Epsiode #016: Running Profitable 5-Day Challenges
Running Profitable 5-Day Challenges
Zach has taught hundreds of students, and thousands of people how to run profitable 5-day challenge launches for digital products.
On this episode Zach breaks down his profitable 5-day challenge launch system including...
The importance of a clear challenge topic
The entire framework for running a profitable challenge
The important sales emails every challenge should have
And more...
Tune in to learn what it takes to launch profitably with a 5-day challenge!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 16, and in this episode, we're talking about launching your digital offers with five-day challenges, so if you've been thinking about breaking out of the webinar mold, changing how you launch your products, or simply doing a five-day challenge, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm really, really, really, really, really, really, really excited for today's episode, because I've been talking about five-day challenges for several years now, and it's been a while since I've done just like a free five-day challenge, and in the last couple of weeks, we actually did a five-day challenge launch in our business, and we got phenomenal results, and it just really ignited my passion for five-day challenges again, it made me want to talk about them more, and I was going through my podcast episodes for the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast and I realized, I haven't talked to you guys about five-day challenges yet, and I'm so stinking excited to do it, so let's get into it.
First things first, what is a five-day challenge? So, you're probably familiar with the concept of a webinar or a video series, but you might not know exactly what a five-day challenge is. And a five-day challenge is most simply defined as five days of free content, followed up by 48 to... 48 hours to three to four days of follow-up emails and ads that market people to your digital product.
Now, what we do is every day, we go live on Facebook or Zoom, in addition to a daily email that gives somebody a task to do for the day. So basically what happens is every day, people wake up, they get an email in their inbox, then they get a live video, plus they get to be in a private Facebook group where they get to engage and create community with both each other and you, as the leader running the challenge. We'll get more into the specifics of the challenge elements, but I just want you to understand it's a daily training, a daily video, and a daily check-in in a Facebook group.
Now, the first thing that I want to talk about when it comes to a challenge is what I see a lot of people do, and really the biggest mistake that we see with five-day challenges, and that is that people don't create a really specific and tangible promise for their five-day challenge. So a lot of people say like, "Oh, I'm going to do the five-day Instagram challenge," or "The five-day fitness challenge," or "The five-day weight loss challenge," and that's great in the sense that people know they're signing up for a challenge, but it's not so great in the sense that people aren't really clear on what are signing up for.
So what I tell people is you need to make sure that you have a clear outcome for the five-day challenge. So for example, if I was going to do a list-building challenge, I wouldn't say "The list-building challenge," I would say, "Generate your next 100 leads in just five days," and I'm going to teach people how to grow their email list to a specific number, right?
Now, the big concern that comes up for people is they say, "Zach, this is great, but what if I can't guarantee a certain result?" And the reality is you can't guarantee a certain result, right? You never know what kind of work people are going to put in, how people are going to perform, what people are going to do. But what I tell people is, if people follow every step of your process, what can they reasonably expect to achieve?
So for us, we just did a challenge called the Automate Challenge, and we basically told people, "We will teach you how to set up your Facebook lead ads, start driving traffic to an automated sales funnel, and by day five, you'll have everything you need to be automatically driving leads into your business and converting them into new customers, or onto the wait list for your program," and we sum that up by saying "Five days to automated leads and sales growth," because that's what we taught people to do in just five days.
So, one thing that I want you to keep in mind is that while you're making big promises, you want to make sure that you can deliver on those promises. So one thing that I used to kind of say, that I've kind of changed my way on, is like, don't just tell people, "Oh, I'm going to give you all this stuff," and then teach them the what, but not the how. And I know that it's really common in the online marketing space to say, "Give them the what, not the how," and I personally, with my challenges, feel better giving people some of the how, right? I want them to understand how to actually implement what it is that I'm giving them.
That doesn't mean that I can't create the demand for my product, or that I can't provide immense value and still get really great conversion rates. In fact, in our most recent challenge, we literally went into Ads Manager and we taught people how to set up lead generation ads for one day of our challenge. We literally spent an hour on Facebook setting up lead generation ads, and guess what? Our challenge still converted at over 7%. Over 7% of people in our challenge signed up for the membership that we offered at the end, and the reason is because we created the demand for the next offer.
