Episode #079: 30 Days to 100 NEW Members: An Experiment
30 Days to 100 NEW Members: An Experiment
In this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m pulling back the curtain on my 30 day experiment (that I’m chronicling over on Instagram) to generate 100 NEW memberships for our business in the next 30 days. I’m talking about our goals, our process, and the “rules” of the experiment that we hope will help us add 100 NEW people to the membership.
I’m going to be covering why we’re ending the experiment in the first place, how we’re leveraging a webinar to hit our numbers, and what’s been happening so far…
Some of the topics I’ll cover include…
Why I decided to go “all in” and “play full out” on this promotion - and the benefits we’re seeing
How I tapped into relationships I’ve built to help create better odds of success in the experiment.
How we’re analyzing our data, and leveraging analytics other than make better decisions going forward too!
Tune in to get the low down…
Links Mentioned:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Zach Spuckler:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 79. And in this episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a live experiment we're doing over on Instagram to get a 100 new people into our membership program in under 30 days. So if you love experimentation, you love sales sprints, you love the idea of getting more people into your programs. This episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Zach Spuckler:
Hey, Hey, Hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. And I am so excited for this week's episode because I have done things kind of like what we're gonna talk about today before, but I've never really gone all in. You know, I always say, oh, I'm gonna do a 30 day social media challenge, or I'm gonna push myself to post every day on Instagram for 30 days. But I did something a little different this time, and that is that I'm doing a daily reel over on Instagram, kind of chronicling a journey that I'm going on to serve the bigger vision of my business. And boy, oh, boy, does that sound like a word salad. So let me just get down to the nitty gritty. Over on Instagram, I'm doing a daily reel for the next 30 days.
Zach Spuckler:
And today, the day that I'm recording this is actually day 10. This podcast will come out on day 11. I'm updating people on this goal that we have of getting a 100 new people into Not Your Average Membership over the course of 30 days. And typically, we get a 100ish people into our membership program when we launch, but we've never done it with just like a webinar or, like, a sales sprint. And so I thought it'd be so cool to try it. Right? And if I fail and fall on my face, I'll be doing it super publicly. But if I succeed or I learn a lot of things along the way because you always fail forward, I'll be doing that publicly too. So if you wanna follow along, you can also follow me over on Instagram.
Zach Spuckler:
I'm @zachspuckler. It's zachspuckler. But you can follow me over on Instagram. We'll also link it up in the show notes. But you can kind of chronicle or follow the chronicles of what I've been doing so far. But just to kind of set the stage of what we're doing, the rules are simple. We have a $3,000 marketing budget for 30 days, which subjective, maybe it's a lot, maybe it's a little for you. That doesn't matter as much as the fact that we're putting parameters around it.
Zach Spuckler:
And we have $3,000 that we can spend to basically get those 100 members. And the reason we do that is because based on how many people typically go monthly and annual when we sell our program, and based on what we expect to see evergreen, it would be about a 3x return on our marketing budget. The other rule is that this has to be people that come from this 30 day sprint. So it has to be, like, people that come to, like, a webinar we do in the 30 days, or funnels that we set up during the 30 days, or promotions that we do within the 30 days. It can't just be like, oh, this guy's been following me for 50 years, and I paid $10 on a funnel that has nothing to do with this challenge, and he bought. Right? It has to be relevant to the challenge for the membership sales account. We actually already had a membership sale that I'm not counting, so we want them to be, like, relevant to the experiment. And then the third rule is that we can still use our assets.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So we can email our list. We can email our buyers. We can ask our affiliates. We can leverage the list that we've been building. We can run ads. We can use that money to run ads and grow a list. We can use the assets that I've been building over the, you know, years that I've been doing this. But, ultimately, outside of those three rules, there are no rules.
Zach Spuckler:
Just the goal of a 100 new people and Not Your Average Membership in the next 30 days. Now, before I kind of get into what we've done so far, I want to talk to you kind of about why we decided to do this. And the first thing is that there's kind of 3 tiers to this approach. And the first tier is that we're trying to grow our Instagram. For those who don't know, my Instagram was deleted in July of 2023 by Instagram, and they just disabled it. They didn't give me any way to get it back. And, honestly, my Instagram had become stale. Engagement was low.
Zach Spuckler:
It wasn't really growing. I didn't feel like I was using it productively. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna start over. I'm not gonna stress. I'm not gonna panic. I'm just gonna start over. And so we basically invited our audience to come follow me back on Instagram, and when I feel inspired, I post over there. But that's not really a good social media strategy.
