Podcast highlights
00:54 – The series so far
02:45 – A hybrid approach
06:25 – Or you can do email
08:37 – Other options to choose from
09:56 – Getting them to stay
11:15 – More ways to optimize
12:26 – Too much follow up?
13:40 – They don’t have to buy
15:12 – There are other doors
17:46 – Wrapping things up
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Part 1 of the series
Part 2 of the series
Transcription:
James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com, and this is Part 3 of How To Use Automated Webinars In Your Marketing. Just quickly, if you haven’t listened to Episode 1 or Episode 2, you need to go and find them right now. Just look for How To Use Automated Webinars In Your Marketing at SuperFastBusiness.com or on iTunes, and you’ll hear Jarrod Robinson, my special guest. Good day Jarrod.
Jarrod: Hey, James, how are you?
James: Good, thank you. We’ll be talking about why automated webinars are such a good idea, and how you actually do them. We’re actually already up to the point now where you probably have a webinar running, and you’re sending out some emails and stuff. In this particular episode, we’re going to talk about more advanced stuff, so you really need to get the foundation for it, go back and listen to Part 1 and Part 2.
But for now, we’re going to go into this final part of the series, and let’s just imagine, Jarrod, that we’ve broken out our topic notes, we’ve brainstormed some things that people keep asking us, we’ve prepared a slideshow in 16 x 9 aspect, we’ve recorded it with some screen software, we were making sure we had the end in mind and that we taught somebody something really cool, we’ve asked them to go with our offer, and then once we recorded that we uploaded it into our media storage of choice.
We then set up our EverWebinar system with a registration page, with sessions and times, we put up a landing page using LeadPages or Thrive Themes, maybe using the webinar template that I’ve got on LeadPages.
And we’ve created a little ad with Canva and we drove some traffic to it and we gave away a PDF and we asked people on the thank you page to sign up for our online training session which you called “on demand,” which is fantastic. And they registered, and that’s sort of where we’re at. We’ve got this thing in play, how do we fine-tune this amazing supercharger that we’ve built for our business?
Jarrod: Well, it’s important to know that at this point, literally your work is done. So unless you’re sort of really in-depth, trying to fine-tune the cold traffic that you’re flowing to that landing page and so on, then you pretty much got everything already achieved, so you can hopefully sit back and start to see some of the results coming in. And I know that when I first rolled out my very first automated webinar and started to see sales result, it was transformative and changed me. I immediately went and started creating some more automated webinars to roll out for the next month.
The Hybrid Model
So at this point, you could be done, I just want to make that clear. But there are some opportunities to sort of take it further, and one of those is using the hybrid model. And I think this is a bit of a hidden gem, because the hybrid model lets you get into your own automated webinar and be in the chat box, so that you can respond to questions that appear while you’re already presenting at the same time.
James: Right. So basically you are watching the webinar as it unfolds.
Jarrod: You are.
James: And people are asking questions. I presume you’ve prompted that with your recording?
Jarrod: Absolutely. So in your recording, you can give different calls to action and ask for questions. You can also schedule little announcements to come out throughout specific time stamps. So what I tend to do is I’ll actually go through the automated webinar during the setup, and put in some common questions I get about that topic. And I’ll throw them out, and they usually start some of the discussion off on their own. The announcement will pop up at a certain timeframe, which also matches the video…
James: So hang on. An announcement in the chat pad?
Jarrod: An announcement in the chat pad, yes. So you say what you want to say, and who it comes from, and they come up with an announcement, and they usually prompt some of that initial discussion.
James: So let me just be clear on that. So let’s say at 10 minutes, you said something like, “Now one of the questions I constantly get asked is blah blah blah, and this is one of the things that we say, but if you’ve got other questions, go ahead and ask them in the chat box.” Would you say something like that?
Jarrod: Exactly. Yeah, you could.
James: And then you could prompt the chat box to say something like, “Go ahead and type your question below.”
Jarrod: Absolutely. So I sort of have those chat lines rolling in at specific points, and asking questions. But I also use it for a lot of the links and things that are mentioned. So if I mention a resource, then because I know people are busy writing stuff down, I use those chat lines as well to help communicate that stuff across to the audience, so that they can download the chat at the end, if they want, but that’s really nice and clear.
And then what I see is, when I come in on a hybrid setting, so I literally turn up to my own automated webinar and watch it, I then already have some discussion happening and I can get in there and sort of start to amplify that discussion even more. And it’s sort of like a 2 for 1, you know, I’ve got the best content being delivered, which is my best recording, but then I get to sort of take that discussion further in the chat box, which I think is so powerful when you’ve got those two things running side by side.
James: Right. OK, so that’s cool. And have you compared the results you get, the difference between you doing the chat and not having a chat?
Jarrod: I think it’s a little bit better, I don’t have a hard data set to compare it, but I do get people asking questions, and being able to answer them is definitely a good thing. So the hybrid model does work, but if you’re running 6 by 6 sessions a week, like I am at the moment, I can’t hybrid all of them. So what I tend to do is when I’ve released a webinar and it’s brand new and it’s in its first week, I tend to pick the really popular time zones in my audience.