And so while we're talking about this, I want you to understand that number one, yes, you want to provide immense value, yes, you want a specific promise, but you want to be thinking about what I call the PSP model, the problem-solution-problem model. So I'm going to give you a really specific example. You have to start with a problem that your audience thinks they have. So for example, people in my audience were saying, "Oh my gosh, I don't know how to run Facebook ads. How do I run Facebook ads? What do I do with Facebook ads?" So I did a Facebook ads challenge, right? The next step would be, "How do I create my automated sales funnel?" And so my offer, my membership, was "Hey, I'm going to give you templates, tools, trainings, and retargeting strategies for advanced Facebook ads, with an email sales funnel."
So think about this, what is the problem? "I don't know how to run Facebook ads." The solution, "Here's how to run them." The new problem, "How do I convert my leads into sales?" And then there's a new solution, which is "Join my membership, where I teach you how to run sales funnels and re-target the people in the process." So it's not as simple as, "Oh, I'm just going to come up with something that people really want, they'll love me so much and they'll buy from me," there's more that goes into it. There's this element of the PSP that has to have you stop and say, "What would they need after my challenge if I do this correctly? What do they need next?" Okay?
So first things first, let's just do a quick recap of what we've covered so far. You want to create a challenge, which is five days of content, followed by two to five days of sales. You want to make sure you have a solid promise, a clear and tangible outcome that people will achieve. You want to give real value, not just superficial vagueness, I say "Value over vagueness." And then for example, if we did an ads challenge, the next... Or if we had the problem of "How do I run ads?" Then the next step would be learning how to run ads. The new problem would be, "How do I convert my new leads to sales?" And then we could integrate our funnel offer, okay?
So let's talk a little bit about the actual challenge itself. Once you kind of come up with this idea for how you're going to teach, or what you're going to teach, then it becomes, "How do I actually run the five-day challenge?" And so I want to take you through my entire system that we use that has been wildly profitable for us in the past, present, and hopefully into the future for you.
So the first thing that happens is you have a challenge sign-up page, and this is typically what you think of for a webinar, challenge, video series, doesn't matter. You're going to have an opt-in page where people can submit their name and email, and you're going to email that to your entire list. You're going to email your entire list and say, "Hey, click here to sign up for my challenge." And when people sign up for your challenge, they're going to get a welcome email, and that welcome email basically says, "Hey, we're starting in seven to 14 days," whatever day you're starting on, and it creates the awareness of your challenge, and it invites them to do a number of things, but first and foremost, it invites them to a private Facebook community.
Now, a lot of people fight me on this. They say, "Zach, I don't know if I want to have a Facebook community," or "I don't know if I want to have a Facebook group." Listen, it is temporary, and it's powerful, okay? So many people say, "Oh, Facebook groups are a ton of work," and they are, but what if that was concerted effort in a short period of time that ultimately increases your conversions and your sales? Would it be worth it? For me, the answer is a resounding yes, so I'm going to invite everyone who signs up for my challenge to join me in a private Facebook community, okay?
Then that is all great, but I want to continue to keep people warm before the challenge starts. So in their email, I'm going to send them three to four reminders leading up to the challenge, right? So I'm going to reach out a week before the challenge, a couple days before the challenge, the day before the challenge, and then the morning of the challenge with day one's content, which we will talk about in a second. But the key is that in each of those reminder emails, you are driving people back to this Facebook group. Your goal is to get 50% to 70% of people that sign up for the challenge into the private Facebook group.
Now, you might be saying, "What if my people don't have Facebook?" Or "What if they're more Instagram-focused?" I still recommend a Facebook group, okay? Because it's a really powerful place to foster community, and it gives you a second touchpoint. So when you do start promoting your offer, you don't just have email or advertising as your only avenues, you also have the private community, okay?
So you have your welcome emails, you have your welcome sequence, you have your private Facebook group, and you're going to just also be posting in that Facebook group before the challenge starts to keep people warm, and you want to just post really simple things, like "What are you most excited for for the challenge? Are you committed to doing the work next week? What has been your biggest struggle up to this point with" whatever you're teaching in the challenge, right? I like to put all of that into the Facebook group in the days leading up to the challenge.
