The Webinar Agency Doing $1.3M Helping Experts Retire With High Ticket Courses

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody. We have Joel Erway from the webinar agency all the way out of Niagara falls. Joel, welcome to the Marketers mindset podcast. What is it that you actually do and how do you generate revenue for not one, but you have two companies, the webinar agency and high ticket courses
Well, thanks Chad, for having me on. So we help experts semi-retire with high ticket courses. That’s our core mission statement. Yeah. I love that.
And if you could take, I know you have, obviously you have the webinar agency, high ticket courses, but who is your ideal avatar? Who’s the people that you love working with the best,
Worst creators coaches and consultants, people who are looking to launch their own, their own branded course. So whether that’s a personal brand or they’re looking to do a, a course or a program, we show them how to take their knowledge package up and sell it in a digital product of some sort and a blockchain million dollar course business around it.
I love it. So you’re essentially, in a nutshell, you’re essentially teaching people how to create an educational product and scale it up. Would that make sense? Awesome. And how many team members are on your team today? What’s like just a quick breakdown of that.
Oh God. I want to say 10 to 12 team members. We have myself, we have my operations manager, my wife we have Catherine Christie Mary Ellen, Marvin, those are our assistants on the content management side. And they’re all full-time. We have Matt, who is my partner on the agency side. We have Ben who manages our client success on he’s our client success director for the mentorship program. We have Layal who manages our enrollment and I’m missing anybody. Jeremy who manages our, our ads. I think that is, I think that’s everyone. Yep. We have one more. We have Neil who is a who was my personal brand content manager. Awesome.
It’s everybody full-time on the team. And is also, are you guys promoter in house?
Everybody’s remote except for myself and my wife. Yep. Most of them are full-time Jeremy. I’d say it’s 50, 50, 50%.
That’s fine. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. And and how many clients are you actively serving? I guess we’ll split this up. How many people are in the web webinar agency program? How many people are high ticket courses,
Webinar, agency, side, hundreds of clients. So in the past, I mean, so we’re a project house for the most part, we do some ongoing but I mean the past month we we’d take out anywhere between 10 to 15 new agency clients a month. And on the education side, we have hundreds of students in there as well. We just launched our mentorship program in a beta. We have about three people inside of that and we’ve had three to 400 people purchase our, do it yourself program. And I don’t know, four or 500 people purchase our introductory program called the power offer workshops. So yeah,
Familiar with both also as well. So congratulations on that. The webinar agency, how long has that been open for 2015, 15, and then high ticket courses
In one version or another has gone through a couple of rebranding exercises, but 2007. Yeah, 2017 is when that first version launched. Cool.
And if you could take both of the, all of your lists for both companies combined them together, let’s say your email lists, your mini chat bot subscribers w you know, whatever other lists that you have, you put them all together. How many people do you want to send a message from, or how many people you think
Probably about 15,000 15 to 20,000? I’m sorry, let me recount that we have like 30,000 people on social media for Instagram. If I look at my subscribers, that’ll probably, that’s probably between 12 to 15,000.
I always ask this as a fun question, because you know, a lot of digital marketers are going to come on here. What’s, what’s open rate on an average email, you send, what do you,
Mine’s horrible. It’s gonna, it’s an, I’m embarrassed to share it, but I will share it. It’s I looked at it yesterday. It’s about 10 to 12%. Okay.
Too bad. I mean, average that we’ve been getting on here, and we’ve had a lot of coaches on the space selling education as well, probably about 15%, 20%, like is probably the highest that I’ve seen. That’s pretty new.
We are having some email deliverability issues. Like even when I send stuff out from my Gmail account, like I’m messaging one person it’s going to spam, so, gotcha. Anyway, it’s something that we have to fix.
So, so pricing model now, let’s, let’s break down segment these two companies if I want to join the webinar agency, what does that cost?
