– The right time to run a webinar and why it matters
– How to make your webinars most effective
– The 3 types of bonuses you can offer
…and much more
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Transcript:
Hello there health coaches! Have you ever tried selling your products or your services on a live Webinar? Oh, I know it sounds a little bit scary sometimes. This is called a one to many approach as opposed to a one to one sales conversation that you may be doing with your clients. Now this would be one too many. And as you can imagine, that’s very efficient. And when done well, I have found it to be really quite effective. So today we’re going to be talking about when the right time is to run a Webinar, for example, when you’re first starting out in your business, when you’re a few years along, like when in your business is it appropriate and how do you know? And then once you run a Webinar, how are you going to make it fabulous? How are you going to make it work for your bottom line?
My name is Michelle Pfennighaus. I am a certified health coach. I have my own private practice and I act as a mentor for my fellow health coaches. And you may have seen me if you’re a student or a graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition as I am part of the curriculum there. Okay. If you’re here with me live, go ahead and give a like if you are interested in or if you’re already running webinars, I would love to hear what your experience has been around these. And I’m happy to take your questions in just a moment. So go ahead and put those in the comments now and I’ll have time at the end to go over those.
So, our big question for today came from Shannon. She posted in our group and she said, I am considering hosting webinars and wondering how many of my fellow coaches are hosting them. And if so, has it really helped you close the sale and grow your business?
Good Question Shannon. Because webinars, let’s face it, they are lots of work to put together and they can be a technology headache. So if they didn’t work. I would absolutely tell you do not bother. You know, honest to goodness, it wouldn’t be worth your time. But like I said, I have found webinars to actually work really well for selling, so I’ll tell you a story. A couple of years ago I held a Webinar because I wanted to fill my practice with more one on one clients and that’s not always the case. Sometimes I’ll hold a Webinar to sell like a five day program or to sell like some sort of group program. But in this case my goal was to get more private clients. So I put together a Webinar and I believe it was called, ‘How my clients lose weight and keep it off.’
So that must’ve been pretty compelling because people signed up for it, you know, I wouldn’t even say I really knew what I was doing now in terms of like picking the best title or the best topic, I just picked a topic that I knew my target market, my audience was interested in. So I held this Webinar and I directed those who are watching to go to a URL where they could apply. This was at the end. I said, you can go here to apply to work with me. The webinar itself gave away all really gave away the special sauce. I’m like exactly what I do with my clients and you would think you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t give away all your information, but people do not pay you for the what, you know, for the bullet points, for the information. Information is free. Anybody can go online and get information. They’re watching your webinar or they’re getting free information. That’s fine.
They’re going to pay you for the how for the implementation. So the Webinar taught them basically what I do with clients and then it was like if you would like to do this with me and get the results that my clients get, go here and fill out this application. And I got a lot of people headed over to the application. Um, it was great. I actually gave them a general idea of how much the price was going to be. I didn’t give an exact dollar figure but I wanted them to know it was going to be a significant investment. So don’t bother applying. If you think this is going to be, you know, $50 or $100. I think the packages were like $1500, so those who applied knew that, so they were pre-qualified in that way. I went through and chose the applicants that I thought would make a really good client and got on the phone with them at that point, um, you know, scheduled like a 15 minute call to connect one on one and closed nearly 100 percent of the calls that I had and just bum, bum bum and filled up my client roster.
So that’s just one example of how I’ve used webinars successfully. But I thought that’s one that you could all kind of relate to because not everybody is running a group program, but almost all of us are selling one on one coaching packages. So that’s one way of how I’ve had really good success. Now in general, it seems, what I have learned through the years is that if you’re selling something at a low price point, like $99 or $25 or whatever it is you’re selling like an eBook or a five day something or other, you don’t have to do a Webinar. You may be able to just send a series of emails to your list, you may be able to do something like a five day challenge and at the end of that you could sell something that’s at a lower price point, so in that case a webinar wouldn’t be essential.
