43-tactics-from-Mindvalley.pdf

WEBINAR TACTICS That Are Worth $20 Million To Mindvalley—Annually

Copyright © 2016 All rights reserved worldwide. | www.mindvalley.com

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43 Webinar Tactics Worth $20 Million To Mindvalley— Annually First, I have to let loose a little fear I have in my heart. I’m afraid what you’re going to read here is a powerful weapon of mass influence that in the wrong hands could be disastrous.

About the Author

Charles Stanly

has been with Mindvalley for over over 2 years. He has written copy for over 30 product launches which includes landing page, sales page, webinar scripts, email copy and more. He brings to you the biggest tactics behind our webinar product launch process used today today..

So to keep my little fear in check, can I ask of you a promise

That you would only use these tactics to promote genuinely good stu. Promise?

Let’s begin.


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43 Webinar Tactics Worth $20 Million To Mindvalley— Annually First, I have to let loose a little fear I have in my heart. I’m afraid what you’re going to read here is a powerful weapon of mass influence that in the wrong hands could be disastrous.

About the Author

Charles Stanly

has been with Mindvalley for over over 2 years. He has written copy for over 30 product launches which includes landing page, sales page, webinar scripts, email copy and more. He brings to you the biggest tactics behind our webinar product launch process used today today..

So to keep my little fear in check, can I ask of you a promise

That you would only use these tactics to promote genuinely good stu. Promise?

Let’s begin.


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WEBINARS The #1 Online Medium For Mass Control

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ebinars are not uncommon these days, meaning it’s not a novelty. However, even though that decreases the value of a webinar, no one can argue it’s the most powerful online sales medium ever invented.

Why do they work? Here are three reasons why.

Direct attention

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During a timed webinar, the attention span of the attendee is at least 45 minutes on average. Which, in ttention economy where everyone competes for your attention, means jackpot. An article, or video just can’t have that same eect. Do you know how much 45 minutes of educating the prospect is worth? All the money in the world. There ain’t an y sales presentation that you can’t do in 45 minutes. You can sell anything from jet planes to java chips, which leads to my second point.

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Ability to sell directly The genius of webinar is that after educating the prospects for a full 45 minutes to an hour, you have the opportunity to directly pitch your product. As long as you make a smooth transition, people won’t realize they’re being sold until it’s too late. It’s every sales person’s dream.

Commitment & consistency

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Webinars are events. This means the user has to show up for the event. There’s a dierent psychology at play when a person is randomly shown a video versus when a person decides to appear for a particular p resentation. It makes a day and night dierence. Because according to psychology expert Robert Cialdini, us humans are hard-wired for commitment and consistency. When a person decides to watch a particular presentation (which shows that they have a problem they’d like to solve), he/she is more likely to stick till the end. These 3 components make webinars the multi-million dollar beasts they are.

Copyright © 2016 2015 All rights rights reserved reserved worldwide. worldwide. || www.mindvalley.com

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HOWEVER, the directness of the webinar also means prospects have more time to call you out on your BS. When they work, they work mysteriously well. When they don’t, they bomb miserably. I mean, at Mindvalley, we’ve had days when a single s ingle webinar would lead to almost $2 million in sales, and other days when it struggled to pull in $40,000 in sales. (Dierent webinars and dierent products of course.)

You can’t win consistently with webinars...

Or

can you?


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Lesson From A Company That’s 178 Years Old In 1837, Procter & Gamble was founded by two men with a capital of just $7,192.24 and now, 178 years later, the company has more than 135,000 employees in over 80 countries with revenues exceeding $79 Billion. Obviously, they had done a lot of things right to get to the position they enjoy today. One of the unusual things they did, that turned out to be a huge success, happened during the early 20th century when radios rst app eared in 1920s and later television in the 1930s. The radio and television industry at tha t time desperately needed advertisers to sponsor what little shows they produced.

They had a broad demographic for prime time—evening and morning segments— but viewers for their other timeslots were just stay-at-home wives and mothers who basically bought nothing and sponsors weren’t interested in them. But Procter and Gamble, by the time already a big soap and candle manufacturer, saw the opportunity. They saw attention as currency even back then. And there it was... attention for dirt cheap price. They not only became a sponsor, but produced their own shows. And they discovered an interesting phenomenon.

