Episode #036: Turning a $37 Workshop into a $10k Profit Launch
Turning a $37 Workshop into a $10k Profit Launch
Ever wondered if those $37 live trianings you see floating around the interwebs can be profitable?
Especially if you've got a lower ticket offer?
Hint: They can be!
Tune into this week's episode to discover how we turned a live training in a $10k mini promo and grew our list by 1200+ in the process!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 36. And in this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of one of our successful promotions, specifically a paid masterclass promotion. So if you're interested in using paid webinars, paid challenges, paid anything in your business to launch your products, you're going to really enjoy this episode. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm stoked for this week's episode, because we're going to take you behind the scenes of a recent promotion we did that brought in about $10,000 in profit while growing our email list by over a thousand people. So I'm really, really excited to share this with you. I just want you to know that my hope for you is that you get to take away from this episode, maybe just one or two little gems that are going to help you generate more revenue in your business with a paid launch model.
Now, I want to start by saying this was not a massive launch. We didn't pull out all the stops. We spent a little bit on Facebook ads which we'll talk about, but really we just did this as a one off promotion, because we had a little bit of white space in our calendar. So I think the best place to start is to tell you a little bit about the offer and what we did.
So the offer that we came up with was we were going to do a paid workshop because a lot of people in my audience, for those of you who don't know, we run a membership called Not Your Average membership. That's $49 a month where we basically teach people how to start running Facebook ads, automate a sales sequence and create a low ticket product to put into that sequence so that you can start automating the growth of your business via list growth, sales, and promotions for your higher ticket services.
We've had some really great success with that inside of our membership. But what we found is that a lot of people were saying, "Zach, this is so great. I love your membership." Thank you so much. But a lot of people were asking, how are you doing this? How did you grow your membership to five-figure a month recurring revenue in about six to eight months? How did you do that? And the big thing that I wanted to get clear on for myself is that I didn't know if I really wanted to launch a membership course, mostly because our membership is less than a year old and we're still kind of tweaking and refining and perfecting it, so I knew I didn't want to create a membership course.
That just didn't feel like in alignment with what I want to do and where I'm at with my business. But so many people were asking, "How are you doing this?" that we decided. Well, let's not turn it into a big course. Let's just do a live workshop. We decided to do a live training called the membership planning workshop that we charge $37 for.
Now, if you want to see the sales page for that, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/membership and you'll be able to check it out. You can also purchase a recording of the class if you feel so inclined. You can absolutely grab a recording for the same price, the $37. But what we did was we did this paid masterclass and we started promoting it about two to three weeks out from the class.
The first email went out three weeks before the class. We realized pretty quickly that that was too early. And we pulled back on promotion and kicked it back up about 10 days out from the masterclass. A couple of quick things that I want to note. Number one, we were really, really straightforward that this was a workshop. So we gave people a workbook via Google Docs.
We actually did work on the training. It wasn't just a webinar where I'm like, "Oh, I'll charge and deliver my traditional webinar." Right? We actually really delivered in my opinion, a lot of value on that class. So what we did leading up to that class was a lot of email promotion. So I built my list up pretty significantly over the last several months. And what we did was we said, "Okay, how do we engage our audience?"
So we started sending emails about this paid masterclass. We also tried running Facebook ads directly to the sales page. Now, here's the reality. The sales page was average at best. I just know it was. I know that I have the ability to write even better sales copy and it could have been even better, but we kept it really simple. We did that because we initially thought we were going to be doing mostly organic marketing.
Well, once we launched that sales page, I thought, "You know what, I'm feeling it. I'm going to go for it. I'm going to let people sign up for this, even if they're cold." Right? So I started driving cold traffic to my sales page and warm traffic to my sales page via Facebook ads. They didn't work very well. We ended up paying 50 to $70 per sign up. I wasn't happy with that number. Especially for my warm audience, I want to get signups at a profit on my lower ticket offers.
