Evergreen Empire, Part 1: Foundations for Automated Revenue | The Growth Booth #89

Aidan 

Welcome to episode number 89 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm joined by Allison Hoyt, our CMO. You may remember that Allison has been on the show a few times in the past. In fact, if you go all the way back to episode number 39 and episode 40, we actually spoke about building million-dollar funnels, and we're doing something similar to that here today. In fact, I think those episodes would be as relevant today as they were a year ago, but today, we're focusing more on evergreen funnels. We're going to be talking about this in this episode that you're listening to right now, and we're going to continue talking about it in episode number 91 in a couple of weeks' time. There's a lot to cover here. So Allison, thanks for taking some time out to join us here today.

Allison 

Thanks for having me. I can't believe we did that last one over 40 episodes ago.

Aidan 

It's been crazy. Yeah, it's been almost a year.

Allison 

So crazy.

Aidan 

Crazy. Yeah. So if we just dive right into this, what do we mean when we're talking about an evergreen sales funnel?

Allison 

I think most of the time that people focus on funnels, they're focusing on these live webinar, one-off big events, which are great and super important, but an evergreen sales funnel is something that is automated. It's ongoing and always available, you build it, and you can just keep driving leads and traffic into it. It's relevant all year round. It's not based off of one event or one timeframe, and the others have deadlines and webinar times that you specifically have to do. You're not looking for a week from now, you're not saying the event is in December, it just can be used all year round, and it can consistently keep running. The concept of strategy can really be used for any industry.

Aidan 

I think also one of the things that we both love about evergreen sales funnels, obviously, is you get a lot of mileage for the marketing effort that you put in. So we can sit down and take a couple of hours to film a webinar, and then to your point, we could be using that webinar for months, years even, to come. I think if you're thinking about how to systemize systematize, your marketing as much as you can, then evergreen webinars are or evergreen funnels, I should say, because it's not just a webinar, there's the other parts as well, which we'll talk about, a great way to go there.

Allison 

Yeah, there's a lot of parts to it. And also, like you said, a lot of people, yeah, their time and energy and maybe content that they're building, they're taking a really long time to build their sales pages and webinars. This is something that you will at least know that like your time is worth it as in you can keep using it over and over and continue to bring people on and it can be seen.

Aidan 

When you're talking about an evergreen webinar, which is just part of the evergreen funnel, what type of webinars are we talking about? Because obviously, we've got the whole spectrum of very low-priced items, low ticket we call them, and much, much higher priced items that could be selling for $10,000 or more.

Allison 

Yeah, I mean, there can be a few different types. That's the beauty of it. There can be tripwire or low-ticket ones. So whether you're talking about a $9 or $1 a monthly fee, $100, whatever that may be, and that's more along the lines of like your lead magnet. You bring them on by saying like, "Here's your freebie," whether it be a free eBook, a free infographic, something that you can give them, then you're giving them that one-time offer on the thank-you page and emailing it to them. You're really giving them the, like I said, it could be anything from $1 to hundreds of dollars, but more low price, that this is a for sure offer that someone would pull out their card. Let's say it's a $97 offer, and you're offering it right there, it's a no-brainer. It'll link with your lead magnet, something to really get them in because it is known if somebody pulls out their credit card and buys anything, whether it be $1 or $100, that they're going to be more likely to buy something else on your list and they're going to be more engaged.

And then of course, there's also high-ticket automated webinars. So evergreen content, like we're talking about, and you send them videos and blogs and things like that, content and information. You have that lead magnet then that you take them. That's a free ebook, free infographic, whatever you want to give them for free that'll give them something to give their email for and sign up for. And then it's that one-time offer, so whether it's $1997 or $3997, whatever it may be that's the more higher price that someone actually has to think about to pull out their card. It's an investment. You're just taking a longer time to build that relationship, showing them the offer, and you're continuing to hit them with other emails and other ways after that. So it's not just that one-time webinar after you get their email, and after they maybe attend the webinar, you're continuing to hit them with follow-up emails, and different kinds of sales pages and things to really show them and prove to them that this is something worth investing in. So really, evergreens can be anything from $1 to thousands of dollars. And that's the beauty of it.

Aidan 

Yeah, the other beauty of it is, it might not make sense to jump on a webinar and spend a lot of time and energy selling something at a very, very low price point if you're doing it live, but if you know that you can recycle that workout and turn 2 hours of filming a webinar in thousands of hours of playback, then that's where I think it can make sense for very low-ticket items where a live webinar maybe wouldn't really make sense for low-ticket items. What do you think about the difference between conversions? Because some people might be listening to this and thinking, "Oh, this all sounds good and well, but an automated evergreen webinar is never going to convert at the same level as a live webinar."