Zach Spuckler:
And I thought, you know what? I as we grow our business and, you know, run ads and do those things, that's great. But I also wanna leverage organic a little more. And I think this gives me the opportunity to, 1, grow my Instagram potentially with a 30 day challenge. But 2, it also moves me back into that creative flow of, like, get back into creating content. Right? I write a lot of emails. I run a lot of ads, but I don't create a lot of content on social media. My page, my Instagram, like, my public facing stuff, I don't do a lot over there. And so I thought, number 1, it's a great way to grow, and on top of that, it's a great way to get back into that creative flow.
Zach Spuckler:
The second tier or benefit of this is that it's gonna grow my warm awareness and retargeting audiences. So we're not just saying like, oh, I hope people find this. We are spending about $10 to $15 a day on each daily reel that we do, boosting it to my warm audience. And we're not using the boost button. We're doing it through the ads manager. But I'm spending about $10 to $15 a day every single day just taking the reel that's performing and pushing it in front of people on my list, people who have been to my website, people who have engaged with me on social media, people who have filled out my Facebook forms, and I'm just pushing them back to my content to kind of encourage people to recognize me, my face, my brand, my goals, my vibes. Right? And I know that sounds really like gen z millennial to just be like, it's all vibes, you know, but it is. People wanna get to know you, and they wanna get to know you before they buy your product.
Zach Spuckler:
And I think because it's video content, and it's super simple and low key, I can bust it out fast, but then I can make sure people are seeing it. And so we're getting thousands of views on these reels that we've been running. Some organic views, some non organic views, but it's still really cool to see. And then the last kind of benefit tier of this is that by talking about the membership and keeping it as a focus for the 30 day challenge, I'm bringing awareness to it. And so as a byproduct, we can see from our statistics that people are googling Not Your Average Membership. Our sales page traffic is going up. More people are looking it up. More people are engaging with it.
Zach Spuckler:
So it's a really cool idea, and I'll be honest, I took it from a guy. His name is viralvideo.club on Instagram, and he did a 30 day challenge to make a $100k in 30 days. And I thought, I don't wanna do that, but I do like the idea of getting a 100 new members in 30 days. And so we tried it, or we are trying it, and we're gonna see how it goes. Okay? So first things first, if you wanna get, like, the day by day, play by play, you should go check it out on Instagram. By the time this goes up, we'll already have 10 videos posted, the first 10 days. But there's some other cool stuff that I wanted to kinda break down on the podcast. And the way that we are structuring this 30 days is that we're doing that experiment on Instagram.
Zach Spuckler:
But then this podcast is more about taking you behind the scenes of, like, what we're doing with those 30 days, in addition to just chronicling it on Instagram. So the center of this 30 day challenge is a webinar, and I'm not doing, like, a big webinar. I shouldn't say that it's not a launch. It is technically a launch, but, like, I'm not doing, like, 4 webinars and a boot camp and an upsell and a VIP and all these things. I'm doing a webinar on March 26th. And the topic of that webinar is how we've been generating daily sales in our business for the last 38 days and counting. So every day, essentially since February 12th, we've generated a new customer in our business every single day. That doesn't count people who have already joined the membership, and then it's like a renewal.
Zach Spuckler:
That doesn't count, you know, 1 on 1 clients who are on, like, their their monthly fee comes up. It's not recurring revenue. It's new revenue that's coming in every day. And typically that's on our Facebook Ads Bootcamp, our Challenge Launch Toolkit, or our membership, our lower ticket products. And if you are like, that's so cool, and you wanna be part of it, you should come to our webinar on March 26th. You can go to getsalesdaily.com, and it's basically gonna be like a live webinar, a presentation, a master class, whatever you wanna call it. It's a live training where we're gonna offer our membership at the end. But I'm gonna walk through how we set up our emails, ads, and automation to basically run this thing with us.
