145: Smoother-Than-Butter Buyer Experiences: Elevating The Delivery Of Your Digital Programs

Hi there. 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 be bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your 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 that tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable freedom giving business you 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 my special guest today is Stacy Coyle. Stacy is a customer journey and buyer experience strategist and she is behind Workplace Lemonade. Using her Sorbet parfait methodology, she helps digital business owners give their customer journey the magical glow up that makes your ideal clients exclaim omg they get me. And yes, that includes rolling out the red carpet for an enchanting buyer experience too. And Stacy, I am super excited to chat with you today and we're going to be talking about smoother than butter buyer experiences elevating the delivery of your digital programs. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit about you and how you help people?

Thanks Destiny. Thank for thank you very much for having me on. Hi everyone, I am Stacy Coyle. As Destiny said, I am a customer journey and buyer experience strategist. And basically what that means is I help you take a look at your customer experience in general. So pre sale and post sale to make sure that you're connecting with your audience, that your goals for your business and your goals for your potential clients are in alignment, and that attention to detail carries through the point of purchase and into how you deliver your products and your courses.

As well, and Stacey, I'm excited to jump into this topic. Like I mentioned when we were talking before we started recording, this is something that I think a lot of us overlook. We put so much emphasis on the front end in, you know, getting people to know us and getting them to buy that we this little bit ignore, you know, after they have purchased and kind of that onboard type experience. But can you tell us exactly when you're talking about a smoother buyer experience, what exactly do you mean by that?

Yeah, so I mean, as you said, it's kind of natural that when we're creating our products and our services, we get really into the pre sale part because that's when you're thinking about your copy, your social media, you might be making investments into helping collaborators come on board to help you reach your goals. And then of course, it's natural to get super excited about curating the product or the membership or the course and planning out what will those modules look like, how can I help people? But something that gets lost in the weeds a little bit or left kind of on the fly is often, how are we strategically delivering the program? Once someone purchases so typically like a experience that's smoother than butter means that someone will not notice a shift in tone or quality or attention to detail once they put their credit card details in and hit ch at you are doing a lot of the labor for them. And by labor, what I mean is that you're preempting their needs. You're thinking of the questions they could potentially have and getting those answers to them before they even start to wonder. So things like, oh, when is this taking place? How do I join this? How do I find that you've done that work for them? So it's just super easy for them to engage with whatever you send to them or share with them. And they don't have to do any of that work. And in terms of the quality, if someone purchases from you and the attention to detail is not there post purchase, what can happen is some people might feel or wonder, oh, did I make the right choice investing in this expert, are they? They presented such a clean, professional front up until now, but now that I purchased from them, I'm noticing a little bit of maybe something is just not quite feeling right. There's a vibe like a little bit of dissonance. And we want to make sure that when our buyers buy from that, they continue just to feel very invested in working with us, that they're excited about what they bought, they're excited to learn from us. So by preempting everything and being strategic in our delivery, we can ensure that the feelings that they had pre purchase carry through into post purchase and then they can fully engage with our program and show up in the way that we intended them to.

So I love what you said about preempting their needs. So it's really just anticipating the, the kind of questions that they're going to have and making sure that you answer them up front. I know that I've joined programs in the past where I got into it, I couldn't find anything, like I didn't know where to go and where to sign up for stuff. So I love what you said there. So, moving on, can you walk us through some of the struggles that people have when they're delivering their programs or their products? So the folks who are listening to this might have an online course, a membership, or some type of group coaching program. What are some things that they need to either think about or consider or mistakes you see other people making?

Yeah, so like I said, we put a lot of effort into the pre purchase parts and actually into the contents of the course. And then often the actual buyer experience, the buyer delivery elements, is kind of created on the fly. So we're just doing the best we can. And if it's a live program or a live course or a membership, then what we can find is we've gone through the heavy lifting of a launch, we're super tired, and it's just a little bit too much to stretch to being actually very thoughtful and strategic about how we deliver our program. So what can happen is we just send, we just do the best we can. We send the information when we have the bandwidth to think about it. But from the customer's perspective, they might feel like, oh, I'm getting this information super late. They might be wondering like, oh, do I need to block stuff off of my calendar? Or when is this kickoff call? So what you have is clients feeling like they're a little bit in limbo and it's just not a good place to have your, your buyers hanging out. You want them to be like, you want everything in their calendar, ready to get started, excited to kick off with you. So by going on the fly, we accidentally kind of kill a little bit of the momentum in the buyer experience by kind of leaving people hanging in limbo. And it kind of, as I mentioned before, it bring, brings in that dissonance between like how glossy the promotional materials might have been and then the slightly disjointed delivery post purchase and it kind of leaves people feeling, huh, something's like kind of a little bit off. So the common struggles are just a lack of clarity or your audience and that they don't feel super informed. But luckily, those are things that we can tweak quite quickly and help our buyers feel like, okay, no, I did make the right choice here.

