The Kajabiverse Podcast

Transcript

You're listening to the Kajabi Verse podcast and today's episode is all about the very popular and widely taught launch strategy of live webinars. Now webinars are an excellent strategy if you're working with time poor audiences and they're great for someone who can captivate an audience. They also typically don't take too long to put together. Joining us in today's episode to tell us all about how he uses live webinars and also evergreen webinars.

Outside of launch time is someone who has taught thousands of students and was recognized as Shopify's top education partner for 2021. He uses webinar launching as a preferred model of enrolling South African entrepreneurs into his e-commerce membership, e-commerce next level. And he achieves an average 7.1% conversion on his webinar funnel. So let's welcome to the show the amazing Warwick Kearns from Inca. Well,

hello Warwick and a big welcome to the Kajabi first podcast. Thank you so much for coming in to talk to us. Thanks so much for having me. Really happy to be here. Oh, now, bit of an accent there. Where are you joining us from? Down at the bottom tip of Africa in South Africa. Ooh, South Africa. I've been there,

I have been there, it was years ago now, but it, it is a beautiful part of the world. I'm actually coming again, you know Gail Star? Yes. I'm coming in June. She's taking me on some 80 kilometer or coastal walk. I'm not quite sure what I've signed myself up for work. I said, oh yeah, it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Now I'm starting to feel a bit nervous about this. Well, there's so many beautiful parts of this country, you know those walks along the coastline where you just won't see any form of civilization for days and days. It's beautiful and I'm pleased that doing this kind of work has allowed me to live in a beautiful place too. So I live in the bush or where we maybe,

or make more sense is where people go safari. So I live in a, in a wildlife area with Jaffe and zebra around the house and Eagles flying above and it's really quite a beautiful place. How amazing. Tell me how long have you been doing this online business stuff? Well, e-commerce is my game, which we'll touch on a little bit later,

but I started selling online in 2008 and I've been coaching online since 2017. Okay. You started it for yourself, you had big success and then you thought, I'm gonna go and turn everything I've learned into an online program. Yeah, I guess you know, that's where I saw the need was because when I started selling online in 2008, I had certain challenges.

I kind of figure out how to take payments online, how to do my deliveries, how to build a website, and all the things that I had to struggle to overcome. Well I had to do that on my own because there was no community training support gurus of any sort. And fast forward to years later when I bought a very successful e-commerce business,

one of the best in the country. And when I was exiting that business and it was up for sale and it was getting a bit of press and people were hearing about it and people were asking me like questions and they were asking me questions which I had to answer for, for myself many years before. And I realized that the training, the community,

the mentorship and the support was still not around. So people were still having to overcome the same challenges, which I had to almost a decade earlier. And so that's where I saw the absolute need to start creating online training and to try and download my brain into online training programs so that people can skip through all the learning curve and try and just get to the fun part to get success for themselves with online selling.

And There are certain challenges that come into doing this sort of work in South Africa. You know, I see them over in the Kajabi group, people posting things about taking payments and payment gateways and things. Now with your programs, are you catering pretty much exclusively to the South African market? Pretty much, you know, with e-commerce a lot of training can cross borders,

but as the Americans say, the riches are the niches. And I suppose that speaks to offering more value to people when they have a very specific challenge. And if somebody in South Africa were to watch a training program from an e-commerce guru anywhere else in the world, they would be talking about using PayPal for payments and using your local postal service for deliveries. And that sounds normal if you're not in in Africa,

but PayPal doesn't really work here for fir first thing. And secondly, if you send something by post, it's not even gonna get picked up. Certainly not gonna be delivered post office barely even exists. It doesn't work. And so we have to find other ways. And so our challenges are very specific and that's why my training is very much focused on our industry,

our challenges and that's why I can help and have such a big impact with my followers and my students. In your business, I'm guessing you started with coaching like or or group or courses before you now I know you now have a membership. Was that like an evolution? Yeah, so it started a course where I wanted to teach people how to, they can actually build their own online e-commerce business and it's not as hard and as scary as people think.

So that was my first course, which was a thousand dollars. I've gotta translate everything from my currency, south African rands into dollars for this conversation. And that course was very successful and we helped thousands of people to do it and it was great. And what later on happened is that graduates of my program together with other people on the internet were coming to me saying,

well I don't need that. I've already got an online business, can you help me to improve it? I was like, yeah, I can. And that led me to actually create a membership, specifically catering for people who are already selling online who want to optimize their site, learn about digital marketing, put the systems and processes in place to just make it work easily.

And that's how my membership really came about. Ah, got it. And the strategy, you know, the launch strategy that we're talking about today is live webinars. And I know you've also used Evergreen webinars in your business, but how did you land on webinars in general as a great funnel strategy for getting people into your membership? Well I tried a couple different ways and webinars actually seemed a little bit easier for me than other strategies.

I feel like it's a good place to start because it's not too intimidating and you can run it with relatively less involvement upfront in terms of building a massive, massive launch around it and it allows you a bit of a, a sample to test different ideas. So my intention was to try the webinar and to try different techniques in terms of how I deliver,

how I pitch, how I present myself and my content. And so I tried lots and lots of different iterations with the idea of evolving it into a more kind of, I could say sophisticated launching model, which may be just be another way for saying it's more complicated as a launch model, but webinars work for me at least. It works really well.