However, if you’re selling a higher priced item, higher ticket item like private coaching or even a group program that’s like $2,000 to join or whatever it is, anything above that $1,000 dollar mark seems to sell best using either a private one on one sales call and I know we don’t like to talk about it that way, a sales call, but that’s what it is. You guys, if you’re doing a health history or if you’re doing a consultation, I mean what you’re really doing is having a sales conversation. So anyway, let’s just call a spade a spade. You’re going to sell your high-ticket items either with a sales conversation that’s one on one or a sales conversation. That is one too many via Webinar and that seems to hold true kind of across the board with online marketing. I’m sort of depending on the price point of what you’re selling is how you determine the method for selling. It makes sense, right?
So is this the right thing for you? We have a lot of new coaches in our group and what I don’t like to see someone who’s just starting out, maybe they have a list of like 60 of their friends, family members and 10 people that they met at the farmer’s market last week or whatever and then they’ll go through the process of putting together a Webinar or getting people to sign up for the Webinar and it’s like two people signed up and only one of them came. And it feels like such a bummer. We don’t want that to happen to you. It’s really, it’s not effective. It’s just not going to be effective for you. It’s going to feel bad. So what I think is that if you’re mailing list is, let’s say in that 100, maybe even 200, 300, like on that smaller size, I wouldn’t do webinars yet.
Like I said, there’s a lot of work that goes into them. There’s a lot of technology, a lot of bits and bots that you have to put together. It is worth it if you are reaching a large audience, but just like off the top of my head, uh, don’t hold me to these statistics, but anything that I offer to my list, and I think this is true pretty much across the board for anybody I offer a Webinar, I offer some free download, whatever it is, you know, only a certain percentage are going to take me up on it. So let’s say that your list is a thousand people and let’s say I want to do easy math here. Let’s say 10 percent signed up for your Webinar, which would be crazy, like 10 percent signing up for your webinar would be a very, very high number.
So that would be 100 people signed up for the Webinar. Usually only a third of them actually show up. So that would be like 30 people actually attend your Webinar, which is fine. And then again, only a percentage of those who show up or watch the replay, which of course not everybody’s going to watch the replay. If they miss the live event, but some will, so let’s say 10 percent of those who actually watched or were there for the Webinar take you up on the offer that you’re making. That would be three people I hit, so it’s a little bit of a numbers game and I encourage you to wait to do the big webinars until you have a larger audience. Okay. Um, however, if you’re already there, then what are you waiting for? Because this is a really great tool. Here’s a mistake. I have a lot of things to say about this but me just saying this right now, a mistake that people make is also holding a Webinar and then waiting maybe three months and then like holding a completely different Webinar and then waiting three months, four months and doing it again, like picking a new topic, doing whole new Webinar for their audience and that is so much work and not advised.
I did that for many years. I was always trying to reinvent the wheel for the same group of people. Essentially the same group of people. Right? My mailing list changes a little bit, but more or less it’s the same group that would be seeing what I was putting out there, so what I have now learned and I can’t believe what a difference it makes is it’s more beneficial to take one Webinar, offer it to a group of people, then learn from what worked, make it better and do it again to a different for a different group of people or you know, maybe there’ll be some of the same people. So one way that you could do that is to segment your list. Maybe the first time around. You only do your Webinar for like a half of your list and then you make it better and then you offer it to the second half of your list.
So that’s one way to do it. Another way to do it would be like if you’re running Facebook ads, you could run Facebook ads and get a whole new audience to sign up for your webinar. But by doing the same thing again and again and iterating on it, you will have better results. You’ll come up with a webinar that converts as opposed to all of these different webinars that may or may not convert very well, so we talked about where you need to be in your business. If a Webinar is viable for you. Now what if you’re thinking, yeah, fat chance, Michelle, I did not have a thousand people on my mailing list. I don’t even have 500 people. Don’t sweat it because I have something for you. If your list is on the small side, I want you to go to healthcoachpower.com/double because I have a free training there that will teach you how to double and eventually triple and quadruple your mailing list very quickly.
So again, that URL is healthcoachpower.com/double. Okay. I want to go through some of the details now for what you actually need to do in order to host an effective webinar and we’re not going to be able to go through all of it right now. I do go through this in detail and provide like the whole technology setup for using zoom to host your Webinar, all of that stuff, plus the done for you email templates inside my course, Healthy profit university. Okay, so it’s like a whole thing. We’re not going to get into all of it right now, but these are the most important bits and let me know if you have any questions if you’re here with me live. Okay. So the first thing that a lot of people don’t realize that they need to do is that once somebody signs up for your Webinar, it’s really, really easy for them to forget or to not prioritize it.