So our, our done for you services, our partner services, going to start at 25,000. Okay. Our ongoing maintenance package is going to start at 6,000. That’s 6,000. Is that annually? Monthly. Monthly. Okay. Gotcha. Yep. So 6,000 a month and those are the two primary packages that we, that we sell on the agency side. Awesome.
And then high ticket courses. What does that look like?
So we just launched our mentorship program. It’s $7,500. And so that’s like our group program done with you a one time fee. Yep. Okay, cool. Yup. Do it yourself. It’s going to be 2000 and my introductory program is going to be $37. Then there’s some upsells and bumps.
You have a nice little value ladder going up there. So, so yeah. Yeah, we built it backwards. I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask this where are you driving all of your traffic to which offer
Right now? We drive it to our power offer. Workshop is our low end offer and we drive it to a minimum that’s the $37 offer. And then we drive it to our mini webinar funnel, which is our application funnel to for our high end stuff. So we drive it to both.
Gotcha. Okay. I’m going to dive a little bit deep into the metrics cause you are, you’re a webinar guy. Okay. and I, I always have tons of questions on webinars. In fact we just had another amazing entrepreneur. Our Keck who’s just on right before this. And we dove deep into some, some pretty big numbers. He’s running a lot of YouTube ads guys doing about about $200,000 a month running YouTube ads sending them to basically a VSL and also a webinar funnel. Right. first of all, there’s many different types of webinars. I know we always hear the term mini webinar, right. Which is something that you do a lot of. I think you’re in fact, the one who created it, if I’m not mistaken the concept of a mini webinars. So for the viewers and the audience that are listening and watching to this, what exactly is, what’s the difference between a mini webinar and like a full-blown hour, hour and a half webinar? What’s the difference really?
I’m going to try and keep this as short as possible. This is normally where I go into my long spiel. So I am going to I am going to slice this down, think about it in terms of this way. We have educational based funnels. Think of that as a marketing funnel, education based funnels. And then we have sales funnels and a lot of people would just combine those two. When in reality they’re completely different. Okay. You’re, educational-based funnels. Think of that as that’s what your webinar funnel is, where you are providing value upfront you’re educating the market and hopefully at the end you make them an offer. They decide to take her up on the offer. They don’t, but there’s a lot of educating that happens before you make the offer. Yep. A sales funnel is you’re making an offer right away. Like it’s a conversion funnel. Like I’m looking to make a sale. This can be a direct offer or it can even be a book, a call. Yeah.
Call to action is happening right away. Essentially
Call to action is yeah. The call to action is happening right away. But in the way that I think about it is like your promise is happening right away. Your core promise of your offer is happening right away. So when we came up with the mini webinar funnel, we were running into all sorts of issues with rising ad costs and our own long-form webinar funnel, wasn’t performing. And without going into the details, I I said, you know what, screw it. I’m going to do the exact opposite of what we’re doing. I’m not going to do an educational-based following. Cause I’m over educating my market. That’s what I ended up finding out. I was over educating my market. They wanted what I was offering them. It was just taking me too long to explain what it was before I even gave them the offer. So I said, I’m gonna flip it on its head. I’m going to make the offer right upfront. Once I hook them in with the promise, that’s my offer, my promise. Then I’m going to give them a little bit of, a little bit of marketing, like the need to know information. And then I’m going to have them book a call with me. Okay.
Let’s I want to just peel the onion back really quick on that so everybody can understand. So when you say make them the offer of fraud, if let’s say as an example, I’m selling a thousand dollar course. Okay. Are they jumping onto this mini webinar? And literally right at the beginning, I’m saying, Hey guys, today, we’re going to talk about this thousand dollar course. And this is, or this we’re going to talk about this and this how much it is, and then you’re going in from there. And then you’re actually teaching them about it.