And so while it's still converting at crazy numbers, I'm happy to stick with it and if that ever changes then I'll look at changing it. But if it isn't broken then don't fix it I guess. And this is not broken. It certainly works very, very well for us. Absolutely. Now I know a lot of people out there cuz you know,

webinars is a strategy that's taught quite a lot. You know, programs like dca, B B D, you know, all the, the gurus telling us that webinars are the way to go, but there are so many people who shy away from webinars because they're just petrified of showing up live on camera and having tech disasters and stumbling over their words and you know,

they wanna script everything out because they're afraid of it not being flawless. What, what words of wisdom do you have to share with those people who are petrified of it not being perfect? Well the first thing I'd say is that I think no matter where you are on your business and your experience levels, everybody still has a bit of nerves when you are just about to click the live button.

And so that doesn't go away, but you do get more used to it and you can do a few things to kind of just get more comfortable with it. And I suppose a couple things that have really just helped me to ease those anxieties is really having done it many times. So that can only come with a bit of experience. Another thing that really works for me is knowing my content.

And I suppose that that's really important is when you are confident in your delivery of your content, then it's just so much easier to speak about and that ease comes across as just being easier to listen to. And if you're nervous people can hear it. So you really wanna try and kind of do it enough times that you can be relaxed. The other thing is that as you might pick up in this interview is that my style is very relaxed and so if I stumble at my words or if I kind of lose my track or or go off on a tangent and tell a story about my dog or something,

then people tend to like that and they think it's likable and they think it's kinda relatable. And so I actually do that intentionally, but I've actually had feedback from people saying that my presentations are personable and that they feel like they're just listening to a friend and that is actually part of my strategy if I wanna call it that. Like I do it on purpose,

I don't want it to be too formal, I want it to be quite relaxed. Any words for advice to people who are like, yeah I hear what you're saying Warwick, but I'm still gonna jump straight to an evergreen webinar and just skip that whole live anxiety thing? Yeah, you could do that, but I would say that that's a mistake. And the reasons I would say that is because creating and launching in Evergreen is a lot of work to begin with.

So you're gonna put in a lot of hard yards before that is ready to deliver. And doing it live can actually be a bit easier. But you'll find that sometimes you need to test out your pitch and try it in different ways. So that's just like I had to, I needed to try different pitches and try different offers and see what works and what doesn't work and again to get confident with my scripts and how I wanna deliver it.

And if you haven't done that a couple times, then going straight to an evergreen means that you might be able to record something that you're happy with on that day. Like you, you've finished a recording and maybe you've done it a couple times and you say, okay, I'm done. Like that was good enough, maybe not perfect but it was good enough and I'm gonna go live with it.

But come a couple weeks later, you're probably gonna look back at that and say, actually I'm not happy with it, let's rerecord and then you're gonna rerecord a couple times. So I find doing the live actually is like the practice run for going evergreen. And then in a completely vice versa way, we actually use the Evergreen as a test to be able to see what's working in terms of our email copy that we send out around the the webinar.

And we also try different Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all the ads are we running. So then we're using that as a testing ground to bring back into our live. So we are using them in conjunction, I needed to practice in term before I was confident to do an Evergreen, but now we can use the Evergreen as a testing ground to see what's actually gonna work for our live when we do it live later on.

Oh, got it. And you know, as far as the actual structure of that webinar goes, for those people who are working to a script, they think, ah, there's no way I can do a webinar without the script in front of me. What's your feeling about having to be on camera? You know, could you just do SlideShare and talk over the top of it without your face there,

in which case you could be referring to your notes and no one would know. Yeah, so for me my bullet points are my notes. I personally find that if I am trying to read a script then it very much comes across that I'm reading a script and it's kind of like when you said those cringeworthy speeches in school when you're a kid and everybody knew that you were reading your piece of paper.

So now I find it easier just to have bullet points on my slides and those bullet points do guide my conversation. I do have speaker notes also if I wanna hit particular points or if I wanna reference particular statistics. But those speaker notes are really just to supplement the bullet points and the bullet points really just guide my conversation. And of course I do practice a bunch of times before doing a live in particular so that I'll know exactly what bullet points gonna go next and where I want to be hitting a point so that again I can be more confident when I'm delivering it.

So that's one thing. But I also find that having your camera on keeps people's attention a bit longer as they feel a bit more connected to you. And having the face also keeps people's attention like they're, they're watching the face more often than they're watching my slides. So NP have a very engaging slideshow where it's changing every few seconds. Then I personally prefer to have my camera on the whole time.

And a little tip that I wanted to share is like something that worked well for me in terms of becoming really comfortable with having my camera on is having practiced loads and loads and loads. So what I did five years ago, I made a commitment and in the banner image of my Facebook page it says every 10:00 AM Thursday Warwick is live and every Thursday 10:00 AM I am live and I need to deliver a piece of content.

So it makes me practice my content and find new content all the time. But it also helped me to become very comfortable with being live on camera Most Thursdays at quarter to 10 I'm like what am I gonna speak about? And now I've got to the point where I can very quickly kind of take an idea in my head and ramble off into a half hour session,

but pushing the live button on my camera is not intimidating anymore and that is only after having done a time and time again. So for me, just setting that commitment, commitment publicly saying every Thursday, 10 o'clock I am live, it made me do it and doing it consistently every single week at least once a week helped me to become super, super comfortable with it.

Did you find that the first time you did it and maybe for the first few times no one was watching, like how have those statistics or numbers changed over time? Do people tune in now for your Thursday lives? Yes, well yes and no. So it started off with nobody watching at all, which was fine because I actually liked that and if it was really horrible I could delete it afterwards.

