00:00:01 You are listening to the Scaling to Freedom podcast and if you are an online coach or course creator, you are in the right place. I’m your host, Christina Bernhard. I’m an Ads agency owner that gets an inside look every day on what’s working and what doesn’t in the online coaching space. I’m here to share with you what we see works in our agency as well as what we see happening and changing in the industry. Stay tuned to up level your coaching business to have the freedom you want. Let’s get started.

00:00:32 Welcome to episode 188. Today we’re going to be talking about paid events and whether you should make your webinars paid. I’m going to talk about pros and cons because this is a common situation. I’m also going to talk about a specific case study of one that we’ve recently done just to give you an idea of what is possible with them. But I’m still going to go over the cons because it’s not really ideal in every scenario.

00:00:58 So I’m going to go through those different things and you can kind of decide for yourself, for your business if it makes sense to try a paid webinar. So the common situation and the reason why a lot of people are even interested in paid events and offering paid events is, and I’m referring to virtual paid events like webinars is because there’s often a lot of sign ups for webinars and live events, but not a lot of attendees. That’s very common, even more so just as time has moved on, it’s just less and less attendees for some of them. This isn’t always the case, so it kind of depends. But it is common to not have a lot of attendees and then also in some scenarios not a lot of purchasers.

00:01:43 So you might wonder if charging for the event will increase the webinar attendees or have higher quality leads. So that is typically why people are even interested in this and in some scenarios that is true and then in some scenarios you are missing out. So I’m going to talk about the pros and cons. So let’s start off with the pros. So the first thing is that if you are running ads, which you might be if you’re listening to this podcast, is that it offsets ad costs.

00:02:15 So this is a huge pro because you can essentially have, even if it’s a very low cost, you can essentially have the ad cost completely offset or you at least just have it help some. So you can have it where you are filling your events for free. If what you’re getting, the return that you’re getting is at least even, I would say a lot of the times it might not be completely even. There are so many variables to this as far as how people are receptive to it. But also the price point of the event is it $100 event for a ticket?

00:02:50 Is it like $11 for a ticket that’s going to really determine that as well. And then what that percentage of people is that actually go to the registration page and opt in and purchase a ticket for the event. So that is one pro which might be a huge one for you. So another one is that there tends to be more committed leads so they are more likely to show up live or watch the replay. So not necessarily always live, but they’ll at least be more likely to consume it if they paid for it.

00:03:23 There’s also this portion of or this component of allowing you to be able to stand out because the content is going to seem to be more valuable if you are charging for it. People are going to assume, and hopefully their assumption is right, that it’s going to be more valuable than a free webinar that they’ve signed up for. And so there has been a lot of talk on whether webinars are still worth it if they still work and I can tell you from the agency they absolutely still work. I believe all of our clients still run some sort of webinar and so whether it’s pre recorded or it’s live, so it does still work but it is different than the way that it used to be. It used to be that there wasn’t as many.

00:04:07 Now everyone has a webinar, it’s just part of it, but it really just depends on what the content is as far as how effective it’s going to be. So if you have a webinar that is not effective and by not effective I mean that people aren’t purchasing from it or people are not signing up for it or people are not consuming it at all, it’s likely the content, it’s not the strategy itself of the webinar. The fact that you chose to use a master class or something like that, it’s the content, it’s the messaging. So that is one thing that having a paid webinar does is it does stand out from all the other types of live events or webinars that people offer and again it makes it look more valuable. So the perceived value of it is going to be higher if you are charging for it.

00:04:56 So that’s one way to just attract more people but also attract people who might be higher quality. And by higher quality I’m referring to people who are more likely to actually purchase from the webinar. So another pro is that people are more likely to invest with you if they have in the past, even if it’s a small investment. They have done studies on this. This isn’t just assumption and this is typically why people offer tripwires.

00:05:24 I don’t like the term tripwire but that’s what they’re called. So that is typically why people offer those is because it does increase the chances of them investing with you again and them purchasing from you a second time if they already have in the past. So that is one thing to start that relationship off of someone investing in you. So those are the pros. So with the pros it offsets ad costs, you might even make money.

