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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
233 Your Plan B Is Killing Your Business
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🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Spencer Russell went from classroom teacher to building a business with over 5 million followers and 10,000 customers. In this episode, he shares why he believes your backup plan might actually be the thing holding you back from success.
We get into the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy and how Spencer found a niche in the toddler reading space that nobody was tapping into. He talks about the moment he decided to quit his safe teaching job, even with a young kid at home, and why he believes that burning the bridge and going all in was the best decision he ever made. He shares both the spiritual and practical arguments for betting on yourself and how necessity became the fuel that drove him forward.
We also dive into the future of online courses and why Spencer thinks the industry needs to evolve. He talks about protecting your business from AI, why community might be the most important differentiator going forward, and how he balances selling physical products alongside digital courses with a 50/50 revenue split.
On the tactical side, Spencer walks us through his plan to use a quiz funnel that segments parents by their child's age and routes them into different webinars with tailored offers. We also talk about his email marketing challenges and what he is doing to fix them now that he has taken his business back after selling it to Love Every in 2024.
🔗 Check out Spencer's work at https://toddlerscanread.com
🔗 Find Spencer on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram at @toddlerscanread .
Thanks for listening and I will catch you in the next one.
#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing
🤝 Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.
When you have a plan B, when you have a backup plan, and your business struggles, what do you do? You quit. You wait. You stay in that struggle, there's no necessity. And I thrive on necessity. I don't think we get anything in life by going halfway. So when I quit my job and my business struggled, what did I do? I stayed up all night. Cause we had to make money. All of the time my wife wake up again and say, there's no money coming in. I was gonna stay up so when she wakes up, I've got a switch. Do I want to die at this time doing a job that I don't love to get benefits if it's good money? Or do I wanna die doing something that I love doing something? I was bidding on a business that I thought would make a million dollars in your life. What am I gonna do? Keep working my own job because it pays well at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_03:Lots of money lots of time like a lot of wealth that is an online course we can get winning factors. In the online course, my name is John Ispot, and today's guest is Spencer Russell. Spencer is an early literacy expert and the founder of Oculus. He creates online courses to help parents after each decade to read a former custom teacher and now has over 5 million followers online and over 10,000 customers. He's known for clear practical instruction and simple funic-based methods that can get real results. Today we're going to be talking about why you need to burn your bridges and commit 100%. The future of online courses, why to prioritize value over revenue, and how to protect your business from AI. Spencer, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Let's do it. So talk us through, I covered briefly there, but like who is it you're helping with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
SPEAKER_00:I've got four main demographics. One is toddler parents who want their kids to get reading early. Two is parents of kindergartners. This is the year that most people start worrying about reading and they start getting spores and things from school. Three is parents of older readers who are struggling. And four is homeschool parents, kind of across those age ranges. My business is called Todders Can Read because prior to my business, nobody really focused on todthers. And I wanted to be really specific about my little lane here. I call it my blue ocean that no one was tapping that I thought I could tap into. And I still wrestle with how much to focus on todders versus some of those other audiences. So I lean today, but there's just so many people struggling with reading. There are so many adults even who still can't read. I'm trying to kind of balance focusing on younger kids and helping their parents because the parents have no idea what to do, while also making sure that my resources aren't limited in their ability to support older readers too.
SPEAKER_03:I love you, you uh mentioned blue ocean there. I don't think a lot of people won't know, that won't have read the book. I'm assuming you're referencing blue ocean stuff to speak, right? Okay, yeah, cool. Could you tell people briefly what that is and kind of the idea of that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so there's the the the concept that I I read in Expert Secrets is we have red oceans and blue oceans. A red ocean is where the waters are bloody with competition. If I wanted to make a diet pill where I wanted to help people lose weight or do exercise or fitness, that's a red ocean. I would have to get really, really, really specific with my lien or my strategy or my way of serving people to find a little blue ocean within that sector. It's possible, but it's tough. When I went to reading resources, I was kind of looking at the field in Samuel K. There's there's hooks on phonics that exists, but it's it's general. There's teacher child to read in 100 easy lessons. Okay, that's a book, super general, probably ages like five and a half, but there's no one at all. There's there's no real competition for the toddler market. So that makes the ocean blue. There's a lack of competition, and then there's the size of the ocean. The ocean is huge. Most people have to drill down really, really, really specific to find something that's just for them. Uh I didn't, I was able to find something that was both uh blue and open, but also huge in terms of the number of people that I could serve and reach, which I think is a recipe for success. Nice.