A Curious Case Of Phenomenal Sales P&G produced what was then called the serials. And they noticed that as the shows got better and better, sales of their soaps—which had nothing to do with shows—grew exponentially (compared to TV viewership which only grew in a predicted way.) Which means that all they had to do was hire great TV producers and their sales exploded. The TV people jokingly called these shows Soap Operas and the name stuck. What followed was a great era (spanning decades) of Soap Operas which pushed the P&G revenues to higher unthinkable levels.

You probably know where I’m going with this. Better show pieces lead to more eager viewers and they bought more stu. (My theory is that, as the shows became intriguing with stories involving romance, betrayal, and dark family secrets, viewers were in a hypnotic state of focused attention and they remembered commercials more than ever and so they bought more. Of course, better shows also led to an increase in viewership triggering more brand awareness but that wasn’t the only factor.)


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It’s The Same With Webinars As long as you’re putting on a great show for viewers, you’re going to see both viewership and sales conversion shoot through the roof. That’s a fact. It has little to do with what’s actually being sold. In fact, we have that very evident at Mindvalley. Two products, by the same author (I d on’t want to bring in the actual names, but the author is VERY well-known.) Product A has less than average satisfaction score. (meaning, it was less than ideal at that time. Even the name of the product was o — did not appeal to anyone. We revamped the product later though.)

Product B has a higher satisfaction score. (meaning, it was a better product. And the name had a better appeal.) By all means, product B could be a winner (better appeal, more quality). Yet, because the webinar for Product A was way more engaging (and more emotionally appealing) than Product B’s webinar, the sales for product A was 5X more than that of product B.

That’s the power of incredible content

This is why I made you promise to use what you are about to learn for good. The power of the webinar should never take your attention of quality products. Your webinar is an accelerator. You can accelerate your success. If the product has a negative NPS score, the pendulum will swing back and could wipe out the business as fast as the success came. Use wisely.

Now we’ve established the basic rule—i.e. there’s no exception to producing good, relevant, appealing content on webinars— let’s move on to the specics.


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HERE ARE 43 WEBINAR TACTICS WE USE AT MINDVALLEY THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR AT LEAST $20 MILLION IN REVENUE ANNUALLY.

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’ve categorized the 43 things (not in any particular order) into 6 buckets but you’ll notice the bulk of the things go into actually getting people to register for the webinar—which is the #1 thing you should be focusing on.


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ENGINEERING

YOUR WEBINAR


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Think appointment consumption What this means is that, don’t make your webinars a one-o thing. Make it a soap opera. Let it be an event that happens every week, or every two weeks, or p erhaps every month. Just like how people will set aside a specic time and day to watch their favourite TV shows, they’ll set aside the time to watch your webinars like clockwork too. Let’s say you’re doing a webinar every Tuesday at 6pm Pacic (which is when Mindvalley’s events air), people will automatically tune in. And in a short while, they’ll actually look forward to that particular time.


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Branding your webinars TV networks do that eectively. And so should you. Remember, the primary goal is to get repeat viewers. At Mindvalley, we’ve branded our webinars as Masterclasses. Or Mindvalley Academy Masterclasses. Sort of like The Tonight Show. But for personal growth. This is important for repeatability. If you keep changing the name, people not only will fail to remember the name, they fail to show up too. Lead pages use the name ConversionCast for their weekly show. That’s a very memorable name. And it’s an example of why even though your business may be small, you must have a good brand. Because there’s nothing like the rst impression, is there? This name should capture your core theme/hook of the webinar which is our next thing in the list.

Copyright © 2016 All rights rights reserved reserved worldwide. worldwide. || www.mindvalley.com

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Give it a hook/theme In order to do a repeated “Soap Opera” style never-ending webinar series, you’ve got to have an underlying story. We c all it our hook. Prison Break’s underlying story is a wrongly convicted prisoner, whose brother has vowed to go in and bring him out. At Mindvalley Academy, we’re champions of unconventional educ ation— education that you don’t get in traditional universities and schools but are extremely crucial to our everyday lives (they are still not taught in school!). So our underlying story is “a vow to get unconventional education to the masses.” And we picked a name that matched that hook/theme of education— masterclass. Guess what the “class” in the name reminds p eople of?

Education. This is our content hole. No one was doing that. When coming up with your webinar hook, look for content holes. What gaps do you see that your education can ll in? One way to look for content holes is using a tool we use called BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo will allow you to peek into the most shared articles out there. And sometimes you’ll see a pattern like this: certain articles don’t appear very often but when they do, they make people go crazy about it. That’s a content hole you can ll.


