Learn how to generate online course and membership site leads and sales using surveys with Rob and Kennedy of ResponseSuite. ResponseSuite is an email marketing tool dedicated to helping you get your ads and content in front of the right people. Rob and Kennedy share some tips and strategies for getting you quick wins with email marketing for your online course website.
One quick win Kennedy recommends that you can do with your current list is to segment your email list to people who are hyper engaged with your emails and send them specific offers to take the relationship to the next level by working with you, enrolling in a membership, etc.
Many course creators focus a lot on Facebook ads, YouTube, and trying to get more traffic, but one of the most overlooked resources you have is your current email list and people who are already subscribed to your content and have purchased from you before.
Your email list can be a super powerful tool. Rob and Kennedy have worked with businesses that have extremely small email lists and still generate one million plus dollars per year. Using your email list as a relationship building tool and really delivering value to those who subscribe by sending them content that is super relevant to them is a great way to approach the email list.
Segmenting your email list through something as simple as a two-question survey can help you greatly improve how you talk to your audience. Often we’ll see course creators work with very long landing pages meant to address all objections from their audience, and demonstrate a bunch of the appeals of their program. But by using surveys to figure out exactly where your audience is at, you can keep the messaging simple and get straight to the point of what they need.
To learn more about Rob, Kennedy, and the great work they’re doing at ResponseSuite, head to ResponseSuite.com and check out their two week trial for $1. They have a Survey Marketing Masterclass there that walks you through eight full campaigns. You can also receive a free 20-minute implementation call with either Rob or Kennedy.
Rob and Kennedy have also spelled out a hidden theme in this LMScast, so relisten to the episode and if you can find the theme tweet at them @ResponseSuite and let them know to win a prize.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
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Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by two lovely chaps, Rob and Kennedy, from across the pond. They are from ResponseSuite. You can find out more about that at responsesuite.com. It’s a survey funnel building tool, which we’ll get into in a little bit, and they also are experts in something that can help you, the course creator out there, with getting more leads, getting more sales, being more conversational with your audience, because they are an experts in email marketing, and they have a podcast called The Email Marketing Show. Welcome to LMScast, Fellas.
Rob: I don’t think we’ve ever been described as lovely chaps before.
Kennedy: Never. Many words have been used, but never lovely chaps.
Rob: Hey Megan, thanks for having us.
Kennedy: Yeah. Good to see you.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. You bet. And if you’re listening to this on your favorite podcast tool, check us out on YouTube. These guys have got a great studio and you’ll see the duo in action here.
Kennedy: And hair. Amazing studio and hair. Amazing.
Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. So for the course creators out there, one of the challenges they have is they have to wear multiple hats. They have to be an expert, they have to be a teacher, they have to be a community builder, which involves building the email list and communicating with people after they purchase. They have to be instructional designers and then they have to be entrepreneurs and do stuff like marketing and building a business and stuff like that. It’s a little bit overwhelming. So anything we can do to help people level up, especially on the marketing front as a course creator, as a coach, what is the low hanging fruit with email marketing? Where can people go first to get some quick wins on the email marketing area?
Kennedy: Sure. Okay. This is a really simple one. What I would do if I wanted to make some sales quickly today, I would open up my email marketi ng tool and I would look at who are the people who are opening my emails, who are my hyper engaged people, and then I filter them in some way and I’d send an offer to those people right now. They’re the people who love hearing from you, the people who love what you have to share the most. So you want to know the people who are hyper engaged and send an offer, an opportunity for them to work with you or purchase from you or to take up relationship to the next level. That’s the lowest hanging fruit.
Rob: One of the things a lot of business owners try and do is they try and … especially people who are selling online stuff where there’s, maybe it’s completely intangible things like courses is they’ll go after trying to get new customers all the time, so they’ll put a lot of their focus on, okay, great, how do I optimize that Facebook ads campaign I’m running? Or, oh, well, maybe I could take the ads campaign and apply it to YouTube and get some traffic from there. But actually they kind of neglect what Kennedy just picked up on that, which is the customers you’ve got.
Kennedy: You basically have to fish in the pond. Yeah. Fish in the pond you’ve already built for yourself. There’s no point in trying to scale it all up unless you work with what you’ve already got and maximize the relationships you’ve already got because you’ve already paid for that. You’ve already paid for that in time and effort in all that outreach and all that content you’ve put out there and all that authority you’ve been building in the various different ways. You’ve built a great community. Most of us already have a decent-size business under our noses for ourselves. I’ve been speaking to people on our podcast, the Email Marketing Show, who have tiny, and I mean tiny lists, tiny lists, who are making like a million plus dollars a year. And we often all sow this dream usually by people who are selling how to build your list courses that we need to have a massive list. You don’t. You really need to just focus on what we’ve got. So that’s one of the things I would certainly do fast.