SPEAKER_03:I love that. Uh if as you're listening to this, if you're interested in this kind of concept, there's actually quite a lot of people who've been on the podcast who we've not talked specifically about the strategy very much, but who've very much applied this. Um, I know a lot of language course creators, a lot of our clients have been language course creators, a lot of guests on the podcast have been. And so, for example, there's Shona Beckwith who's been on. If you want to find the episode, it's spelt C O Nade. I'll see if I can find the episode number, but for now it's Shona. Um, and she's teaching people who are obsessed with grammar. There's a lot of people when they're learning a language, they don't want to learn about grammar. She's teaching the people who are obsessed with it. And then we've got Ollie Richards, who's been on, and he's teaching people uh languages through stories. And then we've got Lydia Marachova, and she's teaching people like how to become a polyglot by learning in their own particular style. And then kind of goes on and on and on. And so everybody has kind of found, whether they read the book or, you know, read Xbook Secrets or anything, they've kind of found their niche, their la their angle that's kind of working really well for them. And I think it's been really interesting because a lot of them don't see each other as competition at all. So like anybody who's learning from who's obsessed with grammar does not want to learn from uh I'm trying to remember Benny's uh last name, but he teaches people how to just go out and learn a language by going into local markets and just making a fool of yourself and getting everything wrong, but just like learning, just just talking, just getting on with it. So one of the things that you've said is that you need to burn the bridge and bet on yourself a hundred percent. Why do you think that's such a big deal?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's a huge deal, assuming that you've done what I just suggested, which is you find a blue ocean. I don't think you should burn the bridge for a red ocean. If if it's super competitive, you better know for sure you're gonna win before going in. But if you've done real research and this isn't just a project you want to do because you enjoy it, it's not just a value that you want to provide because you think you should provide it, but you understand there's a market, there is an audience, there's a strong fit, you have the expertise, you've done your work. Like if you've done all of that stuff first, and you look at the opportunity and you say, I think I'm the right person for this moment, you gotta go for it. I don't think we get anything in life by going halfway. And I think that there's two arguments for it. I think there's uh a spiritual argument and a practical argument on a spiritual level, whether you believe in manifestation or not, whether you believe in a universe or God or not, the the the universe, God, spirit does not work in your favor if you don't work in your favor. You have to go all in. You have to say, this is the life, this is the career, this is the thing that I want. And you've got to be able to lay some shit on the line for that. Strongly believe that. That's that's the spiritual sense. But even if you don't believe it from a spiritual level and you just want a practical level, you're you're simply increasing your chances of success by going for the thing. I don't understand why we hedge bets. I was sitting on a business that I thought would make a million dollars in year one. What am I gonna do? Keep working my old job because it pays well, or am I gonna quit my job and go for the thing that I believe can make a million dollars? If I don't believe it, I stay at my job. If I believe it, I go all in. I think that people can also feel and experience uh our investment. So from a marketing perspective, from a media perspective, if you're not going all in, I think your audience is gonna read that and you're not gonna get the returns you want. And then I do believe that just from uh like in an innovation perspective, from trying things, trial and error, and just going all in, you mentioned uh the person at the market who's just going and trying that language and kind of making a fool of themselves because they want to learn, they want to get that practice and that exposure. There's a certain necessity that you have when you go all in that says, I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying and trying. And I might make some mistakes, but I'm gonna get there as quickly as possible. When you have a plan B, when you have a backup plan and your business struggles, what do you do? You quit, you wait, you know, you you stay in that struggle. There's no necessity, and I thrive on necessity. So when I quit my job and my business struggled, what did I do? I stayed up all night because we had to make money. I uh I I wasn't gonna have my wife wake up again and say, there's no money coming in. I was gonna stay up so when she wakes up, I've got a solution. And that sort of desperation and necessity and hunger and drive, I don't think it needs to be permanent. I don't want to scare people into thinking like you've got to stay in that zone because I'm not in that zone anymore. But as a starting place, when you're betting on yourself and you're trying to get your feet under yourself, I totally believe do the research, do the background, do what you need to do. And if you're convinced that you're sitting on the next big thing, burn the bridge, go all out. And at the end of the day, the worst thing that happened is you lost some money, you lost some time, life goes on.
SPEAKER_03:I got a uh couple of clients at the moment, I won't name any names, but they've got safe jobs, but their course business, like we've been working with them, help them to grow it, make more money from it, and they're making like four times as much from their course business as they are from their from their safe job. And I'm like, dude, why are you working in it? Like, why are you not putting all of your time into like make more courses, make this better, do more YouTube videos, like everything that you possibly can? Why would you also work 40 hours a week in a in a job that's paying you so much less when you've got this potential? But I think people are nervous, you know? Like, what if it doesn't work out? What if it's only working for a few months and then it all falls off a cliff? What if da-da-da-da-da. So if someone's listening and they're in that situation, they're like, you know what, I have got this to a good stage. I have got far enough along that I can see I found my niche, I found my maybe they haven't perfectly got a blue ocean, but I found something that's like a good niche for me where um I'm differentiated from the competition. I've started to get some traction, it's doing well, maybe it's not quite making enough that I could live on its own, but I've got some savings, or it's just starting to make enough money. What would you say to that person to kind of help them to decide if this is uh the right thing for them?
