#343 – English Teacher Makes 7 Figures without Google

You can be mean as well, I think I can take it.

I can pause and have a cry break if I need.

Some emails I’ll send an email and I’ll see a thousand clicks in like two minutes or something for example.

At the time it was very successful, I had no idea what the possibilities were.

It just like reminded me of my childhood days when I was doing these things during the holidays, you know, these little exercises from school.

I really like that.

So I ran it as an influencer style business for far longer than I should have.

I just want as many ideas as possible so that I can chuck away the bad ones.

Do you want to learn how to build a repeatable, manageable system to actually make social media generate big bucks for you?

And I’m not talking about spamming shitty AI images to boomers on Facebook or on Pinterest.

I’m talking about building a real business that will survive platform changes unlike many tactics that are floating around these days.

My guest today evolves in one of the most competitive markets that I can think of, online English lessons.

Lucy started eight years ago with nothing except for her camera and her bubbly personality and she’s now transformed this side hustle into a seven figures per year business without relying on Google at all.

It’s actually hilarious.

As you’ll see in the interview, I asked her, “Do you know what your Google traffic is?”

And after some hesitation, she admits she has no idea and I had to break the news to her that her organic traffic more than tripled this year despite doing absolutely nothing for it.

You see, Lucy is a bit of a social media genius and with over 17 million total followers across all networks and 11 million on YouTube alone, she’s by far the person with the most reach we’ve ever had in his podcast.

And with Google putting so much emphasis on brand signals in the recent updates, it’s no wonder her traffic is shooting up even though honestly, I don’t think her site really deserves it at this point.

But her case conforts me to something I’ve been telling a lot of people since last year’s HCU.

To solve the SEO problems you’re facing, you need to take your eyes off SEO for a bit and grow branded demand on some other platform so then Google picks up on these signals and rewards you with the next updates.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done with Lucy.

This is one of the reasons why I have been broadening the spectrum of the guests that we are inviting on this podcast and the topics we cover in general because I know to be successful, many of you don’t need more SEO tactics.

You need more of what Lucy does.

And honestly, sometimes pushing this narrative feels a little bit like trying to feed vegetables to kids who want fries instead, but I’ll do it anyway, at least for today.

So I broke down this interview in three phases so you can easily skip around to the part that interests you the most.

If you’re on YouTube, there will be chapters at the bottom, so feel free to skip.

The first part is all about breaking down the content creation process that she has perfected to get over 10 million subscribers in a pretty short amount of time if you look at it.

The second part is the one that I think really makes her business special and that’s her lead capture strategies.

She actually gets 2 to 3% opt-in rate from her YouTube videos.

That means for this video that she posted two months ago and has 1.9 million views, she generated between 38,000 and 57,000 emails to her list.

Honestly, this part is so good.

It’s making me rethink how we’re going to approach lead magnets for our brand ourselves.

And the third and final part is becoming a bit of a staple in my interviews recently and that’s her funnel roast.

I go through her funnels and try to understand how she goes about transforming all the subscribers she gets from YouTube videos into actual money.

And trust me, I went deep on this one.

One thing I want to say is that throughout the interview, Lucy has been incredibly generous with information and whether you’re trying to learn how to use social to build an email list or you want to learn how to monetize it, this episode really has something for you.

Before we get started, I want to say thank you to Search Intelligence who is sponsoring today’s episode.

They’re a top-notch agency that can help you with digital PR and we’ll tell you more about them later.

For now, let’s get started.

Welcome everyone to the Authority Hacker Podcast today.

I am with Lucy Simkins from English with Lucy.

Welcome, Lucy.

Thank you very much for inviting me on.

I’m super excited about this one.

I’m very excited about funnels in general and I spent the entire week this week essentially nerding out through your funnel.

I know some people feel a bit uncomfortable when I do that, but I’m trying to be positive here and I think what you’ve done is super impressive.

I’m excited to dive in and learn more on why some things are and how you do things and how you organize yourself behind the scenes because this I don’t see when I’m analyzing your funnel.

Super excited for that.

Awesome.

I hope to be celebrated and humbled in equal measures.

I mean, there’s no humbling to be had.

It’s just like it’s cool.

I just want to give a bit of a snapshot to the listeners/viewers who are watching this of how wide of a reach your business has at this point.

You have 11.1 million subscribers on YouTube and over half a billion views.

You have 1.3 million followers on Instagram, 2 million followers on TikTok, 2.7 million followers on Facebook.

I found a series on Amazon Prime with you.

Is that a thing?

No, that wasn’t.

Someone downloaded all my videos and managed to sell them for a while and I cannot get rid of it.

Well, I found it on Google so maybe we can talk about DMCA takedown requests because that could be useful.

I saw that you have over 30,000 students at this point.

Yes, yeah we do.

And you have a seven-figure per year revenue business basically selling essentially English courses to non-native speakers.

That’s pretty impressive.

How long have you been at it?

Oh, I started in 2016 but I ran it, it was when I was at university, I ran it as a very part-time thing.

But I didn’t start properly selling courses until late 2021.

So I ran it as an influencer style business for far longer than I should have.

That was my next question.

It’s like, when did you make the first dollar?

Because I feel like it looked, the way it looked on your YouTube channel, it’s like, yeah it was just like making videos and that’s it and not having a business behind.

And then recently you’ve gone like all in onto the business stuff and essentially transformed the business completely.

Yeah, I mean my first dollar, I think I remember my first sponsorship that was about, I don’t know, six months in.

And I reached out and I asked for it and it was for $60 for an online language tutoring platform.

I must have had like 10,000 subscribers at the time.

And then I ran it.

I mean, in my opinion at the time it was very successful but I had no idea what the possibilities were in terms of info products.

And so I was probably one of the top earners in the industry, but it’s quite a low earning industry.

If you compare the language industry with financial advice and things like that, it’s quite a different market.

But it was when I joined forces with my husband, we started hiring a team, we went all in, that things really started to grow.

Yeah, seven figures per year in the language learning industry, especially when you’re competing with apps, etc. at this point, like Duolingo, etc.

It’s great.

It’s very difficult to achieve actually.

So I wanted to ask, how many people do you reach monthly?

I guess you get your reach in your analytics on all your social accounts.

Do you have an idea of how many people watch a video of yours or a short or something like this?

So YouTube long form content is what we focus on most.

I think YouTube long and short together, we reach seven, I think probably between six to 10 million a month.

But it really fluctuates, you know, you have a viral video and your channel can take off for five months, and then you can have a really low period.

We’ve only just started up Instagram and TikTok again, we took nearly a year long break from it.

Because we focused really heavily on on creating the courses and having a little bit of a rest afterwards.

But now we’re back on it.

So I don’t have those figures to hand.

YouTube and our email list has been our main focus for quite a while.

Okay, so yeah, that’s how you’re doing this.

So I’m gonna split this interview in three parts.

We’re first going to talk about your content creation process and how you manage to reach this many people.

Then we’re going to talk about capturing people into your email list since it’s to be like one of your main focuses, and it’s the main driver for your sales.

And we’re going to go quite nerdy on the funnel side of things and try to dig deep into like how you actually monetize that email list in a clean way, basically, because that’s one thing that I don’t like in this industry is a lot of people build email lists, etc, but it becomes very spammy and low quality.

Your emails are pretty fun to read, actually, I quite enjoyed them.

Thank you.

So I want to dive into how you put them together, basically, and how you flow things like one after the other.

Awesome.

I suggest we start with the content creation part though.

From what I’ve gathered, your current content production is one long form video per week, and one short form video every two days.

Is that correct?

Yes, well done.

That’s spot on.

That’s our public facing content creation.

And then we’ve got a lot of course production on so we could probably do more social media content.

But it’s just a time and capacity thing.

But I think you’ll have noticed that we do different endings on all of our short form as well.

And we’re working out how to adapt properly to the different platforms because they change so fast.

It’s a different game now to what it was two years ago.

Yeah, you actually it’s funny because like I was literally checking all your shorts for like a month or something.

And I saw you took a break between June 14th and June 22nd.

Like did you go on holiday or something?

It was my 30th birthday.

So I rewarded myself.

No, we had a big backlog of Facebook ads that needed editing.

And our shorts editor also does the Facebook ads.

So he took a time off.

Okay.

How do you handle this content pipeline?

Like it’s pretty difficult to consistently create content, especially like after having so many videos as you have.

Like how does it work?

Like from ideation all the way to publication?

So we have a huge spreadsheet.

I know you prefer Notion.

I’ve tried to use tools like that.

But for long form video ideas, I just need a spreadsheet.

And it’s this massive one that’s been going since like 2022, where every single idea I have goes into it.

I pull lots of videos from other channels, whether they’re in my industry, my niche or not, have them there, add lots of notes.

