Episode #010: Trends in Course Launching into 2022
Episode #010: Trends in Course Launching into 2022
Wondering what's going on with launches these days? Want to know how to change and adapt to get results?
In this episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast I talk about the major trends we're seeing with course launches, how to adapt to them, and what they mean for you!
Tune in to learn how to crush your launches into 2022 and beyond!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 10. And in this episode, we're talking about launching into 2022 and beyond, trends, changes and things to be aware of, so let's get into it.
Hey there, this is Zach Spuckler, host of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. And I'm really excited to be talking to you today because in our industry, in the online core space, we hear that launching is essential and launching is vital. And in reality, I don't disagree with that. I think that releasing a product into the world with a little bit of finesse behind it in the form of a launch, isn't a bad thing. That being said, I think there's some big trends that are going on in the online marketing space that we really need to be aware of. And so, today I want to talk to you about some of the trends that we are seeing and kind of what that means for you as a course creator and how to shift and adapt to these changing times.
Because here's the truth, things change all the time, whether it's your business, your advertising, your marketing, your courses, your offers, the zeitgeist as a whole, things are always changing and as entrepreneurs, we have the power to adapt. And so, that's what today's episode is about. Understanding some big trends that we are seeing and learning how to adapt to them so that you can get the absolute best results in your promotions. So, let's just dive right in. The biggest trend that we're seeing. And we're noticing this within our agency, we're owning this within our student group, and that is that cold audiences don't convert as well as they used to. So, even five years ago, you could do a webinar. You could just kind of be like, "I'm going to do a webinar in two weeks." And run ads to it, get a bunch of people signed up who have no idea who you are and people would just kind of buy your product and it was heyday of online marketing and it was great.
But the reality is it's not working that way anymore, okay. Now at first glance, this might be terrifying. You might be like, "Oh my gosh, what does this mean for me? How am I going to grow my business if I can't run ads to my launch?" Look, you still can't and I recommend you do. But what we're finding is where launches used to convert at two, three, 4% on cold audiences, they're converting closer to like 0.75 to 1.5% on a cold launch. And this actually reminds me of a really great book, it's called Chillpreneur by Denise Duffield-Thomas. And she talks a about the rule of 1%. And that is that 1% of your audience converting to an offer is actually not a bad thing. I think that we've actually been spoiled that we kind of expected that that would go on forever and things change.
You don't walk into a business meeting these days and just go, "Yeah, I'm sold," right on the spot without context, without pretext, without having a sense of what that business is going to do for us. And I think that this is especially true. If you're in the B2B space, if you're teaching marketing, Instagram, social media advertising, people are becoming skeptical and skepticism is a natural part of audience development and maturity. People, aren't just saying like, "Oh, this is it. This is the secret." They've seen webinars before. They've seen trainings before. They've seen content before. And so, you have to realize that times are changing and you've got to change with the times, okay. So, first trend to be aware of, cold audiences don't convert the same way they used to. So, that brings us to right into our second trend, which is that is important to grow and nurture your email list before you go into a big launch.
Now I know that can sound daunting because the reality is it requires you to put some money out in order to get people onto your email list before you go into a launch. But here's the thing. If you're producing content, whether it be social media content, podcast content, video content, blog content, the reality is you need to push people to that content in order to get them acquainted with you and your brand and really what you're creating. So, if you're going to start creating content, you want to read it. But more importantly, you want to use that content to grow Goodwill and trust with your audience. So, we're creating content on a very regular basis in the form of our podcast, and we're pushing it out to our audience. We're sharing it with our audience.
We're telling our audience about the content that we're creating. Why? Because it grows our trust factor with our audience. Now, I want to be really clear about this. I'm not saying create content for the sake of, "Oh, I'm going to just make content and then people are going to buy for me." No, it goes beyond that. You're creating content because you want to prove your expertise, because you want to lead with value, because you want to show people that you actually care about their results, okay? It's not as simple as, "Oh, I'm just going to throw stuff out every week and send a weekly newsletter and people are going to buy from me." You need to be strategic. You need to be thinking about what you want to create. And most importantly, you need to be moving yourself into a process where you're actually giving first. And I think that that more importantly is the trend that we're seeing.
