Ever wondered what a real profitable SLO funnel actually looks like behind the scenes? Jacques Hopkins is back on the show, and this time we’re getting very specific.
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We break down his $27 Five-Day Piano Challenge, the order bump that’s quietly doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and how he approaches upsells and course upgrades without turning it into a sales circus.
Jacques also shares what finally worked after years of ads falling flat and how he’s testing and scaling this funnel with confidence.
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SPEAKER_02:
If you were wondering what setting up Facebook and Instagram adds to a functioning and profitable self-liquidating offer, a low-ticket offer funnel, if you will, you know, something that costs$37 with an order bump and an upsell. If you were wondering an example of what that looks like done well, you’re gonna like today’s episode. Jock Hopkins is back on the podcast again. It was it’s been over two years since we last hung out. He is the host of a really good podcast called The Online Course Show, where he had worked as an engineer for eight years before quitting his job and turning his biggest hobby into a highly successful online piano course, pianoin21days.com. And that course is related to the self-liquidating offer funnel that we’re going to talk about today. But that course brought in over four million dollars in revenue to date, and it’s still going strong. Today, Jock supports his family with the passive income from his course while teaching others to do the same on the online course show podcast. And so we’re going to dive into his ads. We’re going to talk about how well his funnel is working and just catch up in general. Jock, good to have you back on the show.
SPEAKER_00:
Thanks for having me back. This is exciting because this is my second time on. The first time I just kind of talked about piano in 21 days and my story, and most of the success has not come from ads. And and so ads, you know, being somewhat successful with ads is a fairly new endeavor for us, just like the past couple of months. So I’m pretty pumped to actually talk to you about your specialty now, ads. And you said it’s going well. I mean, it’s it’s profitable, but I’m low-key like hoping to get some advice to make it even better at this point.
SPEAKER_02:
Well, that’s what we’re here to do. And I can hear the listener right now who may have been burned with Facebook and Instagram ads, either because they had an agency manage their own ads, or they tried to run their own ads before, after they took a course, and they went through that stage that we all have been through when we manage ads where they’re not working. And it’s almost like, at least for me, back when I was in China in 2018, when I first started managing ads, and I looked and then I realized this isn’t going well. I’m losing money. But something in me was like so scared to go back into ad manager and even shut off the ads. And so, like, I resulted to just kind of ignoring it, even though it was just charging my credit card, and I kind of just avoided it, you know? And we’ve all been there, but I know that you also were can we say burned by ads in the past?
SPEAKER_00:
Yes, yes, John.
SPEAKER_02:
You didn’t give up. So, can you share a little bit about that to motivate the listener that there is a light at the end of the tunnel if you persist through a bad meta ads experience?
SPEAKER_00:
Been in business for 13 years, and so every couple of years, I’m like, you know, what if we can make ads work, right? Because it just sounds so glamorous, not having to, you know, I rely on content marketing, which is amazing, right? Because it’s it’s free, we’re not we’re not paying for it, but then it’s a lot of work, and so it just adds has this allure of like, you know, you set it up and it just has the potential, like almost infinite potential, but it rarely works out that way, right? And so I’ve certainly tried it. I think the first time I tried it was well, the first several times was probably uh by myself without having any idea what I knew what I was doing. I actually remember running some ads to a webinar I was doing, and I was at dinner with my wife one night. This was many, many years ago, and I was like, babe, I’m getting leads at like you know, a few cents each. Well, it turns out they were all from India. And so I had no idea what I was doing. I I ended up eventually hiring somebody in Upwork to run some ads, and those were those kind of broke even. There was a time maybe five years ago where I hired hired this boutique like agency that specialized with course creators, and they were, you know, I guess boutique, I used that word instead of like high priced. It was not cheap. And working with them, I lost so much money. Like we lost like at least 20 grand because that like it never it didn’t it didn’t convert to any buyers. I learned a few years ago from somebody I trust that and and I don’t I don’t know if you agree or disagree with this, probably agree. I I’m sure it came up last time, but for selling uh courses with or course-like products with ads, it works best if you have a very high price product or a very low price product. And something in the middle doesn’t work great. The reason it works with high-ticket stuff is because there’s so much margin, right? You can spend so much for one conversion if you have a two to ten thousand dollar product, let’s say, even higher. And then low-ticket works so well because you set up these self-liquidating offers where you can hopefully at a minimum break even on a very low-ticket item and then get them to upgrade to something down the road at you know, theoretically pure profit. So that was my understanding. And so once I kind of learned that, you know, five years ago, I haven’t really done much with ads because I’m like, well, I have a medium priced product, right? It’s between four and eight hundred dollars, is my is my course, but it’s always been on the back of my mind, like, yeah, but what if we tried a low-ticket funnel? What if we tried a self-liquidating offer? And I just never really did it until about two and a half months ago we started, or is that about when we launched?
SPEAKER_02:
I think when you were saying your experience and let’s just say the common wisdom, because I’ve heard this too, that mid-tier offers aren’t doing so well. Let’s go super high ticket or just high ticket for margins or low ticket because we can bring plenty of people in. I think you’re right. What that makes me want to share is one example I have of somebody who is using their low-ticket offer to sell their mid-tier offer. And by mid-tier, mid-ticket, whatever you want to call it, I mean like uh 497. But then also, I want you to share with the listener how you have your funnel structured, or or we can say the things that your business sells, because anytime somebody invites me to speak on ads, I end up talking about signs that a business can look and interpret to see if they’re ready to run ads. And I always start with saying, Jesus saves, Facebook and Instagram ads do not. And what I mean by that is more eyeballs on like a bad performing offer or an offer that doesn’t sell, like, does not a business make. Like it the offer has to be selling right or well organically before you can even think about running ads to it. Otherwise, that’s the quickest way to lose money. You would agree with that too, right?