Then I found that actually we got to a point where there were thousands of people tuning in every single Thursday at 10 o'clock and now Facebook's algorithm, you know, you know all about it, it doesn't really show to anybody. So our engagement has dropped substantially. So I still do it just to kind of keep myself out there because I know that it forces me to keep upping my game in terms of creating fresh content and also just putting myself out there.

But we find that the reach is actually way less and now we are looking at YouTube lives and doing it on different platforms or streaming on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube of three different cameras and that's how we can get to more people that in, in one particular live session. If you were to sit down, like if I was to ask you to start a webinar from scratch,

the actual structuring and putting together of a webinar, Warwick, in your mind, what do you jump to as like the logical structure for a webinar as far as duration, talking about yourself, some people seem to go on and on about themselves, so like 20 minutes at the beginning and you know, have these two hour long presentations with a ginormous pitch at the end.

How do you go about it? Yeah, so I think that that's a mistake that you, you've seen it and I've seen it where somebody spends so much time talking about themselves faulting credibility and by the time they're finished doing that somebody's just bored and checked out cause they came there to learn and they're not learning. So we try and do a lot of credibility building in the registration page and in the email sequence leading up to it.

So that's when I go live I can just hit a few bullet points like my key things like Shopify's number one education partner for 2021, multiple award-winning entrepreneurs of Africa and just hit home on some very important credibility factors and then go into the training. So my structure will generally be very little credibility building in the webinar, but the education is very important cuz that's what people came there for and if you're not delivering education they're not gonna gonna buy from you.

So I'll push that to about 45 minutes and then do a very subtle transition into the pitch and my pitch, I'll try and finish the pitch with the price and the offer with the call to action and link within another 30 minutes. So after an hour 15 done and dusted, now I'm sending people to the sales page but that's where q and A comes in.

So now q and a in terms of timeline, like how long am I gonna be online? My answer to that is as long as possible because the more questions I can answer, the more objections I can bust and it's proven in our day to time and time again. Like sometimes q and a will last an hour and a half, two hours and I'm exhausted and I'm thirsty and my eyes are red by the end of it.

But the people who stay on for another two hours listening to me answer questions and just prove that I am indeed an expert, those ones are so hot and they're so likely to buy. We segment them, the people who stay on rights to the last 10% of the session and we send them special offers and we send them extra because we know that they are,

they are keen for me, you know, 45 minutes in credibility building with education after 45 minutes transition into the offer after 30 minutes of that then it's just a q and a for as long as I possibly can keep people online. And have you got any tips and tricks around actually keeping people on the end? Because I know that you've seen as many disastrous webinars as I have where the delivery is terrible and people jump off before the presenter even gets to the pitch.

So what sort of carrots do you dangle to entice people to stay on to the end? Yeah, okay, so firstly I, I don't want it to be as surprised that I'm making an offer. So I tell them like in the first five minutes I tell them something along the lines of like, you're gonna learn a lot here and at the end I'm gonna give you an opportunity to work with me more and when you hear what I'm gonna share with you in the training portion,

you're gonna wanna work with me. So I'm already prefacing the fact that there will be an offer so that people don't think it's weird or icky if I start to pitch them at the end. So that's something that we do right up front right in the beginning. I also tease bonuses and hooks as to why they should stay in the end. So we offer like particular bonuses which are only available for people who stay to the end and the end for me is the the pitch and we put those offers on the sales page right at the bottom so they have to read the whole thing.

So that's a nice way to get people to click the call to action and to get to the bottom of the sales page. So that works well for us. And then also just like really upfront just to talk about case studies and training and mention it throughout the fact to tease the offer when I'm in the training stage of the webinar. So what I'll do is I'll mention particular case studies of students of ours that have done really well.

So if I'm talking about conversion rate optimization for instance, then I'll reference one of our students who was able to increase their conversion rate from 0.5% to 1%. So they doubled their sales, then they got it from 1% to 3% that quadrupled their sales from the beginning and they were using the tips I have given to you now in the training when I'm doing the training and so much more that I do offer in my main premium program.

So I'm seeding the idea that I am gonna make an offer and then I'm teasing it through art so that hopefully people are thinking well what is that offer? What is that all about? I want that so I'm seeding it in their mind upfront. We do see in our stats when I do this that it does keep people on longer. I like that cause I think it does,

you know, if you're not mentioning it upfront, it becomes a bit like the elephant in the room. You know when you get so nervous as a presenter where it's like oh how am I going to transition now to talking about my paid program? But you know, mentioning it throughout, dropping a few hints to it, letting people know upfront that there is a program that people can join if they're interested in learning more are all excellent suggestions.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. And I suppose as you're talking about like that transition into the sales pitch are just so important and some things that I'm just seeing is when I watch training I see educators are often so comfortable in their content hopefully that when they're doing the training elements they are so comfortable and they're just rattling it off and then sometimes like coming around to the pitch,

they have a script and now you can see so clearly the change in their tone, the change in the speed of their voice, the fact that they're reading something, it it comes across almost a little bit unsettling to the listener. And so to practice that transition is so important and just to practice, practice, practice. So that's something that I'm just doing to like make sure that when I switch from the training,

which I myself super comfortable with and then my offer is scripted or the scriptor actually on the screen in the slides so they can read along with me and that helps 'em to keep engaged. But I do practice that like loads and loads so it doesn't come across and I'm just reading it so that it is something that is supernatural to me. And then what do you do outside of those live launches?