Allison 

And it won’t, because of course, nothing's like the energy of being live and being able to sell something real time and the excitement of an offer closing. But what a live webinar doesn't do is give you that consistent revenue flow. It doesn't give you the consistent leads coming in. So just because somebody does a webinar or live webinar a few times a year, that may be their only lead gen source, but if you continue to do this, you're getting names, you're getting buyers coming in, you're building your list, you're building engaged people. It's scalable, very scalable, so you're running this through ads, or other partners running it to their list or people consistently find it and are interested in it. So it's pretty scalable.

It's not like just few times a year. It's consistently running, scalable. Once it's set up, you can run it on autopilot, which is really nice, because that's not the case a lot of the times in live webinars. It's a lot of more manual work, and this is somebody signs up, they get an automated sequence from you, they get the follow ups, they get the replays and the encores, everything's done beforehand, so it is a lot more setup, I think, beforehand. But then that's continuously going, which is nice. It's great for building your list, like we discussed. And yeah, I mean, the biggest appeal to me, like I said, is the list building. It's consistent and it runs by itself. Who doesn't want something that's going to consistently run on autopilot, and then also help you reach your goals?

Aidan 

Right. The other thing that I love about the Evergreen webinar model is that if someone comes across news that you've got a webinar, and it's an evergreen webinar, you can say to them, "Look, the next webinar is starting in 15 minutes time, or there's another one starting in two hours and 15 minutes time," it's basically on demand. Essentially, it's like an on-demand presentation, and that can give a good bump to show so you get more people attending, more people tuning in. Then you might, if you're running a live webinar, and the live webinar is happening a week from now, because for that one, maybe someone's going to sign up and then a week from now life is going to get in the way, they're going to forget about that, something more important is going to come along, and so that's another thing, I think, to consider.

Allison 

No, I was just going to say a live webinar, to that point, it's three or two specific times or one specific time. Someone may see that and it may be turned off to them that "Oh, I can't attend at that time, so I'm just not going to sign up," whereas like you're saying, more of an evergreen on-demand, it's giving you three times. You look at it the next day, it's three different times, like it's continuously updating to be more on demand and on your schedule of when you can attend.

Aidan 

Right, if I was to do a 1PM Eastern Time, New York Time webinar, that's going to be like 3AM or something in New Zealand, 1AM in Australia and Eastern Australia and so on and so forth. So there's a big limiting factor there.

The other thing that I was going to say, was another way that I sometimes think about one-off webinars versus a webinar that's been designed to be part of a funnel is sort of comparing it to boom and bust. With a one-off webinar, you get that boom, you get that influx potentially of people coming in being exposed to your product, maybe even buying your product. But then what happens? What happens when you don't have that webinar, not doing a live webinar every day, then you're not going to be able to replicate that kind of thing happening every day, whereas I think the Evergreen funnels enable us to have the best of both worlds.

The next thing I wanted to ask you is, if someone is listening to this and they're thinking, "I've got a product of some kind,” and it could literally be in almost any niche, I think, at this point, what are the things that they sort of flesh out and brainstorm before they would be able to set up an evergreen webinar?

Allison 

I think one of the biggest things is who is your ideal client? Because one of the things also that we didn't mention, one of the benefits of this is how scalable it can be. Your ideal client is going to help you to know what platforms to be advertising on, where to push this out, to who, how to talk to the person, if you don't have that, you're going to be missing a huge audience that you may be able to target. So really fleshing out who your ideal audiences is where you should be promoting this to, there's plenty of places, but you just have to nail that down.

A unique value proposition, what are you offering that's different than anybody else? I'm sure you could talk on how about a lot more, but it's like, what are you offering that's different than somebody else that may be offering this same topic or evergreen webinar? How are you differentiating yourself? And then in that turn, an irresistible offer, whether it be "Sign up now when you get this bonus," or "Sign up now and get this percentage off", or what is going to make them pull out their cards at any point to be able to want to join? And then, how will you get eyes on your offer? Like I mentioned, there's a lot of platforms, lots of social media or organic traffic or people you can partner with, but it's good to brainstorm beforehand so you're not doing your evergreen webinar then sitting there like, "Okay, great, I did it. But how am I going to now? Like, what's my budget? How am I going to get eyes on it all?" That's great, but worth nothing if you can't get people to actually see it.

Aidan 

I think like so often is the case with any kind of marketing, it really pays dividends in doing this due diligence, doing all this hard work upfront, because there's nothing worse than going through and spending all the time building what might be the best webinars, and I keep saying webinar, but really, it's a complete funnel, the best funnel in the world, and then one of these sort of ingredients is off a little bit, like you're advertising to the wrong people, because you haven't fleshed out who your ideal client is, or you've made a miscalculation in your estimate for what it's going to cost or how you're going to get the traffic eyeballs coming in and going through your funnel. I think doing this, a little bit of due diligence, putting a little bit of thought into these types of things early on pays off dividends big time.

