7 tweaks to make more sales of your online course, membership or group program

When it comes to selling your online products, it's the small tweaks that often make the biggest difference. So until you can hone that underlying strategy and make those adjustments, you just won't see the big results that you're always hearing about. In today's episode, I'm sharing 7 tweaks to help you make more sales of your online course, membership or group program—and they may be different to what you think.

– The importance of understanding your audience—not just on the surface, but diving deep into what makes them tick.
– How addressing the Magician's Gap will not only drive your content creation but will help your audience with their decision to buy during cart open.
– Why talking in “expert language” can cause a disconnect with your audience—and what language to use instead.
– How collecting testimonials can instantly connect with your audience (if they're written in a way that leverages their value).
– How gauging your audience's “warmth” will help you decide how to grow your audience between launches.

 

 
Today we are talking launch tweaks, the little tweaks you can make in your next launch to have a big impact on the sales that you make. Now, the smallest tweaks often make the biggest difference when it comes to selling your online courses, memberships, and group programs.

You can follow the best launch plans, you can emulate what you see all of the big names doing in their launches. But until you get that underlying strategy right, you are not going to see those results in your launch. 

So I'm sharing seven little things that might not sound super sexy or super shiny, but they will make a really big measurable difference to your launch. 

 

Tweak #1: Do your audience research.

The biggest thing that will impact your launch results is how well you understand your audience, and you might think that you understand them really, really well, especially if you've been working with them for years but you can't skip the step. And sure, you can send out a survey and you can get those surface-level insights, which are pretty useful. But what really makes a big difference is diving below the surface. And the best way to do this is on some kind of call, zoom call, phone call, somewhere where you can ask those follow-up questions.

You know when they tell you that they are feeling overwhelmed. Now you can ask them, well, what specifically is overwhelming you? And then you can understand what's really going on for them. And your launch content can speak to what's really going on in their minds and in their lives and the result of this is that when you write that launch content and that sales copy, your ideal client who is reading it, they're going to think, oh wow, they really get me. This is the right offer for me. 

 

Tweak #2: To understand the magician's gap for your ideal client.

Once you have done your audience research, you might start to see that there's a big knowledge gap between where your ideal client is right now and where they need to be to be ready to buy from you and until you bridge that gap, it's going to be a lot harder for you to sell to them and this exists with literally any offer. It's not just with courses and group programs and memberships or anything that you are live launching, it exists with literally anything you are selling. 

The only difference is that live launching is this journey where you are helping your audience to bridge that gap in real-time with you. Basically, the entire purpose of your launch is to bridge this gap and to help your audience to make a decision about whether your offer is the right one for them or not. So once you've uncovered the magician's gap, now you can create content that bridges the gap. You can create a launch-specific lead magnet that bridges it.

 

Tweak #3: Stop talking in expert language.

This one isn't easy because it requires you to put yourself in your ideal client's shoes and to think about how they are experiencing the problem that your offer solves.

We're coming at it as the experts because you've probably spent a lot of time learning about the thing that you teach, it's really hard then to take that step back and think about how is my ideal client experiencing this. What is actually going on in their lives? And if your content needs to get the right attention online, it's likely because you are talking to them in expert language which then leaves those ideal clients thinking, oh, this isn't for me. This isn't what I need. This isn't the solution to my problem, and they keep scrolling.

 

Tweak #4: Spend more time helping your potential buyers to make a decision.

Spend less time talking about the features and benefits of your offer during cart-open and spend more time helping your potential buyers to make a decision. 

Yes, somebody might want to know how many lessons and modules and live calls are in your program or your course, but that's not what's going to make somebody get off the fence and decide whether to buy or not.

What they really want to know is, will this work for me? Is it possible for somebody like me in my situation to get this result, to have this desired outcome? How is this any different from every other solution that I've already tried and already failed at? So during cart-open in a launch, Instead of counting down the days until doors close and hoping that you'll pressure somebody into buying at the last minute because they don't want to miss out, instead, how can you help them to make an educated decision about whether your offer is the right one for them or not? 

 

Tweak #5: Send out a non-bias survey. 

So after the doors close, send a survey to the people who chose not to buy. And I know this feels so scary. It's like asking somebody who dumped you to tell you everything that's wrong with you. That's essentially what it is, right? But this is the most effective way to identify the gaps in your launch strategy and your launch content. You will get a much better understanding of any of the knowledge gaps that you maybe didn't address in your launch content or any of the questions and hesitations that you didn't address in your cart open content.

 

Tweak #6: Collect social proof and leverage it.

Ideally, don't ask somebody, Hey, can you write me a testimonial? Because that's going to put them on the spot and they're probably going to write something like, this was a really good course. I got a lot of value out of it. It was really easily taught, and I liked the teaching style and the lessons were really good and like, yeah, that's nice, but it's not super useful. It's not going to help somebody to make a decision about whether it's right for them or not. So instead, ask a past student to jump on a call and ask them questions about their experience.

Or create a survey with specific questions about their experience, rather than just asking them to write a testimonial and then take the answers that they give you and turn those into a testimonial, and then send that testimonial to them to approve or make any changes if they want to. 

This process works so much better, so much more effectively than “Can you write me a testimonial?”. Because they want to give you a good testimonial, but they don't really know how to craft a testimonial that's effective. 

 

Tweak #7: Grow your audience between launches. 

Your first launch is going to be pretty easy because you've probably got a fairly warm audience. Even if it's a tiny audience, they're probably pretty warm. The second launch gets a little bit harder because now you need to get some new people into your email list, into your social media audience, and that means intentionally growing your audience, either organically or with paid ads. 

 

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