The email route
So for me, there’s a couple of major time zones that people would be choosing, and I will make sure I turn up at those time zones so that I can be in there for the hybrid part. And that’s where I can have extra calls to action, and respond even more so than if I wasn’t there. But I should also point out that even if you aren’t there, you can have checks in place so that when someone leaves a question it goes to your email. And that could be manned by a team member, you could actually have a team member man the hybrid chat full time, I mean that could be an option for you.
James: So hang on, they’re in the chat, they ask a question and it gets emailed to you, and you email back a reply?
Jarrod: You can.
James: And that’ll get pushed into the chat panel?
Jarrod: No. So that will just go straight to their email inbox.
James: Got you.
Jarod: Yeah, so you get the email, often I’ll wake up in the morning, because there’s been webinars running at night, and I’ll have a series of questions for specific things that happened during the webinar, and that’s when I respond to them. People are always appreciative because I do get around to answering their responses. But maybe sometimes not straightaway, if I’m not running the hybrid model.
You can also just have straight chat, as well, so you don’t have to have that option, it’s complete customized.
James: Got you. And you could also have someone in your team do this, if they’re qualified, and alleviate the need for you to be involved whatsoever, but still have that human touch.
Jarrod: Absolutely. So for your webinar, we’re going to try both approaches. So we’re going to have a non-geotargeted webinar. Let’s say we’re going to pick 9 a.m. Sydney time, and that’s going to be for everyone across the planet. So whatever that translates to globally, that’s when they would turn up, and that means you could have everyone on at the one time, and you could have one team member whose job it is to turn up at that specific time every week, and engage in the chat, which means you get sort of everyone all on the one webinar at once, as opposed to on their own specific time zone.
So there’s a few ways you could do it. You could have a team member run full time through the hybrid setting, but if you just pick one session a week to run at a time, then you could just have them there for that particular hour or whatever it was.
James: And we can also create a chat that sends an email to our support team who can create a support ticket to respond.
More options
Jarrod: Yeah. So many different choices, and I mean you can just turn chat off completely, I don’t, but there are ways to do that. You can just have chat between the participants, when you can come back to it later on and review the chat. So there’s quite a few choices, and I’ve found that for me, the email option and then people getting an email back, which usually they’re pretty straightforward responses, very similar sort of questions, I’ve got like canned responses for those purposes, has been great. And it usually creates a dialogue then, so they’ve actually emailed me, and I get to email them back, and I can sort of start leading them down the path of the membership. So we’ve had members come from just that as well.
James: Right, OK. So what else do we need to know? We’ve talked about hybrids, we’ve talked about follow-ups, emails… In response to chat, I imagine after the webinar there’s things we can do to go along and sort of collect up all the people who did buy and didn’t buy.
Jarrod: Yeah, that’s where the tags can get really quite powerful. I know we spoke about delivering a very simple webinar in your first instance, but when you start to think about the specific points in your webinar, then you can apply specific tags when they’ve reached it. And for me, that’s massive.
Why so many stay
Most of my audience come, and they stay to the end because I’m actually offering them something in return. And for teachers, the thing that they want is a certificate of attendance. This is something that, they are highly sought after, they need to prove their training. So I mention at the start of my webinar that if you stay to the end, then you will get a certificate automatically emailed to you. And the software applies a tag when that moment in time appears, and they get their certificate. But in a different industry, that could be another goodie that you deliver based on how long they stay in the webinar.
So you could deliver another PDF, or it could be a guide, or anything, and what we’ve found is that that’s why we’re getting 96 percent of people who are staying in the webinars, because the content is really good, but they’ve also got this thing at the end that’s being delivered automatically if they reach that certain time. So that’s been a big, big improvement to our webinar.
James: Nice. That’s really cool. Basically, the certificate would be very compelling to your audience.
Jarrod: Yeah. I mean, I’m just thinking there’s probably examples of certificates for your audience too, that aren’t certificates, that would prompt someone to stay to the end. And it could be anything, really.
Optimizing the results
James: Right. So what else can we do to optimize our webinar results?
Jarrod: From this point, you know, it’s follow-up emails, and I hit them up a few times with the offer, and then if they don’t purchase they get sent down a different path, which gives them a coupon code, and then eventually if they don’t buy again, they get presented with another automated webinar. So if they haven’t bought the membership yet, then I hit them up with another automated webinar, and this is the cool part about it, because you know, I’ve got 6 or 7 of them, they just all become vehicles for tuning the same result and selling the same thing. So for them, they get another amazing webinar, but I get another opportunity to take them through the same process again and try and get them into the membership.
James: Right. OK.
Jarrod: So you can keep stacking them, stacking them on top of each other, even, and delivering more results.
James: You said you have 7 running. Are they different topics?
Jarrod: All different topics. So 7 different webinars at the moment, all around my core audience. Someone could come and do all 7, and I know that there are people that do, they literally wait for these to come out and register and get the next one.
