HSH 144: Lessons Learned from 1,000+ Low Ticket Sales
Episode 144: Lessons Learned from 1,000+ Low Ticket Sales
Join me as I I take you behind the scenes of the lessons he's learned from selling over 1,000 products priced at $37 or less - and what you can do if you want to replicate these results!
Full Transcript
This is the Heart, Soul and Hustle podcast, episode number 144. And on this episode, we are talking low ticket offers. So if you've been thinking about launching a low ticket offer in your business, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey there. You're listening to the Heart, Soul and Hustle podcast. My name is Zach Spuckler. And on this show, we talk about how to go from passionate side hustler to full-time online business owner, with tips, tricks, and interviews to help you take it to the next level. Let's do it.
What, what, what is up hustlers? Welcome to another episode of the Heart, Soul and Hustle podcast. Now I'm really geeked up for this week's episode, because this is an episode that I've kind of been sitting on for a while. And if I'm being completely transparent with you, I've had a little bit of imposter syndrome about releasing this episode. And the reason is that I want to talk about the low ticket offers that we've launched in our business. And I've really been thinking, "Wow, I'll do this episode when I hit a thousand sales. I'll do this episode when I hit a thousand sales." And we've actually done over a thousand sales of multiple products. But we've only done 811 sales of the product that I'm going to talk about today, as of February 15th.
Now, the cool thing that I want to share with you about this is that we actually started a little while back in our business, probably about six months ago, give or take, playing around with low ticket offers. And there's so much behind why I introduced low ticket offers and my mindset behind them. And I'm actually going to bring a guest on the show next week to talk a little bit about my mindset about bringing in lower ticket offers into the business.
But what I wanted to focus on with this week's episode is a few different lessons that I've learned from selling over 800 low ticket offers. And our low ticket offers, we actually have an average value of about $45. So even though the product is $37, we've sold 800 of them at about $45 to $50 a piece, which means that we've done just about $35,000 to $40,000 in sales of a $37 product. Now, I don't tell you that to toot my own horn or be like, "Oh my gosh. Look, how cool is Zach is." But that's a modest salary and we've made that just on our $37 product.
And I'll talk to you about some of the lessons that we've learned. But really the idea behind a low ticket offer for me is that we want people to ascend in our business. And really, I don't love the word ascend. I did this really great interview with a friend of mine. And we talked about how we don't want people to ascend our business. Because ascension is like, "Oh, they're just moving up. They're just buying more. They're just buying the next thing because they need it." Right? What I really loved is that my friend, Joanna, and my friend, Tash Corbin, I got to talk to both of them couple of days back to back on their podcasts. And we talked about this idea of evolution. And we talked about how we want our students to evolve with us. We want them to move to the next level with us. We want them to not just buy a low ticket product and then feel like they have to buy the next thing to get success. We want them to get success at a lower price point so that they're excited to buy into higher level offers.
Because I don't want to sit here and tell you that my whole business is built on a $37 offer. Because it's not. It's built on affiliate offers. It's built on webinars. It's built on $300 courses, $600 courses. We have a $2,000 a quarter coaching program. But not everybody is ready for those. And that applies to your business too.
So I want to really just quickly dive into my low ticket product that we're really going to focus on today. And that is the Challenge Launch Toolkit. Now, if you want to check it out, it's toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. And it's a $37 product that teaches my challenge launch methodology, how I use challenge launches to generate lots of sales with my digital products. And I've done challenges for years and years and years. And I've distilled it down to this really simple product that teaches you my methodology, my basic Facebook Ads framework and gives you some templates and swipe files for the emails that I send out during my challenge. So at $37, it's pretty robust.
And so the first thing that I've learned about low ticket offers, lesson number one is that you have to create something really valuable and test to see if your market wants it. So a lot of times at $37, we think, "Oh, I'm just going to give something really easy or something really simple." But I would argue, give something ... I don't want to say advanced or confusing. You don't want to confuse people. But give something that actually gets people results. I know it's a crazy concept, but what if we actually got people results even before they're spending three, six, a thousand dollars with us?