SPEAKER_00:It's tough for me to talk to this person because I don't fully empathize or relate with this person. I know it's I know it's good to be like relatable, but in terms of like going in on things, that's what I do, that's what I like to do. I find like joy in a little bit of like the risk. I think my first question to them would be do you have kids? Do they have kids? Let's say they let's say they do. Because that makes it harder. Yeah. Let's say they do. I had a kid when I started this business, he was three, and it was a big part of my calculation. 2021, at this point, we have a ton of people dying from COVID. Kobe Bryant had died in a plane crash. My cousin had died. There's a lot of a lot of death and despair and and sadness going on in the world. I felt a lot of that. And there's a very real tangible sense of I could go at any time. Do I want to die at this desk doing a job that I don't love because it has benefits and pays good money? Or do I want to die doing something that I love doing, something I'm good at, something that I'm passionate about? That's the argument for anybody. But specifically for people with kids, I'm having this discussion in my head through the lens of my son. And what do I want him to see? What do I want to model for him? I don't want to be the kind of dad who's scared to try things because I don't want my son to be the kind of person who's scared to try things. I can't say I want my son to grow up and take risks and be adventurous and live his full life and be happy if I'm sitting here unhappy, miserable, acting out of fear. We can't do that. So if you have a kid and you were to role-play the situation because sometimes it's hard to think about ourselves and you were to put your kid in the position your kid has the 40-hour week job, your kid has the online course making four times as much money. What advice would you give your kid? Would you tell your kid stay or would you tell your kid go for it, I believe in you? If you're gonna tell your kid to go for it, I believe in you, but you haven't done that in your life, there's no reason why your kid should believe you because they're watching you 20, 30, 40 years, they're watching your experience and they're learning how to navigate life from that. So I that that's that's that's that's the argument I think that we need to make. And if you don't have kids, maybe you can just coach yourself through it and say, what kind of life do I want to live? Like on on these on these course shows, and you know, what when I talk to entrepreneurs, we we talk a lot about revenue and funnels and strategies and tactics and all that is important. At the end of the day, there's always gonna be people making a ton more money than me. There's always people with a lot more followers, people making more of a difference. I'm not the best at anything. It's my job to live a life that I enjoy, that provides for my family on some kind of upward climb because I love hitting little milestones and getting these little kind of pieces of joy along the way. And that matters. You know, I think that's a huge part of the of the calculation. And, you know, if people are sitting here and they're like totally fine working 40 hours and then working more on top of that, like more power to you. But if they were, then I don't think they'd be starting online courses on the side. So I think we should think about what kind of life we want to live and what kind of example we want to set for our kids.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think the thing if you don't have kids is is almost so easy. I mean, it depends, you know, maybe you've got a a wife or a husband who you don't want to move away from. But I knew so many people when they when they were getting going were just like, I'm just gonna move out to Thailand, to Chiang Mai, where it's like a thousand dollars a month and my current savings will last me for two years. If I can't make go of it by then, it's it's obviously not, you know, it's not working out. But uh that's not I know it's not always possible, but I always had that in my back pocket when I was like start I made a kind of a list of here's plan B, C, D, E, and F. If like everything goes horribly wrong with this business, I am or it takes much longer to get it going than I think it will. I'm not stopping it. I'm just gonna move somewhere cheaper, you know, and like okay, figure it out. Because it's like I've got I knew there was something here. It's like, okay, let's fucking go. And then like about a month in, I was like, oh, okay, it's all it's all fine. I didn't need all the other plans.
SPEAKER_00:But it was, you know, it's good to have them, right? But like, why not? Why not like move to Thailand and go all in on your business for a little bit? Maybe it fails, maybe, maybe it doesn't, but at least you'll fail knowing that you gave it a hundred percent, which I think is a lot better than failing, knowing that you never actually gave it a full chance and it could have worked.
SPEAKER_03:Something else that you'd said was that you felt like or you you feel that you should prioritize value over revenue in a business. Why do you think so strongly about that?
SPEAKER_00:I've gone back and forth on this, and I think it's hard to fully separate the two. Part of my growth on social media has been because I give people a lot without asking for things to return. I don't have calls to action in my video to follow or subscribe or to do this or to do that. It's just really, really simple tips for people to say, here's how to help your kid or here's how to avoid doing this mistake. And as a result, I think that's really resonated with people. Could I be pitching more, selling more, more focused on income and revenue? Totally. But I think starting from a place of value I've learned has been really, really valuable for my audience in growing my platform in a way that if I started from a lens of how do we make the most money from each person, I wouldn't have gotten to. Then in terms of products, right now I have three online courses. I started as just a course grader and realized that people really want physical products. They want flashcards, they want books, they want things to support. And I was really hesitant to provide those things because it would be more work. It'd be a lot more operationally. They don't have the same profit or margin as courses do. And if I had just one course, I'd probably make more money than having all the books and flashcards and other things because everyone who's interested would be going towards this two or three hundred dollar thing. But my job is to help people teach their kids how to read. I've got to respond to what people need, what they want, what's gonna help them. And there's a level of confidence and just kind of practicality that comes with having the physical stuff with you. So that gets added. Currently, I'm thinking about the community component of it and what people need. I think people need other parents doing this work with them. I can have the best course, the best instruction in the world. I just piloted this challenge where I brought people through this seven-day experience together, and it was like nothing else we had ever done. It was so valuable. We built so much confidence in parents. And it's gonna take me some time to figure out how to fold that into our course and product experience. But I believe we will probably make less revenue the next several months while I figure this out. But if we can figure this out and take everything we've learned from the courses and from the community and from the products and put it together, then there's gonna be so many people teaching their kids to read so quickly and with so much confidence that it can't help but make money. And I think it can be a slower path to getting there. But I'm very big in like what you put out, you get back. And if we're able to really truly serve people and focus on value and an excellent product, I think we're gonna make that back in in revenue and not for nothing, help protect ourselves against competitors who inevitably are gonna be innovating and improving uh on their products to try and put us out of business.