Chris Badgett: I love that you mentioned that a lot of people stay focused and obsessed like you’re saying on the top of the funnel or getting new leads. A client of mine once said something about your existing customers are leads. They said that they’re not in the witness protection program. You can talk to me [inaudible 00:04:29]. You can make offers. And in fact, like you’re saying, it’s one of the easiest places to go to generate more revenue.
Kennedy: [inaudible 00:04:36] we were making for absolutely months here at ResponseSuite, we were like, why are sales numbers being hit? And we realized it’s because we’re really good at generating leads, but we weren’t doing any selling. How many of us are guilty of that, of going, Oh, well, I’ve got my front end offer, I’ve got an opt in bribe and I’ve optimized that out of it. I’ve built a beautiful page, I’ve got content out there, I’ve got a podcast, whatever it might be. And you’re not actually asking for any sales. So a really important decision and a big shift for us was to say, hang on, what about sales?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. And like you said, a small list can be a good thing. As a student and a coaching client of somebody else, there’s a particular program I’m in that doesn’t have a lot of people. I don’t know how big the list is, but I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars to be in there. So that person doesn’t even need … They have a lot of people in there actually, but they don’t even need that many to have a very viable business, and they’re really focused on a specific type of person, so [crosstalk 00:05:38].
Kennedy: Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:38] just need to have a deep relationship with a few people, rather than star fishing all over the everything, you can just really go narrow on that one thing.
Chris Badgett: Well, I know one of the things you guys are experts at is you call it mass personalization. How do we do that? What do guys mean by that?
Rob: So it’s all about asking questions that help you to understand who each of your customers are and exactly what they want. Because it doesn’t matter what kind of course you sell or who you serve or what that course is going to help them to overcome. They want it for different reasons. They want a different outcome. I mean let’s imagine if you created a course about how to do, I don’t know, Facebook ads. Well, that’s now going to appeal to people who want to do Facebook ads, whether they’ve never run a Facebook ad before in their life, or they’re currently spending $1 million on Facebook ads, but they think they can get better results than they’re currently getting. And if you think about that vast chasm, that vast difference between those two different types of people, you now realize, and everybody in the middle of those two people, you now realize that they need to be talked to in very different ways about things in a very different manner.
I mean let’s look at Netflix for a second. Netflix is such a huge monster with, I don’t know, millions of customers-
Kennedy: A friendly monster.
Rob: A friendly monster with millions of customers, but they totally understand the importance of personalization. And when they first came out, it was a little bit ahead of its time, I think actually. It felt like it was a little bit too soon when they first launched, but now we live in a world where most people can’t comprehend rushing home from school or rushing home from work to watch that program that’s on at 7:00 PM or whatever, or being late at school at 4:00 PM and they want to watch that program, otherwise they’ll miss it, because for years we’ve been trying to solve that problem, for years. VHS recorders came out so you could record that program. Then eventually that became a digital box where you could record it on the digital box and watch it back when you wanted to.
And now with the advent of Netflix and Hulu and Amazon prime and all of the rest of them, you can now just go and watch the program you want to watch when you want to watch it. And not only that, but they’re then able to personalize the experience that you’re having inside your Netflix dashboard if you like by showing you more of the stuff you’re likely to watch. So my stepmom and I share a Netflix account and she said to me … which I’m sure you’re not supposed to do, but she says [inaudible 00:07:50] on her profile on the Netflix account. She said, Oh, have you seen that amazing murder mystery thing that’s on the minute? She just told me what it’s called. I can’t remember now. And I said-
Kennedy: It’s called Murder Mystery.
Rob: Maybe. And I said, no, I haven’t seen it, because that’s not being suggested to me because it doesn’t fall in line with the stuff I like to watch. And so what we realize is that now, course creators need to follow suit. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a financed billion dollar company in order to do it. You just have to pay a little bit more attention, ask people the right questions to find out who they are, what they want help with, why they want help with that thing and then go after it.
Kennedy: And it’s really simple to do. It sounds like you need to have some technology really clever thing created. You really don’t. The resources, the tools, the things that you can do in order to sort of enter somebody else’s mental bubble is already around. For example, a really simple way of doing this. Is it okay if I sort of share a simple campaign? Is that kind of-
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Kennedy: … style we go with? I’m not really-
Chris Badgett: Bring it on.
Kennedy: … sure on the rules here. Cool. All right. So the simplest way, imagine somebody joins your and you want to sell them membership into your program that you’ve got. You’ve got one membership program and it probably solves a number of problems for a number of different types of people. And different people will … If it’s anything like my membership programs or membership programs [inaudible 00:09:10], if it’s anything like those, we sort of help different people through the various bits of content, right? So rather than trying to sell everybody through the same way and hope they’re going to just ignore, rather be confused by all the stuff that’s irrelevant to them on that sales page, what if you did this instead? Hello, you’re on my list. Thank you for being on my list. I want to know how I can help you the most. So I’ve put together a two question survey, a really simple two question survey. It requires you to do no typing, which means no thinking, and you only have to click your mouse twice. All I want you to do is go and take this so I can help you the most.
