Episode #017: Behind the Scenes of a 5-Figure Membership Launch
Behind the Scenes of a 5-Figure Membership Launch
Last week on the podcast we talked about what it takes to have a profitable 5-day challenge - but we're not ALL talk on this show.
(I mean, I guess we are since it's all talking, but anyway....)
On this week's episode we take you behind the scenes of a 5-figure membership launch we used doing a 5-day challenge. When you tune in you're going to discover...
-> How we positioned our challenge to generate maximum sign ups!
-> How we got a 7.8% conversion rate (and all the juicy launch stats your heart desires).
-> The simple ad that got us a 4-5x return on ad spend.
So tune into this week's episode for all this launch-y goodness.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 17, and in this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a five-figure membership launch, so let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, this week's episode is going to be really special because up to this point on the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, we've talked about some cool stuff. We've talked about email sequences, and we've talked about planning your year, we've talked Facebook ads.
We've talked about a lot of stuff, but what we haven't done yet, really is a major debrief of a launch. Now, we did a debrief in episode five, behind the scenes of our beta launch, but that wasn't like a big formal launch. We did that mostly via email. We, if you listen to last week's episode, got to go behind the scenes of running a profitable five-day challenge and learning how I run my five day challenge process, but I wanted to actually do an episode where I show you, "Hey, we don't just talk about five-day challenges. We don't just teach five-day challenges, we actually run five-day challenges to launch our digital products," so I wanted to take you through how we were able to run a really profitable membership launch of our $49 a month program, tell you a little bit more about how it's structured, how we ran the launch, and kind of how we were able to get really phenomenal results.
If you are into it, let's get into it. First things first, the five-day challenge that we ran was in mid-January. We actually ran it from January 10th through the 14th was our five-day challenge, and we called it the Automate Challenge, and we were teaching people how to automate their list growth and set up their first email sales funnel. Now, as you know, from the previous episode ... If you haven't listened to episode 16, by the way, I highly recommend you go back and listen to it before this episode because I'm going to reference it a little bit, including like the structure of our challenge, how we presented everything, and so if you want like a full grasp on the whole strategy, plus a behind the scenes look, it would benefit you to both listen to this episode and the last one.
From the last episode, we talked about how important it is to have a really big promise for your challenge, a really big premise that people can get behind before they dive into your free opportunity, and so what we did was we said, "Give me five days and I'll give you an automated list growth and email sales funnel system." We basically said to our potential customers and our audience and in our ads, "What if in five days you could have an automated list growth strategy leveraging Facebook ads and a simple email sequence that would promote your offers and trainings to brand new leads?" One thing that we did that was really cool is in December of 2021, we ran a 30-day experiment in our business, and that was to try and generate over 3,000 leads in just 30 days, and we did, and it was really successful. We've also been teaching inside of our membership, our students how to run their own ads to grow their email list, and they've been getting phenomenal results too, so we decided to put this together into a five-day challenge. Just to set the stage, the five-day challenge was Facebook ads and email sequences.
We really offered a lot in this challenge, and if you're wondering, yes, we did use Facebook ads to promote our challenge. Just to give you a sense of how things went, we ended up generating 657 signups for our challenge with Facebook lead ads at $7 a piece. Now, real quick for context, a Facebook lead ad is a little bit different than a regular Facebook ad in the sense that generally, we send people to a landing page on our website to get them to sign up for something. In this case, we did not send people to a landing page, we actually built a form inside of Facebook where people would drop their name and email to sign up for our challenge, and it converted that form around 50% of people that clicked on the ad. In total, we spent $4,698 on lead generation and we brought in 657 leads, which comes to just about $7 a lead. That's how we got a lot of people into the challenge, was with advertising, but it's really important that I stress this, we didn't test just one Facebook ad.
We actually tested three different Facebook ads creatives, which is like the image on the ad, and we tested two different sets of copy. Anytime that we promote a challenge, we always split test at least two images and at least two sets of copy, and I actually taught this inside the challenge, how we get that all set up. We tested one that was an appeal to a result, so we tested an image that showed our screenshot of our ConvertKit account with those 3,000 leads in 30 days. We took a screenshot of that and we put it on a Facebook ad. We also tried a Facebook ad that just had the title of the challenge, and then we also did a Facebook ad that was really long-form text.