It's like people want to know you and they want to know that you know what you're talking about before they invest with you. And so, creating and producing regular content to your email list that you're actively growing is a huge, huge opportunity. Now that brings us into our next trend, which is if you're thinking, oh my gosh, that sounds great, Zach, I want to grow my email list. I know I need to be creating content to nurture my audience, but I also don't want to just throw a ton of money into growing my list and take a big risk that my launch doesn't convert. And that's where low ticket and paid opportunity launches, when it makes sense, come into play. Now previously on the podcast I talked about if you should be doing low ticket offers, episode number six, and you can go check that episode out.
But if it makes sense, adding a low ticket offer to your business can really, really be a huge benefit to your launches. And I know that sounds silly because you're like, "Well, if people bought from me already, why would they buy again?" Well, number one, people who buy from you once are more likely to become repeat customers. For those who don't know, we run a small candle business as well, unrelated to the online marketing space. And we work with a consultant and one thing that they told us that I absolutely love is like getting a customer even at breakeven isn't a bad thing because those people are more likely to come back and become returning customers, okay? So, you can put low ticket products, you can put trip wires in place. And a trip wire is really just a low ticket, all offer that you give to somebody right after they opt in for something free.
You can put email sequences in place that offer your low ticket products in between your launches, but you can start generating revenue while you're growing your audience. And I'm a really big fan of that because the other thing is that we have a low ticket product called the challenge launch toolkit. It's the $37. And you all, it is one of the best trainings out there on challenges if I can say so myself and it's 37 bucks.
When someone buys that and gets immense value from it, when I turn around and offer my quarterly group coaching program or my membership, they're more likely to trust that because they know the caliber of the content that I create and that has been a game changer for us. That is where the magic has been happening for us is that people come in, they don't have to spend a ton of money to start working with us and once they start working with us, they realize the value in working with us. So, don't be fooled into that you have to get somebody as a customer at $2,000, $10,000 to really start a long term relationship. You can get people in at 27 bucks start nurturing them. And they're more likely to buy from you at a later date.
Now, all of that being said, the cold audiences aren't converting, you've got to grow nurture mail list. You've got to put some low ticket offers. If it makes sense for your business. The other thing we're seeing is that in launches, attendance is down, okay. Attendance is down universally. And I think that this really comes to, a couple different things are coming to our head. Number one, with everything that's happened over the past couple years, I think people have been online so much that they're starting to numb out to some of the marketing. They're starting to numb out to having to be at events live, to having to show up to a webinar live, to having to participate in a challenge for five days. The second thing is I think people, like we said earlier are getting skeptical. They don't want to show up to a webinar or a challenge for five days, not get value and then just be sold to.
So, one thing that I want to throw in here is that if you start creating content webinars, challenges, video series that are actually packed with actionable and relevant and quality information, people are going to start trusting you even more and they're going to start coming to your events. And the other thing that I've noticed about this is that because we tend to rely on cold audiences, when we do a big launch, we tend to run a bunch of ads to people who don't already know who we are, less people show up because there's no inherent trust. There's no built in, "I know this is going to be great." There's, "Oh, I saw this ad. I registered, but I don't know if I'm actually going to show up." So, because attendance is down on our launches, it's really important that we start working on writing really great email copy.
We've actually been really fortunate at our business that we still get an open rate of 25 to 30% on our emails with a pretty decent sized list and we're pretty happy with that. Generally, you're not going to get a massive open rate, but in a launch, we tend to get a slightly higher open rate, a slightly higher click rate when we write really good email copy. So, now is the time to start investing in copy education. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that you have to buy a copywriting course, but there's books out there you can read on copywriting. There are webinars you can take. There are YouTube videos. There are educators, there are podcasts. There's so much at your fingertips in the world wide web that you really need to start playing around with writing really good email copy. One little hint that I'll give you that's been crushing for us is really direct email.