What do you do with that live webinar recording? Do you turn that live recording into an evergreen webinar because your program's open year round from what I can see. So do you make use of the live recording or you rerecord an evergreen version? So some people would say that the smart thing to do would be to repurpose the live version as the Evergreen, but because so many people are doing webinars,

like I think that the audiences are wise up to the fact that there's so many pre-recorded training programs out there. And so I'm very clear like when people are watching my Evergreen, I'm never trying to pretend that it's live. And similarly when it's live, I'm telling people that it's live because they're still people who like said like I'm saying it's live. And then in the comment I can see people saying,

yeah right, this is pre-recorded so then I'll call them out. I was like, Hey Jason, yeah it's live. Or I'll reference something that happened, current affairs or the weather outside or I'll say the date. And I do that intentionally so that people are comfortable with the fact that this is indeed live and that I haven't just tried to, I don't know,

people feel crooked if I've said it's live and it's not live. So I'm very specific about the fact this is live and that makes it unusable. I can't repurpose that into an evergreen unfortunately. I guess you could say if you want to to listen to our recent webinar, here's the recorded version that happened in August. I suppose you could say that that's how I'm doing it and maybe I should try a different way,

but I like doing it also, doing it live is quite fun. Also doing the Evergreen, it's a little bit different in terms of how I deliver it because the time expiring bonuses are easier to do when it's live because we just know what time on the clock it is. Whereas some very cool tools like we use with Deadline Funnel on the Evergreen, it's not as seamless so we can't figure out exactly how we can allocate the time expiring bonuses so we can do certain things in a live situation we can't do in an evergreen situation.

And then also the q and a, if I were to do like a two hour q and a at the end of an Evergreen, I think I might lose people to that because the energy isn't quite the same. But also with the Evergreen, we do add q and a at the end, but the questions that come up on my own, like I know what objections are coming up,

so I just bring up those as questions and then answer those. So it's really just a q and a in the Evergreen is like 15, 20 minutes of me debunking objections and then moving on to the call to action again say okay, if you haven't yet done it, then please do click through to the sales page. And for those people who are putting together a webinar,

the webinars that you watch, someone's gonna screw it up. Like where do you see that people make the most mistakes with delivering a live webinar? Well we've touched on a few of them already, you know, like spending way too much time on their credibility is you're just gonna have people dropping off because they get bored or they're not getting to the training.

So the training is important. So another point is to deliver value to make sure that people who came there to learn are learning. Because one thing is that they're gonna feel a bit cheated if they sacrificed an hour or two hours of their day and they didn't learn enough or was just wishy-washy stuff that they could have got anywhere else. And also if you aren't really impressing them with your skills and your ability to train them,

then they aren't quite likely to buy your stuff. So you gotta deliver tons and tons of value. We spoke about reading a a pitch like a script, so we wanna practice as much as we can. Another thing is nerves, people who are nervous, like it comes across as unsettling. And where I see this the most is when somebody gets to the price of their program,

you know, now it's time to unveil the price, how much is it gonna be? And then they're go into a squeaky voice and you can hear that they kind of think maybe people shouldn't buy it or nobody's gonna buy from me. And so there again, like I spend a lot of time practicing the delivery of my pitch, keep a low tone of voice and even when my camera's live,

I'm nodding to like acknowledge the fact that this is a good deal and that I'm delivering it well. So I find delivering of the pitch and the offer and the price is just so crucial and some people get really nervous and rush through it, but you really wanna spend some time there and confidently deliver the fact that this is a good deal because you want people to buy it and you know that this is gonna positively impact them.

It was definitely difficult to convince people that your offer is a good deal if you don't truly believe it, you know, know you have to really believe that your offer is going to help people. Yeah, absolutely. And just one other thing that's coming to my mind right now is the call to action. Sometimes people say, you know, check the link and then that's it,

you know, then they, they kind of move on to q and a, whereas you really want to kind of give people an incentive with a bonus to click the link and to repeat it many times and to say it in different ways and to say click the link because this is gonna transform your life or to click the link because this is gonna deliver so much value and to really just repeat it at time and time again instead of like skimming over the price and the call to action.

Alright, well let's change gears and move on to a bit of discussion around marketing. So when you're putting together a live launch, what is your favorite strategy for getting registrants into your webinars? Is it ads, is it affiliates? You know, how do you go about it? Yeah, so both, I'm a big fan of affiliates. In 2019 I went to Launch Con and I,

I heard Dean Graziosi's talk there where he had just done the first launch with Tony Robbins where they had absolutely annihilated all records with an A launch where they didn't really have a suitable audience for their own offer that they were putting out yet they had a 30 million launch and most of that, the vast majority of that revenue came from affiliate partners. And so the,

what he said on stage there was that they did two launches, they did a launch for their affiliates and they did a launch for their audience and the affiliate launched training people on the program and how to deliver it and giving swipe copy and making sure that people understand the calendar of when to send what and when not to send what was just so important. And I came back from that conference in America,

came back to South Africa and in early 2020 I started putting together our next launch for my course and I was going all in on affiliates. I'm like, I'm listening to Dean Graziosi, I'm doing this. And we had so many amazing affiliates sign up and the launch date coincided, it was at the end of March and I couldn't have picked a worse date or possibly a better date because the day of my launch of cart open was the first day of lockdown in our country.

And I thought this is gonna be a disaster or it could be amazing. But all of my affiliates actually came back to me and they said, this is a perfect program to be launching right now. Everybody's gonna be stuck at home, they're looking for alternative ways to generate income and this is gonna be perfect. And all my affiliates got right rot board and we had at the time,

not just our biggest launch, but by three times in terms of our biggest launch prior to that, thanks to the affiliates. So we are doing paid ads, we're doing affiliates, we have built a substantial email database ourselves and we're going on all three of those avenues. Our organic traffic, our paid traffic, and our partner traffic. We have very specific strategies for dialing in all three of those as we go into any one of our live launches.

