Episode #056: Low Ticket Offers to Fill Coaching Programs
Low Ticket Offers to Fill Coaching Programs
Hey hey Not So Average Marketer - welcome to this week's episode! We're talking all about how a low ticket offer ecosystem can actually help you fill your coaching program a lots faster, easier, and simpler than having to do a big fancy launch.
When you tune into this week's episode you're going to discover...
How the "old school" tactic of the ascension model is dying, and what is taking its place.
How your warmest audience of buyers might be hungry for an offer
The value of leading with price in your warm audience promotions
I can't wait to hear what you think of this week's show!
Links Mentioned:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Zach:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast episode number 56. And in this episode we're talking about filling coaching programs through low ticket offers. So if you've been trying to get more seats in your higher level programs, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. I, as always, am very excited for this week's episode because we're going to be talking about how we build up our group coaching program, leveraging the power of low ticket offers. Now, you know me, I don't like to mince words. I like to get right into the good stuff. And so that is what we're going to do.
So to set the stage, or for context, what we have is a quarterly group coaching program called the Incubator. And the Incubator is essentially a 90-day program with enrollment every 90 days for a maximum of 12 people, okay? So we let 12 people join our coaching program every 90 days for $2,500 for the 90 days. That comes with a variety of things. It comes with monthly one-on-one calls, weekly group coaching calls, access to our membership, access to some of our content that we create. But all of this to say, we have a coaching program that's kind of advanced beyond some of our lower ticket offerings, our memberships, even some of our mid-level courses and offers. And so every quarter we have to sort of fill that program.
Now, the cool thing about this program is that we have a really good retention rate. So first thing I should note is that every quarter people have the right to stay in the program and renew for another quarter. We generally have about 40 to 60% of people renew from quarter to quarter. This quarter, we had 58% of people who were in it last quarter who wanted to continue to this quarter. So we always have people kind of sticking around in the program, staying for an extra quarter. We have people that come for a quarter, leave for a quarter, or take a quarter off and come back, and we let people do that. But all of this to say, we have our group coaching program that is specifically around growing your audience, running Facebook ads and launching your digital products, okay?
So I won't get too bogged down on the details of the Incubator, and I will tell you, we already sold out all the spots. So this isn't a podcast that's talking about the Incubator to promote the Incubator. Not that I have anything against that, it's just not what I'm doing today. Instead, what I want to talk to you about is how we've leveraged our low ticket products to ultimately fill the Incubator.
So a lot of times when you have a coaching program or you're trying to fill a coaching program, people say you have to do the big traditional launches, right? You've got to do the webinar or the video series or the challenge, and you've got to kind of get people paying attention so that you can launch this thing and fill it up. Well, for us, we filled our coaching program in about a week and we did it with two emails and one post. I'm going to go into the details of that in just a second. But essentially, we were able to leverage the power of low ticket offers to sell an advanced level coaching program.
So how did that work? Well, to really set the stage, we have to go back to what we've been doing for the past year and a half to two years, which is we've been consistently creating low ticket products and running our membership. We started our membership not September of 2022, but September of 2021. We have been loving up on people. We've done $10 Facebook ad challenges that people have told us are so good we should be charging 2, 3, 4, 10X what we charge. We've had people who take our challenge launch toolkit that tell us this is some of the best training they've taken at a fraction of the cost. We have our Facebook ads evergreen trainings, we have our live workshops.
So you might be wondering, "Zach, why are you going on about all these things?" Well, because what we've done is we've created an entry point into our business for generally between 25 and $50 that people can start working with us. What I have found from my personal experience is that I don't want to say it's easy to wow people, like the expectation is just so low that it's easy to wow people. But it's much easier in my experience to exceed someone's expectation at 25 to $50 than it is to exceed someone's expectations at say, like $2,000. Why is that? Because when we spend more money, we have higher expectations for the programs that we're joining. So I'm not saying that our high level programs don't meet expectations. That's why I led in with the fact that about 58% of people renewed from previous round to this round of our coaching program. I want you to understand that what we found is our low ticket products allow people to really experience us and move through the process of our offers.