I know that sounds silly and you might be like, "What do you mean by direct email?" What I mean is sometimes we write subject lines. Like we did a $10 bootcamp for Facebook ads and our subject line was $10 Facebook ads, bootcamp. It was one of our highest open rate emails in the entire promotional sequence. Why? Because people don't want to have to like anymore, at least cryptically figure out what an email's about. They want to get in. They want to read their email, they want to know what they're getting and they want to open it if it makes sense to them. And just being really direct has been working phenomenally for us. So, start working on your copy skills because people, they might not attend the webinar. They might not attend the challenge, but they're reading the emails.
They really, really are reading the emails. And so, I just want to encourage you that really good copywriting is starting to make a huge, huge difference in our business. And we would encourage you to start playing around with it as well. Now that brings us right into the fifth trend that we're seeing, which is you've got to have good copy and distinction, okay. Now what exactly do I mean by copy and distinction? Well, we've kind of already touched on the importance of copywriting in your email, but copy goes beyond just email. Copy goes into what you put on social media, what you put in your advertising, what you put in your marketing, what you write everywhere that you're writing, okay. What a lot of people are doing or have done, or that I see as a trend is that it's starting to become this homogenized space.
And when I say homogenize, what I mean is that a lot of people aren't standing out, okay. And I've said this before, both on the show and to my coaching students, is that in a sea of sameness, it's never been easier to stand out. Why? Because a lot of people are saying the same things. Want to live your dreams, want to launch your course, want to grow your Instagram following. There's nothing wrong with that, but if it sounds like what everyone else is doing, what makes you different? See with the, Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, Not Your Average Membership Challenge Launch Toolkit, we've taken this stance that we are different in the sense that we want to be accessible. We want to create incredible content for free. We want to be one of the best on the planet in terms of what we do and we want to be real.
And when I say real, we've done a couple of different things to create this really approachable approach to business in terms of we're being honest in our marketing. What's probable versus what's possible? We're being direct in our marketing. We're not doing hype marketing. We're not doing fake countdown timers and special T funnels that are super complicated and a million opt-ins. We're just like, "This is our offer. If it makes sense for you, great, come join us and if it doesn't, that's okay too." Right? We actually write this email in our launches, which I really love. It's one of my favorite emails that says, "This is not your last chance to join." See, our membership is open 24-7. We don't close it. Sometimes we do little promotions for it, but we send this email that says, "If you don't join today, you can join tomorrow and you've got that opportunity to do that."
Because we want our audience to not feel trapped and pressured and forced. And that's one of our differentiators is that we're not using scarcity in a crazy way. We're not forcing people to make decisions last minute. We're simply sharing opportunities. And do we have limited time promotions? Absolutely. But we're not making people feel like they have to do it right now, make a decision on the spot to be able to get what they need, okay. And that brings us right into trend number six, which I think is people want to start seeing themselves in your testimonials. So, I don't care if you do fitness. I don't care if you do marketing. I don't care if you do self-love, people want to see themselves in your marketing. So, to give you a really tangible example, we've run the Challenge Launch Toolkit.
And honestly I want to update the page a little bit, but we want to start using testimonials that talk about things that people are achieving, that our potential customers feel like they can achieve to. So, if I were to run a testimonial, that's like I made a million dollars with my first challenge. Maybe it happened. In fact, we have somebody who used our toolkit. Now, granted they've business a long time. They adapted it to their own business, but we had somebody say, "I used your toolkit to help me have a million dollar challenge." And that's great. But my target market, the people who really use my toolkit are doing their first or second challenge and they can't see themselves in a seven figure testimonial. So, knowing who your audience is and curating testimonials and client results and proof based on what they think they can achieve is going to be huge.