Zach Spuckler:
And it's pretty darn cool, and I'm really excited to share that with people. So couple cool things about the webinar that I'll share. Basically, our goal is to get 750 people signed up. We actually have good, better, best goals, 500, 750, 1000. But my goal is, like, 750, middle of the road. I'd be super happy with that. My goal is that 20% of people show up live, and then 10% of everybody who signs up for the webinar goes on to join the membership. That's my goal.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? A little a little audacious on the conversion, I know, or or optimistic, I should say. Maybe not audacious, a little optimistic. But I think it's possible, and so we're gonna try it. We're also doing something a little different on the thank you page. And I was talking with a friend of mine about this new trend that I'm seeing where people are like, oh, you have to be on my webinar live or there's no replay, or you have to be on my webinar live or you can buy the replay. And I kinda was talking to her, and I was like, you know, it just doesn't feel aligned for me because the reality is everybody has a different 24 hours in the day. You know? What about my lovely Australian listeners and tuner inners who can't be there live because it's, like, 2 in the morning? They just get penalized because they don't get, like, a live show up bonus or, like, a live only incentive? Or what about people who can't get childcare? Or people who have a job still and are doing this as a side hustle, and it's in the middle of their work day? Like, because they're not there live, I don't want them to feel penalized. And so I did a 60 second video on the thank you page.
Zach Spuckler:
You'll see it when you register. But basically, I'm like, look, we wanna have you there live. Like, we do. You're going to get massive value if you're there live. You're going to be able to ask me questions. You're going to get the energy of the room. You're frankly going to be more likely to watch the content if you show up live than if you say you're going to watch the replay later. But and if it doesn't make sense or it's not possible, we're going to have a limited time replay, and that's okay.
Zach Spuckler:
And we put that right on our thank you page. And to me, it's counterintuitive to do it because I know it's gonna lower my show up rate, but it feels really aligned. And what I love about that is that our membership is called Not Your Average Membership. And that really is what our membership is about, doing things that maybe aren't necessarily popular or considered, like, the right way of marketing, but they feel good and they feel aligned. And so I was really excited to be able to put that on there. Now we started promoting this webinar about 5 days ago. We have a full, 10 day cycle that we're gonna be promoting the webinar, and today is day 5. I'm recording this.
Zach Spuckler:
Again, you're if you're listening to this on the day it comes out, that's day 6 of promo. But we've been doing some really cool stuff. We have 350 people signed up so far. Again, our goal is 750. I'll expect about a 100 to 200 in the last 48 hours. This is pretty typical. So I think we're set for that 500 entry goal, but we're doing some cool stuffs. We're doing Facebook ads.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So I've got Facebook ads running. We're doing regular emails to our list. Right? So that's another thing. I'm, like, really big on email. I think you can email really frequently when you're promoting something because especially when it's free, because it doesn't hurt anyone to get an email. No one is ever like, you've ruined my life by sending me too many emails. They'll just unsubscribe. And if they unsubscribe, they're probably not a good fit.
Zach Spuckler:
And if you register for the webinar, you won't keep getting emails to come to the webinar. Right? We're also leveraging social media, which typically I don't do a lot of, but I've been doing Instagram stories. Obviously, we're doing those Instagram reels. I've been posting on Facebook and Instagram to kind of get people to engage and join our class. So that's been really cool, you know, just to kind of be, like, going all in. We also asked our affiliates to share. And I love that we have built a really robust group of affiliates. We actually have an affiliate Facebook group with about I wanna say we have a 160 people in there.
Zach Spuckler:
I'm gonna pull it up and actually tell you. Yeah. A 165 people in our affiliate group. So, you know, we have a 160 plus affiliates who share our content. And so we kind of decided to do this a little spur of the moment, but I was like, hey, I've got this webinar coming up. If you wanna share it, let me know. I'll get you anything you need to share it. And if people want to share it, they can.
Zach Spuckler:
And if they don't want to, that's okay too. Right? And so it's just a really fun way to get my community behind me. And I know that if affiliates send traffic, that people are gonna be more likely to purchase my products because they're coming from a trusted source than if they were say like completely cold traffic. Right? So we're also leveraging our affiliates and we're also using organic stuff. And when I say organic stuff, I know that sounds really broad, but I'll give you a couple of examples. We're leveraging real estate that we already have to push people into the membership where it doesn't cost us any additional revenue. And so, for example, on this podcast, if you are listening to this podcast in real time, you probably heard, like, what we call a pre roll or, like, before the episode started, I invited you to the webinar. On the podcast, I'm inviting you to the webinar.
Zach Spuckler:
If you go to heartsoulhustle.com to check out the show notes or you're on heartsoulhustle.com listening to this, during this period of time, you'll notice we have a little bar up at the top of the page that drops down a little bit and says, hey. We've got an awesome webinar coming up on March 26th. You should come register. Right? We're leveraging all our organic real estate. And I think, you know, if I could be honest about this, like, a 30 day sprint, I think what's most exciting about it is not necessarily like, oh, we're gonna get a 100 members in 30 days. Like, we may we may. That's the goal. That's what I'm shooting for.