So now they're getting warm-up emails, they're getting warm-up content in the Facebook group, and then day one starts. So what you want to do with your challenge on the first day is you're going to give people a simple assignment. So whatever the promise of your challenge is, you want to break it down into five easy-to-follow steps. And on day one, you're going to give people a task that they can do in under 10 to 15 minutes that moves them closer to the ultimate outcome of the challenge.
Let me say that one more time. Every day in the challenge, you're going to give people a simple assignment that they can do in 10 to 15 minutes that moves them closer to the ultimate outcome of the challenge, and that's your first email of the day. Within that email, you're also going to remind them that later in that day, I like to do noon or 1:00 PM Eastern time, you're going to go live on Zoom and Facebook, and they're welcome to join you. This is really powerful, and we used to livestream just to Facebook, but now we do it in Zoom and actually invite people to the Zoom room as well, because we find that the people who show up for the Zoom calls and get to interact with me and ask questions are more likely to buy the product, and it's a lot more fun frankly for me, because I get to connect with people, I get to answer questions, I get to talk to them, and it's been really amazing.
So we do that, and then we send a second email that day, 15 minutes before the live video training starts to remind them to show up for that live video training, then we go live. Now, this is the big concern that people have. They say, "Zach, what am I supposed to talk about on the live stream?" And I tell people it's supplemental content, it's something that enhances their understanding of the task that you gave them that day. And these live streams, I used to say, "Keep them under 15, 20 minutes," but you can really go for 30 to 60 minutes, people really want good solid content, and if on that first day, you go live for 30 to 60 minutes and you provide really solid content, people are more likely to come back the next day, and also watch your training videos.
With all five of our videos, we ended up having thousands of views on them for our five-day challenge, because people saw the value in watching the videos. We had one video where the replay got over 500 views, and we only had 1,500 people in the challenge. Plus we had dozens of people on the live call, dozens of people watching it on Facebook, and then over 500 people watching it on the replay. It was super, super powerful.
So what you're going to do is you're going to continue that process every single day, day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, and on the fifth day, you're going to introduce your paid opportunity. So that's why I really like the live streams, because on day five, you're going to give them a task, you're going to encourage them to come to the live training, and then on that live training, you can really pitch your product, and you're not boxed into just email, or like, "It has to be perfect," like on a webinar, because you only have 90 minutes. You've built trust and authority with these people over the course of five days. Now on your fifth day, you're just making a casual offer for them to continue working with you, and that is really, really powerful, and really, really simple, and it works, okay?
Now, once you've done your day five livestream, you're then going to set up another page, which I call the recap page, okay? The recap page is basically a part of the challenge where they can watch every video that they might have missed. So if you have a training video and a live video, right? So each day of your challenge, you could send out a written training or a video training, but you're going to put both of those on the page, the training and the live video, so that people who missed something can just head over to the recap page and watch it.
Now, I usually release that inside the Facebook group on day three, and by email on day three, and that's really, really powerful, because anyone who feels like they've fallen behind or signed up late now has access to the entire system, the entire process, everything that we've covered up to this point, so you want to make sure to create a recap page, okay? That recap page, throughout the challenge, will just have the content, but on the last day of the challenge, you add to the recap page a link to the sales page for your final offer, and your sales page links to a checkout page, right? Might sound simple, but incredibly powerful, okay?
Now, let's talk really quickly about the sales sequence. Once people go through the five days, you want to spend two to five days promoting your offer via email, and there are six core emails that I send out to my audience for my sales sequence. Number one is a bonus email. So the first email I send out says, "Hey, if you enroll during this cart open period, I'm going to give you a bonus," right? For our Automation Challenge, the bonus that we gave was a Facebook ads audit, and a Facebook ads bonus call for what to do after you're running lead ads.
