PLUS – 1 Simple Funnel Tweak that Increased Strategy Session Bookings by Over 400%

If you’d like to see how you can create a webinar funnel that converts a high percentage of cold traffic into high-ticket clients within your business, then make sure you read every word on this page.

What you’re about to discover is the process I went through with a client who’s a certified hypnotherapist & mindset coach. She helps women over 45 to rewire their mindset & lose weight.

I’m going to show you how we took her business and created a high converting webinar funnel that generated strategy sessions for around $15 each.

We then went on to make $26,400 from spending just $520 on Facebook ads. If you’d like to see how you can generate the same results in your business – pay attention.

Webinars are obviously a super effective tool. In this post I’ll show you how to combine a solid webinar strategy with Facebook marketing, to create a sales funnel that prints cash – literally.

The business I’m going to be talking to you about was founded by Maggie Wilde also known as ‘The Potentialist’. She was referred to me by a friend to develop a plan to generate more qualified strategy session leads for her hypnotherapy business.

I’m going to break down in this post the strategy we went through, how I went about building it, what tools I used and some of the features of the funnel.

I’ll cover the Facebook campaign, including the ads & targeting, and then break down the results and show you the numbers.

I’ve included screenshots below so you can see for yourself and I’m going to show you exactly how you can generate the same results in your business.

As I said, Maggie is a hypnotherapist & master NLP practitioner who runs a clinic in Melbourne, Australia. Basically when I commence working on a new project to generate leads for coaches & consultants, I start with developing a marketing strategy.

1 – Strategy

When developing a marketing strategy, the first step is to ask “What do we actually want to achieve here?” and identify the goal of the campaign. With Maggie – the goal was to get qualified strategy sessions booked in for her premium program, ‘Emotional Eating Solutions’ (or EES for short).

In EES, Maggie teaches women how to rewire their brain using NLP. This helps them to overcome yoyo dieting, comfort & emotional eating to lose weight and improve their quality of life. It’s a really great thing that she does.

Her target market is women over 45, which I already knew would be a great market to target using Facebook Ads. This is because its a niche that isn’t heavily targeted with ads, like say men between 18 & 35 who are small business owners.

Maggie’s sales process consisted of 2 steps.

The first was to book a prospect into what she called a “Rewire Session” where she takes them through exercises that begin to rewire parts of the brain. If they are qualified for her program, she then ascends them into EES.

Maggie wanted to have more qualified strategy sessions in her calendar every single week.

The best way to qualify prospects for her program and have them book in a consult call is – yep, you guessed it… using a Webinar Funnel.

Now here’s the thing with Webinar’s that almost everyone gets wrong.

Whenever I suggest this type of funnel to a new client, there immediate reaction is.. “so I just run a webinar and offer a session at the end as the call to action? And that’s it?…”

Well, the reality is… this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Below, I’ve included a standard webinar funnel diagram, as presented by my good mate Ricky Baldasso of Metric Driven Marketer and it looks like this:

The funnel begins with the webinar registration page and then the thank you page. Naturally they get emailed access details to the webinar, which can be accessed once its live.

If they don’t attend, they will get access to the replay. Then of course they are offered to buy our product / service, or in this case book in for a strategy session.

That’s the most basic webinar funnel strategy, and… it’s where most people get it wrong.

Here’s how we massively boosted our strategy session bookings:

After the registration page, we changed things up.

Instead of having the usual “thanks for registering” confirmation page, we placed a call to action on this page to book for a direct consult with Maggie.

Just after someone’s taken action and registered for the webinar, we asked them:

“Hey, would you like to fast-track the results you’re looking for? Would you like to solve this problem quicker? Book in here for a consultation.”

Then once they confirm the consult and enter their phone number, both the prospect and Maggie are sent an email notifying each other so they can book a time to speak.

At the end of the webinar, everyone on the call is again asked to book in a consult.

That’s the call to action. We don’t sell anything on the webinar, we simply get people to book into a consult who want more information. So there is 2 points of contact.

The first strategy has one call to action, and the second strategy has two, to boost consult call bookings.

Now, its one thing to know the outcome of your marketing strategy and the type of funnel you will use to execute it – BUT…

If you don’t know the numbers behind your funnel, how much you will pay for a click, a lead and then a new customer, you are already behind.

Now, obviously we will only be estimating initially, but it is best to have target goals and know the most you can pay per lead.

I start with baseline metrics I’ve developed from my years of experience and work backwards from there.

For a high ticket product, I always expect to pay a customer Cost per Acquistion (CPA) of between 10 – 20%. Lets go with the worst case and say CPA = 20% of sale value.

Maggie sells EES for $2,200 – so at 20%, CPA = $440.

Her average close rate is 1 in 4 sales calls which means she can afford to pay $110 CPL (cost per lead) to get a strategy session booked in.

If 10% of webinar attendees book in for a rewire session, the cost per attendee is $11.

This means with a 30% webinar attendance rate, we must pay $3.30 for a webinar signup.