It had like 25 words on the image that said, "Free challenge," "Five days of training," "Automated list growth," "Proven followup framework," and then it literally had our big promise, "Give me five days and I'll give you an automated list growth and email sales funnel." We tested out those ads, we ended up getting just over 650 leads, and we also brought in over 550 leads organically, so we had about 1,200 people sign up for our challenge completely organically. I think that's worth noting because when we went to promote our challenge, we didn't just say, "Oh, well, the ads will do all the heavy lifting." We also sent out multiple emails to our list, we posted on social media, I posted inside my Facebook group for customers, we really pushed this thing hard because we had a good feeling about what was going to happen. You might be wondering like, "Is that all you did, you just kind of promoted to your list and ran ads?"
Yes and we also had ... We got really fortunate with this challenge that someone found it and posted it in their Facebook group, so I want to give a shout-out to the person who actually shared our challenge, and that is Elizabeth Buckley-Goddard. She has a Facebook group with about 3,000 people. We'll link to her website in the show notes, but she basically posted in her group and said, "Hey, this challenge that Zach is running is really amazing. You'd be silly to not go sign up," and she drove several hundred people into our challenge through that because when I saw her post in the group, I reached out and I said, "Hey, this is amazing."
"Thank you so much for sharing. Would you like to formally be an affiliate? I can give you an affiliate link, and you can share it," and she said, "Oh my gosh, I would love that, and by the way, I'll email my list about it," and she has a good size list, and she actually emailed her list about our challenge, so we also brought in affiliate leads. Now, if you're listening to this and you're saying, "Oh my gosh, great for you, Zach. Somebody saw your challenge and promoted it, but that's not duplicatable," it's not.
Straight up, it's not duplicatable. What is duplicatable is paying attention to what's happening during your launch and reaching out to people who are supporting you know that you appreciate them, and even giving them the opportunity to like share. One thing that we do is when you join our challenge, we actually, and we have a call to action that says, "Hey, share this with a friend because people who go through these trainings together get better results," so it's not that I want you to say, "Oh, I need an affiliate to get great results," I want you to be thinking, "Oh, who's already a huge fan of mine that could amplify my message?" Right? That's the takeaway I want you to have.
When all was said and done, we ended up with about 1,557 people in the challenge. We ended up with 1,557 people signed up, okay, and so once those people started signing up, of course, as you know from the previous episode, we put them into a private Facebook group. We had about 1,200 of the people who signed up for the challenge joined the Facebook group. About 78%, which is crazy high of people that said, "Yes, I want to be in the challenge" also opted to join the Facebook group. To put things in perspective, we generally shoot for 50 to 60% of people who sign up to be in our Facebook group, but we ended up with 78%, and I truly attribute that to having like, frankly, a really sexy topic, right?
People want to learn Facebook ads. People are always saying, "How do I run ads? How do I run ads?," or they're hearing, "I had a big launch with my ads," or, "I got amazing results with my ads," and they want to do that too, and so we put them in the Facebook group, and it's important to note that we actually let people join the Facebook group about seven to 10 days before the challenge started, but every day leading up to the challenge, we posted something. We posted like, "What are you most excited for? Are you committed?"
"Are you showing up to the calls? Did you hit, I'm attending the events?" We just made it super simple for people to engage with us because that's really powerful. Then, on January 10th, the challenge started, and when it started, we had about 12 to 1,300, but part of our process is we get new people to sign up as we go, so when we finished the challenge, we had closer to 1,600 registered or that had signed up, but we got really great results throughout the challenge, partially because of the affiliate promotion and partially because of the way we do our live streams. Let me just walk you through the actual content of our challenge.
First things first, day one, we talked about developing a really epic freebie. We asked ourselves, "What would our ideal client need to know first before they run Facebook ads?," and that is that they're going to have to have like a freebie or an opt-in offer, so we started by saying, "How do you create a really great opt-in offer?" On the first day, we had people kind of share their ideas for opt-in offers, and we encouraged people within the community to comment on each other's stuff and say what they did and didn't like. That worked super well because it encouraged a lot of comments and it encouraged a lot of engagement within the community. The second day was a crash course on Facebook lead ads.
We literally said, "Hey, you're going to learn everything you need in the next 45 minutes to an hour to set up and run your own lead generation ads." Now, this was really intentional. You might be like, "You just dove in and gave them all the information?" I did, because I knew that if I could get people to start generating leads over the course of these five days, they would have a deeper level of trust with me, and so early on in the challenge, I gave the goods. Now, on the third day, we basically gave people templates and ideas for writing really good Facebook ad copy and developing really good creative or images, and we did that because we wanted people to focus on ads for at least two days, plus this is a really easy topic to cover for me personally and for my audience because it's not overly complicated, right?