Now, traditionally, what we used to kind of say in the online marketing world is that you need an ascension model, okay? And the ascension model was basically like, oh, somebody gets your freebie and then maybe they buy your $25 course and then maybe they join your $300 course and then they move into your coaching program and then they join your mastermind, and then they might hire you one-on-one at the very tippy top of the ladder or the pyramid or whatever you wanted to call it, right? What I have found is that in 2023 that the new model is less about ascending people and more about thinking of it kind of like a spiral or a sphere or kind of this nebulous abstract thing, for lack of a better word, that really lets people kind of decide how and where they want to interact with your brand.
So I have people that say, "Hey, Zach, I don't want to learn Facebook ads. I want to go learn how you're running your membership site" and they take our membership workshop. I have people that say, "I'm never going to run a membership, but I want to launch my podcast. I want to come to your podcast workshop." I have people that say, "I don't need either of those, but I do need Facebook ads. Teach me the fundamentals of Facebook ads." And so what happens is people buy those things. Now at the center of this kind of sphere is our membership, right? So the way that I like to think of it is I've got all these kind of ancillary products that kind of grab people's attention. It brings them in, it tells them, "Hey, this guy knows what he's talking about, and here's some really incredible content at a killer price point," right? Then if people like me, I say, "Hey, I'd also like to share with you an opportunity to join our membership." Our membership is really how to kind of take what you're learning and put it into action.
Now, our membership has its own methodology and I won't go too deep into that today, but I just want to stress that we're always moving people towards the center of this sphere, but people can kind of buy across, right? So we have people in the membership that might buy ancillary products, and then we have people who buy ancillary products that never join the membership. We have people that buy mid-level programs, which are on the inside of the sphere and move closer to the middle, and then we have people that don't buy any of those programs. But the big thing that I want you to understand is that we're basically, with low ticket products, creating a way for people to experience us with less risk.
So I just want to ask you a question. How often have you gone to a training, a webinar, even a sales call where you're like, "I need this support, I need this help" and then they unveil the price point, and the price point is like a thousand dollars or even $5,000, and you go, "I really feel like this could work, but I just don't know this person. I don't know if this is going to work for me. I don't know this person's teaching. I don't know this person's style. I don't know anything other than maybe it was a great webinar"? Maybe it was a really good sales call, maybe it was a great challenge, but you don't know this person yet. And so what happens is people kind of expect their audience to buy from them higher level products completely cold. The argument that I'm making today is that getting people to buy a low ticket offer from you can actually prime them to want to buy a higher level offer more frequently.
So let's talk about how we positioned this and how we filled up our coaching program. So I told you we sent two emails and that we posted once. So let's talk about the emails first. So we first and foremost invite our existing members to renew, and then once we have how many people are renewing, we then send an email to the members of our membership first, okay? So people in our membership get first dibs. They get first dibs on the Incubator applications. This was super simple. We have a segment of our audience, about 280 people. We have over 300 in the membership, but some people unsubscribe or don't want weekly emails. So we only send it to the people who are active email subscribers in the membership. And our email, y'all, was so simple. This is what it basically said. I won't read it verbatim, but I'll give you the basic gist.
We said, "Hey, if you're newer here, you might not know, but I run a group coaching program every quarter for the past couple years. If you've been in the membership for a while, you might have heard about it, you might have even thought about it, but you just haven't joined yet. Now, this is an offer that we put out in addition to our membership. You are by no means required to join this offer if now's not your time or you're content with what you're getting in the membership. We'd just like to give our members and our customers first dibs. So we have a program called the Incubator. It's a 90 day coaching experience for a select group of 12 business owners that want to scale. We only take on 12 clients to maintain a high-touch environment, and we're giving you first dibs as a member. Here's a link to our application. Here's key details about the program."
