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Jacques Hopkins shares how shifting from questionable tactics to ethical strategies boosted his revenue by 50%.
We’ll cover practical ways to create urgency without crossing ethical lines—and why being upfront with your audience isn’t just ethical, it’s smart business.
Watch the previous episode ‘8 Years of $11k+ Months With a Piano Course, Featuring Jacques Hopkins’
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Speaker 1:
Welcome back to the Art of Online Business podcast and if you have ever wondered, how do you apply urgency, because you’ve heard it on other podcasts, how do you apply urgency to your online course or coaching program in such a way that it motivates people to jump off the fence and take the plunge, so to speak, go ahead and advance towards their goals, along with your gifts and skills that you’re going to help coach them along or teach them along, as you will.
Speaker 1:
but how to do it in an ethical way that feels right, that is, let’s say, out of integrity, right, because too many of us have seen like just scams and been scammed. Well, I have a guest here who is an expert at doing that. His name is Jock Hopkins and you can see him if you’re watching on the YouTube channel. If you’re not watching on the YouTube channel, it’s about time you went down to the description below and clicked on the link, because you’ll also be able to see my lovely wife here. Thanks for joining me, jamie, and thanks for coming back, jock.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, thank you for having me back. I love this topic. I’m excited to get into it.
Speaker 1:
Cool, awesome, let me give you a proper intro though Eight years as an electrical engineer before you quit to start your online piano course and it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, so to speak, in the beginning. But you grew that course pre-pandemic which I have to say that right out of the gate. This wasn’t like a pandemic story. You grew this thing well before people were just stuck online, and you grew it first to you quit your job. You started off. You got $1k a month, then you were able to grow it to 10k a month and keep scaling it from there and now you teach people. You’re the host of the online course show podcast, you support your family with passive income from your course and you teach others how to replicate your success. That sounds about right to me.
Speaker 1:
I want to hear more about what you have to say so like today we’re going to talk about the ethics of using urgency when selling a digital product, the three types of urgency you can use and which works best. And I also, because in the previous episode we didn’t quite talk about selling a course in a niche that doesn’t teach others to make money.
Speaker 2:
But I want you to.
Speaker 1:
I want you to re-touch a little bit about your experience doing that too. You did it again, where you asked 74 questions.
Speaker 2:
I did do it again where I asked 74 questions, but hey, that’s just how I roll.
Speaker 1:
You know what? We’re not going to answer all those questions. Let me just be honest with the listener right now. However. If you heard the previous episode and you’re not type a like with a list did he answer all the questions? You will realize that this episode will be really good, because that one was really good. It was moments ago for us.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
But it’s a link in the show notes below for you if you haven’t heard it yet. Doc, tell us about the unethical kind of urgency and then how you got started with the right kind of urgency.
Speaker 3:
I think the ethics behind it simply come down to doing what you’re, what you say you’re going to do. Okay, so let’s, let’s talk about. Let’s talk about urgency. That that has to. It gets confused with scarcity. Sometimes urgency has to do with time, right. Something is going away at a certain time, right. Scarcity has to do with quantities. Limited amount of quantities, which is scarcity, is a lot harder to utilize with digital products, right. Both are powerful when you can use them ethically, right. If I said, hey, there’s 50 copies of this piano course, come and get it, that wouldn’t be very ethical because I have an unlimited amount of copies, right, but urgency is just as powerful and it’s better for digital products.
Speaker 3:
There are three types of urgency that we can use inside of our digital product businesses. The first one would be based on the availability, so something’s available and then at a deadline it’s no longer available, your offer is no longer available. The second type is a discount, so you discount it for a limited period of time. At the deadline, that discount is no longer available, but you can get it for the full price after that. The third type of urgency is some kind of bonus going away, and that can be paired with a discount, if you want to. So the third type of a bonus could be paired with something else. From my experience, the bonus one works the worst, but it very much depends on what.
Speaker 3:
That bonus is right and how you package the whole thing together, so I prefer the first two, but it’s harder to do the first one ethically with a digital product, right what?
Speaker 1:
do you mean?
Speaker 3:
it’s not available. Right, it’s a digital product. Why is it not? I want it now.
Speaker 3:
Give it to me. Of course it’s available, and that’s a mistake that I have made. So I talked in the last episode about discovering a funnel in urgency back in 2016, implementing a funnel, and I didn’t do it all squeaky clean at first. I did it. I was listening to a podcast episode that told me how to set up a funnel. I did it exactly like you told me, and what I did was, before I implemented urgency and a funnel, you’d go to Piano in 21 Days. It was basically a sales page and it was like you buy now or you don’t buy now, right? What I did was, instead of that, I switched it to a landing page that said we’re currently working on the newest version of the course, but don’t fret. In the meantime, you can download this free workbook and we’ll let you know when it’s ready, right? They’d opt in, the funnel would start and then it would be an evergreen funnel, and so we’d have the open cart and the closed cart, and so that that urgency that I use was availability. But it worked.
