#218: How to Sell to Existing Students and Clients

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to get you moving, to get you excited about your course creation, your workshops, whatever it is you’re working on, to put yourself out there in an even bigger way. And I’ve been working on some marketing audits lately, So companies, small businesses, entrepreneurs will ask me to come in, check what’s working, what’s not working, and giving them advice about how to get more bang for their buck in terms of their promotions and their marketing.

So they might be promoting an event, they might be promoting a course. And I love it because I get to play detective. I don’t know about you, but I read a lot of Encyclopedia Brown as a kid and now my 11 year old’s into those books as well. So I love playing marketing detective. And if there’s one theme that comes up again and again, there are several themes, but one that’s really been popping out to me as I’ve been doing these marketing audits is the idea of selling to customers that already love and adore you.

Now, you guys have heard the statistics before that acquiring a new customer or a new student or a new client can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing one. And if you do a little bit of retention when it comes to your customers or your students, you can see a big increase in terms of what’s next.

So it really pay used to go back to your best people and make new offers, give out new invitations. So today I want to workshop a little bit with you and I want you to stop acquiring for a minute and think about how you can optimize your current clients, your existing students, how you can make the most out of those awesome people who are buying from you and and really get the ROI behind them.

Let’s talk about marketing friction, right? When you’re offering an event in the thousands and I mentioned marketing friction, that’s what causes people not to buy, right? It’s kind of like roadblocks every time you want someone to buy. If there’s friction, then a little bit less opportunity, a little bit less opportunity. All link to that episode in the show notes where I talk about marketing friction.

But if you’re talking about an event in the thousand, so a price point could be friction, right? You’re asking people to pay thousands of dollars. You’re asking bull to fly right? So they have to buy a flight. They’ve got to get a hotel. If you are talking to parents of parents, moms and dads or one of your core marketing audiences, if you’re talking to parents of young children, they might have to get sitters.

So they have to pay for that as well. If grandma and grandpa are not available. So you’ve got to think in terms of all the friction that’s available. But when you go back to your customers and your old clients who maybe have attended your event or gone through your course, there’s a few reasons why this is so powerful.

One, they know the power of the experience with you. They know the transformation they’re going to get with you because they’ve gone through it one time. They have this feeling, these positive feelings connected to you. So you don’t have to do the work as much because they know what’s involved too. There’s an inherent trust that’s baked in. I still have six week accelerator students who come back to me and we did the six week accelerator gosh, four, four years ago, five years ago.

And they come back to me and say, Gina, what you got in terms of what are you teaching now? What are you building? Because there’s trust there. They know because they’ve had the experience with me about what I bring to the table. So that’s why we want to go back to our existing clients. So I thought we could workshop a couple of ideas of how you can go back to old or existing clients and students and really maximize the spending power when it comes to that community.

And this episode, of course, is brought to you by our Done for You service. By the way, this is part of the conversation we have. When you do done for you with us, we build and market your course from scratch. We handhold you through the entire process and we talk about how can we market and use and leverage a client that you already have in the past.

This is definitely part of the conversation when it comes to done for you. So go to course creation boutique dot com slash course to learn more and set up a call and we can talk more about your course in your marketing. All right let’s talk about a few ways that we can effectively leverage existing clients and students. Well, the first one is coming back for more, right?

Going through your service, your course, your event again. So we build done for you, of course, as I just mentioned a minute ago and we have clients that come back and say, Hey, can you build me another course? So maybe we built a signature course with them the first time and now they want a lead gen course or they want an onboarding course or they want a certification and they want to build a different kind of course.

So that’s a great way for us to work with clients that we already have to get the opportunity to build another course with that. And Perry More4 was on the podcast link to his episode in the show notes we built out a beautiful signature course for Perry. Actually, we’ve built multiple courses for Perry. We built out a signature course first and foremost.

Then we built out cohort courses and we recently, a few months ago built out a trip wire course for him, a starter course. So we love doing that and there’s a trust there. If you listen to that Perry episode, there’s a trust between Perry and I that is very powerful and that’s why he keeps coming back to us.

And we are thrilled to work with Perry because he’s amazing as well. Here’s another example. I’ve also invited my students back to the six week accelerator to refresh themselves at a reduced rate. Now, that’s key. By the way, if you are inviting someone back to your course or your event or your services, almost always there’s a reduction in rate because they paid the full price at the onset for the first experience.

