Success isn’t found in selling low-ticket dreams; it’s making high-value solutions to transform lives. Happy 2024! To kick off the new year, our host Kendra Perry discusses the pitfalls of selling e-books and memberships in the coaching industry. Learn why these seemingly popular revenue streams might not be the golden ticket for your coaching business. Kendra emphasizes the critical role audience size plays in the success of these ventures. Drawing from her own journey, she shines a light on the challenges faced, including the exhausting cycle of creating consistent content and the struggle with retention rates in memberships. Tune in now and start the new year right!
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Selling An E-Book Or Membership? Think Again…
In this episode, I want to talk about something I’ve been seeing a lot of on Instagram. I always engage with new followers. I always want to know what their struggle is. What are they working on? What do they want to launch? Something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately is coaches wanting to sell eBooks and memberships. I wanted to speak a little bit about that because that’s a pretty big mistake.
This might be a little bit of a polarizing episode, but I’m always going to tell you how it is. I’m always going to state my opinion, and my goal is always to help you, not make mistakes in your business, and generate income so you can go full-time. You can change lives. I’m not a fan of anything low ticket and I know there’s going to be people who disagree with me. I know there are coaches out there who are all about low-ticket.
A low ticket isn’t worth your time. There are many different reasons to maybe write an eBook, but I never think that we should do it as a way to make money, especially when you’re new. There is a time and a place for making money off an eBook, but something we always have to keep in mind when we think of what we’re selling is we have to have respect for our current audience size and how quickly we anticipate being able to grow that audience.
A lot of times, when we’re newer, we’re in the first few years of our business or we’re transitioning from our in-person practice to being online, we don’t have an audience. Everyone starts with zero audience when they come online. Your audience size affects what you’re going to be able to sell realistically. If you’re someone a few years into your business and maybe you have a big following, you have tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, maybe you get a lot of website traffic or have a big podcast, a $20 eBook, sure, that could make you good money. However, if you have a smaller audience, maybe you have like 1,000 Instagram followers, maybe you have a few hundred people on your email list and that’s it, then an eBook isn’t going to be worth your time if your goal is to make income and make money.
The first goal in any business is to try to make $10,000 a month. The reason why I say that is because I’m talking about $10,000 a month in revenue. That’s revenue. It’s not profit. Usually, by the time we pay our expenses and taxes, we’re going to be making around the $80,000, $90,000 a year mark. That is a respectable income, something we can live off, something that will help us create a bit more freedom in our lives. A $10,000-a-month goal is important as a first goal in business.
If we want to make $10,000 a month and we’re selling an eBook, we would have to sell 500 books per month. It’s a lot. If you only have a couple of thousand Instagram followers and a few hundred people on your email list, how are you going to make those 500 sales? Just keep in mind that in order to make 500 sales on a sales page for a book, you’re going to have to have a lot of traffic.
A good sales page conversion, let’s pretend it’s like 5%. I can’t do math on the spot. I should have had this calculation ready to go, but that’s something like probably 10,000. It might take a bit more. Do the math, but tens of thousands of people need to land on that page. I don’t think doing an eBook is worth your time unless there’s another reason why you’re doing it. Maybe you’re doing it because it’s a goal. You want to write a book. One of your goals is to write a book. You’re passionate about writing. You love it. It’s easy for you. In that situation, by all means, do it and it’s a great thing to have out there.
However, until you have a bigger audience, it’s probably not going to be a money maker. It’s probably not going to make you money. One of the biggest things that people want in the earlier stages of their business is to make money. They want to be able to make consistent income. They want to be able to go full-time, maybe quit their part-time job, or maybe retire their husband. An eBook is a silly way to do that.
This is true for anything low ticket. I don’t believe a low ticket is worth your time unless you have a bigger audience. I want to speak to something, as an example. For my own business, for my Black Friday sale, I didn’t want to put HCA on promo because honestly, the program is way too valuable and it’s already underpriced. I could be charging 2 or 3 times the price. I didn’t want to put it on promo.
I was like, “What can I do for Black Friday?” Black Friday is a time when people have their wallets out. They’re ready to buy. It’s a great time of year to take advantage and sell something. I was like, “What do I sell the business side of my audience?” What I ended up doing was creating a DIY course where I pulled the content section out of HCA.
I made a few little changes, spiced it up a little bit, and called it the Social Media Success System. It’s a very good course for teaching you how to create content that engages people on social media and helps you get clients. Since it was Black Friday, I wanted to give it for a no-brainer price. The full price is $397 for this program, but I ended up charging $147. $147 is way more than $20. $147 is like 15 or 20 times. I can’t do math. I should have had the math done for me.