And so for me it's not one or the other, it's all three paid partner and affiliates. I think so many people are under utilizing the potential of affiliates and partners. You know, a lot of us, we start with no list and then it comes to launch time and we haven't really given ourselves enough time to grow an audience. We dunno anything about affiliates or getting partners on board.

So we turn to paid ads and paid ads really do take quite some time to perfect usually. So it's not uncommon that I speak to my students and they feel like they just threw money down the drain when they put it into paid ads. How do you go about your paid ads strategy? Yeah, so we are also revisiting it because we certainly haven't thrown money down the drain.

It's worked very well for us in the past, yet as everybody's saying, it's just the cost is going up and up and up. So we are looking for alternatives, but what has worked really well for us in the past is meta ads, Facebook and Instagram. It's worked incredibly well. So our launches we spent, in our last launch we did $17,000 for the launch in terms of our ad budgets and we've been doing Facebook and Instagram,

but lately we are definitely leaning into TikTok and YouTube ads, YouTube ads a little bit difficult to get right for a, for a runway that changes like in terms of the the pre-launch content and we're figuring out how that can work for us. But we are totally looking at alternatives to see what we can do because the other thing is that the pixel data for Facebook and Instagram and most places has become so unreliable that to put your ad spend into that is really difficult.

So one of the great things that has worked in our favor is that after starting in 2017, from day one, having been in e-commerce for so many years, I understood the value of building a database and a list. And when I started in SAR with training e-commerce, I knew that was gonna be the sustainability factor for the business. And so we've been able to build an email list of,

of about 58,000 people now. And when we are doing a launch, we have a sizable database, of course we segment it as much as we can, but we aren't just relying on paid ads. And so for anybody, whether you're just starting or you have a list already, just keep pulling that list like something that I tell my students from an e-commerce perspective,

but it's no difference. Yeah, for me the future growth of your, of your online business can be determined by the current growth of your email list. And I believe that wholeheartedly. And that's why we are continually building our email list every single day so that we've always got new people to deal with and to talk to. And your, your email list really is one of the digital assets that you truly own,

whereas so many other platforms, you're paying to be there and you're playing in somebody else's sand pit and those rules can change just like Facebook has changed, now it's like cost per leader's gone up, whereas your email list is yours if you're not enjoying the email provider that you're working with at the moment, then you can switch to another one and you own that asset and there's actually very little digital assets that you actually truly own when it comes to online businesses.

So for me that's a major focus point. Have you experimented at all with Google Ads? Because I feel for your niche, so many people would be going to Google, you know, especially South Africans struggling with issues like how to accept, you know, payments. So we do run Google ads, but the thing is that that with it being an intent-based advertising platform,

we need somebody to type in a term like what you've just said in the time of our runway or our launch and we need to get them into the runway to correct time at the, like at the top of the funnel and bring them through a journey of education so that they are kind of teed up to purchase. And if we solely rely on Google ads,

which are time-based, we need somebody to type something in to find us, then it doesn't work all that well for us. But what we do is we do run a lot of Google ads around our program. So during the launch we run ads on our brand name and on our course name and on terms like Warwick Kearns, Izzy legit or something like that,

and reviews of our course because people are typing those phrases in and we want to send them to very specific pages so that they're getting the answer that we want them to get. And yes, to also answer that question, I am also legit in case that's leaving a question mark in anybody's mind, I like it. I think that's very strategic what you're doing and not something I'd considered doing before.

So I, I'm off to do that ahead of my next launch. Thank Excellent you wonderful. Now you know, when I've run Facebook ads, I do find that getting webinar registrants or challenge registrants I find similar. I do find that that cost per lead or registrant to be quite high. Do you know roughly what you pay for a webinar registrant? Ah yes.

So for our webinar, let me just gimme a, gimme a sec. Yes. So our cost per lead is $9 14 cents and that we actually have a combined cost per lead because we have all of our pre-launch content okay. That we're paying ads for and getting people into a segmented audience within our Facebook ads. And then we are advertising to them again to get them to register.

And so we're not just tracking the value of the cost per lead when they click the final ad to register, but rather we're doing a total cost per lead with the early content like the thought leadership pieces. And so that's where we get to $9 14. Got it. And you've got like a, a sizable ads budget, let's just say around 17,000 bucks.

How many registrants would you expect for that on your live webinar? So we had just under 1,900 registrants, which was lower than what we were targeting, but our cost per lead was higher than usual so our budget got exhausted a bit earlier, but we were still happy with that because we know our numbers and we know that it all converted a good amount.

All right, so let's talk about the cost of acquisition. Do you know roughly what it costs you to get somebody into your membership? Because usually, you know that's quite a high figure and your membership is only if I, you know, converted the numbers correctly. It's about 35 US dollars a month. So I was thinking as I plotted this out perhaps why it doesn't actually break even in month one.

Maybe it's like month three or four where they start to make a profit. Well you're seeing some of our secret sauce yet because this is the beautiful thing about memberships in particular is that you have the recurring revenue and once you've run it for a while, you get to understand your numbers and people, everybody's gotta know your numbers. And we do know that on average our members stay for on average 8.5

months. So we aren't just trying to break even on that first sale, on the first month's enrollment fee because if we were then we would really have to limit our budget, which would limit our reach, which would limit the enrollments, which would actually lead to this revenue. So you actually spot on you, you've seen straight Through Me, we do make a loss on our launch but we make a profit further down the line and we make a good profit because we understand our numbers.