All right. Well, it’s going to take you probably three seconds, two clicks on my mouse. I’m probably most likely to do that, unlike the surveys I’ve seen in the past, which suck, they’re boring because you’re asking me for all this information about stuff that I hate and I don’t even remember anymore.
Rob: They’re then going to ignore that information anyway because they can’t read 1,000 people’s essay answers and do anything with it.
Kennedy: So they’re basically a waste of time and we know it as the person filling in a survey. So none of that is going to happen. So Hey, I’ll give you guys chance. I want to go and take that survey. So I get out the survey. It looks gorgeous. It’s fully branded, it’s trusted. I love that because trust is really important online, right? One of the questions is what’s your current situation? And let’s say we’re in a business. It’s a business membership just for the sake of this, right? Well, let’s say we teach email marketing just because that’s the thing that we talk about and we can probably give some rather sensible examples about that rather than something like, I don’t know, how to grow a mermaid on an October morning or something.
Let’s talk about email marketing. So we’re going to ask … The first question is going to be how experienced are you with this? Is it like I’ve never done email marketing before and I’m very new and I’m out of the gate and what the hell is all of this? Is it, I’ve done some and I sort of know what I’m doing, but I’ve never had any results? Is it I’ve had some results but I’m dissatisfied? Or is it I’m an absolute rock star, show me some advanced email marketing stuff? That’s sort of where I could be. Now, the content of what will be relevant to me depending on which one of those four things I choose will be very different. And the reason I’m going to buy your membership or become a member will be very different.
The second question is really about the challenge and that is what’s your current biggest challenge? That’s really important. What’s your biggest challenge right now, your current challenge? I might say my biggest challenge is one, growing my email list. Two, it’s getting my email list to engage with me. Option number three might be getting my engaged list to actually buy something from me. We’ll just take those three options. Based on what I’ve said in that question, when I hit submit on that survey, what we’re going to do is link our survey to our email marketing system. So that might be your ActiveCampaign or your ConvertKit or it might be your Mailchimp or whatever the heck it might be. You’re going to link it so that when the person hits submit on that survey, two things going to happen straight away.
The first thing that’s going to happen is depending on their choice of what their current challenge is, I want to take them to a different thank you page on hitting submit. And that thank you page is a sales letter for the membership angled specifically around your challenge. So I’m going to say to you, Hey, come and join my super duper email marketing membership because it’s going to help you get started with your email marketing and start building your list. Flip. And that guy’s talking straight to me.
Whereas Rob, he’s a bit more experienced. He filled out the same survey at the same time and he said, he’s really got a great massive list, but he’s getting terrible engagement. No one’s opening it. He hits submit and he gets a different page, and it says, here’s how to reengage and create maximum engagement from your email list. And I talk about this in our membership in here, here and here. Whereas Grace who works for us here at ResponseSuite, she’s an absolute email marketing ninja. She’s been doing it for years. She’s fabulous on it. And so when she hits submit, she sees a sales page, which is all about the same membership, but talking about how this is about using that next level of knowhow in email marketing. Simultaneously, something happens, so that’s the thank you page. Simultaneously, something else is going to happen inside of your active campaign, your Mailchimp or whatever the heck you’re using.
Rob: Sure. So all you now need to do is have the survey also apply different tags or put them on different lists. That sort of depends on which email marketing platform you’re using. Let’s say ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit or MailChimp or something, it’s likely to put them onto a list and, or apply a tag. And then that means you can now kickstart a campaign or an automation. They all have these different words, a campaign or an automation, a sequence of emails that go out based on that particular thing. So if they don’t join and buy it right there and then on that thank you page, well, now you get to send them a sequence of emails, but all the emails are relevant. I mean can you imagine if you have somebody who tells you that they are a brand new beginner, that they’re new to this, they don’t know quite what they’re doing, they’re going to one little bubble over there. But then the people who say that they’re quite advanced, they go into another little bubble over there.
And now what happens at the same time, you send one bunch of emails across to the beginner people and all of your case studies are about people just like them. This is Timothy. Timothy was brand new. He never even looked at a computer before. He didn’t know what a mouse was, and now he’s a billionaire. Maybe not that example, but you have given case studies that are really-
Kennedy: True story.
Rob: … really glued to them. But then you have somebody who’s really advanced, and their case studies are all about much more advanced things. Here’s a company that were making $10 million a year, and now by applying our strategy, they’re now making $100 million a year. And now what it means is if you compare that to the way you can currently do it, where you’re just sending people maybe a testimonial today and then an objection that you overcome the following day, you’re kind of just guessing and hoping that that’s going to fit.
