3 Simple Ways to Keep Your Course/Membership Clients Happier

You don't just want to have a course-- You want THE BEST course, right? You want thrilled clients, who get REAL results, and send you tons of referrals. 

From client experience, to tools to teach different types of learners, to onboarding workflows, this episode spills actionable tactics I learned as a 7 figure course creator.

There are simple tweaks you can implement to improve customer experience and this episode will give you TWENTY of them.

In fact, by streaming this episode, you'll also discover a new way of generate new clients: By keeping your current ones sooo happy, they send you boatloads of referrals.

This episode is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat!

👉 [See the PDF Space I mentioned in this episode: https://adobe.ly/4b2yLiG ]

In this episode, I'm breaking down what 5 years of running Magic Marketing Machine has taught me about the client experience. If you're a business owner and run an online course or membership, this one's for you.

Inside, I get into:

• The online learning-style blind spot I didn't even know I had — and the AI tool that fixes it.
• Why "let's go, rah, rah!" high-energy doesn't work for every customer, and what we do now instead so our students don't get overwhelmed 
• The online course worksheet upgrade that makes people excited to "work"
• The 4am problem every online business owner has run into, and the automation that solves it for good
• The back-end workflow that curtailed refund requests
• The one-page fix that makes contracts feel like a relief instead of a threat and helps your clients understand their expectations

🎧 Hit play, then go poke around the PDF Space above — I put every resource from this episode in one place so you're not scrambling to take notes.

🎉 Get clients from Instagram inside Magic Marketing Machine! www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Watch a FREE masterclass called “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

jenna harding (00:00)
I was shocked to find out that my husband doesn't learn via watching videos. When I recorded my signature program, Magic Marketing Machine, I thought teaching everything in like short, fun, entertaining videos would mean that it was accessible to everyone and all different types of learners. Then my husband and I were having a conversation where I found out that he learns best by reading information.

And I guess this is why when we're learning a new board game, I always pass him the instructions because I'll learn it by having it explained to me or actually playing the game. But if I try and read the instructions, we will be sitting there for hours. And then ironically, when I started to think about it, I realized I'm a huge audible listener and listening is probably my number one way to learn something. And not to brag, but I listen to business books for fun.

You too? You're here. So maybe. Maybe you do you listen to business podcasts. I know that about you. So today we're gonna talk about ways to improve your customer experience when you have an online program or membership. And after five years of running MMM, Magic Marketing Machine, we've learned a lot and tried a lot to make it a better experience and also to help all different types of learners. And we've seen what choices have the biggest impacts on our clients actually getting results.

Fun fact, only about 15% of people who buy courses will actually complete that course. So knowing that stat, one, we want to not be mean to ourselves if we don't have high completion rates because it is totally normal. And two, we want to make sure your members

Get as much as possible out of the time they spend with you and the time they are in the course, let's make sure that they are learning and gaining from it and getting results.

And specifically, we're gonna be talking about how the tools that Adobe Acrobat Studio provides Can make that happen and help your clients have a better experience when working with you. I am very excited to announce that this episode is in fact sponsored by Adobe Acrobat.

Which is really cool because that means I get the chance to hype up all of the features and workflows and tools that are new that I think a lot of course creators don't know about yet and can really, really serve you and your clients.

jenna part 2 (02:21)
I recently taught a sales push workshop. So inside my community, we had this big event, a lot of hype around it. And it was all about how to run a promo in your business and exactly what to post on Instagram during that time. So as you can imagine, there was a lot of information we needed to get to our clients. We had a whole workbook. There were different marketing psychology elements that we needed to teach. There was

Post prompts, there was a calendar, like there was so many things because we wanted to give them literally every step they needed in order to run a promo in their business.

And so normally if we needed to give our clients like a lot of information, we might make a Google Doc workbook, but that has shortcomings. And I really wanted to make sure that people didn't feel like they were overwhelmed by this amount of information because I know if a learner is overwhelmed by the information, they're not going to take action. And

in the online course community, if you have a course, you know that there's a lot of talk about how we we don't just want to load people up with information. We want to make sure they're repeatedly taking action and implementing what they're learning. So we put

everything to do with this workbook into one big beautiful PDF Space.

Let me describe the magic of PDF spaces to you.

It's basically like you take all of your PDFs and you put them into one hub, and then you can link your people to that hub. and now you have an experience that goes beyond just letting them read your documents. It's much more interactive Like for example, you can have AI turn your PDFs.

into podcasts. and when this concept was first explained to me, this the this idea that the software could turn your PDF into a podcast, I didn't understand it. I was like, what do you mean? It's gonna script a podcast and then I will read the podcast? Like what do you what do you mean? It didn't make any sense until I saw it in action.

So I'll tell you how we used it. And there's, I mean, there's a million different use cases for this. We took any important thing that people needed to understand. So for instance, urgency mechanisms. In the workshop, we talked about urgency mechanisms, which I describe as giving your client a reason to choose now to buy something. So that could be a discount, a coupon, a bonus, a time-sensitive deadline, a cohort.