And my team of teachers are also able to access this, add things.

And then we just map out week by week, our one piece of long form content.

We normally work two and a half to three months ahead.

But it’s only for the past year and a half that we’ve been properly working that far ahead.

It felt like we were always chasing our own tails before.

I finally feel more or less comfortable.

I don’t know if you could ever feel comfortable with content planning because things change and you’re always trying to hop on the latest trend.

But observing what other people are doing, also observing other people trying to hop on trends and failing.

So then ticking that or crossing that one off your list is also an important part of it.

We try to put our content into three categories.

It’s stuff that’s going to please the algorithm and get new people in.

Videos that are going to please the current subscribers and the loyal students.

So they’re normally higher quality, they get better leads, but we get a lower audience.

But the audience seems to convert a bit better.

And then the last pool is stuff that I want to make because that’s the best way to avoid burnout.

Sometimes I was just kind of hustling for the algorithm and it got a bit boring.

Every now and again, I’ve got to throw out a silly video that I find funny.

And normally my audience quite likes it.

Nice.

How do you balance that?

What percentage of each category is your content strategy?

Oh, I would probably say 45, 45, 10.

And the 10 is for me.

Yeah, I get it.

It’s the same for us.

Our audience loves talking about SEO and link building.

That’s basically it.

But sometimes I feel like I need to get past that.

And it’s like, I don’t care if nobody’s watching.

It’s just like I actually do that content for me.

Actually, this podcast is definitely one of them because you’re definitely going deeper than SEO and link building.

But we’re going to talk about SEO a little bit later and you’ll see actually.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

We need help on that.

We’ve really not started.

We’ll talk about it.

Don’t worry.

So in terms of the ideations, where do the ideas come from for your content?

Oh, I think I’m constantly on.

So I consume a lot of social media as well.

So I easily get inspired, but I consume a lot of media of social media content that is not related to English and see how I can bring it in.

I do a lot of watching what other people in my niche are doing as well.

And I have a huge list and I would say probably 20 percent of what I put into the list gets binned.

And then the 20 percent that remains, probably half of that actually gets created into something someday.

I just want as many ideas as possible so that I can chuck away the bad ones.

There’s probably a treasure trove of bad ideas that have been chucked away.

But yeah, it’s something I feel like I can never relax about because if I take a couple of months off without or a month off without coming up with new ideas, I feel like I’ve fallen behind.

But like so you basically find like a cool video from even unrelated to your industry, maybe a cool format or something like this, like three, you know, tongue twisters or something like this.

And then you write it down and you just put your own twist on it, like you bookmark it in your spreadsheet or something and then you go through it and you’re like, OK, how can I make it in English with Lucy?

So I don’t write the content anymore.

For the first, I don’t know, five or six years I did, I used to write everything.

And I feel like that content was really authentic because it came, you know, it was my voice.

But when I started hiring really great teachers who were way better explaining grammar than I was, I could train them to start using my voice as well.

And I have a handful that specialise in producing the content for social media and I know their strengths.

And so I allocate the different videos to them to have a look at.

Sometimes I allocate to more than one teacher and they’ll kind of collaborate together.

And so, for example, I have a teacher that is just amazing at pronunciation and teaching pronunciation in a really cool way.

So if I have an idea for that, I’ll allocate it to her.

I have a super creative teacher who’s actually now doing most of our copyright, copywriting, and he does a lot of our short form content because he’s so good at getting that, that punchy hook.

And I know he consumes a lot of social media as well.

So he knows what’s good.

Okay.

So like to recap the process, you find something, you scroll yourself, you bookmark it, you maybe add a note or something and you pass it on to one of these teachers that then prepares a video for you inspired by it.

Yeah.

Then it goes on to a teleprompter.

I’ll normally know whilst recording it if it’s going to do well or not.

And sometimes we ditch a few that I just think, “Oh no, this isn’t, it doesn’t have the hook point.”

I don’t get it right every time.

I feel like in the past, I used to get it right one in three times and one in three videos would be a hit.

Now I feel like it’s one in five.

The algorithm isn’t as easy as it was.

Yeah, we have it on a teleprompter.

We do batch filming.

I film every two weeks.

I like to travel a lot.

So we just have like a pretty mobile filming kit that we can, with special coloured backdrops, so we can film from a variety of places.

Batch filming every two weeks.

And then we’ve got a team of editors for our long form content and course content, and then a different editor for our short form content, because I feel like they are very, very different.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, and I see that, especially for Shorts now, it seems like it’s splitting into different directions between Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Like you have the same content, but usually the last 20 seconds or something are going to be unique to the platform from what I’ve seen at least.

Yeah.

If we have a call to action, if we’re trying to get leads from a video, then yeah, we do stick a different end on.

Although we’re considering not bothering with TikTok lead magnets at the moment, because I’m sure we will talk about this later, but the results are not there.

We’re going to talk about this very soon, actually.

I have one more section before that, and that is kind of like content promotion, right?

It’s like, do you do anything to promote your content or you just post it and that’s it?

Do you share with your leads?

Do you maybe share on like, I don’t know, Twitter or whatever?

I haven’t looked at everything, so I want to know.

Before it was always really encouraged to cross promote on your platforms, but now my understanding of the platforms as they stand is that they do not want, YouTube does not want you sending someone to Instagram and TikTok certainly doesn’t want you sending someone to Facebook.

So I like to keep them pretty separate.

If I had all the time in the world, I would make catered content for each platform, but I need to back that up with data and with results, which we don’t have at the moment.

We don’t have good enough results.

So the only thing I do is post my YouTube video to my list, my email list.

We have a really big email list.

And the reason we post it to them is obviously to get that initial view hit, but also we give a free lead magnet with each video.

And one of the benefits of being on my list and staying on my list is you just automatically get that free PDF and sometimes exercise pack each week.

So it’s a really high value weekly email.

And with the bonus of slightly increasing the YouTube views, although I’m not a hundred percent convinced that email views to YouTube videos make that much of an impact.

We don’t notice any significant difference if we don’t promote to our list.

Yeah.

But I really like the formula though, because, you know, when you get people on your email list, the challenge is to give something a little bit exclusive to them.

So there’s a reason to be on your email list.

Otherwise, like what’s the point?

Why don’t I just subscribe on YouTube or something?

But like, because you put this lead magnet together for each video, which is what I’ve seen so far, you essentially give it right away to people who have already given you their email.

And then that is the reason why they are still on your list because they get these free exercise books basically that you’ve created.

And then at the same time, the same resource is also growing your email list because people who watch the video and are not on your email list, they have to opt in to get it.

Right.

Yes.

And, you know, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of lead magnets now because we do a unique one for every video.

But once you join, you only get that lead magnet you’ve signed up for and all future ones.

So people are less likely, I think, to unsubscribe because they don’t want to miss out on all of these PDFs.

Because if I do say so myself, the PDFs are amazing quality.

I see people using them in schools.

Teachers write in and say they’ve been using them in their classrooms.

And so we take a lot of pride in them.

And in a way, yes, it’s a great tool for getting leads, getting people down our funnel.

But it’s also a nice way to reward loyalty for people who do stay on the list.

I agree.

I think they’re really good.

Actually, it’s funny because I was going through the funnel.

I started doing the exercises myself and I was like, I don’t have time.

So it’s like I did the interactive ones.

But yeah, I actually did that just to test myself.

And I didn’t want to know the results.

So I didn’t finish.

But I really want to talk more about the lead mangers, but I really want to finish on the video creation first.

So you’re pretty, like, given the reach that you have on social, like you’re doing very well with videos.

Retention is basically the number one metric for reach now at this point.

Like if people watch your videos long enough, you’ll get enough distribution.

Can you give me like three tips as a beginner to improve my retention on my social or on my long form videos?

Yeah, I’ll start with a really simple one that I did in the last couple of years.

If you have, I used to have this beautiful 10 to 15 second, maybe it’s five seconds.

It felt like ages each time I watched it.

Intro was like music and it was like a slow motion video of London.

No one cares.

People were just skipping through it.

It was affecting reach.

It also meant that when people were skipping through their feed and they saw the sometimes you see like a gif version of your video, gif or gif, that could be a video.

I’ll write that down.

But yeah, you can see the the moving version of the YouTube video.

When you go past mine, all you’d see was this intro.

Whereas if you go on another video, you’d see the beginning and it would hook you in.

So remove that.

I know it makes you feel professional to have your logo appear and music play, but I don’t I don’t see the value in it.

Other ways to improve.

Retention.

This is such a good question.

I would say if you have an editing team, make sure they have access to the analytics so that they can dive in as well and see these things that create hooks.

At first, I was quite protective of my social media.

