Episode #56: John Lee Dumas On How To Sell High-Ticket Products Through Webinars (and his secret to converting 1 out of every 3 attendees into paying customers)

Interviewer: It’s John McIntyre here, [inaudible 00:00:02]. I’m here with John Lee Dumas. Now John has a podcast, it’s a very popular podcast, it’s a daily podcast called Entrepreneur On Fire. And everyday he interviews a different … the idea is, he interviews a different entrepreneur and finds out why [inaudible 00:00:20]. There is a bunch of things he goes into, into each entrepreneur to talk to them. But why I got him on the show today was not so much to talk about Podcasting, but to talk about what he is doing with his sales funnel, which he has got a Facebook ad, which goes to like a landing page for a webinar, and then he brings people on to a webinar and then sells them on his paid membership community.

And he is absolutely crushing, so I though I want to get him on the show to talk about what he is doing, why he thinks it’s working, maybe some of the mistakes that he has made along the why and how someone or how a listener, you as the listener can go and apply some of this stuff to your own business. So we’ll get into all that in just a moment. John, how are you doing today?

John: John, I am doing quite well today. And to be honest, yes, financially we are crushing it right now, but if I had somebody half as good as you a copy, we would be double or triple the revenue.

Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you. [Laughter] You crack me up, man. Before we get into the sales funnel, give the listener a background on who are you and what do you do. I have done a little bit but you can probably do a bit better than I did.

John: Yeah, I got the real quick rundown. I’m just a country boy from the state of Maine, which is a state couple of hours north of Boston up in New England. And I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship, John. That’s why when you rain me up here on Skype, and I saw you shooting a 9 mm Beretta, I got a little fired up, it brought me back to my combat days in Iraq where I spent 13 months as an Armor Officer leading 16 men and four tanks and battled in Fallujah and Ramadi and Habania.

But that was way back in the day and I’ve since retired, and now I’m just floating around. I tried corporate finance, I tried commercial and residential real estate, and finally I had my little aha moment and decided to start a daily podcast because everybody told me I was crazy when I brought the idea to them. I said if they think that’s a crazy idea, that’s exactly why I want to do it. They zig I zag, let’s do this. The only thing I’m missing is a little Chiang Mai, John.

Interviewer: You’d get over him, and you were recently in the Philippines too, Chiang Mai is not far away from there.

John: Just a little hop skip and a jump I hear.

Interviewer: When are you going to move over here? You did the whole digital nomad thing.

John: Man, I am so close to doing that. Now that I hear how strong your Internet is and how clear your audio is, what’s stopping me.

Interviewer: Exactly. Exactly, man. It’s crazy. You know what’s even crazier is that we have better Internet at home in Chiang Mai where I am right now at the apartment than I have at my mom’s place in Sydney, Australia. And Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world but the Internet sucks.

John: That’s brutal.

Interviewer: It’s horrible, man. That makes me cry every time I go home.

John: It just makes me miss Chiang Mai, which is totally cool.

Interviewer: Alright, let’s get into this funnel. How about we start, give me an overview of what you’re doing right now, what’s working? If you are up for sharing some figures that would be cool too, but an overview of what’s going on with your funnel, and … yeah, let’s start there.

John: John, I’m up for sharing figures, I publish my monthly income reports every single month at EOFire.com/income. We just published our March report yesterday actually. The first month since we started publishing this, we actually decreased in our actual overall finances, but I can’t complain because February was 188,000 and March was 185,000 so we stayed pretty close, and that’s still a pretty awesome number.

But the funnel is pretty simple, John. So my audience is built up of podcast, listeners. Again, I was that crazy guy that started that daily podcast, nobody thought it could be done, nobody thought anybody would listen. A few people have, we had 580,000 downloads in the month of March, because that we’ve built an audience. And audience, John, they just talk to me, they send me emails, they send me tweets, they Facebook messages, and they were telling me, John, how do you podcast? How do you rank so high in iTunes? How do you create a product or service off of, which are actually building with your audience?