So we said, "Okay, this is not working back to the drawing board." We did something that I think a lot of people underestimate the value of, but worked exceptionally well. And that is we decided to create a freebie related to memberships. And you might be saying, "Well, if the point of this promotion is to generate revenue and you're driving traffic to a paid masterclass, why would you create a freebie?"
Because what we did was we created a freebie and then we wrote out a three, four email sequence. It started at three. We expanded it to four. That promoted the workshop to brand new subscribers of this form. We also put an invitation to the workshop on the thank you page of our lead form from Facebook. So when people signed up for our freebie, three things were happening.
Number one, immediately after sign up, it said, "Hey, check out this workshop via the thank you page." Then they would get a series of emails that said, "Hey, come check out the workshop. We'd love to have you. And then one step further, we also put a link to the workshop inside the freebie. So we were consistently promoting this freebie that was turning people into fans of the membership. Or I'm sorry, the workshop. Fans of the workshop.
So we ended up getting 40 people that had signed up for the free workbook that went on to grab the workshop. We had about 1,217 total people sign up for the workshop, which means we converted about 3% of people that went through this freebie funnel directly into the workshop.
Now, the big question becomes, "Zach, how much did you spend on Facebook ads to get all of these leads?" Well, in total, we spend about $3,800 on Facebook advertising for those leads that would later end up being in the workshop. But if you're doing the math on that, you might be saying, "Okay, how many people, or how many..." Let's try that one more time. "How much money did you generate from those people that signed up for the workshop?" And that number is $1,480, about $1,500. So really we actually spent a really healthy amount to get people on the list.
And if you're doing the math on that, we spent, or I shouldn't say spent, I should say that we ended up investing about 3X what we were getting back. Does that make sense? Let me say that a different way. We ended up, for every dollar we spent, we made 39 cents. Okay? We were losing 61 cents to the dollar. However, that means that I was growing my list really, really, really cheap. Okay?
So the total that we ended up spending net on growing the list was 2,320, right? So 3,800 minus 1,480, we ended up spending about $2,320 on 1,217 leads, which means we were only paying a $1.90 per lead. So we grew our list in addition to selling the workshop. Now on the workshop, we also had an offer and the price on that was 247. We had 30 people who took us up on the workshop and the workbook that ended up buying that offer.
So in reality, even though we only made about $1,480 on the workshop itself, the actual revenue from those ads ended up being $8,890. Right? Now, we actually in total spent about 4,600 on Facebook ads. Because remember I told you, we tried running ads to people who were in our warm audience to get them to buy and it didn't work very well. We also ran cart open ads once we had the offer from the workshop, which I'll tell you about in a minute that we ended up about 2X'ing our ad spend, right? 1.93 return on ad spend, meaning for every dollar we spent on ads after the full promotion, we actually ended up making $1.93. Okay?
Now, the reason I give you all these numbers is one, I like to be really transparent on these shows and I'm a numbers junkie. But number two, to tell you that we specifically have made money on our ads driving free leads to a paid opportunity. Okay?
So I just really want to cement this point that you can grow your list and sell a product and be low ticket and still make revenue, still make profit. Right? And this worked exceptionally well for us. So for those of you wondering like, "Okay, this is great. You filled it up. You ran ads. You set up this simple sequence and that worked really, really effectively."
But what did you sell on the class that converted people into mid-level tier customers? And what we sold on the class is what I called the membership template pack. Okay? And what this was, was quite simply, we were just putting people into a series of eight templates around memberships for $247. And we said, you have until June 15th, we're going to raise the price to 297. So if you're listening to this and you want to check it out, you can go to heartsoulhustle.com/templates and see our checkout page. We did not have a sales page for this, which I'll talk about in a minute. And you can purchase them, but it'll be 297.