Now, what this also allows you to do is beyond that initial sales process, is to find tune every single email that you ever send down that stream, down that path towards that person. Because now if you ever think, well, do you know what, we’ve just got this amazing new case study from our biggest ever client, I’m only going to send that to the people who can kind of see what it would be like to be that person, because I know as a beginner, if you send me this case study about some really advanced thing, I’m not going to be able to relate to that. I’m never going to be able to picture myself being in the position to sell my company for $1 billion because that’s not my world.
Kennedy: So it’s about for us as course creators and membership owners, it’s about meeting people where they are to offer them the help, the assistance, the outcomes that they need at their stage and not overwhelming them, because one of the biggest … If you’ve got a membership site, you’ll probably know this already, that one of the biggest reasons people leave membership sites is because of overwhelm. An overwhelm is basically I’m seeing too much irrelevant stuff and I haven’t got time to implement the stuff that is relevant. So if we can remove a lot of the overwhelm from the sales part of the element, that sales bit upfront, we’re going to attract more people who feel like we’re speaking their language.
If you’ve ever done any … I’ve never done, but from friends of ours who’ve had sales jobs, one of the things you do if you’ve ever been a salesperson is you sit down and do what’s called the consultative sell. You sit and find out where the person’s at and what their biggest challenge is. And then the way you sell your product or service to them is based on all of that. Well, for a lot of us sitting down opposite somebody selling is either terrifying, that’s what it is for me, or it’s not possible at the scale you want to do it. You don’t want to do it online that way, but this having a survey or a quiz type thing so early on in that process allows you to have that consultative sell without that terrifying moment of being in front of the person and also to do it at scale where you wouldn’t be able to do that for a lower price item.
Chris Badgett: Wow. That was awesome. I think I’m going to be signing up for ResponseSuite soon.
Rob: That was like ResponseSuite, the movie there. Sorry.
Kennedy: Yeah. But what’s important is yes, ResponseSuite is the solution that we built to do that. You can do that other ways. We’ve just come here to go, buy ResponseSuite 400 times. You probably should.
Rob: Haven’t we?
Kennedy: Have we? That’s what we’re about. We’re really about tailoring the experience, because I don’t know about you, but I get way too much irrelevant email.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. Low open rates is … I mean you can solve that. Be more relevant. I mean there’s companies that I’m on the email list, not individual communications, that I can’t wait to open when I see them, and that’s because they’re relevant. I wanted to dig into something you said and what in your two questions survey, which I think is super valuable. It’s a more mature way of looking things to … instead of just having one customer avatar or whatever you want to call it, to have those questions, it’d be like, you know what, you’re actually probably have got a couple of groups, and let’s figure out how to … What I want to ask you is what are … You kind of mentioned it, but I just want to revisit it. If you’re going to ask two questions, what are the best two questions that people could start using to think about? And you mentioned I believe, what’s your biggest challenge? You have the three core challenges that your business or your course solves. And the other one I think was skill level.
Kennedy: It’s like what age, how experienced are you? But there’s the way-
Rob: That’s one of our examples. That’s the cool one that we usually go back to. That’s the one that fits most circumstances. But really the big question you need to ask is what is the key information that I need to know about somebody in order to make a better job, a more informed sales process for them? So, for example, if you were to … I mean for example, let’s take you, you’re going to have people who are coming and joining and using your platform because they want to create a course and they want to make sure they get it right from the beginning, and they’ve decided that yours is the way to go. There’ll be other people who currently have their course in a different platform, believe it or not, and they’re-
Kennedy: Shocking [crosstalk 00:19:00].
Rob: … fed up with it. They don’t like it. Working, it’s clunky and they’re just dissatisfied and they want to move.
Chris Badgett: I have some, just to share with you is I have three groups, I call them starters, switchers and builders.
Rob: There you go.
Chris Badgett: And the switchers is what you’re talking on.
Kennedy: You, you need to figure out which one of those they are, and that’s one of your questions, because the way you’re going to approach that sales process is going to be different depending on that.
Rob: So what I’d encourage everybody to do is to think about what it is that they sell. So for example, one of our clients, Paul, is a salsa dancing instructor, runs a big salsa dancing school in real life.
Kennedy: That sounds like one of those terrible incident marketing example of being a customer. Yeah.
Rob: But also has an-
Chris Badgett: [crosstalk 00:19:37] golfer or whatever.
Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [inaudible 00:19:39] training, the usual [inaudible 00:19:41].
Rob: Fish juggling. Is that just me? But Paul also sells online salsa training as well. And so one of the big important things for him to know when somebody comes into his world is, are they somebody who considers themselves to have two left feet like me and doesn’t dance at all? Are they somebody who’s had some training but maybe not salsa? Are they somebody who’s done quite a lot of salsa training and wants to upscale? So in that case, that is about skill and proficiency in the opinion of the proficiency is in the eye of the beholder, proficiency in the eye of the customer. So that would be his example. For other people, it might be based on something more demographic like where did they live and how old are they? If you sell fitness, this is an example we see with a lot of our clients. If you sell fitness and health products, if somebody is 25 to 35, the way that you’re going to help them to exercise and lose weight and live a healthy lifestyle is probably going to be very different from somebody who’s 70 and is trying to up their health in that area of life. Likewise, if somebody is male, the way that their body responds to training is going to be different to if they’re female. And so there’s important information to know here.