00:05:54 But that’s not the goal typically for that and you likely will have more committed leads hopefully that are more likely to purchase. You will stand out, look more valuable, the content itself is going to just be perceived as more valuable likely. And people are more likely to invest with you if they already have in the past, even if it is a small investment like a $12 ticket or something like that. So let’s talk about the cons. So the cons are of course you will likely get less leads.

00:06:26 So these are going to be less people into your event than if you offered it for free. So this one’s a fairly obvious one. So with that you are reaching less people and a lot of the times the sale is happening in the email sequence after the event and you’re having less people go through that. So less people are being exposed to the sales funnel. So this can be a huge con, right?

00:06:51 If you would have had it for free, you’d have more people going through and you’d have more opportunities to sell. Another con is expectations. So there’s no value system for cost of information, so people will have different expectations. And whenever you have a paid event, someone like who knows what exactly they’re going to be expecting, but depending on the ticket price they might be expecting way more than you offer and that could look bad, that could really hurt the relationship with them or hopefully they’re blown away. But there is a higher expectation as well obviously if they are paying for it.

00:07:31 So that’s something to keep in mind. That can be a con. And then the other obvious con would be that it is more complicated to set up, like just more tech set up. That might not really be a con for you if you have a solid team or if you are tech savvy yourself or you have the resources to do that and it’s not a big deal. That might not be a con but I would say the biggest con is just having less people go through the email sequence and less people going through the funnel.

00:08:01 So let’s talk about some hybrid alternatives. So I wanted to go over just a couple of options that you could do. If you are seeing that there are pros and there are cons, is there something kind of in the middle where you can have some of the benefits without some of the cons that having a paid event has? So one of them is having some sort of upgrade or add on option. So this one is mostly for maybe a larger event most of the time.

00:08:31 So maybe whether it’s a multi day event or there are guest speakers that are involved, you can have some sort of upgrade option. So usually the upgrade or the add on option to the event is either more information or like more resources that are added on to the event or they get access to replays. So if you do have an event and it’s live and you’re not offering a replay, they could pay for the replay. That’s an option. I would do that for a larger event or like a multi day, something like that.

00:09:03 Certainly if you have guest speakers and you’re doing kind of like a summit style event, then I would definitely have that add on option because with that you can still offset the ad costs and it still stands out more. And also people are again, they’re more likely to invest with you with whatever you’re pitching at the end of it if they have already made a small investment in the beginning. So that can be an option, but you’re still offering it for free, so people can still have the free option. So I really like that one because you also don’t have to worry about not having as many people through the funnel. You’re kind of getting the best of both worlds where you can still kind of offset some ad costs.

00:09:45 You still have some higher quality lead people in there, but you’re still having a good volume of people going through the sales funnel. So that’s one. The second hybrid alternative would be adding a tripwire to the end of the webinar. So, again, I hate this term tripwire. It just sounds so like sleazy, but that is what they’re called. So to my knowledge there’s not another term that’s really well accepted or well known. So I’m just going to stick to the term tripwire. Basically, you can also with the tripwire, again, people are more likely to invest with you if they already have in the past. It offsets the ad costs, all of those things. And this can be a good thing too.

00:10:27 If your event isn’t set up to be kind of like a larger event or a multi day or have those guest speakers, you can have the tripwire at the end so it’s free for everyone to join the event, but you are offering something on the back end so it can still have those benefits. Another thing that you can do is the people that do go ahead and purchase the tripwire, you can have them tagged, of course, and you can put them into a slightly tweaked email sequence that is a little bit more focused on them and knowing where they are at in their journey because they are a little bit further along than everyone else in the email sequence. So you can actually split those email funnels on the back end and have people go through different ones, whether they did just the free event or they did the event and also purchased the tripwire. So that’s another pro as well. It’s just another way that people can kind of raise their hand and show them that or show you that they are interested even more so than the other people, potentially, depending on what the tripwire is.

00:11:27 So those are some hybrid alternatives where you can still get the benefits of having the free event, having that volume, but also having the offset of the ad cost. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds. With both of those, I think it’s worth trying. But I did want to go over a really quick case study of one that is that nice hybrid where it was a free event. This one is a larger event. It had guest speakers, so it was perceived as a larger event. And it’s definitely one of the larger events that we run ads for in the agency. And we have been with this client for three years. So this is our third time running ads for this event. So I will say that that we’ve really nailed this down over the past few years.