SPEAKER_03:I think that the next couple of years, I think it's already started, but I think the next couple of years is gonna be really interesting for innovation in online courses. Because I think a lot of people, I think the industry as a whole has got a little bit complacent because there weren't that many people doing online courses if you go back, let's say 10 years. It was there, but it wasn't as big as it is now. And then it started to grow, and then COVID came along, and for a lot of people, that led to uh skyrocketing in sales because lots of people were doing stuff in person, they couldn't do it in person, so they got courses online, especially like these kind of cheaper online courses, like a few hundred dollars versus like coaching. They went through the roof, and people some people were getting like two, three times as much revenue. And then that's kind of slowed down, and there's been more competition coming to the market, and um, for a lot of people, their revenue's kind of stayed stagnant or it's kind of gone down slightly. And I see people being frustrated about this. And I'm like, this is business. It's like the market changes. What happened is if this is your first foray into business and you've never done anything before, and then it's like, oh, this is how it is. You you build the audience like this, you sell the courses like this, the course is this kind of structure, you just kind of think, okay, well, that's just how it is. But it's not, it's how it has been and it's how it is right now. In like two, three years, I think it's gonna be very different. And one of the things I think that's gonna change a lot is that people are going to have, people are starting to think get higher standards. There's slightly more competition, there's more free content out there, there's AI, there's all of these different factors. And it's like you're talking now about like, okay, how do you provide community for people? I think that's one of the things that's gonna differentiate different certain kind of different groups. I don't know for definite exactly how it's gonna look, but that's the impression I get. I think more use of AI, improving, you know, using AI to make the product better for people, um, community, membership, all of these kind of things are gonna start to really kind of come through. And I know this is something that you think about as well a lot as well. Like, what do you think is gonna be the change? Is there anything outside of the community aspect that you mentioned that you're looking at in terms of how to change your product and make it better?
SPEAKER_00:It's a great question. I think the community piece is gonna be huge because one of the biggest questions we need to ask is how can I protect my business from AI in a world where knowledge is everywhere and it is no longer special? Like you can go into Chat GPT and ask how would Spencer Russell structure this lesson for my four-year-old? And if you give details on your four-year-old, it's gonna give you a stronger answer than what I give in my courses. Like, my knowledge is no longer special. You gotta think about what is special. I think doing it with other people is special, having access to someone like me or the course creator live to support and answer the questions and kind of calm people down, that's special. I think physical products are special. ChatGPT is gonna be able to give you like a a PDF of a sound card, but they can't deliver you a really nice flashcard to your door. And outside of those things, right now, physical products, access, community, I'm still kind of grappling with what else we have that will that will be AI proof. And I think your point about business is exactly right. This is my first business, my only business. I'm learning a lot of these things on the fly, but it's clear to me that online courses were the thing. It's what everyone in the toddler space did. Course on feelings, course on motor skills, course on feeding, breastfeeding, nursing, labor and delivery, courses on everything. Huge in 2020. I really missed the boom. By the time I started late 2021, schools were back open and stuff was kind of getting back to normal. But I don't think a lot of people want to do courses right now for a lot of reasons. And so I'm I'm trying to talk with them and figure out what do you want? How can I serve you? Like what's going to be the thing that you can actually do in SIC2, not just a thing that I can make a couple hundred bucks on per person without having to pay any overhead.
SPEAKER_03:We had a really interesting uh guest on the a couple of months ago. Um, I mentioned earlier, actually, my friend Lydia, and she teaches languages, and she had felt very strongly that online courses were not the future. She'd made her, you know, a very good living selling courses for many years. And um she decided to close all of her courses and not sell them at all anymore because she built uh an AI tool that was like a replacement. So it's like her all of her bespoke knowledge, but in this AI tool that you can access through uh chat. So she's got it through Telegram. And she put tons of work into building it and like updating all of her processes, making sure that the AI was based on it, that was working really well, and then spent, I think. Like six months working on her perfect webinar for it as well, and launched it, and she made three times more revenue from the launch of that than she'd ever made from like her best course launch before. And I was like, oh, this is fascinating. And I want to talk to her again in a month or two and be like, okay, well, now you've launched it, because that was quite when she'd when she came on the podcast, she'd only just launched it. How's it going? What's the uh churn rate? How many people are sticking around long term? How much are you making from people? Uh, like what's the what is it like as a business now? But there's there's something that's there's some stuff that's gonna get what's the right word? Like, some people are gonna come into some markets and come up with something way better, and everyone's gonna be like, what? What happened to my business? It's like, no, no, no, you we need to be the ones who are going and doing that ourselves and being like that. You're talking about like right with the community. We're like, well, someone else is gonna come after me. Let me go after it. Let me see how I can make something that's like way better than what we've got now. What's the what do you think about with the with with AI? Do you use that a lot in your business? You mentioned about protecting your business from AI. What's your kind of takes on it?