I was so worried about, you know, oversharing with the team.

But now I think it’s really important that they they can look in there and like analyze their work and see themselves the hook points and the the retention peaks.

I think I need to get to grips with it more, actually.

I for the first kind of five years of running the YouTube channel, I was winging it a little bit.

And I do think there is still nothing more important than a really good thumbnail.

And that’s something that we need to be working on for the next year, because I still make a lot of the thumbnails.

I’ve tried out different thumbnail creators.

I’ve never really fallen in love with any of them.

So that’s the thing I’m I’m really looking for.

So watch this space.

Have you tried them, though?

Because I feel like what you said, like, you know, when you hire the teachers to prepare the scripts, you were like, oh, I love my my tone.

And then eventually I realized people were like, you know, better than me.

Do you think something similar is happening with thumbnails?

I don’t think I’ve given enough time and energy to training up a thumbnail designer because it’s something I’ve been so precious over.

But that’s silly because it took me a while to find an editor I really liked.

And then once we had that relationship built and we got through that onboarding phase, it was a no brainer and I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.

So I think that’s something that could even be holding my channel back.

Yeah.

OK, fair enough.

I think it’s the same for us.

Like, you know, I tend to like be a bit technical, so I’m not afraid to like go and do everything.

The problem is I hold a lot of things back when I just don’t pass them on.

And it’s like I just have so many hours where I can focus intensely in the day.

And so it’s like it’s been a big job from Mark to like force me to give stuff up in the business because you always feel like you do things better yourself, but eventually it holds you back down.

In terms of like actually talking about the team, do you post your own videos or do you have someone managing all of that and all the scheduling?

And is there some strategy behind this?

So we have our operations manager and she does the uploading of all the YouTube videos and preparation.

But because I’m still in charge of the thumbnails, the huge thumbnail issue, this is a huge issue.

And I think I’m going to address this as soon as I finish this podcast call because I’m seeing the light now.

But the last thing I’ll do before I post the video is make the thumbnail and kind of come up with ideas for it.

So I’m the one who schedules it or posts it immediately.

It’s definitely something I could do better.

Same with TikTok and Instagram and Facebook Reels at the moment.

I get a big batch and I just upload them and come up with the captions.

Once I start to feel a little bit more comfortable with what works and what doesn’t work, then I’m more than happy to hand that off.

In fact, I can’t wait.

Fair enough.

I want to talk about platforms now.

So let’s do a little bit of a tier list.

So you’re very present on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

It’s kind of like the four platforms where I can find you.

Let’s go from the worst platform for your business to the best platform for your business in terms of sales and what works best for you.

Because I’m not sure view numbers are always correlated with sales and with actual business growth.

And I want to hear from you because you’re big on all these platforms.

So you have a vision that very few people have, I’d say.

So which one do you say is the worst platform and why?

Okay, I’m going to divide this into YouTube, YouTube shorts, and keep them separate.

Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

And I would say the bottom for me at the moment actually could be YouTube shorts.

The reason why, and it’s fighting with TikTok, but the reason why is I don’t know what it does for my channel apart from over-inflate my numbers, bring in like next to no ad revenue.

Not that ad revenue is a big part of our business anymore, but it’s almost insulting when you get 30 million views on a video and then they pay you $40 or something.

But the problem with YouTube shorts is they used to allow a pinned comment where you could have a link.

And so I used to at least be able to get a few leads from YouTube shorts and say, you know, click the link in the pinned comment.

Then they took that away.

And now I have a load of really high performing YouTube shorts that have a fake lead magnet in it because people can’t get it.

There is no way.

So super annoying.

And also quite a few went, you know, majorly viral, got millions and millions of views, brought in loads and loads of subscribers, but these subscribers don’t seem to interact with my short form, with my long form content.

Nor do they seem to, when they subscribe, it’s not like my shorts all then appear in their subscription feed.

Maybe it just makes them slightly more likely to see my shorts again in their feed.

I’m not really sure how it works.

I’m not sure YouTube is that sure how it works either.

So yeah, that’s the one I’m most frustrated with because I feel uneasy about it because I don’t know if it’s negatively or positively affecting the channel, which is so valuable to us.

Next is TikTok because you can get so many views on there and it just, I don’t think it’s my, you know, ideal audience from a sales point of view.

Anytime you have any sort of call to action or you mentioned link in bio or anything, the video gets suppressed.

So normally we get, you know, a couple of hundred thousand, maybe a million views on a TikTok.

If I say, oh, there’s an ebook, click on the link in the bio, I’ll get like 18,000 or something.

And the leads we do get, they just don’t convert.

I just exported all of our latest leads.

And I think we had like four sales from TikTok and they’d gone, you know, it was like a couple of thousands of them all going down a welcome sequence.

After that Facebook reels, we don’t really do any long form content on Facebook.

Probably should.

But we just don’t, we see a very different audience that’s much less willing to buy.

And then YouTube.

Oh no, Instagram.

I have to say Instagram next.

You can get good leads with many chat.

I wonder, so that’s when, you know, the automatic chat bot where you say, you know, write book and I’ll send you my book and then they get an automatic message.

That brings in a lot of leads.

We’re still gathering data on whether they convert, but they seem to be converting in a way that’s better than nothing.

And then YouTube is the number one, but not for sales.

If we launch a course and we make a promo video and we post it on YouTube, we don’t get that many sales because our lead magnet game is so strong on YouTube that the people who are going to buy are already on our email list.

Yeah.

So we don’t see many direct sales from YouTube.

Because people are probably engaged with your content multiple times before they buy.

So they’ve already downloaded like four lead magnets and then they buy, I guess.

Yes.

Yeah.

And we do a lot of promotions, probably more than your listeners would expect on our email list.

And we think that we are, you know, we’re not too spammy because we give a lot of value.

Okay.

That’s super interesting.

It’s super interesting because, you know, TikTok’s super hot, for example, and everyone’s talking about that.

YouTube Shorts for me, it’s like, it’s a separate platform from YouTube.

I feel like they just kind of like, they run two platforms and then they just have a common subscriber account.

But it was, I saw your Shorts and I saw you basically have a link to a lead magnet, but it’s not a link.

So people need to copy it.

So I went on my phone and I tried to copy the link, but I can’t copy the link because they don’t give you the option to copy it.

It’s horrible.

They’ve made it really hard.

We’ve come up with lots of ideas.

You could try a QR code, although people are often already watching on their phones.

So how would they do that?

And then also you could, we bought a really short domain and we, you know, you could have a very, very short domain, but you know, the harder you fight it, that they’re just going to find more ways.

And you’re creating pieces of content that are only, you hope will go viral for years, maybe.

But then they change their system.

So it doesn’t work anymore.

So I don’t know what they’re aiming for with YouTube Shorts really.

Let’s see.

It’s like, I guess it’s bound to change and it’s good to grow there for now.

And potentially later you get something.

There’s one channel we didn’t talk about and that is SEO.

Have you looked at your Google traffic recently?

Yes, we, why is my question?

Not why look at SEO.

So you haven’t looked?

My husband, he’s the one who looks at SEO, but very, very lightly.

And we’ve been doing backlinks and things like that, but I feel very embarrassed saying anything in such SEO company.

I’m interested to know why you’re asking.

I’m asking because your traffic’s been shooting up recently with recent updates.

Ah, is that?

Oh yes, of course.

Oh, that thing.

Of course I’ve seen.

Yeah, it has been shooting up a lot.

And one of the possible explanations is that Google has been doing a lot of changes in its algorithm in the last few months.

Like, they’re basically trying to work a little bit more like a social network where you can show engagement on your content.

They will essentially show your site more.

And because you have a large social media presence, a lot of people search for your brand, et cetera, and land on your site.

And it seems to be helping because your site’s curve is literally shooting up right now.

Even though, I admit, when I checked the articles, I was a little bit underwhelmed.

I think you can do better, like embedding your videos and in terms of lead magnets, pop-ups, et cetera.

I don’t want to go through, like, you know, there’s a lot of things to do, but it seems like now is a really good time to look at it because Google is rewarding the kind of creator profile that you’re matching with.

So it’s like, if you had more content and most importantly, if you collected more leads through pop-ups, et cetera, I think you can make SEO quite worth it for your business, actually.

Okay.

I’m convinced.

Will and I, we were just talking about this the other day.

We’ve just been doing the bare minimum to feel like we’re doing something with SEO.

But we know we have the capacity and we’re coming down now to the end of a really high, high, like productivity period where our whole team was overloaded, but we also didn’t feel like we wanted to take on more team members.

So we kind of felt capped.

But now I think it would be really interesting to work on SEO because yes, you’re right.

The articles are underwhelming and there are so many quick fixes and large fixes we could probably implement.