It’s significantly more money, and I probably have a much bigger list size than you do. I have about 7,500 people on my email list. It’s not a huge list, but probably bigger than yours. Let’s be honest. Honestly, it did well. I’ve talked about this before, but this is worth mentioning again. When I have a goal for a launch, I always have a good-better-best goal. That helps us get more in the ballpark because it can feel frustrating when you don’t always hit your goal. The good goal is what’s the minimum goal that I’ll be happy with? That’s my good goal and then I have a better goal and then I have my best goal.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever hit the best goal, but I think that’s the point. If you’re always hitting your goals, then you’re not making big enough goals. You’re underselling yourself. It’s good to have goals you don’t reach because it keeps you motivated and trains your brain to shift what it believes to be possible in terms of what you can achieve.
Anyway, I digress here, but I ended up hitting my better goal. We did about 30 sales or something like that. A list of 7,500, 30 sales. What is 30 times $147? $147 ends up being like $4,400 US, probably about $6,000 Canadian. Maybe you’re thinking, “$6,000, Kendra, that’s pretty awesome.” Look at the size of my list. This is going to sound a little bit snobby and I hope it doesn’t come across like that, but $6,000 for me at the level my business generates is almost not worth my time.
If I was ever going to charge hourly, I would be charging like $1,000 an hour. It felt like for the effort I put into it, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t put a ton of effort in because I pulled it out of HCA, but I probably spent a day tweaking it so that it made sense as a DIY course. I probably spent a day or two creating a sales page, writing sales emails, that sort of thing.
In the end, we hit between the good and better goals. Now that I’m remembering, I don’t think we hit the better goal. I think we hit a good goal. It was fine, but I was like, “I don’t know if that was even worth my time.” I don’t do low-ticket stuff very often. That was the first time I’d done that in a very long time, and I’m like, “I don’t think that was worth my time. If I’m going to do a Black Friday special again, I’m going to create something that has more value, something that maybe is at the $500 mark. To me, that would be more worth my time. You can imagine.
You’re like, “Kendra, you have a list of 7,500. You made 30 sales at $147 and generated $6,000. My list is only 1,000. How am I going to sell this $20 eBook or this $100 course?” We have to respect our audience size. That’s not to say that this type of business model could never be successful for you. I am of the belief that every business model can be successful. It just has to be realistic for your business.
When we’re starting, doing something like selling an eBook is not worth your time. Save it for later in your business when you’ve developed an audience and you can build an audience, especially if you’re using ads. You can build an audience at a decent pace, but it still might take you a few years to build the audience size you would need to make good money selling an eBook.
The next thing I want to speak to are memberships. I will be transparent. I’m not an expert in memberships, but I have had a membership for two years as a health coach and learned a lot from that. The reason I pursued a membership is because I had a colleague at the time who had a successful membership. She had hundreds of people in her membership and it was very successful. I was like, “I want to have a business like that,” so I decided to create my own membership.
I quickly realized that it was a hard business model. In my opinion, the membership business model is the hardest. Why is that? First off, most memberships are going to be lower ticketed, especially in health and wellness. Maybe you can charge $100 a month. It gets tricky to start charging more. It ultimately depends on what is in your membership and what you deliver.
You’re like, “That’s fine. I could charge $100 a month and if I can get 100 people paying $100 a month, I can make $10,000.” The problem with memberships is twofold. Retention, which is keeping people in. That is something I notice. I would enroll new people into my membership, but people would always be canceling. What is the main reason why people cancel a membership? It’s because they’re not using it.
You have to work hard to keep up your retention, which means the main reason why people will stay in a membership is because there’s constantly new content. What I found when I was doing the membership was I was in a constant state of selling, and it was hard to sell outside a launch when it was always available in between launches. I’d make the odd sale. I’d enroll the odd person. It was very much dependent on live launching because it was a lower ticket. I think at the time, I wasn’t $100 a month. It was like $67 a month or something like that.
I’d have a launch and I would make 50 sales, which was great, but that was still only a few thousand dollars. That would make like $3,500. It would generate some recurring revenue for the business so that was great. Ultimately, a portion of those people would cancel. Cancellations are an ongoing thing. I was in this constant state of selling and then I was also in a constant state of creating content because every month, I wanted to have something new. Within that membership, I believe we did two Q&A calls a month, and then we did a training call, an education call.
After two years, I ran out of topics. I don’t know what to do next. I have covered every topic. That honestly felt draining. By the end of the two years, I managed to get close to 100 people in it. I had launched the original founding member price at $27 a month, so most people were paying $27 or $47. Some people were paying $67. I was generating about $5,000 a month.
FYI, I want to be transparent because I was a functional coach. I was running lab tests within the membership. You could order lab tests and we would create a protocol for you. You didn’t get any one-on-one. You would get an interpretation and a written protocol. You would be able to ask questions in the group and come to group coaching calls.