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04 The straight line is everything.”

Stick to a straight line process & refine it This has to be Vishen Lakhiani’s favourite. Throughout the last two years, he’s gone great lengths to patiently drill this into our DNA. It wasn’t easy for him. Or us. Lots of people didn’t like it. But eventually, we got it. And when we did, we almost slapped ourselves for not realizing it’s value earlier. “The straight line is everything.” And it isn’t said simply. The “Straight Line” is a sales process from Jordan Belfort — the man who built one of the fastest growing brokerage rms in Wall Street history (who then lost it all - remember that NPS score I spoke of before? I can’t stress this enough). The straight line is a step-by-step sales formula that works wonders when it comes to closing the sale. It’s ingenuity lies in the concept itself—a straight line process that always works. In fact, it doesn’t matter what each individual steps are. Simply by following a process and innovating u pon it, means EASY SCALING. So for webinars, our straight line is the entire series of steps consisting of 1) Pre-webinar sequence 2) Show up sequence 3) Webinar sequence 4) Post-webinar replay sequence 5) Post-webinar sales sequence and 6) Reengagement and Closing sequence. We’ll explain some of it later in this post.


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Stick to a straight line process & refine it (continued)

But here are 2 reasons why this is important:

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The straight line provides a set of clear newbie-friendly guidelines and checkpoints that are known to work when followed to the dot. So all you have to do is to simply follow the recipe and “cook” it. Whenever you get a new idea to implement on a webinar, you can test it by keeping everything else the same in the straight line and only varying one single element. It’s an unbelievably accurate tool for innovation—innovating on the recipe that is (there’s a slight dierence between innovating on the food and innovating on the recipe. Sometimes people innovate on the food ad hoc—a little extra sauce here, a little extra pepper there—and it clicks. However, they have no clue exactly what was the ingredient that made the dierence.)

However, the straight line is not just about the steps in a process.

It’s anchored to both our inner and outer world. Inner World: This is about your vision for the company—ours being making an impact on the world with unconventional education. Having this will help you manage the emotions and state of mind during every phase in the straight line. In other words, it anchors the “why” behind what you do.

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When you educate the team on the inner world, you’ll get everyone on the same attitude towards the techniques. There’s a dierence between a painter painting a Rolls Royce car and a painter painting the cheapest car in town—it’s the vision. The Rolls Royce car painter knows the vision is to create the ultimate luxury on wheels. So his attitude is dierent. He a ligns what he does to what the vision is—maybe he puts more of his personality in it or something. So when you hire people, you hire people that match your vision—not the skill you need. Outer World: These are the actual steps themselves as in what you actually do—but always start with the inner world rst. Then design a detailed step-by-step process to realize that vision.


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Reuse and rebroadcast successful webinars The title explains it well. If it ha s worked well in the past, chances are it will work well in the future. When done well with a straight line, you can almost predict your future. We’ve had several webinars that consistently bring record number of attendance and revenue whenever they’re aired. Even if you insist on doing real live webinars, copy the old webinar exactly as it worked before. Those who sign up repeatedly for the same thing want the same thing anyway. And even if they’ve watched the previous one, they won’t even remember it. Because if they did, there’s no reason for them to sign up for the second time (unless they really want to watch it again. Which is ne too).

Here is a banner from one of our most successful webinars, Unlimited Abundance


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Remember the most important metric -VPL VPL stands for Value Per Lead. Meaning, the average revenue generated by a person who signed up for your webinar. You get this by taking the total revenue from the webinar and dividing it by the number of registrants. And the idea is to keep a benchmark. Our benchmark VPL is about $7. And it goes all the way up to $35 and more. It’s sort of like the Nielsen ratings for TV shows. When the VPL dips below the benchmark, we know it’s best to pull the plu g on the show/ episode. There’s one other reason why it’s important. And it’s because VPL-CAQ = prots. CAQ is cost of acquisition of a registrant. Meaning the investment you make (whether to Facebook or Google) to get a registrant. Once you know your VPL, this equation dictates how much you can spend on your trac. When CAQ=VPL, your prots are 0. And this is the max you can spend to acquire a registrant. But frankly, your CAQ can be 2X or 3X your VPL and it all depends on the registrants’ lifetime value— we measure the revenue the registrant contributes to in 2-3 months time (buying other products or services).


