140: Bundle Up: How Free and Paid Bundles Can Grow Your Email List and Your Wallet with Kate Doster

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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 my special guest today is Kate Doster. Kate is the host of the do the Brave Thing podcast, creator of Love youe List 2.0 Email marketing megacourse and and is dangerously obsessed with helping ethical entrepreneurs carve out their slice of the interwebs by wooing the hearts and wallets open of their small but mighty audiences. Thanks to fun email marketing and easy, yes, mini offers. And Kate, I am super excited to be chatting with you. You're one of my favorite email marketing people. I just want to go ahead and tell you that I think you're like.

One of my favorite people too.

So today we're going to be talking about running free and paid bundles to grow your email list and your bottom line. And this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I've done free bundles, I've done paid bundles, and I know the audience has questions about when to do one versus the other. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you, your background and how you got into all of this?

Sure. So I am, like I said, super excited to be here. You're going to hear me talk about how great Destiny is, but you all are listening to the podcast. You know how great she is. Make sure you leave your review saying how great she is too, by the way. So. Hey, everybody, I'm Kate Doster. So I started online. You kind of lose track when you've been around for as long as I have. I want to say, like, 2016, 2017 ish is when it got started. I started kind of like most people where I kind of did blogging first. And then I found out that copywriting with a W was a thing. And so I would always just say it's just about writing words that inspire people to take action. And what's really great about copy on like blog posts and such is that the more it sounds like an actual conversation and a person, the better it converts. Meaning, like, the more sales you'll get, the more signups you'll get, all that great stuff. And I can talk and I love people so like copywriting was just like it for me. I was so excited. So I started copywriting business. I got a bunch of clients decided, like many people, you know, you do a lot of service work for a while and right. I want to switch to a one to many model. So then I switched over exclusively to courses and digital products. You know, every now and then I like to throw in some private coaching because I do really like to get into the nitty gritty with people, their businesses and I, you know, I started my entire business. I don't bring this up very often, but I find people actually like to hear about it. Like I started my business when we were like on food stamps. Like I was a stay at home mom. Like we were poor, like poor poor, right. So like if we were going to get out of that situation, like I was going to have to do something and unfortunately where we are, we would have lost money. If I put my two kids in daycare, like for the amount of work that I could have gotten and for the rate that I would have been paid, so. So it made no sense. So I'm like, I'm going to get us out. And so that's what I did. I literally, I said I hamiltoned it as a girl with dyslexia and adhd, Hamiltoned our way out of poverty and here we are.

And I love that story. And I think, you know, what you just what you just said about, you know, if you were having to put your kids in daycare, you would have lost money. And I think a lot of people around the world, especially with the high cost of daycare out there, I think they can relate to that. I mean, you have to be making a ton of money, right?

Right. Or at least, you know, everyone wants the best for their child, right? So like I take care that like, you know, sometimes not even once it meet your standards are going to put you out. Like it is very, very expensive here in the states when you have children. And I think I don't share the story very often because like, oh, it's a little rags to riches story, but like it's not a rag to riches story that like happens like in 24 hours, y'. All. Like this is over a span of a couple of years, right? Like, you know, did a little blogging thing, did copywriting, got successful at copywriting, switched over, you know what I mean? Like it took a couple of years for everything to sort of hockey stick up. So I always do like to throw that in there. Like I was not one of those people that took like one person's course and then three months later I was rolling in it.

And I think that's a good point and something that we always need to make sure that people realize it does take a while to get these businesses up and running. So let's kind of switch gears, if you would, and we're going to jump right into our topic today, and we're going to be talking about four free and paid bundles to grow your email list and your bottom line. So I think the first question that I have, and I'm sure a lot of people listening here have, can you describe what you mean by a free bundle versus a paid bundle and when it makes sense to do one versus the other?

