122: How Liz Wilcox Has Five-Figure Months With a $9 Membership

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Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my digital product accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable, freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply. I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and evergreen sales funnels. In this podcast we go deep into product and marketing strategies for digital product creators. We cover everything from digital product creation, how to market and sell your digital products, and just as important, how to find your ideal customer. Let's jump right into our show.

And today my special guest is Liz Wilcox. Liz is the fresh Princess of email and she is an email strategist and keynote speaker showing small businesses how to build online relationships, package up their magic and turn it into emails that people want to read and most importantly, purchase from. Now today we're going to be chatting with Liz on how she has built a five figure per month membership with that that is only $9 a month. So I am super excited to jump in with this today with you today, Liz and learn a little bit more about your journey and how you came up with this idea of this membership and how you've been marketing it.

So.

So Liz, welcome to the show.

Oh my gosh. What up, what up, what up? I'm so excited. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for listening.

So Liz, why don't you just jump right in and tell the audience a little bit more about you, how you help people and then we're going to jump into your journey.

Sure. So I think the fresh Princess of Email kind of says it all right. I make email marketing wicked simple for you with some fresh strategies you probably haven't heard of and probably why the membership has kind of blown up to those five figure Months. Like Destiny said, I started off, my style is a little different, a little fresh, so to speak, because I started off as an RV travel blogger. So I think I just had to kind of do things my own way. If you've ever traveled in an RV or even been in the woods, you can imagine what kind of Internet situation I was working with. So I had to just, you know, do the bare minimum. And it turned out that was actually kind of a good strategy. And now I'm talking to you today.

So I definitely want to learn a little bit more. I will have to tell you that Will Smith is one of my favorite actors, and I remember him initially from that Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Is that where you kind of came up with your idea for your, you know, your branding?

There's. Yeah, this is actually a really fun story. So my branding has always been very 90s themed. You know, I was born in 1988. I love NSync. And I mentioned I used to be an RV travel blogger. And one of the things about being in that space was I felt like I couldn't really let that side of me out. The majority of my customers and subscriber base were men in their 60s. Right. You can't see me right now, but I'm wearing a. An in Sync T shirt. I've got a Seinfeld hat on. You know, I just felt like that wasn't very relatable. Right. And so, you know, I was talking about things that their generation came from. So when I started this new business, I knew I wanted it to be very 90s themed. And so that's kind of what I leaned into. And then a couple. And maybe like, you'll have to. You'll have to DM me and I'll share the picture with you. But I have a. Or I went to an event and they called me up on stage as a surprise. I had no idea what was going on. And they actually crowned me. They actually gave me a crown as a surprise, like, for being, I don't know, like, an inspirational member of the community or something. And it's a giant NSYNC crown with, like, pom poms and pipe cleaners and all the members of NSync. So, yeah, definitely, like, find me on social media, DM me. I'll send you the picture. Hilarious.

So I got to see that.

So, yeah, yeah, it's all super. I'm looking at it right now. It's super amazing. But as they're, you know, I had to, like, literally kneel to be crowned this Thing is gigantic. And the guy, the host, Terry Weaver of the Making Elephants Fly podcast, check him out too. He said, you know, Liz Wilcox, the queen of email. And I just, I grabbed the mic, I don't know what I was thinking, and I was like, I'm not the queen, I'm the fresh princess. And it just kind of stuck. People started calling me that. I said, you know, heck, why not? That's so fun. And, you know, now I'm, now I'm being introduced as that.

I love it. I love it. So why don't you, why don't we kind of change gears just a little bit? And I want to jump into the details of this membership. So you have built basically a six figure business with a $9 per month membership. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with this idea of this kind of low cost, you know, membership that really, quite frankly, nobody can say no to, versus, you know, some higher price type, you know, program that, you know, a lot of us kind of, you know, start out doing?