Yeah.

Especially on lead generation.

Like you just have a sidebar, like your lead magnet game is so strong on your videos.

And then I came to the blog and I was like, what is it?

So if you actually put like a pop-up that like loads on page load or things like that, you can collect like, I collect two to 3% of opt-ins.

Oh wow.

So if I get a hundred visitors, I get three leads basically.

If I get a hundred thousand, you know, I get two, three thousand leads.

So it’s pretty good when you optimize for it.

And Google loves your brand right now.

So there’s something to, I didn’t do anything for that.

You don’t have to thank me.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah.

We’re currently undergoing a website redesign as well.

So hopefully we can do that thoughtfully and make it as good as possible until it all changes again.

Yeah.

I think it’s a huge opportunity.

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And now, back to the episode.

I wanted to ask also, do you ever sell, you sell directly in your content sometimes, right?

Like you literally promote your courses, etc. in your videos.

How do you do CTAs without killing your reach?

Because that’s a huge taboo on social media these days.

Is this on YouTube or on Instagram?

Yeah.

So we experimented a lot.

And our idea at the time was, because we don’t do it as much anymore, our idea at the time was we have a lot of what we call hero videos.

These are videos that consistently get 20k views a day for three years.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a great evergreen offer for one of our low cost courses in there?

So we did that and it did okay, but the results were really underwhelming.

And I think that is because, A, when you’re putting the CTA in, or you don’t know if that’s going to be a hero video or not.

And I’m finding it harder to predict each time if it’s going to be a hero video.

And then also you are pulling people away.

So, and YouTube don’t want that.

So we’ve stopped doing it.

When we have a big launch of like a brand new course or a really exciting sale, maybe sometimes Black Friday or, you know, a new course, then we will do a dedicated video, but then we’ll remove it afterwards.

So it’s just like a, it’s just there for a week.

The thing that does work are live stream webinar style videos.

When we have a launch, we will do, we will actually launch the new course in a live stream instead of an email.

And the results seem to be stronger.

And normally we will do a closing down sale as well.

When we’re ending it, we’ll have the countdown and we’ll pull everyone’s names up on screen.

And really as people are buying, they get shout outs and it’s really interactive and people get really excited.

So you have a live when you open the course and when you close it?

Yes.

Yeah.

When we close the enrolment.

Okay.

Yeah.

That’s super interesting.

I agree.

Like lives are like a little bit of a different kind on YouTube and they get a little bit of different reach.

And yeah, I can see how that would work actually.

I think Russell Branson does a lot of live, for example, as well.

So it’s something that probably work.

Okay.

Let’s talk about capturing leads and your email marketing.

We can talk about the lead magnets.

We can talk about all of that.

I think that is going to be super interesting.

That’s my favourite part of your business, to be honest.

I feel like that’s the kind of like the thing that you’re most, you know, unique for is your ability to drive your viewers into opt-ins.

And one thing that I was very surprised at is when I looked at your long form videos, the CTA to the lead magnet is literally just after the intro most of the time, right?

It’s like there’s the intro is like, oh, hey, download this exercise book.

So you reach more people that way.

But in my head, I was like, isn’t your reach going to die because of that?

Or like, is that not an issue?

Yeah, I thought the same thing at first as well.

And we experimented.

But it was from my experience, we don’t do sponsorships anymore.

But when I did, like the difference in results for the sponsors was so stark when we had a lead, when we had the shout out in the first 60 seconds compared to the first 180 seconds compared to at the end.

So I just knew that was the only option.

And we still had loads of videos go viral that contain sponsors and we still have videos that go viral with all our lead magnets in.

I think it gets to the point now where people who aren’t interested will just click ahead and you do see that little peak.

Yeah, so for every 100 views, we tend to get one to two, sometimes even three, depending on how juicy the lead magnet is.

Sign up to my email list, our email list.

And I mean, it would be it’s just a no brainer for us, because ad revenue for us is low with our industry.

We get a very, very diverse nationalities watching different ad rates in each country.

We wouldn’t even I don’t even think we’d be able to pay our editing team and writers on just ad revenue.

So the lead magnets is what we do.

Fair enough.

The thing is, what I’m thinking hearing you is that it’s probably worth front loading your CTA provided it’s high value so that people actually are excited for it and keep watching and keep doing that.

But you might be willing to trade less reach for more opt-ins and that probably still helps your business further more than getting as much reach as possible, especially given the low ad rates, basically.

Would you agree with that?

That’s a perfect summary, I think.

Yeah, I think it helps that the lead magnet perfectly compliments the video, because I don’t think I don’t know if I’ve mentioned what the lead magnets are yet, but they are lesson notes for the video.

So they’re gorgeous PDFs, really, really beautiful.

And they have like a nice lesson summary of all the content, plus more, plus more information and always a quiz at the end and sometimes an interactive, a link to an interactive exercise pack.

So they are designed for people to use after they’ve watched the video to test what they’ve learned, to see if they’ve taken it in.

Yeah, there’s a risk that people might just download that and not watch the video.

We’d have to do some A/B testing, I think, to work it out.

Does it even matter if they use the lead magnet?

It’s like in the end, they’re still deeper in your funnel, right?

They consume your content on their term.

One thing I really liked is you had the answers in reverse at the end of the page, and I really liked that.

It just reminded me of my childhood days when I was doing these things and during the holidays, you know, these little exercises from school.

I really like that.

Yeah, I mean, how much work does goes into a lead magnet?

And do you have a template system?

Like, how does it work?

Because I think this is one of the keys of your business.

You have hundreds of lead magnets like this.

And it’s probably like a large part of the creation of a video, right?

Yeah, it’s definitely a couple of hours per lead magnet.

In fact, our operations manager is currently doing an audit because I think we’re spending slightly too much time on PDFs in general.

So we have our courses are so PDF and interactive activity heavy.

And they are taking more time than they should at the moment.

We’re seeing how we can streamline it.

I think the PDFs are created on Google Slides, if I, or maybe they’re on Canva, actually.

It depends.

And they do take quite a while.

But I have nothing to do with them, to be quite honest.

Our operations manager is the most organized person I’ve ever met in my life.

And she has everyone on this like automated system where they take that they’re done and it gets sent to the next one.

I’m sure we can make it even better though.

I mean, I think it’s pretty good already.

So you’re promoting it on screen, you’re telling people they can download it.

There’s a QR code, I guess it’s for people who watch on YouTube TV, basically, they’re just watching and snapping it.

And do you use anything else?

You have it in the description, do you use pinned comments, do you use annotation on screen?

How do you link to your lead magnet in a long form video?

So the QR thing is new and actually seems to be doing quite well.

One of the recent lead magnets, I think it got 20,000 downloads and 1000 of them came from the QR codes.

I was really surprised by that.

I didn’t believe in QR codes when I first saw them.

I thought they were just weird and not going to go anywhere.

And then obviously COVID happened and everyone got every menu is under a QR code.

So I think that really helped people become used to them.

We also, yes, we use a pinned comment.

I’m sorry that I haven’t done any testing to see how many come from the pinned comment, how many come from the description, but that would be cool to see if it’s worth it.

Sometimes you’ve just got to think, I’ll just do it.

It takes two seconds.

We also bought, as I said, a really short domain.

It’s like ewl.info.

And we have a very simple, like PDF one, PDF two at the end of it.

And people, we put that on screen just in case, you know, someone’s on their phone, but they want to, they’ve also got their iPad with them and they want to type it in fairly easily.

And that’s it.

Yeah.

I mean, one to 2% opt-in is very good.

It’s comparable to a blog, basically comparable to what I told you about SEO, basically.

I think like 2%, it’s like, you’re pretty happy already with your opt-in rates.

So I would say it’s like, you know, a lot of people, we’re on the side where a lot of people now got bashed by Google updates and they have to play with the other platforms, including YouTube, et cetera, but they feel like they lose control compared to having a website.

And what I’m hearing from you, this opt-in rate is so good that I’m like, there’s not even a point bothering fighting Google on your own site when you can actually just get the same opt-in rate on YouTube, actually.

So it’s quite interesting to hear how you do that.

Do you put anything on the end screen as well?

Because obviously that’s another area where you can optimize.

Do you know what?

We’ve never noticed that much engagement from our end screens, but that’s a good idea.

So yes, potentially we should.

We just, ah, just before our end screen, I say, and don’t remember, I say, don’t remember.

I say, don’t forget to download the PDF, the links in the description and we show everything again.

Maybe we should hold it for longer, especially the QR code and the link on the end screen.

Yeah.

And I think the whole, the thing with lead magnets is to not put all of your eggs in one basket because we know we’re at the mercy of these huge companies that seem to be very temperamental and change.