And that’s where I came up with the idea, John, for Podcasters’ Paradise, which is a community for podcasters to create, grow and monetize their own podcast. But the problem is, it’s a $1200 community, you can’t sell people on a sales page unless you are John, I’ve dropped a copy, you could probably create a sales page to sell people but not with me, not with my skills. So I knew that I had to create a funnel, I knew that I had to figure out a system, John. And for me that was having on the intros and outros of my podcast, driving people to a webinar opt-in page. Having it’s on my actual homepage EntrepreneurOnFire, click here to sign-up for your live podcast workshop.

And then also doing a lot of spend in Facebook ads, driving people to this webinar opt-in page where every single week we have a live podcast workshop webinar. And that’s our main funnel, John, we get people to show up to these live webinars. I give them 45 minutes of pure value on podcasting, some super hacks, a lot of great tips, tools and tactics. And then in the last 45 minutes I take them inside the doors of Podcasters’ Paradise, I show them everything they are going to get when they purchase.

And that’s huge for a lot of people to actually see that before they buy. And it’s a live webinar, John, I answer all the questions, I take away all their barriers that they may have and we convert an average of 25 to 35 people every single week into Podcasters’ Paradise, which is how we are generating six figures a month in revenue from that product.

Interviewer: And from what I’ve heard, you stay on this webinar answering questions until you’ve got into the last question?

John: Every question, John, because every question is just one barrier that somebody has put up in front of a sale. So my attitude is, hey, I’m going to sit here and answer any question until every barrier is removed, and then everybody has bought and then we’ll close it down.

Interviewer: I love that, I love that. So let’s talk about, let’s break this into pieces, you’ve got traffic on the one hand, you’ve got converts and then you’ve got your economics, which is that’s a [inaudible 00:06:39] framework, that’s not something I came up with but, and the economics is basically a product, is how you are making the money. So your traffic is, it sounds like its Facebook and podcast listeners. Is this equally split or you doing more Facebook advertising or more podcasting or how does that breakdown?

John: It’s about 65:35, 65% of my leads come from paid Facebook advertising, the other 35% are organic from both the podcast and the website.

Interviewer: That’s interesting, and I think why it’s interesting, someone is going to listen to this thing. John has got a daily podcast, he has got 500,000, half a million every month. I can’t get the same results as that because I just don’t want to do a podcast or I don’t have it or, I don’t have this seductive sweet voice to producing people in.

John: Listen to the copy guy in action, unbelievable.

Interviewer: But anyone can do Facebook. So by the sound of it, what’s going on here is that someone could start if they need a traffic to start just doing Facebook advertising to a certain audience whether it’s podcasting with someone else, and that would get them the tray. Quite a lot of traffic that they could then lead into a funnel and so on, so that’s step one, which is interesting.

So someone goes … just to clarify, someone is on Facebook, if they click on the ad and they end up on this webinar, are they coming … how likely are they to have heard of your podcast?

John: Quite likely because, John, the actual people that I target through Facebook targeting, which you can get very specific on are on the online entrepreneur, people that do listen to podcast, people that do live in our space so to speak. I target people like Pat Flynn, like Lewis House, like Amy Porterfield, like Dan and Ian Tropical MBA, like those type of really high-level entrepreneurs that I know their audience has likely heard of me, it would probably make sense if they added podcasting to their business model in 2014, so it’s fairly likely.

Interviewer: And then what happens? So their own Facebook and they see one of your newsfeed ads and they click on it, and they end up where? So basically it will be a newsfeed ad of either me, I don’t know if you have seen it yet, because it’s a pretty stark image but I’m actually on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and I’m actually stabbing with a spear a shark that has fear branded across it. It is pretty visually stimulating, and I actually got some emails from the Animal Rights Association from that, but I kept it going, because I think any publications is good publication. So I kept that one rolling, for sure.