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Use the “No List, No Money & No Product” tactic Think about this for a moment. What’s holding you back from experiencing all the success you’ve wanted in your business? Chances are, it has got to do with either of the 3—your list, the money you can invest and the product you can oer them. What if you don’t have all of these? What would you do if you had no money, no list and no product? Well, you at least need a few good friends. All you have to do is this: Oer to do a great webinar (think about one that lls a content hole) with someone who has a good following in your industry. And then sell their product as an aliate in that webinar. And what about the list? Where will you get your registrants from? Chances are, the friend you’re hosting the webinar with has a proven VPL for their product (be sure to ask.) Now tell your “other friends” that you’re doing this webinar and tell them the estimated VPL. They’ll mail for you. Voila. All you do is produce a great show and you will be rewarded generously. We do that at Mindvalley and it never fails to work. And if you want to take it up a notch, see the next tactic.


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Phish your JV partner’s audience This is nowhere as unethical as it sounds. Trust me. But it works only if you got a chance to partner with an industry giant. Let’s say you use the “No List, No Money & No Product” tactic to create an amazing webinar with a giant like Je Walker of the Product Launch Formula fame (or even better— someone like Tony Robbins.) What you do is promote the invitation to this webinar to everyone who talks or reads about Je Walker on the entire internet—be it Facebook, Google, Twitter, everywhere. Now, just to make sure we’re on the same page, I’ll repeat that. It’s a webinar with Je for Je’s product and you’re promoting it (for an aliate cut) to Je’s audience. The Aliate cut will probably make up for the bulk of Acquisition costs (CAQ) incurred. And you’ll have thousands of registrants who are hard core fans of Je. Now, they are in your list too. All you have to do is deliver an amazing webinar—packed with thousands of dollars worth of tips—and the new audience will love you to pieces and stay in your list forever. It’s especially good if the giant you’re partnering with is on a totally dierent—but related—niche than yours. One reason is, you can oer a new set of values to the audience you’re attracting. Don’t go for the obvious partnerships. Look for unconventional ones. For example, if you sell women’s handbags, partner with a popular make-up artist and educate them on how to choose the right bags that match your makeup. If you sell software for marketers, partner with an author who has a new book on entrepreneurship and teach them how to automate their business.


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Choose the best days to air the webinar Research shows that when asked to pick a date and time for their webinars, most people preferred Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. And it’s usually in the afternoons. So it’s safe to say, if you’re preparing a show, these are the prime times. We chose Tuesdays for our webinars because we have extended sales sequence that can run till the next Monday. And that’s another tip. Do you know most people prefer to shop online on Mondays? They’re fresh from their weekend shopping trip and it’s psychologically easy to pull out their credit cards. Or that’s what we think. But it works. So we chose our webinar day as Tuesday and we can end our sales sequence on a Monday.


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Monetize early Showing registrants a small related product oer immediately upon sign up is always a great idea and helps set back the cost of acquisition. Because a small part of your audience will be hungry for instant gratication. Or they’re in a buying mood already. Help them and you’ll recoup some of your investment immediately. Having a free trial for a subscription is a great idea of a low resistance oer that has potential for higher lifetime revenue. However, oering them the main product (the one you’ll be promoting in the webinar) is not a good idea. Because there h as to be some sort of surprise—either on the part of the product or the particular oer you’re making at the webinar. If they’ve a lready seen the product or oer you’re oering at the webinar, there won’t be sucient pattern interrupt that will lead them to take action.


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WEBINAR

INVITATION

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Serve appetizers Before you open up your webinar for registration, serve content that warms u p the audience. It can be a blog post, a video or an infographic. This also helps introduce the webinar topic and the teacher (if he/she is new) to the audience. It’s sort of like dating. You need to earn trust before you can proceed. Show th e creds. Show the transformation people are getting. And show the author up close and personal.


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Keep the bullets short We’ve tested and found that short but intriguing bullets work better than long detailed ones. I suspect two reasons. 1) Short ones are easier to read. 2) The vagueness of the short bullets make the viewer curious enough to register. Keep it short and snappy. Tease them intelligently. Don’t explain it away and drain the excitement.

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Let the visuals flow towards the CTA Firstly, have images of people on the webinar invite/registration page. It’s good for conversions. So if you have a special guest, make sure the guest’s photo is as c lose to the sign-up box as possible. People love looking at other people. Secondly, if you can, choose an image that has the person looking or pointing towards the CTA. Not always important, but if you have an opportunity to do this, you better make use of it. Like below. You may have seen these heatmaps before.