There's lots of different urgency mechanisms you can use to give your clients a reason to choose now. So we needed to explain it in theory and then give a bunch of options so everybody could choose an urgency mechanism that felt good to them. So I was able to tell the computer to tell the PDF Space, the AI, to generate a podcast that quickly explained urgency mechanisms.

And I did the same thing for a bunch of different concepts that I was teaching in this class.

So say you were taking this class and you were like, wait, what did Jenna mean by social proof? What did Jenna mean by urgency mechanisms? wait, what posts am I supposed to make for week one of my promo? We can have a podcast that explains those things to you. And it just sounds like two normal people talking back and forth in a very like,

casual conversational way, but explaining the material that you fed it in the PDFs. And I think that if this software existed when I was learning, like when I was in college, I would have done so much better in theater history class. You know, I would have gotten such better grades

Because reading the information and trying to synthesize it does not work in my brain as well as listening to it and hearing two people just like talk out the concept.

I'm gonna play it for you in a second so you can understand what I'm saying.

And just so you understand some of the nuts and bolts, we can tell it what to generate, we can tell it what to focus on, and then it's generated automatically and you can edit the transcript and it'll be reflected in the AI voice that you hear. some things I wanted to like double check for accuracy or edit or change a bit, and it took me two seconds. It took me all of two seconds to make all of those edits.

So now like seeing all the pieces come together, students will learn because they're sitting there across from me in the live workshop. And then they can take the PDF Space so that they can review everything after and have it nice and like tidy and organized, not a bunch of docs floating around on the computer.

jenna part 2 (06:55)
and they can listen to super succinct podcasts that are generated explaining key principles.

And PDF spaces have AI assistant.

So they could ask AI assistant questions and search the docs for whatever they're looking for and answers that they need.

So this is helping us create material that serves all different types of learners and all different types of brains.

And also just makes it so much less overwhelming. Okay, I'm gonna play an excerpt right now. so you can hear exactly what it sounds like. I'm gonna take this right from the sales push workshop that we hosted so you can hear an example of what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (07:33)
Hey, welcome to this episode. Today we're talking about something that can feel, well, a bit overwhelming. Launching or promoting your

Speaker 1 (07:41)
Yeah, it's that mix of excitement and stress, right? Like you want to do well, but sometimes it just feels like a lot to handle.

Speaker 2 (07:50)
Exactly.

So we thought we'd share some mindset reminders to help you feel more confident and less scared as you start your launch journey.

Speaker 1 (07:58)
I love that. So, first up, let's reframe what selling actually is. It's not about pushing or manipulating people.

Speaker 2 (08:05)
Right, think of it like waving your arms and saying, Hey, if you want this result, come this way. You're not convincing anyone to buy something they don't want, you're just showing them the path to what they already desire.

jenna part 2 (08:16)
How cool is that?

jenna harding (08:19)
I even had a podcast generated from my mindset section where it's like, okay, you're mid launch, you need a pep talk here. Listen to this pep talk. keep going, stay strong, go launch your face off. to like cheer people on.

I love a launch. I love like the intensity of it, but I also have found that a lot of people don't like working under pressure, I love fast paced, push me to win, energy, vibe. But some of our clients we found were really freezing if we asked them to make something on the spot. Like that didn't work for all the types of brains. So now we know that that

Woo woo, let's go. Style isn't for everyone. And we actually added lessons and in my program and then moments in our workshops where we slow down and do a regulation, like a nervous system regulation exercise. And that has shown to really help. I think any coach, if you're in the room and you notice the room is starting to get like they're starting to get stressed, you want to bring peace to that room, help people regulate so that they can

you know, move forward and learn and get a result. And we now built that into the program because we saw it firsthand actually. the quick rundown is on a Tuesday we had a coworking session and we had people make a post really, really fast and some people like froze. And then on the Friday we brought in Molly Donlan

to teach a bonus class for our my clients on how to be creative when your mortgage depends on it. It's like one of her trainings. And part of it was about regulation. And she did this nervous system regulation exercise. And then we gave our students the same prompt we'd given them on Tuesday and watched some of them be able to like crack it open and come up with eight posts ideas.

when previously they couldn't come up with one. Like there was literally a girl in the class. She's like, on Tuesday, I totally froze and I found this really difficult, but I just came up with eight ideas in we gave them like less than five minutes to do it too. So

couple things to consider working into your program or membership.

another thing that was so hard for me as a course creator, and I asked so many people about this when I first started my program, was like, yo, how can we give people worksheets they can fill out? Like, how can I just I want to be able to give someone a worksheet and they fill it out online and it's easy to save and it can look

pretty and there I could not find any way to do that. Enter fillable PDFs.