And what I really want to push with this is that this first offer worked so well for us. This was actually one of the first low ticket offers we launched. We tried some other ones. I'm going to talk about why we're not doing that as much anymore. But we knew this offer works because I had been teaching about challenges for years. So lesson number one is that you need to test your offers before you start trying to scale them, or running ads to them, or spending thousands of dollars on sales pages and marketing. First things first, create a really simple offer and test it.
Now you've probably seen me do this on my social media. The way that I test out offers is I just throw out a post that says, "Hey, if I did something like this for X number of dollars, would you be interested in joining me?" Now this is becoming a really popular strategy. I know some people who teach it. I know some people who use it and don't teach it. I know people that teach it and use it.
But here's the gist. If you put a post out on your social media, whether it be your Facebook, your Instagram, and just gauge the interest level before you start to build the thing, that's a really great place to start. Now with all of my low ticket offers, I pre-sold them first. And I had my numbers in my head. I was like, "If I don't sell at least 50 of these, I know that I'm off base here." That was us. We had an email list of 4,000 to 5,000. And I said, "If I can't convert 1% of my list, I feel like I'm missing the mark."
Now, if you're sitting here going, "I want to test an offer, but what the heck do I even sell?" This episode, I don't want to get too deep into offer creation, but I want to recommend what I call the Offer Cure. Well, I don't call it that. That's actually what it's called. The Offer Cure by Cathy and Julie, over at Funnel Gorgeous. If you go to heartsoulhustle.com/cure, this is their $37 low ticket product that teaches you how to create a really robust offer. It's super quick. It's super high quality. If you want to check it out, heartsoulhustle.com/cure. I'll link it up in the show notes as well. But I recommend this to everybody. My coaching clients, I recommend this program. My group coaching clients, I recommend this program. Inside of my Facebook group, I recommend this program. Because here's the thing, they are experts at crafting really great offers.
And two, if you're thinking about bringing a low ticket offer into your business, one of the things I recommend is that you study other low ticket offers. What makes them great? What do you love about them? What do you not like about them? I personally have spent hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars on products that range from $37 to $97, just to explore and experiment and see what's working, see what I like, see what elements I like. And I'm not talking about content. I'm not saying go to your competitors, take their content and turn into your own. But what I am saying is go study other low ticket products and see what you think. If you teach homeschooling, but you want to run Facebook Ads, go buy a Facebook Ads low ticket offer. And ask yourself, what about this structure, what about this content, what about everything that I'm seeing here do I like that I could put into my homeschooling offer?
So lesson number one is test your offers organically, but study what's working. Okay? And then release them organically to your audience. And that brings me into lesson two, which is set goals and leverage your organic before you do paid marketing. Now this might seem very similar to the first point. But what I really want to get into here is get clear on what a win is for you. If you've never sold before, maybe selling your first 10 copies organically is a total win. But you have to set a benchmark. You have to get clear on what you would determine a viable product. For me, it's if one to 2% of my audience buys, maybe just 1%, if I'm talking purely about social media and not my email list, then I want to see a one to 2% conversion rate. And that tells me that I'm onto something with my low ticket product. So what I say for most of my students is, "Build your email list, build your audience before you sell a low ticket product."
But if your email list is 200 people, then you want to be converting two to four people into your low ticket offer. If your email list is 300 people, you want to be converting three to six people in your offer. I say one to 2% of your audience. Here's the reason why. Because it is a paid offer, it may convert higher, it may convert a little lower. But I know if 1% to 2% of my audience buys it without advertising, without any fancy marketing, without a big fancy sales page, that is going to really tell me that I'm onto something.
And this is a perfect time to note that when I first test my offer organically to my audience with a metric and a goal, I don't do a big fancy sales page. I do a really nice checkout page. I use SamCart. I use ThriveCart. But I design a page that outlines the offer and then briefly tells them what they're going to get with a $27 to $37 price point. And when I prelaunch, I also tend to discount 10% to 30%. So when I launched my Challenge Launch Toolkit, it's $37 now. I pre-launched it, no sales page, just a checkout page for $27. And we got about 100 people to buy it, which hit my metric, hit my goal and told me I was qualified. So lesson one, test your offers organically. And lesson two, set the metrics of that offer and pre-sell it to that organic audience.