It validates both of what I’ve just said. The red areas are whee the attention goes to mostly. First image shows that the attention goes to the baby, but not to the CTA. The second image is a win-win. Attention goes to both the baby and th e CTA. Because us human beings love to look a t images of other human beings. And when you have the people look toward a CTA button, it causes curiosity as to what they’re looking at. Which increases readership and thus conversion.


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Facebook comments on Landing Page We’re still testing this. First, have a Facebook comment system active on the “Thank you” page of the webinar registration. And then h ave it displayed on the webinar registration page too. So people can see what other people are saying about the webinar. It is known to have worked for other well-known marketers with a loyal audience.


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Use countdown timers Timers increase conversion. Period. And it helps users know exactly when the webinar airs. Is it 48 hours from now, or 24 hours from now. You should have timers on the “Thank You” page, webinar invite/registration page and webinar access page. Plus, now with apps like http://motionmailapp.com/, you can have live timers in your emails too. For your last 2 emails, that go 48-hours and 24-hours before the webinar airs, have these little timers highlight the scarcity and urgency of the webinar.


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Offer replay upfront using exit pop-up Some people just prefer anytime replays. Others can’t free up that particular time slot you’ve chosen for your webinar. For these people, oer the webinar replay as a second option. Using exit pop-ups, we can oer the user that option when they decide to close the browser without signing up. We’ve seen 8%-13% boost in sign-ups because of this option. And no, don’t use the usual exit pop-ups. Use Exit Intent techn ology. Here’s an app for that. http://www.picreel.com/

Exit Offers | Conversion Rate Optimization | Picreel.com Picreel exit offers help to increase conversion rate and recover up to 25% of all abandoning visitors for you to follow up and retarget.


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Best 3 testimonials on the landing page Some marketing gurus say you can’t go wrong with testimonials. Use as many as you can on all your pages. We beg to dier. Having three carefully chosen, well-highlighted testimonials is much better than a page cluttered with unreadable testimonials. At least that’s what works for us for webinar invite pages. And how do you choose a good testimonial? Choose those that communicate specic outcomes that users get as a result of applying the principles taught in the webinar. Like th e ones that say “I 5Xd my revenue”, or “I earned $50,000.” When it comes to testimonials, specicity matters.


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Deliver a powerful 24-hour scarcity email Scarcity is a powerful marketing tool and it goes beyond mention that if you’re not using it, you’re probably missing out. For webinars, you can have a registration closing date (which obviously must be the time the webinar airs). So have the copy highlight the fac t that registration closes in 24 hours. And also, tell them they won’t even get the replay and other free resources unless they register.


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Focus on “what you’re going to experience” Your webinar is not just a webinar. It’s an event. An experience. Why do people go to watch movies and dramas in theaters? Because of the experience. So think as if your webinar is an event. And you’re delivering an experience. Focus on what they will experience. Will you be taking them through a roller-coaster of realizations? Will you be demonstrating how to actually solve the client’s problems? Will you be shining light on the client’s biggest enemy there is? Or will you be shocking the audience by revealing something totally new and unusual? Then, say so. Tell them how they’ll feel when they watch your webinar.


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Be clear in your invitation There’s a tendency among marketers to try to hype it up a bit. And in doing so, they dilute the message. Silly. Let the rst message be clear and direct. One of the rst webinar invitation emails we send follows a simple format called WWWW— which stands for “Who, What, Why and When”. And highlight the time investment. The idea is that the p eople who love your content will sign up immediately. They won’t feel oended by the unnecessary hype. On the other hand, for those who don’t sign up at rst, use a secondary angle (which may or may not be a little hyped up—hey, there’s nothing wrong with hype if it helps customer take action on their problems) to get them interested.


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Add a video on landing page No matter how clear your copy is and how visually you explain things, there are some people who prefer to watch a qu ick video to understand what’s going on. Give them an escape route by adding a short two-minute video to explain the benets. Explain what the experience is all about, what you’ll achieve by joining and what time investment is needed. Also add a video on the thank you page to congratulate them on their decision.