We gave them a template for Copy Flow, we gave them a really quick crash course on how we create images in Canva, and it gave everybody an extra day who didn't get to set up ads yesterday or who felt stuck because of copy and creative the time to actually start to get results. Now, on the fourth day, remember that the challenge was about an automated email sequence. On the fourth day, we helped them write a really compelling, high-converting welcome email for everyone that signs up for their freebie, okay? We literally wrote it together, and then I gave them a copy of the sample that we wrote. Then, the final day, we gave them our email framework. We taught them the five emails that we send out to all new subscribers to hopefully convert them into our paid program, and so we taught them the framework, and then we said, "Hey, by the way, if you want templates and samples of the entire framework, we have that available in our membership site."
That worked really, really well, because some people were still working on ads, some people were going through, but we ended up getting a handful of people enrolling into our membership that day. I talked about this in the previous episode, but I just want to run through it again, the actual flow of the challenge was pretty straightforward. First thing in the morning, at around 9:00 AM, we would email them the task that we wanted them to do for the day or the education that we wanted them to have for that day. For example, on day one, the task was, "Share your idea for a freebie and comment with three different freebie ideas, and then go into the thread and comment your favorite freebie for someone else," so they dropped three ideas, and then they commented their favorite from someone else, which really incentivized, like I said, that community engagement. We sent a second email later that day that said, "We're going live in 10 to 15 minutes on Zoom."
Then, at around 1:00 PM in the afternoon, we would go live on Zoom, stream it to my Facebook page, share it into the private group, because people could view it on the page organically and potentially sign up for the challenge, or in the group, they could watch and engage live as well, and we repeated that every day for five days. The only exception to that email flow is that on Wednesday, we also shot out an email with our complete recap page, where every day of the challenge, we were uploading the challenge daily videos, and we were uploading the emails that we had sent out that day. On Wednesday, we basically shot out an email that said, "Hey, if you're feeling behind or you've missed anything, don't stress, I've got everything waiting for you." I think I said Wednesday. It may have been Tuesday, I'm looking at a big report.
It might have actually been Tuesday, but about halfway through the challenge, we sent out that, "Hey, don't miss anything." Now, if you're thinking about this, first off, the product that we offered was our Not Your Average Membership, which is $49 a month. You might be thinking, "At $49 a customer, how did you generate so much revenue?," and the reality is, we got people to go annual for our membership, which is actually $490. The way that we did that was we said, "Hey, we just wrapped our challenge for the next few days until Tuesday, January 18th. If you enroll and go annual, we're going to give you a Facebook ads audit absolutely free on Zoom in a group call."
What that meant was that anybody who went annual would get to hop on a private Zoom call with our annual members only, ask me any questions about their Facebook ads, and then share their screen, and I would literally audit their Facebook ads and tell them what was going on. That was for anyone who went annual. I also incentivize people who went monthly by saying, "We're going to do a bonus advanced Facebook ads training the day after cart 'Closes'." Right? We actually don't close the cart to our membership, it's open all year round, but we do these promotions where we have limited time bonuses, and then they go into the membership for future people, but we said, "Hey, if you want to join the call live and you want to be there live to learn together, ask questions, get additional coaching, you can enroll before the 18th as well, monthly or annual, and you'll be invited to that training."
That actually really, really worked. Now, I just want to run you through real quick the sales numbers by day, because we talk about launching a lot with our students and our clients, and a lot of times people are like, "I'm not getting the sales, I'm not getting the sales," and y'all, it can be that last 24 to 48 hours that makes a world of difference in your launch. On Thursday, January 13th, we mentioned our membership very casually on the call. It wasn't our formal open. We got four enrollments that day, we got six enrollments on Friday, we got seven enrollments on Saturday, 14 on Sunday, 27 on Monday, and 59 on Tuesday, plus seven people enrolled the following Wednesday after the cart was closed from the launch list, okay?
That means that in total, we had 123 people joined the membership. Of that, 24 of them were affiliate sales, so our affiliate who promoted this product, shout out to Lizzie, she absolutely crushed it for us, had a really high conversion rate from leads to sales, which makes sense because there's built-in trust, was a low-ticket product. She sells low-ticket products. It was really great alignment, and it just worked super, super well. We ended up, without our affiliates, getting 99 new people into the membership, so we were really, really happy with that.