So just to run through really quick, we gave away eight templates. A template to warm your email list, a sales page template, a checkout page template, a sales sequence template, social media templates, Facebook and Instagram ad templates, a launch statistic tracker template, an evergreen sequence for new subscriber template. And as a bonus, we gave away a swipe file of all the emails that we sent during the membership template pack sales sequence. Right?
So we also, as a bonus, we're like, "Hey, if you're loving this and you want to go a step further, you can absolutely see all of the things that we did." Right? And that worked really, really well. So we ended up selling the membership template workshop or... Oh my goodness. I'm going to, I'm going to interchange these a lot. We ended up selling the membership template pack, like I said, for 247 with the price going up in about a week from the time that we did the class. And I want to just point out a couple things about the training that we did that were a little different.
The first thing that we did was on slide five, six, seven, eight, and nine of our workshop, right? So within the first three minutes, we told people, here's how we're making money on this class. Number one, we're going to talk about our membership. If you join, we'll generate revenue on that. We've got affiliate links inside of our workbook. So if you buy a software or a tool as an affiliate, we'll get commission. And then we said, we've got an offer at the end of this workshop. It's $247 or two payments of 137 with $37 per order going to charity.
I won't give you all the details of the offer, but I just wanted to tell you that so that you can let your guard down, enjoy this class, have a good time and know, "Hey, I'm in the running for this offer or this offer is not right for me."
Now, historically, with a workshop, a webinar, a training, you don't tell people the offer until the very end. You try to paint the need for the offer and you try to get people to engage with the content and then feel like, "Oh my gosh, I want more. Or this is my next step." We did it differently. We said, "What if we told people what the offer is right up front in terms of pricing, positioning, and how we generate revenue?"
Because what we found was happening was that people were becoming more and more receptive to just hearing us out because there was no hidden surprise. It's not like I was going to jump out and be like, "Surprise. It's actually $5,000. I lied to you." Right? We didn't do that. We actually just told people what they could expect coming up. And it worked super, super, super well.
And I tell you this, not because I'm saying, "Oh, you should run out and put the price of your offer at the beginning of your webinar." But this is something that felt really, really good to us because honesty, transparency, and connection are some of our most important values that we have in our business.
Now, the other thing that I want to tell you is that for every purchase of the template pack that we made, we took $37 and donated it to The Trevor Project, which is an LGBTQ crisis intervention hotline that is very close and near and dear to my heart with it being pride month and with me being a member of the LGBTQ community. It just felt like this is totally worth it to put out there.
And in total, if you guys are wondering, I'll give you some key stats, but we ended up raising $1,184 for The Trevor Project, which I was astounded by. I was so grateful for. It really touched my heart to just be able to make that donation. So we're making that donation by the end of June. That's our pledge is to donate that by June 30th. We'll probably do it, probably the day you're listening to this podcast honestly, but we really were just excited to do this and to support a community that I'm a part of.
I want to be really clear, this isn't... I actually talked to a friend and I said, "Should I even advertise that we're donating a portion of this?" And they said something really incredible to me. I want to give a shout out to them. They said, "If you're advertising to a community that you're part of or you're donating to a community that you're part of then it's okay to share that because you're not taking advantage of someone else to further your sales, right? You're leveraging.
I wouldn't even use the word leveraging, but they're saying... Just to be honest, I was very nervous to even talk about this on the podcast, even talk about it on the webinar because I thought I don't want people to think I'm just taking advantage of this charity contribution to get more sales, but it's not. It's like I'm actually a member of this community. I actually believe in this charity. I've actually used this charity when I was younger and I just love what they stand for.
So we made sure in our messaging and our marketing that we were like, "This is really important to me. This isn't just some ploy to say, "Well, if we give this percent away, we'll make more, right?" It was really coming from the right place. So if you're listening to this and you don't have a charity that you have an affinity to, or you do, but you're not a part of that community. That's okay. But you have to really feel out the situation to determine how front facing you're going to be with your donations.