Yeah. So a couple years ago, back in like 2020, I was doing those high ticket services, copywriting, you could hire me for, you know, sales pages, emails, all that jazz. And because I started off as a blogger, I knew I didn't want to do that forever. You know, that was just a way for quick cash. Right. Like, I knew, okay, you know, me and Destiny, we can hook up, you know, I'll write some of her emails for like quick cash. Let's go. But because I had that background in blogging and I had made money with digital products with that side of the house, so to speak, I knew that's the direction I wanted to go with Liz Wilcox dot com. So it's about a year into Liz Wilcox dot com I was actually sitting down to write my newsletter. I had just made 20 or I had just secured $20,000 in contracts. So that's $20,000 over the next couple months. Right now, of course, that sounds amazing, especially for me. I grew up wicked poor. Like, I still at the, like to this day. At the time of this recording, I support two households. I'm a single mom. Having secured $20,000 in contracts should have felt really, really good, right? Like, who. I've always had a financial insecurity. Always had, you know, like I've been homeless before. So knowing that my bills are paid for the next few months, you know, on, like in the forefront of my mind felt really, really good. Like, okay, Liz, you're safe, right? We've all been there in some capacity. But in the back of my head I was thinking, oh my gosh, now I have to do $20,000 worth of private client work. Which if you are a service provider, you know, that's a lot, right? Even if you're charging high prices, you know, and you know your worth and all that 20k is a lot of project, right? I don't care how you slice it, that's a lot of responsibility.

And you also feel like you have a lot of different bosses, right? You don't just have one, you have 10 or however many or you know, you have that contract with.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. So such a good point. And one of my bosses, so to speak, was a company that, it was just wild. It was actually like a, like a funeral company, like after, After Life Services. And it was just like, you know, if you, if you go to my website, you'll see like, I have no idea why they hired me, but there you have it. So it was just a lot of responsibility, which, as I've already told you, I already had a lot of responsibility in my home life, right? And so it was just adding to that and I was sitting down to write my newsletter to my subscribers to these people that I was building out, like, oh, you know, Liz is the fresh princess of email, right? And I just thought, okay, Liz, are you going to talk about building recurring revenue and getting out of this service based business or are you going to do something about it? Right? It was kind of a, for lack of a better term, like a come to Jesus meeting with myself. And then I thought about all these people in, on my email list like, and I, and I started looking at my sam cart and conversion rates and trying to think like, okay, what can I, what can I do to have more customers so I can have less clients, right? I want more customers, less clients. What can I do? I'm looking at my conversion rates and my tripwire at the time was $22. And in my head I'm like, $22? This is a no brainer. Why isn't everyone buying this? And I don't subscribe to the. Oh well, 1% is typical on average. If I'm working this hard for 1%, I need to get into a different business. So I thought, okay, what can I do right now? All these people have seen this tripwire. Everyone on my email list has seen my tripwire. Only I think it was like 5%, maybe 7 have purchased. How can I get these other 93% of people to just trust me enough to Buy something from me and to like start on their email journey. Because I know email is not the sexiest topic. I know it seems complicated. How can I make this simple? How can I make this a true no brainer offer? And I thought about also when I started my business, I had $0. Like $22 was not just $22. $22 has never been no brainer for me. Even buying gas, which I need to get to my job back in the day I would have to think, do I have $22 right? So thinking about that, it was just kind of this frenzy of thoughts and this perfect storm to make me think about. Well, I've seen these template memberships, right? You know, social for social media, canva, you know, they get a new template once a month or whatever. I could do that with my people. They need email marketing, but email marketing seems so tough to them that they just don't know where to start. You know, we all have like blank cursor syndrome, right? Like it's so bad to start from scratch. What if I just wrote an email once a week, sent it out to folks and what if I charged a price where everyone would be like, oh my gosh to what Destiny said? Like, I can't say no. I've just got to give this a try. Like if Liz is going to put in that work for only nine bucks, I'm going to give it a try. So I wrote up my newsletter and I say all this, it probably, you know, it was like 10 minutes of thought and my subject line was, can I have $9? And I decided $9 because it had to be under 10. It had to be an absolute no brainer. Remember I'm thinking, how can I get people to actually trust me and trust email marketing and how can I get, you know, the maximum amount of subscribers turned into customers? Remember I was like, I want more customers, less clients. So I said, can I have $9? And I just started typing. This wasn't even, this was like straight in ConvertKit. It wasn't even, you know, a Google document that I was going to send out, you know, the next day or whatever. This was, you know, all in action. I said, oh, I'm going to send out a weekly newsletter template. Oh, I'm going to send out a video walkthrough with it. So you know, what the heck, this is even, oh yeah, sure. I'm going to throw in a live Q and A once a month. And then literally on the page I said, and whatever else I think of later, right? Like it's $9, you're in or you're out type of thing. And I sent it out And I got 30 people, I think in the first 24 hours. And in the first 30 days I had a hundred people, which was my goal. I told them if I can get a hundred people in in the first 30 days like this, this is going to be the thing, right? So I got 100 people. And just over the, over the next year and a half, I average about 100 new members a month right now.