A couple of other thoughts around that. I'm thinking about the ideal client, something that both Allison and I do a lot of thinking is in terms of creating an avatar. An avatar is a profile, essentially, of who your ideal customer client is, and it should be something that you can write out on a one-page piece of paper. You can do it in bullet point form if you want, and you could say, "My ideal customer is a 50-year-old male who lives in rural North America, and his hobbies are camping and spending time with kids. He's typically got two to three kids. This person might, this avatar might work an office job where they make $100,000 a year," this kind of a thing. We're building out a demographic, you can understand what makes that person tick, you can speak their language, and it makes it so much easier when designing these funnels because you can speak to that person exclusively at the expense of everyone else.

Sometimes people say to us, "How did you get your funnel to work?" and one of the ways we get the funnel to work is by speaking specifically to one very specific group of people and knowing who they are. I think that the avatar exercise is great for that and you don't have to have it perfect. You can do doing a half-good, if you like, job, a halfway job on that there. Still better than nothing.

In terms of the irresistible offer, the thing that I always think about when I'm designing offers and webinars and so forth is I want to make my offer so good that people would be willing to pay 10X what I'm selling it for. If I've got something that's being sold for $100, that's the price, then I want my offer to be so good that people would think it would be a complete no-brainer to purchase that for 10X the price or $1,000 in that case, and then going beyond that, also adding in things which continue to make it a no-brainer, so eliminating risk.

What happens if I'm selling a dog training bootcamp, if that's my product, and I can be doing this as an affiliate, by the way. You don't have to be a product vendor yourself to be able to use these funnels. But if I'm selling a dog training bootcamp and an online info product as an affiliate, then is there a way that I can mitigate risk? Is there a way that I can offer money-back guarantees? Is there a way that I can make sure that the person can feel confident, comfortable in making that decision? So lots and lots to think about there. Anything else that comes to mind about this part of fleshing things out and brainstorming?

Allison 

I also just want to say I love the example you gave about the value proposition because I think a lot of people sometimes are thinking "I'm giving too much," or "Oh, I'm worth more," and although you are, like you said, you want that offer to seem like that to everybody, I think a lot of times people think the opposite, like "I don't want to give too much. It's too much for the price," but you're trying to prove to people and give people the offer that they will spend, and it's totally worth that price.

Aidan 

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. I guess building up on this, we've got things like fleshing out the details and a funnel outline. If you've got any thoughts that we could share with folks around how to approach that.

Allison 

For me, I know something that, and Aidan will attest to this, and I'm super organized, like I use project plans, and I use Asana to do this. For me, it's really big to make sure everything's fleshed out from the start, from the very beginning. What do you need before you even start? What are the details you need? I break things up into pre-launch. Once you launch, what happens? And then after the launch, what happens? So for me, it's a lot of organization, a lot of project planning.

We talked about all the things you need to brainstorm, all of the content you may need. Every single detail you may think of beforehand, start with that in the pre-launch. And then once you do launch, what do you need to figure out? And then when you launch, things like what are the KPIs you need to look for? All of that stuff. To me that's really, really big in the beginning to have that written out. I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, well, I just want to jump in," you do that, you're forgetting steps, and you're going to go backwards and take longer anyway.

Big advice that I'd say is definitely start with the project plan. Second, determine your funnel, and really, really outline that. Are you starting with a lead magnet registration page and then going to the confirmation page, a confirmation email? Once the webinar happens, are you having a follow-up sequence after that? Are you emailing the sales page? All of those things may seem, like I said, like, "Oh, I could figure this out as I go," but if you don't have it written down, it's so much harder to go backwards. It's nice to see, even though it may be a little overwhelming, it's nice to see everything laid out and just know in advance everything that you have to do. It just makes it a lot easier. It helps you determine what your main goal is going to be from all of this. There's a lot that goes into it. Lots of moving pieces, so it's nice to see what the main goal is, what KPIs are trying to hit, what the point is of all this, if it's to hit a certain CPL, or if it's to bring in a certain amount of leads, or a certain amount of sales and breakeven, just determining all of this upfront.

On that note, when you also outline your funnel is really determining your value. What is the pricing? Are you having upsells? Are you having down-sells? What are you going to do if they don't buy or offer? Are you going to try to sell them, whether you're doing an affiliate offer or your own, like are you going to try to sell them something else after? Just really every single aspect of "Yes, they bought” “No, they bought," where do they go from there? So like I said, it can seem overwhelming, but it's so much easier if you figure this out in the first place than going backwards afterwards.

