I’m so excited about today’s episode. Our guest today is one of my favorite people. I’ve known him for years. We used to be in a mastermind group together.

Zach Spuckler has done so many things. You’ll hear about them as we dive into this episode. It’s been so fun to watch his journey. Zach is now a member of my Accelerator coaching program.

One of the things that we’re working on is growing and scaling his membership, and I love the name of it. It’s called, Not Your Average Membership, and he has taken it to a six-figure run rate in about five months.

I asked Zach to come on the show and share how he’s done that. What’s gone into it. How he launched it. Why it is a membership with an actual mission: he’s very clear on who this is for and who it’s not for. How he’s leading with his values in creating this membership, and why it’s always open for enrollment—it’s not an open/close membership like you often hear about.

We also get into the topic of membership churn. His churn rate has been fairly high, so we talk about what he’s doing to reduce it, and how long it’s going to take to see results.

Zach is an open book, and he delivers a lot for you in today’s episode.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Benefits of ongoing membership enrollment
• How Zach reached a 6-figure run rate in 6 months
• Tips for increasing membership enrollment
• Ad strategies that work
• How to launch your membership
• Why leading with your values pays off
• How to build relationships with your members
• Straight talk about churn rates

Links & Resources:

• Circle
• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

Zach Spuckler’s Links:

• Heart Soul & Hustle’s website
• Heart Soul & Hustle’s membership
• Follow Zach on Facebook
• Zach is on Instagram
• Check out the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast

Got A Question You Want Answered On the Podcast?

Ask your questions or let me know if there is a topic or guest you’d like to hear from in the comments below or click here to visit my contact page and submit your question there for a chance to be featured on one of my upcoming Q&A episodes.

Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!

Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy:

Case Study: 0% Churn!, with Ali Manning (Membership Series)

Quick Tip: Increase Launch Conversions With This One Strategy

Facebook/IG Ads: Avoid This (Overlooked) Mistake When Running Conversion Ads

[00:00:00] Rick:
Hey, my friend, I want to let you know that we only have three more spots available this month for my Accelerator coaching program. We only allow 35 people in the program, and we only have three spots available this month. So, if you want to grab one of these three spots—it’s application only—go to RickMulready.com/Accelerator.

This is for established online course creators. Maybe you have a membership or you’re an online coach, or maybe you’re a teacher entrepreneur and you want to grow and scale your online business. You’re not really sure what next things to be doing in your business in order to achieve that. Maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed or heading towards burnout. You’re not really sure how to grow your team, for example.

Well, we help you create more profit and make a bigger impact in your business with less hustle. We do that by helping you optimize your sales and marketing, your systems and processes, and your mindset. If you’re interested in grabbing one of these three spots, go to RickMulready.com/Accelerator.

[00:01:04] Zach:
Three years ago, I was like, I’m done with courses. I burned everything to the ground. I took my email list from 20,000 down to 4,000. I was like, I’m only doing one-on-one agency work; quickly burned out on that, believe it or not. Big shocker.

I started evaluating like the business as a whole, and I was like, well, where was the issue with why was like really starting over, and over, and over, and over again?

What I identified was that I was doing stuff I hated. So, I started building a really nice team around me. Now I can do the things that I want to do.

[00:02:01] Rick:
Hey, what is up, my friends? Welcome to the Art of Online Business podcast. I’m your host, Rick Mulready. I want to share a little something with you, and this may sound super bougie, but my favorite coffee shop, for those of you who don’t know, I am a coffee snob. I just love coffee, and I just love the experience of drinking coffee, which in and of itself sounds super bougie.

But anyway, my favorite coffee shop here in San Diego is called James coffee and they make a honey cinnamon latte. And I always thought it was like specific to GM’s coffee, but apparently that’s a well-known Drake. I had no idea. And so. we have, we have a really nice coffee machine, espresso machine, I should say, here at home.

And I started, I was like, I’m going to try making my own honey cinnamon lattes. And, holy cow, that’s amazing. Like my whole world has opened up now, but I can make a honey cinnamon latte at home. And, I know this disappoints, so many of you that are like, dude, why aren’t you just drinking? You know, like straight up.

Espresso or black coffee, which I love by the way, both those things. But I don’t know. This has just been a major breakthrough. I don’t know why I’m sharing this with you, but you’re welcome. All right. I’m so excited about today’s episode because this person is, he really is one of my favorite people.

I’ve known him for years. we used to be in a mastermind together and it’s been so fun to. Watches journey over the years. And, Zach Spuckler has done so many things as you’re about to hear when we dive into this episode. and it’s been just so fun to watch his journey. Zach is now a member of my Accelerator coaching program.

And one of the things that we’re working on is, growing and scaling the membership that you’re about to hear about here, today. And he’s already done an amazing job. Growing his membership. And I love the name of the membership. It’s called not your average membership and. It just, I mean, he has taken this membership to a six figure run rate for the membership in about five months.

And so I asked him to come on here to share how he’s done that. Like what’s gone into it and how he has launched it, why it is a membership with an actual mission where he’s very clear on who this is. And who it’s not for and how he’s leading with his values in trading this member. And so we break down how he launched it, why it is always open.

It’s not an open, closed membership. Like you often hear about, we, we talk about a paid challenge and a Zach is very well known as, you know, as like the challenge guy, if you will, super, super good at challenges. And so he breaks down how he has leveraged the paid challenge. To launch his membership, how often he does that.

And then we also get into a topic and I’m so glad that he was open and willing to talk about this. His churn rate has been fairly high when it comes to his membership. And so we talk about what he’s doing to reduce that churn rate, and you know, how long it’s going to take to see results from that, et cetera, et cetera.

Zach is an open book and he delivers on a lot here for you today. So without further ado, let’s go hang out with Zach Spuckler. how are you? My friends welcome to the podcast.

[00:05:40] Zach:
I am just so excited to be here. it’s a good day for a good day.

[00:05:46] Rick:
And you are, so you were in my neck of the woods for a while. How long were you living in Southern California?

[00:05:54] Zach:
We were in Southern California for two and a half years. Give or take.

[00:05:59] Rick:
And now you’re back in Ohio, correct?

[00:06:02] Zach:
Yeah. Now we’re back in Ohio, you know, families, nieces, and nephews. They kinda missed us. They wanted, you know, we’re, we’re in Ohio. I’ll say that.

[00:06:12] Rick:
Heck of a lot cheaper there, right?

[00:06:14] Zach:
Oh my gosh. So much cheaper. Like, you know, groceries and gas have gotten a little more expensive. Like what we were paying in California. We’re now paying in Ohio. But I also know in California, it’s got. Even worse. So, yeah, but now

[00:06:29] Rick:
When you went back to Ohio to get time.

[00:06:31] Zach:
Exactly.

[00:06:33] Rick:
So you’re really known for challenges. You’re known for ads. and you have created this, this really cool membership that I want to dive into here today. You also do a lot of other different, you know, promotions in your business and offers and so forth.

What I want to dive into here today, as you’ve created this member. And your business that you’re on a six-figure runway, basically in your

[00:07:00] Zach:
Yep.

[00:07:01] Rick:
And it’s not that old within the past six months, is

[00:07:04] Zach:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s officially seven months old on the 18th. I believe of March, March. Pre-sale

[00:07:13] Rick:
Okay. March 18th, seven months old.