But I use pictures like that, there is one of me actually podcasting with my arms and hair literally on fire, and I love that picture as well. But then there is just other ones regular of bunch of people who have been in Podcasters’ Paradise, all like smiling and podcasting is like a collage, any number of things, and a little bit of copy. Again, not the best copy, not the John McIntyre copy but the best we can come up with, which is just basically saying, hey guys, do you want to learn how to create or monetize your podcast, John, share some tips, tools and tactics about how he has generated or how he has created a business, it generates over $100,000 a month, XYZ.

They click on that image or that link, John, and it takes them directly to a lead page webinar opt-in page. It’s actually the James Schramko special, that one with a little faded mind map. So it’s just a very simple landing page, they just sign-up for the webinar there. And I typically do this every single week, so for six days I’m running these Facebook ads to this webinar opt-in.

Interviewer: Quick question. Do you get sick of doing a live webinar every single week? What happens if you want to take a week off? I don’t know if [crosstalk 00:10:29]

John: It’s interesting, I don’t take weeks off, I don’t even days off to be honest with you, but when I first started I was a little terrified, a little scared, there is definitely some fear of failure. When I first started doing webinars, as I’ve heard that most people do experience because it’s like what if nobody shows up, like what if nobody buys, it’s going to be embarrassing. I was having all those doubts as well.

So when I first started, it was tough to get over that hurdle, but pretty soon, I’ll say after the third or fourth live webinar, and now I’ve done over 50, I just started hitting my groove. I just love interacting with the audience, I get on 15 minutes early before the webinar starts. And I’m calling people out like, oh, it’s John McIntyre from Chiang Mai, it’s Julie, it’s Josh Stanton, it’s Bryce, like what’s up guys, how are you doing, thanks for joining me, XYZ. Where you guys from? Oh, we got somewhere from New Zealand, we have somewhere from Poland, and really interacting with them and making them know straight up, hey, this is a live webinar. I’m here for you, I’m answering your questions, XYZ.

Then when we launched the live webinar, and I just had fun, that it’s a fun webinar, it’s about an hour presentation, maybe an hour and 15 minutes. And then by the end, John, I am getting back into question, I’m answering everybody’s questions live on that webinar, and I like the questions that gets fired at me, makes me think on my feet. I get to react quickly, it makes me better as a podcaster and as a presenter. And now that I’ve done so many, it’s actually the thing that I look forward to most, John, besides obviously being on this podcast.

Interviewer: I was talking to a buddy of mine here in Chiang Mai recently, he is a conversion loan specialist.

John: Was it Bryce?

Interviewer: No, it’s not Bryce, it’s another guy.

John: Oh, I miss Bryce.

Interviewer: So this guy was talking about how some people get 10%, 15%, he reckons 20% [inaudible 00:12:20] on a webinar. So you, it sounds like you are getting 30 to 35%, what do you think? You went through some of the differences, some of the things you are doing right there on the webinar, but are there any key things that you think that are making you get almost, 20% is the standard, you are almost getting double the results that most people would love to get?

John: For complete transparency, I’ve definitely had … I’ve done so many webinars, I’ve done some that have converted 20%, I’ve rarely seen a conversion less than that. I’d say I average between 28 to 32% and we really do keep these stats because I want to see what’s working. And I have done as high as 30 of 38% before. I remember I did one where I had 123 people on I think, and we did 39 sales. So that was our best webinar that we’ve ever done. And especially because this is a product where we do give a $300 discounts for the people that take action on that live webinar. So it takes there from 1200 down to 900, but 39 times 900, that was in the high $30,000 range for one webinar, which is one hour and 15 minutes, so definitely a success.