Then we tell them what they're going to get, what to expect on the live calls. And then we also give qualifiers and the price point. So we say, "You have to have a proven offer. You have to have a basic understanding of ads or be willing to go through the training that I provide, be open to coaching and want an intimate container, and be willing to invest $2,500 to work with me for 13 weeks." And then we link to the application again.
Now, what's really cool about this is that we lead with the price, and I love that. I think that for an offer like this, going mostly to our warm audience, we can absolutely lead with the price because number one, I don't want to attract people into this offer who may be thinking, "Yeah, I need more support, but I don't have the business or the funds for that right now." There's nothing wrong if you don't have the funds for that, but we want to be really transparent about who this is for. And for me, I know that when I was getting started, I used to look at these offers or look at these trainings or webinars or sales opportunities and I would go, "Oh, that sounds so good." And then I would get on the call or I would go through the process and I'd be like, "Oh, I can't afford that."
And so this way, in one sense, it helps us qualify people more efficiently, but in another sense, it maintains the integrity of our members and our membership because people know going in. There's no bait and switch. There's no like, "Ooh, I hope I can afford this." There's just, "Here's the price. We have payment plans available. If it makes sense, great. If it doesn't make sense, that's okay too."
So the way that we frame it is we say early applications are now open, and we resend that email to non-opens, okay? So we give it about 48 hours and then we resend the email to anyone that didn't open it, okay? We ended up getting about five or six applications from that first email. And then about five days later from the first email, we sent another email that says, "Hey, this is the last call. We just wanted to let you know that in a couple days we're going to be opening it up for general applications." So last call for applications before we open it up to our entire list, and we got another one or two applications from that. And that email, it's almost a mere image of the first email. We just add a line that says, "We've got a couple spots left. We wanted to let you know. This is kind of like last call for members only before we go fully public," okay?
So I sent two emails, but you could argue we sent out three because we send one resend to not opens, and then we send two. And then the other thing we did was we posted not on Facebook, but in our membership. So our membership has its own standalone community on Circle, which is just a membership community hosting platform. We hosted the entire membership on Circle because we didn't want to have a Facebook group to go with the membership for a variety of reasons, which I can get into on another episode. But what we did was we posted once in the membership and just said, "Hey," exact same thing we sent out in the email. So some people got the email from Circle, some people got the email from ConvertKit, but ultimately we wanted to make sure that our members saw this offer.
What ended up happening was we got seven applications. Everybody who filled out the application was qualified. I'll talk about how we figured that out in a second. We ended up having five of the seven people join the program and the other seven spots were taken from renewals. So we didn't even have to go to our entire email list with this offer. It actually filled up just from an email to 281 people directly to invite them to the coaching program. So I tell you this because what has happened is, number one, our membership has grown as a result of this kind of spiral circle sphere of people just buying offers and then saying, "I'm going to join the membership one day," or "I'm joining the membership now," or "I'm getting into the membership." That's been really, really effective.
And I tell you, number two, because our membership is one of our low ticket offers where we're able to reach out to those people first and say, "We've got this next level offer if you're interested." It makes the conversion process so much easier not just for us, but for the people on the other side. One of the cool things that we did was with the application, we used Typeform, which is like Jot form or SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, but with Typeform you can do what's called conditional logic.
And so what we did was we asked a couple of key questions on our application about what people were willing to spend on their launches, how long they'd been in business, how big their email list was, and we have general qualifications for the program that I know. And so when people filled out applications, if they answered certain questions in a way that told us they weren't ready yet or maybe they were overqualified based on the level of people that we have in the room, we basically told them like, "Hey, you don't qualify for this offer at this time, but here's some resources you can check out."
Now, the flip side is we also set it up to automatically tell people like, "Hey, based on your application from a preliminary perspective, it looks like you qualify to be in the Incubator. What we're going to do is review your application manually just to make sure, and we'll reach out via text and email in the next 24 to 48 hours just to ask some qualifying questions, make sure this is something we can support you with and make sure that it's going to be a great fit for both of us." And that's really key. Number one, it's key that we set the expectation of how we're going to communicate with them, but number two, it's key that we tell them like we're still reviewing your application and we want to make sure it's a mutually beneficial fit. We don't just because they filled out the application and have a credit card, say you're in the program.