I don't think it's ever a bad thing to be front facing, but you just have to be mindful of how you communicate your intention around that. So we ended up doing that. Like I said, we raised $1,184 for charity. And if you're doing the math on, that means we sold 32 copies of the membership template pack. And I just want to walk you through some of the key numbers.
So in workshop sales, we ended up with 197 people registered. My coaching clients got in free. So if you do the math on that, you'll be saying, "Oh, Zach, you generated just about 30." Whoops, let's try that one more time. I want to make sure I give you the right number. You would be saying you generated about $7,289. The reality is we generated $6,993 in workshop sales. Because like I said, some of my coaching clients got in for free. We shared that with our coaching clients and it worked really well.
So we generated just shy of $7,000 in workshop sales. In template sales, we generated $7,384 cash in hand and we had some two pays. So we generated a little bit more than that. But in total, cash in hand, we had $14,377 and then projected revenue, we had $15,092.
Now, our ads expenses were $4,651.16 once you factor in lead generation, direct to sales and cart open ads, and that put our profit at $10,441 for the promotion and a 16.2 4% conversion rate on the promotion. So that means 16% of people that signed up for the workshop bought the membership template pack. Right? Pretty great conversion rate. I was astounded. 20% was my like, "That would be absolutely insane." 15% was like, we'll be lucky if we get there and 10% is what we were shooting for.
So we were really, really happy with these numbers. I also want to point out one other thing, which is that we didn't have a sales page for the templates. So if you want to see it, you can go to heartsoulhustle.com/templates and you can see there's nothing there. It's quite simply a checkout page. Here's what you get. There were a couple other things on there.
We had a picture of the slideshow and we had the charity we were donating to, but we took those off at midnight once we cut off the period of time that we were doing the bonuses and the pricing changed and the offer changed a little. But it worked really, really well even though there was no sales page.
So the point of that is not to say, "You don't have a sales page," but rather to say an amazing offer aligned with an amazing presentation can lead to an amazing conversion rate, right? And it worked really, really, really well. Now of that $10,441 profit, we'll be donating $1,184 to The Trevor Project which means we'll walk away with $9,250 give or take cash in hand, which we were very, very happy with. So we got to support a charity. We got to generate revenue for the business. We got to support people and create new customers in our business.
I want to talk briefly about the bonuses that we gave away, because I think these did play a factor. So we didn't give away any bonuses on the live call. But in the followup email sequence, we gave away three bonuses. So the first day of "cart open", we realized people were saying, "Should I do the membership or should I do the template pack?" And we were like, "Well, both would be ideal."
So everyone who joined the membership template pack got a free month and a membership. That was our first surprise. And existing members got a free month credited to their account. New members got a coupon code that they could go sign up and have that free month. And it'll go into a recurring subscription after that.
So we really, really happy about that. That was really cool to see new members coming in. The second bonus that we gave away was a bonus live call because with the template pack, we didn't do a Facebook group. We're not doing live calls. We're not doing anything like that. It's not a course. It's just static templates, but we set it up so that we're going to do a bonus call. So anyone who was in that training has the opportunity to come back and ask additional questions and we'll set it up so that it can submit questions in advance or be there live and get their answers.
So we're really excited about that. And then the third bonus we rolled out is once our promotion hit a 10% conversion rate and we felt confident about our email sequence, we gave it away for free to everyone who joined the membership template pack. So the way that we write emails within Heart, Soul & Hustle is I write them all inside of a Google doc, and I put the subject line, the send time, the body of the email. And then my team comes in, does a quick edit and schedules it and sends it out in convert kit.
So that means that I have this full Google doc of all of my sales emails from this promotion that I can just make shareable and people can check it out and enjoy, right? So that worked super, super well. People really love those bonuses. We got great feedback on them. And I really think that they tipped the needle. And we sent those out at various times throughout the sales sequence.