[00:07:15] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:07:16] Rick:
And you’ve been at this six figure run rate on your membership for a little while now.

[00:07:21] Zach:
Yeah. For a couple months.

[00:07:22] Rick:
Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. So with that, let’s add some context. You’ve been doing this a while.

[00:07:29] Zach:
Yes.

[00:07:29] Rick:
Not a membership. I mean, you’ve been doing the membership a while, but you’ve been in the online business space for a long time.

So let’s give some context there and let people know for, you know, that don’t know your background, sort of, what is your background and kind of bring us up to where you are.

[00:07:44] Zach:
Yeah. So I always jokingly say it started when. 12, because I know that because I used to do like online surveys. This is like super old school. I don’t even know if this is a thing anymore, but you still get paid to like fill out surveys and click on ads. And like, I had this whole fake persona, which my family still jokes about to this day.

Cause every once in a while they’ll get mail for Jameson, Tomi, sta he does not exist. He’s not a real person.

[00:08:08] Rick:
What’s the name?

[00:08:09] Zach:
James

I use an online name generator back in like 2007. but I started kind of like really being enamored with this idea of like financial freedom, being able to just make money out of nothing.

And I did that for a number of years. I remember when I was like 17, my parents were like, Hey, I’m like, where are you getting this money from? And I was like, oh yeah, I made like $17,000 clicking on ads. and. Okay, this is a little bizarre, but yeah.

[00:08:43] Rick:
What kind of scam are you running

[00:08:44] Zach:
What kind of scam you’re running here. It’s gotten more legitimate over the years.

I’ve done all kinds of stuff from like direct sales, freelance writing website, flipping domain sales, affiliate marketing. I’ve tried everything. And back in 2015, I had been running a food blog for a couple years and I had sold some online courses. I was doing some ad revenue. I had even played around with like, not Kickstarter, it’s called Indiegogo, but I had done like an Indiegogo campaign, which was very similar to Kickstarter for a cookbook.

And it was going really well. And I kind of, at that point back in 2013, 14 kind of looked over the last 10 years and was like, what is, what is the driving force? Right. Cause, I, we we’ve known each other for a while. You know, I’m a jumper, I jumped from thing to thing. What is the common trend here. And for me it was marketing.

I was like, I may not like really always be like a namerd with making a recipe, but I love the idea of marketing that recipe. And so in 2015, I said, I’m going to start a marketing company. I don’t really know exactly how I’m going to do it, but our principles from day one, where we were just going to be honest, transparent, and tell people.

I’m not making a million dollars, but I built this blog up. It’s getting 25,000 views a month and we’re getting some ad revenue. We’ve sold some courses. We run some Facebook ads and, you know, we started saying like, we, we got on Periscope, super dating myself now, but we got, we got on Paris.

[00:10:07] Rick:
That’s another thing that you’re known for,

[00:10:08] Zach:
Yeah, which I was known for Periscope for awhile.

And we were like, look, we’re just going to show you what we’ve been doing. And at the time I was landing, Facebook ads, clients via Periscope, because I had learned a little bit about ads from my blog. And we started doing one-on-one services. And after booking several clients, people were like, well, how are you booking these clients?

And so we made a Periscope course. We took that to six figures. then people started asking, well, how are you running the Facebook ads? I made that course and took it to six figures. And then people were saying, well, how are you launching these courses? And we were doing challenges, which were a little more novel a few years ago.

And we created a, a course around challenges. We took that to want to say around four or $500,000. and then in the interim, you know, I was doing coaching consulting. And then about, it would have been about three years ago. I was like, I’m done with courses. I burned everything to the ground. I took my email list from 20,000 down to 4,000.

I was like, I’m only doing one-on-one agency work and. Quickly burned out on that, believe it or not big shocker. And, I started evaluating like the business as a whole, and I was like, well, where was the issue with like, why I was like really starting over, over and over and over again. And when I identified was that I was doing stuff I hated.

And I started building a really nice team around me. So now I can do the things that I want to do. Like we have a coaching program, we have the membership and like the membership, all I do is check in and make the content. Like I don’t schedule the calls item. Send out the member roundups. I don’t, or like the weekly Roundup.

I don’t, I don’t even check to see the new post. I actually get a slack message every morning for my team.

Go reply to these posts. And so after doing that and building a really nice team around me, We now have the membership. We have some boot camps that we do. We have the agency side of things. We still have the agency side of things.

We’ve just taken our client roster down to a much more manageable number. And, that’s what we do now. We just, we just really want. You know, I think the biggest compliment that I’ve gotten from my team is like, I messaged them a few months ago and I was like, does everything just seem really smooth lately?

And, Jessica who’s like my my right hand. It does don’t jinx it, but it definitely feels like we’ve, we’ve got a group going and, you know, that’s how we ended up here.

We’re just, we’re just kind of grooving and move in. And everything just feels, you know, not easy all the time, but definitely a lot later and easier than it did when we burned it all to the ground.

So that’s my life story since you asked for it and, feel free to probe away.

[00:12:41] Rick:
It’s been fun to watch that journey of yours. And because when we first met, you were doing like the jumping,

[00:12:48] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:12:49] Rick:
Jumping around. You said something really, really key there that I want to make sure that we don’t just fly by. And you said the common theme too. When I look back from when I was jumping from thing to thing to thing was that I wasn’t happy and doing what I was doing.

[00:13:06] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:13:08] Rick:
I think that’s something that so many people can relate to because we oftentimes do spend too much time. With something, even though it might be making a lot of money.

[00:13:20] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:13:20] Rick:
In, you just mentioned, you threw out dollar numbers, you were making really good money, but yet there was still a level of unhappiness there based on what you were focusing your time on.

[00:13:31] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:13:32] Rick:
It’s been really fun, especially like the past two years where I’ve watched you really, you really focus on values and going against the grain. Of what is quote unquote the norm in the online marketing space, which I absolutely love. And, you know, you talk a lot about, you know, higher prices versus, what’s often talked about in this space and again, going against the grain for which, for, you know, really, really great reasons which, which I love.

And so now you have, I just, I took some notes there. You’ve got your members.

[00:14:09] Zach:
Yep.

[00:14:09] Rick:
You’ve got your coaching program

[00:14:12] Zach:
Yep.

[00:14:12] Rick:
And you have an agency, but yet smaller, very manageable select clients,

[00:14:18] Zach:
Yep.

[00:14:19] Rick:
Meaning you’re running Facebook ad campaigns. Is that

[00:14:21] Zach:
Yes. Yeah. Facebook ads agency.

[00:14:23] Rick:
Okay. well, so let’s start, let’s stop right there for a second.

I know for a fact that people are listening right now are going to reach out to you to inquire about that. So what number one? Are you looking for clients?

[00:14:40] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:14:41] Rick:
If you are, what type of clients are you looking to work with?

[00:14:45] Zach:
Yeah, great questions. So we are booked out through about mid may, as of recording, this is it’s mid March, so we’re booked up through mid may. I would venture to guess that by may, we’ll probably be booked out through mid to late June. People love to launch may June. So I’m guessing we’ll probably be a little busy, but, we like to work with people who have a proven con proven course or, or coaching program.

So you’ve sold at least $10,000. You’ve got an active budget for your launch of at least $5,000 plus management fees.