Like I said, we had two people that we reached out to, that one person was super overqualified and one person was just maybe going to be ready in six months from now or three to six months from now, and that's okay. We want to get people into the program that we know or feel confident that we can help support on moving forward with their business. So we did that automatically for people who filled out the application. That was a tweak that we made from previous enrollment periods that I really, really liked.
So once we had done that, we communicated with people via text and via WhatsApp. We had some people who were international so we use WhatsApp. And then we have some people who were US based. So we use text messaging. But it was really, really effective because we actually didn't do any sales calls. We had one Zoom call that was a qualifying call with somebody because I had a feeling that they were just too advanced for the program and we ended up being right. So I wanted to get on a Zoom with them just to suss it out. It was like a 10-minute call just to feel it out. But we didn't have to do these long 45 minute hour long sales calls. We were able to text with people, ask a couple questions, tell them if they were qualified and enroll them right into the program.
And then my team, I have to give kudos to my team, Ashley, specifically on my team, who does an incredible job of moving everything over quarter to quarter so they get an onboarding email, an intake form, the schedule of the calls. Everything comes directly to them once they make the payment. And then we have a tracking log in the backend that tracks who's on what payment plans, what calls they filled out. So we have a really robust system. But I tell you that not because you have to have a robust system to do a coaching program, but because this coaching program has grown over the past two years. Just over two years. We're going into Incubator round number 11, which puts us us at two and a half years. It's grown and become more and more robust over time. So the cool thing is as the price has shifted to a higher price point, as we've learned more about how we support people, we continue to move people through this process and just optimize it every single day.
So I want to recap what I covered today because I think it's super important to understand that, number one, low ticket products can be a great entry point into your world and the old school ascension model isn't how people buy anymore. They're buying different products at different points for different problems, and that ultimately moves people into maybe a central product for you. In our case, it's the membership, and that gets people excited about working with you. The other cool thing is that from these buyers, from this pool of people who are going through your paid workshops, your paid launches, your evergreen products, your memberships, whatever you have, they're ready to buy up to something more advanced. And when you make that offer, that's when it's easier to get people to say yes, because you've wowed them with your low ticket process. You've wowed them with your content. You've wowed them with how incredible you can teach and what you do and the results that you're getting them.
The people who are getting results, they're going to start shouting your name from the rooftops. They're going to start sharing you. We've had people join our membership, join our coaching programs because a friend of a friend or a friend said, "This is really good. You need to be there." The coaching program itself is a robust system that's always growing. So you don't have to have the perfect answer, the perfect process, the perfect onboarding to just get started. You've heard me talk about low ticket a lot on this podcast, but I'm not higher ticket. We have a $2,500 coaching program, and I'm not against charging more for higher touch services and higher touch support, but it's something that we've grown and evolved over time. I just want to encourage you that you can always raise your prices. You can always charge more when you're ready. But the key is we want to create an experience that reflects the price point.
I recently saw a post on Instagram that I thought was really good. Somebody said, "How do I know when I'm ready to charge X amount of dollars?" The post that they were commenting on... And I'm so sorry, I can't remember whose post it was, but the person who had posted said, "You don't have to be ready to charge that much. You have to have a program that creates that type of transformation or creates that type of value." I think that's really key and that's something that I want to instill in you, is we started this at a much lower price point and we've grown it over time as our systems, our process, our team, and our offers and promises have become more and more robust.
So I hope that you get some value from this episode. I hope it makes you think a little differently about low and high ticket products and how they can play together really synergistically to grow your audience. So with all of this being said, I do hope you got great value today. If you want to, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap056. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap056 for Not Your Average Podcast episode number 56. We'll have the show notes, the full transcript as always.
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So there you have it. Low ticket offers, mid-ticket offers, high ticket offers, they all play together in a synergistic way if you want to have them in your business. I hope you got value from today. And until next time, stay not so average.