SPEAKER_00:
Oh, a hundred percent. And that was when I had you on my podcast a year or two ago, that was one of my favorite things I remember, I remember you saying was Jesus saves and ads don’t, because it it’s so true. Like it, like I said earlier, there’s an allure to it. It feels like the easy button, the magic pill, all that stuff. But there’s a lot of qualifiers there, a lot, and it is not, and look, my my business two and a half months ago didn’t need saving, right? It’s a well-established business. It it needed it, it just kind of needed something new, something fresh, a new offer, a new traffic pattern. And that’s that’s what we’ve done here. And I’m pretty excited about it.
SPEAKER_02:
I can’t wait to hear more about it, honestly. The example I was going to give to the listener, uh, before I ask you, just to kind of lay out your funnel and any other offers that I might not know about, but certainly the listener doesn’t know about in your business. I will say, right now, it’s fresh in my mind because I’m still running ads for this client, but she has a$37 workshop. And our strategy is just to grow her email list with a free mini course, and then every month she does this workshop. And so people pay to come into the workshop, and then off of the back end of the workshop, or should I say, toward the end of the workshop, it’s just a one-hour workshop. She sells her mid-tier course, and it’s so cool. I just want to encourage you, listener, once you spend the time and the effort to develop an offer, a low-ticket offer in this case that sells, it’s so cool to see this lady do her thing and we’re bringing in leads, well, paid workshop registrants profitably. And then it’s even more profitable once a percentage of those registrants end up buying her mid-tier course. And like I’m looking at it right now, and so far, we’re not like knocking it out of the park, but like 480 purchases in the past for the workshop in the past seven days. I turned these ads on last Monday and 7.35x ROAS. So I’m like, woohoo! And she’s like, Woohoo! Which means everybody’s happy. So I just wanted to share that.
SPEAKER_00:
I I need your help getting up to a 7.3 because I am not there.
SPEAKER_02:
Here’s the thing any ads manager that’s honest will admit that we all we can do our ads with wizardry. Actually, it’s not magic. We can we can we can pull all the ads management tricks, arrows out of our quiver, right? And we can get row ads up to a certain point. But really, what happens is with the super high ROA ads, it comes down to the offer of the client we’re serving. Um, I’ll just be like really honest and say that like ads management strategies can make an already profitable offer more profitable because we’re doing all the right things, mainly testing through the things that don’t work and landing upon the things that do work. But like it’s not magic. Like the difference between like me and somebody who just watched an ads management course and is starting out is like they might learn two or three ad management strategies that can help them when like certain indicators go south, or you know, they see like certain stats, like link click-through rate, or why is my mind linking? I know because there’s lots going on in my mind. But the difference between them and me is just like I got 15 or 20 strategies to go through, and maybe I can pick which one of those would most likely work first. But yeah, it’s it’s always cool when we can do a great job for a client. Now, I did tease to the listener that you would share not just your funnel, but any other offers that are funneled into or sold after somebody comes through your five-day piano challenge funnel because you have a highly profitable business, and I think the listener would benefit from just seeing how you structure the various offers and kind of the funnel that guides somebody who you were put on this planet to serve through those offers so they can get the get the skills that they need.
SPEAKER_00:
I like to keep offers pretty simple. So when we make a sale, you know, let’s say pre pre-ads a couple months ago, I just had two tiers to the same offer, essentially. I had my my essential plan for piano in 21 days is is in in funnel, it’s$400. And it’s basically my piano in 21 days course. And then there’s the ultimate tier, which is$800 in funnel, which is the course plus about 10 bonuses, some extra courses, some extra support, community, things like that. Most people actually go for the higher end option. So that’s that’s been my offer for many, many, many years. What we did a few months ago is we created a brand new uh low-ticket offer. And there were several steps to the process for me. The very the very first thing I did was I reached out to some people for advice. Hey, I’m gonna do this thing. I know you know a little bit about it. What advice do you have as I’m starting it? Right. You were one of those people I reached out to. I’m sure you remember. And just to kind of set the stage, because I had never done this before. So I reached out to you and I reached out to a couple of my clients who I know have set up funnels like this before, even, you know, even though they’re my clients, like I’m not an expert at this type of funnel, and I knew they had them set up. So I got I got advice from a few people I trusted. And then the very next step that we we took was I do have a copywriter on my team. She she’s on my team because she works with my clients directly when they need some copy reviewed. So, you know, she’s not full-time with me or anything, but she is a regular part of my team. And so I reached out to her about this project and and and how she could help with it. And so she ended up writing all the copy for the sales page, as well as writing the script for the sales video we have on the page. And she she knows what she’s doing. She’s done this for a long time. So it started with a questionnaire, collecting a bunch of information, collecting reviews, and and that whole process. I mean, to be honest with you, probably took a month to do it well, do it right. She’s busy, she’s she’s got other clients and whatnot. So it took a few weeks for that step. Copy. Once I had the copy, you know, she just put everything in a Google Doc that wasn’t very pretty, right? That that’s not her job. The the next step is I hired a designer on Upwork for pretty inexpensive to take the copy and the ideas and turn and design a sales page using Figma. So not worried about anybody being an expert on the platform software we’re using, just design it for me. And that that took some time, a lot of back and forth getting that right. And then that’s about the point where I started thinking about the ads themselves. So fortunately, I have I do have a full-time person on my team that has experience running ads because I’ve been burned out so many times. I didn’t not did I say burned out, I guess that could work. Burned by ads so many times. I didn’t really want to pay somebody, no offense to you, Quayjo. Like it’s just I was not, I want to see if this works first. And I just happen to have this guy on my team who who knows a thing or two about ads. So I tasted him with not only setting up the ads, but giving me the ideas for the ads, right? So like he scripted a bunch of different video ideas and gave them to me to record. So I recorded those. We had the designs, and then it came time for final implementation. I ended up going with Go High Level for everything. I thought about using Thrivecard, I thought about using ClickFunnels, I thought about using a few different things, but I’ve I’ve just been fascinated by Go High Level, and I was looking for an excuse to play with it, to try it out. And I’ve been so impressed by it so far because it just does so much so well. And with this project, I’m able to run everything inside of go high level, meaning, you know, email marketing, the funnel, the checkout, and then even the fulfillment too, right? They just do, I just have everything out and it’s gone so well. I’m moving the rest of my business over to go high level as well. So I hired, yeah. I and so then the kind of the last piece was I hired a Go High Level person on Upwork to do the final implementation of the design and the emails because I was, you know, I I know so much more about Go High Level today than I did two, three months ago. So I hired somebody to just kind of finish all that for me. So I mean, I hired several people along this process, but in total, we’re talking about less than a thousand dollars, like pretty inexpensive for the work that I got done. And we launched, and you know, what’s funny is I’ve heard from people like you, you know, don’t expect to be profitable on day one, right? It there it takes there could be some tweaking. Like once we fine-tune some things, then then it might be profitable. And my goal has always been to break even and then down the road at some point upsell them to my full piano in 21 days program. Well, they’ve they’ve been profitable since day one. About about 1.5 on the initial funnel is the ROAS. And we’re we’re increasing every few days, we’re increasing the budget by about 20%, 10 to 20% every few days. We’re up to over$600 per day. To me, that sounds like a lot. To you, that might not be very much. Um, but we continue to be profitable, continue to raise it. When you factor in the upgrade to piano in 21 days, which comes about a week later, we are right at about a two, Rowaz, when you include that. So without that, it’s about a 1.5 when you include that, which I think it’s okay to include that. We’re at about a two, which to me feels amazing given my history. But then you tell me about this 7.3, and I’m like, man, we are doing terribly.