And, we want people who are like open and receptive to testing. that’s. Unquantifiable one, but if you’re like, my ads have to work from the jump right away in the first 24 hours, I’m probably not a good fit. we will test and we will do everything we can.

We always tell people, like on our sales calls, we say, legally, morally, ethically, we can’t promise you anything. except that we will show up professionally, we have the experience and we will do everything we can to get you the best results. So, if that sounds like you feel free to reach out and we can let you know if we have any openings.

[00:15:49] Rick:
I love it. And so are you focusing just on launch campaigns or is it

[00:15:56] Zach:
Yeah, we do evergreen and launch campaigns. We find the mass majority of our clients come through a launch and then go, oh my gosh, this was so great. How do I keep working with you? which is a compliment to my team, not me.

[00:16:07] Rick:
So, so yes, I mean, and I want to, I do want to talk about your team because you, you made really good rate, great reference there to, you know, as you were going through these different changes, you’ve built this great team around you.

[00:16:20] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:16:21] Rick:
And so I want to talk about that because you mentioned for the membership that you have.

You know, a few yet really, really important responsibilities, obviously when it comes to the membership, but the team is taking care of the rest of the deliverables, if you will, when it comes to the membership. So when it comes to the members, so first of all, what’s the membership called?

[00:16:43] Zach:
Yeah. So our membership is called not your average membership.

[00:16:47] Rick:
Your average members. So if it is, June 17th, do I have to wait until September 30th to get into it

[00:16:58] Zach:
Nope. Our membership is open 24 7. You can go to the website right now and enroll. You can go to the website tomorrow and enroll, go to the website in a month and enroll. It’s always open.

[00:17:07] Rick:
Whole, wait a minute. I’m being sarcastic right now because I know like, why did you decide why? Because everyone always talks about,

[00:17:14] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:17:15] Rick:
On the podcast, like. Why aren’t you launching it? Why don’t you have a, an open, closed period?

[00:17:20] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:17:21] Rick:
W what went into the decision of making it like, look like it’s open

[00:17:26] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:17:26] Rick:
For you when you.

[00:17:28] Zach:
So we are sometimes are a little tongue in cheek, but like, one of the things that we hear in the online space is like the, the three I’s like, oh, I want impact, influence and income. Right. And it’s funny. Cause people will be like, I just have this massive goal to help millions of people. And I’m going to, you know, my, my goal is, I remember there was somebody who spoke at our mastermind.

I don’t remember who, but I remember them saying like our goal is to impact a million people. And I remember. What does that even mean? And for reference, this is a mastermind we were in, not your master. And

[00:18:01] Rick:
And I know who you’re talking about

[00:18:02] Zach:
I cannot remember who it was, but that’s okay. We don’t, we don’t have to name drop,

[00:18:05] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:18:06] Zach:
Thinking how is that even quantifiable?

Right. And so our thing is like, if, if one of my goals, which it is this year, is to really reach and support more people. How can I do that? If I’m like, oh, you started your business or you’re in a season of your business where you need help and it’s June. Sucks to sag, but you have to wait till September to get my help.

Right. And, and I get it. Like, I, again, I’m being a little tongue in cheek because there’s nothing wrong with launch models.

We do promotions. We have launched models in our business. Like there’s nothing wrong with it. But if my core offer isn’t accessible 95% of the year, I am limiting my impact. I might make more income. Because I’m condensing it into a period and I’m leveraging scarcity and all this stuff. But like if one of my primary goals really is to influence and help more people. People need to be able to come to me when they’re ready. And that, that really was the primary driver of that decision. Now, what I will say is that we still do launches for it and we’ll do like limited time bonuses or special live classes when you enroll in a certain period. And then we give those to everybody inside the membership.

So like there’s incentive, like, and we don’t even do like crazy incentives. It’ll just be like, Hey, we’re doing this call on Thursday. The recording will be in the membership, but if you want to be there alive and roll this week, and people really, really seem to resonate with that based on the numbers we’ve seen in our promotions.

[00:19:29] Rick:
Yeah, I love that. And that’s a reason why, you know, I’ve talked about it here in the podcast is that Accelerator is open enrollment. It’s, it’s ongoing, right? It’s not like, oh wait, you need help. And you know, the same thing, like you need to help June 30th. Well, you gotta wait until.

[00:19:45] Zach:
Exactly.

[00:19:45] Rick:
Right. And it’s just like, yeah, it is a little bit tongue and cheek, but it’s also like, Hey, I think that speaks to, you know, a big piece of the values that, that we both, you know, live by is that we’re here to help people when, that person is ready and, you know, have the kind of impact that we’re looking to have on a deeper level.

Like, okay, cool. Like enrollment’s open, it’s ongoing. It’s a rolling.

So how, when you, so why the membership? Why? Because you you’d mentioned, you know, you have an ads course. You’ve got your challenge course still. Why did you decide to, to create the membership?

[00:20:27] Zach:
Yeah. So for selfish reasons, like we wanted recurring revenue in the business, right there is with, with a service-based business, there’s just always a certain level of unpredictability. Right. And I think especially online, we kind of get sold this bill of goods. Oh, just do this and you can get rid of the revenue. Yoga is just do that. And we were like, well,

The only thing that we really feel confident we’ll get rid of those yo-yos is a membership. And that was reason. Like that’s the selfish reason. The client-facing reason is like we, and this is like, I feel a little like braggy saying it, but like we make great content.

Like, and I, I truly believe that we make some of the best content on advertising and training. And I know that because we get the feedback from our people saying, like, I’ve tried a million times, I’ve never gotten leads and now I’m getting leads. And that takes like days not months or, or weeks. and we kind of said like, why is this information so gated when some of it is really like conceptually basic, right?

Like, if you can, you can go out there and people will be like, oh yeah, I’ll teach you ads. It’s $2,000. And people are like, oh yeah, ads are the secret sauce. I’m going to, you know, I’m going to go learn ads and, and then I’m going to have the money to do it. Right. And it’s like, you spend all your money, you spend your $2,000.

And then, and I know you’ve experienced this, right? Cause I think we talked about this in the past that people will buy your high ticket courses. And I had high ticket courses. So again, I’m not dogging on higher ticket courses, but people will buy. Thousand dollar $2,000 course and go, but how much do I need to spend on ads?

And you’re like, well, that defeats the purpose because. You just spent all the money. You had to learn what you need to learn. And business is not free. Right? We hear things like bootstrap and organic and, you know, make it work. But the reality is it costs money to be in business. And so our thing was like, how can we make something that really gives people a system, a process, something that brings in more leads and revenue than it takes out of the business in an accessible way.

And for us, it was a total, no brainer that it’s a membership because. We can do that. We can put people on a success path, which we’ve just started building thanks to you. we can give people accessible information. And another selfish reason is that we find contrary to what the market says. Like the conventional wisdom is like, oh, the more someone pays, the more committed they are.

And the more somebody pays the less of a problem that. We have experienced the complete opposite, at $49 a month. It’s not hard to over-deliver. People are constantly impressed, even with very, I don’t want to say superficial, but very like accessible or entry-level information. Now we have advanced information in there, but it’s like, what kills me is that people get excited about the simple stuff and the complex stuff.