Good question. So, no, we’re not going to reveal the price right away. I’m making them put my, my core offer. I’m referring to that as my promise, like that one core promise that you’re making, like I’m going to put that right up front, essentially like, yeah, my big bold statement. So like when I launched my first my first mini webinar and I launched it with a power offer, like my offers made right on the ad. Like the first thing that they see is my promise. My long form webinar was trying to enroll people into my done for you service and my high-end coaching program. When I flipped it on its head, I said, you know what? I’m just gonna make the offer right in the ad. And it’s gonna be a, Hey, listen, if I offer to make you a webinar what’d you take me up on that offer? And so that’s when like the flood Gates opened up and I was, you know, I went from paying $400 per application to $30 an application overnight.
Well, cause you’re not, you’re not making people go through an hour and a half of content to finally get to the offer to finally think of it’s a good fit for them.
Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of benefits to that. Number one, anyone who opts in to listen to your offer is an intended buyer, right? They might not, they might not take you up on the offer, but at least they, number one, know that you have an offer. So many people out there are building lists of, of an, an audience members people who never see an offer and they’re just freebie seekers. So whenever they do make an offer, they’re not conditioned to buy and they get offended when you make an offer. So there’s a lot of pros to building a, a buyers list or an intended buyers list. Yeah.
Gotcha. How long on average is that many webinars? What’s the timestamp on that
Shortest four minutes. And some of my clients, they are a little bit lengthy, so they can make them, you know, as long as 25 minutes, but on average 10 to 15. Okay.
Let’s go through some, let’s go through some metrics. I know, obviously I’m an analytics and marketing guy metrics are different for every single campaign. So for those of you viewing do not take these and stamp them and make, you know, make it seem like you’re gonna get the exact same results. But talk to me about maybe the results that you’re getting for your front away. If we can use one of them as an example, top of the funnel, how many people are you getting to? And let me actually rewind really quick before I ask this question, are you sending people to an opt in to watch that many webinar or are you literally sending to the page and the mini webinars just straight up playing right there?
You can do both. So we have done both. I’ve done both. And we wouldn’t take it if we really take it a two phase approach, they both work almost equally as well. There is there are, if you are doing an ungated many webinars where you mini webinars on the landing page and they don’t have to opt in to watch it. Normally I will build that out after we’ve kind of validated our offer. I know it converts and you know, it’s, I just want to, I want to get as high, a quality as lead as possible. Now when I’m working with clients and this is what we did when we first started out, if we’re testing a brand new offer, we will gate it. So we will just make it, we’ll make it, we’ll put a headline on the landing page with our core promise and we’ll, we’ll let them know, like we’re looking for clients, start your application now. And we will collect that lead because it, it generates a list and it validates our core promise headline because they’re opting in, based on that headline, you know, the core promises on. Yep. So we usually always start out with a gated mini webinar with a very, very simple landing page.
So you drive traffic, I’m assuming let’s just use Facebook ads as an example. Okay. Running Facebook ads to a landing page. What’s your average opt-in on that gate.
Yeah. So I’m going to speak in terms of percentages because costs are going to vary every single market. Yep. So percentage we’re shooting for at least 20% opt-in rate on, on that. They tend to be a little bit lower because you are making a direct promise or direct offer. So it tends to be lower, but
You’re waiting out the people who are just not a good fit right off the bat. Exactly what you want to do because you’re saving time on the back end. Right. For all your sales reps.
Yep. So we’re going to see on average 20 to 30%. Cool.
And then, so let’s keep, let’s see, let’s go down the funnel really quick, 20, 30% opt in. How many of those people, I don’t know if you’re tracking this, but how many of those people are making it all the way until the end of that video and then actually applying.
Yep. So of those first initial opt-ins you’re going to have a dialed in funnel when you convert 10% of those, opt-ins into a call into an application and a recall. Right. so those are the kind of benchmarks that we look for 20 to 30% on the first step, 10% of those people to schedule a call and, and apply.
Is it using long form or short form applications? Like, are you asking 30 questions to like super qualify them? Or are you just like, Hey, give me your name, email, phone number, pick a time. Let’s do this.