Aidan 

Yeah, I think if someone's listening to this, they might think, "Oh, wow, it sounds like there's so much to do here," and I think there are a lot of items, but one thing I'll say is, there might be like a larger list of items, but none of them are overly complicated. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff to do, but there's not a lot of difficult technical, complicated things to do.

The other thing that I'll say is, with this kind of marketing, you really do get compensated in proportion to the time and the effort that you put in. This is one of the most scalable, lucrative forms of marketing that we know of for sure, because you just get so much bang for your buck, you get so much mileage out of a handful of pages, and your funnel might consist of four or five, six pages. It could have 50 pages in it, but a really, really simple one to get you going, they might have a landing page where traffic goes to, and the traffic that lands on that page might be “Sign up to get a free report.” That free report, they might then sign up to a webinar, or maybe on their landing page at the very beginning, they'll sign up to the webinar, and because they sign up to the webinar, just as a thank you, they'll get a free report. So there's lots of different ways that you can sort of piece this together.

One of the things that we find is, every time we build out a funnel, we need to do a little bit of sort of testing to find the optimal combination, and then sort of crack that code, as it were. I think, one thing I'd say is it's a good idea to do a mind map or just a brain dump of all your ideas of how you might want the funnel will look. You do this by scribbling on a piece of paper, by jotting something down and down in like a Google document or something. If you are unfamiliar about how a funnel in your niche could work, then one of the best things you can do is to spy on other people in your niche, other companies, other entrepreneurs, whatever it may be that have already set up some kind of a funnel, because you could use what they've done as a starting point for fleshing out your own funnel and eventually putting your own stamp on it.

I guess the final thing that I sort of want to add here before we start wrapping up is don't be overwhelmed or thrown off by this. The payoff can be enormous when you get a funnel dialed in, and it's something that can work in pretty much every niche, I think, that I can imagine and we see them. Also, we've seen funnels working even long before the internet was around. We would get a brochure of some kind in the mail about some seminar that was happening at the local town hall. And then people would go along to that, and they'd buy something. It was the same thing. It was just offline. The system works. And online, especially with the tools we've got at our disposal, it's so much easier than it's been in the past.

We're going to get into some more granular details in a couple of weeks' time in episode 91, but is there anything else that comes to mind that you want to leave with folks, and this one, Allison?

Allison 

I think on the note that you said, there can be a bunch of different types of funnels. I think even some people may, other than saying there's a few different steps to do, may look at it like, "I can't film a webinar" or "The content worries me and how am I going to put that together," try it with a sales page. Try it with something that you could sell them just in an HTML format, and see how that works. Have a five-minute video on top of that, if anything. You don't always have to film like a two-hour webinar just to get started. The important thing is just to get it up and start testing. There are some steps, but by doing that, you'll see what works for you, what doesn't, and what you want to spend more time on, tweak before you go into a full-blown webinar. Definitely go through the outlines and take the time and just do the research and think about whether it would be like I said a full-blown 2-hr video or just a sales page, and just test it out and see.

Aidan 

Also, we often talk about, to our webinars, we've mentioned that a little bit here, but if you're selling a $15 product, a 15-minute webinar is perfectly sufficient for that. So typically, the higher price product is the longer a webinar needs to be. We've also kept on harping on about webinars, but as Allison just pointed out, you don't have to have a webinar as part of your funnel.

One thing I would suggest and sort of leave people with in this episode is think about and ask yourself, "What would your funnel look like in its simplest form?" If you had to get a funnel built by tomorrow, using things that you can already do right now, what would that look like? Maybe it's a simple landing page and a simple PDF of some kind that you can give away, because a funnel can be as simple as capturing leads by giving something away or not giving anything away at all, just by the promise of providing value in the future, so what would it look like in its simplest form.

Now, as I mentioned, this is the first part in a two-part series, and the second part of this is going to be released in The Growth Booth Episode 91, which will be airing in a couple of weeks' time. In that episode, we're going to get much more granular with different things that you can do to optimize, to work with emails to track the performance, and how to start your evergreen funnel right now, if that's something that you want to do, so we'll get a lot more into the granular operational side, I guess, if you like, of these evergreen funnels in a couple of weeks. I hope you can tune in for that one, because that'll add the other piece to the puzzle here. So thanks for listening.

As always, you can get show notes, you can watch the video of this, everything over at thegrowthbooth.com. Navigate to episode number 89. You can do the same thing by going to YouTube and doing a search for The Growth Booth, or wherever it is that you'd like to consume your content.

Thanks very much, Allison, for being here today, and look forward to having you back in a couple of weeks' time.

Allison 

Thanks for having me.

Aidan 

All right, guys. That's a wrap. We'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.