They’re like, oh, I may or may not be there, but it’s, it’s like, that’s what I love. And for me personally, that has taken. So much pressure off of me because when you run, you know, we did one year, like it was, it was $12,000 a year. We broke it into six months, a mastermind and I just felt so much pressure to perform.

I had like the highest maintenance clients I ever had. They’d be like, well, I’m not available at that time. I’m like, I’m sorry, but I can’t do five calls a week. Right. And here I’ve had that happen one time. it was international based. We add an international call and instead of people being. I’m still not available.

People were like, I can’t believe you’re adding another call. This is amazing. This is where everything. I just find that people are so grateful. versus when I would spend more people would be like, you owe me, like I paid you, you owe me. and it’s like, I like joking to say it’s like Netflix, like nobody at $20 a month is calling Netflix and being like, I didn’t really like that.

Right. But if it costs 20 grand to watch Netflix, people would be like, let me give you all my opinions. Right. And so for us, that’s really the driving factors behind the membership is like, it’s less pressure for us. It’s recurring revenue for our business. And it’s wildly accessible to the people that.

[00:24:31] Rick:
I love it. Number one, I think it’s. And this is something that we’ve talked about, within the framework of Accelerator, who is this for? Who’s the membership for.

[00:24:43] Zach:
Yeah. So our membership is really geared towards, we’d only need to say beginner in the sense of time, but we like to say beginner online businesses. You’re S you’ve generated some money or you have your idea. And now you’re like, what do I do to get in front of people? We find that most people have done something organically up to this point, and they’re not disillusioned, but they understand that the organic is only going to take them so far.

And that it’s a bigger picture, a long play. Generally they’re making between a thousand to $5,000. Of course, there’s always exceptions, but basically what they’re looking to do is grow their email list, consistently sell their products and have a clear path on what they’re going to do next. That is like our perfect customer says, the, the running joke is that our perfect customer says, just tell me what to do.

Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. now a lot of entrepreneurs say that, but realistically it’s within the confines of the. I’ve taken the courses, I’ve done the things I’m tired of. The, you know, it’s all in your head or just manifest your way to the top. I want somebody to say, click this button, do this thing, test it out.

And one little caveat I’ll put on this is it’s for people who are open to try things, because we say this explicitly in our membership explicitly on our sales page is like the goal with our membership is not that you make a million dollars every month though. We have people. Done it with our low ticket products.

The goal is to get you in a place where you’re willing to try new things. So like one month we did reels. It’s like, maybe you don’t want to run reels in your business, but are you willing to just try them for 30 days to see if it serves the grander vision? one month was Facebook ads. Maybe you’re not going to run Facebook ads forever, but are you willing to try for 30 days to see if it impacts your business in a positive way?

So that’s our thing is it’s like it’s one specific strategy a month. See if it works and if it does or you need to modify it. Great. and if it doesn’t work for you, no big deal. You’ve got another month because business is a long game, you know?

[00:26:42] Rick:
And that’s, I mean, that’s really key there.

What you just said. So many people want that. I’m so glad you bring that up. Geez. Like so many people they’re like, Hey, I need to do, I’m doing a launch in September. And I need a, you know, this many leads or whatever, and I’m not doing much of anything to build my

[00:26:59] Zach:
Right.

[00:27:00] Rick:
Generate leads.

And so it’s like, then there’s like panic that starts to set in and they think that there’s like an overnight solution.

[00:27:09] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:27:10] Rick:
You’re showing people that are in that phase of the business where that you just mentioned that, Hey, here are a whole bunch of things. And I’m so glad that you also, that you bring up was like, there’s no one right way to do.

[00:27:22] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:27:22] Rick:
You know, I, I was asked a couple of years ago, like when it came to Accelerators, like, why don’t you just teach one, one way, all these other people are doing that they had teaching like RK, your the way that you do this is through evergreen and they teach the evergreen solution or whatever it might be.

Right.

And I was like, because there’s not one way, like if I teach you one way to do something, I’m doing you a disservice because you might hate that.

You know, and so I love that. That’s what your membership is offering. Hey, all these things work, but, and here they are, how to do them correctly.

You gotta be willing to test

[00:28:01] Zach:
Yep.

[00:28:01] Rick:
And to see number one, do you enjoy doing it?

Number two, does it work for you? That sort of thing. So how did you get to such a, such a great run rate within a matter of. Not many. I only went like

[00:28:17] Zach:
Yeah. 5, 5, 6 months. Yeah.

[00:28:19] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:28:20] Zach:
Well, the first thing is we, I think the biggest thing is that we really created a membership with a mission, with, with like a key message behind it. So in September of 2022, We launched our membership fully email-based to get our first a hundred members, no webinar, no challenge, no video series, no nothing.

And we timed it with our podcast. So the podcast that I have was formerly the heart, soul and hustle podcast. We changed it to the, not your average online marketing podcast, you know, not traveling. Clear theme here. and we like teased that something big was coming for about a week and a half. And we had built our email list.

We had about 7,000 people on our email list. So I, we had an audience that is like, definitely a key piece of the equation, but we just kind of like tease, like, this is what it is, and this is what it’s about. And we led with.

The values of the membership. So this is not for people who feel this way. This is for people who feel this way.

And we really defined what is a, not so average marketer. And for us, it comes down to a very simple definition is it’s people who aren’t willing to do the things that they don’t like or enjoy just because somebody says it in birds. and the best example I use is like, hate them now is like those automated webinars that are like starting in 15.

Every 15 minutes of all time, I’m actually doing three webinars at once and it’s like fake live. And you’re like, it’s so overplayed at this point? that everybody knows, and you can’t skip fast forward, pause, rewind. It’s like a terrible user experience. So, we’re like, you don’t have to do those things to make money, whatever everyone’s saying, you have to do, you don’t have to do that.

And a not average or a not so average marketer basically says. I’m going to do it a way that feels good. I’m going to use marketing principles, but just because, you know, insert guru here said card open-close is the way to do it. Doesn’t mean that’s your way to do it.

[00:30:16] Rick:
Yeah.

And so you had 7,000 people on your

[00:30:20] Zach:
Yes.

[00:30:21] Rick:
You did an email only

[00:30:24] Zach:
Yep.

For about four,

[00:30:26] Rick:
What was

[00:30:27] Zach:
Five days. Yeah.

[00:30:28] Rick:
Okay. And then. You said that your goal, would you say a hundred people?

[00:30:33] Zach:
Yeah, we got a hundred people in, at $40 a month and we did it as a founding member rate with the price going up to $49 after a certain date. So that was the first time that we really played with scarcity. But, you know, anytime you launch something new, we like to do a founding member rate.

[00:30:50] Rick:
What was, did you have a whole bunch of content in the membership at that point? a lot of people think like, oh, in order to launch my membership, I have to have all this content built

[00:31:00] Zach:
Yeah,

[00:31:01] Rick:
It look like when you like.

[00:31:02] Zach:
Well, we had three bonuses in there and that was that, that was all we had. We had no content. We had, how to create a low ticket product. We had how to take your first product to 10 K

And then we had the, the overview of what was coming the first month. and the the, the low ticket product thing was a live recording of a, of a two day event that we did, or a one day event, one day event.