So it’s important to send lots of reminders and not just reminders that are like, hey remember webinar on Tuesday, but engaging emails beforehand so you might send a funny story or you might ask a question and you want to do something ahead of time to keep people engaged with you and remembering who you are and why they signed up for your event. So you keep them engaged beforehand. You definitely want to remind them like an hour before the Webinar, 15 minutes before the Webinar and sending them the link to join you, and then once you’re on your live Webinar and you’re broadcasting and you’re probably a little sweaty, blotting your forehead like this, what you want to do is first of all, be very well prepared. You know you’ll have your slides. You’ll either be facing the camera like I’m doing now or it’ll be going through a slide show or you can do both at the same time.
I’m. I always have a script next to a next to my slideshow that I can refer to because I don’t read it like a script word for word, but sometimes you get lost. Sometimes somebody asks you a question and you just forget where you were. So I like having everything mapped out for me right there. And what you want to be doing is giving your viewers a ton of value. Like I shared with you earlier, I told my webinar participants exactly how I help my clients lose weight, but you don’t want to just say, okay, here’s everything you need to know. Um, and also I offer private coaching. There’s a real disconnect there. You want to give viewers value in a way that leads naturally into your offer. So it’s almost like I’m going to tell you x, y, Z, and then you’re going to be wondering which is what my offer is going to solve.
Do you know what I mean? So, it’s almost like you want to create your content to leave, uh, a hanging, you know, of like a hook at the end, you know, a big cliff-hanger like, oh, well, what comes next? Or how do I actually do that? This all sounds really good. But, and then you make your offer that solves that problem for them. So for example, let’s say that your target market is women who have Hashimoto’s. You could do a webinar about, um, how to know if you have Hashimoto’s, right? Going over signs and symptoms and the test that you should have done and whatever. And you’re giving out this information and then it would be, wouldn’t it be like the question, everybody’s mind, they’d be thinking, Oh yeah, I think I, I do have Hashimoto’s, or I know I have Hashimoto’s. Now what? What do I do about it?
So then you would offer your private coaching for women with Hashimoto’s, right? Like it just makes too much sense. So, do you want to really combine your content with your offer in a way that they just don’t hand in hand? The other thing that’s really helpful to do with a Webinar is to have a deadline of some kind to encourage people to act because if they know they can sign up for your private coaching any time, then they’ll be like, cool, I will do that someday. And you don’t want them to wait and do it some day. You want them to do it now before they forget who you are. So having a deadline is really important. One thing that I did when I held the Webinar and then I just told you about is I said I’m only accepting, I forget how many but like x number of clients this fall, so if you want in, you know, I won’t be accepting any new clients until next year apply now.
So that was sort of like the Oh, like motivation, I need to go ahead and do this right now. I can’t wait and I give a date for when they had to have their application in by. So you could do something like that. Another way that you can impose a deadline, even though truly like any day of the week, if someone walks up to you on the street and says, Hey, I want to be a client, like you’re going to sign them. Right? But you have to create some urgency. So another thing you can do is you can create a bonus. We’re going to talk more about bonuses in just a second, but you can create what they call a disappearing bonus. So you could say, yes, you can sign up for my coaching package 365 days a year. However, if you sign up in the next seven days, you’ll get up, up, up, and it should be a bonus that is massively valuable or appears very valuable because someone’s going to go, oh, I don’t want to miss that.
So that’s a great way to get people to actually take action for you. Another deadline that you could play with is like a price, something where you’re playing with your price. I don’t love discounting. I really would encourage you to not go here first, but it’s something that you’ll see done all the time. So I just want to mention that you could say, you know, this package is usually $2,500 sign up by Friday for, you know, $2100 or something like that. You know, you’ll save $200. But again, be careful with discounting yourself. It tends to have the Walmart effect. People tend to undervalue you overall if you lower your prices. And then the last thing that a lot of people miss out on, there’s this, there’s a huge opportunity after the webinar. So yes, you have somebody who’s attention. Hopefully you have their attention for that 45 minutes, hour, 90 minutes sometimes that you’ll be on your live webinar with them, but very few people are going to like go to your website and sign up for the thing right there, and then they’re going to think about it or they’re going to have to hop off early.