I mean, YouTube could one day say, oh no, no more links in the description or no more links that lead off platform.

And then I’d be in trouble, but that’s why I’m trying to build a presence on other platforms as well.

And clearly on my SEO.

I mean, you have an opportunity right now.

Yeah.

I think you should seize it, you know?

Yeah.

We can have a chat.

I’m seeing you in a, in a week or something.

I’ll tell you that I’ve put something in place.

We’ll chat about this.

You bragged about having a big email list.

How big is it?

Um, do you know what?

We are high, high, high six figures.

I, we always clean it before we get to seven.

Um, I love that because that’s my next question.

Like how do you maintain it?

We clean frequently and hard.

And I think I hear very different opinions on how you should manage cleansing the email list.

Um, we use ConvertKit.

Uh, we really, really like it.

Um, they have the engagement star rating.

So basically anyone who has never purchased, who hasn’t engaged within a certain amount of time, it depends on how recently they joined the list.

Um, every two months we, um, we’ll send them a very basic re-engagement email, but we don’t really bother with the re-engagement campaigns.

Thing is if people don’t want that, well, no, I don’t think so either.

And you know, sometimes there’s six figure cleanses.

Um, I always download them all and set a store them just in case I ever made a mistake, but we’ve never revisited, um, people that have left.

Um, so yeah, the email list grows really fast, but we also are not afraid to hack off quite a few people.

Yeah, that’s good.

Okay.

I think that helps a lot.

Uh, especially when you collect this many emails, there must be a lot of like junk emails or people who don’t open people who mistype the emails, et cetera, because for a lot of things you use single opt-in, right?

Uh, yes, we experimented with both.

Um, we were advised to use single opt-in, um, because apparently it drastically increased the signups.

And so we’re willing to just clean up the list more often.

Um, but yeah, I’d be, I’d be interested to test it again.

Cause that was something you put in place two and a half years ago.

I mean, yeah, I mean, we haven’t tested recently, but yeah, it’s like we, we saw like 30% uplift or something going from double opt-in, single opt-in, obviously, you know, 30% more emails, but maybe like 12% of these are probably not emails you want or they’re fake emails or something.

So it’s like, it’s hard to exactly gauge like the exact gain of, of good subscribers, but there’s definitely some in there.

So it’s like, you’ll, you’ll make more money, but you need to be more responsible with how you manage your email list.

Yeah.

We’re trying to, we’re now taking even more care than ever on how we send our emails, trying to really keep our delivery rates up.

So maybe that is something we’ll look into quite soon.

Cause for example, we, to anyone who is not a five star engaged subscriber, um, I don’t know the exact criteria for that.

It’s calculated by a ConvertKit, um, or someone who’s purchased.

If they’re basically our value emails go to nearly the whole list, but any promos or anything that only goes to super engaged people.

Okay.

Interesting.

And you, and you gauge engagement based on opens and clicks.

Is that, is that basically how it works?

Or?

Um, as far as I’m aware, the ConvertKit engagement rating goes off that.

Yeah.

So not perfect, but.

Yeah.

Not perfect because now Apple mail automatically opens every single email, uh, and clicks on the links as well.

So it’s a way to like, uh, lose the trackers.

So like we use ActiveCampaign and they basically have two, uh, levels for open rates.

You have like the one for like Apple devices and the one for everything else, because otherwise it’s, it, it doesn’t work.

It actually makes your open rate much higher than it actually is because people did not open the email.

So it’s, it’s quite tricky to, to manage your list because of these privacy features I find.

And there was me thinking we were just doing such a great job that our open rates were going up.

I mean, it’s probably, it’s probably working, but it’s probably working.

But there’s a, there’s a part of that where Apple has this privacy things where they literally just auto open everything and auto click everything.

So like some emails I’ll send an email and I’ll see like, I see a thousand clicks in like two minutes or something, for example.

But that’s just the Apple, uh, system that clicked on the links, not necessarily people who clicked or something like, uh, so it’s just something to keep in mind, but I’m sure ConvertKit has thought about it.

Yeah.

I’ll have a look.

I’m sure it’s on their radar.

Um, so I’ll have a look at that.

Uh, I want to talk about short form video lead generation, because I think, um, I think like we said YouTube shorts is terrible basically.

Um, how is TikTok?

Like how do you, how does that work on TikTok?

So for TikTok, we, the only way we found is a link in bio because we sell digital products.

I think if you’re selling a real product, real, a physical product, um, then yeah, you can have amazing success on TikTok.

Um, in fact, TikTok reached out to me and they were like, Oh, we need to, you know, get you on TikTok shop and get you selling in lives and all of that.

And then they were like, remind me again what you sell.

I said, online courses.

And they’re like, Oh no, no, no, no, you can’t sell those.

Um, you can sell like scammy Chinese products or whatever, but no, no online courses.

I think they wanted, they invited me to be a part of something where you could sell batches of videos, but there was no interactivity.

And you know, we take a lot of pride in our courses.

I’m not going to sell a batch of standalone videos with no quizzes or PDFs or anything with them.

Um, yeah, they make it hard.

They don’t want anyone to leave the platform.

We do get leads from TikTok, but such few sales.

Um, even when we launch a brand new course that we think is perfect for the TikTok market, that it just doesn’t convert.

So we’re kind of using it as a just in case I’ve already made the shorts or the short form content.

So we might as well.

Yeah.

Do you have an idea of the option right on there or not really?

I actually, should I give you like what our total, I think we got something like 20,000 leads and I think we sold like eight courses or something.

It was like absolutely minuscule.

Um, but the funny thing is TikTok is quite good for your ego.

If you want to be recognized in public, which I actually, I don’t get recognized a lot in public.

Um, but if I do, it’s often someone who is British or American, not my ideal audience who have seen my, my videos, which is funny.

So I think a problem with TikTok is that they, they push it.

If you are making a, if you make an English speaking TikTok video, they will push it to an English speaking audience.

Um, I think it has something to do with where you post the video or the SIM card in your phone or something.

Yeah.

I guess you need someone to post from another country and then maybe that’s going to help.

And I have to choose which one.

Yeah.

It’s not easy.

Instagram though is working quite well for you, right?

Yeah.

Instagram always surprises us.

Um, we’ve launched a couple of courses and done promos on, you know, organic promos on Instagram and they’ve done considerably better than we thought.

Sometimes they surpassed direct sales on YouTube, but then of course we have more leads from YouTube on our email list, so you can’t really compare.

Um, but yeah, now with many chat, we are getting in really surprising number of leads, um, to the point where an Instagram video that goes, you know, moderately viral, like maybe a million views will bring in more leads than a YouTube video with 200,000 views, which I didn’t expect.

I’m not, I’m not a hundred percent sure whether they’re converting well.

I don’t think it compares that well when they go down the Instagram, when they go down the welcome sequence.

But I think we might have, uh, priced our product too high or done something too high priced for Instagram.

That was my next question.

Actually, like our short form content subscribers, less lower value than long form content subscribers, basically.

Yes.

I think they’re younger.

Um, especially on Tik Toks, they don’t have as much disposable income.

Um, I’m just drawing my own conclusions here, but they’re probably a little bit more, you know, they’ve got a shorter attention span.

I would like to think they’d be more impulsive, but they, you know, you’re swiping through.

I see it with myself as well.

Um, I get like half dopamine hits where I’m like, Oh, I might buy that.

Actually, no, I’m onto the next thing.

Um, you definitely have people’s attention more with written content and long form.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it’s like, even though you have less reach, it might still be more valuable for a business.

I think it’s like Alex Hormozy as well, who was like, you know, he gets so much reach on, on shorts, but he was like, actually like, it’s not helping my business at all.

So I’m just refocusing mostly on long form content because of that actually.

Um, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah.

I was just going to say that with our content planning, we’ve now put in a lot more really long videos that we know we’re not going to do as well.

And they go, they’re like deep, deep dives into grammar or really advanced English because the advanced English speakers do tend to buy a little bit more, I think maybe because there are fewer advanced English courses on the market.

Um, our C1 course was our best selling course ever, which is the advanced level.

Um, so yeah, we put something out and it’s almost quite peaceful posting one of those really long videos.

It’s like, I know I’m not, I know this isn’t going to go viral, but I know it’s going to bring in really good leads.

Um, and so yeah, that’s part of our strategy.

Okay.

Uh, one thing I saw as well is on your Facebook ads library, I saw that you are actually sending people to opt-in pages through your ads as well.

Um, can you tell me like who is targeted by these ads?

Are you just like cold targeting or are you just retargeting people who watch your content or how does that work?

Um, so this was an ad that we ran last year, I think.

I don’t think we do it at the moment, um, because we don’t have a Tripwire product in place at the moment.

We are creating one.