This is about five hours of video. we spliced out the teaching from the Q and a, and we just put it in the membership. And then we, the how to take your product to 10 K was a 45 minute video training. And that’s all that was in there. Now, what I will say is the day we opened cards. The next day we dropped the first piece of content so that they could digest part of the first month if they joined in that first week.

Right. So that was everything. I mean, essentially three pieces of content.

[00:31:58] Rick:
Yeah. Or people, did you let people know that.

[00:32:01] Zach:
Yes. We’re very transparent about that.

[00:32:04] Rick:
Yeah, that’s one thing, another thing I love about you is that you’re very transparent about, about things. Was there any kind of backlash from people I would imagine, not from your specific audience that in the best way, possibly because you have such a great relationship with the people that you attract, but did where people was, anybody off about it?

[00:32:24] Zach:
No nobody’s said anything. Nobody was upset. Everybody was really great. And like I said, we were super transparent about it. And we tell people now you actually retroactively get access to all the content when you joined the membership. and that was, we weren’t sure about how that was going to be received because people.

Well, I paid for six months and now, you know, Joe can join on month seven and get access to all six months. But we have really leaned into when people ask us about that, cause we’ve had a couple of people ask like, well, why do you do that? And we’ve said, because you’re paying for the community, the coaching and the support, the content is the bonus material, right?

You’re, you’re paying to be in an atmosphere where you’re going to do that stuff and it’s one activity a month. So when somebody is not joining on month seven and go. I’ll just watch all six months of content in the next 30 days and cancel like, and if you are good on you, you’re not going to get the full experience.

And that’s fine with me, but people generally don’t, and people want that retroactive content. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had some pushback on that, but nobody’s ever explicitly been like, well, why did I pay. You know, so-and-so can join on Monday. No one’s ever done that. We’ve just noticed people say like, kind of be inquisitive.

And we’ve always just handled it really honestly and directly.

[00:33:42] Rick:
Yeah, I love it. So when you launched it, you got about a hundred people in.

[00:33:48] Zach:
Yep.

[00:33:48] Rick:
Off the bat. so at 40 bucks a

[00:33:52] Zach:
Yup.

[00:33:53] Rick:
Now what’s sort of the next, because it’s open at this

[00:33:57] Zach:
Yes.

[00:33:57] Rick:
Right? So what do you start to do to continue to promote enrollment?

[00:34:04] Zach:
So as the challenge guy, we felt that the next logical step was to run a challenge. So we actually did a paid challenge. we charged $10. We taught the F a month. we taught content from the month in the membership. We gave all of our members access to that.

And we had a couple of people say, well, like, why are you taking? And this was where the pushback was. A few people said, like,

Why can they pay $10 for something I’m paying 49 for? And we basically said, well, number one, there’s going to be hundreds of people here. You still have intimate access. Number two, they’re paying for the content. They’re paying a quarter of what you’re paying to get a quarter of what you get.

Right. So we wanted it to be an equitable exchange. but we did a five day challenge. It was 10 bucks and it was basically how to set up your first Facebook ad. And then. After that it was like, oh, inside the membership, we have advanced Facebook ad strategies. And then this month we lined it up really strategically.

We said, this month, we’re teaching you how to write a follow-up sequence for all of the new leads that you’re generating. So basically everybody in the membership by Friday, or I’m sorry, the challenge by Friday, if they had followed the steps, they were bringing leads into their email system. We were like, well, what are you doing with those?

Let us show you. So we were really strategic about that. that was our first step was that it was a paid challenge. We had 246 people pay $10 to be in the challenge. And we had 50 people convert from the challenge to the membership.

[00:35:27] Rick:
Wow.

So where did the 246 people come from? Primarily? Was it your email list? Was, did you run ads for.

[00:35:35] Zach:
Pretty much organic. it was pretty much organic from our email lists from social media. And then we let people, we did like a little affiliate contest that anybody who joined the membership or the challenge could have an affiliate link and the top refer would get an a 30 minute call with me. I want to say like 25 ish of the leads came from there.

Less, less than 15% came from. 84% came from organic and like 1% from advertising. So if you remember back in October, when Facebook went down for 24 hours and everyone was like, the world is ending, we started as the day before it went down, they were super wacky. Then Facebook went down for a day. Then we tried to run them again and we just could not get them dialed in.

And we asked around and everyone was like, yeah, ads are really weird right now. so we just, we were just, you know, unfortunate timing. We just couldn’t get the ads to work where we wanted them to. So it was, it was a majority organic promotion.

[00:36:36] Rick:
Do you ever do where you do a promotion to get in to the membership where it’s like, Hey, you can buy the challenge course where you anchor a course, that’s in the

[00:36:50] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:36:51] Rick:
With the like, Hey, you can buy this for whatever

[00:36:54] Zach:
Yeah.

So. Yes, we have, in a unique way. So we have something called the challenge launch toolkit, which is a $37 low ticket offer that basically teaches you how to run a five day challenge. Well, in January, we did a completely free five day challenge. we ended up bringing in 123 members in January, and I promise, I know your question.

I will answer it. but contextually, we did this challenge in January. Well, we had an affiliate pop in, in January. And that said, I’m like, this is like one of the best challenges I’ve been in. it’s like it was Tuesday or Wednesday and she was like, I’m going to share this with my people. And we reached out to her and said, well, if you’re going to share it anyway, do you want to be an affiliate?

And then after that, we were like, you, you did so great. Like we ended up getting, I want to say 20, some odd sales from the affiliate out of 125 or 123. And we were like, okay, do you want to like, do something for your audience? Because.

They’re clearly interested in. the offer and she said, yeah, totally let’s do it.

So we set up a joint venture webinar where we taught how we just ran the launch. And then we said, Hey, if you want the toolkit, we’ll give it to you for free. Now through Tuesday, if you join the membership. So we actually did like the, you know, here’s a free course when you join the membership in this given time.

Plus she had affiliate bonuses, which always helps. but I want to say that in that launch, we have. and 8.2% conversion rate on the whole thing. Sorry. I know I’m lighting up if you’re watching on video that’s because I’m switching tabs, but yeah, we ended up having a, an 80.2% conversion rate and 25% of people went annual.

And it was super light, super simple. And it was just like, Hey, this is what we just did. So I’m like a huge fan of like call it inception marketing, where I’m like, oh, you want to know how I just did this? I’ll give you all the details and you can keep working with me

[00:38:48] Rick:
Yeah,

[00:38:48] Zach:
Love that.

[00:38:49] Rick:
I love it. So how often are you doing the promotions to Get in again, people can get in at any

[00:38:56] Zach:
Yup.

[00:38:57] Rick:
They go to your website or whatever, and they can join your email list and they can get in. But how often are you doing the promotions? Because that’s a big question. That’s so many people have is like, all right,

I’m going to evergreen this, but I also still want to do, you know, launches or promote promote or whatever throughout the year, which is what I talk about here on the show.

Like, how often are you doing.

[00:39:16] Zach:
We’ve done four in the first seven months. And now we’re going to slow down a little bit to like one to two, a quarter, which I guess isn’t really slowing down all that much. we want to do a paid challenge every quarter, but then we’re also setting up some evergreen systems. So we passively pick up a few members from time to time.

It’s not a huge volume. Bye. We are like really hammering lead generation. And in our lead generation funnel, we basically promote an automated webinar a couple of times. we actually changed it now to, instead of like really pushing the membership. We really push the podcast. Cause we talk about the membership on the pod.