And this is actually a really important point for somebody who's looking at their ad spend and their budget and trying to see, well I can't afford this. If you can understand the value of lifetime value then it really speaks to the fact that you can outplay and outsmart your competitors, the competitors who are looking at their budget and trying to break even on their launch because that's where you can limit yourself somewhat.

Yes, we are making a loss on our launch but we're making money further down the line because we know our numbers and if anybody's hesitant to, to put money in because they aren't breaking even on their ads. Provided you have a recurring model and you can learn your numbers over time if you're just starting or if you've got numbers, go and see what your lifetime value is because that's how you can start to outbid your competitors knowing that you'll make money further online.

And this is actually something that I teach an e-commerce too. If somebody is selling a product that is recurring, then don't worry about breaking even on that first sale, purchase the customer and then you'll make your money further down the line. And that's also where building your email list becomes so important because you've got more customers up front and if you understand how much you're gonna earn per lead further down the road,

then you can put budget into advertising your lead gens just to build your list knowing that you can make money later on. Excellent advice. I noticed when I was watching your Evergreen webinar, I'm not sure if this is something you also do with the live, but it looked as though you sort of position A down sell alongside your membership. You know, for those people who aren't quite ready to go into the membership,

you offer an audit checklist and I thought, oh I wonder if that's like a good price anchoring strategy that actually converts more people into the membership. So we do have a down sell but it's a little bit different in in the way that you described. Our down sell is sent to the non-biased after the whole card close has come and gone. So that down sell,

we do a oneand or we can call it a $1 trial for 14 days access to our membership. We get on average in the last launch we had 21% of our total sales were down sales. So totally worth doing. Now going back to that audit that you mentioned, this is a slightly advanced strategy in terms of a webinar launch and it's very nuanced so I wouldn't recommend anybody do this for their first rodeo.

But this concept actually comes from a coach that both you and I've worked with called James Wedmore and it's his concept called the football phone. Now the way he explains it is pretty easy to understand and the football phone was something that was created by Sports Illustrative Magazine when their sales were tanking, nobody was buying subscriptions of their magazine and they did an above the line advertising campaign for a an American football which had a phone in it,

you could kind of open it up and there was a telephone inside the football and people loved it and they were advertising it everywhere and there was a lot of hype and a lot of social media around it and everybody wanted this football phone and they said, where can we buy it? And the answer was, well you can't buy it but if you get a membership,

a subscription to the Sports Illustrator magazine, we'll give you the football phone for free. And suddenly the membership and subscription of Sports Illustrator went right back up through the roof. Everybody wanted this football phone. And so how can we use that in our launches? Well, as I get into my offer, I don't actually mention my membership initially. I go into a pitch for what you've pointed out as being the e-commerce audit.

Now this audit is actually what I've teased throughout my training and people really want it. It's, it's an amazing little thing. I'll, I'll just tell you, it's, it's amazing. It helps people to increase the sales in their website with without getting any more traffic. So it's a no-brainer and I price it at about $300 and at that price point I think people are saying,

well it's, it's kind of worth it but I dunno if I'm gonna buy it. And then I, I pivot entirely. So once I've teed up the value of this football phone, in my case the e-commerce audit cheat sheet, I then pivot<unk> and I say, look, as a coach who really wants you to have all of the tools in order to be successful in the e-commerce world,

I wanna make sure that I give you everything. Everything that you need and everything that you need is actually in a different offer of mine. It's my membership and I go into the offer of that and when you join my membership, which is only $35, I'm actually gonna give you the e-commerce audit absolutely free. So if you want that, normally it's $300 if you join the membership,

then that's a freebie that all of our members get together with everything else and then I unpack all the other value inside the membership and then they just see well this is just a piece of the puzzle. I really wanted that now I can get it for free for just $35 when I joined the membership. And it works really, really well to build a desire for something that people really want,

it's really valuable. And then to swing completely the other way and say, well you can get that for free if you just join our membership. I love it. And you know, only $35 cancel anytime except I happen to know that you're probably gonna stay for eight and a half months and this is going to pay off in the long run. Absolutely.

And it works. So it works really well for us. During your live launches, do you add in any extra elements to sort of boost that launch juice? I mean do people also get invited to a a Facebook group or anything else you might see in other people's live launches? So Facebook group, yes we offer that to both the Live and the Evergreen,

but we do have specific bonuses that are offered to people who are in the live launch. And again, I mentioned earlier that these are some things that we can do which like unique deadline, final countdown timers can't do so much. So we definitely do this and one of the things things I do is when I make the offer, when I give the call to action,

say click the sales page, then along with that I give a fast action bonus, which is to say something along the lines, I don't remember the bonus, but it says if you join in the next 20 minutes, I'm gonna give you this amazing bonus. So that's really the people who are hot and are chomping at the bit to get in, that's to help convert them.

So they then go to the sales page, they want that extra bonus, it's just that little bit extra incentive to get them to say yes. And that works really well. We see our inbox like the sales just start flowing, which is amazing. So that's the first thing. Now what we also do is in a live launch situation, the first email announcing the cart open to the rest of our segmented audience that goes out at 9:00 AM the next day.