We had one back then.

Um, and we got, they were okay results.

The Tripwire product wasn’t, it wasn’t good enough.

Um, and then after they bought the Tripwire, they didn’t go down any other funnel.

We just did, we were building courses and we were so distracted that we, we half-assed that one.

Quite honestly, I don’t know too much about that.

I think they went, there was a level test where people would get their level test, but we found that that was quite an impulsive thing.

Um, and there’s a big difference in the people that would just go down a quiz and get, just want their result or people that want to engage with a beautiful ebook that you’ve made.

And you know, you can talk about your courses all the way through it.

Um, and also with a level test, people tend to really disagree with the results.

Um, and actually get quite angry about it.

We got some really angry emails where people are just, they didn’t want to be told that they were a lower level than they thought they were.

Um, so yes, it was, it was an unsuccessful experiment, but we’re going to try again this year when our Tripwire courses are made.

Whenever we make our courses, we work with a curriculum designer and we’ve done, we’ve worked with a curriculum designer to make some really beautiful Tripwire courses.

I’m aiming for a slightly lower opt-in rate because it’s not a super spammy promise, like learn English in five days.

It’s actually something genuine they will be able to achieve.

Um, so slightly lower opt-in, but hopefully a much higher opt-in to the upsell, which will be to go to one of our full English level courses.

I’ll let you…

What price point are you going for in your Tripwires?

We don’t know.

Previously we did $17 and $27 and the $17, we A/B tested it and the $17 won.

Um, so we went lower.

Um, I don’t know.

For some reason the number seven always seemed to work.

So we’ll probably do $17, $27, see what works.

Just try everything and see what works best.

I want to talk about your evergreen funnel.

So I opted into one of your lead magnets, uh, one week ago.

So, you know, I watched the video, I clicked on the link, I opted in, I found myself doing the exercises.

Then I was like, what am I doing?

I don’t have time right now.

Uh, but it was fun.

Um, but, um, the first thing that I noticed is your thank you page, which was like, just like, thank you.

Your email is coming soon.

And it’s like, that’s it.

And I was like, ah, there’s, there’s maybe a missed opportunity here.

Uh, at least tell people to follow you on social or something like you can do soft, soft CTAs, but I feel like your thank you page, your thank you page, people just, just gave you their personal contact details.

It’s like, there’s an opportunity to do more actually.

So it’s like, just like one little piece of feedback here that I think there’s an opportunity for something on this page.

Um, awesome.

So that’s an interesting thing.

So we had the tripwire on the thank you page, of course.

And then obviously we took it away.

So we just replaced it with a message.

Um, we could definitely do more with it, but why would you want to, um, distract people when they’re straight on the way to their inbox, their email inbox, ready to engage with your first email and the actual piece of content you’ve sent them?

Uh, usually the, the reason is like the less steps there are the in between like opting in and buying the more people convert.

Like it’s like, it’s like, it’s like the less friction you put.

So like usually what we do, for example, like we have this like free training thing.

So people opt in and the thank you page is like the lead magnet actually.

So it’s like, you get there and it’s like, here you go.

You know, since we do single opt-in, uh, it doesn’t matter.

Like we’ll, we’ll, we’ll clean them out of the list later if they don’t engage on to do anything.

Um, so like, here you go, no friction.

Here’s what you wanted.

Let me deliver value to you right away.

And then below the video, because we do it as a video, then there’s a button to go to that essentially launches the evergreen funnel for people.

So it’s like the, the thank you page becomes what they opted in for.

So it’s like, it’s really nice.

And at the same time, like, it’s kind of like you can fast forward through the funnel the same way you would watch a Netflix TV show and just like, uh, not want to wait for next week to see the next episode, you know?

Um, so it’s like, yeah, it’s kind of like, it’s kind of the logic, obviously, like, we, I don’t think we have tested this in a while.

So it’s like, well, in terms of experience, like we feel like if people can just fast forward through the thing with as little friction as possible for us, we just get more sales actually.

Okay.

Yeah.

That’s a great test idea.

I’m, um, so I’m going to have to listen to all of this again to, to retake my notes.

Well, at least we get one view on the podcast.

But, um, so then the first email came in and asked me for my level of English, right?

It’s like, it was like, Oh, like, are you like a one B one, something like this.

And you know, you had an explanation for each one, like, Oh, you can watch the videos, but with subtitles, you can watch the videos without subtitles, which was really nice.

But, um, what was the logic behind that?

Why did you do that?

Oh, because we have three different courses, um, our B1, B2 and C1.

Um, B1 is intermediate B2 upper intermediate C1 advanced.

Um, and so we want to gauge which level they think they are at so that we can promote that we can send them down the right welcome sequence.

So the four links actually have the same PDF behind them is just whichever link they click on.

They then get a different tag and then there’ll be sent down the right welcome sequence.

Um, the welcome sequences should be written, you know, they should be quite different.

They’re not that different at the moment.

They just have, you know, the different course at the end of them.

Um, but it’s something that we’re working on, but that’s the logic behind that.

Okay.

What happens if I don’t click?

Um, we have a little delay, I think it’s two days.

And then we automatically assign our middle level course, which is B2, which was our most popular at the time of creating the welcome sequence.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cause I’ve done that before, right?

I’ve created sequences where people have multiple choices and I completely forgot the, uh, scenario where people don’t click on anything.

It just wouldn’t trigger.

So it’s like, yeah, it happens.

Like, you know, it’s like I can roast people, but I think you could roast me back right there.

So yeah, it’s good that you thought about it.

So basically after that, I got two days of storytelling, right?

It’s like the story of like the student who cried in the, in a classroom.

Don’t ruin it for everyone.

It’s a very exciting story.

Then there’s a, there’s a plot twist on the email after, so I won’t tell, I won’t tell what happened.

Uh, it felt inspired by like, uh, Andrew Shapron, like, uh, these, um, so popular sequences he called is that like, it basically, you tease what comes in the next email.

You have a bit of storytelling, you introduce yourself, et cetera.

Uh, is that, is that where it comes from?

Um, I think so.

Uh, was it called a super, what did you say it was called?

Soap opera sequence.

Soap opera sequence.

Yes, exactly.

It, um, I think, so we worked with a very good friend of ours who has, you know, done lots of these and he introduced us to that concept and helped us build and write it.

It was something where I had put it off for so long.

I really don’t enjoy copywriting at all.

Um, but at that time I had not, I eventually put one of my teachers through copy school and he’s become awesome at writing copy.

Um, but at that time I just, it was one, it was a huge block for me and I wasn’t getting it done.

So we worked with someone, he helped us get it done.

We know it could be a lot better.

Um, but we really liked the story type of it and it gets loads of engagements from our students.

And you know, a lot of our videos on YouTube, we teach through stories and our courses teach through stories as well.

So we thought it made sense that the emails do as well.

Okay.

I’m just surprised to hear an English teacher doesn’t like copywriting.

Uh, but, uh, so after the two emails, I got basically a product intro email.

So like an email that breaks down what’s in the course.

I was in the C1 sequence.

Um, then I got basically a testimonial email.

So an email that would like show some stories of people who got value from the course.

Then I got an FAQ email.

So basically it’s like asks which questions you like you may have with some answers.

And then I got two close emails.

It’s pretty much, uh, how, how the launch went for me.

Uh, but again, like one thing that I was surprised is that you wait two days before you put a clear call to action to the course actually.

So it’s almost like three days after the lead magnet basically.

So like, it’s interesting to me because from our experience, like, you know, when, when I’m opting in for lead magnet, like to, to improve my English, my emotional state is at a point where it might be very different three days from now.

It’s a long time, three days.

And I felt like maybe you could blend the copy, the, the storytelling with, with the selling a bit earlier because it’s opened anyway.

There’s a link to buy really at the bottom of the email, but I guess there’s not a lot of clicks on this.

On the PS.

Um, no, I think you’re right.

I think for me writing it, I didn’t want someone to, I think I got too emotional about it.

I was like, they’re my babies, my students.

I don’t want to promise them a free PDF and then be like, buy my, but now I’m considering putting a trip wire in.

So maybe I need to get over myself.

Um, yeah, I didn’t want to be too pushy.

That was what the idea was.

Um, but I definitely didn’t understand that the customer psychology there of I’m ready.

I want to buy now.

Um, I think it would be an easy test to do.

Yeah.

I think opportunity here.

Yeah.

Thank you.

No worries.

Uh, and so the cost was $75 off.

So it was like $224 instead of 299 for the lower tier and $374 instead of 449 for the higher tier, which has some coaching, uh, baked in basically.

And so you’re basically offering a set for me, by the way, the sales page didn’t close, by the way, that’s one thing.

It’s like, uh, after the launch, I can still access the sales page.