All the time. and that’s been great for the podcast, but we have the evergreen systems and then we want to do at least a quarterly challenge. Plus we’ll probably do some like pop-up promotions where we’re like, oh, you know, come join the membership this week and get this. Or have you checked out the membership yet?

Or an email blast, you know, monthly to our automated webinars, to the brand new people on the list, that kind of stuff. But our primary promotions are one or two, a quarter is our.

[00:40:24] Rick:
So I think the key to That’s really important for people to understand, as you’re talking about that is lead generation and you do an amazing job of building a relationship with the people in your community, meaning both on your email list, obviously, and in your membership, but you, you are so clear about what your values are.

What you are okay with and what you’re not okay with that you attract a, you do a great job of attracting people who align with you.

[00:40:58] Zach:
Yeah,

[00:40:59] Rick:
And that in turn allows you to just develop that much deeper relationship with people on your email list. What, is there anything else to that? Because it sounds so simple, but yet so many people don’t do that.

It’s just like, I’ll take anybody.

[00:41:17] Zach:
Yeah. I mean, I think getting super clear on who I wanted to work with, came down to having done this for, you know, seven years now. I’ve been running this current business for seven years and it’s.

You pick up who you want to work with along the way. And for me, the, the ideal customer avatar of like, oh, my ideal customer is Jenny and she drives a Lexus and she lives in, you know, New York and she really loves eating at, you know, steak house, like that never worked for me.

I was more like, how do people feel? What do people do.

And

[00:41:49] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:41:49] Zach:
I changed it to that, everything else became a lot clearer. So like when I say my person makes, you know, a thousand to 5,000 a month, well, that’s just from having done this for so long. I know that’s where most of my audience is right now. I think that that clarity is just something that you gain over time by casting a small net and letting it expand.

So like, when I started, I was like, I work specifically with, with course creators that want to run ads for their launch. And that’s it, that’s what this course is. And now it’s become a breadth of work where it’s like, I know the person and I know what they need. And so I create the content in that capacity.

[00:42:25] Rick:
So I love that it sort of feels. What I’m picking up throughout this whole conversation is that this membership feels light and easy

[00:42:35] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:42:36] Rick:
And so let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier, as hard as what are the deliverables when somebody joins, you mentioned obviously the content, but they get a community and coaching and so forth.

So let’s outline what those deliverables are. And then what is your role in. Delivering on undeliverable

[00:42:55] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:42:56] Rick:
Versus what your team has delivered.

[00:42:57] Zach:
Yeah. So we have a, four-phase a monthly process that we go through. Phase one is an action plan. So we drop a PDF, a video, a training of some kind that we want you to be able to get through. And under 30 minutes, that is specifically on our topic of the month. Second deliverable is we do an action plan, live call.

So to get really specific this month was copywriting. So we did a 20 minute video on. Copywriting crash course, here are my five favorite ways to come up with copy. And then for our live action call, we actually brought members on and. What kind of copy do you want to create social media, email ad copy.

What’s your niche. And then we did copy research and creation together, which was super fun. so it’s like the action plan then supplemental or interactive content. Then we do an implementation week. This is my favorite part of the membership, because I feel like so many memberships are like, here’s the content for the month.

Good luck. once a month we do five days in a row. We drop. One small action you can do in under 15 to 20 minutes, but if you do it every day for five days, generally, there’s a couple of exceptions, but generally you’ll have executed on the content for the month and basically leveraged it into your business.

And then we do, I call it coffee, coaching and conversations, which I always joke we should rename it because I gave up coffee at the beginning of the year. I know, I know it’s blasphemy to most people, but,

[00:44:21] Rick:
However, let’s be honest here. You were at

[00:44:24] Zach:
I was at eight cups a day.

[00:44:25] Rick:
Eight

[00:44:26] Zach:
Do you ever take? so it was, it was definitely needed.but we just do, it’s like an open Q and a call, so co coaching and conversations. So it’s very casual. I generally show up in like a hoodie, you know, sometimes a beanie when my hair’s really messy. I just roll into the office and we just hang out and chat and we really get to learn from our members.

That’s phenomenal because our members, a lot of them are trying to get access to coaching and don’t have the budget for like a one-on-one coach. but it’s great for me because people are literally like, here are my struggles and we had so many podcast episodes, so much copy until so much benefit.

We’re never going, oh, what should we cover in the membership next? I’m like, oh, this is what we’re going to cover in the membership next, because this is clearly where people are stuck. so yeah, that that’s the format. Plus then we have an online community where off of Facebook we use what’s called circle.

It’s almost like a Facebook E style, forum. And we really love that because some people say they want to be on Facebook. We actually surveyed. And like 50% of people were like, no, stay on Facebook, but then you have terrible. And then in the same breath, people will be like, I don’t even like Facebook.

So we just made the decision to not be on Facebook. Best decision we’ve made so much less noise. So much easier to deal with is definitely lower than when we run a Facebook group. For sure. but our, our members tell us that they really enjoy the platform

[00:45:52] Rick:
Do you have no. Does random thought, do you have notifications turned on

[00:45:56] Zach:
For.

[00:45:58] Rick:
Or not? You do you encourage your members to turn on notifications for circle so that when there’s an important update, they get a notification.

[00:46:07] Zach:
We can sh so the nice thing about circle is we can choose when they’re going to get a notification via.

[00:46:12] Rick:
Okay.

[00:46:13] Zach:
So we don’t there isn’t, there is an app, but we don’t encourage people to necessarily turn on notifications. The cool thing about circle is that it’s very Facebook looking. so there’s like a little bell at the top and you can just click on it and see all of your active notifications.

So, and then there’s a central newsfeed that is chronological, where if they just log in. They can just scroll through and see all the new activity, but then there are sub they call them groups, but are sub forums basically where you can go and see what people are saying. And like our community feedback forum, our ads, feedback forum, our wins and successes forum are, we’ve got a bunch of now I’m going to space on all of them, but you know, we have little sub sections that people can check

In on.

[00:46:55] Rick:
So you’re bringing a lot of people. There’s people are loving, like I’m loving, like, just learning more about what you’re doing in there, who it’s for and the type of content that it’s in there. but we do need to address the big, the big issue,

[00:47:10] Zach:
Charron.

[00:47:11] Rick:
The churn rate. You’ve

[00:47:12] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:47:12] Rick:
High turn rate. So what’s, I know this is something that you and I are working on and, and the other Accelerator members are timing in on. too, as far as, alright, let’s lower this turn rate because at this rate, it’s not sustainable.

[00:47:27] Zach:
A hundred percent.

[00:47:28] Rick:
Yeah. So let’s talk about that,

[00:47:30] Zach:
Yeah. So just to give you some metrics, our first month that we finished, our turn was at 21. Well, I guess it would be our second month because you don’t you’re churning in the

[00:47:41] Rick:
Right?

[00:47:41] Zach:
End of month. But the first month that we calculate a turn, we had lost 21.4 21.2, 4% of members. So basically one in five people said deuces, which is great.

We were really excited about that. Actually we didn’t care because I wasn’t even looking at churn until the last month and a half. I’m being totally honest. but then our, what we noticed was that as new content dropped, the churn came down. So we were, we started at about 21. We dropped down to about 17.6, dropped down again to 14.5, dropped down again to about 9.7.