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So I love your story there in terms of really thinking through, you know, your audience and what, what they could benefit from. And, and I've been in your membership for a while and quite frankly, I wish I knew exactly when I joined Liz because I don't remember, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I think I remember that subject line. Can I have $9?

Yeah, it's kind of infamous nowadays. I've seen it pop up in other places. I'm like, yeah, get it, get it girl.

And I tell you, and I'm an annual member so I'm, you know, I get access to all the other perks. But I, you know, and I what I love about something like this because I'm always looking for templates to make my life easier. I mean, I'm a pretty small team. I mean I do have a full time va but you know, we're working our tails off. So anytime we can make it easier for us, you know, I'm always, you know, I jump right into that. So tell us a little bit more about how you've grown it over the years. How do you find new members?

Yeah, so another thing that I love about this Membership and the price and, you know, what I have in it is that it just delights me to talk about. Like, when you said, oh, you know, before we hit record, I really want to talk about your membership, I was like, oh, awesome.

Let's, like, hit record.

I'm ready. And I think that factors into my ability to do all these next things I'm about to talk about. You know, you have to be enthusiastic about your offer. You have to feel really good about it in order to have other people kind of, you know, hop on that wagon, like, feel your passion, right? Like, we all know when someone is just promoting something because they think this is the next step, right? Versus, like, oh, my gosh, this person has come up with a genius idea, and it's just, like, on fire when she talks about it, right? We've all seen that difference. So staying really excited about my offer and then really doing a lot of, so to speak, like, visibility or publicity work. So getting on podcasts, that was already one of my strategies for the year 2021 when I released it, and just really doubling down on that, getting on as many podcasts as possible. I think in 2021, I had over 50 podcasts. And then about halfway through the year, I realized, okay, you know, I've got. I think it was like 500 people in the membership. People are starting to kind of talk about this. And I opened up an affiliate program. And so if you sell the membership, you get 50%. And before you're like, what? How do you make money? That's like, you're giving yourself like, four bucks. Think about it. I don't pay. I'm not paying for ads. So in my mind, it's like, well, this is how much I would be paying if I was trying to do some kind of slow funnel ad strategy, right?

So.

And I'm more than happy to give people that talk about my membership, you know, half the sales, like, it's. It's part of the fun for me. So started to open up that affiliate program. So when you purchase email marketing membership, in the very first onboarding email that you get, there's a PS that says something like, you know, really excited you got this deal. Do you know anyone else who needs it? Sign up as an affiliate right now and I'll give you half, you know, half of the sales. So if they, you know, you think if you signed up today and then you got your friend to sign up tomorrow, you really only paid $4.50, right? So now it gets even more affordable for you. And I would say, and it's been about a year. The affiliate program is about a year old now, and I have almost 500 affiliates. I would say about half of them are active. So I pay, you know, once a month, about 200 to 250 people. So it's. That has been another way to really get the word out. And again, just having an offer that's just really exciting to talk about has helped. Like, I don't want to downplay that there are some offers that are easier to sell than others. Of course. Then I started doing. Once I started opening up the affiliate program, I noticed people started to ask me to come in and talk to their private groups, like masterminds, Facebook groups, Instagram lives, private training, stuff like that. And that really helped grow me not only as, you know, the fresh princess of email, but as helped me grow the membership as well. Because, of course, usually when people hear about it, they're like, oh, well, I want to promote that too, or I'm going to check that out. I think that might even be how Destiny and I found each other. Right? So that's really helped. And let me. Let me think. I think there's one other thing. It's a brain fart. We're recording this in the summertime on a Friday. Forgive us.

