This Week:
- Should you sell to beginners? 🤓
- Turning new subscribers into warm leads 🔥
- Should you use commas in your pricing? 🤔
- Do this before you invest in creating that online course 📚
- When and how to use video on Facebook 📹
Lately, I’ve been looking at ways to add more leverage to my business through scalable products and services.
I’ve reached the point where consulting takes up a large chunk of my time, and if I want to create additional income, I can’t keep trading more time for more money. There are only 24 hours in a day, after all!
So I’m starting to create a scenario where part of my income comes from the sale of digital products (like an ebook, training videos, or courses) as well as scalable one-to-many services like group coaching/mentorship programs.
With this direction being a focus for me lately, below are the links to a few resources that spoke to me and may help you as well.
Target Market: Should you sell to beginners? 🤓
Justin Jackson makes a case about not targeting beginners, especially in a B2B scenario. His thinking that when people are just starting out in their professional path, they are likely focused on free resources and trying to “bootstrap” their way to success. They tend not to be earning as much money, so they don’t invest as much as they would into their business as a more seasoned professional. Lastly, they tend to go out of business faster, as most businesses do, so the lifetime of the customer is not as high as a more established person.
I realized a long time ago in my business that I couldn’t do agency-style consulting work for companies smaller than $1million. They needed too much, the budget was too low, and the results would not be nearly as dramatic and valuable as a company who was more established and had figured themselves out.
The article goes on to explain this point in better detail using a few examples, but I recommend checking it out if you’re looking to sell anything B2B.
> Link: Don’t sell to beginners
Subscriber Onboarding: Turning new subscribers into warm leads 🔥
A big part of successful marketing in the digital era is through what I call “Lifecycle Marketing”. I’m sure other people have names for this idea too, but I don’t know what people call it, so we’ll use my name for it. 🙃
What I mean by Lifecycle Marketing is thinking about your marketing and planning around the various stages of the buyer journey: from pre-problem awareness, to problem and solution awareness, to product/service consideration, to purchase, to onboarding, to customer satisfaction and retention, to cancellation, and all the way through to the reengagement phase. It simply means having a plan for how you’ll talk to your prospective, current, and former customers at every step in the phase.
If you take one small sliver of this lifecycle marketing experience, the subscriber onboarding step, and investigate how 50 copywriters onboard new subscribers and warm them into a sale, the result is this article.
It’s quite in-depth and might be too much information for the average business owner. But if you have some time and want to digest some tried-and-true subscriber welcome/onboarding emails, definitely check this out. I downloaded it to my Kindle so I could read it more fully.
Pricing Tactic: Should you use commas in your pricing? 🤔
Another value bomb from Derek Halpern.
The short answer, according to this article, is don’t put a comma in your pricing. The reason? In a group of people studied, the majority read the price out loud using more syllables with the comma than without, therefore making the number seem subconsciously bigger.
So, $1,499 read as, “one thousand four hundred and ninety-nine”, whereas people read $1499 as, “fourteen ninety-nine”.
Here’s a quote explaining it some more:
With the comma, people frame it as a “thousand-something” price. Without the comma they think of the price in “hundreds.” And they SAY it differently…
This is important, because WITH the comma, it takes more syllables to say the price. And, as the researchers found, this makes the price seem higher!
Plus, the price with the comma looks bigger on paper or on the screen, simply because it’s takes up more visual space, too.
> Link: What Converts Better: $1,499 or $1499? Or in other words, COMMA or NO COMMA? Science says…
Selling Courses: Do this before you invest in creating that online course 📚
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I have one more Derek Halpern link for you. It just so happens I have been looking at his content more lately as I consider ways of creating more leverage through digital products. Last one this week, I promise.
This is a fairly short video. It’s really a sales video for his product, Zippy Courses, but there’s a good idea inside that makes it valuable in and of itself.
The premise? If you want to create a course, create a free mini-course instead. Test the waters. See what reaction you get. Is it hard to sell or easy? Does it solve a problem people care about? Great, expand it into a bigger course. Proof of concept is made.
> Link to video: How to Create (and Sell) Online Courses
When and how to use video on Facebook 📹
Getting on video can be scary. Rationally, it shouldn’t be. It’s no different than talking to people in real life.
Except it is different. It lives longer “on the internet”. Strangers (and even friends) can see it and judge it.
But it’s also extremely powerful in business, especially if you’re the face of your brand.
This video by a fellow consultant gives you some great insight into how and when you should post videos (live or otherwise) on Facebook.