Is that, is that, do you close your, your launches or is that just the links stay there and stay like that?

Um, it should close.

I’ll have to review that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Maybe it wasn’t long enough then.

Um, yeah, when it hits, um, it then just should redirect to our course catalog.

So did you get to zeros to the, so when I click on the link, the countdown doesn’t show at all.

And I still open the link actually.

Okay.

I think something has gone wrong with a web hook.

We did get an email about it the other day.

Um, we use deadline funnel and I think something changed.

Okay.

We use deadline funnel too.

It’s a, but like, yeah, it’s like, I was surprised I could still open it, but like I was, I was wondering because basically you’re for the $75 off, right?

Um, and then you have your full price course.

Like you sell a lot of full price courses.

Yes, we do.

Um, I wish I could give you numbers, but it’s recently gone up a lot.

We’ve, um, especially when we run any sort of Facebook ad, it just brings more iPod iPods, brings more eyes on our page and, um, and more purchases.

We’re still working on tracking, you know, where all these people are coming from.

Um, but our main purchases are our welcome sequence purchases, or if we’re running an email campaign, um, we will get loads more.

Someone the other day called them drive by buyers, which I really liked.

They, um, they just go back to your, they just go back to your course page on their own or you advertise it.

I think whenever we’re bringing eyes on, um, whether it be through Facebook ads or we’re launching another course, we will see much higher purchases on the non-advertised courses as well at full price.

Okay.

Interesting.

Uh, the reason why is because like $75 off doesn’t seem like a huge discount.

Um, and I’m like, so like our pricing strategy is to price high on full price, but not even count on making sales there.

Um, and then when you run promos, you can run a 50% off or something like this that feels a lot more appealing, uh, emotionally.

And so, uh, but like it might be different in your business because if people are buying a lot at the full price, then it’s more difficult because you will probably kill that by increasing the price.

Like I would charge that price.

Like I don’t like lying to the audience.

It’s just a pricing strategy, you know?

Yeah.

We’re very careful to make sure that we are not, you know, inflating prices or anything.

Um, because we’ve also, we’ve put higher prices in the past, recently actually, and it didn’t work.

So our, our audience is very price sensitive.

You’re right.

The $75, if you buy the, the lowest tier is quite a good discount.

It’s like 30 something percent, but if you buy the VIP, yeah, there’s no, there’s no real incentive to go for the VIP.

Um, Will, who runs all the marketing, my husband, he, um, has just taken on a data analyst and they’ve got a big list of split tests they want to run.

And that’s a huge one, um, that we want to do.

Cause I was, I always favor discounts as in percentage discounts rather than simple money off because we have all the different plans.

Um, so yeah, something to try.

Okay.

Uh, what was, do you have an idea of the conversion rate on, on your Evergreen funnel?

Like you say you get 2% opt-in rate and how many people end up buying basically?

Yeah, I’m not, I’m not a hundred percent sure on that.

Um, but I know that it’s much lower than average because we, we get so many leads and it’s, it’s a difficult industry as well.

And there’s a lot of optimizing that we could do, um, so much.

So if we could get even close to the industry standard, I think we would be buying a mansion.

Okay, nice.

Uh, try to implement the, the, the two days earlier sell.

And then I expect that your barbecue invitation at the mansion.

Yes, you may, you may come.

That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s all I’m asking for.

Um, do you run ads on this funnel?

No.

Like do people, people don’t get ads?

Like people opt-in and they’re in an Evergreen funnel, they don’t get ads?

No, it’s something that we’ve got.

We’ve got, we’ve got a plan for our Evergreen funnel ads, but we’ve only been running ads.

Um, apart from our little test with the, the lead magnet one before we’ve only been running ads on our launches.

Um, and having moderate success, like we, yeah, it’s a still an untapped market for us, but we’re getting these, these tripwires in, we’re optimizing the, um, the funnel.

And that, cause I don’t want to put money behind something that I know isn’t optimized yet.

Um, maybe that’s a mental block, but it would just pain me to have a low, a low ROAS on.

I think, uh, I think you underestimate the power of retargeting.

It’s quite, we’ve, we’ve almost never lost money on retargeting campaigns on Evergreen funnels.

Uh, it’s, it’s, I mean, it, we work in higher value markets, like the leads are higher value, so it’s easier to make a positive ROI.

So I’m not going to tell you it works for sure.

Um, but if there’s one type of ad that is the easiest to run, that would be it, you know?

Uh, people who have shown high engagement by giving you their email, who are already in a sales sequence and being marketed to.

And just essentially what you do is you, you drive up the number of clicks.

It’s pretty much like triples the amount of clicks you get from your emails, consider for like a fee, basically.

Consider it that.

Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s probably one of the easiest things to do in terms of ads, even though ads can be complicated.

This is the simplest things to do.

This is great.

I feel like I should be paying you.

You’re being a guest on the podcast, so I guess that’s already, that’s already something.

Um, let’s talk about your other funnels because I haven’t gone that far, but what happens to me after, after I’m done with the Evergreen funnel?

You’re in my PDF club, so you get my weekly PDFs.

Um, yeah.

So every week you get at least one high, super high, super high, because we have interactive activities and everything, super high value email that promotes the YouTube video.

It gives you the link to the PDF and it gives you a link to an exercise pack if it’s included.

And then we run two promos a month on average, I think it’s about 20 a year.

So we do miss a few months.

Um, at the end of each month, we promote the next month’s monthly challenge, which is a 30 day, sometimes 21 day, but normally a 30 day challenge focused on a particular topic like phrasal verbs or idioms or slang or pronunciation.

Um, they are lower entry, um, or lower price products that we, obviously it creates a nice baseline because we do it every month and it’s what we created first to create kind of cashflow in the business before we then went on to invest in creating the big courses.

Um, but you will get a three day warmup period that’s high value, but it’s all about the topic that we will then be promoting, but it’s like quizzes, information, value emails.

And then we normally do a four day promo for that.

Um, we try to mix value and selling.

Um, and then we do our mid month promos, which are our main bread and butter.

It’s either a new course launch.

If there is one, a new course launch, we’ll have a three week warmup period.

Sometimes not emails every single day.

Um, so for example, say we’re launching our C1 course, we will start doing content at C1 level, um, little tests to see if you’d be ready to start the C1 level information on what the C1 level is.

Maybe we’d create an ebook with everything, you know, to pass the C1 level.

And it has basically our curriculum, but lots of value in it as well.

So it’s just hyping people up, making them aware of what we’re going to be selling.

Um, but also making it, doing it in such a way that, you know, say someone’s never going to be interested in buying.

They wouldn’t feel annoyed by what they received because it’s good stuff.

Um, normally for a big launch three week warmup period, we do sometimes do, we often do an amazing, you know, targeted lead magnet.

Um, and then we will sometimes put ad spend behind that, but we, it worked really well for our general English courses for our business English courses.

It didn’t work so well.

So we’ll review that for next time.

And then it’s nearly always a one week promo.

Um, mid month promos can be anything from three days for, you know, maybe we’re bundling courses we already have, or we’re doing a random discount or another angle.

Maybe the price is going up.

Um, they’ll be short or if it’s a new launch, it will be seven days.

So yeah, we send a lot of, a lot of emails.

I see that.

Um, if I’m like a beginner and you’re promoting the C1 course, the advanced course, is there a way for me to opt out of this launch or I’m just going to be bombarded by emails?

Sometimes we offer that option.

Um, we’re kind of in two minds about it.

One thing we do, we never ever email our unengaged audience with promos and we are getting better at segmenting.

Um, so definitely segmenting on people who have bought certain products.

If they’ve bought this B1 course and they’re not going to want the C1 course, uh, we could go even further, but sometimes it’s hard to know whether someone has just accidentally clicked that they are at a low level because it’s the first link or if they genuinely are and it’s like weighing up, should I miss the opportunity to make a sale or should I risk, you know, slightly annoying someone who’s at a low level?

Don’t know.

We’re not perfect at it yet, but I think we could do a much better job at segmenting.

So is your segmentation based on the level basically?

So you just like have a A1, B1, C1, et cetera?

Yes.

That’s the main segmentation.

We also have based on country as well.

So if there’s a super high price launch we’re doing, we won’t market to India because they’re realistically not going to purchase.

And, um, they would also generate a lot of customer service queries, for example, things like that.

But we’re happy for them to be on the list to receive the free content or the lower priced course offerings.

Um, so it’s about managing a little bit of that as well.

Okay.

Uh, I see you’re running all the bumps on your checkout.

How did, like, did all the bumps make a big impact on your business or like, did you not get too much effect from implementing them?

Yeah, we love order bumps.

Order bumps normally boost any course launch by 10%.