SPEAKER_00:I think we need to use AI to help our business, whether that's increasing productivity, which is how we typically use it, or building it into our product itself. Most people stop here, I think, and then go, oh, you've chat GPT for this, or I've built like this AI version of myself for this. I'm much more concerned with protecting myself against AI. I I see a future a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, where AI puts Spencer and my employees out of business where it replaces Todd Thursday can read and ultimately provides people with a ton of knowledge really, really quickly, but doesn't provide the kind of life-changing impact that I am trying to provide families with. So I I spend some time, I should probably spend more, thinking about the future, thinking about this kind of exponential wave that we're on that we don't know when it's going to pick up, we don't know when the next model is going to be released. And I really try to think about the investments in time and energy and resources I need to make today to make sure that the future is better. I almost, almost, almost spent a lot of money, like took on an investors and spent a lot of money making an app. I think AI would have been a key part of that app. And I think that would have been a mistake. I think that the amount of time I would have had to spend and pay developers for to create a custom AI had I just waited three months, would just be open source. Yeah. You know, I am really glad that I didn't I didn't do that. So I'm not trying to get ahead of a technological curve that I can't predict because I'm I might be winning for two or three months, and then the open source stuff that everybody has access to could be ahead. Um, I'm I'm really trying to think about what's my mo, what's what's what's what's my little thing that I can do that nobody else can do, whether it's one-on-one time with me or small group, whether it's access to cohorts of people going through a thing together, whether it's taking the same information that you could get, but just making it simpler and easier and more human. One thing I do that I forgot to mention before that I think is relatively AI proof is working directly with kids. I think AI can tell you here's the best way to keep a kid engaged. It's totally different if you see me sit down with a kid who's disengaged and you watch how I get them back in that lesson. These are things I'm really good at that I can show on camera and help people see the kind of value and the humanity in the product. And again, I don't I don't have it all the way together, still trying to figure it out. But I think if I spend enough time in this area of how do I create the best possible product and how do I protect it, so it's it's future-proof and it's unique. To me, that's more valuable than thinking about exclusively how do I maximize revenue, how do I scale? Because some of my AI-proof stuff is not going to be scalable. And I'm I'm gonna focus first on how do I deliver it and then I'll worry about scale later. Like that's that's really where my head and where my passion and where my energy is at right now.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, one of the we're there's a few approaches that we're taking in the business around AI, very much the productivity side of it. I think most people are underestimating the impact that can have now. So I've started building out um AI-based apps, and the difference between what you can do with it now and what you could do six months ago is just extraordinary in terms of the interface and how well it works. So um I was building something out a while back using um ChatGPT, and it was a process that a person would run where they go into ChatGPT and they would ask it to do something, it would do a certain amount of thing, you'd then export it, you'd then do the next step and go. And a friend of mine uh suggested I try Replet, which is like for it it will write the code and then run the app for you. And I went in there and gave it the process that I'd written so far, and it just went, okay, and it just started doing the whole thing pretty much. I was just like, man, that's extraordinary. Like we could just do instantly like four times as much work. Still needed a person to be involved, but that person could run the process and make it run way faster. So it's like, this is a couple of days a week of my job. It's like just going, what else needs building? How can we make something that builds better sales pages, writes better campaigns, whatever it is. But the other angle I know I'm taking on it is like, how can we make sure we've got that human aspect that people want where it's really needed? So it's like your got an, you know, clients of ours have got an account manager that they're working with, who's empathizing with them, helping them think through difficult decisions, understands all the strategy, understands that person's business, um, and can help them from a from a human point of view, but then they're supported by AI behind the scenes. So that's that's my approach. It might be different in six months. We'll kind of see as stuff starts to evolve. But um, yeah, I think I think this is fascinating. And I think most people are not pushing hard enough with it at the moment in terms of what can they do, either like you're talking about, to protect from it or to use it. And I think if you do both harder, then you can move forward at quiet speed. I want to get really um uh uh practical, tactical with some stuff around your your funnels for a little bit, if that's okay. You've said before that you you don't think you get any of the clicks or the opens or sales you should from your from your email list. Could you talk us through like what are you doing at the moment? Like how often are you running email promotions for the courses that you've got?