Now, once you start generating sales and you're selling your low ticket offer, you're going to start asking yourself, "How do I sell more of these? How do I amplify? How do I leverage this to grow my audience?" And for me, the first thing that I do is I start running ads to my warm audience only. Now inside my signature program, Launch It!, I teach my students that they should be running ads every week that they're not launching. One to build their email list, and two, to get people interacting with their content. Because with Facebook Ads, you can re target everybody who's liking your stuff on Instagram, everybody who's engaging with you on Facebook, everybody who's watching your Facebook Lives, all the people on your email list, all the people who have visited your website. You can re target those people with your ads. And that is what's called your warm audience.
So when I start to scale my low ticket offer, I run ads to my warm audience first. The inclination that people have is they say, "Well, 1% to 2% of my audience bought it already. And I really want to get cold people onto my email list." So they start with lookalike and cold traffic.
But here are the three steps you need to run your ads to a warm audience first. One, you have to build a sales page. So now we move away from that checkout page and we add a full-blown sales page to the mix. Again, if you want to see what that looks like, toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com, and you'll be able to see my low ticket offer sales page.
The second thing you need is ad copy and creative that you can test. So you're going to have to write various forms of ad creative, ad copy and really test multiple things out. The third thing that you need is tracking. So make sure that whether you're using SamCart or ThriveCart ... I highly recommend ThriveCart for low ticket offers because they're tracking into Facebook Ads is very robust. You want to make sure you can track how much you're spending versus how much you're earning. And this is the eye-opener you guys. You can get a really great ROI on your ads. But my goal with my $37 offer is a 1 to 1.5 X return. My goal is to get $1 out to a $1.50 out every time I spend a dollar on ads.
But it all starts with my warm and here's why. Let's just step back for a second. If your ads don't convert on the warm audience, the people who already know you, like you, trust you, directly to your sales page, it's probably not going to convert on cold and look-alike. So as I'm running the traffic to my warm audience, I'm checking for key metrics. I'm checking to make sure that everything works. Is my ad converting above 1%? Is my sales page converting about 5% to 10%? is my traffic and engagement on my ads good? Are people commenting that they're excited? Are people commenting that they bought it? And I'm also engaging that audience to see if I can get social proof on the results that my low ticket offer gets.
So let's just, just do a quick recap because I know we're covering a lot and I know I'm a fast talker, but I appreciate you listening anyway. First things first, we test our offers organically. Second thing is we test them organically to our list, our audience, and we set the metric we want to achieve to determine if this is a viable offer. Once we've determined it's a viable offer, we then run ads to our warm audience first with a sales page and a checkout page now to test if traffic from Facebook and Instagram directly to our low ticket offer actually converts.
Now for me, this is the part where if I can be completely honest and transparent with you, I've got a little imposter syndrome about. Because one of the things that we do now is we expand the relationship with our low ticket sales clients. And we've just started doing this. So in December, the very tail end of December, December 28th, I emailed my entire list of buyers, anybody who'd ever bought anything from you before, whether it was $37 or $3,700, I shot them an email as long as they were on my list. And I said, "Hey, I'm opening up a Facebook group where you can join me as a paying student."
Now in the past, I've had free Facebook groups and they really burn me out and they're really exhausting. And I feel like I'm constantly battling spam. What I find is that the quality of my Facebook group is through the roof now that I'm focusing on customers who have paid, customers who have bought in, because they have a sense of where to go. They a sense of where to go for help and they have a sense of what they're working on. So when I've done a free Facebook group in the past, it's kind of like, "I want to grow my business and I'm going to join Zach's group." Now, it's like, "I want to run a challenge, I'm in Zach's group. I want to run Facebook Ads, I'm in Zach's group."
And so what I find is that the quality of the content, both that I can create and that people are curating for me is focused and central to these key topics that I sell low ticket offers on. So it's creating a higher quality community and experience. And I'm not saying that free Facebook groups are bad. I don't want a dog on free Facebook groups. What I am saying is that compared to my free Facebook groups and what I see now, in my paid Facebook group, I'm in love. I'm smitten with this group. I love it.