So are there any things that we need to look out for to kind of clue us in that our customers, you know, basically are saying there's something missing or our program might need some attention? Yeah, there are.

Like, honestly, if you're getting a lot of questions like, oh, when is this event happening? What time is this at? Is that Eastern? Is what is that Pacific time? How do I access or find that material you mentioned? I can't see this in the course area. Or maybe if you have a lot of live elements of your program, you're noticing that people aren't attending live like you kind of hope they would. So it's kind of killing the momentum a little bit in that when people aren't present live, it doesn't feel as big as much as you would like it to feel as a community effort. And if you find yourself wondering like, oh, did we actually tell people about this or did we send that reminder? And the answer is like, I don't know, let's go check. And then you're looking at it and you're like, oh, we did, but it's kind of like half an hour before the event took place or, whoops, we forgot, we'll catch it next week. Then you might find, you might at that point think like, okay, we need to get a little bit more strategic about this and again, start anticipating what it is they might need to know ahead of time and then doing some of the work ahead of time to make sure some of those elements, like reminders are in place so that we're not left wondering like, oh, did we actually do that? Or did they get that?

I think that's a good point. Is kind of, you know, looking at it from one of your customers perspective and say, you know, somebody who doesn't know really what's going on, what might be missing here? Because I think we think in our minds, oh, I've done all that. But when you really dig into the details for somebody who's brand new, not familiar with what you're doing and kind of coming into the program, they might just be lost. So do you recommend that people interview or talk to some of their newer, you know, some of the newer people that are coming into the program to find out, do you, you feel, how do you feel? Do you have what you need?

I mean, anytime you launch a product or a service, I think you should always be looking for constructive feedback. I mean, it can be hard to put yourself out there because no one wants to hear like, oh, this wasn't what I thought, or I didn't like this thing. But grow through knowing more about how our clients and our buyers, what they experience when they are connecting with us. And every time we get that feedback, that's a learning opportunity and something that we can take a look at and see whether, okay, do we need to make a change here or not? And in general, I think placing yourself periodically in your buyer's shoes is always a great exercise to do. Even if it's a program you've run for a long time. It's easy to get a little bit complacent and just assume everything is working like clockwork. But it's always good to go back through those touch points and make sure that everything's up to date, that there's no tech glitches appearing that weren't there before, that the information is still correct and relevant and constantly asking for their feedback. I mean, there's always the advice that you should be asking for testimonials, but I think of course we should get testimonials because we want that social proof and we want to be able to share the wins people get from our programs. We also want that feedback side of things too, to make sure that the quality of our delivery is there and ultimately that we are taking care of our buyers.

And I was thinking about if somebody has a membership, and you know, generally memberships, they pay on a monthly basis or there might be like a three month commitment or whatever. But if somebody, if you, if they have students or clients who are leaving the membership, that would be a really good opportunity to ask them why. And it may have been related to how the program was being delivered.

Absolutely. Like you might find just by asking the question, especially for a membership that might have live elements, like you might discover that maybe your live elements are not taking place at a time that's in alignment with your main demographic. So for example, if you're based in Los Angeles, but It turns out 90% of your buyers are actually in the UK for some reason, but you're running your calls late in your evening, then of course people in the UK wouldn't be able to attend live. So just by asking those questions, you might find something obvious that didn't occur to you during the planning phase that has translated across to your delivery. And just knowing that information empowers you to kind of assess and decide, okay, how can I better support my clients? And just through being able to do that, you will find that your retention rate will increase because you're continuously placing yourself in your buyer's shoes and anticipating their needs and their wants in order to fully participate and kind of engage in your program or with you as an expert.

Now Stacy, you've been doing this for a while and I know you've worked with a lot of clients and seen behind the scenes of a lot of different programs. Can you tell us and walk us through some of the most high impact tweaks business owners can make to kind of elevate their program delivery there?

