Episode #009: Paid Bootcamps: Results, Lessons & Must Dos
Episode #009: Paid Bootcamps: Results, Lessons & Must Dos
In this episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast Zach breaks down the results from the bootcamp he ran in the month of October to grow his Membership.
You'll get a real look at the numbers (revenue, sales, conversion rates, etc) from his promo and learn what worked well and what didn't.
Also, expect an overview of how to run your own 5-day bootcamp in this training too!
Listen in!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number nine. And in this episode, we're talking about a paid boot camp we ran, what we learned from it, the results we got, and if it's right for you, so stay tuned.
What is up? Welcome to another episode of Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. I am so stinking excited for today's show for two reasons. One, today's episode is kind of a behind the scenes of what we did and how we've gotten results for our boot camp and basically what it was, how we ran it, what we learned from it. And I'm actually going to share with you revenue numbers, profit numbers, add cost numbers, lessons that we learned, and what you can kind of take from what we did and apply it to your business.
So, first things first, I want to set the stage. We ran a boot camp called the Five-Day Facebook Lead Generation Bootcamp. Now you can check it out at bootcamp.heartsoulhustle.com. Full transparency, when we ran it, it was $10. We put it on Evergreen; it's now $25. But you can still get access to that material if you want it for 25 bucks. But what's been really cool about it is we offered this training for $10 about how to generate leads with Facebook ads. And this is always such a hot topic in our industry, and realistically, this was the perfect timing for this challenge because so many people are struggling with their Facebook ads costs. They're having a hard time getting their cost to come down, they're having a hard time getting their ads to convert, they're having a hard time growing their email list. When your costs go up, it's harder to make money in your business. So between iOS 14 and the change with Facebook ads, I think that there was kind of this odds in our favor element of this training because so many people were like, "I need to get my Facebook ads working."
So what we did was we ran this five-day boot camp around Facebook ad lead generation, and at the end of the five-day boot camp, we shared an offer to join our membership, the Not Your Average membership. Now, for reference, our Not Your Average membership is always open for enrollment. It's $49 a month. You can check it out at join.notyouraveragemembership.com. And I'm just giving you links so that you can kind of creep on the assets that we have and created. You don't have to join anything just because you listened to this episode. But what we did was at the end, we said, "Hey, if you want to join our membership, we're actually going to talk to you this month in the membership when you join about how to turn new leads into customers. We're going to help you write your first sales sequence."
And so that leads us to the first thing that I want to talk about. One of the biggest things that I think is important if you're going to run a boot camp, this lesson is that your topic for your boot camp needs to follow what we call the PSP model, the problem solution problem model. So what this basically means is our audience had this problem, I want more leads, so we give them a solution. How do I run Facebook ads for leads? Which leads to a new problem, what do I do with all the new leads I'm collecting to generate revenue? And then after that, we solve that second problem with our offer.
Now, it's not about setting people up to fail, right? We in our boot camp got crazy good results. People got hundreds of leads. People got leads for a dollar, $2 or less. People were growing their email list. And we actually got the results that we promised. So I think it's really important that I stress this. I'm not saying that the goal is to make people feel like, "Oh, wow. Now there's more I have to do," right? No. What I'm saying is there is this element of, there's always going to be a next step, okay? There's always going to be a next step. So you need to be thinking, what is the step that people are going to take after they join my boot camp and get results? And the key being get results. So one other thing that I want to talk about is that it is vital that your boot camp or five-day training actually get results. Okay? If you run a challenge or a five-day boot camp or a launch, however you want to frame it, if you do that and you don't actually get results for people, then you're not actually going to move people into your next steps. Okay?
Couple things that I want to highlight is that we had people saying things like... I want to give a shout-out to Sheila who said, "The five-day boot camp was incredible. This was the best training I've ever received on Facebook ads. I appreciate your simplicity, your approach, which made it very easy to learn the concepts, and thank you for an awesome training." We also had people like Sabrina who said, "This was way more than I expected for the investment I made. I got a new ad written, images tested, 80 new leads at $1.42 per lead. I expected this to be a week of education and a lot of review of what I had learned in other trainings. Instead, I was blown away.' Now, I don't share that with you just to brag, though I am impressed with what our students did and what my team and I were able to put together. I share that because the other big takeaway from a boot camp is that it's about creating so much value for an accessible investment that people can't help but to continue to work with you. Okay?