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Involve mystery The best webinars have a promise to reveal something of great importance to the audience. Just like the best soap operas are the ones which seem to prolong their mysteries. One of the most successful webinars at Mindvalley recently involved this promise, “we will let you experience a breakthrough technology that reprograms your mind in minutes.” But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. It can be like Mike Geary’s The Truth about Six Pack Abs webinar. Or Porter Stansberry’s famous End of America webinar. One of our most successful ones, called Unblock Your Abundance, was about 24 Abundance Blocks—but we never reveal what these blocks are—they have to attend the webinar to discover them. Remember, this is the name of the individual episode of your weekly show. The name of the show can be totally dierent—it is about your mission and brand.


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Benefit driven title Can you communicate the #1 benet of listening to the webinar directly on the webinar name? As I said before, one of our best webinars is the one na med “Unblock Your Abundance” — and the name immediately conveys the core essence of the webinar. Here are some of the catchy, benetdriven examples my brain can spit out right now—”Unleash Your Soul’s Potential” by Panache Desai, “Six Weeks To Six Figures” by Je Walker, and “Revolutionary Parenting” by Jan and Chip Chipman.

It helps if the name starts with a power verb like discover, unleash, experience or explore.


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GETTING THEM TO

SHOW UP


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Offer pre-training materials

Often marketers leave the registrants stranded for days and ultimately, they forget about the webinar itself. That’s where pre-training comes in. Give them videos to watch, assignments to do and engage with them. Give them results in advance. And at the same time, throughout the sequence (which we call show up sequence), remind them of the importance of showing up for the webinar. We sometimes highlight the Maharishi efect —the eect of having thousands of people together focused on a common goal. To further demonstrate value, you can also oer a PDF download full of testimonials and case studies. This gets them excited about the results they’ll get from the webinar and people love downloading PDFs.


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Send reminders (email and text message) Some people hate reminders. But as marketers, it’s our job to remind them of the training they have signed u p for. So yes, do reminders. But also oer some sort of value. Do keep educating the customer. Drop hints about what’s going to be revealed in the webinar. And the most important one you can send is the “It’s happening now” reminder. Often marketers send all kinds of hourly reminders but fail to send the “It’s happening now” message thinking that they have enough reminders already. Big mistake. The “It’s happening now” message is very powerful. Think ab out this. If you’re checking your email and you see that the webinar you wanted to watch is happening now, would you not be at least curious enough to tune in and see what’s going on? I bet the majority will. Do it. It never hurts.


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Ask a power question A power question is a soul-stirring hook that ca ptures the essence of the problemsituation that your audience is in. For example, for one of our abundan ce-related webinars, we asked registrants if they believe they deserve more abundance and why. And we asked them to post their answers on Facebook. People started writing story after story and the engagement went over-the-top with members relating to each other’s experiences and so on. We also have a community manager who oversees this kind of group engagements because it’s important to let the u sers know that every one of their stories matter. We read them all. This goes back to the golden rule of marketing. The #1 job of a marketing message is to get a response. Be it engagement, taking action to try something or even just commenting on a blog post. Make every message so compelling that they feel compelled to respond. Power question is one of those tools that gets a HUGE response every time.


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Retarget every step of the way If you’re not using Facebook and Google retargeting, you’re probably missing out. Every piece of the show up sequence—the content videos, the blog posts, the power question emails—all can be retargeted to audience depending on the pages they have visited. Facebook (and I’m sure Google too) allows you to do that. After they’ve registered, retarget them with pre-training content 1. For those who’ve visited the pre-training content 1 page, retarget them with pre-training c ontent 2. Or even retarget with the power question and let them post a comment on Facebook. It’s a fun way to keep them reminding of the webinar they’ve signed up for.


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Showcase the host

Remember The Oprah Winfrey Show ? Why do people keep watching the show and keep buying products featured in it? Because they love the host. Same if you want people to keep a ttending your webinars, you’ve got to let the host connect and communicate with the host. At Mindvalley, we always ask registrants to follow our hosts Vishen Lakhiani and Asha Gill on Facebook. When they do, they get a glimpse of the host’s personality—from regular updates and photo sharings. And they fall in love with them.


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Build A Community Around It One way to massively engage with the audience is to ALLOW them to communicate with each other. Because when the audience feels connected they feel like they’re not just a person with a problem. Rather, they feel as if they’re part of a bigger movement. And for that, we need a platform like Facebook. Or our proprietary platform TribeLearn. We usually, create a fresh new F acebook group for each webinar and let the users join where they can get special updates and extra resources. And of c ourse, we pose questions which trigger a conversation people can take part in.