And I tell people in the webinar, look if you join before 9:00 AM tomorrow when the rest of of South Africa finds out that enrollment is open, I'm gonna give you this other bonus. So 9:00 AM tomorrow is your cutoff for this bonus. And if we're still within 20 minutes, cuz I tease this 20 minute thing, I'm like, look, there's a few minutes left,

you can still get this other bonus too. So we tease that quite a lot and those two things do work. We see before 20 minutes is up, we've had a ton of sales before 9:00 AM the next morning we get a ton of sales and also what we kind of do, the people who stay onto the webinar, you know those people who are hanging on all the way to the end,

like an hour and a half, two hours of questions, I then offer them that fast action bonus. I'm like, you know, just a thank you if you join now everybody who's joined up until the time that this webinar's done, I'm gonna give you that bonus. So just to help convert them because we know that they are eager, they really want,

they soak in. And then while we, on this topic of kind of live launches and the timing of it, another thing that works really well for us is our timeframe. Our timeframe really works. The Monday is a webinar, Tuesday's car's open, Thursday is car closed, Thursday, midnight. So it's really quick. What I do is because of the fact that we know that people who attend the webinar are far more likely to convert,

we host a second webinar on the Tuesday night and that is also live. And what I do is we pull out the list of people who registered but didn't yet attend and we send that segmented audience an email to say, look, life happens, maybe your kids interrupted your ability to watch or something happened in, in our country we also have something called load hitting where sometimes you have electricity and sometimes you don't.

It's a thing. And so we call out all those factors and we say, look, if you couldn't make it last night, for those of you who couldn't make it, I'm gonna go live again tonight and I'd do it again all over and I'd do the whole pitch from start to finish. And the attendance is obviously way less, but the conversion again on the live webinars,

the people who attend are far more likely to buy. And so that's something that we've tried once or twice years ago now we just do, we do it every single time because it works really, really well. I think that's an excellent strategy and I've worked with, you know, so many people who were just determined when they come to their live launch,

especially you know, first time they've ever run a webinar and they want to offer straight off the bat, three different live webinars, you know, first time they've ever run it. And I always think, oh just go all in on one, you know, otherwise you're going to end up with just these little groups spread out over the course of a week.

Whereas I think it's much easier as the organizer to just focus all your energy on getting the registrants for that one date and time. But then of course you do have so many people who register and then can't actually make it cause they've double booked themselves. And then you've got this captive audience that you can retarget to get along to that sort of secret second webinar.

Yes, I love it. The secret second webinar. Yeah, absolutely. Now do you happen to know what the conversion is on your Evergreen webinars versus your live webinars? Do they both convert like crazy? Yeah, so I actually double check the numbers before our conversation in case you ask this question. And on the live webinars we're seeing conversion of 7.1% and on the Evergreen it's slightly less at 5.8,

so it's not too much lover, which is good. Still amazing. I know. Makes me kind of wonder why we don't just focus on the Evergreen, but the live people like the Live and we do it big, we do a lot of hoo-ha around it. Like we do all the effort ed staff, we do paid advertising, we really bombard our email list.

So it's a good way to get people in when they weren't actually just going for the Evergreen. And you've only got a very, I mean it is a short cart open window. A lot of people find even five days too short. Like when I talk to my students, I say three to five days is perfect. Like any longer than that you get bored of writing and reading your own emails and everyone else gets bored of hearing about it.

Like they really have made up their mind usually within a couple of days. Once your live launch is done, do you transition immediately back into Evergreen sales or is there sort of a period of time where people can't get into the membership and you're sort of creating a bit of FOMO around your live launch? Yeah, so we kind of tear it up as a fact that we only open enrollment publicly once a year.

So that's something I say time and time again and if somebody sends us an email saying I really wanna join your membership, our answer is not right now, but he has a webinar or he has a link to some free training, which will help you to understand what it's all about. Because I know that somebody who says they want to join, I don't know if you ever get this,

we get like people say I wanna join and then we send em a link to buy and they're like, there's crickets. So our answer is like, it's only open once a year publicly. And I use that word publicly so that there's no comeback in case I say, well that was available because we say, well that was private just for you. So we are constantly directing people due to the Evergreen outside of a live launch.

But we do absolutely turn off ad spend six weeks before a live launch and for about four to five weeks afterwards we just do that so that people aren't seeing our ads time and time again, you know, ad fatigue where they're seeing the same picture, same copy or same offer. And so we definitely want to dial it back so the Evergreen doesn't shut down because we do send people directly to it,

but we do one annual launch, the live launch and then the Evergreen is just kind of running in the background and it's great. You know, we see sales ticking over every single day, hopefully every day most days. And it's just so wonderful to see that because we know that it's helping people, you know, those businesses are fuel good business, you know,

we're building a business which is wonderful to run, but it's also having a great impact. And if you're helping people and you're helping them to help themselves, it's just such a good feel good business. I agree with you. What we do is very similar. You know, one of my favorite programs is teaching the Kajabi specialists and they can then go out and create businesses for themselves.

It does fill you with so much joy to be able to see what lives people are creating for themselves with the training that you're giving. Absolutely. And I did a one-on-one coaching with somebody today and, and they've been a student of mine since 2020 and they said that before finding our training, they actually weren't that interested in e-commerce, but they just saw the opportunity,

you know, it was Covid time and they enrolled in my program to see what it was all about and kind of hesitantly. They followed the steps and they built a business and last year they did their first 1 million round year and it's a side hustle for them. So Million Round is about, I call it $80,000 and that's pretty decent for a side hustle.

And the guy is just saying, you know, thank you so much. And when people tell me that, I mean it, it does boost my ego a little bit, but more importantly it reminds me and my team why we're doing what we do. Because you know, going back to why I started this business in the first place, people have problems and they have challenges and either they can go through the very lengthy learning curve that I had to go through or they can really enroll into our training program and just accelerate their own success.