And that was after, that was after we hadn’t done any launches. So what we noticed is that when we launched. Your turn goes up, which kind of makes sense. You bring in a ton of new people in super cheap. People are going to be like, oh my gosh, I just want to check it out. And then they kind of figure out if they’re really a great fit or not.

It’s like one of those things where you can tell people all day long until you’re building the face, this is not for you, but until they buy it and go in and be like, oh, this wasn’t for me. And you’re like, yeah, I know we had a couple of people who are in e-commerce and we’re like, it really doesn’t help e-commerce brands.

And they were like, I bet it will. and they, they canceled, you know, cause it’s not going to. But then our, in the last couple of months, our churn went up again to like 14.8%. and then March, it’s kind of hard to tell, but we’re at a 5.5% churn on March 15th. So I would estimate Adobe right around 10%.

So like, I don’t want to be at 10%. I want to be closer to six to seven, but compared to starting at 21.4 and now we’re down to like a 10% sure. There’s definitely some clear improvements. but it’s still high, right? So it requires a couple of things. One, it means that we are constantly having to bring new people in which is inconvenient.

But it also means that there’s lots of room for improvement. So we have started a onboarding process. So we’re in the process of writing onboarding emails that come out on a weekly basis for all new members. Every single week that are like, here’s what I would do next. Here’s what you should check out in the membership, encouraging them just to check into certain places and leave certain comments.

So we’re working on that. We also created a 90 day action plan, which we immediately saw the churn dropped the following month. that. We want to integrate into like videos and something, a little more interactive, but what it is right now is quite simply like you log in, you download a PDF and it says, week one, do this week to do this week three, do this.

It obviously needs to be a little more robust, but that has helped. and then we also started, we noticed that our turns are to dropping when we started doing a weekly member Roundup, which we were inspired from the membership guys were in a membership on membership. And they do a weekly email.

That’s like, here’s what’s happening in the forum. Here’s what people are saying. Here’s the winds, people are getting, here’s the spotlight. Here’s what we released. Here’s what’s coming up. So every week, you know, I think sometimes. And I, and this is just my kind of, inference is that people cancel things.

When they sit on them for two or three months, then go, I’m still paying for that versus seeing the value every week. It’s like, yeah, I’m sure that sparks people, like we know because we get the cancels right after those come out. Sure. It sparks people to cancel, but it sparks the diehards to be like, oh yeah, there’s still stuff happening.

There’s still value in this community. So we’re doing, those are our three big initiatives to decrease. and we’re also trying to increase engagement though. That’s a big struggle because we’re not on the Facebook platform. You don’t naturally every day log in to the platform and go, oh, this is great, but they do have an iPhone app and that has been helping us, get more people to engage.

We’re encouraging people to download the app as well, but overall, you know, it’s just a process. And we’re like, when we do our metrics, we assume a 10% churn every month. We’ve actually bumped it up a little bit, just to be safe. But when we bring new people in, we actually project, what is the four month return?

The six month return, the two month returns. So that when we’re going in, we’re not saying like, oh, did we make money? We’re projecting. Okay. Let’s say we lose 10 people a month. And then anything that improves that as gravy and anything that doesn’t improve, that we’re not sitting here going. Man, we weren’t expecting to lose 10% of people this month.

You know, like we, we know those numbers and I think there’s an element of just like making peace with that fact, like not everyone’s perfect for you all the time and that’s okay.

[00:51:57] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:51:58] Zach:
Seasoned. We have people leave the membership all the time that say like, it’s just not perfect right now, but I’m going to be back.

And we do have people come back, even in the first seven months, we’ve had people leave and come back. So, you know, that tells us we about strong content and we just need to work on engagement and retention.

[00:52:13] Rick:
So when you have, when, when people leave, are you asking them why they chose not to connect.

[00:52:20] Zach:
Yes, we, so we have what we call. So we do something a little different with our membership, which is that we do a 30 day refund. so most memberships are like, oh, if you cancel, it’s no risk because we’re just going to cancel, you know, future charges. And we kind of said, was that really no risk cause you risk the money.

So we said for the first 30 days you get a refund. after that you’re not eligible for a refund on future future renewals. same thing with the annual 30 day, but then we have what we call the two click cancellation policy. So if you log into your membership, you can click billing and cancellation, enter your name and email and click submit.

And you can cancel when you do that, we say, optionally, would you like to tell us why you’re canceling? You do not have to tell us this does not affect it. We will not reach out to you. And basically. If you say, like, I’m just so busy, we’re not going to send you an email. That’s like, I get that. You’re busy, but let me tell you how this is going to save you more.

[00:53:13] Rick:
Here’s the time management course.

[00:53:15] Zach:
Yeah, exactly. Right. So we don’t, we don’t do any of that. We just collect the data, but most people say time. most people say that they’re just trimming expenses. and a lot of people just say like, you know, I, it’s just not a great fit for me right now. which tells us that we need to refine our messaging on the sales page.

Like when I talk about the membership, we get great people when I passively promoted or send people to the sales rep. They’re not getting the full picture of what it is. And so we also know kind of talking about churn a little bit, that we could probably benefit from refining the messaging of the sales process to.

[00:53:47] Rick:
And that’s one thing that we’re working on in Accelerator is that we’ve identified like exactly what you just said, because. I mean, I’ve told, like, I think this is such a great concept of a membership and what you’re delivering and how you deliver it. And I hear all the time, like your, your challenge course, for example, 37 bucks.

And people are like, oh my God, like, this is, the value of this is way more than $37. And it’s not just that course for you. It’s like all what you put out there has. That feel to it.

[00:54:26] Zach:
Yep.

[00:54:26] Rick:
It’s very, well-priced the value of it is much, much higher.

And so, yeah, I mean, thank you for being open about the turn rate, because, so for everybody listening to put it in context for a membership, you kind of really want to be ideally at that 5% or less on a turn, for your membership for long-term sustainability.

This is one thing that Zach and I have been talking about a lot as you see it dropping. And big thing to remember too, the things that Zach just mentioned, he’s doing like an onboarding process, for example, or giving people a clear path. It’s like, okay, you’re going to do this. Then this, then this et cetera.

It takes time to see that come up in the turn rate. It’s not like, oh, I’m going to do this. Then two weeks down the road. I’m going to see a difference in churn rate. It’s I’m, we’re going to do this. We’re going to roll this out, test it, but we’re not going to see any results from this tip for, you know, 120 days or so.

But you are starting from, you know, 20 ish percent and you’ve cut it in half and we’ll continue to, continue to do so. as we start to wrap up, Zach, I know.

That people want to know you teach ads, You and I have been doing ads for years and years and years. What is working for you right now?When it comes to ads?

[00:55:53] Zach:
Oh, my gosh lead ads, which we’re obsessed with lead ads. So just for context, a lead ad is where people put their name and email on a form on Facebook instead of your website, we’re obsessed with them, the CPMs, which is what you paid to run them are so low. The click through rates are high and we. We kind of hypothesized that Facebook is rewarding you for keeping people on the platform?