Speaker 3:
But it always felt a little bit gray as far as the ethics go, right, because I was saying something on my website. It wasn’t really true. We’re working on the newest version and not really like it exists. It’s just not ready for you yet. But I did that for several years. It worked really well. Occasionally I would get messages like hey, stop being a scammy marketer, I know it’s available. This is ridiculous. I knew about the discount thing, but gurus through the years I’ve always, I always had heard never discount your products.
Speaker 3:
You’ve heard that too right, because we don’t want it to come in, we don’t want to devalue it, we don’t want to come across like we’re devaluing our product. But one day I was like all right, what can I do about this? Like I want to run a completely ethical business. I’m tired of getting these messages. You know what I like a good discount, like when it’s done well, like that. That can be the push for me to to buy the thing and use the thing right. But let me test it.
Speaker 3:
And so I decided to run a test and try the discount thing and I was like, if it just completely flops, I can always go back right. So this was about three years ago. So I did the availability thing for years and I tested switching to a discount, leaving the funnel completely the same. And all the emails are almost exactly the same, except instead of saying this offer is going away, right, the course is going away, it says this discount is going away. But other than that, the funnel was exactly the same and the results were that it actually increased revenue by 50%.
Speaker 2:
So it was 50% better.
Speaker 3:
Now, caveat, right, okay, I’ll be completely honest. I didn’t want to make less money per sale. Okay, so that statistic is a little flawed because I also raised the price, rightfully so, though.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that was my next question. So you raise, you raise the price of the initial course so that when you discount it, it’s still the price that you want. Is that what I’m understanding? Even higher even higher, okay.
Speaker 3:
Okay, price turned out to be higher than my original price, but they don’t. They don’t know that, right.
Speaker 3:
And it’s and it’s all still true because my real price is what I started advertising on the website. So then, when I made this change, for the first time you could go or I guess for the first time since I did the funnel you could actually go to my website and sign up at the full everyday price. So at the time I had three. At the time I made this switch, I had three different tiers. You could buy $100, $300, $500. And of course it’s, you know, 97 to 97, but let’s use round numbers here 100, 300, 500. The $100 version was just my workbook. It was just a PDF with the course in words and pictures.
Speaker 3:
Nobody got results from that one. People would buy it but nobody got results from it. You saw the testimonials on my website. None of those came from people buying that. So I was like, okay, I’m going to get rid of that tier. That leaves the 300 and 500. I raised those prices to 500 and a thousand, okay, and then in the funnel they could get either 100 or 200 off, so 400 or 800 essentially.
Speaker 3:
So I just wanted to be fully transparent when I say it. It raised revenue by 50%, so it worked, but I also did raise prices too.
Speaker 1:
Did your conversions change Like the percent of conversions in the funnel, or did that go up to you?
Speaker 3:
We would have to do some math to find the exact answer to that. I like to think it was about the same. The conversions were about the same All right.
Speaker 1:
Another follow-up question when did you get this idea to change to a discount funnel and where did you get the idea to increase your prices from?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So I just it had been on the back of my mind to change how I was doing the urgency because of what I was talking about with the ethics. And I never gave the discount model. I never took it seriously because, like I said, all the gurus would say don’t do that, don’t do that Right. And then one day I was just like I said earlier. I was just like I like a good discount. Let me at least try it Right. When I, when I make big changes in the business, I like to make sure it’s reversible and I can go back if I need to. And so that was what motivated me to try equally as well, or maybe even slightly poorer. I still felt so much better about it and that would have been an okay result. The fact that it performed 50% better was just icing on the cake for me.
Speaker 1:
I still would have felt so much better about it. That would have been an okay result. Yes, you teach people how to do this. Tell us a little bit about the podcast that you run.
Speaker 3:
Oh well, that’s very kind of you to ask. Yeah, I started the podcast in 2017 because I love talking about this stuff and I wanted a platform to be able to do that. You know, when I started, I was very like I mean, I’m introverted, right, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not super extroverted and I was scared, like I wanted to use it also as a way to reach out to other course creators, cause I’m I’m here, like in my home office, like doing my thing. I’m like I know there are other people out there out there doing that, this and other cool niches. Like I thought it could be a good, good way to meet other people and then also share value in the process. But I was scared to reach out to people cause I didn’t have a podcast yet, I didn’t have a platform yet I I didn’t have a platform yet, I didn’t have an audience, I didn’t have a brand. So I was featured on a big podcast side hustle show by Nick Loper.