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Create a “ladder of awareness” invite sequence Basically, there are 4 stages of awareness that users go through when they hear about your webinar. And when sending emails to ask for registration, you can send emails that correspond to these 4 stages. Keeping these 4 stages in mind helps you write emails and create ads faster because it’s a ladder where you reveal more and more of the things about the webinar.

Stage

1

What is it? There are people who’ll sign up for whatever you oer. This rst email is for them. Don’t try too h ard. In fact, they are oended if you use clever tac tics. Just tell them what it is and they’ll sign up immediately.

Stage

2

What’s in it for me? These are the people who didn’t sign up for the rst email. So explain to them all th e benets. What are you going to get out of this webinar? Explain the benets in detail.

Stage

3

Why this is different? This is for the people who didn’t sign up from the rst two emails. Chances are they didn’t sign up because they don’t believe that th ey’ll get the benets you promised. So what you do is explain your breakthrough new mechanism that actually makes it hard for them to not enjoy the benets. A little bit of hype helps. But not too much. Back up the claims with testimonials.

Stage

4

I don’t know The people who haven’t signed up yet fall into two groups. 1) They don’t want the solution you’re oering. Fine, we can leave this group alone. 2) Is the still doubtful group. They are saying “I don’t know, I’m confused, should I register.” Normally, what works for this second group is scarcity. “Last ch ance to register” works. So does “24 hours before registration closes forever” and so many similar scarcity-based messages. Whenever you use this ladder-of-awareness messaging, you’ll see better results than just repeating the same message over and over again.


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EXPERIENCE PHASE


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31 1 2 3

Take an audience-first approach All webinars are created equally in the sense that they are primarily for oering value. The more value you give to the viewers, the more impact you’ll make and th e more they’ll be willing to exchange their hard earned bills. But one of the crucial aspects of teaching anything is to remind them of what they’ve learned. Three things you can do throughout the webinar. 1) Break down the learning into concrete steps, 2) as you go through the steps, remind them of what you’ve already covered, and 3) always tell them what’s coming next. In other words, keep teaching and reminding them. And tell stories. Powerful authentic life experiences can teach much more easily than just lectures. Oer them your heart. Paint a picture of your “darkest night of the soul.” It’s engaging. And they will not only remember the stories, but also the lessons inside the stories will be deeply imprinted in their DNA.


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Pepper case studies throughout the class I used the word pepper here deliberately. You know what too much pepper can do to your dish, don’t you. Don’t make the webinar look like a cheap infomercial where it’s all testimonial after testimonial. Use them carefully. Choose detailed case studies and illustrate them in the form of stories. Refer to these case studies throughout the webinar. To make it easier for you, collect a ll testimonials and categorize them into dierent use cases. For example, during the webinar, when you say the guest teacher has helped 100,000 people, back it up with ONE or TWO relevant testimonials saying “Her work is phenomenally inspiring. It has the potential to awaken millions from their misery. ” Or when you say her work delivers fast results, bac k it up with ONE or TWO testimonials that say they got results in just X number of days. Or when you say how awesome your customer support and refund processes are, back it up with, again, ONE or TWO testimonials that say “I can’t believe there are companies like this. I’ve never seen such easy, honest and happy people before. ” You get the idea. Testimonials should be the rst thing your prospects hear right at the beginning of the webinar, throughout th e webinar and right till the end before you hang up the call. And do it artfully so it’ll look like you’re telling stories. Flash them on screen—let people read the full testimonial while you’re mentioning them.


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33

Give it a format This applies only for repeat webinars in the form of a weekly or bi-weekly show. Because format denes the staying power. If it’s a 60-min webinar with solid training for 40-mins, a gentle pitch for 10 minutes and a Q&A for the rest of the 10, then stick to the format. Format means every time they attend the webinar, the attendees can come with a certain expectation. It’s consistent. If people are not loving the format, change it. But in the long run, stick to it. Because your audience is expecting it. It’s like how we receive bank statements. We’re expecting it to be in the format we already know. Right? It’s similar to the concept of hero’s journey—every story has one.


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34

Drive replay consumption Timed replays work really well—give a 48-hour window for them to watch the replay. Or create a xed schedule for replay (even one where the prospect can choose their own time.) And remind them about the expiring link. Remember, the goal of every piece of marketing material is to create engagement. You’ve put out a webinar, so immediately after the webinar, for the next 48 hours or so, remind them to watch the replay. Just getting more people to watch the webinar will boost your Value Per Lead (VPL). Use retargeting Ads as well as emails.