So the first thing is I build a deeper connection with all of my students. Now what that does is it means that when I have other offers, people are listening and people are watching. So I've got this container of people. Last week, we had somebody post in the group and say, "I just had a $23,000 challenge with your Toolkit." We had another person chime in and say they had a 10,000 pound challenge with the Toolkit. And they're in the UK. Right? So it's dollars pounds, et cetera. But think about what that means for all the other people in the group who have the Toolkit and are aspiring to get results. It creates inspirational content that I don't have to create. And it builds connection, not just with me, but with a community.
And so what happens within that community is that people start connecting with each other. People start talking to each other. It's still pretty new. We started December 28th. We initially got about 150 existing students in the group. And now it's up to 484 members in the group. So it's grown. Just over 300 of our new customers have joined the Facebook group based on what we can see. Obviously we've probably got some old people jumping in. But somewhere around 300 new students have joined the Facebook group. And so they are building this connection with each other. And I sincerely hope that people are starting to connect one-on-one and have Zoom calls. And I'm starting to build this collective.
The last thing is that it really feels like a community because a lot of times the free community, it's like, there's this big overarching topic. Like, "Grow your business. Build your list. Run your ads." With my community, yes, there's that big overarching topic of Facebook Ads and list building, and all the general stuff that we talk about in online marketing, but there's a clear directive. If you bought a low ticket product, you have an end goal in mind.
And right now we're focusing on just two. We've got the Challenge Launch Toolkit, which is where 80% of my low ticket focuses. And we have a two and a half hour Facebook Ads for Launching workshop that we've integrated because a lot of people are saying, "I need extra Facebook Ads support." But everybody in the group for the most part has come from one of those two offers. A couple exceptions to that. But I would say 90% of the group has bought one or both of those offers. And what that means is that everybody's working towards the common goal of launching. And so the questions in the group aren't like, "What should I do?" It's like, "Hey, I'm following the Toolkit. I've got this question." And then people in the group watch the evolution.
So I think of one of our students. I won't use her name just because I don't have permission. But I can share this story. And I'm sure she will not mind, which is that she came into the group and basically was asking a bunch of questions leading up to a challenge. Which I love. This was great. And she was asking all these questions and gearing up. And people were watching. And when she finished her challenge, she ended up having a really successful multiple five figure challenge. And people were celebrating her. Because not only did they watch her journey, but they saw the results of the program that most of them already have.
So think about this when I'm like, "Oh my gosh. I did a challenge. I ran Facebook Ads. I, I, I. Me, me, me. Zach, Zach, Zach show." It's like, "Yeah, you get some of that authority. But when you have a student who's basically chronicling their journey in a way that all the other students get to see, all the other customers, all the other clients get to connect with, it creates this beautiful story where I don't have to be the hero. They get to be the hero." And I love that. And I love that. We get to highlight our community and see the winners there.
I want to be really transparent about this. I'm not saying start a Facebook group for all your low ticket sales. What I am saying is think about how you can build a deeper relationship with your low ticket clients. Because when we launched our signature Launch It! program, which ranges from $300 to $600, depending on if you buy in at the DIY or the group coaching level, we had a lot of people who had already bought my low ticket product, bought the next thing. Why? Because they saw results like this. Because they were in a community that was working. And we actually didn't have the community yet. So I project that our next launch will be even bigger.
And this is really, really cool. We are doing a webinar today. If you're listening to this on February 16th, that's the day that this episode releases. But we're doing a webinar today. It's an affiliate webinar that I have with my friend Michael on Google Ads. And if you want to check it out, it's heartsoulhustle.com/google. But we're doing a webinar with Michael on Google Ads. And because I have a Facebook group, I literally just created an event for that group, invited most of them to the Google workshop. And literally we have a group of 484 people. We created the event and out of that, we had 55 people say they were going. And eight people say that they're a maybe. And people actually started registering for the webinar through the event on Facebook.
And so if we just do some math on this, that means we had 63 out of 484 people. And we actually had 450 people when we created that event. 14% of the group registered for this free webinar. Now think about that. Not only am I building deeper connection, deeper community, deeper relationships, but people are actually coming to my webinars now. People are actually registering for my trainings. So when I launch, when I do an affiliate promotion, when I do other things, people are coming to join me because this community is building a pool of trust, connection, and community.