As you can tell, I'm getting into the numbers, I'm going to run through some fun numbers with you because I love to take people behind the scenes in the numbers. In total, we had 17 people go annual, we had 106 people go monthly, and because we had 123 out of 1,557 signups, we ended up with a 7.8% conversion rate. Pretty darn good. We were very, very, very happy with that number. Now, I told you that we spent about $4,600 on Facebook ads for lead generation, but we actually ended up spending $5,124.11 on ads because we also ran retargeting ads while the cart was open, and we ended up getting 40 sales from our retargeting ads.
Let me say that again. We spent about $525 on retargeting and we generated 20 sales. If you do the math on that, based on who went annual, we almost 4 to 5Xed our money just on retargeting. Pretty darn cool. Our total revenue for the launch was about $13,656.
If you subtract the cost of the ads, it means that our profit for the launch, cash in hand was $8,531.89, but y'all, there are some expenses in the launch that we did not talk about. The first one is that we hired a copywriter. We have been driving a ton of traffic to our membership page. I felt like it needed a facelift, a refresh, and so we hired a copywriter. It was $1,500 we spent on a copywriter, and we also had someone reach out to us during the challenge saying, "Hey, I can't watch the videos. I need a transcript for accessibility," and we had all the videos transcribed for about $273.75, so in total, our expenses were $6,897.86, about $6,900, so our actual profit for the launch was $6,758.14.
Now, if you're sitting here, you're going, "So you profited $6,750. Zach, that's not like, after team and taxes and expenses, that's not enough to live on," and listen, I agree with you. It's not, because we have team, taxes, things like that, but here's where it gets really cool. Because we sold a membership, it was $4,879 in monthly recurring revenue was created, okay? I just want to make a note that these numbers I'm sharing with you, take into account the money that we're paying to affiliates, so the revenue was actually higher than this.
If you were to look at what the revenue was for the entire launch, it was actually closer to $14,400, but we had an affiliate, so we have to pay out affiliate commission, right? We also estimate that of the 106 people that go monthly, we'll retain at least 60% of them over the next six months, so we estimate that over the next six months, we'll actually generate over $25,000 worth of pure profit on the recurring subscriptions, right? Pretty darn cool. That's it. In total, the launch over the next six months will bring us about $32,000.
The 26,000 is the profit, and we brought in all these new people into our membership that are engaging, building the community, building engagement, and building connection. Now, two things. One, if you want to learn more about the membership, you can go to join.notyouraveragemembership.com. Again, it's join.notyouraveragemembership.com. You can get all the details on the membership there.
I won't dwell on it too much here, but I did want to tell you if you like this concept, if you like the challenge training or what we're covering on the podcast now, you should head over to toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. We'll also link this up in the show notes, because we have a $37 mini-course, and it's really not many. It's actually a pretty mighty course that teaches you how to launch your digital course with a five-day challenge that gets results without having to stress over webinars, video series, spending a ton on advertising, if you're just getting started, we give you simple advertising strategies, and in that training, we teach you our complete challenge system that we've talked about over the last two podcasts. We teach you how to build your challenge for scale so you can create assets you can use again and again. We teach you the process to get people into your challenge, how to actually you make sure you don't have a challenge of crickets, and then we teach you how to actually sell your system.
We give you the templates for welcome emails, sales emails, content emails. We give you tons of templates for all the emails. Plus, we give you a 30-day checklist and a Facebook ad cheat sheet that you can use to start getting your challenge off the ground. Even better, we have a no questions asked full 14-day refund policy. This isn't one of those, oh, you have to do a million worksheets and get on a bunch of calls, and tell us why you don't like it, and how it's a bad fit, and go back and forth on email.
No. If it's not a good fit, it's not a good fit, you email us, we refund you. You can check that out, all the details over at toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com, and, you guys, that's it. That's how we ran a profitable five-day challenge ourselves that generated over five figures on a $49 a month product. If you want to get the complete show notes for this or you want to go through and you want that full transcript, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap017.
Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap017 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 017, 17, and you can get all the details there. We'll have a quick little synopsis of the show, a link that you can listen again, and of course, we'll have a full transcript of the show, so if you need a transcript of what we covered today, it is going to be waiting for you there. With that being said, I hope you have an incredible rest of your week. Stay not so average, and we'll see you next time on the podcast.