SPEAKER_02:
Well, there’s let’s see, what can I say to encourage you? She also is in the um, what do you call this niche? I don’t want to say the specific niche, I can tell you offline, but it’s not like a teach you how to make money niche. Like you teach piano and she teaches a fine art too. So there’s encouragement there. It’s all just different models, right? We can see, we can see what’s going on. But I I do like what you said that with the piano in 21 days, with the people that upgrade to the piano in 21 days course, you’re at a 2x ROS. With just the funnel alone, you’re at a 1.5x ROS. I don’t think enough people are tracking further down into their funnel conversions to know how profitable their business is, including like funnel conversions. And so I love that you track both. And guess what? At the end of the day, although it sounds like you have put in a lot of effort, you have it set up and you’re still adding the best kind of person to your email list, which is a buyer, profitably. I mean, it’s quite a marvelous thing, right? Like you could look at it like Meta’s paying you to add super qualified people to your list.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So I mean, we are not even two weeks into January. This month alone, we’ve added 442 people to our email list. And half of those are probably we’re doing a two-step order form on Go High Level. So half of those are through our abandoned cart sequence. So they’re not all buyers, but you know, two this month we’ve had 240 buyers, 442 people added to the email list in total. So yeah, I mean, my email list is growing at a rate we have not really seen before because of this as well. So it’s so it’s a two-row ads, but that doesn’t include if somebody buys three months down the road, six months down the road, nine months down the road, and so on, which I’m sure they will because we have the system set up to be able to do that too.
SPEAKER_02:
Right. And that is the goal. That it’s good, it’s good to hear. It’s good to hear that this is going well. Shall we talk about the ads or the specific funnel? Which we where do you want to start off first?
SPEAKER_00:
See, the ads is the ads is the part I know the least about. I can talk to them a little bit about them a little bit, but I would let me why don’t I finish giving the details of the funnel with like the pricing, the offer, the bump, the upsell. You want to do that? Good idea. That would be a good idea. All right. Okay. So the main offer is$27.
SPEAKER_02:
Okay.
SPEAKER_00:
How do we pick that number? I don’t know. Came out of came out of our butts collectively. It’s a it’s a number we’ve heard of before. I mean, you should you mentioned 37 earlier. Would that perform better? No idea, right? I mean, we could potentially split test it, but then I’d have to record a new version of the video. Sounds complicated. We priced it at$27. What they’re getting is a five-day piano course. It’s basically the first five days of my piano in 21 days course, right? I know that you’re not really supposed to sell information. You’re not really supposed to sell features. So the way, so I’m not saying like get five free lessons, or not free, but get five lessons. Like, I’m not saying that, right? It’s called like the headline is learn 36 popular songs in five days. Right, very outcome focused. So that’s what we’re pitching for$27. There is an order bump on that page for our hand coordination course. It says something like, you know, this is the number one beginner problem. So we are marketing this toward beginners, right? And so this is the number one beginner problem coordinating your left and right hand. Our our mini course solved this, solves this once and for all. You know, never you’ll never see it again at this price.$19. That’s our bump.$19. Okay. 42% of people take that.
SPEAKER_02:
Ooh, we’re jumping the gun, but I like that stat.$19 order bump, 42% uptake. Okay. Okay. All right. Dear listener, hold let me pause really quick, Jock. Dear listener, we’re going to dive into why you should have an order bump and upsell. And then like what are good, if you’re already running this for yourself and you want to know like what’s a good uptake on the order bump and upsell, we’ll get more into that in a moment. But I wanted to give Jock a moment quickly to tell you about his podcast because I really believe that you should head over and listen to his episodes. They’re super valuable.
SPEAKER_00:
Thank you, Quajo. Yeah, if you have an online course or you’re interested in online courses, you’ll never believe this. But that’s what our topic is over at the online course show, the podcast that I’ve hosted for nine years now. And we interview other course creators just trying to get the real world stories behind, you know, people with guitar courses or cooking courses or Facebook ads courses. That’s our typical episode. Sometimes we’ll bring in subject matter experts and just tell us how to run ads for online courses or how to do SEO for online courses. But it’s everything related to having success with online courses at the online course show.
SPEAKER_02:
Awesome. And now back to the episode. Please continue, talk.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I’ll I’ll try to keep it high level and let you let you feed me the question. So the bump, and and I don’t know if that’s a good conversion rate or not. So hopefully we can talk about that. Well, it’s not so I don’t think my upsell conversion rate is very good. So upsell is what happens for me on the next page, right? They check out whether they’ve hit the order bump or not. They get one more little offer from me, right? To try to increase the average order value. I’m on my third iteration of the upsell because the first version nobody took. The second version, nobody took. And finally, on the third version of the upsell, we actually have people taking it, albeit at a low rate. So I would say this is one of the most unsuccessful parts of the funnel so far. But what we did, do you want me to go through like what the different versions are or just tell you what it looks like today?