They're easy to use. it's sitting right there in Acrobat, especially if you care about making your worksheets look pretty, which I really do think can get people more excited. And then when people are more excited, they do a better job and then they get a better result. So something as small as using Acrobat's fillable PDFs to make your worksheets can improve that client experience.

it's gonna be easy to sort, easy to label, easy to download, easy for you to make pretty. we would typically use Google Drive and create Google Docs, which kind of freaks me out because it doesn't give us a ton of control. And I would put in the footer like trademark, magic marketing machine, but I always worry that those are gonna be shared beyond my clientele, you know.

once that document's out there it could have a life of its own.

So it's a little bit less secure in my opinion than using a fillable PDF.

here's actually a good one. I haven't done this, but I've seen it done and I it's been on my to-do list forever. But making your invoices pretty enough for people to share to their Instagram Stories I've seen this happen where you book something and the confirmation page or the invoice is so pretty, people get excited about it and they're like, look at this like investment I just made. And they'll literally share their invoice

To their Instagram stories, and then everybody sees that they've signed up to work with you and makes you look good. just because that page like had, you know, flowers all over it and maybe like a congratulations message or like you're in, it's the first day of the rest of your life, some sort of inspiration. And you could even add to it, like share this to your stories if if you wanted to, if you wanted to be bold about it, and we do wanna be bold, right?

It's those seemingly little things and admin things, administrative things, that can improve your client's experience. Onboarding, signing their contract, communication, clarity. if someone invested, you know, $10,000 to work with you and then they didn't immediately receive their contract, like picture what that moment is like for them. They click yes, buy. It was scary for them to click buy. They click

Pay now. And then they're sitting there watching their inbox. They're like, okay, what now? Did they get it? Did my money go through? Is it stuck in cyberspace? Like, you gotta get them that welcome email Be excited for them. Send the contract. Send the receipt. When that stuff is all a tight automated workflow, they can breathe a sigh of relief and have what they need immediately, especially in this online world where someone could be.

signing up to work with you at four o'clock in the morning, like you're not gonna be there manually sending all of this. So we wanna set that all up in an automated workflow.

For instance,

when the Thrivecart sale happens, that tells Zapier to get Adobe Acrobat Sign to send the customer their agreement. And it's all automated and you set it up once and then you walk away. then you know the second somebody signs up to work with you, they're immediately getting their contract.

We have even curtailed refund requests and the failed payments just by having clearer communication when someone enrolls. Like people need to know what they're paying for, what they're agreeing to. what's expected of them. Having more clarity there is gonna like save you in the long run.

Talk about contracts for a second more. Ooh, so spooky. So spooky. I have a friend who's a lawyer. She was a criminal defense attorney, actually. And so when I got my contracts made for my social media management clients, I sent it to her and she goes, Whoa, why is this so complicated? I don't know why he used such complicated jargon.

Because then it looks scary, right? and scary jargon does not equal good communication. So she gave me such a good tip. I'm not a lawyer, but I will share this tip with you. Not legal advice, of course, but what my friend had me do as a friend, not a lawyer, was add an easy to read opening page to your agreement

That sort of synthesizes the legal jargon and positions the contract as a good thing for both sides. All right. So you've got this fancy contract, you do need some legal jargon. There's all these different sections to it, but the thing opens with almost a welcome one pager that's bullets and that's easy to read. And it's like, hey, in short, here's what this contract says, here's how it protects me, and here's how it also protects you.

I just signed a new with a new contractor like last week and I found that her contract did a really good job of this. I felt like it wasn't just a tool to protect her. It was something that was gonna really work for both sides, and I was gonna benefit from signing the contract as well. And it made it so much less scary. And I was so much happier to be like handing over my money.

I want to reiterate, we didn't start the program with all of this stuff in place. we've grown it over the years and we fixed it and we've responded to feedback and we've learned about how different brains work and different people learn through doing. So if you're brand new to all of this, it's okay if you're just going one piece at a time.

But if you're like me and you're highly concerned about the success of your clients and the happiness of your clients, and you really prioritize that, then bit by bit, here are different ways that you can reimagine how your course looks so you can have happy clients who get results, like providing materials that work for different learning types. it seems so simple now that I say it, but it's not something that I considered at the beginning, like as I as I shared.

I created a PDF Space for you to look at so that you can see kind of what I'm talking about so that you don't just need to envision by listening what I explain, but so you can actually see it. So the link is below. It's like obviously free and then you can boop around and experience what a PDF Space is and what those automated podcasts sound like and look like.

And there are actually a ton of other features that I didn't even mention,

I'm gonna put mine together quickly so it's not gonna be as as gorgeous and designed as they can be, but you can also make these look really pretty.

Let me know if you want more episodes like this. I could talk more about what it's like to actually run a giant successful program and managing our clients and communicating with them and curbing refund requests. Like I can talk about

all of those things if you want to hear them. So let me know in the comments and I I can do future episodes on that. And thank you so much to Adobe Acrobat for sponsoring this episode.