Sure. So let's start with a paid bundle, because I feel like that's kind of an easier concept. So basically, a paid bundle, you're going to get together with, with other people in your industry that serve the same ideal audience. And everyone is going to chip in one of their paid products and you're going to sell it, the whole bundle, if you will, at a discount. Right. So usually anywhere between like $97, $88. You know, depending on your niche, you might want to go a little bit lower. But the goal there is to have a lot of paid products. Usually you want paid products that people are actually selling for about $47 or higher. Again, the higher the better, because then more people are going to want to actually purchase the bundle. So that's how a paid bundle works. A free bundle is a little bit different. A free bundle, you still want either that paid product or something that somebody does sell as a tripwire, or I'll even suggest parts of paid products that people have. Basically, you want something that your audience cannot get for free anywhere else on the interweb. And what you're going to do for a very limited time, usually about a week, that's what I recommend for my students. Nine days, sort of tops. And is that people are going to be able to get these either paid or paid quality products completely for free when they sign up for the bundle. So really, a free bundle is excellent, excellent for list growth. And we do have a method, we call it the LEAFS method, where you can make money off the back of a free bundle. Whereas the paid bundle, obviously you're going to get paid up front because you know you're making commission as a contributor. You're the one that's hosting it also. So, like, you make money there if you're hosting it. So a free bundle, and everybody loves because it is such a fast way in like a week, granted, takes a little bit longer to set up to grow your email list by hundreds. I mean, we've had some contributors that have been over a thousand. And I don't think people quite realize how many email subscribers that you can get, especially when you're either participating or hosting in a free bundle. And you would think that when people are coming to something that is a free bundle, that they wouldn't want to stick around or that they wouldn't end up buying stuff. But a huge majority of the people who sign up for a product of yours in a free bundle will stick around. And most of them do actually end up becoming buyers, which is really fun. So I would say when you're trying to decide, should I do a free bundle or paid bundle? I say if your email list is anything south of especially like 2000, but definitely if you're in the hundreds, 1000%, I would stick with a free bundle. So with a free bundle, you're going to go off to other people that help your audience, but in different ways. So say that you are a productivity guru for months, right? You're going to find someone that does budgeting, you're going to find someone that does meal prep. Maybe you're going to find someone that does mindset, maybe you're going to find fashion. Right. Other things that your people would be interested in and other creators that have your audience with a free bundle. I always tell my students, you don't want the same topic covered twice. And there's a couple reasons for that. One, who wants to go to a free bundle and see like five how to start a blog courses, right? But I always like to think of free bundles, especially as a big community project. That's not fair to my five contributors that all are battling for those same eyeballs. So for a free bundle, I have a hard line in the sand. It's one person. I call it per topic or vertical per vertical, like that's it. So that way when somebody is going like, we had our back to business bundle, if somebody wants a blogging thing, there's only one person they can get it from, or that contributor is going to get more signups. They're going to be happy with me, the audience is going to be happy, Everybody wins. But with a paid bundle, I do think that it's okay if you do have a topic covered sort of once or twice. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You just want to make sure that sort of evenly distributed so you don't want to have like, you know, five budgeting worksheets and then you've got like one of every other category. So we do try to keep it a little balanced if you can. So. So I think anything over that couple thousand mark on your email list, if you want to try a paid bundle, go right ahead. But I think that most people running a free bundle first I think works really, really well. And here's the thing, your audience isn't going to get mad at you if the first time you do something it's a free bundle and then the next time it's paid, I would probably pick a different name for it. But other than that, like everybody likes it. Every. Everybody wins. That's the only thing I could explain with it. Everybody wins.

I agree. Everybody wins. Whether you're doing a free or pay. One of the things that I wanted to kind of expand upon, you had mentioned even with the free bundle, there was a way on the back end to drive some revenue or get some revenue there. And that's, you know, something I think we'd be interested in, right? We've put a lot of time, energy and effort, probably months, right, Putting together this free bundle. How does that work and what do you recommend?