SPEAKER_00:I'll be super transparent. I've been hands-off with email for quite some time, which I think is part of why I don't think we've had the kind of open or click that we should. I think very relevant, helpful context is in July of 2024, I sold my business, Tothers Can Read, to a larger company, LeVebre, and have been working full-time as a LebEvery employee while still doing Toddlers Can Read stuff. On January 1st of this year, I took the business back. So I'm running Toddlers Can Read full-time again, but I'm also still working with LoveEvery, promoting, helping, assisting with the reading soul set. I think it's like a nice special partnership because we're both anti-screen for kids, pro-family engagement, intentional parenting, awesome resources. We have all the play kits and stuff for our baby. So love Love Every, and it's been amazing working with them. And also have missed running my business, thinking back to just life satisfaction. I learned that I'm the kind of person who just kind of likes being an entrepreneur. I like having a business, I like thinking about it, I like the risks, I like the gambles, I take the losses pretty well now, I take the wins pretty well too. And I like this kind of forward climb and forward momentum. All of that, I think, is is critical context for email, which is to say, as of January 1st, which now is 27 days ago, I've been back full-time running Todd Rus Can Read and trying to kind of get stuff running that we thought we were gonna phase out. So email the last year and a half hasn't been my focus. My focus has been promoting the reading skill set and transitioning to this role and supporting the team and coming back and seeing uh some of the numbers, having campaigns where we're not getting the number of people signing up that we want to get to sign up. I've hired someone who was highly recommended that I trust. It's not my area of expertise, but hopefully about a month of me working hands-on, doing an audit, working together, and then two to three more months of her kind of running and working on her own will make it such that if we have a launch or a product or something that we need to do, we're able to get the numbers we want to get from email.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. Do you know numbers? I know you said you've been hands-off, so you might not know. Do you know like what kind of percentage conversion rates you're getting or any of those kind of things off the top of your head? I did.
SPEAKER_00:And then I didn't have a sense of how to interpret it. So I ran it through Chat GPT and created like a one to four point scale for my industry that seemed close enough. And essentially it's like from like one to four. Where are we on most of these metrics? One being bad, four being great. Um, and it was like oh a two for most of it, like one one and one three. I I could find it in like three minutes, probably. I should add it pulled up, but overall, my impression was not doing amazing. And with business, it's tough because at the beginning, I I knew everything. I I looked at my data every day. I knew every metric. If you put me on Shark Tank, there's not a question I'm not answering about the business. And then as it's grown and I've hired, and my philosophy on hiring is like hire well, pay people well, and then trust them to do the job. I just take that out of my brain. I think I've I've I've almost overcompensated to the point where I'm just like, I trust you, go do the thing, instead of getting a little bit more involved with each of those people to understand. And email is tough because I don't have a lot of knowledge of email. I don't I don't know email strategy particularly well. So even when I have the data and the analytics, it's hard for me to know what's the industry standard. How does this fit? And what are the strategies for making it better? That makes sense.
SPEAKER_03:One of the things that you've got, you said your main funnel is a webinar funnel, but you're swapping at the moment to a quiz funnel through to a differentiated webinar, which is really interesting. Why are you doing that? Have you got like different segments that you really feel need a different message in the webinar after the after the quiz?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I've I've played with a lot of different webinar models. I've played with the quiz to webinar funnel before. The challenge that I face is we have very, very different audiences coming to our page. If I'm running like a how to get rich business, maybe some people are coming from different areas, but it's like, all right, like here's how to get rich, here's the webinar, here's the thing. If I'm running a teacher kid to read webinar, even if the goal is reading and that's the ultimate objective, it needs to look and feel different if I'm talking to a two-year-old who can barely speak, or an eight-year-old who's behind and struggling in school. If I choose to show video footage in that webinar of a lesson, I've got to be really strategic about age. If I pick a five-year-old and split the middle, the parent of a two-year-old is gonna say, How's that gonna work for my kid? Parent of a 10-year-old is gonna say, Okay, that's a little kid, my kid's already behind. Versus how to get rich, it doesn't matter if I show a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old, a 50-year-old. You're just like, here's the strategy. I think parents are coming in with a lot of concern and hesitation and uncertainty. A lot of parents, I'd say most parents, have a but my kid mentality where they fill that sentence in with something, but but my kid has ADHD, but my kid has autism, but but my kid doesn't listen to me, but my kid is this, but my kid is that. And if I can answer and address as many of those as possible, specifically as it relates to age and the concerns I know they're gonna have at that age, I think it's gonna serve them better. And I'm starting from that lens. I think they're gonna get a better webinar if it's focused on their needs. So toddler is signs of readiness, how to know your toddler's ready to read, and what the first steps are. Kindergarten is how to help your kid get ready for kindergarten and succeed in kindergarten. Here's the skills your teacher's gonna expect, and here's what's gonna be expected of them in terms of all the other things that they're gonna face, and here's how reading fits into the puzzle and what to do about it. An older kid is like how to help your kid either catch up or get ahead. That's my thought. And my messaging, my framing is very different depending on which age I'm talking to. And not for nothing with the business called Todders Can Read, having a webinar that talks directly to you and says, okay, you're the parent of a kindergartner. Here's what to think about, helps to alleviate some of that fear uh or uncertainty that says maybe this is for younger kids, which I face a lot. My thought on quiz is really three things I think this will serve. Not an in-dailed quiz. I imagine a quiz with one question, which is how old is your child? We might go past that. But when you see that quiz, I think the first thing it does is it says, even if I don't have a toddler, I'm in the right place, because there's a box for me to select that fits my kid. I think the second thing it does is it gives us in our email marketing information about that child's age, which isn't a perfect predictor of their stage, but I can bet with probably 85% certainty where your kid is at in reading based on whether they're two or three. They're just starting. They're five or six, they know some letters, some sounds are probably not reading super well, or whether they're seven, eight, nine, ten, which means they know most of the letters, some advanced letters. They're beginning to read, but it's probably slow and choppy, and they're missing some advanced sounds. I can get most of the way there. So uh that's the second thing. So it gives us that kind of ability to differentiate our email list and and run segmented campaigns, which we can't do now. And the third thing it does is where we led with, which is it lets us then put them into a webinar that would be a kind of tighter and better experience for them. And maybe fourth, as a bonus, having conversion-specific data for different groups would be super interesting because each group is getting a different offer. I'm not offering parents of a three-year-old every product I have. I'm not focused on the advanced sound cards and the sight words and those sorts of things. It's like, here's my first two courses that you're gonna need, and here's some sound cards and the first set of books. This is kind of like the basic pack. And I'm not offering basic letter sound flashcards to an eight-year-old who's who struggles. So it will give me data on attendance and watch rate and click-through rate for the offer, as well as how people are responding to the offer at each of those three levels. So if I need to make a change to the webinar, I'm not changing one big thing that is just everyone. I'm saying, okay, my kindergarten one needs some work. Let me let me figure out how to better message or package or provide a better offer for this for this one group here in the middle.