Kennedy: It could be a do … One of the things you could think about, one of your questions could be, and sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. So just bear in mind, just another example, is to do with the media and how they like to consume information. So I know in membership that can be a thing. Example for us, if you like to consume audio stuff, we’ll suggest to people, go check out the email marketing show, it’s a podcast in their own podcast players, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, usual stuff. Like you did the beginning of this episode, if you prefer to watch video, you could find the Email Marketing Show on the YouTube as well. So we do the same sort of thing. Or if you’re like PDFs and stuff like that, we’ve got some courses or whatever that’s [inaudible 00:21:24] going to be.
So again, it could be to do with the media. How do they like to consume stuff? Because again in all of your messaging, you will focus on that messaging, Oh we’ve got all these lovely PDFs. You can read them however you want to read them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rather than, Oh, we’ve got this podcast to people who have never listened to a podcast before. So like Rob said, it’s literally about what are the questions I would have with a person if I was actually brave enough and skilled enough to have conversations face to face? And what are the fewest number of questions I could ask? Don’t go for more than three. So let’s get some on three. You’ve been to like, this is a terrible old-fashioned survey.
Rob: The other one that works really, really well is to find out what their sort of aspirations are. So for example, if you teach somebody how to make money on the internet and build their own business, you will get somebody who is in their 20s and wants to have a Ferrari and a 9 bedroom house and 15 girlfriends that you travel around the world with on your super yacht.
Kennedy: Stop talking about me like that.
Rob: I said 20s. And then there will be other people who are in their 60s approaching very soon retirement or recently retired and they want to earn an extra $2,000 a month just to pay the bills so their pension is a bit … their sort of pensions investments are a bit more fun money. And again, that’s very, very different. If you start using case studies and testimonials and [inaudible 00:22:45] wiz kids with their private jets and all this amazing stuff, that’s going to turn off. It’s not going to appeal to that demographic who are older. And because of this mass personalization, this idea of having conversations at scale on a personal level, it means, like you said before, we don’t have to have a customer avatar anymore and shoehorn all of our stuff and say, well, if you don’t fit our avatar, you can go away. We can now say, okay, great, we have this little pocket over here, this little pocket over here, and we serve all of those people and we serve them all equally well. I can help all of them, so I’m going to.
Kennedy: Do you remember that thing that people used to talk about a lot, which was to do with customer journeys like everyone’s on that same one stream. We actually believe that’s not really the case anymore because of the way Amazon and many other … not Amazon, but yeah, Amazon and Netflix and stuff all are now. We basically talk about dynamic customer journeys where people move between different streams and find themselves going through different sort of almost like different currents depending on the choices they make, and that allows them to have a much more personalized experience. So it’s really, really important to think …
Another big thing that I think people forget, and this is a bit more advanced and we’re not going to go into really how to do it today, but just to sort of set a seed or sow the seed of when … it’s really important to remember that people will change. So the person who joins your list is not [inaudible 00:24:00] when they join your list and you ask them some questions through a survey at that point, they’re not going to stay having that same challenge in that position forever-
Rob: Because you’re going to help them.
Kennedy: … because you’re going to help them. They’re going to mature. They’re going to not only take on your content, but take other people’s content. They’re going to research themselves, they’re going to ask their friends, etc., etc. So you also want to make sure that you insert surveys and other ways of segmenting your people throughout their journeys with you, throughout these different streams. And that might be when they’ve registered for a webinar is a great time to ask them a couple of questions about what they’re hoping to get out of it, or when they’ve just joined the new program, what they’re really looking forward to getting out of it, or when they’re exiting a program, if they’re going to leave, is another really good time to do that. The idea is to constantly be just checking in and going, then like a doctor comes round and does just the reviews of the patients on the ward and says, I just want to just take your temperature and see where you’re at and how’s that going? You want to just keep a constant finger on the pulse of that person.
Rob: And you can wrap these up in really cool, exciting ways. For example, we’ve got a customer who’s just in a really great thing. She’s releasing a new training and has asked people to decide on what the graphic for that cover should be. So what’s happening is there’s a survey goes out and it says, Hey, I’m working on this new video course, I think it is. Would you mind choosing one of these four covers? And when they get to the survey, there’s four images and they just click the one that they want to use and it sort of select that one. And then the second question appears, this is great, just so I can make sure that the content of this is perfectly tailored to you, which of these things would help you the most right now? Great. Done. Super quick. But the angle to get them into it was, which of these graphics would you find most appealing and would you most like to be the cover of this new artwork?