However, given that we have the added strategy session page, the webinar registrant & attendee costs are slightly different.

Typically, I find 10% of webinar registrants will book a strategy session on the consult page. This means if we have 100 registrants, 10% will book in for a call after registering (100 calls). 30% of registrants will attend the webinar (30 people), and then 10% of those will book a call as well (3 people).

Therefore, 13% of registrants will book in for a strategy session, so the targeted cost per webinar  signup is $4.29.

Obviously all of these numbers are just estimated metrics – but the reason they are so important to begin with is they give us a baseline to measure against the results we get, which helps us to further optimise our marketing funnel.

So to recap:

EES = $2,200

CPA = $440

Close Rate = 25%

CPL = $110

CPa (Cost per Attendee) = $14.30

CPr (Cost per Registrant) = $4.29

After testing this same funnel in many niches, I knew this would generate killer results for Maggie.

Especially after calculating the baseline metrics.

The last thing we needed to develop was the “Big Idea” or the concept for this promotion. After discussing numerous ideas with Maggie, she revealed that she’d had past success marketing her 3 ways to stop emotional eating.

This was used as our initial concept and we decided we’d wait to see the results before testing other topics.

2 – Build

Once the strategy was mapped out, the next phase was to actually build the funnel. For this step, we used Clickfunnels as the landing page builder, GoToWebinar for hosting the actual webinar and Infusionsoft as the CRM.

Typically when I build a funnel, I create the tech aspects first. Then I will build the creatives like copy and design separately. Once each part is complete I will put them together.

For this funnel, I built the entire infrastructure in Clickfunnels, and then created the necessary campaigns in Infusionsoft so prospects got the indoctrination & reminder emails before the webinar. I won’t go into the technical aspect in much detail – you can find out how to build these assets out online.

What I do want to cover however, are the important conversion principles. The sales copy and design.

For the landing page, it has a very simple yet elegant design. It follows a fairly standard format with a headline, sub headline and then a call to action.

The reason the CTA is placed so high on the page is so that its optimised well for mobile. As you scroll down, you can see the date and information about the presenter, and then the bullet points on the right:

 

 

Now, I’m a copywriter so the bullet points on the right were strategically planned.

I wrote them to not only address the pain points of the prospects, but also to intrigue them into attending the webinar.

For example, take a look at: “The secret exercise to switch off emotional cravings instantly & how to win the battle in your head with sabotaging patterns”.

You can see there are some very emotional words used. “secret, cravings, instantly, sabotaging” just to name a few. These words draw people in and get them interested in what you’re talking about. They promise to reveal strategies & exercises people haven’t heard in a fast and efficient nature.

If you’ve studied human psychology, you’ll know these factors influence a high response rate. Having great copy is the most important aspect in a sales funnel.

Moving on to the consultation page. From a design aspect you can see we went with simple, brand consistent colours and large, easy to read font.

This may seem obvious, but you’d be amazed at the amount of time I see horrendous landing page design with hard to read font.

One key here is to make the Call to Action bright and easy to read so it grabs people’s attention. As far as the copy goes, I followed a simple strategy like this:

1. Acknowledgement: Whenever you want to make people a secondary offer after they’ve just taken action, you MUST acknowledge the action they’ve taken on the previous page. Simple just congratulate them, and then say hey – if you really want results… you need to take action NOW, don’t wait etc. You’d be surprised how not acknowledging what you’ve just asked them to do can drastically affect conversions.
2. Bridge: Once they have been acknowledged, you need to ‘bridge’ them to the next stage of your offer. This is simply by saying what I touched on above – “if you really want results and don’t want to wait – book in a consult now”. You tease them with the idea of solving the pain they are having much sooner, to get people to take action.
3. Offer & CTA: After the bridge you will have the offer and then the direct CTA as you can see on the consult page. 
4. How it Works: Below the first CTA you need to explain how the call works and what will happen.
5. Filter: Filter out the people who aren’t qualified for the offer by explaining the qualifying points before the final CTA. “ie – you must be hard working, will to invest in yourself” etc, whatever applies to your specific offer. 
6. CTA: Include your final CTA at the bottom of the page.

Now there is one thing to be aware of with this funnel, particularly when a prospect books in who hasn’t watched your webinar. If they aren’t familiar with who you are or what you offer, they’re not going to be a super qualified prospect.

When people booked in for a call with Maggie, she would counter this by sending them a replay of a previous webinar. We would also book them in for a call after the date of the webinar where possible.

That way we would ensure they watched the webinar, familiarised themselves with what Maggie did and built more trust.

These were the key design and copy aspects that helped the funnel convert. After this was completed, we finalised the tech side of the funnel.

Then all that was left was setting up the Facebook Campaign and turning on the ads. Exciting!

3 – Facebook Campaign

When it came to running traffic to the new funnel, Facebook ads were the obvious choice. I break these down in terms of the two critical factors – 1) Creatives & 2) Targeting.