SPEAKER_02:
I mean, this is so this is such helpful information. Please go through all the versions.
SPEAKER_00:
So the main offer and the butt and the bump have not changed because those have done well from day one. Okay. The upsell, what we did at first was we said basically, do you want to add some coaching to your order, right? Do you want the like we’re sitting next to you feedback system? Is what we called it. So ability to record yourself and ask for feedback, unlimited questions via email, a community where you can interact with others and with me, even proposed live QAs. And we priced that at$97 for that upsell and hundreds of sales, not a single person took us up on that. Okay. And I was so confused because I’m like, surely somebody like would at least accidentally hit the button, right? Like, but you know, I I signed up for Microsoft Clarity, which has heat maps that shows you where people are clicking on the pages. You know, there’s there’s lots of them out there, hot jar, crazy egg. And nobody was clicking that button. I’m like, okay, so we need to change something. And in my mind, it’s like, well, they’re still they’re signing up for a$27 course. Maybe they if they think there’s already some coaching in there. Maybe they don’t really know that they need it. Plus, do they really want to add some, you know, add something that’s three times, three to four times more expensive than what they already had? I don’t know. So we we decided to pivot completely and change it to a little singing course instead. Hey, do you want to sing while you play piano? Okay. So I changed it to that. I already had a singing course I had somebody made for me many years ago that I that that that’s what that is. Priced it at$97. Once again, 100 sales in, nobody bought that either. So then I’m like, you know, those are two totally different offers. So I’m like, maybe it’s a price, right? So then the third thing we tried was stuck with the singing thing, but just brought it all the way down to$37 for the upsell. And we actually do get some sales now, finally, but it’s not much. It’s it’s about a 2% conversion rate there. So it’s not really increasing the order value average cart value very much, but that’s going, that’s what the upsell, and that’s it. I don’t have any downsells, I don’t have any other upsells after whether they take that or not. The next page is just a thank you page. Hey, thank you so much. Go check your email to get logged into the course.
SPEAKER_02:
You know, three iterations and it feels like work. I can first of all, two things I want to share is I can relate to that. My wife is actually venturing back into having an online course and offer. We tried this when we first, way back when when we first got stuck out of China in 2020. And then I think it took us a year. So 2021, we tried this and it failed horribly. It was very humbling for me, you know, with like all my years of coaching online like course creators. I couldn’t even get my wife’s online course off the ground, but we came back to it in the format of like a low-ticket offer powered by meta ads. And we too have played with the price. Sometimes you have to play with the price once you especially once you look at like your ad metrics and you realize your ads are working, the link click-through rate is solid, you know, you’re getting a good number of page views. You spend the time, like I’m sure you have jock to calculate the sales pages conversion rate, and you realize, oh, okay, they say, you know, four to six percent is decent, higher would be better. And okay, we’re at that. What’s wrong? So we, you know, we’re playing with the price too. That is to say testing and doing the hard things or the things that are time consuming. You’re like, I don’t want to do that, but I know I need to make sure that that’s not the unlock, so I’m gonna do it. That’s worth it. And I think of uh Colonel Sanders, right? The original founder of K, well, the original founder, the founder of KFC. Like, I think he did like over a thousand pitches of his recipe to investors or something like that before somebody actually chose to invest in him and he was able to open up the first KFC fast food joint. So it reminds me of the quote Thomas Jeffer Thomas Edison that we miss out on opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and it looks like work and looks like you’re putting in the work. So that is that is cool and encouraging.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, we’re definitely putting in the work. This is this is our big initiative right now to try to make it better and better. And you know, I I mentioned the bump, I mentioned the upsell. But ultimately, like if if like what do we call the ultimate upgrade to my piano in 21 days course? Like, that’s not an upsell. I’ve been calling it like the upgrade because that’s a whole different layer to this whole thing. And ultimately, if people are not upgrading to the full program, this is never going to be super profitable. And so that’s another layer where at first nobody was taking and I’ve had to tweak how I was doing that. And now now I think about three percent of people end up taking that upgrade, which is even higher than the$37 upsell.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, you know, once you get there, like I’m no specialist at funnels, but looking at increasing the percentage of people who upgrade into the 21-day piano course, that’s probably going to come down to messaging and how you’re structuring those emails, like what the delay is on those emails. For example, what I have seen in the past is sometimes the upgrade emails that go out go out too soon. And so the person who has bought the first course hasn’t made it to that key, like, oh my gosh, this is amazing point yet. And so then they see the upgrade for in the email, you know, for the next thing. And you understand this too. I mean, you’re the online course guy for crying out loud. You know this too. But sometimes that happens, and we got to test with with like delaying that upgrade further. And other times it just comes down to looking at those upgrade emails themselves and trying to dissect, like, what’s going wrong? Like, are we on point as far as open rates? What about click-through rates to the sales page for the upgrade? What about conversion rates on that sales page? And just looking and then seeing in the steps of the funnel, or let’s call it the links of that funnel, the funnel behind the funnel or the funnel in the funnel, which one is the weakest link, and then kind of plowing our resources, either time or money, if we’re hiring out to like copywriters to shore that up, and then that’s the name of the game, but I know you’re in it though, right now.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. What what’s worked so far on that end to get us to 3% conversion rate on the upgrade is because and because that’s what I’ve wrestled with. Like they we make the sale, and now the communication I have path I have with them is email. So, where do I draw the line? Where do I weigh the balance between emailing them about going to finish what they purchased versus trying to sell them more? Right. And so where I’ve settled on right now, that’s that’s converting at 3% is basically a week-long campaign once they purchase. The first three days, I’m just trying to get them to go back and log into the offer they’ve already purchased and adding value to that. No, no sales pitches, nothing like that, just adding value and getting them to log in and take the course. And then the next four days is a hard sales pitch to the upgrade. So that’s what’s converted well, three percent. What I would like to do is split that, test that, and maybe spread that out further. Because, like you said, maybe it’s not just not giving them enough time to get results and value. Because I think if people actually go through the course, they’re gonna want more, they’re gonna want days six through 21 and the bonuses. So I wonder if taking that week and just spreading it out to two weeks and you know, sending those same three emails, but over the course of six days and just kind of having a gap in between. Like I want to split test that and see if that converts better. So that’s that’s where we’re at right now is is continuing to optimize. Now that now that every piece is working to some extent, where’s the weak link and how can we continue to optimize?