00:12:17 And to be honest, I don’t know how many years that they have done this summit before us. But I know that it was not new whenever we started, but it has just gotten better and better every year, which is fantastic, because ads have gotten more and more difficult, the visibility has been more difficult, and also they’ve gotten more expensive. But the numbers have gotten better and better for this event. So the numbers here, I’m just going to break them down and I will try to explain what they are if you’re not familiar with some of these different metrics. But for the overall event sign ups, it was a larger event.

00:12:53 But from this specific ad, there were almost 5000 webinar sign ups and the cost per sign up was $1.53. I will say that. So $1.53 is not typical. This is in a specific industry where it just seems to be that much cheaper. Like their cost per leads are not typical of coaches. So I do want to point that out, but I’m just showing you the ratio. So don’t focus too much on the $1.53. But the number of upgrades is there were 566 people that upgraded out of the 5,000 and the cost per upgrade was $12. And so with that, the upgrader’s purchase value was $30,000. So they made $30,000 from these 5,000 free webinar sign ups just by offering that upgrade.

00:13:44 So I wanted to just point that out that it really can make a huge difference. And again, they still had all of these free event sign ups going through the funnel, so they’re still getting in front of a lot of people and serving a lot of people. Their total spend on this event was just over $7,000 and the return on ad spend was 4.19. So it was a great event. And again, every year that we’ve ran this event, it’s done well because it is again a really good event.

00:14:12 They know their ideal client, they know who they’re speaking to and they have really great guest speakers. So the lineup is fantastic for this event and so it sells itself for sure. But having the upgrades, we did do different things where we retargeted the people who signed up for free with content to upgrade and we also did it during the summit as well. We had completely different creatives for every day of the summit because every day of the summit there was different content, there were different themes and so everyone was sort of in a different headspace on each day of the summit. So the ads reflected that.

00:14:48 So the messaging was very dialed in and we really just ramped up those upgrades and it was really effective. So that’s another thing that you can do as well, if you do offer some sort of add on or upgrade, is that you can retarget them to encourage them to upgrade or purchase that add on on top of your actual webinar ad. So those are the pros, those are the cons, the hybrid alternatives, and an example of one where it did use one of those hybrid alternatives. And so the last thing is that I will say is to just test it, especially if you’ve been doing webinars for a while, you’re never going to know until you test it. So if free events are killing it for you, then stick to what’s working.

00:15:36 You don’t necessarily have to, obviously. What is it? If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Or don’t fix it if it’s not broken, whatever it is. But if it’s working for you, don’t worry about it.

00:15:51 Obviously you can still test it, but if what you’re doing isn’t working that well, you want to try everything until you find something that works. So this is something that could be worth trying, especially if you are able to offset ad costs. You can just keep putting that money in to the webinar ad and just keep scaling it up and ramping it up based on what you’re getting back. So that’s what we also do is we watch those returns and if they’re looking really good, then we will just continue to funnel that money back into the event just to get it larger and larger. So that is what I have for you in this episode today, where we’re talking about paid events and whether you should do that.

00:16:30 So hopefully you looked over the pros and the cons to see where’s the sweet spot for you, but at the end of the day, I say to test it and just see how it goes. It’s just going to be for one launch and you’ll get really valuable information either way. But I really do think that the best pro is that you can offset some ad costs. But we do still want to make sure that we’re getting a good volume of people going through. So either you have a really large organic audience that’s very warm, that’s ideal, right?

00:17:01 But also you are having the budget and you’re willing to put the budget into the ads to fuel that event. That way you can have a nice big launch and hit your revenue goals. So that is what I have for you this week. I hope that you found this helpful and have a wonderful week. Thank you for listening to the Scaling to Freedom podcast.

00:17:20 If you are a seven figure coach looking for ads management with an agency that partners with you to get your work out into the world and amplify your impact, see if we are a good fit by applying for a spot in our agency at christinabernhard.com/apply. Find the link in our show notes.