The second is a live Q&A email. So it's an email you send out inviting people to a live Q&A on Zoom or on Facebook, where they can ask you questions about the challenge and about the program. So we want to give people the opportunity to join us live, ask us their questions, and get clarity on if the program is a good fit for them. The third email that I always include in my sales sequence is a case study. Now, for those of you who are like, "I don't have a ton of testimonials," or "I don't have a ton of case studies," you can be the case study. You can talk about your own results and share them with your audience.
The fourth email is an objections email, or a frequently asked questions email, where I'll answer the question, "Will this work for me?" And I just write the common questions that I get asked, and overcome those objections that people may have. The fifth email is where I recap the results that people have gotten in the challenge. So I might take screenshots, I might call people out, I might give people shout-outs, basically saying like, "Look at what people have done in the challenge, and this was free. Imagine what the paid opportunity is going to be like," right? So I'm kind of painting this picture of like, "Look what people have achieved, and they're going to achieve even more when they join the program."
And then the sixth and final email that I'll make sure I send out is a last chance email, "Hey, this is your last chance to join," or before the cart goes up. Sometimes I say it's a "Not your last chance" email. If your program's always open, you can say, "Hey, this isn't your last chance to join, but the bonuses are expiring," and those work really, really well, okay?
So, let's do one quick run through of the system. Number one, people sign up, then they get a welcome email, they get a series of reminder emails that invite them to the Facebook group, plus the welcome email does too. Then every day of the challenge, we do a training, an invite to a live call, and then we do an email before the live call, and then we host the live call. We do that every day for five days, and on the fifth day, we then open the cart to our program. We have six emails that we recommend. A bonus email, a live Q&A email, a case study email, an objection-overcoming email, a recap of the challenge results email, and a last chance email. Of those emails, we also link over to the recap page, in addition to the sales page. The recap page itself links to the sales page, and the sales page links to a checkout page where people can actually buy. So that is what we do with our five-day challenge sequence.
Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much information here, what am I supposed to do with all this? How can I actually execute it?" I want to tell you a little bit about our digital program called the Challenge Launch Toolkit, and this is a $37 toolkit that you can sign up for that gives you everything you need to run a challenge using the exact system that I covered today.
It's got a visual map of the entire challenge system with a 20-minute training that walks you through exactly how to run your challenge. It's got templates for those daily emails, those sales emails, those welcome emails. It's got a workbook to plan out the content of your challenge. It's got samples of the recap page. You can also opt-in, for another $37, a sales page and an offer outline page so you can learn how to write a great sales page and how to pre-sell your course offer. It's just jam-packed with goodness, so if you want to check it out, you can head over to toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. Again, that's toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com, and you can check it out. We'll also link it up in the show notes for you, along with the transcript.
Now, before we wrap up, I want to let you know that this is going to be a two-parter episode, because in the next episode, I'm going to talk about how we got incredible results with our challenge, and I just want to share with you some preliminary data. We launched our recurring monthly membership that's $49 a month called the Not Your Average Membership. We launched that with a five-day challenge, and we had a five-figure launch. We generated over $13,600 with a $49 offer. Yes, you can go annual, so we did have people pay $490, but we... But we also had a 7% conversion rate, it was actually over 7%, from the challenge to the membership, and we now have over an additional $4,500 in monthly recurring revenue in our business, and we did that all with a five-day challenge.
I teach the entire system inside that toolkit, if you want to check it out, but in the next episode of the podcast, I'm going to go even deeper into the intricacies of our challenge, the trials, the struggles, the things that worked great, the things that didn't work great, and share them with you. So if you want to learn more, make sure you tune in to next week's episode. Of course, if you head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap016, again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap016, for Not Your Average Podcast episode number 16, we will have a transcript of this, we will have show notes from this episode, and we will also link up the toolkit for you if you want to check it out.
So with that being said, I hope you have an incredible rest of your week, and one final favor, if you love the show, could you head over to heartsoulhustle.com/itunes and leave us a review? It means the world to us, we love to hear from you guys that we're doing a great job, and don't hesitate to tag us over on Instagram Stories @heartsoulhustle with your big takeaways from this week's episode. That's it, that's all. Get out there, consider running a five-day challenge, and until next week, stay not so average.