SPEAKER_03:That makes sense. I think the diff the disadvantage I've seen in the past that can come up with quizzes is the drop-off that you get during the quiz. And so therefore, even if the conversions afterwards are better, you've lost too many people from going through the quiz. I think because if you're talking about just having one question, that could be really interesting. Because you actually could even do that as part of the registration form. It could not even be a separate quiz, right? It's almost just like you've got three things you put in name, email, age of your kids that you'll focus on. And then it's going to point you through to the to the right webinar after that. And that's like, that's super simple. Like we've got a um an extra question that we added, I think, to our lead magnets. Well, I think it was all lead magnet signup forms. So we asked people basically uh revenue level, were they under or over some revenue amount? And the the point of that was based on that, we were gonna send them through different bits of information on the confirmation page. We're gonna point them to this point or point them to that page instead. Um that had almost negligible effect on the conversion rate on like how many people actually filled in the form. So that was like that was really interesting to see. Then what we did, because we wanted to get uh we did want more information than that, but we didn't need the other information as urgently as we needed that one thing. So then we put the form, the survey for more information on the confirmation page afterwards. Now, with a webinar, you might not do that because you might be going straight through to it as like a uh just in time webinar that people can watch straight away, um, versus doing a live one. But uh what we then found is about, and I I found this multiple times, about 70% of people will fill in a survey on the confirmation page asking for more information. Um something magical about confirmation pages after someone's already started and they've hit submit, and then there's more questions, people are just like, okay, I'll just carry on answering your questions. And that helps us to kind of know better how to follow up with people. Um, so I really like that. It could be really interesting. The d the other downside to doing a quiz funnel and then different offers is it's like now you've got to do three times as much work on three different webinars, three different offers that come after it, manage three different funnels, three much three many things, uh, three times as many things that can go wrong. So it's like that's I think uh just an amount of work you've got to put in that you've got to take into account when you're trying to decide was this worth it or you know, or not. It's not just did the conversions get better, it's like did the conversions get enough better that this was actually the right thing to do versus something else in your business completely. Yeah. But I look forward to hearing how it goes, man. That sounds cool.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um, I'd be curious your advice if I were to kind of paint a potential picture of execution, what you think, or if you think there's any way to make it better. I had this idea. I think the company is called Field and Company or Fields and Company. It is a um it's a cast iron pan company. And I came to their website because we use uh the same agency with our Shopify sites. If you go to it, what you should see on the page is a pop-up. And the pop-up is like a three option select, kind of like a quiz.
SPEAKER_03:I'm just gonna share screen because I think I found it, but I just want to check I'm actually looking at the right thing. If you're if you're listening, we're still gonna describe everything, but if you're watching, then you'll get to see um what I mean, what we're talking about here.
SPEAKER_00:I took a screenshot of it too, perfect. Uh it's it's a pop-up, it's horizontal orientation. One half of it is a really nice picture of the pans, the other half says field and company. You've got 10% off to claim it, share with us what type of stovetop do you primarily use? Gas, induction, electric, glass, electric coil, no thanks. And then no thanks is is small. This to me is kind of how I'm thinking of quiz. It's it's simple, it's streamlined, it's one question. We're asking what age is your child? Toddler in parentheses one to three, pre-K in parentheses four to five, kindergarten in parentheses five to six, elementary in parentheses six plus or six to ten or whatever it is. So we've got the four basic options. I don't know if I'm combining too many things at a time, but I like the idea of they're clicking it for a discount. My parents are cheap, they're gonna want a discount. Then 15% feels feels fair to me. So how old is your kid? Click one of these four for a discount, they click 15%, they click their thing. Next screen obviously is gonna be email. Then I capture their email, then they're through. I've got the email, I've got kids' age. From there, things can go a lot of different directions. I imagine it could be helpful to have a landing page that people are taking to next, specific to the age level with the webinar on the page. So it's like this is the top of their page, the webinar, I'd have to switch my webinar company and figure out how we're gonna do that. Is it autoplay, blah, blah, blah, some copy, whatever, but take them right to the webinar. And then maybe there's some products and some other things on the page specifically for their level that they can use that 15% off thing for. And to me, it's combining pop-up with discount, with quiz, with webinar. And I don't know if that is complicated and terrible, or if it's simple and intuitive. Because my my goal is to put people where they need to be with as little friction as possible, and I can really see it going either way.