Zach Spuckler:
Let's let's claim it now. But it's really cool to be like, what does it feel like to go all in on something? Right? To, like, really give it a solid go. And so we're, like, putting everything we have into this to see what's the maximum result we can get out of it. And that's been so dang exciting to do. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that it's day 10 of our challenge, and we already have 4 people that joined the membership. We actually have 5, but like I said, I'm not counting one of them because of the way it came in. I think that's from an existing, you know, funnel. I don't think that's from our 30 day challenge. But we have 4 people that have joined the membership.
Zach Spuckler:
And so just by talking about it, just by being about it, just by, you know, sharing it around, we can see that people are coming because we started using Google Analytics. And that's the other thing I wanted to mention is that we've really been going hard on analytics. So before this challenge started, I bought a program. It's called Measure and Maximize. I'm not an affiliate. It's just a great program. You can Google it, but it's essentially how to take your Google Analytics data and turn it into, like, readable interactive charts so that you can look at what your data is telling you. So after we do this webinar, we'll also go look like how much traffic did that bar on our website bring to the webinar? How much traffic did those emails bring to the webinar? How much, did our affiliates bring into the webinar? We'll be able to go in and track where the traffic is coming from.
Zach Spuckler:
And so that's really cool. And so just to do a super quick recap, we've basically got this 30 day challenge going on Instagram. It's pointing to our webinar. Our webinar goal is 750 people. We're doing everything we can to promote it. And speaking of, like, doing everything you can, we're working all angles. And I kinda said to myself, look, maybe we can't replicate this every 30 days, but I'm gonna play full out for the next 30 days. It's a commitment I made to myself.
Zach Spuckler:
Like, I'm gonna go all in 30 days, whatever it takes. Just go for it. And so that means I'm doing 3 things. 1, I'm going for the ask. So on my webinar, I'm gonna offer the membership. Why wouldn't I? I'm gonna have a membership pitch. I'm not gonna just, like, nurture and talk about it. I'm gonna be about it.
Zach Spuckler:
I'm gonna be like, this is why you need to be in the membership. The second thing I'm doing is calling in favors. So we, have a lot of connections that I built up over the years of running this business. And 2, I reached out to and said, like, I'm calling in a favor, basically. 1, is my friend, Michael Alaniz, and he is a Google Ads ninja. And I basically said, look. I wanna run retargeting ads during this 30 days. And the the 30 days had already started, so they won't run the full 30 days.
Zach Spuckler:
But I was like, I wanna retarget everybody looking at our low-ticket offers, and I wanna retarget everybody looking at the membership. And he was like, you got it, Zach. Let's do it. Cool? Cool. So I spent 2 days of the challenge basically creating Google Ads assets. I didn't know a lot about it. I don't I don't think they're perfect. I don't think they're the best.
Zach Spuckler:
But you know what? We now are gonna have Google Ads running. The other thing I did was I called in a favor of my friend, Aandra Bohlen, who I will, you can check her out on Instagram at Aandra, aandra, Bohlen, b o h l e n. She is a sales genius, and I was like, look. We want this to be the best it can be. So we had her come in and audit and pull all the stats for us. We did it together, but, like, help us analyze them for, like, our full freebie funnel, our full, low-ticket offer to membership funnel. She also took a look at, like, our webinar slides, our membership positioning, our offer positioning, how we sell the membership evergreen versus live. And so she's also taking a look, we're finalizing it this week.
Zach Spuckler:
But she helped us design our entire webinar pitch based on our webinar content. And so now I'm spending today and tomorrow, like, refining the rest of that webinar, dialing in the rest of the webinar, you know, kind of practicing the webinar, and then I'll send it back to her. And the day before our live webinar, we'll do like a little dry run and make sure that everything goes well. So I'm like having her optimize our sales pitch, our sales process, our freebie process. And here is what I want you to take away from that. Not like, oh, you have to go out and hire a Google Ads person, or you have to go out and hire a sales genius to make everything work great in your business. And if you don't, you're silly and you're losing money. Like, that's not the message.
Zach Spuckler:
The message is, as you grow your business, you will make connections. You will connect with people. You will help people. You will serve people. People will serve your audience. You will serve theirs. And there's nothing wrong with going for the ask. And I'm not even saying, like, go for the free ask.