Now, as a thank you as a courtesy, you are discounting the rate because they are a returning student or they are graduate. I talk about Bowe and Don Easton all the time and their personal story power, event, power, awful, powerful, three day event where you learn how to create your signature story and really learn about your physicality and how to use your body to tell your story.

Really great, awesome event always gets amazing reviews and they’ve got this great grad rate because they know people love to come back to the event. They also know that every time someone comes back to the event, they experience something different and so they entice them with a graduate rate and or they say, Hey, bring a friend, bring a guest.

 

You know, the power of this event, this time bring a guest. So that’s another thing that we could do. Terms of the six week accelerator say, hey, come back for this reduced rate and you could bring a guest or bring your business partner or bring your visa or somebody want to work through it with for just this amount of money for a discounted price.

This is a really great strategy. If you’re inviting someone back to your course, back to your workshop, whatever it is. And sometimes I get people asking, well, why would people want to go back through it? Like I just said about Bowe and Don’s event, about personal story power, a lot of times they want to have that feeling again or and or they want to be in your space because they want to be in that peer group.

So there’s a feeling like when people when students went through the six week accelerator, there was definitely a feeling when I did it live of going through it with other course creators for six weeks. You’re in the trenches. People felt this at the Conversion copywriting playbook as well. We had 30 days together and we felt like writers in the trenches, people love that feeling.

They love that power of a peer group and they know what you bring to the table and they want more of that. They want more of that emotion. So that’s why we people will come back. It’s not necessarily that you’re teaching something different now. Inevitably, when you’re teaching, it will come across different. You will have different shares. But it’s just that power of the experience, right?

And that power of the peer group. Here’s another idea if you want them to come back is you could frame it as a refresher course. So maybe you don’t give them access to the entire course. Again, maybe you have one or two new modules and you say, Hey, I’ve got these new modules as a refresher part of the course and I’ll charge you this this much as graduates.

So don’t be afraid to get flexible. Okay? Another other offer that you can make existing or past clients is ongoing group coaching. Sometimes people take your course and they just want a little bit of coaching after that. Okay, I’ve got the training, I’ve got the information now I’m just trying to figure out how to make it work for me.

Well, sometimes group coaching is a really great next offer, so you can offer them one month of group coaching and maybe after that they get some additional resources. So this is a great option for you if you want to take them a little bit deeper. Now, another option, speaking of taking it deeper, is offering limited one to ones with you.

Now I see limited because as we talk a lot in this podcast, maybe you’re burnt out on 1 to 1 in terms of coaching or consulting. A lot of my listeners don’t want to necessarily go back to the one to ones, but you could use or you could offer a limited time three month package where you can let them go deeper and then that’s it.

You just cut off those one two ones, another idea to offer a certification. So I’ve talked about Pam Hendrickson before, who I worked with at Tony Robbins. She was his right hand woman, incredible, brilliant lady. She would teach a course, for example, a marketing course. And then right after that, she would roll those attendees and those students into a certification.

So if you went through her marketing roadmap as a next step, like once you were done with that three or four months down the line, she would offer a certification. So you could then turn around and teach the marketing roadmap to your own people as a coach. So if you have a successful course and you have people in there and you’re teaching them something, a value certification could be a really great next step in terms of having them teach it to their people.

So it’s another great option. A link to the episode I did about certifications in the show notes. And if you don’t want to do any of these options, if you don’t want to sell something else to your clients, I would encourage you to roll them into a referral program. So I’ve done this before with my students incentivizing them to either get an affiliate commission or to get coaching calls, whatever it looks like, offer them something in return for sending students your way.

There’s no better referral source than the ambassadors that you’ve already cultivated. No one will refer you more than the people who are your raving fans, who trust in you in your process, and the promise that you will deliver for them. I promise you this. These people are your ultimate ambassadors. You want to ask for referrals. Okay. You also want to ask, I should mention testimonials, right?

And making sure you’re getting case studies from them. Very, very important. Remind them a link to an episode I’ve done on testimonials. Okay, so important. You can use them for focus groups. I’m talking all the time on this podcast about validation. This is another great way. So if you don’t want to make them a separate offer, at least ask for the testimonials for them to be your sounding board for the referrals.

Very, very important. I want to make sure you are maximizing these former clients and students that love you right that want to talk about you, so make sure you’re leveraging them. Those are just a few options to help you maximize if you’re interested in done for you and the hand-holding that comes with us creating and market your course through the course creation boutique e-commerce slash course until next week.

Go create be you and be brilliant and get it done.