And I've been out of a pool all day, so there you go.

Yeah, yeah, Amen. Amen to that. So, yeah, just being enthusiastic about it. Getting, you know, trying to get on as many different platforms as possible. And of course, with the podcast, with the private trainings, I was not directly promoting the membership, but I was promoting, you know, my freebie. And of course, when you download my freebie, I actually turn that. Can I have $9 email into the last email of my welcome sequence. And just, oh, that's the last thing. And then just promoting it in my email as much as possible. So I was really focused on list building, you know, with these podcasts, with these private trainings, and then just mentioning it all the time in newsletters. Like, you know, oh, my gosh, I just hit 500 members in my membership. Are you a part of it yet? You know, click here to check it out. Or, you know, oh, I just added, like, I had this type of email for the newsletter template this week. Like, here's a sample of it, right? And just sending them a sample and saying, if you want to sign, like, in the sample itself, you know, having a link to sign up, like, do you want this every single week? Sign up, things like that. Like, really harnessing the Power of that list growth and those new leads to get them into the membership.

So, Liz, I think you gave us a lot of great tips there on how you can market, you know, a new product like this. And I like all the tips, you know, making sure that you're feeling, you know, you stay excited about that, then that could be tough. I don't think a lot of us realize how tough that is sometimes. And then the affiliate program and then just all the visibility and publicity work that you've done. So I want to take a little bit of a turn here, and I want to talk about what you have in the membership, specifically in the annual, because you have some bonuses in there. So every week you send out the templates, the email templates. So I'll let you go into details about that, but also tell us a little bit about what we can get if we sign up to be an annual member.

Yeah, Destiny, I'm so glad you said that because that was the thing that I was brain farting on. I actually, I. So in order to stay enthusiastic and to, you know, I'm selling the same thing, but, you know, getting the maximum amount of people in there, figuring out how to reduce my churn rate, et cetera. Back In November of 2021, I came up with this annual passholder idea. And it's basically just like Costco, right? You pay Costco 60 bucks, you get inside the store, right? I thought, well, I could do that. If somebody pays me for a year of the membership, they can get inside my store, quote, unquote. But instead of selling them stuff, right? Costco, once you're in their store, they sell stuff basically at cost, right? They make almost all their money from membership fees alone. So I sell digital products. So I thought if you can get inside my store for a membership fee, then I can just give you everything else for free. So any digital product that I've created or will create for the next year, at the time of your passholder purchase, you get for free. So I have, you know, a Black Friday training. I have a sales page template or no, that's what I'm creating next month. So pass holders will get that for free. I have, you know, a workshop on how to keep your email list healthy and how to get people to actually open up your emails. A list building training, you know, an email building community with email. I have at this point, there's probably a dozen other products that are at different levels of email marketing. And when you purchase the annual pass, you get all of that for free. So you give me $108. That's just $9 times 12 months. There's no markup. And, you know, you get quote unquote into the store where you get every. You get access to everything else for free. And I just thought, like, well, if Costco can do that with physical products, why couldn't I do that with digital products? And it's been super awesome. I love it so much and people really love it too. And again, going back to that second question that Destiny asked, it's been another great way to grow the membership.

And Liz, you only have the annual pass, if I recall correctly, open what, three times a year during Black Friday, which is, I think that's when I bought it last year. I bought the annual pass, probably. Okay. And then you do it, you know, maybe in the first quarter. And then we have one coming up this next Monday, which, which, you know, when we scheduled this podcast recording, I was not thinking about when your, you know, your flash sale for your annual pass was coming up. But this is like perfect timing. It's going to, you know, you're going to have your flash sale for it on Monday and Tuesday, which is July 11th, 11th and 12.

It's like Christmas in July. So excited.

