#108 - 6 Proven strategies to sell more courses in 2022

Your offer has to be good in the first place. Your program has to be something people want. But if you're not telling people about it, they're not going to jump on in.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host serial entrepreneur six and seven figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with its ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello guys. Welcome to episode 108 of the Doing It Online podcast. I am your host Kate Newman from hello Funnels and today we are talking about six of my favorite mini strategies that are going to help you to sell more courses this year 2022. So let's dive on in. But hang on a second before we do, I just wanted to quickly shout out from the virtual or is that audio rooftops that are much raved about six figure school live six day marketing and sales workshop designed just for course creators and the course creation curious who are really wanting to get in and get rolling to crack the that six figure ceiling in the next 12 months or less. Well, the doors are currently open but just for a few more days because we do kick everything off on July 25th. That is Aussie time. So July 24th for most other people and right now you can jump in, get yourself a ticket for a teeny tiny $66 which is crazy amazing value considering what you are going to walk away with. So all you need to do if you want to come hang out with me and my team and to make your plan to get your course to six figures in the next 12 months is to head to hellofunnels, co school or grab the link below, grab yourself a ticket, get your name in there, I will see you inside and hey, I'm happy to wait while you go do that. Off you go. Go on. Done. Amazing. Okay, let's dive into today's episode. So as I said, today's episode is all about the six proven simple strategies that you can use to sell more courses in 2022. I know you're a busy guy so I'm gonna dive right on in the first one and this one is a shocker. You're going to be like, what? No way. Okay, so number one is you need to make more offers. Seriously, I mean it. Most people are not launching or sharing their offers with their audiences enough. Not at all. Because I know you're busy. You've got so many other things and it almost becomes this, like, this afterthought because you get tied up in the stuff that you thought would take a week or two and actually ends up taking months. Like creating a new course, updating a sales page, creating a website, all of that stuff. Stuff. And then you realize, hey, actually I haven't had any sales for a while. And then if you have a coach or a mentor like me, that coach or mentor will say to you, oh, when was the last time that you made an offer? And it just like, it really never fails to surprise me, guys, again and again that people like, oh, six months ago, and they're like, oh, okay, well, that's probably why no one's buying. But like this, of course your offer has to be good in the first place. Your program has to be something people want. But if you're not telling people about it, they're not going to jump on in. We had a client. I won't name names. She's amazing. I love her. She's made such crazy progress in the last 12 months. But one of the biggest game changers for her was when we sat down as part of our six monthly planning that we do with our virtual retreats and she set her goal. She reverse engineered that goal. She went and looked and said, hey, when I do a launch, I Normally sell like 20 to 30 programs rather than just launching once a year. If I launch three times a year, I'm actually going to hit my goal and I don't need to do anything else. And then, you know, we add a funnel on top and amazing. And just by getting her to map that out, put it in the calendar, that that is when I'm going to have some kind of promotion. Doesn't need to be a huge launch either, guys. I'm not talking about something that takes four months to set up. It's just you need to be letting people know about your offers and giving them a reason to buy. Right? So that's number one, make more offers. Number two, and this is a sneaky little one. I actually got this originally from a really great Aussie marketing and sales mentor called Taki Moore. He calls it the super Signature strategy. And that is basically at the end of every email having a little hey, P.S. when you're ready to work with us, here's how you can do it. And just linking through to either directly to your program. If you have a funnel linking into those entry points, but just meaning that every time you are communicating with people again, this comes back to how Often are you making your offers that if you happen to send an email on a day that landed in someone's inbox and it really resonated with them and they're like, oh yes, I need this, I want to work with this person. I think this person can really help me guess what. That person has now got options to dive into. And we use this, we've used this strategy for years and it is whenever we look at our data and our tracking again, again it comes back to. It's one of the most clicked links is these links that are in our PS and it's super valuable. Something you go and implement in a couple of minutes and it can make a really big difference. So strategy number three, and this is a controversial one. Well, it's not really, but I know a lot of people are very hesitant to do this is to consider actually closing the doors to your programs. And I don't mean like forever and never letting one anyone in, but in between your offers or your promos actually have your doors shut. Because it has been shown that having that real urgency, like giving people a reason to buy today and not potentially buy in three weeks time, like they need that reason, they need the. Whenever you're doing a promotion of any kind, there needs to be something in there and usually it's a couple of somethings that are a reason why you should buy today, A reason why it's. You don't want to miss out. A reason why it's extra special. Like if now is the right time for you to act rather than to put it back, come back to it later. Like it's those little extra incentives that get those people who are like, oh, maybe I'm not sure, like