There's, it's a lot of wrangling Pats, a bundle. I will say, I know that we're both very big fans of summits. Hint, hint, guys, there's a free summit you guys should be signing up for. There's a link in the show notes, but it is way less work than a summit, 1000%. So how do you make money with a free bundle? I love this question. One, the thing is like, how do you make money at all on the Internet, right? You need people to sell to so you can have an amazing product that you want to launch, say in a month or two. But if you only have the same 10 people to talk to and it's not going to work, right? So you can host a free bundle as what I like to call a pre, pre launch activity. So maybe about a month or so before you're going to go say into your webinar, into your challenge series, or even into your email only sort of big product push, you're going to have this free bundle because now you got a couple thousand extra people. We have one of my students who went from 400 people to 4,000 people on her email list. So you can make money on the back end by having a launch. You can also have a hate calling it Tripwire, but like People know what it is. I like to call it an easy yes offer on your thank you page. So basically what would happen, somebody goes to the free bundle page, they register so they can get to the gift claim page. That's what we call it. They'll go ahead, they'll pick out your gift, and then after they sign up for your gift, that thank you page for your gift can be an upsell to a paid product. Again, you would not think when people are getting all these things for free that they'd be interested in buying Tripwire products, but they 1000% are. So you make money off of Tripwire sales. If you have, say, an automated webinar funnel, you're never going to give away your webinar in a free bundle because again, you want things that are paid. You want to knock people's socks off. Okay, that's like the whole deal. We're just over delivering like crazy for this free bundle. But what you can do in your welcome series or even on that thank you page for your own gift, you can get people to sign up for your autowebinar. So there's that way you can have. We have a section that we tell all of our students to have called the resources section. And you make it very clear that these are affiliate links. So again, I help online business owners, right? So we have ones like I'll always make sure thrivecart's on there. I have a couple of other people. I don't put all my affiliate products. I put the ones that get the highest click through and make the most sense. And honestly I make the most commission and usually about mid bundle because again, the audience is so blown away that they got all this cool stuff for free that usually they want to know how they can help. And so you can even send an email to the people that just signed up for the bundle and be like, hey, we've been getting a lot of support. How can you help us if you are in the market to get any of these products? If you could buy them after clicking on my link, that's awesome. If not, it's totally okay. We get big, big sales from that. We make a lot of money off a Thrive cart that week. I have to say, as an affiliate for that and you can have something, we call it a chip in fee. I've seen some people take this to the extreme because again, I'm not the only person in the world that hosts bundles, right? Like I've seen some people charge other people like $150 to be in a Bundle, I personally don't do that, but what I have done and tested out in the past is chip in fees. So if I'm going to get like ads or any, like the website, it'll be like, you know, 25 bucks, right? For your very first bundle, I wouldn't charge a lot because you don't have any results to show them, right? So you would host your free bundle. You're going to get all the stats. You're going to ask your contributors how many email subscribers you've got. Okay? So now when you go and you host your next one, because you're going to want to host your next one, then you can be like, hey, we got our contributors an average of about 5,000 subscribers. And while we can't guarantee to me 500, 500 subscribers, I can't guarantee that for 20 bucks, you are definitely not going to get 500 leads from Facebook for $20. So that way you can sort of price anchoring it towards paid ads. So that's just another way. And of course, again, after your first one, you can get sponsorships. So you're going to make sure you collect a lot of data. In my course, we actually have a special guest training about sponsorship. So there's a lot of ways that you can monetize a free bundle.

So let me recap. Sponsorships, affiliate. I love the, I love the Thrive cart and that, that's a high commission for, for folks. So sponsorships, affiliates, the Tripwire offer. And let me just ask you, on the easy kind of Tripwire offer, do you have additional maybe order bumps or upsells through there, or do you recommend just focusing on the Tripwire and that's it?

I don't think that I would necessarily do an upsell after it. You know what I mean? Like in that traditional sense of going like smaller product. Upsell, upsell, upsell until people say no. Although I think an order bump, again, this is thrivecart terminology. I'm sure other checkout services have it as well, where it's like, hey, you want to add this too? I think, hey, adding this too on that page is fine. But again, I wouldn't go from like, okay, like, do you want a $36 product? All right, now buy this. $100 one. Now buy this. I think that might be a bit overkill, personally, but I mean, test it out.

So then the question I have is, for your contributors, when they're promoting the free bundle, do you recommend giving them affiliate commissions on maybe the Tripwire or the order bump?

If you have that if you want to, you can. I have for paid bundle, obviously. Definitely. And you want to give your contributors more commission than you're taking yourself because they'll promote it more. But for a free bundle, like, I have a very strict, like, if you haven't bought the product, you don't get to be an affiliate for it policy. Because I want everyone to be in integrity. Like, that's just my personal stand. So if any of my contributors have bought my stuff, then they come 1000% earn money either off my tripwires or any other products that I'm going to be launching off the back end or any other, like, funnels that I'm going to be putting on there. But you can 1000%. If you want to get your contributors to promote more, let them be an affiliate for your tripwire products. I feel like after the first day, when the affiliate, excuse me, when the contributors of a free bundle see how fast or lists have grown, they get very excited to promote it a lot more. But it's like, again, everyone wins. Your audience gets stuff for free. They're the hero because they got their audience stuff for free. They're growing their email list. And if you're the host now, everyone loves you, so that's a great thing, too.

So a lot of, lot of pros there. So here's the question I have. I think, you know, a lot of people understand and they're seeing the benefits, Kate, of either, you know, offering these free or these paid bundles. So I, you know, I get emails, I want to say almost every day, but probably not that, definitely every week saying, you know, here's a bundle that they're either promoting whether it's free or pay. How do you make yours stand out in a crowded marketplace?