Creatives

For the Facebook Campaign, we had the webinar funnel strategy & the big idea for the campaign which was “3 Ways to Destroy Emotional Eating Habits”, based on strategies Maggie had developed using NLP.

I decided to put together slightly longer copy ads, given the sensitive nature of a weight loss market. I told a story about the challenges of weight loss and the solutions to overcoming them. You can see an initial draft below:

When it came to the images for the ads, I tested a range including pictures with Maggie, text, and then slightly more provocative photos, like this one:

This style of image proved to get a far better result in terms of response and signup cost.

By pairing these images with the longer form copy, they offer was incredibly clear and concise. This produced a good webinar signup cost as you’ll see below, due to highly relevant ads.

Targeting

For the targeting, I created a conversion campaign and initially created 5 ad sets. These were for each audience I was targeting, which happened to be 4 different interests, and 1 custom audience – maggie’s existing client database.

The 4 interests were Weight Watchers, Michelle Bridges, Obesity Awareness & The Biggest Loser.

These interests always need to be tested. This is particularly relevant in a niche like weight loss, where the focus is on a negative quality of the prospect.

The reason for this is Facebook is primarily a social platform & people don’t go there to promote their own negative qualities. So as an advertiser you need to be more focused on how they can improve those things.

When I run ads, I create each ad set with just one interest. That way I can see which interest leads to the highest conversions for when the campaign gets scaled.

After this was set up, we started the campaign and ran it for two weeks, between November 22nd & December 5th, 2015.

4 – Results
After 2 weeks of running the campaign, we were able to analyze the results and figure out whether anything needed to be changed or tweaked from 2 webinars. The results we achieved and ROI generated proved the campaign a great success.

Facebook Ad Manager

Now as you can see, we had a 109 conversions for $4.78.

33 of those leads were straight booked in for a call on step 2 of the consult page, so we were paying $15.75 to get someone into a strategy call from cold traffic.

The other 76 conversions were webinar sign ups. This is an incredible result, and FAR below my initial goal of $110 CPL.

As you can see, the results were quite different to our estimated metrics. In fact, they were much better. We paid slightly more than our target webinar signup cost.

But far less for a session, and as you will see, to acquire a customer.

After the webinar was run, we had a total of 36 strategy calls booked in, which made Maggie’s next week quite busy – in a good way of course.

Of that, 12 sales were made. The conversion rate is much better than expected – 33% instead of 25%.

Some of these leads were a little bit less qualified because we didn’t put them through a proper indoctrination process by showing them content and then re-targeting them the webinar.

This would have helped to improve the conversion rate and lead quality. However, being the first time we’d ran the campaign, we just wanted to launch it as quickly as we could and get some results.

The breakdown of numbers, from November 22nd to December 5th shows:

– 109 Conversions: 76 Webinar Registrants & 33 Strategy Session Bookings (after the webinar, 36 sessions were booked in total)

– $520.80 spent on Ads

– $6.85 per Webinar Registrant, $15.75 per Strategy Session (CPL)

– 12 Sales @ $2,200 = $26,400

This produced an ROI of 4,969.12% – which is a great result to begin with.

5 – Analysis

After launching any new ad campaign, I always conduct a critical analysis to see how I can improve and what I can learn from what worked and what didn’t. From $520 in ads spend, to then make $26,000 is obviously not a bad result whatsoever.

Essentially there’s a bunch of reasons why this worked well, the first one I would say is emotional direct response marketing. By being direct and upfront about the problem that your market faces, and how you can solve it in a way that emotionally draws them in to responding.

I think that’s not something that’s done exceptionally well in this niche and that’s why our funnel worked very well.

6 – Whats next?

If you’re a coach or consultant and you have a high ticket marketing funnel, whether its webinar or otherwise that you want to take to the next level, then a strategy session with me is the ideal next step.

In the session we will do 3 main things:

1. Build your marketing strategy, so you have the right funnel to reach your goals
2. Get clear on what your big idea & offer will be so it crushes it when you launch!
3. Develop your “baseline metrics” so you know your targets to generate a large ROI

And at the end of our session if you want me to build your funnel, write your copy and/ or run your traffic & I decide we’re a good fit to work together, awesome!

Otherwise, you’re more than welcome to take what you get from the call, write your own copy and build your funnel by yourself! Just make sure you come back and let me know the results – I love hearing about people who have huge success.

To set-up a successful funnel, it obviously take some work so to qualify for a funnel strategy session with me, your answer must be YES to the following criteria:

– I know what niche I serve & am clear on my value offer to them

– I have an initial marketing budget of at least $3K, to be invested in either Facebook ads, working with James or both

– I take full responsibility for my success and I am committed to succeeding no matter what!

If that’s you, click here to apply for a funnel strategy session with me, then after completing your application, you’ll be redirected to my calendar to schedule a time with me to chat.

I look forward to talking with you!

Also – connect with me here on Facebook!

I hope you enjoyed the read – make sure you check out more of my articles while you are here.