Well, I think it's kind of obvious just from this conversation that I definitely advocate for thinking of your delivery as the third pillar. So if the like the launch materials and the sales are one pillar and the actual program itself and what's in it is the second pillar, then the delivery is the third pillar. And we dedicate a lot of time to like the pre sale and then the actual program or the product. So just having time carved out for the delivery of your program and that customer experience is kind of the first thing. And then the second thing I really recommend is assigning someone to take point like to lead the delivery of your program. So if it's unclear within your team who's the ultimate person to deliver those, like schedule the emails, make sure that everything's ready to go, then it's definitely time to assign something. Now if you're flying solo, follow of course that someone is going to be you. But if you have a team that includes maybe an assistant of some kind, making it clear to them that one of their responsibilities is to make sure that everything is going out on a timely manner and notifying you if there's an element missing so that you can strategically look at it and add it into the mix. Now of course that's kind of more strategic planning, but if you want small, high impact tweaks that you could make today, if you currently have a live program going, I would think that some of the things you can do is start adding the pro, like the resource area or important links to any emails that you deliver so that people don't have to go looking for how do I access the course area, how do I change my credit card details or anything like that. That information is just one click away from them to share a calendar with people at the start of the program so that they have all the calls, the live elements ready to go, to plug into their calendar and that those. Those events also include the links. Because sometimes we get the event, but we don't have the zoom link and it comes much later. And then people, like, have it in their calendar and they're like, oh, there's no zoom link here. And then they have to go searching in their email. So try to, like, be cohesive with that so that all that information comes at one time and then people can just plug it into their calendars. So that's using a Google Calendar or a tool like Add Event. And then also a small tweak that's super helpful in terms of communication is pinning the name of your program or an abbreviation of it into the subject line of all emails relating to the program so that they can spot it easily in their inbox, prioritize opening it and see what's happening. And if you need them to take an action that they're more likely to have seen it than if it's kind of coming in in the general mix of your newsletters or your general promotional emails.

And I like the tip you just said about putting the name of your program in the email. And I would also say do that in your calendar too, like your ad event or whatever. Put the name of the program. Because I've had meetings on my calendar. I'm like, I can't even remember what this meeting was for. And it was for one of the programs that I was in. Oh, yeah.

I mean, being super mindful about how you name things. Consistency in your delivery and in your naming convention is like king when it comes to communicating you. Like, if you have a variety of ways that you refer to your program, just choose one that's customer facing. So there's just no confusion as to what it is you're communicating to them about. And just making sure it's consistent across the resource area, the program area, the calendar links, the emails, etc. So that people know exactly what they're receiving and what it's about.

And to follow up on that, Stacy, I know that, and this is just a pet peeve of mine, I know that some people use like acronyms or they shorten a name or they do, like Ric or what, Whatever. I'm making that up, but. And they put that in the meeting invite. And I'm like, I don't know what RIC is. They do, because it's their internal name that they're using for their program. But I don't know what it is necessarily. So I think that's some really, really good tips. Any last minute tips here, Stacy, before we wrap it up?

I mean, when it comes to like delivering your program, your digital product, like at the end of the day, Conn, Communication is, is everything. If you are connecting and communicating in good faith with everyone and doing your best, that will always shine through and you will have an open channel of communication with your buyers. When like, it's kind of like you, you talked about asking for feedback. When you're genuinely open to feedback, people will genuinely share their feedback. If people get the vibe that you're kind of, you're not receptive, then you're less likely to hear about these things. And I know it can be hard to hear like something that you put so much effort and time into and someone has what feels like, oh my gosh, it's the end of the world. They didn't like this thing to kind of rethink it as this is an opportunity for me to do even better. My program is already great. Your delivery is likely already great. But it's just a chance to kind of take it to the next level, to elevate. It's just part of the growth of being a business owner. Embrace the idea of progress, of perfection and kind of any chance that we have to learn more about what our buyers need and want can actually be great because sometimes we give them things that they don't need and they're a lot of effort on our part. So we might find that even in the mix of all this, it can end up ultimately working out better for us as the provider too, in addition to working out better for our buyers.

Thank you so much, Stacy, for joining us today and you know, bringing up a topic I think that we oftentimes just kind of put on the back burner, which is delivering our, our programs. Can you let people know how they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.

So, yeah, as I said, my name is Stacy Coyle. I am the founder of Workplace Lemonade. So you can always find me@workplacelemonade.com or over on Instagram at Workplace Underscore Lemonade. And today I have a little freebie to help you with, especially for membership when you need like a weekly or monthly overview of what's happening and you want to curate it into one email that's had going out consistently either monthly or weekly. So it's an overview email template and basically it's a plug. It's a plug in Play template to help you elevate your bar experience. It helps you kind of like anticipate their questions and what's coming up and make sure that that information is getting to them. And it's designed to help you quickly lay that out and email it out to your participants.

And Stacy, we'll make sure all the links are in the show notes so people can easily click on them and find you. And thank you so much for joining us today. I love chatting with you about this topic. And you know, I loved hearing about all the wonderful insight you had about buyer's experiences.

My pleasure. Thank you so much 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.