SPEAKER_02:
You know, it might be pushing it out further. So let me let me regurgitate here and see if I understood. You said they get how many emails right after they purchase?
SPEAKER_00:
Basically, weeks worth of emails. First three days is getting them to go back to the course they bought, and then the last four days is trying to get them to upgrade.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, maybe the delay will work. My mind instantly thinks when I get a course, unless I’m super enthusiastic about it, like I probably am not gonna start it right away. I might log in and look at it, but like usually, okay, the impulse, I want to get this thing and I get it right. And then life happens for a couple days, and I remember, oh shoot, I wanted to get that thing because of whatever reason, and then I go in. So maybe in a five-day course, somebody’s not actually starting until, and I don’t know how you’d you would figure this out, but my theory, they might not be starting within the first like three or four days. So let’s just say two weeks probably before they go through the five-day course. Because, like, I mean, I don’t know who your buyers are, but if I get something, usually my good intentions kind of get derailed for a day randomly because you know, I gotta go to school and pick up the kids, or something happened, or like this one time my teacher ran over my kid’s foot when she was picking him up, and then we had to go to the hospital. Like, life just happens, and so maybe you’ll see success by delaying that that upgrade sequence, like even further, maybe by a week.
SPEAKER_00:
Maybe, maybe. The the only thing that convinces me that that’s not dead definite is because the the majority of the upgrade buyers have not necessarily completed the five-day challenge, right? Oh, it’s and it’s and it’s look, it’s a very strong upgrade offer because what I do is, you know, if you go to my website, you can buy my my two tiers of offer at full price. So full price is$500 and$1,000. And that’s why I said in funnel price earlier, because my normal funnel before I did all this ad stuff, you could get 20% off. So instead of$500 or$1,000, you could pay either$400 or$800. Well, what I do, I wanted to make this like a no-brainer offer for these people, is I they only have the option of buying that top tier. I don’t even mention the bottom tier. And I’m marking it all the way down to$500. So it’s half price. It’s literally 50% off the website price. And so what’s what I think is happening is even if somebody hasn’t finished, or even if they haven’t started the five-day challenge, they’re seeing that they can get into my full program that’s been around for 13 years at half price, which is true and legitimate. And it’s never that cheap. And so they’re they’re just taking advantage of that offer. So that’s the only reason that I would say that spreading it out might not work, but I don’t know. We won’t know until we actually test it.
SPEAKER_02:
True, true. You won’t know until we test. And then also you can say that at least hold on, poke a hole in my logic, because it might it might be flawed, but we can we can say that most of the people who purchased the upgrade haven’t finished the course, and that’s true, but that doesn’t necessarily say like how many people would purchase the upgrade if they had already finished the course and have that win in their pocket, too, so to speak. Right. Yeah, that’s that’s what that’s what I’m that’s what I’m kind of sensing when I hear that because it’s it’s it’s a steal of an upgrade. So those folks who are getting it literally haven’t made it through the course yet, or most of them haven’t. Also, what do you have in day five as far as any sort of feedback tool? I’m I’m speaking the day five of the course, down in the description. Is there anything is there any feedback there in the form of a simple survey or something that can send you a signal? Like, okay, so many people have filled out this survey. Maybe we can put a question in there to see how long it took them to complete the course, or does GoHigh level show how long it takes somebody to complete a course?
SPEAKER_00:
Well, I have a tag set up to where when they mark when when they finish day five, they do get tagged. I’m not doing anything with that yet. So I, but but that data, I I would have access to that data to see. Obviously, the majority of people don’t get to that point. I mean, you know, people buy courses and when they finish them. So I’m not asking for feedback. The way I have it set up is there’s there’s seven lessons introduction, one lesson for each of the five days, and then a next steps lesson, which is really my pitch. That’s my in-the-course pitch. So if somebody’s really motivated and they go through all five lessons in the first day, like I don’t want them to have to wait for the email if they want. So there is the next steps lesson, which is like, hey, here’s what you’ve accomplished so far. Here’s what else we could do together. Here’s, you know, for for for the next week, you can get in for 50% off.
SPEAKER_02:
Maybe you end up experimenting. If you know that most of the people who purchase the upgrade haven’t finished the course, I wonder if your team could look and see, on average, the people who purchase the upgrade, how much of the course they finish. And then later on, you can test that upgrade email sequence being triggered by uh, let’s say a tag that’s applied to somebody when they make it through the third lesson of the course or something like that. Yeah, I like that. It’s all just testing, right? Like one of these, one of these will unlock higher conversions into it, but it’s profitable, and that is that is the really encouraging part for me, since I’m in it with my wife’s offer right now, testing so many things. And then for the listener, too, who’s considering doing the work to develop a low-ticket offer. Or if you’re listening right now and you have a low-ticket offer and it’s just not working as well as you hope, like just keep trying. That’s the thing. Like, if we stop, we’ve stopped, and we don’t know what else we could have tried, you know. So keep trying if you want to see it work. Let’s go talk about ads. Or if you had any other questions about actually, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. You were going to tell me the you did tell me the 42% uptake on the order bump.
SPEAKER_00:
Yes. So can we talk about what’s good and what’s not good? Like, what’s the range there for the bump? 42% of people are taking my bump. Is that does that kind of fall on the average? Is that really good, really bad?