So that's lesson number four. Think about how you can expand the relationship with your low ticket students, low ticket clients. And again, I'm not saying that students are of a different caliber, depending on the price point. I'm just saying that these prices are under $50 and I would consider that low ticket in our space.
The last lesson that we've learned is to focus on one or two low ticket offers at a time. So when I started, I had all of these ideas. So I created a launching low ticket, a Facebook Ads low ticket, a Facebook workshop, a Challenge Toolkit. I created all kinds of low ticket offers. What I found was that the majority of my low ticket offer sales were coming from the Challenge Toolkit. And so rather than extend myself in all different directions, I said, "Why not just go all in on the Toolkit?" And so that's why with the Toolkit, we've been able to get some really robust results over the last 30 to 60 days. And where we were normally like, "Oh, should we be promoting this or promoting that?" If we look at the last three months of the Challenge Launch Toolkit, we've gotten 360 orders. Which breaks down to just about a 120 orders a month. And that's November through January.
And then this month to date, we've already had 60 orders and it's halfway through the month. So we're pacing to consistently hit 120 orders a month. Now we're trying to scale that up to 300 to 500 a month and we're working on our ads. But imagine if I was trying to do that with four different products. What I like to do is focus on one and then I can test supplemental low ticket offers as people may or may not need them. But I can honestly tell you having had four to five low ticket offers, that focusing on one has been so freeing, so liberating. I don't feel like I'm trying to promote 30 different things at once. And I just continue to run ads to it. And it's working so incredibly well.
And I just want to just want to impress this upon you, that if you're thinking about a low ticket offer and you're like, "Well, what if the first one falls flat? Or what if the first one rocks? And then I do a second one and it falls flat?" Think about finding that winner. Test those offers. Lesson one and two, test those offers. And when you find an offer that's working, go all in on it until it's really, really optimized.
Because when we were trying to do both my Facebook Ads workshop and my Challenge Launch Toolkit, which are my two low ticket offers that we're really pushing right now, we were running around like crazy people. Because it would be like, "Are the ads working for this? Are the ads working with that? Which ads are working better? How much are we spending? Where's the conversion rate? What's this look like? What's that look like?" Versus now we check in as a team. And we're creating tracking as a team. Which I love my team. Shout out to Jessica and Ashley, if you guys are listening, who are my number twos. They're incredible. But we focus on the metrics of one thing and we're not tracking a thousand different things. We're looking at, what did we spend on ads? What did we make in sales? How many people are joining the group? And what's the growth look like? Imagine trying to track those four metrics for three or four offers consistently and spinning all the plates or juggling all the balls in the air. It's really hard to do.
So I'm going to recap these lessons. Lesson number one, test your offers. And shout out to the Offer Cure, which is the queen, because it's Julie and Cathy. They are the queens of creating killer offers. Number two, test your offers organically first. And set that metric of 1% to 2% of your audience to make sure the offer is valid and is going to scale. Then number three, lesson is always test your ads warm first. Because you're going to have to build a sales page and content. And you want to make sure it converts on your warm. If you can't get your warm to convert, your cold is not going to convert better.
Lesson four, once you start building this up, think about ways to expand the relationship. We have a Facebook group with Facebook Lives, community aspect, connection aspect. Think about how do you deepen that relationship with people. And then number five lesson, focus on one, maximum two, low ticket offers at a time. The only time I would recommend focusing on two is if you have one and you're not sure it's viable, you may want to launch a second one and test it. But stop there. Don't have a million low ticket products. It's harder to promote 10 things than it is to promote one.
So there you have it. The five lessons that we've learned from selling 800 low ticket Challenge Launch Toolkits. And if you want to recap, we'll have a full transcript of this show over at heartsoulhustle.com/144. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/144. And in the show notes, we'll link up everything, the Toolkit, the Google Ads workshop I mentioned. We'll link up to the Offer Cure. We're going to link up to everything. So head over to heartsoulhustle.com/144 if you want a copy of the show notes.
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