Now, I realize I kind of just dove into it. I'm such an action-oriented person that I just want to get down into the nitty-gritty right away. So realistically, I just want to lay the groundwork. When we say five-day boot camp, what I'm talking is a five-day challenge or a five-day training where you release content every single day, and that content helps your clients get a result that moves them through the PSP model. Okay? So you can see why I led with the PSP model, because if you don't know that first, then it doesn't really make sense to figure out what you're going to teach on, right?
So once you have your kind of idea for a topic, it's really simple. What you're going to do is every single day, there's four elements to your boot camp. Number one, you have your Facebook group element. Okay? We hosted our boot camp inside of a private Facebook group. That Facebook group closes after the boot camp ends and encourages people to take the next step, which in our case was the membership.
This second thing you have is a daily training or a daily task. Okay? This can be written, it can be video, it could be audio, it could be a workbook. The medium isn't relevant. What's relevant is that people are taking a really simple and accessible action every single day. If you overwhelm people with a ton of information in your boot camp, what's going to happen is you're going to basically get them to a point where they go, "This is just too much, so I'm not going to do it." And if they don't take action and get results, then they're not going to continue into the next offer. Okay?
The third element is a daily Zoom. We did a daily Zoom call. We had just about 250 people in our training, and we had about 40 to 50 show up for the first day of the Zoom call. I want to say it was about 48. And about 25% of people, or 20, excuse me, percent of people who sign up for the paid training will actually join the live stream on the first day. And by the last day, you'll have 10 to 15%. Okay?
These Zoom calls are different. If you've taken my Challenge Launch Toolkit, you know that I say for a free, five-day challenge you should not actually teach for more than 10 to 15 minutes because you'll overwhelm people. Well, these are a little different. These run about 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes a little shorter, sometimes a little longer, but you actually engage with everyone in the room. I am not doing these webinar-style. I'm actually doing them on a Zoom call. I was lucky enough to have a team member join me to let people in the room, to make sure people were muted, but people actually can unmute themselves beyond camera, talk to you, engage with you, ask you questions. Y'all, this will build trust faster than anything else. We found that the people who bought our membership were the people that were showing up inside these Zoom calls.
And then the last element is that we keep a command central. So our command central is basically a recap page, we just do it on lead pages, but it's every single video from the boot camp in one central place. It includes the daily task, the daily training, and the daily email. We put the email in a Google doc, the daily task was a video for us, and the daily training was the Zoom call. You want to give them a central place. And there's a couple reasons to do this, but basically people are going to say, "Where do I find this? Where do I find that? Where do I find this?" And if you just give them one simple link, instead of saying, "It's in the group, go find it. It's in the group, go find it. It's pinned in the announcements," and they have to sort through stuff, if they have a central location they can go to get everything, it's really going to enhance their results. Okay?
So those are the four core elements you need to have in your boot camp, but every single day, here's what you do. You send two emails, one with your daily training pointing them to post in the Facebook group and one with a reminder to join you for your Zoom call. Then you also have one daily live call a day in a Zoom Room, and then I post in the Facebook group twice. So I post once with the daily training and ones to get people excited, ask them how the training's going, check in with them, get them hyped up, just keep the momentum forward. And then the last thing you do every day of your boot camp is you post your content over to your recap page.
Now, one question that a lot of people come to me with when I talk about doing a paid boot camp is should it be... What do I give away for free versus what do I charge for in my end program? I tell people the goal with a paid boot camp is to give big. Don't stress about what should be free versus what should they have to pay more for, because the goal is to get people to invest at a low ticket and build massive trust and value. It's not simply about, "Oh, how do I convert people to my offer?" It's, "How do I get people to trust me in the long-term so when I make an offer of any kind, whether it's today or in the future, they actually take me up on it?" So when it comes to what you should charge, I tell people think about your end goal. Okay?