And speaking of the sales sequence, we did something cool, which is we sent out a couple story emails. So generally, when I'm in a sales sequence, I'm just like, "Buy now, buy now, buy now." But we tried writing a couple stories. One such story was at the time I'm recording this or the time it's being released, last Friday, I went and got a tattoo of Pluto from Disney, because y'all know I'm Disney obsessed, and I didn't have a Disney tattoo yet, which is crazy.
But beside the point. I went and got a tattoo. I took a picture of the process and I wrote an email that basically said, "We think of membership sites like tattoos. They're permanent, they're forever." But the reality is if it doesn't make sense for your business, number one, you don't have to get it just like a tattoo. And number two, it's not permanent, right? It's really not. Because if you decide it's not right for you or you have to shut it down, you can do that. Right?
Nothing in business is permanent or forever. We don't always sell most successfully what we start selling. And I just wanted to communicate that. So that's just an example, but these story emails got really high clickthrough rates, really high response rates, really high engagement rates, and we were very happy with how people were receiving them.
So what does all this mean for you? Right? I don't want to just sit here and throw stats at you and be like, "Oh, that's amazing. Don't you wish you were me." Right? That's no fun. So what does this mean for you? Number one, if you're considering a paid workshop model, it can be really, really effective. And you're either going to need a really strong sales page or you're going to have to rely on organic traffic. So just keep that in mind.
Number two, if you are doing a live workshop, consider using list building and leveraged backend to sell more of your workshops, right? We sold 197 spots, but 40 of those came directly from Facebook ads and of the ones that came from Facebook ads, a lot of them purchased. A lot of them got the workbook and purchased the training.
Number three, have a good offer that's in alignment. So the backend offer at 247, we actually had somebody on the training say, "This is all so great. I wish that you had templates of this." And we said, "That's literally the offer at the end." So you want to have a strong offer that's in direct alignment with your live class.
Number four, transparency goes a long way. Depending on your industry and depending on your niche, people were really geeked out to know the price before the webinar. We even had one of our promotional emails for the workshop talk about what we were selling on the workshop. It was crazy and people still enjoyed it and bought and loved it.
Number five, if you're going to do a paid workshop, make sure it's content packed. We made sure that we weren't just being superficial. We went deep on how we created and scaled our membership site. And we shared numbers. We shared data. We took people behind the scenes and showed them what was working well. And then the last thing that I want to put in place is that you can get really good conversion and profitability with these if you leverage both paid and organic.
So what I recommend is that you grow your email list, you build it to 500 to a thousand people. You do the live workshop. You get people excited about it. You have your backend offer. And then you repeat that process over time. And if you're listening to this going, "Zach, how the heck did you get all these people on your email list?"
Well, we use our Facebook lead ad strategy. And if you want to learn more about how to run lead generation ads that ultimately lead to more sales, more conversions and more growth of your list, you can head over to bootcamp.heartsoulhustle.com. Again, it's bootcamp.heartsoulhustle.com and we have for 25 bucks, a five-day training, pre-recorded that you can check out that walks you through our exact process for running these lead generation ads that grow our list and engagement.
So I'll wrap it up with this. I think that a paid masterclass can be great. If it makes sense for your business, awesome. If it doesn't that's okay too. But I just wanted to show you that you don't have to have a $2,000 or sales calls to generate profit. We had a very modest $37 workshop, a very reasonably priced 247. We're trying to keep everything that we sell at 297 or less in terms of our one to many model. Our coaching is a little more expensive, but we're trying to keep it all systematized and reasonably priced so that we've got good access to as many people as needed. And frankly, I felt really good because at 247, we were providing the value that built our membership to a six-figure run rate.
So with all of this being said, I can't wait to see what you create from this episode. If you want to get the full show notes with all the links, transcript, all that good stuff that we usually have, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap036. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap036. We'll have all of the information there, a copy of the show, the full transcript, links to any resources we mentioned. And yeah, that's it.
I hope that you got lots of value out of this episode. I know it was a little longer than usual, but I had a lot to share and until next week, stay not so average.