SPEAKER_02:
It’s above average. I would expect to cold traffic that you would see 15-20% uptake on a successful order bump. So if you’re at 42, what about the price though?
SPEAKER_00:
Because it’s less than the main offer. Is that normal? So my main offer is 27, the bump is 19. Pretty low priced.
SPEAKER_02:
I’ve seen such a range, Jock. I can’t say less. So I can say having the order bump be less than the offer is normal. I can’t think of any examples where I’ve seen the order bump be higher than the offer, but I can think of plenty examples that follow the advice that I would give you now, which is if you have 42% people taking the order bump, as long as you don’t have to record anything in the funnel, as long as it’s just a price change, bump the price of the order bump up a few dollars and see if that drastically, or if at all, lowers your conversion rates, especially because you’re getting so many sales, you should be able to tell that pretty quickly. Because if it doesn’t, you’re you know you’re looking at average order value, right? And so if your conversion rate doesn’t drop too far and your average order value increases, then you’ve won. Yeah, you can kind of test. I think the technical term for that is price elasticity with that bump. But yeah, 42% uptake, that’s quite high. Cool.
SPEAKER_00:
And then on the upsell, like I said earlier, that’s two percent. So what’s normal there?
SPEAKER_02:
Five to ten percent, 10% being knocking it out of the park. I would expect five percent to say this upsell is successful, otherwise, keep trying different upsells or different messaging on the upsell page.
SPEAKER_00:
Well, what about my pricing there of$39?
SPEAKER_02:
That’s actually really low for an upsell. Because somebody, what’s your average order value for just the bump? You might not be able to have that like$37. Okay. 36. I guess usually I’m I’m used to seeing upsells that are like between 67 and 97, sometimes as high as 127. So at 30, if you had to drop it to 37 in order for it to sell, because this is also on the back end of a purchase, too. So people, I might try another iteration. If you have any other courses, if there’s anything else that you could think of that you were willing to deliver that would speed the result or give them more certainty that they’re doing it right. I don’t think you’re in you’re gonna you’re into life coaching, right? Like clarity call with jock or no, no, you’re not doing that, right? Okay.
SPEAKER_00:
No, I mean, I charge a thousand dollars an hour for consulting. I just don’t uh I certainly can’t get that value, that that amount from my piano students.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, that’s a big upsell, and it might not be like maybe it would it could be worth it for them, but it wouldn’t be worth it or censical for. You as the business owner to do that then. Right. Yeah. Having to had drop it to$37 and then being still at a three percent conversion rate, knowing that you wait, sorry. Did I get that right? Three percent. Two percent. Two percent. Knowing that you also already invested in a copywriter and you have your initial sales page converting well and your order bump converting well. What that tells me is you know how to choose an offer, you know how to align an offer, you know how to message an offer. I would just change the offer of the upsell when you when you have the energy to do so.
SPEAKER_00:
So we’ve me and me and my, you know, the guy that’s running my ads, we have beaten this so hard, like trying to figure out what to sell there. And the singing was like the last thing we could come up with. So we really don’t have any other ideas of the back burner. We’re just honestly kind of pumped that people are taking it. Yeah, but there it’s such a low rate and it’s such a low amount. It’s it’s almost like, is it really even worth it? Should I just just send people straight to the thank you page so they’re not bombarded with another sales pitch? Because ultimately I’m trying to sell them on the full course. And I don’t necessarily want to pitch them that there because I don’t want to immediately upsell them to a$500 product, even though it’s 50% off. Guess I could try it, but it seems like a lot. Because look, my audience is like the people that are buying this offer are between 60 and 80 years old. They’re older people, always alone to learn piano, not tech savvy at all, not into like super salesy. You know, several people have called this a scam. Like, like people, some people have not like the the initial login email go ends up in their spam, and so they don’t see it, and they’re immediately like, oh no, I got I got scammed. I’m doing a chargeback on my credit card. You know, that’s the type of audience this is. So I gotta be really clear with my communications, instructions, things like that.
SPEAKER_02:
If you haven’t tried the main course as an upsell, what would be the downside to trying it? I heard what you said. Would there be any other downside downside to trying it?
SPEAKER_00:
I don’t think so. The the only the other problem I have with doing that is because one of my motivations for doing this type of funnel with the ads is to let my lessons speak for themselves and not have to be too salesy. I want people to be like, wow, these are the best lessons I’ve ever taken. I need more of them, right? I want them to experience it for themselves and get the wins themselves. And that be the thing that like if that’s the way most people are buying, I I just feel so good about that. So that’s my other concern.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know if that’s so much of a concern as let’s call it a guiding principle.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:
In that case, stick with it. Your course is knocking it out of the park. Maybe that same guiding principle does guide you to try a lesson completion based trigger for that upgrade email sequence. And maybe that is what ends up boosting, boosting the sales of the full course. Who knows? Or maybe that’s the that’s just the next test, and two tests after that, you land upon the solution and you’re you’re hanging out with me again, you know, to tell me what worked out. Like, you know, cool. But yeah, that 40%, that 42% uptake, that that’s that’s probably where you’re going to see by bumping up the price a little bit and just incrementally testing that. That’s probably where you’re gonna see more profitability come out of the front part of your of your funnel. You had shown me in a loom, one of the first looms you had sent to me, how you were breaking out segments. What am I trying to say here? When I saw your ads, you were testing different segments and you were testing specific messaging to those segments. And I think you had said, I think you had said something about you ended up targeting engineers, yeah. Because you knew that you spoke well or had served engineers in the past. Can you can you give like the high-level view of this and then go into it? Because I know there’s nuggets of gold for the listener here. I’m intrigued too.