Speaker 3:
The morning that episode came out, I had an email in my inbox from a guy was like hey, jacques, I loved your story. I’m trying to start this course business teaching people to grow and sell microgreens, which are these baby versions of plants that are 40 times more nutritious, and I need a mentor to help me get going. Will you coach me? Long story short, I was like, hey, dude, I’ve never really coached anybody, but I’ve been thinking about starting this podcast. How about I coach you? We record it and turn it into a podcast. So the first 19 episodes of the online course show are just me coaching this guy with ramping up his online course business. It got to a point where he was doing better than me and I had nothing left to teach him. But now I had a podcast with 19 episodes and now I had the confidence to start reaching out to people.
Speaker 3:
And so the majority of the episodes since then have been featuring other course creators or experts like Quajo Not that you’re not a course creator as well, Quajo Getting their stories and understanding how they did things. So that was kind of the genesis behind the online course show Nice.
Speaker 2:
You coached yourself out of a job initially.
Speaker 1:
You must have been pretty brave, though, to put that out there, because it’s not like you knew that coaching him was going to work. I mean, he reached out to you in an email and he was your first, and you made a podcast out of that.
Speaker 3:
Listen, kwejo. When nobody’s listening, it’s easy to put anything out there. There were very few people listening to those first 19 episodes and now people find the podcast for an episode 240, seven years later and they’re like oh man, I love Nate, he’s the best. Like I love hearing the, the, the origins behind all of that, but like nobody was listening. Look on the very first episode of the podcast, episode one. I recorded using the wrong microphone. I got this nice podcast microphone and I recorded on my like my computer’s built in microphone and the audio was terrible in there. I was like nobody’s listening, I’m going to air it anyway, right? So if you go back to episode one, the audio is awful because when you don’t have an audience yet, it’s easier to just put stuff out there.
Speaker 1:
I am looking for that episode on your YouTube channel. We’re going to get back to urgency pretty quick here, but I got to know because the listener there’s plenty of people listening right now who have ideas that they want to try in their business and they might not have the biggest business or, let’s say, podcast listenership, but you said it’s easy to do something when there’s nobody listening and yet you didn’t get stuck in your head doing it. Nor does it sound like you got stuck in your head when you were doing, when you switched from the scarcity model for your funnel to the discount model. So can you share either a thought process that you teach now or one that’s still like alive in your memory from how you kind of jumped over those mental hurdles and analysis paralysis and went for it? Well look.
Speaker 3:
I think one of my favorite quotes I think it’s from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear is you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, right? So just because we want, we have goals in mind, we want to achieve something, we want to have a profitable online course business, obviously that’s not enough, and so I’m a big believer in systems and understanding the different pieces that we have to put together and then creating systems to get there. So, for example, what I find is typically the hardest part for people is the traffic and audience building piece. Right, most often, the course is the easiest part because that’s the area you have the expertise in, not necessarily like being on camera. That can be daunting, but like you know how to cook or you know how to garden or whatever your course topic is, and you can teach that thing so you can make the course.
Speaker 3:
Maybe somebody can show you how to make a funnel or put an offer together, but building that audience can be the hardest part. And so if you have great systems around, that meaning, okay, I’m going to build my audience on TikTok, I’m going to build my audience through a podcast and understand what good ones look like and then consistently put out valuable content on those platforms, knowing it’s not going to be just like you put out one and it’s going to be an overnight success. You’ve got to stick with it, learn from it, get better and systemize the process and eventually, if you do that and iterate and get better, you will find results.
Speaker 1:
If you do that and iterate and get better you will find results Okay when we had started, I believe we were going to talk about three types of urgency, and it could be that my brain is just failing me, but we talked about limited quantity, we talked about discount. Did we forget that third type of urgency?
Speaker 3:
Bonus. So the third yeah bonus. It’s better listener than me. It’s the least effective right. That’s why we haven’t talked about it and I haven’t. I don’t use it much in my business, but sometimes I will pair or recommend you pair, say the discount with also a bonus going away. But, like I said, it very much depends on what that bonus is.
Speaker 1:
And the thing with a bonus too, is like you want to have a good one, but then you also have to make sure to differentiate it from your course. Otherwise people are like why isn’t that in the course in the first place?