SPEAKER_03:The reason that nearly all e-commerce businesses use discount as the lead magnet to get people's contact details is because if someone's on an e-commerce website, they are almost definitely interested in buying a thing, a widget, a dingus, a cast iron pan, whatever it is. The reason it doesn't always work on course business websites is because people are often there to get information rather than just uh they're they're not necessarily ready to buy. They need the kind of education about the thing first, it's just why email works so well, right? Because you get the chance to send lots of information through to people. And it's one of the reasons webinars work so well. So my concern with this, I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just saying that I instinctively I'm like, having having gone through it, worked on enough funnels over time, it's not the approach I would take first. I would focus on the the get them into the webinar as being the focus rather than the discount as being the focus. I think the single question at the beginning is really good. Do you know, do you know write message from Brennan Dunn? Because I think there's there could be something there that could be very powerful for you. So the basic idea of it is it's a SaaS business, Brennan's been on the on the podcast before. Um, really, really good guy. And what he what his concept is, is how do you improve conversions by personalizing your website, your marketing to people based on important information about them? And then how do you get that information from them? So the idea with WriteMessage is they have lots of places where they will ask you for that bit of information. So they'll have a pop up, but they'll also have a thing that pops up in The bottom right corner of the website, they'll have it be when you're signing up for the lead magnet, they're asking you that as another question. There's lots of ways of them doing that, and they provide all those tools for it. And then it can it makes it very easy for you to then get that information into care to active campaign or whatever your email marketing system is and point people off to the right step that's next. So I need to think about this a little bit more in terms of you said like uh get my advice and I I need to think about it a little bit more. And I'm gonna chat with Josep, who's our head head of final strategy, about like what what would be the right order to do these things in. Because you've got a few moving parts here, right? You've got the webinar, you've got the getting more information about them, you've got uh making different offers, you've got sending different emails to them. And I think that there's probably something clever you can do, but I think it has to, it has to line up with if you're trying to get someone to a webinar and you start off by talking about discount, I feel like you're kind of your your your watch rate of the webinar is going to be too low because people weren't expecting to be going to sign up for it. Um it would depend. I'd need to um like you were saying earlier, I'd like I don't know this person, I don't know what advice to give them when I was trying to give you a hypothetical. Like I'm starting to think that like now I like what I'd want to see, what was your webinar sign-up right before? What did your previous webinar sign up look like? What's your audience how does your audience behave? But I think that um I think I like I said, I'll have a chat with Yosip and I'll I'll um we'll get some useful opinions over to you on this one to actually like give a proper answer. Um but I think that what you're saying as a concept of get the information about the age sounds really important. Having a different webinar, having a different offer, having different emails sounds great. I think that initial step might be uh need a bit of thinking through. So apologies, I haven't like I'm I'm hedging, I'm not giving you like a full uh a straight up answer.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's it's a good answer. I think there's something that you said about people are signing up expecting a discount, and instead they're getting information that could be I mean, they're getting the discount too, but that's they're signing up for one thing, I'm giving them something else. I think matters. The reason why I think discount could work is because I have online courses, but I also have physical products. So I live in a different space than a lot of course creators. In terms of revenue, it's about 50-50. Oh, wow, as high as that. Yeah. But what that means is the products, I sell a lot more of them than I sell courses.$20 sets of flashcards,$30 sets of books, 10 times more products probably than I sell courses. Oh, that does yeah, that might change things. But the courses provide a very meaningful$50 that I don't have to pay for them to be created. I don't have to pay for them to be stored in a warehouse. You know, um so with without the courses, it's tough for me to even fund and pay for the products. But people come to my site because they've seen flashcards and books and stuff on social media, they want the quick hit the quick thing to help teach the kid how to read. And I I I want to give it to them. I'd love to give them a discount to get it. But also I do want to move some of these courses, and if they pair it with the course, it's gonna give them a much better experience teaching the kid to read. So that that to me is why I kind of say, like, what if I just tried a discount strategy instead of a webinar strategy? But I was kind of trying to marry the two together and do both, which might not be the best plan.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah. It might be those are two separate things. Yeah. And I I'll think about it some more. I'm gonna come back to you. Um, if anybody wants to check out the stuff about write message, I had Brennan on the podcast, episode 149. Um, and that was a really, really interesting episode. And so this has been amazing. Um, I really, really appreciate you coming on and being so open about everything and and talking about uh your business um in so much detail today. If people want to go check you out, where should they go? What's the website? Where are you on socials?
SPEAKER_00:You can go to toddlerscanread.com or at toddlers can read on everything YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. And uh yeah, you want to check out some reading products, want to check out the funnel? If you check out the funnel, send me feedback. So I have it. I'm I'm always open and there's always more to learn. Um so yeah, appreciate it, appreciate people listening. That's amazing. Thanks so much, Spencer.
SPEAKER_03:Thanks so much for listening as always, uh, and we'll catch you guys next time.