You know, it’s very easy for them to just go on with her life and forget about everything that you shared with them. So well. Some people may sign up right away. You want to catch all the others. I always send a series of follow up emails after an event like that. So you would send something that same day with the replay and then every day for the next say five days, seven days, and you can do it different ways. But that would lead up to the deadline. And then on the day of the deadline, that’s like today’s your last day to get the bonus. Or today’s your last day to get your application, whatever it is you might send out sometimes up to four or five emails on that last day. I know it sounds like way too much, but it works. It works because people are busy and it’s very easy for them to overlook these things and just hit delete and forget that they actually really did want to sign up, but there’s other things going on in their life, so it’s really important to stay in communication with them. Oh, okay. That was a lot of information on webinars. Again, I’m happy to answer any questions. Little water for my dry throat there.
I want to talk more about bonuses. I thought these two questions went really well together. So, this is a question that Lorraina asked and she said, I’m planning on running my first cleanse next month. What kind of incentives do you suggest? I offered to get people signed up. I was thinking of doing something along the lines of invite two friends and get 25 percent off or something like that. Any suggestions when it comes to that?
So Lorraina, I don’t know. Maybe you’re doing a Webinar to sell your cleanse, you don’t have to. Cleanses are usually in the category of less expensive, but again, you’re selling one to many and usually want to have a big group for our cleanses and detoxes and these types of things.
So anyway, you might want to think about it, but in terms of what kind of bonus you can offer. So one thing that you see a lot of isn’t early bird incentive. It’s nice from a business point of view because if you’re putting together a group program, there’s a lot of work that goes into that. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that you have a group instead of waiting until the very last moment to find out that only one person signed up. I mean I hope that doesn’t happen to you, but these things do happen. So I always like knowing, yes, I have a group like 10 people signed up today, so I know I have a group running who I can just put it out of my mind that I may have to cancel or reschedule or whatever. So when early bird can work really beautifully for that, and sometimes that’s done with pricing.
So if your cleanse is like $99, maybe they sign up today and they get it for like $79, that’s very common. You can also do an early bird with a bonus. So sign up today, sign up by whatever date and you’ll get such and such bonus. You just have to remember that this is a bonus that not everybody in your group is going to have. So it can’t be something that is part and parcel to your program. If everybody needs recipes, then you can’t make the recipes a bonus for the early bird. Makes Sense? Now let’s talk about that because you could also have a bonus that everybody gets and a way to create that bonus is to take something you’re already giving them and call it a bonus. You don’t have to come up with this whole other thing for them. You could say like, I’m doing this cleanse.
Here’s what your. You know how you’re going to feel. This is the problem. It’s going to solve for you. You’re going to do x, Y, Z, and as a bonus you’ll get this cookbook with a set of suggested meals for the week. I mean really you were going to give that to everybody anyway, but everyone loves to get a bonus. It increases the perceived value of what they’re getting. EU bonus. Oh, that’s exciting. So there’s a little bit of psychology behind this. It’s why you see bonuses offered the way that they are. So take something you’re already doing. Call it a bonus. Everybody gets it. And just in general when you’re trying to come up with what these bonuses should be, particularly if you are adding something extra, they usually come in three flavors. One would be more access or more personal support to a bonus that I’ve seen coaches do.
In fact I have done this myself is offer a bonus of a one on one session with you if it’s like a group program and that can be really nice because you can use it as a sales conversation potentially to turn someone into a private client. But anyway, they are proceeding it as a one on one session with you to review what’s gone on in this group program and decide what their next steps should be. So I’ve seen a lot of coaches do that with some great success there. So that would be an example of giving somebody more access or more access to you or more support as a bonus. Another type of bonus flavor is get it done faster. So trying to think of an example here, something that you can get done faster. Let’s say that it’s a group that you’re running that’s going to help moms feed their family on a budget, you know, maybe get it done faster is a bonus that has like a bunch of meal plans already created for them.