And you're going to see this when we start to talk about the results from our five-day challenge, but the end goal is to make a little bit of money up front or break even on the front-end, maybe even lose a little bit of money on the front-end, but to make a lot on the back, whether that's a course, a coaching program, a membership. You don't make a ton of money charging people $10 to be in a boot camp. And if you're like, "What should I charge?" I think $10 to $40 is kind of this sweet spot. Okay? If you charge 10 bucks, then people are going to be like, "Oh my gosh, that's a total no-brainer." If you charge 40, people are going to be like, "This is going to be amazing information." But it really depends on your audience and your niche, right? If you're teaching busy moms how to create a meal plan for the week, they're not going to pay 40, 50 bucks. If you're teaching busy professionals how to automate their email system so they can save an hour a day, they're going to pay 40 bucks, right? We chose 10 because we wanted it to be a stupid no-brainer offer. We charged $10 for our boot camp, and it was a total no-brainer.
Now, as far as getting people into your boot camp, once you figured out your topic and your price and you're scheduled with your content, there's really just three ways, I think, to get people into your membership, or excuse me, into your boot camp. And I talk about this all the time. There's only three types of traffic: paid, organic, and referral. We used all three in our promotion. Paid is where you run ads. Okay? That's just Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads. Organic would be like posting on your Instagram, posting on your Facebook, posting on your stories. Anything that doesn't cost you anything is considered organic promotion. Okay?
And then the last one is referral, and this works really well for us. As people were joining the challenge, the boot camp, we invited them to refer a friend. And rather than just say, "Hey, refer a friend," we said, "If you refer a friend, we're going to give you 100% of their boot camp admission price, and if you sell three or more we're going to enter you into a chance to win a one-on-one call with me to review your copy and creative." So we gave away this incentive because these people were already paying and they wanted to learn from me, so why not incentivize them to get an opportunity for a one-on-one? And we gave them 100% of the boot camp admission because, again, remember what I just talked about. Our goal wasn't to make money on the front-end of the boot camp. We were willing to get people into the boot camp and make no money on it because we wanted to get them into our back-end membership. Okay?
Now, as far as ads go, we did a couple of different things. We ran ads to drive people directly to our sales page, which didn't work super well. We actually ran these the week that Facebook and Instagram had that outage, if you remember that, and it totally messed up our Facebook ads. But what we did do was we set up a lead generation ad where we promoted our Facebook ads freebie, and then on the thank you page and follow-up sequence invited them to the boot camp. And that worked super, super well as well.
So at this point, you're kind of probably wondering what actually happened. So first things first, let me walk you through what we did in terms of pricing structure, cross sells, upsells, back-end offers. We'd charged $10 for our Facebook ads for a list building boot camp. Like I said, on Evergreen it's now 25, if you want to check it out. I just want to have that clear transparency in case you go to investigate it. We charged $10. Now, the minute people paid $10, we gave them an upsell video. Okay? I'm not a huge fan of high pressure upsells, so what we did was we shot this really simple video that said, "Hey, you just enrolled in our Facebook ads boot camp. If you want, you can join our membership where all of this content is already waiting. You don't have to wait for it. You can get instant access to it. Plus, you get access to me to start reviewing your content early, plus all the benefits of the membership. We'll take the $10 you paid towards the boot camp and we'll apply it to your first month of membership." People loved that.
But what we also said was, "You don't have to make a decision today. If you want, you can join any time during the boot camp and for several days after. So if you're all in and you want instant access and you want the membership, join now, and if you need some time to think about it, that's okay, too." I loved this because it didn't feel high-pressure, it didn't feel sleazy, it didn't feel gross to me, it didn't feel like, "Oh, I have to pay to get everything?" It was just like, "No, if you want quicker, faster, more direct access, click the button and you can get it." And that was phenomenal. We ended up only getting about 6% of people taking us up on that offer, but it was still meaning we were making money on the front-end of our boot camp, which was great.
