My Favourite Teachable.com hack right now (to get more course sales).
Teachable has a host of great functions to build great landing pages for your courses. Multiple landing pages, Guarantee Buttons at checkout and that cool banner widget thingy that makes the header of your page look great. But the best hack right now is in the course information settings!
Yes, I know that that is hardly the coolest places for a hack but trust me it is!
Go into one of your courses, and from the left-hand menu select INFORMATION and then scroll down to DEFAULT PAGES. In the main panel where it says Post Purchase Page — select the drop-down and move from the default “Thank You Page” and select “Custom URL” instead.
Then in the Custom URL add the sales page URL for a tripwire course.
And BOOM! there your have it more sales and students!
Ok, so out of context that makes little sense. So let's take a look at the context for this, which is a Lead Magnet and TripWire entirely hosted on Teachable.
Lead Magnet 101
The general principle is this: If you are trying to sell your course by driving cold traffic (strangers) to your course Sales Page through paid Ads, in the hope of selling your course. You likely are going to fail.
The cost of your Ads will usually be greater than the number of sales you make. You can quickly lose thousands of pounds or dollars or whatever currency you are using. Your money will go straight into the pockets of the Social Media giants or Google as you won’t cover the cost of the ads.
The way around this is to stop selling courses to strangers directly and instead build lists (usually email).
Then you can provide information and value to these lists over email sequences and eventually, that list of (not strangers anymore) are more likely to buy your course because you have demonstrated over time, that you are an expert in your chosen topic and your course.
Ok, this is a pretty basic digital marketing fundamental these days.
The way you build your list is normally to get strangers to opt into your list by giving them something for free. An ebook is normally the go-to freebie of choice.
This freebie is referred to as a Lead Magnet. Using the metaphor that you are attracting leads to your business through this giveaway like a magnet attracts iron fillings.
A Lead Magnet page is a much better place to run cold traffic to (i.e. the destination URL for your paid advertising). Because the step that the prospect has to take to download a Lead Magnett is much smaller than the large step of purchasing your product.
In other words, it’s easier for somebody to give you their email address (usually their personal Gmail or Hotmail address) for a free download, than it is for them to go through the much larger step of taking our their credit card and giving cash to you.
And it is these STEPS where a small but significant detail lies. And where the HACK detailed above comes into its own, and it is to do with conversion rates at checkout.
The more hurdles in the race the greater the number of falls!
A simple principle of Sales Funnels and eCommerce is that you need to remove as many hurdles and barriers as possible between your customer and them making a purchase.
Get rid of unnecessary clicks, menus, forms, buttons, screens etc. In other words “make the customer journey as simple as possible”
Why? Because every time you add complexity such as asking a customer to enter their email address or postal address YOU LOSE SALES. Ask them to do a frustrating task more than once and you are going to see big drop-offs in sales conversions.
Adding complexity through unnecessary steps at a payment checkout is the worst of all sins, imaging adding a paper form asking for your personal contact details at the grocery checkout in a store! Imagine you had to fill in this form before you could purchase your items at the cash register.
People would walk out of the store!!!
The Lead Magnet / Trip Wire Dichotomy
Before I explain the final HACK solution, there is one other principle that we need to establish. The Trip Wire.
So, if a Lead Magnet builds a list and from that list, you're able to generate future course sales once the list has “warmed up.” Then the Trip Wire is a way of spotting the people who are already in the market and who are ready to dip their toes in the water right now!
The Trip Wire then is a beautiful waypoint, a little revenue-bump on the road.
Some percentage of your Cold Traffic will be ready to buy right at the point they have downloaded the Lead Magnet. Sure they are probably not ready to buy your full course, but they might be ready to buy a small sampler course.
And the Trip Wire is just that. A small course that can be purchased (usually for $20 or less). If the Trip Wire course is designed well it should be a no brainer purchase.
The Trip Wire has the added benefit that if you can execute it correctly you can actually build a Self Funding Funnel to cover the cost of all your ads.
So here is the problem. If you want to build a list, you need to capture an email address. If somebody has just given your their email address, they won't want to add it again when they purchase your TripWire.
And if you are selling your Trip Wire on Teachable.com the user has to enrol first for Teachable.com before they pay for your course.
Most people host their Lead Magnets on their WordPress Website, especially as the Lead Magnet is normally just a .pdf download. They capture an email address perhaps in a popup on exit as we do at www.reachable.agency (see below).
After the email address is captured, then you redirect the user to your Tripwire. BUT If you tripwire is a mini-course on Teachable then the user will have to go through the Teachable registration at checkout…
…And what have we just learnt?
Correct. Introducing unnecessary steps ESPECIALLY at checkout will cause more of your precious EXPENSIVE traffic to abandon the process.
The Solution (and why we love this hack)
So the answer is to host your Lead Magnet on Teachable as a FREE course!
Yep create a new FREE course on Teachable.com, upload your Lead Magnet (ebook or single lecture) and create your Lead Magnet sales page using Teachable. You then run your cold traffic to this page. I.e. Your ads for the Lead Magnet point to this page.
THEN USE THE HACK ABOVE — to redirect the user to your TRIPWIRE SALES PAGE after they “purchase” the FREE Lead Magnet
The benefit here is that in order for the user to get/download the Lead Magnet they will go through the TEACHABLE REGISTRATION at this low entry point.
Sure you may lose some traffic here, but it will be much less than the amount of traffic you would lose at a PAYMENT gateway if they had to register there.
AND because they registered for the Lead Magnet. The checkout process for your Trip Wire is now easier!
To see how this hack works let's follow the steps:
- User clicks on Ad for Lead Magnet
- The user goes to the sales page for Lead Magnet (this is a FREE Teachable course) and REGISTERS on Teachable to get it.
- Using the HACK you redirect the user to your TripWire page.
- You offer your LOW-COST course.
- When the user checks out they are ALREADY REGISTERED and the checkout process is frictionless, resulting in a much higher percentage of conversions than just running cold traffic to this lead magnet.
Remember pur aim is to remove unecessary steps at payment checkouts!
Not only that! There is the additional benefit that when you come to sell your full-priced course via your email sequences. The user is already registered on Teachable. They will have used the platform to access both your Lead Magnet and TRip Wire and because of this familiarity, you WILL get a much higher conversion rate on your main high ticket sales.
How do I know? Because we have created literally hundreds of these sequences and every time we introduce this HACK we see greater numbers of enrollments and course sales.
So consider using Teachable as the host for all your FREE downloads if your primary high ticket courses are also sold on Teachable.
And remember the best HACKS are usually the most overlooked ;-)