Speaker 3:
So the thing yeah, bonuses are tricky because people will fall into the trap of just like trying to throw in bonuses for the sake of bonuses, like I did that. I did that at first for sure, but a bonus really comes down to trying like, ultimately, with our course, we want to promise some sort of dream outcome. Right, I like to say, like I’m not selling piano lessons, I’m not selling a piano course, I’m selling the ability for you to be playing your favorite songs in the piano in as little as three weeks from now. Right, and people will pay that. I have one of the highest priced piano courses and one of the shortest piano courses as well, so it’s not based on how long it is or anything like that. So that is the dream outcome that people are paying for, and any bonus that you tack onto that should simply make that dream outcome faster or easier or potentially cheaper.
Speaker 3:
Thank you, yeah, and if your bonus doesn’t do one of those three things, you probably should get rid of it, because we do not want bonuses to feel like more work, right. If you include a bonus or it’s like oh, I didn’t know I needed to do that too, that’s going to make getting to that dream outcome even harder.
Speaker 1:
That’s not a good bonus, since we’re talking about urgency, some people are tell us about like the best kind of timer to use or urgency tool that you use, cause, like you know, people are on Kajabi that’s like a super popular platform or they’re on Teachable, or they’re on Thrivecart or SamCart, all of which offer countdown timers. What’s the one you use and why?
Speaker 3:
Okay. So that opens a little bit of a can of worms that I’m glad you brought up. It would have been good to go through this episode without getting more specific on how this actually works. I don’t know that we’ve properly clarified like evergreen urgency, versus, not versus. I guess I don’t know the opposite of that like non-evergreen urgency. So some course graders very successful ones will do the launch strategy where they’re launching to everybody two, three, four times a year and they’re using one of those three urgency things availability discount at the end of the launch.
Speaker 1:
We will not name the third one, it’s just going to be, and that’s a very popular way to go.
Speaker 3:
And if you like those live launches, then more power to you, Right? But I prefer more automation and more systems and more passiveness if that’s even the right word there in the process. But that’s a perfectly fine way to go. And when you go that route all of the software tools like Kajabi you can put a timer on your page. You can put a timer on your order form. You type in your exact date. You want it to end? Easy peasy, right? What’s not as easy as having it evergreen, right? So, like I said, Quajo, if you opt in today, your deadline is in 12 days from now. Jamie, you opt in next week, your deadline is 12 days after that. You can’t just put a specific date on a Kajabi page and have that execute.
Speaker 3:
And so there’s a wildly popular software that is the gold standard for doing this. It’s called Deadline Funnel. I’m sure you guys are familiar with it. It’s most of the guests I have on my podcast are using Deadline Funnel. It’s crazy effective, amazing. You too. Look, I discovered Deadline Funnel in 2016. I set up my campaign, Dude. I haven’t touched it since in eight years, Like it is so popular. It just works, it just works. The it just works, it just works. The deadline funnel is what gives you those evergreen deadline. It gives you the evergreen deadlines and the timers right, so you can have timers in your emails. You have the timer on the page and it’s different for everybody. Basically, what I’m doing is 365 launches a year all on autopilot.
Speaker 3:
And, that being said, let’s get back to the ethics behind this whole thing. Right, I started by saying it’s ethical when we say we’re going to do something, we do it, right. So if you’re like, well, I still don’t love this because it’s not the same for everybody, like you know, in this scenario, you know Quajo is going to be able to buy one day and Jamie’s not going to be able to buy another day. Everybody has their own unique timeline and deadlines that are true, and that’s what deadline funnel does for us. And so when you get that last call email, quajo, and I say, hey, this, this discount is going away at midnight, and you come the next day and click that link in an email, yeah, you should not be able to take advantage of the offer, right? And Deadline Funnel helps us to do that, right. And so there are people that have evergreen funnels with evergreen deadlines. I’m holding up air quotes.
Speaker 3:
I do everything I’m doing, but they’re not using a tool like Deadline Funnel and the next day after somebody said something was going to go away, I can still get to it. I would say that’s not an ethical way to do it.
Speaker 1:
It’s not Hot, take, I’m going to needle of it. What do you do when somebody emails you right after their funnel expires and says hey, chuck, I just wanted to, but now it’s typed out and I can’t get it, can you?
Speaker 3:
just send me the link. So, case by case, basis, right, I am a business person looking to make money and help people with a product. I know that can absolutely help people make money and help people with a product. I know that can absolutely help people. So it very much depends on the situation. I like to avoid those situations as much as possible.
Speaker 3:
I’m trying to find my last call email. So a few hours before the deadline, my email says hey, first name I remember, after one of the first times I offered Piano in 20 Days, getting an email like this Jacques, jacques. I was in outer Mongolia on a fishing trip last week where we had no internet signal and a mongoose ate my cell phone. Omg, the course is closed. Can I still get in? Why, oh why, did you not send out a warning email? I would have beaten the mongoose down, gotten my phone back enrolled and only sent out a final warning, if only. And then I say this is that email, no need to harm the mongoose. So like I send out two emails on that last stage, really making sure people understand that the deadline is coming up.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it’s clear.