Yeah. So people can join, right, for that annual pass. But is that the only time you have it available?

Correct. So I'm just doing it a few times a year. It Black Friday, of course. Like, why not? It's just a super fun way to sell the membership. And then I actually have a birthday. First quarter is my birthday. I actually run a sale on my birthday. The last one we did in March 2022, we sold over 400 passes. So let I know the title of this is like making five figures a month. Like I'm. It was a $48,000 launch and I only sent four emails over five days. So, like, I'm saying that to let it be inspiration to you that whatever your idea is, if you can get excited about enough and provide enough value, you can, you can make as much money as you want. And then I do, you know, it's like kind of a Christmas in July. I was thinking of anyone that, excuse me, in March that kind of heard about it after the fact. I had a lot of people that, you know, after my birthday, oh, I joined your membership. I heard about this yearly thing and I said, oh, well, you know, it's closed right now. And so I'm just doing kind of a short, like pop up sale for any of those newer members in the last few months to get in on that annual pass and really commit to email marketing for the next year.

So Liz, I want to thank you for sharing your inspiring story and how you have literally, you've really grown this six figure business in a very short time. So kudos to you for everything you're doing. I think that annual pass and how you're marketing it is absolutely genius. What last minute tip would you have for our listeners out there? You know, we have course creators, people who have memberships, coaching, you know, they, and a lot of them might be still be struggling, they might be thinking about what kind should I launch or you know, maybe the offer they have is just not working for them. What tips would you have for them?

Yeah, number one, find something again, I mentioned this that lights you up that you're just like, oh my gosh, I love to promote this thing. Number two, keep your costs down at first, especially with a new offer for me like this membership we're talking about, where, you know, I'm sending weekly templates. Oh my gosh. It was in Google Drive for the first 13 months. It wasn't until I had 1300 members, you do the math. 9 times 12 times 1300. Right. That I, that I was like, okay, I'm going to invest in a different platform. And then to even keep the cost down with that, I just built the membership onto WordPress, which I was already paying for. WordPress, right. So I paid for a couple extra plugins. It cost me less than $1,000 and now the site is on my site and everybody's happy. So remember, you know, you don't have to, sure, you have to spend money to make money, right? But you don't have to spend that much money, especially before you've proven your offer. And just in general, any time that I'm creating something, I ask myself two questions. Number one, what would this look like if it was easy? And then a follow up question is, what would this look like if it was fun? And when I filter everything through that, the marketing, the offer, the way I have to sell it, creating the content for it suddenly becomes magic. And now like Destiny said, I've been able to build this business into six figures just for my membership alone. I sell other stuff too. It, you know, in, let's say less than a year and a half and I was able to retire my services completely right after Black Friday. I hope that's helpful.

It is. And I, you know, when you were talking through this, I remember when your membership was on Google Drive. So I remember back in the day when you were actually doing that, that is. She's an og.

She's an og, folks.

I. I think I am. I think I am. Well, I'm super passionate about the membership, which is why I'm one of your affiliates. So there you go. So, Liz, can you tell people where they can find you?

Heck yeah, of course. If you want to check out a little bit of this magic yourself, you can go straight to Liz Wilcox dot com. In the top right hand corner, you're going to see a hot pink button. You can't miss it. It says free email swipes. If you're just starting off with email marketing and you don't want to check out the membership, you can get all that for free. Get a welcome sequence already written for you. You get three newsletter samples, one to help you get clicks, one to help you get replies, and one to help you get sales. And then if that's not enough, you get 52 subject lines completely for free. That hot Pink button@lizwilcox.com that's going to give you a sample of what the membership is like and what it's like to be a true email marketer.

And we'll make sure that we have the links in the show notes for people to find you. And Liz, thank you so much for joining me today. I think you and I are going to. You're going to go to the beach. I'm going to go back up to my pool. And I think we're done on this Friday afternoon.

Yeah. And the listeners are going to go to LizWorldCox.com right?

That is absolutely right.

I'm also excited. Shameless. Thank you so much. Destiny, thank you so much for listening.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.