And I think this goes very well for summits, too. I know we always try to talk about them in tandem. Again, summits are a lot more work, I can't lie to you. Fun work, but a lot more work. Um, I think that if you want to be able to stand out, I think having at the beginning having relationships with people which you might not have, which is fine, you can use this as a friend building activity. So anytime you can have a connection like, oh, yeah, Cindy, it's like destiny is, you know, in this bundle with us anytime and your first time, you're not going to have it anytime you have stats. I think it's really great to share. And also, and I know this can be a little bit more time consuming, but again, it's not like you're editing videos or transcripts, I think that you can send out even a personalized loom video. So L o o m It's just a free Google Chrome extension. You might have to pay for a month or two if you record too many videos because I think they have a limit on their free plan. And if you actually like send them a message and have it be like, hey, Destiny. It's like, hey, Destiny. I just wanted to reach out because I would love for you to be a part of my do the brave thing bundle that we have going on. I absolutely love how well you know and then you talk about what they teach. I always like to even suggest, like, products or if I happen to be a little bit nosy, it's like, especially for a free bundle, I'll be like, this will be perfect if you are our mindset person, because I know that you're going to be launching your money mindset course in a couple of months. So when you're like straight up telling them how this is going to benefit them, when you have a little added touch of not just like, be in my bundle, here's the commission, which is fine. Obviously you want to tell them the commission, but I think being able to sort of build those personal connections really can help. But definitely go outside of your circle too, a little bit.

I love those tips and, you know, I think just one of the things I love about running summits and, you know, hosting summits, which we do quite a bit, is I love being able to build those relationships. So it's definitely an opportunity for that. And I'm so glad that you brought that up. Kate, before we wrap it up, any last minute tips for the audience on free or paid bundles?

Just run one. I think that everyone should run a summit once and I feel like everyone should run a free bundle once as well, just to see what fits better for you and your team and the results that you are looking to get. I think the key with a free bundle is you don't want to overwhelm people as much as you would think. I would say you want to cap it to about 20 gifts and since you're the person hosting it, you can have two. Why not? And again, make sure that different verticals, as I like to call them, are covered with a paid bundle. The sky is the limit, truly. Again, you want things that are a little bit more evenly dispersed. Can you have a little bit more productivity than you do Facebook ads? Yeah, that's okay. But with that one, you know, having anywhere from 40 to 60 gifts that sort of a thing, because it's paid, it's going to work out well because people like, oh my goodness, I'm getting such a deal with the free one. When you have so many people get very overwhelmed and they don't know what to pick. So you're going to actually get a little less action for everybody. So that's probably my biggest thing. And again, you just need to be like, super excited for it. And I think that your contributors will be super excited for it as well.

And I think, you know, 20 gifts, you know, 20 people there, that's doable. That is super, super doable for running a paid bundle. Now, now, Kate, I just want to mention that you are going to be one of our speakers in the summit this month. We're having a summit coming up on May 16th and 17th. It's called the Subscriber Growth Summit. And we're going to be focused on helping people grow their email list and turn that list into a money making profit house. So definitely want to check out Kate in that summit. And Kate, before we go, can you let people know where they can find you and you have a free gift for them also?

Sure. So wherever you are listening to this podcast, after you go ahead and you leave a review, you can either type in my name, Kate Doster, or you can type in do the Brave thing. And that's my podcast we upload every week. I love hanging out with my besties over there. And if you're like, oh my goodness, Kate, like, but what do I actually say to my subscribers? Like, okay, I've got an email list whether it's big or large, but I have no idea what to say to them. Then I want you to head on over to Kate Dawster.com newsletters with or without the S. And that will give you two years worth of strategically planned email ideas. So, like, y' all don't have to worry about what to send your list until 2025 at this point, which is pretty awesome. Actually. I think it goes into 2026 now and it literally breaks down like week by week. So be like May, week one, week two, week three. And if you're like, but Kate, like, I'm getting it in May, like, what about, you know, January through April? Not a problem. Those months come back around so you can just flip them on the edge. It's fine.

And yeah, 2026, there you go.

You are, you are fine. It turns out those months come back and so it gives you a little sentence prompt. So that way it kind of just sort of gets your brain going. We make sure that on there one of the prompts is a little bit more money focused. Although technically you can turn any email into an email that's promoting a paid product. But we like to just make sure people are actually selling.

And definitely check out Kate in the summit. She has a wonderful presentation coming up for you. We'll dig into a little bit more with these free and paid bundles. And Kate, thank you so much for joining me today.

I am so excited. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you found value in this episode, I'd love a quick review on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. If you don't know what to say in the review, just say Destiny. I loved your episode on whatever topic you're listening to. This will help us get our content out to more people just like you. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.