Zach Spuckler:
Like, to give you context, Aandra was in our wedding. She was at our wedding in in the Dominican Republic, and she is a great personal friend. And so I wasn't calling someone who I've worked with one time and been like, can you help me for free? I'm also offering some services in return to support her. So, you know, there's, like, an exchange there. Michael, for example, is a great referral partner. I send him Google Ads clients all the time, and I took work off his plate and made it super simple for him to set up my ads for me. So, like, you know, I'm not saying, like, you need to go out and, like, try and get freebies from people. What I am saying is if you've built relationships, ask when you need help.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? And if the answer is, yeah, I can totally help you, it's going to be $1,000 You can always say like, Hey, I don't have that right now. Or you could say, I do have that right now, and I wanna support you as a great connection in my, you know, personal life and business. But the thing is you gotta go for the ask. You gotta call in the favors when you need them. So, like, if you're doing the thing, another way to look at this is, like, let's say you are doing a big promotion and you want, like, affiliates, ask your affiliates to share. Invite them to share. Invite people to talk to you. Invite people, invite people, invite people.
Zach Spuckler:
And do it again and again and again. Okay? Now the last thing that I'll mention about this is that our goal with this is, like, our webinar happens on and I've got a little spreadsheet for this entire challenge because it's already taking a life of its own. But webinar day is actually the 16th day of the challenge, and then we'll have, like, a short sales period. But after we do the webinar live, we're also gonna try and do, like, an evergreen transition. So if we don't get a 100 people into the membership from the webinar, we still have all this work that we're doing with Facebook retargeting, and Google retargeting, and funnels, and optimizations, but we're also gonna try and evergreen the webinar afterwards. And so I'll probably have a whole episode about what that process looks like, because I won't, bog down the length of this episode with, like, a whole talk about the evergreen plan. That's something we've got that got coming up. But, you know, I I wanted to share this with you because I think there's so many little nuggets of gold just in sharing this story.
Zach Spuckler:
There's no, like, go out and do this. Right? We did have somebody in our community who was super cool. They reached out to me and they were like, this has inspired me. I am totally gonna go out, and I'm gonna, like, do a 30 day challenge on Instagram. And I was like, I love that. Right? And if this inspires you to do that, great. But if it doesn't, my hope with this episode is that I can be transparent. I can tell you what we're doing.
Zach Spuckler:
I can take you behind the scenes. I can show you what's going super well for us so that if it's something you wanna try, you have the opportunity to do that. And I just wanna I just want to encourage you that there's so much cool stuff that you can do outside of the box. Right? And what I'm noticing 10 days in is that little things are happening for us. You know, we got a 100 new leads on Instagram. That's really cool. I shouldn't say leads. I should say followers.
Zach Spuckler:
We got a 100 followers on Instagram. You know? We lost our account in July. We're down over a 1000 followers in about 6 or 7 months. Our lead cost on our ads is coming down in warm audiences. Our video engagement is high. Yes. We are running them as ads, but we're getting, like, over a 100 plus engagements a day, and we're spending $15 to $20 per video. Right? We're not spending a crazy amount of money.
Zach Spuckler:
And we're getting 100 of likes, which we can retarget. We're on track to hit that goal of 750 people because we'll see a last minute influx. There's just so much benefit to playing full out, going all in, thinking outside of the box, doing something different, and I hope that's what you take away from this week's episode. So if you want a full recap and, of course, a transcript, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap079. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap079 for Not Your Average Marketing Podcast, episode number 79. I hope you got massive value from this. I'm so excited to be sharing this with you. I'll be sharing more as we go through the challenge over on Instagram, @zachspuckler.
Zach Spuckler:
Feel free to DM me. And if you loved this episode and you're like, oh my gosh. There's so much going on. All the links. I just wanna come to the webinar. You can also DM me the word sales over on Instagram, and I'll immediately send you an invite. So if you're on your phone right now and you're listening and you're like anything like me, you've already got Instagram or Facebook open, kind of scrollin' social while you tune in. That's okay.
Zach Spuckler:
I don't judge. Drop me a DM over on Instagram, the word sales, and I'll send you an invite right to the class. So I hope you got mad value today. I had so much fun sharing this with you. I'm having a blast doing this challenge. I can't wait to continue to share with you the results. And until next time on the podcast, stay not so average.