35

Give them a reason to stay till the end No, don’t keep the best for last. That’s a recipe for massive drop os. Oer the best piece upfront and they’ll look forward to more. HOWEVER… you should have an interesting piece of information you’ll be revealing towards the end. And then constantly remind them throughout the webinar about that piece you’ll be revealing later. It can be a product give away. Let’s say you’re giving out a free gift for participants an d you’ll tell them how to get it only at the end. Or it can be a fun little tip or trick to solve one of their main pain points.


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36

Ask for feedback immediately after This is called digging for gold. After the webinar is done, immediately, often within minutes, ask them about their experience. You’ll get tons of feedback. You can use them in 2 ways. 1) Use them to improve your future webinars. 2) Use them to drive replay consumption (show them what other participants are saying).


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37

Have a mix of slides and face-to-face teaching Whether you have face-to-face teaching or audio-only teaching, slides are important. For some reason, people love to read what they are hearing. So make sure the key points are conveyed visually using elegant slides. You don’t have to go all fancy. A simple white keynote slide with black text on them will do.


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SALES PHASE


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Include a “Don’t buy now” message Did I go nuts? No. It’s actually a very powerful tactic. Remember the pre-training materials I mentioned earlier? Somewhere in that content, showcase your actual product. Leave a link to the live product page with normal price. But caution them to not buy it, saying a great discount will be oered in the webinar. What do you think it’ll do? It sets an anchor for the price point. It’s like an advanced Popeil price-drop (a Popeil drop is when you do price anchoring. Like when you say “it’s usually $500, but today it’s not $400, or $200. Not even $100. It’s just $29.) We usually include the product page link in the case-study/testimonials PDF that we give as pretraining material. People will check out the product page. And it anchors the price in their mind. When they attend the webinar and see the discounted price, now it looks like a real bargain.


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Display the “order button” at the right time If the order button is visible when the prospect rst arrives, your webinar will look like a Video Sales Letter. Whether you have a full sales page that drops down or just an order button, it must be timed to the segment of the webinar when you introduce the product. I like to read sales pages. Especially when I know I’m going to buy that product. A sales page gives the attendees the condence they need to buy. There are many webinar platforms oering this technology, for example, lead pages is a good one. We use our own blink webinars. http://www.blinkwebinars. com/

ORDER NOW

40

Send out product page link This, like the “it’s happening now” email is crucial. And it should also be timed to the segment after you close the sale. Because thing is, most people ch eck their emails and Facebook updates while listening to the webinar. So why not take the sales pitch to them? Send a very brief email with a link to the product and post it to the Facebook group as well.


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Sell hard Many marketers assume that once the webinar is over, people forget about your pitch and your teachings. So they put all their eort on selling them during the webinar. While one must sell h ard during the webinar, it’s not the only place you can do that. You can sell to them for up to a week after the webinar. What we do, as I told you earlier, is broadcast the webinar on Tuesday and for the next 7 days we’ll send them sales emails. And we try to hit as many psychological triggers as possible—mainly social proof (here’s what other people say how awesome this product is), commitment and consistency (you need a solution, that’s why you attended the webinar. why not take action) and the big one, scarcity. And our email sales sequence is timed to close on Monday (because as I mentioned before, people are back from their weekend shopping and they’re still in shopping mode). And you know when the bulk of the sales come in? During the last 24 hours. Yes, on Monday.

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Use profit maximizers You have a core oer. So when people buy, oer them expensive upsells that’ll help them solve problems even better. Like if you’re oering a course for $495, give the takers an opportunity for live coaching through a $5,000 package. And then for those who didn’t take the core oer at $495, give them an opportunity to buy a smaller product at say $97. One of the easiest upsells/downsells (and you can oer multiple upsells/downsells) is a low-risk subscription oer. Maybe a free trial. It has a high customer lifetime value and with the free trial it’s extremely low-risk.


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CLOSING

PHASE

43

Close cart, re-engage and thank the registrants Always thank the registrants. One of the last emails in our sale sequence is a thank you email thanking each registrant for taking the time to join us in the event. And give them a nal piece of content for staying in the community.

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Remind them to join your next webinar In addition to thanking them, you can also remind them of upc oming webinars. Don’t forget to reinstate your mission. Whatever your mission is, that’s the binding force that keeps you connected with your audience. Or if you kn ow what your next webinar is about, tease them about it.


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43-tactics-from-Mindvalley.pdf

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