My money was made in upgrades and supplements because I was doing Fullscript, which gives you a pretty decent commission. I was making the great majority of my money in supplement, commission, and live chat. That was one thing that did work well for me in membership. If you’re someone who doesn’t have labs and you don’t have a lot of upgrades, it can feel like a hamster wheel.
I believe a membership model is hard. I think the people I know who do it well have a team. They have people in there doing the training calls for them. It’s up to their team members to come up with new topics every month to discuss with coaches, help them with the Q&A calls, and help them answer questions in the group. They also have large audiences or big budgets for Facebook Ads.
Where I went wrong here is I was mimicking the business model of this colleague of mine. What I didn’t realize, which I found out later, is she was spending $15,000 a month on Facebook Ads to get people into the membership. The membership was inexpensive, $57 or something like that. I can’t exactly remember. She was essentially breaking even on her ad spend because the cost to acquire someone to come into the membership ended up being similar to what the membership costs. Where was she making her money? She was making her money in the upgrades for lab tests, supplements, and consults. That’s where her income was coming from.
The membership, honestly, it can be more of a break-even strategy to get people into your business and make money off upgrade. I believe any business model can be successful but when it comes to anything low ticket, like a membership, like an eBook or even like a cheap course, you need the audience size to support it. If we think about it, 1% to 5% of your email list will take an action. Imagine if you have 1,000 people on your email list. What is 1% of 1,000? It’s ten people.
With low ticket, I do believe you need a consistent incoming source of traffic. You need to be running ads. It can be a bit of a stressful business model because sometimes you break even with the ads. You need to be getting cheap ads in terms of a membership. You get into a constant state of needing to create new content every month. Without help or a team, it could be exhausting.
Now that we’ve talked about this, you understand, “Maybe it’s not the best to sell an eBook or go for a membership at this point in my business. What does make more sense?” It’s selling an online program at a higher ticket price. I will always promote selling an online program at a higher ticket price because you need to make less sales and you don’t need a ton of people in your audience to make the money that you want. Let’s say you have a group coaching program that you charge $2,000 a month for. You only need to make 5 sales a month to make $10,000. That’s it. It’s also going to require a whole lot less of your time.
With a group coaching program, you probably only need to do one 90-minute Zoom call a week versus multiple clients than a one-on-one program. That being said, you can run an online program as a one-on-one. Some people prefer to do that, especially if they’re newer and especially if maybe they’re licensed and required by the regulatory board to offer some level of one-on-one.
An online program allows you to charge that higher ticket price and is very specific to the person that you serve. You have to be niched and you build that program specifically for that person. They feel like, “This program was made for me.” It provides the entire step-by-step to getting the result. Plus, it offers support and access to you and accountability sessions. That is invaluable. This is one of my predictions. I did marketing predictions for health coaches, which was I believe episode 207, 2024 Marketing Predictions for Health Coaches.
One of my predictions is that there was going to be a lower demand for cheap DIY products because, at this point, people have been online. They have bought cheap DIY products and they haven’t gotten the result either because they haven’t committed or it wasn’t that good. I think there’s going to be an increased demand for online programs. I think people are going to want the full support experience of working with a practitioner inside a program and in a program that is designed specifically for them to solve their problems. They are going to be willing to spend more money to get the support and transformation because personally, I will never sign up for a membership because if I sign up for a membership, I will not use it. I don’t use it. I will let it sit there.
I know this about myself. I’ve signed up for enough memberships at this point to know that I don’t use them. I bought this DIY course. It was something on Facebook Ads and I believe I spent $27. I did the upgrades. I probably spent somewhere between $40 and $50. I still haven’t opened it. I haven’t forgotten about it yet. I have the intention to open it, but it’s been two months. Let’s be honest, I am probably never going to open it. At this point, I know that those low-ticket programs are pointless. They’re going to be a waste of my money because I’m not motivated. For me, the money and the transaction are very much a part of my transformation.
What I will be willing to invest in is a program that will help me get a specific result and give me access to an expert. I would pay for that and I would show up for that. I believe 2024 is going to be the year of the online program. If you do not have an online program, you need an online program. The good news is, I am running my six-figure wellness offer challenge on January 8th,2024. If you were reading this before January 8th, 2024, I would love for you to join me.
During these three days, I’m going to show you how to create and fill out your first online program. We’re going to teach you what the things you need to have in place in order to have an online program. You’re going to learn exactly what goes into an online program and how to start building it. You’re going to learn about how to market and sell it.
Over those three days, you’re going to get an education. You’re going to get daily tasks and the opportunity to get free coaching from me. It’s completely free. We did this back, I believe, in September 2023. We had so much fun. People were so into it and I would love to have you join us. You can go to KendraPerry.net/challenge and get registered. That’s all I got for this episode. I hope you found this helpful. If you want to give this show a five-star review, you can go to RateThisPodcast.com/wealthy and give me a review. I would love that. That’s all for this episode. I will see you same time, same place where I help you become wealthy AF.
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