Normally we’ll do around like eight to 12, somewhere in that, in that range. You don’t want it to be too too long if it’s cold traffic. Cause it will just turn them off. But you also want to make sure that these people are, are, are vetted. So we do about age 12. Okay.
Fair enough. Where are all these leads go? And what’s CRM using
Personally, we use Kartra we’ve used ClickFunnels. We’ve used active campaign. We’ve used convert kit right now. We’re on Kartra because it’s an all-in-one platform. And for the most part, I’m, I’m relatively happy with it, aside from their page builder, but I’m going to yeah,
Because there’s a big, there’s a big question Mark in the space. What do you like better Kartra ClickFunnels and why? I view them as two completely
Different platforms. Like I like ClickFunnels page builder better and funnel. If it worked, I would like their funnel tracking better, but I have never found it to be accurate and I hate cartridges page builder, but I love a lot of other things that they’ve got going on in love all in one. It’s great. Yeah, they really should. I wished that they had taken the best of like the click funnels page designer and implement it because their patient desire kind of is archaic and is a big pain in the butt, but fair enough.
Okay. Hey. All right. Well, let’s keep going. We’ve got a couple of minutes left here. In the last 12 months, if you take the webinar agency and high ticket courses, I don’t know if you want to split them up so the audience can get a better understanding and learn from it. But how much revenue have you generated the last 12 months for these companies?
Yeah, so we are pushing so the education side is going to be, it fluctuates a bit, but it’s about I’d say it’s about a 70, 30 split. 70% of the revenue comes from comes from the agency side and 30% comes from the education side. So we do about 1.3 million total collective. And so whatever that means,
$1.3 million. You guys have third, you said it was 13 people I think on your team, right?
Yeah. I I’ll be honest with you. I think nine of them were brought on about wouldn’t past six months.
Congratulations.
We kept it relatively. You know, we, we kept it relatively a lifestyle business for a long time. And now that we’re really growing the education side, it’s, it’s grown, it’s grown.
That’s awesome. Where do you see yourself in 12 months from today? What revenue number do you would you like to be at fast forward 12 months now that you have team? Cause you got Bronto. That’s a lot of people, nine people.
It is, it is a lot of people. I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t think in terms of revenue, to be honest, it’s it sounds weird. Like I’ve, I’ve you would have asked if you would have asked me three years ago, I would have told you, I thought in terms of revenue, but I worked four days a week. I this is it’s it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a lifestyle business, but kind of not, I’m not in it to grow a huge company. I’m in it too.
I’ll rephrase it. I’ll rephrase the question. What goal would you have for yourself to hit in 12 months? And that can be revenue. It can be, I want to work less. It could be anything. What would be your number, one thing that you, if you could have anything, what would it be?
I biggest goal right now is to grow my personal brand. And it’s not really to grow a huge company. Like I’m not one, I don’t want to build a massive education business. I don’t want to grow a massive group coaching program. I am very with my clients right now and, and I’m really looking to grow the personal brand. So get on more stages, get on more get more get more exposure. And as a result, everything will grow. So might not be the answer you’re looking for, but
Nope. Yeah, that works. That works perfectly fine. So last question I have for you. I’m going to say aside from Kartra, what’s a favorite software tool you use in your business today?
Favorite software that I use today? Got it. I mean, w what am I on right now is probably Google sheets. Is that sound? I like building I like building spreadsheets. My, my background is in engineering, so I like coming up with formulas and seeing it all work automatically. So I’ll say I actually enjoy working here.
Google sheets, Google sheet. I love Google sheets and Google sheets, it is. Ladies and gentlemen. Joel Erway all the way from Niagra falls with the webinar agency and high ticket courses. Joel, thank you so much for jumping on the marketers mindset podcast, and we will see you here in the near future. My friend, you got it. Thanks, dude. Good one.