And it does work and it does help them. And I just love hearing those testimonials and those stories from people cause it does change their lives. Oh, you have shared so much actionable stuff with us today, Warwick, I'm sure all our listeners are all off to go and put into place everything you've shared as far as live webinars goes. Now I've got one last question for you and it's around your text stack.

Now I'm thinking because you're on the Kajabi verse podcast that you're a Kajabi user. If you're not, I won't be able to publish this episode. But as well as Kajabi, what else do you use to make these live webinars work? So you'll be pleased to know that we are all in on Kajabi. I'm like a hashtag Kajabi fan and I tell everybody who's coming into this industry that this is a platform for you.

And I really believe that it's just everything. And what previously I was on some WordPress plugin nets. I had everything stuck together with sticky tape and it was a disaster and such a pain to run. And when we moved across to Kajabi, it was like a breath of fresh air and a weight off my shoulders and it just worked and it was easy and it was just like I didn't have to worry about Zapier's apps and like understanding what that all meant.

And so I'm very pleased to let you know that we run our entire business on Kajabi except for our webinars. Yeah. So in terms of our tech stack, we run different tech for the live and the Evergreen. So for the live we do all of our emails through Kajabi and we specifically using Kajabi events. So when people register they go into an event and all the comms are handled through that event.

And we're tagging people depending on whether they click or not. We are really using those events as thoroughly as we can. But the webinar itself, we are directing people to through to Webinar Jam. This is for the live. And interestingly with Webinar Jam, normally people would get people to register for the webinar on Webinar Jam, but then you are losing the value that Kajabi offers you in terms of being able to tag people and manage a conversation and send the emails that you wanna send.

So there's an alternative with Webinar Jam where you can send people straight to the page where they just arrive for the webinar and there's a current timer on Thomas. So we only share that link on the afternoon of the webinar and that's the only time. So they don't have to register there. They've already registered on Kajabi and we do all of our comms through that.

At the end of that we do then export the list of attendees and compare it against the registrations to get that secret Tuesday list so that people who registered but didn't attend, we then invite them to the Secret Tuesday webinar. So that's for the lab. Now the Evergreen is slightly more complex and I actually had to ask my Hecky guy to remind me of all the tech that we use because of,

so we do use Kajabi for our sales page. That's what we're using Kajabi for. For the webinar. We're using Easy Webinar together with active campaign for emails. And those emails are specifically use because they think nasty with Easy webinar in terms of some actions that people can take. And they also connect into Deadline Funnel. So Deadline Funnel is the unique countdown timers,

which we also have on the Kajabi sales page. But then the Deadline Funnel can also trigger specific actions within the email sequence that we sending are from Active Campaign. So that's how that's all working. Now there is Xavier that's doing something, I don't actually know what it's doing. I'll have to check with my tech eye again. And then the final tech piece that we're using is a little cool thing called Ad Event.

Now. Ad event we put into the registration email. So when people register they get an email and it is please click this ad event button to put it into your Google calendar or your Apple calendar so that it is actually booked into their calendar and they can see it there. And that we see also helps to get attendance rates much higher. Hmm. With the live webinar and webinar jam.

If you are collecting the registrations through Kajabi, how does Webinar Jam know who stayed on to the end, like for the long Q and a that you did at the end? If they don't have the names? Ah, good, good. Okay, so you got me there. So when they land on that page, they're not registering for the webinar but they do have to put their email address just to say who's attending.

So that's how we can then that's our check and balance to to filter out who attended. Okay, gotcha. Perfect. Ah, I like it cuz you know most of us would just turn to Zoom, but I don't know of a way inside of Zoom to be able to determine at the end, you know who stayed to the end and should be given the special Offer.

Yes, good point. Yeah, so that's what we are using and I know that there's thousands of different options, but that's what's working for us. And like I mentioned before, but it's broken, I'm not gonna fix it more. I'm always open to exploring alternatives, but this is what's working for us. Thank you so much R for coming in and sharing all this valuable information with us.

You've given us plenty of actionable tips that we can go away and put into action. Now for people who would like to connect with you and perhaps even learn more about your e-commerce membership, especially if they're down in South Africa, I'll definitely link to your Evergreen webinar below so they can go and see the private invitation, not the publicly available invitation into your membership.

But when is the next live launch coming up for you guys? It's once a year and this year we scheduled for August 28th. So that's gonna be our once per year annual live launch. All right. August 28th. Not long to wait guys. In the meantime, go and have a look at warwick's Evergreen webinar, check his style out. It's converting like crazy and we have absolutely loved having you on the show.

Thank you so much and hopefully you'll come back in and have another chat with us after the next live launch. A bit of a debrief for it. Let us know what went well and maybe where you'd like to improve any lessons learned for the next time. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Ah, we will see you later on in the year.

Thanks worry. Well, I hope you've enjoyed our podcast episode on live webinar funnels as a strategy for enrolling into everything from signature courses to low priced memberships, even if that means that you don't break even on your ad spend in month one. Now one of the big takeaways for me today was worry strategy around down sells. For those people who don't join his membership during the live launch,

he offers a $1 14 day trial and 21% of his new member signups are attributed to that downsell, which is absolutely incredible. So that's definitely something to consider when you're next doing your launch. If you'd like to learn more about Warwick and his e-commerce membership, e-commerce next level, I'm gonna link to his Evergreen webinar below. And if you'd like to learn the step by step of building out your own live webinar funnel over on the Kajabi platform,

sure. To head on over to Meg Burrage dot com slash Funnel Club, join us on the next live masterclass.