Well, couple of things have happened now. First of all, that respondent, the person filling in … the filler inner, as we call them, the person filling in the survey, they have now become sort of emotionally invested in the thing that you’re going to create. First of all, it’s very cool. They’ve cast their vote as to which one they want. That’s great. But the second thing that comes out of that is that they have kind of followed through. It’s sort of that commitment and consistency thing. What got them to the survey was the fact they want to have a say on that thing and they voted for it. But now the second question appears and now that makes them feel even more a part of it because now they get to contribute what they would like to be included in that thing, which means you can submit that, and now when it comes to go ahead and sell them that thing, you can focus so, so heavily on that specific pain point all the way.
Kennedy: And the thing with all of this though is the way the surveys have been done for absolutely eons is they’ve been anonymous, which is actually we believe is a real mistake. And the reason it’s a mistake is because while we could survey 100,000 people and find out that the biggest single proportion is 40% of people want thing A, we can’t actually talk to anybody individually because we just see them as big blobs of different bits of information. So the really important bit of information you want to add to the end of your survey is to ask for a contact information. So that could be someone’s email address because that’s usually how most of these email service providers target and use and store the information against a record is via that email address. So what we do is always ask for that email address.
Now, of course, if they’re already on your list, if your survey provider allows you to do this, you can pass that email address invisibly through the survey, which means it won’t ask for that email address again. It’ll just be attached to their record invisibly.
Rob: For them, it looks anonymous. It looks like they’re just clicking.
Kennedy: I mean, obviously don’t say it’s anonymous if it’s not because that’s shady and we don’t want to ever do that, but it means you can tag that person individually. That’s a really important thing here. You want to be tagging people individually. You don’t want to be just collecting a massive data which you can’t actually do anything with. This is about creating that mass, which is that scale individuality, that segmentation, that personalization.
Chris Badgett: Keep listening. This podcast is not over. This is just a special message about this episode sponsor, WP-Tonic, managed WordPress LMS hosting. Think of it as everything you need to have a professional online course training platform right out of the box, ready to go. Find out more about WP-Tonic’s managed WordPress LMS hosting by going to lifterlikes.com/tonic. Now back to the show.
That is awesome. And I’m looking on your site over on ResponseSuite and I’m looking at the use cases. You’ve got email segmentation, lead generation, webinar show up, membership retention, coaching application, customer satisfaction. All of these use cases are relevant to course creators. It’s not just about the front end and the top of the funnel and all this, for example, I wanted to ask you about the scenario where one of the dangers of a membership site, especially if you have a really prolific creator and expert is they make so much stuff and then the years take by and the years take by and the courses add up and then they start bringing in other experts to teach on their platform, and the platform gets really massive. And then when a new person drops in, it’s like, Oh my gosh, I don’t know where to start at. What do I need? How can you use a survey to guide the learning journey or to choose your own adventure?
Rob: So we talk about this a lot and it’s one of our favorite applications of this concept is that the moment somebody joins your membership program, the first thing that they could see either immediately after paying or immediately after logging in, whichever you want, is they see a survey. Again, it’s a simple two, maybe three questions survey. And again, it follows the same structure that we talked about. Who are you? In other words, where are you at? What do you want right now? What’s your big obstacle? And where would you like to be? So what’s your big aspiration? And so now what happens is as soon as they come in, you’re now able to ask them those questions and they’re able to click those options and hit submit. And now you can take them to the specific category of content that is going to give them the quickest win.
Because let’s face it, in membership sites where it’s a recurring monthly or annual thing, you have to get them quick wins. Otherwise they start to become demotivated, they start to drop off. And so if you can get it to the point where you might have 1,000 hours of content inside your members area, and we’re not saying that you hide stuff if they haven’t chosen it. Of course you still want to leave it and have it be accessible to them however it would normally be, but you can at least show them the stuff that’s most relevant first, and that can happen as soon as they’re filler in, you could create into a page where it’s like, great, watch these modules first that’s going to get you a super quick win. And what happens is your members finish up feeling like this is a membership site they can’t imagine not being a member of. If you can get them to feel comfortable and at home and this is for people like me. This is not for people who do what I do, this is for people like me.
Kennedy: You’re talking straight to me and my situation at my stage about my issues.
Rob: Our friend Natalie, who’s founder of bossbabe.com talks about market that … I’m going to paraphrase a little bit, but it’s something like the best form of marketing is the marketing that feels like you’re in my head. And so you want your members once they’ve just paid you to get in and instantly there’s no buyer’s remorse because the moment they get in, they see a bunch of stuff that solves their problem. They can see everything else as well if they go and dig for it, that’s fine, and later they’ll come onto that. But for the time being initially, they can see all this stuff that’s going to help them right there and then.