SPEAKER_00:
So let me let me tell you my perspective on the ad side. Here’s what we’ve done. Like I said, I have a guy on my team that has mostly handled this. So I’m I’m coming at this a little bit from the outside, but I’ll tell you what I know. All right. So, what we started with was we’re mostly doing video ads. He gave me three scripts to start with, and that’s what we launched with was three video ads. And we launched our campaign with the three, I guess would each one be an ad set. I’m trying to use the right terminology. Ad set, yep. Okay. And it turned out that one of those, like uh we’re just we’re letting Facebook do a lot of the work for us. So I think one of those was served, you know, 90, 99% of our ads was gonna be that was gonna be one of those, right? And they were pretty generic, like just they weren’t targeting a specific type of person, just like beginners who want to learn piano. Here’s what you’re gonna get with the with the challenge, 36 songs. And then the next thing we did was he he created three image ads that are that are converting decently well as well. And then and then I went to him and I was like, you know, and this is another idea I’ve always had was creating like another knockoff brand called like piano for engineers, because I I have a background in engineering and engineer type people have always been drawn to my lessons because I’m an engineer and I I teach piano like an engineer teaches piano. There’s a lot of formulas, it’s a lot of left brain learning, whereas piano is is in general a very artsy thing, you know, musical, you know, piano teachers are typically very right-brained. And so rather than create a whole new brand or anything like that, I was like, you know, Renato, that’s that’s the guy I’ve been talking about. I was like, Renato, what if we just kind of made some ads speaking to engineers and talking about why this challenge is the perfect way for engineers to learn how to play piano? And so the next three ads that we did, I don’t know, I guess he likes to do three ads at a time. That’s what we’re doing, apparently, now that I talk it through, was all three were focused on engineers. And just like that first set of three, one of those new sets of three is you know, is the one getting served out. And what I did was I took a piece of paper and I wrote engineer on it and I taped it to myself. And I took another piece of paper and I wrote piano on it, and I taped it to my piano and held it up. And I was like, hey, I’m an engineer. This is a piano. You want to know how an engineer learns piano? Like something like that. And that that ad is like today, we still have all nine running, and that one ad is is bringing in by far the most traffic and and everything.
SPEAKER_02:
Wow, that’s great.
SPEAKER_00:
Those are the nine ads, and in fact, I plan to record some more. He’s got about, I think he’s got six more ads that he’s put together that I need to record. So I’m planning to record six more this afternoon because I know ads can go stale, and I know like every time we’ve done a new group of ads, there’s been some higher benchmarks. So let’s I think we should keep doing new ads and trying new things on the ad side. Curious if you agree what you think about that.
SPEAKER_02:
Thumbs up all around, meaning to put it another way, we test through the 20 ads to find the one ad that outperforms the other 19, and we test through 50 ads to find the one ad that outperforms the other 49. And it’s it’s Pareto’s principle that works most of the time, and by testing through ads and doing more tests, jock, like you’re tapping into that principle. 20% of the ads that you’ll find that will give you around the 80-80% of the results, and so that 20% that’s vastly outperforming the other 80%. So, yeah, I’m I’m all for testing more ads.
SPEAKER_00:
If so, like if we were working together, we’re two and a half months in, and I’ve only created nine different ads, would you say that’s way too far on the low end?
SPEAKER_02:
So here’s the thing test I can say everything I just said, and you also can buy into testing, right? But practically, testing takes resources, and also not every test goes wrong. So, what you have in a scenario like yours is you’ve found ads that are working, and so it kind of makes sense, or I could say you could justify slowing down testing because you know that not all tests will work, and while some might, most won’t, and you already have something working, so maybe you decide to slow down that testing is all. If we were working together, well, we’re we’re here, we’re working together, we’re like letting our brains meld, so to speak, kind of like mastermind style. Look at the nine ads that you have, and actually, let me let me back up and ask you a question that I forgot to ask. On those nine different ads that you have, are you creating nine different ads that combine different creative with different ad copy? As in ad number one has creative and then a unique piece of ad copy, and then ad number two has another unique piece of creative and a unique piece of ad copy, or are you combining all nine creative with the same ad copy?
SPEAKER_00:
No, each each each video or image has its own ad copy. Okay, right, but we’re not like like the engineer video I told you about, we don’t have multiple versions of that one with multiple ad copies. We have like nine total ad combinations.
SPEAKER_02:
Okay, and so does it also then happen to be that the best converting creative also has the best performing ad copy?
SPEAKER_00:
How would I how would I differentiate the two?
SPEAKER_02:
I feel like creative drives the link. I feel like so subjective here, but that create that creative would drive the CTR. If you’re looking at your ad manager and you have enabled two headers or stats, one is CTR all, that’s click-through rate all, which measures the percentage of people that see your ad that click anywhere on your ad. You probably already know this because you have an ad guide too. I’m just saying this for the listener is tracking with us too. And then right next to that, I put uh CTR link, link click-through rate, which measures the percentage of people that have seen your ad and also clicked on a link. A link could be the technically the learn more button, or a link in the ad copy, since both of those link to the website that you’re sending traffic to, whereas CTR all measures a click anywhere, meaning they click on your little profile picture to go to Instagram or your Facebook business page, or they click on the creative itself to play a video, a reel, for example, or they click like or heart or share or they comment. Any and all clicks. And so, okay, let’s go there. I usually see a three to one ratio as in if things are going well, you get three times the percentage of folks or CTR all as you do CTR link.
SPEAKER_00:
We are not getting that. I’ve got it pulled up. We were getting, I’m just looking at that one that one ad that’s performing the best right now, and it’s CTR all is about seven percent, and our CTR link is about five percent.
SPEAKER_02:
Oh, so in that scenario where you’re not getting 3x, the CTR all of the CTR link, I just wanted to tell you if you’re running ads to a lead magnet or a low-ticket offer and you’re not sure which stat is telling you if the ads are working or not, but at the same time, you know that you could stand to get better results out of your ads. I have a simple 48-hour ad audit. You can get my eyeballs on your ads, and I’ll tell you the next three steps that I would take as a seasoned ad manager to get better results out of your ads. That link is in below. So let me clarify where we’re going here. And I I have an internal document pulled up, but you want your CTR all to be three times your CTR link. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:
Meaning, meaning at least three times more. So more is better. I honestly don’t see often more than three times.