Obviously they would probably never own that. but we get phenomenal results. We are getting leads for like, I haven’t checked our campaign this morning, but we’re averaging like a dollar 50 to $2 a lead in the B2B space. for online course creators, very specifically. And it’s crushing.

[00:56:35] Rick:
Which is very

[00:56:36] Zach:
Yeah, super low.

We.

[00:56:39] Rick:
But wait, I got to jump in art. They crap email addresses

[00:56:44] Zach:
No, they’re so good. Oh my gosh. The emails are so good. Our open rate is like 30%, which is, well, we know that slightly inflated since iOS 15, but we compared our, like our open rate has been at 30% for months. Like it’s not dropping. and if you add crap leads, even with iOS 15, you would start to see your open rate to.

Click through rates on the follow-up sequence, average five to 10% open rate on email. Number one, average is 40 to 60%. even when we deliver the freebie without having them check their email. So one of the things we do with lead ads, that’s really unique to the space is we don’t, we don’t say your freebie is on its way to your inbox, right?

We say, click here to get your freebie and they can download it instantly. And we still have. 50% open rate on that. Here’s your freebie email?

[00:57:35] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:57:36] Zach:
They just crush it for us and I can’t say enough good things. They can be a little daunting cause you need third-party software to connect Facebook to your CRM, but there are so many software options out there now that are like ridiculously simple to use now. We’re. I mean, we added 3000 people to our email list from November 30th to December 31st, we did a sprint to see if we could hit 3000 in 30 days and we did, and it was insane. And now we spend about 200 ish dollars, a hundred, I would say a hundred to 200. It varies depending on how much promotion we’re doing and what’s working, but you know, a hundred to $200. on lead generation, we’re just constantly pumping leads in because we’re the biggest trend in advertising like for launching is like, it’s not like you used to be able to just be like, oh, my launch is in 10 days, I’m just going to spend $10,000 on ads and five, 10 X, my money now. It’s like, it’s not about that 10 days.

It’s about the hundred days leading up to that. And so our thing is. the best thing this membership has done for us is we have the agency side of things. We have the membership side of things. We have the coaching program. I have told my team point blank once everything’s paid for, and you’re paid and I’m paid and everybody’s happy we make no additional money because we’re driving leads into our business.

That’s great. as long as everybody’s paid bills are paid contractors, you know, software, all that. I’m cool to have like a lower profit margin, because at the end of the, well, first off taxes, right? We love having showing low profit margin on paper, but to, because I know the next launch is going to be even bigger.

If I just keep pushing leads into my business, we’ve seen podcast growth. We’ve seen engagement growth, we’ve seen sales growth, like everything just. When you’re always growing your list. and I think it’s just a really, you know, we here, the money is in your list, but I think that the money is in the leads and the nurturing.

[00:59:33] Rick:
Yeah, absolutely. And just to give some quick context, as we wrap up what I was joking about, aren’t the email addresses crap historically

[00:59:42] Zach:
Yeah.

[00:59:42] Rick:
The lead ads, right. And this is a big. you know, source of confusion for so many people. When you go in to set up your ad, your ad campaign and ads manager at the campaign level, you’re choosing your objective, you know, and a lot of people think like, well, I want to grow my email list.

I want opt-ins or whatever. So they, they click leads versus conversions. Conversions is where they’re taking. I think it’s what do they call it? Sales

[01:00:05] Zach:
Yeah, they call it space.

[01:00:06] Rick:
Yeah, they’re taking you off. you click on the ad and you go to your landing page outside of Facebook, where, which then gets into the whole pixel and iOS 14.5 and all that fun stuff.

But then with lead at w where it says leads with lead ads, that’s where the whole experience takes place within the ad unit itself. You’re not leaving Facebook or instant. And you can set it so that it pre-populates the person’s name and an email address that they’re using within Facebook years ago.

It used to be, you know, the quality of the, like you used to get good lead cost, but the quality of lead was crap because it was auto-populate in their email address. And it was like their Facebook email address, which was like a throwaway email address, basically. Yeah. I mean, we’re about to start testing that on a few different things and you, you know, you’ve been talking about it a lot.

Also just be like my own behavior on Instagram. For example, I will tell you that the past, I don’t know, I’ve just opted into like six different things in the past couple of weeks when we’re recording this, every single one of them is a leader. And it’s seamless it’s happening right within the ad unit.

And yeah, I agree. I mean, I think Facebook is rewarding. but it’s also a solution for, you know, this is first party data,

[01:01:27] Zach:
Yes.

[01:01:28] Rick:
All happening within Facebook has nothing to do with the pixel. You can still build retargeting audiences of people who are interacting with the ad unit itself, et cetera.

[01:01:38] Zach:
Yeah. The retargeting options are bananas because you can target people who have opened the form, submitted the form, or didn’t submit the form. So you can basically create custom audience. Every potential outcome and then retarget them with new offers, low ticket offers, all kinds of cool stuff.

[01:01:55] Rick:
Yeah.

[01:01:55] Zach:
Favorite part unaffected by the pixel like 90 plus percent accurate.

[01:02:00] Rick:
Cool. Cool.

Alright, where can people connect with you? Where can they join your membership? Where can they listen to your podcast? All of that good stuff.

[01:02:08] Zach:
If you want to connect with me, the best place is over on Instagram, @heartsoulhustle. I know it’s not the name of the podcast. Maybe one day. Our podcast is the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. We drop a new episode every Thursday. Very tactical. Very action-oriented; things you can test and implement in your business.

If you want to join the membership you can head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com. You can check it out there. Rick, I’m sure you will link it all up in the show notes.

[01:02:39] Rick:
I’ll link it up in the show notes for today’s episode, my man.

Thank you so much for coming on here. Super appreciate you. Love what you’re doing, and I look forward to having you back on the show a little bit down the road here to see where things are at with the membership churn rate, et cetera. My listeners love to hear updates from a case study perspective on what’s happening.

I look forward to having you back on the show.

[01:03:04] Zach:
I’ll be back.

[01:03:05] Rick:
Awesome.

Hey, my friends, if you are an established online course, creator and or coach, or maybe you’re a teacher entrepreneur, you want to be growing and scaling your online business to the next level, whatever that next level looks like for you. Maybe you’re feeling stuck in your business. You’re not really sure what next steps to take things to be doing in your business in order to grow and scale your business.

Maybe you’re doing all the things, and you’re feeling overwhelmed. Maybe you’re heading towards burnout. Maybe you just want to plan how to grow your business without working longer and harder.

Well, that is exactly what we help you do inside of our Accelerator coaching program. This is about helping you create more profit, more impact with less hustle. This is not about working more hours, longer hours, and harder, et cetera.

This is about helping you get unstuck so you stop spinning your wheels and you are creating the business that is ideal for you. Also helping the kind of people that you want to help while generating the revenue and profit that you want to be generating.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, this is one-on-one coaching, group coaching, and a mastermind experience where we give you a growth plan that you follow step by step for your specific business. This is personalized coaching.

You’re also surrounded by support, other coaching from the other members, and accountability. That is what embodies our Accelerator coaching program. This is application only, and it is rolling, ongoing, open enrollment. This is not open/close.

So, if you want to learn more and apply, just go to Rick mul ready.com/Accelerator.

Alright, my friends, thank you, as always, for tuning into the episode here today. Super appreciate you.

Until next time, be well, and I’ll chat with you soon.