's out of the way, you can let your guard down, have a good time, enjoy the class, and just be present without having to sit on bated breath to see what the offer is going to be, right? So that was the first thing we did. The second thing we did was we went almost two hours of pure value. So I had a presentation that I had built in Canva. It was over 170 slides long and I just went through them at a reasonable pace and I talked to people about how to start and grow their membership, which is crazy, but I literally gave them what I told them I was going to give them.
I know that it sounds a little tongue in cheek, but people don't do that right now. It's actually super common for people to not give value on their webinar. And so we are like, "This is not a webinar. This is a workshop." We also coupled it with a Google Doc workbook. So there was a complete workbook. It was like 10 pages long, and it was just everything that we talked about on the class so that people could actually take notes and do the work while we were there live.
Only about seven to 10 minutes of the class itself was the pitch. And then we opened it up for Q&A. Just general questions. And we told people the questions can be about growing your membership or they can be about the offer, but you don't have to ask about the offer to stick around. Right? And then we did a couple of limited time bonuses. So we said, "If you join before Tuesday..." this class was on a Thursday. We said, "If you join before the following Tuesday, you can get the membership template pack for 197. Then we're bringing it back to 247." And then we also said, "If you join today, Thursday, tomorrow Friday, we were hosting a live debrief of one of our profitable membership launches."
So we gave that debrief to everybody who joined the template pack as a bonus. But if you wanted to join us live for it to be able to ask questions and hang out, you could buy the template pack that day. So a couple of incentives there. Now, once we opened up the "cart", quote, unquote, for the membership template pack for 197, we gave away three bonuses over time. So first was the debrief, which I just told you about. The second was a swipe file of all the sales emails we sent for this promotion. 'Cause I don't know about you, but I love a good swipe file.
We also did a live Q&A call bonus for anyone that bought the template pack. You could join us in the next few weeks, and we're going to do a live Q&A to answer any questions that might come up while you use the template pack. And we do that because the template pack is a standalone product. It's not a course or a training really. And sometimes people have questions, so we give them the opportunity. And then of course, save $50 and 10% of your purchase between now and Tuesday night goes to the Trevor Project.
So this worked out super, super well for us. What's really nice about this is that we had made this offer before and we'd sold the template pack before, so it was finished. There was no extra stuff to really create like, yes, the swipe file, but honestly, my team put that together. Yes, the debrief, but we were already doing that class as a bonus for our membership, and we just invited people to come if they wanted to.
And then of course, I have to do an hour and a half live Q&A call, but I just get to show up, hang out, have fun and answer questions. Right? So huge benefits here and the bonuses and the content doesn't have to be recreated or be a ton of extra work for me. We also have the benefit that we get to move it to Evergreen. So if you're listening to this, you can still buy the membership template pack at heartsoulhustle.com/templates. And the only downside, I guess if you would even call it that, is that they're 247 now.
So we did them for a limited time exclusively to people that joined the workshop. Now it's 247 to get the template pack, but you can still get it. Right? And we'll also move the workshop to Evergreen, which we already have, and you can still buy the workshop at heartsoulhustle.com/membership for 25 bucks.
Now, here's the downside of all of this. This was so great in theory, I was so geeked up, so ready to go evergreen. The only downside is that because it's a pre-recorded class where I talk about the price point of 197 and bonuses and all this stuff, I have to re-record some of the class or edit the video recording so that the price is reflected accurately in the evergreen version for the 247 price point of the template pack now.
So that's the biggest downfall. There's one other thing that I wanted to touch on very briefly and I know that this might ruffle some feathers, but I think it's worth having a conversation. It's something that frankly, I'm taking you into the conversation that I'm having still in my mind. I'm not solidified on an answer, but I was recently reading something on Instagram from someone who talks about the coaching industry as a whole, and they were talking about how sometimes payment plans are almost predatory.
I don't know if I fully believe that payment plans are predatory. Like I said, this is something that I'm thinking through. Sometimes we say things like, "Oh, well, we charge extra for a payment plan because there's clerical or admin." But sometimes, originally we were at 197 or two payments of 167, which if you do the math on that, two payments of 167... Or I'm sorry. We were at two payments of 127, which if you do the math on that, two payments of 127 is 254, which is approximately $57 more than going for the 197 offer.
I sat down and I said, "Honestly, if I'm completely honest with myself, is it really $56 of work if somebody fails on that payment and my team has to follow up with them?" And I was like, "Honestly, it's probably like 45 minutes, maybe 30 minutes of work for them to see the failed payment, send the email, maybe converse with people." Let's even say like an hour. I think that justifies a slightly lower cost. So let's say it takes a half hour, 15, 20, $30 would cover that, but it's like, why am I charging in some of my products and programs two, three, four, five times the cost on payment plans?
I know that's a little dramatic, but we've started to think about pain plans differently. And so for some of our high-touch programs, we still have payment plans, but for example, for our coaching program, our one-on-one coaching, it's the same price per month whether you pay upfront or in payments because a high-touch client isn't going to disappear on me generally speaking, and if they stop showing up and stop paying, I'm not going to collect the money.
I've made peace with that because I don't know that... Like I said, the thing that I read was like it's almost predatory the way we priced it, and I don't know that I would go that far, but what I would say is there's a conversation that needs to be had about we're pricing our payment and our full pay to reward people for paying in full, which I get. It brings the money up front. It guarantees the revenue. People do default and cancel payments, but at what point are we pushing that envelope and saying, "For example, there are programs where you're paying 10, 15, 20% additional on payment plans"?
And so it just got me thinking, I have not made a final decision about where I am other than that I am 100% willing to have this conversation, talk about it, think about it, and test it. And honestly, we ended up doing this where it was the full pair of the payments. And I know we're at a lower price point of 197 versus like 1997, but in total, out of everyone, we only had 19% of people take the payment plan. And honestly, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that.
And if those people were to fail, I'd be okay with that too. Payments fail, not personally. We don't want people to fail. But it's just something that I wanted to tact into this episode as a conversation that we need to be having. And to me, the conversation as a whole about payment plans is not necessarily as important as the conversation that we need to be having about the whole as an industry. What are the things that we're doing blindly because that's what we were taught or because that's what we see people do, or because that's what so-and-so said I'm doing it for, versus how often are we having a true conversation about the reality of what we're doing?
So I hope you get massive value from this episode. And if nothing else, the last few minutes of this made you really think and take stock of some of the things that are best or general practices in your business. Before we wrap up, I want to invite you to DM me over on Instagram @heartsoulhustle and tell me what you think. What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear from you both about the show and about payment plans. What are your thoughts? Do we love them? Do we hate them? Do we think that there's things that I'm not thinking of?
I want to have the conversation with you. So drop me a DM over on Instagram. As we wrap up here, if you want a full copy of the transcript, the show notes, all that good stuff, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP055. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP055 for not your average podcast, episode number 55. We'll have a full transcript of the show, show notes, links, all that good stuff. And I just want to tell you, thank you for listening.
I really appreciate it. And if you were wondering where last week's episode was, I talked about it earlier. We lost our beloved Theodore Bearstien, Teddy Bear. We called him the teditor-in-chief at Heart, Soul, Hustle, and we did lose him. I just want to thank you for your grace. So many of you have reached out and said nice things, and I really appreciate that.
We are going to do our best to be more consistent with the podcast, but life happens and we're going to try and be better at it. But I just wanted to be honest with you, tell you that I appreciate you. And sometimes life happens and sometimes Zack should be better at batching, but he's not. So we're working on it. We're all trying to be a little bit better every single day, 1% better every day. I hope you have an incredible rest of your week, and until next time, stay not so average.