When is it too much follow-up?
James: Look, I followed an ad on Instagram for Eben Pagan, and I went to one of his automated webinars, the first one I’ve ever been to. And he sends email every single day promoting another and another and another and another, I mean, relentless.
Obviously, they’re filtered, because it’s just too much. From when I signed up to that webinar, I got emails, often there’s 3 in a day. Three in a day, then every day, 2 in a day, every day, I mean just continual. Basically, it looks like he’s got the “buy or die” philosophy of marketing, and I imagine that if people were going to buy something, they would buy at some point, with that relentless pursuit of email.
Jarrod: I think so. There’s like a balance. Like for my audience, email is a thing that they get a lot of, teachers and so forth, so I’m pretty mindful of it. I hit them up a few times, and if they don’t buy, they go into just the general list, which is all about value.
Continued value delivery
And like I said, I do give my new automated webinars to my general list. So eventually, they’re going to get back on another automated webinar, and then get another opportunity to purchase. So it’s this whole vehicle of automation which leads the members. But I’m really happy in saying that even if they don’t buy a membership, they’re actually getting a really good result. They’re getting high quality training, and I know people are probably never going to buy, they just keep coming back.
James: Well that’s OK, and it’s kind of how our podcast works. I get 65,000 downloads a month. I’m not signing up 65,000 members to my membership. It would be great, but it’s OK. There’s people who just like to listen, and they get the results that they get. There’s people who want to take it to the next level, so I do make offers in each podcast to come along and join SuperFastBusiness membership, and a percentage will. And then a percentage of them come to the live event, or take up the high level program like SilverCircle, which you’re in, and those people get the results associated with that participation level.
So I think that with any marketing, there’ll be a percentage of people who might never buy, and it sounds to me like with your automated webinars, there’s no real extra cost to you to serve a few hundred people versus just one or two people at a time. It’s very leveraged.
Multiple front doors
Jarrod: Oh, completely. And like I said, like literally could be sleeping, I’m delivering high value content. And I think one of the forgotten things here is that even though I’m trying to sell memberships, the thing that people may end up buying from me down the track, and you made the point that just clicked, is they may actually come to one of my live sessions. So they might actually see what I do in an automated webinar, think that it was valuable, and sign up down the track for a workshop, or a conference. So there’s other ways that you could eventually get to them, and I think that’s something that I’ve sort of missed explaining.
James: Well, there’s one of the most interesting threads inside SuperFastBusiness membership at the moment, it’s called “The Power Of Content.” And it stems from one of the audience members at my conference. I can’t remember how she found out about me, however she went and looked it up, and she found an original course that I put out in 2010, and you won’t believe the topic of that, “How To Run A Webinar.”
Jarrod: Really?
James: Yeah. I’ve been on this webinar thing for almost 10 years, and here we are in 2016 talking about automated webinars, which for the longest time I’ve avoided. But I’ve been running webinars every single month for almost a decade, so it is a topic I’m qualified on. But what really came to the fore is how many front doors people use to find me. Whether it was a podcast, whether it was a live event, some people sit there for years before they turn into a customer, because that’s suddenly when they’re ready. It was such a revealing discussion, it’s up to four pages, and not many people have the exact same path.
So I think it’s good to come up with continual topics, it’s OK to daisy-chain them together, and of course, if you’ve got all this time leveraged because you’re doing automated webinars, have a think about what other marketing could you run in parallel to this to complete the marketing front that you have out there. And you can really leverage different content pieces as a front offer that has the thank you page upsell to the free on-demand training. So if you have more front doors, as Ed Dale was saying in his presentation at my live event, and as I’ve been teaching with Own The Racecourse, you’re going to have more offers out there, and if you have more offers there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll make more sales.
Series wrap-up
So Jarrod, just a quick recap. In this 3-part series called How To Use Automated Webinars In Your Marketing, we have covered how to do it, why to do it, what to do, what if you can’t turn up, or what if you’re not technically savvy, and all of those things, and we’ve given plenty of action steps along the way. So by now, someone really has a good chance of sitting down, coming up with a topic, recording something useful, putting it up on the Internet, setting up some software to deliver this thing with a landing page, running some traffic, and then fine-tuning their emails.
I hope we get some good comments from this, and some feedback. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, please share it with someone, that’s all we ask. If you want to put it out there for other people to find, that would be terrific. You want to check out what Jarrod’s up to, go and have a look at workwithjarrod.com.
I’m James Schramko. Jarrod, thanks for sharing all this stuff. You didn’t have to, and it’s lovely that you’re giving back to the online community, and I know that as a P.E. geek, this isn’t your primary thing, teaching other people how to replicate and clone your effective marketing systems, but it’s a lovely thing for you to come and share with us.
Jarrod: Yeah absolutely, a pleasure. Thanks, James.
James: Alright, so we’ll catch you on the next episode of SuperFastBusiness.com on a different topic, but for now it’s Jarrod Robinson and James Schramko signing off from this little 3-part series, I hope you had a great time.
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