I want to do it, but I'm a bit busy and it gets them to stop, think about it, actually make a decision and take action because those things are going to go away. Now I know there's a lot of people again when I have clients and I suggest this to them, they're like, oh, but I wanted to have an evergreen program. So I just wanted to have it, people can buy it. Whenever I'm like, okay, yes, but that's actually not the best way to make evergreen sales. And one thing to always do and always check before you do this, before you close the doors and have that more open closed kind of strategy with your programs is have a look. How many sales do you make when you're not launching like on a standard month if you didn't have a promotion going, how many people just rock up to your sales page and buy and usually it's like one none. You're not losing anything by shutting the doors. But what you're gaining is that real urgency, like not something made up. There's like a real reason for people, they want to jump in now because they go, they're not going to be able to tomorrow or next week. If they're wanting to do this, they're wanting to work with you, give them a reason to do it. Give them a reason to take action. And closing the doors Jet. I've seen this happen so many times. People were really worried about missing out on sales. They thought let's just try it, let's just try it for three months, right? As I said, they maybe made three sales normally in that time when they weren't launching, it wasn't a huge risky thing to do. They closed the doors and their launch sales went bananas. Like so much more. So much more profitable, so many more sales because people all of a sudden were gonna miss out on something. It wasn't just like, hey, we've got a program, it's cool. Join whenever you like. It's like, hey, we've got a program, it's cool. You have to join now. Otherwise you won't be able to like yes you can down the track. But if you're thinking that you're wanting to do this anytime soon, now is the time to take action. Give that one a try. Proven strategy number four. And this again, something people really, really hesitant to do and I don't know why. Maybe it's because they're scared of what people will say. But you shouldn't be. Most people are lovely is to actually do a survey of your buyers and your non buyers. You want to do a certain. We love to have this kind of baked in where possible, particularly for your buyers. Usually we ask people to do an onboarding form when they purchase a program. We can get a bit of information about them about where they're at. We can obviously help point them in the right direction, make sure that they get in and running and get the best results quickest. And we include in that a couple of little sneaky questions about why did they purchase? What was it that where were they at before they purchased? And this is just amazing market research. And to this really helps you to shape your sales pages, your list Legion, your list building, which is the same as Legion. So anyway, ignore that. But it helps you to know where the person your dream client was at, what they were thinking, what they were needing, what they were worried about that, you can then attract more dream clients. That's what of the quickest ways that you can survey your existing buyers. And if you don't have that banked in or so baked in, you can of course email everyone all at once who's previously purchased a program, do that quick survey with them. But I would recommend adding that in to your onboarding if you can, because you're more likely to get those responses. Responses always sort of dwindle after a while, particularly if people did the program a little while ago and it's not quite as accurate because they've now probably progressed and they've now probably improved and the information is not going to be quite as juicy as if you ask them literally when they join. But still good information. But the other people, I always think it's really interesting to speak to and you don't have to actually physically speak to them, but to ask some questions is the people who showed interest, who looked like they were considering buying your program and then they didn't because you want to find out, like, what was it that was missing that wasn't. They thought about it and went, oh, it's not quite right for me. Like, what could you have done differently? What could you have added taken away even to make it so that if they are a dream client and they would get a good result from your program, that they felt like they had everything that they needed to make that decision and to jump in and join. Usually we do this at the end of a launch, about a week after we shoot an email to said everyone. Anyone who's like viewed the sales page. You can do this inside your email system. Usually if you've got your tracking set up or even just people who've clicked through on links in a launch email, there's lots of different criteria you can use, but basically come pull together a little audience of people who seemed in, showed interest, showed intent, looked like they were thinking about it, but didn't take action. And then we normally send them a link to a form. It can just be a Google form. Make sure it's anonymous because you do want people to give you real answers and make sure it's really short and brief. If you want to incentivize them, offer, say we'll give away a $20Amazon gift card or something like that to one of the answers. You can do that as well. But all you really want to ask them is usually two things. Number one, what stopped you from joining? And number two is what could we add to make this program perfect for you. Because I think it's important to have both of those questions because if you just say what stopped you, they might say something like, oh, the timing wasn't right. You can't do much about that. It's not very useful to you. A lot of people will say that odd price. Again, that's not always like yes, for some people it's obviously is a genuine objection, but sometimes it just means that the value that the program gives in relation to the price hasn't been communicated clearly enough for them or they don't value it enough in accordance with the price. But what can be more