SPEAKER_02:
Like I don’t see a four to one to I don’t see a four to one ratio. I usually just see three to one. And when I look at my accounts, if it’s three to one, I know things are good. As long as three to one is the ratio and the CTR link is above one percent. And that’s the case for yours, right?
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, it’s above one percent. My CTR link is five percent, but then my CTR all is is is you know forty percent higher than my CTR link, so and not three times higher. So does that raise a red flag for you?
SPEAKER_02:
Not a red flag performance-wise, but it just says there’s room to change up the visuals and you could get an even better CTR all.
SPEAKER_00:
Okay.
SPEAKER_02:
That’s all. So here’s here’s what I do know from practice. When I see a CTR link that’s below 1%, so we’ll we’ll come back to the three to one ratio, right? But when we see a CTR link that’s below 1%, the things that we can do to get like an immediate improvement in that CTR link click-through rate is to make sure that there’s a link in the ad copy and then update the first one to two sentences of the ad copy. That’s the hook. The reason we’re doing that is if it’s a real, you know how like we see the vertical video, and then at the very bottom of that ad, we see like only the first three words, so to speak, and then you can kind of expand those. Or if it’s in if the ad is showing up in the Facebook or Instagram feed, we can usually see the top two lines or three lines of the ad. And so we know that, and what I keep seeing over and over again is that the stronger the hook is, especially when you have an ad displaying in the feed, the more people will actually look at that hook and choose to click the C more or the dot dot dot C more, however it’s displayed, and expand that full ad and read the ad copy. And so, yeah, those on my internal troubleshooting checklist that like any ad or junior ad manager that I train and then the way I operate, that’s why I like I know that CTR Link, you can improve that by changing up the ad copy. Now, when you have unique versions of ad copy combined with every unique version of creative, that’s and you asked me the question, Jock, how can you know how an ad how an ad creative is performing relative to an ad copy? Those are the two metrics you look at. And so if you want to know how your ad creative is doing relative to the other ad creative, then just look for the ad that the different real, the real that has the highest CTR all, and you can call that your best reel. And then look for the ad copy that or look for the ad that has the highest CTR link, and you can call that your best ad copy. And then before coming up with new ad creative or new video ideas, if it happens that your highest performing CTR link ad or ad copy has not yet been paired with your highest performing real or CTR all or ad creative measured by CTR all, then pair those two and see what happens. Okay, that’s brilliant. It’s it’s just it’s just the data, it’s just looking at the stats and approaching it like that. But uh any other questions that you might have for me?
SPEAKER_00:
You know, I think I’ve hit them along the way. I think right now the plan is to create new ads and continue to test new ads as long as it’s profitable. We’re gonna just keep increasing the budget, right? Is that is that what you do as well? Like in terms of scaling. Yep. We’ll play with the upsell offer and then the the upgrade offer, the timing of all of that. I think those are the areas where you and I have agreed and identified that this could potentially be improved. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:
And those see what happens. There’s other things you can try, but try those first. Especially the the easiest one to me would be pair the best performing ad copy and add creative, and then the easiest one to you for revenue would be that order bump. Test the price elasticity on those.
SPEAKER_00:
Oh, right. That’s the other thing is is maybe try$27 on the order bump, but do it in a way that’s reversible and just make sure I’m I’m measuring the performance to see if it increases or decreases the average order value.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Track in the spreadsheet, or if I’m not familiar with Go High Level, but if they provide the right kind of tracking, then you can just track it there. Otherwise, have a team member track it in the spreadsheet over a time period that gives you a significant number of sales so that you can get some sort of result that is statistically sound or makes statistics. We’ve been talking too long, so I can’t, I’m not gonna be able to say words now. But you want you want you want a number of stell of cells that allows you to say that this result that you get is statistically significant. There we go. That’s what I was thinking. Thank you for being open with the numbers and sharing a bit. I, for one, am leaving this conversation encouraged because I know I can go back and keep plugging away with my wife’s new low-ticket offer funnel. And I feel like no matter how much we know, mindset and perspective and encouragement do go a long way. And so I hope sincerely, listener, that you leave this quick time with jock encouraged too to continue testing your ads and go for the results that you had hoped to get out of them in the first place. And I speak sincerely to you, listener, who may have started ads too early and realized, ah, you know, the offer really wasn’t selling organically. That’s okay too. You can shut off your ads and go right back to focusing on the messaging in your offer, who you’re serving and how it helps them and see success by spending time investing in your messaging. And uh Jock, what is one word of advice that you would like to leave the listener with before we say goodbye? I put you on the spot.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, totally. I mean, I would say take your time. Like I I’ve been wanting to do an offer like this for so long. And then once it felt like the right time to move forward, I was ready to see results from it immediately. But I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to sacrifice quality or anything like that. So I did take my time in terms of getting a copywriter involved and then this designer involved. And it went slower than I wanted. But I’m so glad that I was as patient as I could be and and went the route that I did because I’m just so proud of the way it’s turned out. It’s turned out really, really well. And I think if I would have rushed things, if I would have skipped any of these steps, we wouldn’t be looking at a two plus ROI right now. And so to just be patient and take your time and do things right. But not so much that you’re a perfectionist and it never gets launched. So that’s that’s kind of cop-out advice because it’s like on both sides of the spectrum. But that’s what I that’s what came to mind.
SPEAKER_02:
I I would say that’s practical advice. Take the time to do it right, but don’t let the illusion of perfection stop you in your tracks.
SPEAKER_00:
Better said than I did.
SPEAKER_02:
Well, I get the luxury of paraphrasing what you said because you went first. So where can somebody find out more about you or share the name, please, of your podcast again?
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, that’s the best place. I host the online course show. Been doing that for nine years now. And we just talk about all things related to online courses. You know, you talk about ads, it’s great niche. You’ve been on the podcast before, great episode. So I just interview other people who have courses or maybe expertise in areas that are related to courses, and it’s just a good time. So the online course show. Appreciate you bringing that up.
SPEAKER_02:
Very cool. Well, listener, until the next time you see me or hear from me, take care. Be blessed, and we’ll see you in the next one.
unknown:
Bye.