And bear in mind, we’re running order bumps through Teachable.

We use Teachable’s checkout.

We have tested other checkouts.

We have tried to build our own and the tax, the tax is such a headache, um, and things breaking.

And we were doing so many launches last year, so many new pages that we just, we had to, we had to prioritize.

Um, you cannot optimize or customize, sorry, Teachable’s checkout page.

It’s so annoying.

You have no control over it.

Um, when we use things like ClickFunnels and Thrivecart and WooCommerce, we had all the control.

We got these amazing opt-in rates of like 40% opt-in rather than an average of 30 on a double order bump on Teachable or 20% on a single order bump.

Um, but then our taxes are remitted for us.

We don’t get people who are paying and then not, not going in the loop.

Web hooks aren’t broken, breaking.

They are getting registered in click, in ConvertKit.

So yeah, it was knowing where to, where to cut the losses.

Um, but yeah, we love order bumps.

They’ve just released a feature where you can put two in.

So we’ve been using that.

Um, and it’s good.

Yeah.

Fair enough.

I was going to say, yeah, the checkout, I see you cannot, uh, you cannot customize it.

Cause I was going to say like when you collect the full address, for example, when it’s like a digital product and it’s like, it’s lots of fields to field, et cetera.

And it’s like, usually when you have more fields, you have a lower completion rate, et cetera.

But, uh, I can understand the tax, the tech burden.

Uh, people don’t know it until they’ve done like a proper product launch and they make hundreds of sales and you know, 5% of sales don’t get added to the, to the course or something.

It’s a pain in the ass.

So it has happened to us.

We use Thrivecart and to be frank, it does miss some stuff sometimes.

Like it’s just like the hook’s not going to trigger or something.

It was the same for us on Thrivecart as well.

And I feel like they were gaslighting us saying, no, it’s you.

And I was like, no, it’s you!

Like, um, our product manager absolutely hates them.

We still use them, but like, because our volume of sales is lower, like we sell higher prices, lower volumes.

So it’s like, it’s kind of like manageable by support.

Like it’s, it’s, you know, a small percentage of times, but I can imagine with, you know, if you launch Tripwires and you’re going to make like hundreds of sales per day or something, uh, it’s gonna, it’s not going to work.

Like you won’t be able to manage it.

So I, I feel your pain.

Uh, I I’m actually shopping for a new, uh, shopping cart right now as well because of Thrivecart issues actually.

How do you handle upsells?

And do you have any upsells after people check out?

Do you try to maximize customer value?

Like how do you, what happens after I’m a customer for you to make more money off me?

So, um, upsells have never been so successful for us.

Um, Teachable had a terrible upsell system.

There was no one click upsell.

Uh, they’d have to go through the whole checkout process again.

And it was really confusing.

Um, they’ve recently changed it.

So they do have it now.

So we’ve gone from a 2% upsell rate to 8% or something like that.

And they seem to be making about 10% boost.

So our total for promo, 10% is order bumps, 10% is upsells, which we’re happy with before it was, we were so disheartened with upsells.

However, you’ve got to remember that we do such frequent promos that people are often always being upselled, upsold to things.

Um, so I think it would make sense for someone who does, who relies more on the evergreen funnel and does fewer promos to really optimize the upsells.

Um, we are going to do our first big experiment with upsells when we launch our tripwire courses, because they are all courses designed to lead onto purchasing the B1, the B2 or C1 courses.

And they will, um, have hype videos at the end that will hopefully get people to do a one-click upsell.

So we’ll see.

Okay.

I mean, for tripwires, yeah, that’s kind of the challenge.

It’s like, it’s easy to make a tripwire, but if you don’t nail the upsell, it really doesn’t make much of a dent in your business.

So that’s, that’s the double challenge.

And so like, it’s easy to be excited by a high number of sales, but in the end, especially if you have ad spend, uh, it’s, it’s very challenging to, to even make it profitable sometimes.

Okay.

We’re going to slowly wrap it up.

So I’m going to finish with a couple of like more opinionated questions to you.

So it’s not really like, we’re not talking tactics.

We’re talking about like how you feel towards all that stuff.

And just in general, things that helped you get where you are right now.

So I want to ask first, like, what do you think is the best part of your business that you’re like really proud of, and you feel you’re ahead?

Oh, the quality of our content.

Um, and actually it’s the quality of the courses.

I just, I knew I didn’t want to.

So back in the day, I worked with a management company and a, an agency that created this rubbish course with me.

You know, I put my heart and soul into it, but they just didn’t have the knowledge.

They were used to working with fitness influencers who just wanted to put a load of workouts on an app or something like that.

And I was so disheartened with it, a little bit embarrassed as well.

I felt like I hadn’t served my students properly.

I swore to myself, I’m never, ever, ever going to put out something that I’m not truly proud of.

Um, and something that I’m not able to constantly keep up to my standard.

So our courses at the moment, we released them and they were great, but then we went through an audit and got, made them even better, um, made them accessible as well, which was really important to us.

Um, yeah, it was a humbling audit, but it was amazing to have, you know, actionable things that we could put in place to make people use them who are colorblind on screen readers.

It was cool.

So I’m really, really proud of the quality of our content.

I also think the quality of our YouTube content and the lead magnets that go with it are awesome.

And I feel really excited to put them out, you know, to such a large audience and to get emails of teachers using them in their classrooms.

And yeah, it’s really nice.

Um, there was a time where I felt really, really nervous.

I had some backlash online and people were kind of critiquing my content or, you know, there was some, it was a very sensitive time on the internet, but I really feel like we’ve now put systems in place where everything is proofread, multiple layers of proofreading.

We’ve got teachers that are better than I am overlooking everything.

And I know that everything we put out is super high quality.

So yeah, I think that’s the best part of our business.

Okay.

Now let me ask the opposite question.

What’s the worst part of your business and what needs the most work?

So is this the bit I least enjoy or I think is…

No, what do you think is objectively the worst?

Like external audits, someone’s like, you really need to work on this.

Like this is not good enough.

Which one to pick?

There are so many things that we could work on, which is also exciting in its own right.

Cause you know, you’re not finished yet.

You have room for improvement.

Like you can get there.

And it’s exciting to progress.

Like it’s cool.

I’m going to say two.

One is our SOPs, systems and processes.

We grew really fast.

We grew our team really fast and we haven’t got all the correct systems in place.

So a lot of time and a lot of money has been wasted.

The other one is our damn funnel.

It’s taken us so long to get something in place.

It’s not optimized.

And yes, I’m so proud of all the courses we’ve created, but it’s at the expense of getting, you know, taking advantage of all these leads that are coming in.

I think I have no regrets over doing the courses to such a high standard.

But I wish I could have hired the correct people back then because I didn’t have enough time to help us set up a proper funnel because it would have cost us a bit, but it would have made us a lot more money.

Yeah.

I mean, I think most companies either are better the product or better the marketing.

It’s quite rare to nail both.

I mean, that’s what we all aspire to.

But the reality is you tend to be leaning one way or another.

And if you’ve done the product, then I mean, it’s probably better.

Like you probably feel better about your business because of that too.

So it’s not so bad.

Yeah.

I just feel like it’s a bit of a drop off because you’ve got awesome product, awesome lead back that came.

But then it’s just, they’re jumping over this huge crevice to get there instead of it being an easy, easy flow.

I can.

Yeah.

But there’s a lot of room for improvement as well.

And you’re already doing quite well.

So it’s like, this must be exciting.

Like the mention is inside, you know.

One more thing, kind of like a personal thing.

People often make fun of my accent or say it’s difficult to understand.

Like what grade would you put me in the English level?

I think your accent is charming.

Really charming.

And it’s probably part of your success as well.

You know, you both have interesting accents and like good banter together.

Your level, oh, you’ll definitely be C1 or beyond.

I mean, you did my test and it obviously put you at C1 level, didn’t it?

Went down my C1 final.

I didn’t finish the test.

No, I just clicked on the link.

So I cheated.

You cheated.

No, you speak very, very well.

And very fast as well, which is super hard in another language.

It’s a problem.

I speak too fast, actually.

Anyway, we’re not going to go into that.

Lucy, thanks for joining the podcast.

Do you want to send people anywhere or, you know, do you want them to follow anywhere?

Do you know what?

I imagine most of your listeners aren’t really my audience.

So if they do want to, download one of my lead magnets, go through my funnel and reply to it with any advice.

You’ll find me on English with Lucy on YouTube.

That’s probably the best way to find a lead magnet.

I welcome it.

Awesome.

Well, thanks for joining, Lucy.

That was super nice.

Thanks for sharing so much and being so open.

And it was really fun.

Thank you for such great questions and so much value to me as well.

It was really enjoyable.

All right.

No worries.