Now, furthermore, you’ll obviously want to have some sort of onboarding sequence that is designed to get them to find the Facebook group or the community or the forum, the bit that’s designed to help them work out where they manage their accounts and the bit where they do all those things. And that onboarding sequence can now be perfectly tailored to them as well, because like we said, not only does it connect to your membership platform to unlock all the right stuff, but it also makes sure that it sends them the right email sequence inside ActiveCampaign or whatever, in order to make sure that you say, Oh, did you see this module? It will really help you too. We’re a big fan of consumption emails. So getting people to buying and then rather than just focusing on selling them more stuff, actually sending them emails that get them to consume the thing they’ve just bought because that drives longterm brand ambassadors, which is a term that gets banded around too much, but it drives longterm fans, raving fans.
So for us, if you can do something that makes the consumption of your memberships not only easier but better for them because they get better results, then that’s a win-win. So the first thing people see when they’re joining your membership program should definitely be a survey.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I really appreciate that. Now, a lot of people listen to this are WordPress people. They want to own the platform. They have their own WordPress website. How would they use something like ResponseSuite on their WordPress site? How do they make it happen? It sounds like ResponseSuite really connects to whatever CRM marketing automation told people like, but how do you get it to be part of the website experience?
Kennedy: Yeah. Easy. So all you do is literally, once you’ve built your survey, which literally if you can use Canva or if you can drag an image on your desktop, if you can drag a thing on your computer, you can build a survey with ResponseSuite. Rob and I are not technical whatso-
Rob: We didn’t develop it. We have our developer here in the office who does all of that.
Kennedy: Yeah. So it’s all developed right here in the Northeast of England as well, which is lovely because we get to go, no, we still don’t understand.
Rob: Show us again.
Kennedy: Show us again. Make it simpler.
Rob: Collin, our developer, literally sometimes will try and explain something about the software to us and how it works. And we go, right, don’t get it. Explain that again. And he’ll say, right, imagine a little rabbit and the rabbit lives in a hole. It’s like story time in the ResponseSuite office.
Kennedy: Yeah. We sit on the comfy carpet. So literally you build the survey, and then when you configure it, on the next page you’ll tell it how to integrate with which platform, to integrate with, that might be your ActiveCampaign, whatever it’s going to be. And then on the sharing page, when you choose how to share that survey, got a number of options. One, you can take the URL like a link and you can send that to people, and it’s on a hosted page with ResponseSuite. That’s fine. You can do that. But if you want it inside of your members site so not only people who are members of your site who are paying you can see that, we give you a single line of code, you paste that into your WordPress and boom, headed right there onto your WordPress.
And literally as soon as you update something in ResponseSuite, it’s updated straight away there and then. We take care of all that resizing and stuff on the fly so that it always looks fabulous as well. And because your brand’s really important, what’s really nice about it is you can put your brand colors and logos and fonts and all that sort of stuff to make it really a brand for you. There’s nothing worse than go around the internet and go, no, I can see they’re using that survey builder because they all look bloom insane. It has to look right for you and has to fit really beautifully inside of your members site or your platforms. That’s what we’re really passionate about for you as well.
Chris Badgett: I love that. And a really just like a nuance thing you mentioned actually really early in the call I wanted to highlight is you said something about don’t make them work too hard or think, they just have to click. They don’t have to fill out. I think when people get into surveys, they think of this long multi-state lots of questions, paragraph texts that I need to type. It’s a lot of work.
Kennedy: Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean-
Chris Badgett: What’s your philosophy?
Kennedy: Yeah. We have a couple of things to tell you about that. If you’re building a survey, whether it’s with ResponseSuite or not, we’ll give you some tips in a second on how to get more people to complete your surveys whatever you’re using them for, because as we’ve already explained and by listening to this episode, watching this episode, you obviously understand already that there’s a value in running surveys to your audience. So we’ll give you some tips on how to get more people completing them because if they’re not completing them, then that’s kind of a waste of time.
Before we go into that, one of the things that does help with completion, but it’s what you mentioned there is about what we call clicking, not thinking. So when someone sees an open box, whether that’s a single line field or a multi line text field, they know I’m going to have to think about something and that will immediately make people think, I’ll think about that and come back to it. Well, we know when people come back to things, never. It’s never happening because they’re onto the next thing and looking at chickens.
Rob: And understandably.
Kennedy: Yeah. We’re all busy, right? Whereas if you present me a bunch of options, all I’ve got to do is decide and then click. I can be in my pajamas having a coffee in the morning, a bit hung over or whatever, and just click fairly mindless and I can do it as a reflex reaction without engaging my brain. That’s going to immediately get you some higher engagement and higher completion. Also the fact you’ve passed over invisibly that email address, it means they don’t even have to write in their own email address. How lazy are we getting as a race, by the way, these humans that we are.
The next piece of that in terms of getting more completions is put a single question per page. So split your survey up over multiple pages, put a single question per page. It does increase completion rate. The next way to add on top of that is to drag in and add in a progress bar so people can see how many more pages they’re going to be, because you don’t want to be part way through thinking, will this ever end?
Rob: If you’ve got two questions, they click once, they’re 50% of the way through, and when you see that bar shoot, that’s a really happy day.