useful is that what could be added or changed to make this program perfect for you, because that can be. You can get some real gold nuggets out of that. All right, Proven strategy number five. And that is adding a personal touch. I love automation like I crazy love automation. I think that in this busy world where everyone wants everything right now we've all got to do lists 10 miles long. To not have as much of your sales and marketing and those important delivery processes automated in at least some way is crazy. And it's costing you hours and dollars. Absolutely. But also in this rather overly automated world is that people sometimes like to feel like they're still a human, like they're not just a number. Trying to find ways that you can add a personal touch. And there's so many different ones. I know some people who when they might have like a trigger that comes up when somebody is obviously showing that they're very interested in their program and they might send them a little voice note or record a little video and send that to them. Like that's quite a time consuming one if you do have a lot of people coming through. But if you're just getting started, could be good. Another one that can work really well, particularly if you are right at the start is actually sending personal emails, not just from your email system to like if you're in a launch and there's it's coming up to last couple of days, you want to get a bump in sales email. The people who have looked at your sales page directly and say hey, I'm just, I'm here, I'm a human. You've got any questions, let me know. I'd love to help you make that right decision. Like it's. Having that personal touch is amazing. Giving people and this one takes a little bit more of a setup. But having a mobile number people can SMS their questions to rather than sending an email just feels more personal. Just thinking about like how can I add this personal touch throughout my wonderful automated system that people do still feel like they're special and they're heard and they're seen and they're valued. It can make a big difference to your sales. Number six is having a look and starting to set up low cost retargeting ads like literally everywhere, but only of course, within your budget. Thinking about a budget that you'd be happy to spend each day, it's $10, $20 and setting up some retargeting ads. And these ads should be a combination of sharing value, like maybe some of your best podcast episodes or blog posts. Sharing stuff that's like allowing people to engage and get to know you better. And of course, sharing some of the best wins and success stories of your clients. That once some, and usually these are triggered by them maybe visiting your website or opting in so that they are kind of, once they've taken that first action, they sort of dipped their toe in your world all of a sudden you're kind of everywhere. Now. There's like, this is a very sort of intense strategy that you can do that's specific around this, which my mentor Scott Oldford teaches called omnipresence. That's a whole other big kettle of fish. But even just like getting started by having those ads, like maybe some on Pinterest, because you can do some really great low cost stuff on Pinterest. Yeah. Facebook, Instagram, where you're just going to start making sure that you stay top of mind, making sure you're sharing your best stuff and it can be done really, really inexpensively and it can make again, make a big difference. If that person, if they hadn't heard of you before, maybe they've just opted in for something. Perhaps their inbox is busy. They're not going to open your emails. But they might be more likely to if your name looks familiar because they've seen that you've reshared some of your best reels or you've had some really great articles popping up on Pinterest when they were there. Like, make sure that you are allowing people to see some of your best stuff and to build that relationship with multiple touch points. Okay, I know, I know. This episode was called Six Proven Strategies, but I did just have to put in one more, although I'm not going to elaborate because I'm sort of just being cheeky with it. But number seven is of course, add a funnel. Okay. If you're wanting to. When we talk about proven strategies to sell more courses in 2022, if you have a program, you've sold it successfully before and you're doing any list building at all and you do not have a funnel, then you are craz in the best possible sense of course. And simply by adding in the right funnel for your business, it can make a huge impact and will continue to as you grow. Now if you've been nodding along with this episode, taking notes, which I hope you have, but maybe now you're like, okay, well that's all great but Kate, can you just like sit down with me with a wine and some chocolate and let's map all this out for my business. Well, I've got you there as well of course. And that is exactly where what we do, albeit virtually. And you'll have to BYO your own wine and chocolate. But that's what we do inside six figure School. And that is our live and amazing six day sales and marketing workshop where yours truly will help you to literally map out, plan out, step out your six, multi six or even. Hey, go crazy seven figure course sales and marketing plan for the next 12 months. It is super value packed. It's all actionable and right now the doors are open. But only for a few more days because we do kick off on July 25th. Tickets are just 60 which is just amazing considering is what you're going to walk away with. Like the tangible stuff and changes in your business. Like we've run this a few times now and every time people are blown away. And it's so much fun. I love it. I love these like little, I call them party tricks. Like these little things that I can teach people quite quickly that can make such a huge impact into their business. And that's what we do for six days inside six figure School. But you only get it if you come and join us. Head to HelloFunnels Co School, grab your ticket, put it in your diary, put stars around it. You do not want to miss it and I will see you all inside.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today at stealmyfunnel.com.

Sam.