... the boot camp started, we referenced the membership starting Wednesday. So on the Zoom calls on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I really talked about it. I mentioned it Wednesday, I went into it Thursday, and I pitched it Friday. Okay? I wouldn't say aggressive. I just went in a deeper, more depth of the explanation each time that I talked about the membership. And what ended up happening was that a lot of people did join the membership.
What I want to do is share with you our results from our Five-Day Facebook Ads for List Building Bootcamp. So first things first, we ended up with 246 people who paid $10 to be in the boot camp. We ended up with actually around 270 registered because we gave the boot camp for free to coaching clients, we gave it free to anyone in the membership already that wanted it. And of that, only 12 of them came from ads. So it is really important for me to note that we were working with a largely warm audience and an affiliate audience because a lot of people just wouldn't join from ads. Again, we had major issues post-Facebook outage. Our sales page wasn't converting where I wanted to on cold traffic. We'll definitely improve that for next time.
35 people were referred to the boot camp. Out of 246 people, 35 of them were sent to us by somebody in the challenge. That was about 14% of the challengers. We did no marketing to get our members [inaudible 00:17:30]. Like I said, 15%, or excuse me, 15 people, about 6%, converted to the membership on the front-end, and y'all, this is where it gets really, really cool. We ended up having 50 people total join the membership during the week of the boot camp. So from that Wednesday to the time that we said, "Hey, you could no longer apply your $10 to the membership. We're expiring that coupon code," we had 50 people join, a 20% conversion rate on the boot camp.
In terms of revenue, this is the big question. How much did you actually make? So this wasn't about generating massive revenue for us. It was about getting more people in the membership. We ended up with $5,663 in revenue and $2,352 in monthly recurring revenue. That's revenue that we will collect every month. Yes, some people will cancel, yes, some people won't continue, but essentially we'll be collecting between 1500 and $2,000 a month for the next four to six months on the back-end of this offer. So if you look at the lifetime of a customer in the membership, this is definitely a five-figure launch, which we were super happy with.
Now, in terms of ad spend, we actually spent about $2,800 and got about 278 new leads into our list from our ads. So our profit was actually only about $2,200 cash. If you're doing the math on that, you might be like, "Well, wouldn't the profit be 2,800?" Yes, but we had the cost of building the sales page. We hired somebody to create the sales page for us. I wrote the copy; they made it beautiful. Shout-out to Pam Baro, who is an absolutely incredible magician with our pages. We absolutely love working with her. We made about $2,200 cash in hand and will now make around $2,000 a month after the fact.
So I just want to encourage you that a paid boot camp can be a really powerful strategy for your business when it's done correctly. And so I want to do a quick recap of everything that we covered today in a quick little bullet point session. So, number one, we talked about the PSP model. Make sure that people have a problem, a solution, a problem, and your next solution is your offer. That's how you determine your topic. In terms of promotion, you have three avenues: paid, organic, and referral. Okay? Now we did an upsell on the front-end, the middle, and the back-end of our boot camp, because the money doesn't come from the front-end of your boot camp, it comes from the back-end of your boot camp.
When you run your boot camp, you have four core elements: your Facebook group, your daily tasks, your daily Zoom, and a command central or recap page. When it comes to pricing, you want to price between 10 and $40. You can go higher, you can go lower. I've just found that to be the sweet spot. And the goal is to build massive trust and value. It's not about making money on the front-end. It's about building deeper relationship with tons of people so that the next time you make an offer, it works. Our total monthly recurring revenue on the back of our membership was $2,352, and that will continue to pay us in perpetuity as we continue to grow the membership.
So I hope you got massive value from this episode. I'm a fast talker. You may want to listen to it at half speed again. You may want to listen to it at 2X speed again and really let it soak in your brain, or you may want to listen to it at single-speed yet again. I cannot wait to talk to you guys next week on the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. In the meantime, if you want to check out anything that I referenced in this episode, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap009, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap009, for Not Your Average Podcast, episode nine. We'll have everything linked up for you. So get out there, think about a paid boot camp or challenge if it makes sense for your business, and I cannot wait to hear what kind of results you get as well. Until next time, let's do this.