Okay. Actually that starts to fall into the other category which is done for you. But anyway, something that you can give them that would make their progress go faster. It could be a bonus and then the category or a flavor of bonus would be done for you. Something that is literally like, here I’m giving you this thing that you can use, so now you don’t have to create it yourself anyway. So those are all ideas for bonuses and Lorraina, your idea of invite two friends and get 25 percent off, that’s a little complicated in my mind, but maybe it’s like bring a friend for free. Just really simple, um, would be a really great way to get more people involved potentially. And that may work if that’s your goal, to get more people involved as Google assistant plea sign more people up early, then think about an early bird price and if your goal is to just create huge value for whatever price point you’re putting out there, then consider, uh, the more access, more support, get it done faster or done for you type bonuses.
Oof so much to say today you guys and it just like the week before Christmas as we are recording. Who knew that I had so much to say about webinars the week before.
Okay, We’ve got a question here from Alayna, and I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly, Allana. Alayna, I think it’s Alayna, she says, has anyone had a client who decided to stop working with you around the halfway mark? This happened to me today and I’m struggling at how to respond. This person signed on for a 12 week, one on one program, paid in full. In my agreement, I included what types of topics we would review, which also consisted of a market tour, shopping trip and meal prep session. She was enthusiastic and seem to be on board. Then it became apparent to me that she had no experience cooking. We scheduled the meal prep session which ended up turning into a shopping trip because the food wasn’t ready for me in advance and the following week, which could have been another prep session she cancelled.
I have sent her recipes from that clean life, the most simple and easy that I could find. I also gave her other options for healthy takeout, food delivery, smarter dining in her neighborhood, etc. I think she’d signed on expecting me to be there for her more in person to do the work for her week after week and this was never part of my offering. All of my session notes and recaps were hardly looked at. Has this ever happened to anybody here? I’m still relatively new to coaching. It’s been a super stressful experience. Can’t help feeling a bit defeated.
All right Alayna, this happens to all of us. Absolutely. I mean, and maybe a slightly different scenario, but we can have a client who’s just not clicking with us for whatever reason and it might be that something else is going on in their life.
It might be that they got a wrong impression of what your program is going to be all about and you know, I think we could also consider, you know, maybe we are not doing something wrong, but maybe we have come across a certain way that put them off. Maybe we’re pushing too hard. I mean, I know this is where our head tends to go anyway when we doubt ourselves, but I’d like to leave the door open for all of these possibilities because it is a great big learning experience. So I’m thinking right now of a client that I had and I felt like she didn’t like me. I mean she showed up for the session. She did reschedule a lot when I asked her for a food diary, you know, most people send me a pretty detailed list. She scribbled like sandwich on a piece of paper, took a picture of it and sent me the picture.
That was her food diary. So I could tell pretty early on that she was not a good fit for me and when I would kind of look back on and tell myself as I should have said something, you know, I should have let her know that it didn’t feel like a fit. I could have quit her instead of the other way around because it made me feel very anxious. Talking with her. I was constantly doubting myself, you know, in the weeks that we did spend together. And then ultimately she did quit anyway. So anyway, I think it’s good to look back on all the different things that may have been going on there and ask you don’t want to get negative feedback. Negative feedback can really, really help you. Maybe this person would say, I thought this was more of a meal prep service now.
Is she right? No, I’m sure you didn’t tell her it was going to be a meal prep service. However, maybe she didn’t read. People don’t read. And if that’s the case then you may want to change something about how you talk about your program so that it’s super duper clear exactly what your program is and isn’t. So I would say don’t feel bad but use it as a learning experience and ask for the feedback so you can make decisions moving forward. Alright, good luck Alayna. And thank you for sharing that with us because again, it has happened to all of us and nobody should feel bad and want to hide and never work with a client again just because didn’t go well.
Alright, you guys, it is 3:30, so we’re going to end here. Thank you so much for joining me. I know that many of you, amazing health coaches are watching. You’re listening, you’re joining a Facebook group and from the feedback that I get, the show has become a great resource for you, so if that’s the case, please go to iTunes on your computer and leave a rating and written review for the show. Thank you so much for being here. Keep asking great questions and I’ll see you next week.