Again, there some expenses laid out there, I’m paying a little over $2000 every single week to get the Facebook side of that there. I am not paying anything except sweat equity for the organic side, but there is lot of time and effort that does go into that. I do think the reasons why I’m typically getting between again 28, typically on the low average, 32 is definitely the high average conversions on these webinars is because they are live, John. A lot of people don’t do live webinars.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with Amy Porterfield, and she told me about people’s mentality like James Wetmore and how they create one webinar and then they’ll just put it into automated overdrive, and they’ll answer questions on that first webinar, but then it’s just all are recorded after that. And I think people get that because people are always surprised when they get to this webinar, no matter how many times we put in capital letters, ‘Live Webinar Starting Now. This is a Live Webinar.’

People are still shocked when they show up and it actually is live, so I’m like, it is April 8th, it is 12:01 p.m. Pacific Time. I’m seeing, Joe, Sarah, Sam in the chat room and I’m interacting with the people there live, and I still get that shocking odd that it is actually live and people love that. When you actually are answering their specific question, they feel like you really care.

Interviewer: I can see that. So when you are doing the live webinar, a lot of people would get on there, and they might have one question or two questions, and if only they can get those one or two questions answered, they’ll sign-up. But if you are doing those canned webinars, that a lot of people are doing they’ll never be able to get these questions answered. So while it appears as a Q&A to everyone, whether they think it’s live or not is irrelevant, they are not going to be able to get that question answered and there is someone else asked it on that very first one webinar. So it sounds like this Q&A is a really key part of what’s making this webinar successful.

John: I couldn’t agree more, I’m really finding that to be the case. I’m seeing that there is definitely a large segment of people who are coming in with barriers in place, and those barriers are those questions. And when you’re actually there taking the time to remove those barriers, you are leaving an open hallway and open runway to that ‘Buy Now’ button, and when you are making an event, when you make it exciting, when you make it seem like you they are already in the community, when people buy, John, and I’m like, “Okay, we just had John McIntyre buy. Welcome, John, say hi to everybody in the chat room, let them know you bought.” And then you are typing real-time in the chat room, “Hey, I just bought guys, I am so excited for Podcasters’ Paradise.”

Other people are seeing, wow, that’s proof of concepts, nobody wants to be that only person that buys, like they want to know that other people are making the same decision they are, because that validates their own decision.

Interviewer: I love it. I love it. So someone signs up, there is obviously [inaudible 00:16:22] lead pages, what happens in the lead up to the webinar, are you doing … usually this is typically where people would do some email marketing to get more people to the webinar because you are going to get a certain amount of people sign up, but not everyone is going to actually show up to the webinar. So are you using any email marketing strategies or anything else to bump those numbers?

John: That’s exactly the second area I’d say that we need like John McIntyre on our team. First would be that Facebook ad to really make that enticing copy to actually click on that. And then the second place would be that actual lead page for that quick little sign-up, and the third place is that leading up to the webinar, like how are you building up anticipation. Nathan Barry has a great product launch strategy where it’s all about building anticipation and you are getting people amped and fired up for it without offering anything yet.

That’s a great point, I don’t think that we do a good job between when people sign-up to when they actually show up. They get an email the night before, they get an email that morning, that’s a reminder, and then they get an email 15 minutes before the webinar starts. I think there is a huge opportunity that we need to step up and start taking advantage of for those people that signed up four or five days ago. What about a couple emails that go out that really peak their interest for something that’s going to happen on that webinar. We don’t do that, John.

Interviewer: You could do it so easily as well, so an email from Frank Kern, he was recently doing some webinar launch. And one of the things he sent out, I didn’t actually go to the webinar because the times really didn’t match with Thailand, but one of the things he said, I thought that was so smart. One of the emails come out, so I’ve got this free report, this guide to the webinar, it’s going to tell you all about what you are going to learn on this program, so great, I’ll just read that, then I can skip the webinar and save my time.