Speaker 3:
But I mean people sometimes do have very legitimate excuses, for example, for example hey Jacques, I just I’m just seeing this. All the emails went to my spam folder. I’m just seeing this. I didn’t know it was available. Like I would love to get in. I just didn’t see it.
Speaker 2:
Yes, is there that possibility with deadline funnel that you know how some people leave the page open and then they can still get back to the link. So in deadline funnel it just if the page is open there, then it still just counts down and that’s it.
Speaker 3:
Are you saying like does it automatically redirect at the deadline, Correct?
Speaker 1:
I think that is. I think what you’re saying is, if I just leave the tab open, can I? I’m with Deadline Funnel, can I get around its Because?
Speaker 2:
there’s some people that have done that before right when you think like, oh, it’s timed out or whatever, but they still have had the page open.
Speaker 1:
Because the timer goes to zero and then just sits on the page with the timer that says zero.
Speaker 3:
I honestly don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if Deadline Funnel will automatically redirect it if they’re up or not. It does.
Speaker 1:
I’ll say, as a user it does Okay.
Speaker 3:
Okay, well, there you go, it solves that. But also I will tell you like one other thing I do that’s very effective is like, after you send those last couple of last call emails, wait a couple more days, two to three more days, and then so offers are gone, discounts gone, like our deadline has passed. So now one more email asking people why they didn’t enroll. So for me the subject is just you didn’t enroll question mark and just say, hey, we just went through this thing. A lot of people signed up. I noticed you didn’t. If you could let me know why? I’m just curious, always looking to get better and what that it doesn’t have any links or anything.
Speaker 3:
And sometimes you know I mentioned like people will say hey, I didn’t see this, my email, your emails went to spam because that email doesn’t have any links. It’s very short. Sometimes that’ll be the first email they see, and in the whole process so there have been times where where they’re like, hey, I, I’m just now getting this, can I get in? That email also is great for feedback. Right To understand what it was about your offer, that they decided not to take advantage of it. And one more pro tip around that email is it’s good to ask people for three reasons why they didn’t sign up, because almost always people will say time or money. So you really want to get down to the actual root of why they didn’t sign up. And so if you ask for three, they’ll probably say time, money and then the real reason.
Speaker 1:
I can’t remember ever hearing that. So thank you, Because it’s rare that I hear something that’s completely brand new. That is, I’m going to. Can I steal that jock?
Speaker 3:
Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:
To the root of their objections Right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, three reasons why you didn’t. I guess me stealing that, along with all the other hundreds of online course creators that you coach in your program.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, we’re all just learning from everybody and a lot of us are sharing the same information. But I don’t remember where I learned that from, but I’ve implemented it. It’s very effective because that’s it’s so true. Like people almost always say, it was time or money when you, when you ask them for a reason. But if you ask specifically for three, a lot of times you will get down to that root objection.
Speaker 1:
When you said, a lot of us are sharing the same information. Maybe, but we’re sharing it through our very unique lenses of all the experiences that we have or have not had, and I think that’s really important and a good reason why somebody would want to listen to your podcast, because, episode after episode, you just keep interviewing these people. I’m seeing the crazy difference in a free course versus charging a premium seven figures per year teaching tennis online. And another episode says the underrated strategy to explode your audience without ads or social media. That does not have my face on it. That is somebody else. Tell us the name of your podcast and where’s the best way to find it.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so the online course show. Thank you, you can certainly find it through my website at the online course guy G U, icom. And then I don’t know your favorite podcast app, right, what’s your favorite podcast?
Speaker 1:
app. Quite quite, joe. I’m a fan of YouTube, even though most of my listeners are still listening on Apple.
Speaker 3:
Podcasts? Yeah, for sure. So we do. We video them as well, like you do, and put we try to do some production.
Speaker 1:
Your journey from going from secure engineering job to starting your piano course to doing your piano course right and absolutely crushing it, income wise to at the end of the transition to coaching online course creators the same. This has been a really intriguing interview and I can thank you sincerely. I learned a couple of new things. I appreciate that.
Speaker 3:
Jock, that’s great. If I can teach you one thing, that’s a win, and hopefully it’s been some value for your audience as well, and once again, just can’t thank you enough for the opportunity. The art of online business definitely a goal to come on this podcast for a long time, so I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:
Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:
Thank you very much, Until the next time that you hear us or see us, take care, be blessed and.