Kennedy: Yeah. We’ve purposely programmed the progress by in ResponseSuite, so that’s actually encouraging rather than demotivating as well. So there’s a few things you can do, put a single question per page, clicking not thinking and put a progress bar in, and you’ll immediately see a bump based on if you’re not doing those things. Well, we certainly have and so have our customers.
Chris Badgett: Those are some solid tips. Rob and Kennedy, I want to thank you for coming on the show. We have a culture of learning here at LifterLMS and you two have done a lot of teaching, which we really appreciate.
Rob: A lot of talking.
Chris Badgett: Well, talking is teaching if you do it right, and you guys are doing it right, which is awesome. If people want to go deeper on your content and go into the Email Marketing Show, what should they do? And if people want to go into the survey tool ResponseSuite, what should they do?
Kennedy: Okay. A couple of things before we tell you that, [inaudible 00:38:07] things we hook you up with just for being here and hanging out and spending time with us. We really appreciate you. Well, we’re going to tell you about that in just a second. Before that, we have a little confession to make.
Rob: And it’s that just before we jumped on the call, we decided we play a little game, because we like to try and lighten things up. And so here’s our little game. We said we’re going to do the end of you. We’re going to give the best answers that we possibly can. It’s going to be a great episode if we can do it. But along the way, we’re going to drop in little hints or metaphors or ideas-
Kennedy: Tons of phrase.
Rob: … tons of phrase towards a particular theme. Now, that theme has nothing to do with courses or membership sites or marketing or business or life or any of that stuff. It’s a random theme and we’ve dropped in a little metaphor. So for example, if the theme, and it’s not, but if the theme was farmyard animals, then I might have said something like, Oh, I went to my favorite [inaudible 00:38:54] the other day and I was really pigging out on that big steak.
Kennedy: Oh, Rob, move out of the way of the microphone.
Rob: That wasn’t the theme, and those weren’t the metaphors because you’d have noticed those. They’re a little bit more subtle than that, but we dropped [crosstalk 00:39:07]-
Kennedy: A lot much more, to be honest.
Rob: Because the way that we market is all about dropping ideas into people’s heads and influencing and persuading them in a really nice way. So we had been dropping in little ideas into your subconscious mind and you might need to listen back to the episode again from beginning to end, but along the way, if you listen again, you might just catch what that theme was.
Kennedy: It will stand out like a sore thumb on that second listen.
Rob: If you hear it, and if you work out what the theme is, make sure you tweet us, it’s @responsesuite, and if you get it, you’ll get a prize. Don’t know what the prize is yet because we’ve just made it up. But you’ll get some sort of prize just to say thank you and congratulations for getting it. So that’s the little game.
Kennedy: Okay. If you want to hear more about email marketing, how we like to teach it, and also hear some guests talking about what they’re doing in their businesses, of course, you obviously love podcasts, you’ve got smashing, impeccable tastes, so listen to our show, the Email Marketing Show, free podcast across all the players. And finally ResponseSuite, well, what should you do about that? Rob.
Rob: So whatever you do, don’t go to responsesuite.com and just buy it, because we want to hook you up with something special for listening to the podcast. Instead of doing that, what you want to do is, well, here’s what we’re going to give you first of all, you can try ResponseSuite out for two full weeks for just a single dollar. That’s the first bit. So you’ve got two weeks to get in there, get it set up, create a survey, make something happen and start getting better results with it. That’s the first bit. And on top of that though, we’re also going to, because you can get that responsesuite.com, but don’t, we’re going to give you this, the first thing you’re going to get is a four-part video training course that we put together, which is called the Survey Marketing Masterclass. It’s actually not on sale at any price right now. When it was on sale, it was just under $500, and it basically walks you through eight full campaigns. We’ve touched on a couple of them here, but it walks you through eight full campaigns, talks about emails to send, the questions to ask, why it works, how it works-
Kennedy: The psychology sitting behind them.
Rob: … in full detail. So we’ll give you that for free just for taking the 14 day $1 trial, and you’ll get a free 20-minute implementation call with either Kennedy or myself. Whoever’s available will hop on a call with you and will find out where you’re at in your business, we will find out how ResponseSuite is going to work for you best. We’ll basically help you kickstart the implementation of it so that you can work out what questions you need to ask, how to do it, all of that stuff. So to get all of that, then what you need to do is head over to this URL. It’s responsesuitedeal.com/lifterlms. So if you go to responsesuitedeal, obvious it’s S-U-I-T-E, responsesuitedeal.com/lifterlms, then you’ll be able to grab all of that stuff we just talked about.
Chris Badgett: Rob and Kennedy, I really appreciate it. You out there listening, head on over to responsesuitedeal.com/lifterlms. Thank you so much guys for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
Kennedy: Thanks for having us.
Rob: Thanks for having us.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging results getting courses on the internet.