People don't want to see these massive transformations that they think, "I could never do that." There's nothing wrong with being aspirational. I'm not saying don't use those testimonials at all. What I am saying is you need to include testimonials for your target market, for the ideal client, for the person who wants to get in on this, okay. And that leads us to the last thing, which is transparent and honest marketing. I think that people more than ever just want transparency. That's what they want. They want to know what to expect. They want to know what's going to happen. We experimented with a webinar about a year ago where we actually told them what the cost of the offer at the end of the webinar was before the webinar happened and it was one of our highest live webinar conversion rates. Why? Because people weren't blindsided. They weren't like, "Oh my gosh, what's going to happen next?
What am I getting out of this? What do I need to have my guard up?" They knew what to expect. We're also doing a promotion right now for our quarterly group coaching program, which I am going to tell you a little bit about at the end of the podcast, where we told people in our promotion, what the price of the program is. And we're not even doing an information webinar, like a content webinar. We're doing an informational session in open house. We're going to have some alumni there. We're going to have people show up to give us feedback on what they want to know, ask questions, engage with us. We're not even kind of doing that thinly veiled, like, "Oh, we're going to teach you something. But really it's just a pitch for the membership. We're just doing an info session on Friday that says, "Come learn about it.
Here's the price. Here's what you get. If you want to learn more, come join." And I think that's going to be a game changer for our marketing. And reality is we're not getting hundreds of people registered. We'll probably get a couple dozen, if not, 30 to 40 is our goal of registrations for the info session. But again, we're being really transparent and honest about what to expect so the right people at the right time are going to come to this info session. So, those are the seven big trends and launches that we're seeing going into 2022. I'll give you a quick recap of them. The first one is cold audiences don't convert as well. So, you need to number two, grow and nurture your email list between launches. And if you're worried about spending money on that, trend number three is start introducing low ticket and paid opportunities for your launches.
Because number four, webinar attendance is down, challenge attendance is down. And so, it's really important that you start creating killer email sequences and really good copy. Which brings us to trend number five, copy and distinction, or differentiation is more important than ever. And for us, what's done that is trend number six, accessible testimonials and levels of access based on our audience. Because trend number seven, people are really looking for transparent and honest marketing. Now, we will have a complete recap of this episode along with a complete transcript of the show. If you want to skim through find anything, you can absolutely do that over at heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP010. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP010 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode 010. Now, before I wrap up this show, I do want to share with you that we are starting to open the doors to our quarterly group coaching program for the beginning of 2022.
Now we have a 90 day program that we share with people where we walk you through how to month one, grow your email list, month two, nurture that list and month three launch to that list successfully so that you can kind of lean into these trends of 2022 with group coaching along with a monthly one-on-one call with me to move yourself into success. Now we've had some really awesome results, but if you want to learn more about it, we're having an info session on Friday. This Friday, November 12th at 2:00 PM Eastern time, 11:00 AM Pacific time. If you head over to heartsoulhustle.com/group, again that's heartsoulhustle.com/group, G-R-O-U-P, you can check out the training or I shouldn't call it a training, really, because I already talked about that. It's actually an info session where we're going to walk through what you can get from the program.
We're going to have a walkthrough of what's inside. We're going to have alumni speaking. We're going to have time for you to ask questions. So, we've already filled six out of the 12 spots. We do cap the program at 12 people total and the cost is $2,000 dollars for the quarter. We do have payment plans available, two pay and three pay, but if it's a good fit for you, we'd love to have you and if it's not that's okay. Because this is really us leaning into the trends of transparent and honest marketing. If you're like, "I'm not ready for a group coaching program," that's okay. If you are, awesome, come check it out. No pressure, no giant content pitch that's like, and if you want to get the actual results, you have to join us. Just an information open house about what's inside, what to expect and if it's right for you.
So, if you want to check that out heartsoulhustle.com/group. And with that being said, those are the trends in launches that we're seeing going into 2022. So, pay attention, adapt, change, grow, be mindful. And if it makes perfect sense, get out there and launch because we'd love to see you succeeding. I'm so excited to see what you all create within the end 2021 and going into 2022. I hope you crush your next launch, keeping these trends in mind. And until next time, this is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast.