So we all opened the PDF and it’s basically fill-in the blank, five or ten page PDF. It’s got all the information, like everything that’s on the webinar except the keywords that would actually make, will make sense. So I’m reading, this going, here is the three essential elements to doing like a powerful webinar. But then I just got, number one, blank spot; number two, blank spot; number three, blank spot. So you could have basically a PDF with catchy headlines and then just fill-in the blank copy, and you can send that out the day before or something like that. I saw that, yeah, I was just signing, he was doing, I thought it was genius.

John: John, this is why they pay you the big bucks, my man.

Interviewer: So let’s jump real quick then, what about after the webinar? Another thing that some people do is webinar follow-up. So after the people who didn’t buy after the webinar, there is going to be people that may or maybe interested in purchasing if you give them something or do some additional persuasion out to that. Are you doing anything there?

John: So we are. Again, I think this is a huge area for us to improve upon because we are fairly aggressive in the post, that’s something that we have worked fairly hard on. So right after the webinar is done, basically what happens is like three hours later an email goes out to everybody who didn’t buy and saying basically, hey guys, we know you didn’t buy slash weren’t able to attend this webinar. We just put up the replay page, it’s only going to be up for 24 hours, tomorrow at midnight this would be going down, there still is a discount. It’s not the $300 discount, but it’s $200 off till midnight tomorrow night, and then that too gets pulled away.

And basically what with the link will do is just send them directly to a lead page that just has the video, that just has a ‘Buy Now’ button, just those two things. And then there is some testimonials actually below as well. And we convert a handful of people through that 24-hour process, but again not the kind of numbers I’d like to see. I mean we do a unbelievable job converting people that are live on the webinar into sales. We don’t do a great job in the pre-amping up to make sure the most number of people are there.

And we don’t do a good job post, making sure we are maximizing the post sales, because pretty much how it runs down is, just let me give you a really hard number example, John. So a couple of webinars ago we had 650 people who had signed up, about 400 people through Facebook advertising and about 250 people through organic. We had 176 people actually show up live, and then we did 46 sales on that actual live webinar. So that’s pretty much what we’ve been seeing pretty significantly is around 30-ish percent of people that sign-up show up and around 30-ish percent of people that actually show up buy.

And we are seeing those numbers within about 5% one way or the other, give or take on almost every single webinar. So we got to find ways to amp up the people that sign up to show up, to bring that to the 40 or the 45 percentile. Then I’d also love to take those numbers that, people that don’t buy after the webinar is done and go … right now that number if we even did it out, it’d probably be like 1% or 0.5% because it’s just a handful of people that sign-up after the webinar is done, during that replay action. So that needs to be improved as well.

Interviewer: Fantastic. We are right on time, before we go there one thing I wanted to ask you, do you have anywhere any resources that you would recommend to go and learn about webinars. I think that’s what out of all the things, see I’ve talked a lot about your email marketing on this podcast, almost nothing about webinar, so someone is probably listening to this thing, how the hell do I do a good webinar. So tell me about that?

John: Great question.

Interviewer: Just give me a good link, good resource, something that works.

John: The best resource for webinars is a phenomenal product called Webinar On Fire. If you want to know how to create, present and convert your webinar, WebinarOnFire.com will take you to a page where you can sign-up for free for a live webinar workshop where we teach you everything about webinars. Of course, we offer you entrance into Webinar On Fire at the end.

So, John, that’s my favorite resource, probably because I created it, but we are having a lot of fun with Webinar On Fire. Again, it’s one of those things, listen to your audience what do they tell you. When you do $476,000 in sales on a live webinar in five months, people start asking you how are you doing this live webinar? Even though we’ve already identified some areas that we are lacking in, we are obviously doing a lot of things right at the same time. So we did create that product, we are really proud of it, Webinar On Fire is really a great tool for people.

Interviewer: Cool. And if they want to checkout your podcast, I’m sure some will, that’d be on EntrepreneurOnFire.com, correct?

John: Yeah, but that’s a hard word to spell, just go to EOFire.com.

Interviewer: EOFire.com. Easy. Absolutely. John, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you.

John: What a blast, John. I’ll catch you on the flipside.