How to Promote Evergreen Memberships Without Launches – Episode 09

Melissa: All right. So let me go to Orest.

Orest: Hello

Melissa: Hello

Orest: I'm in Europe. So it's like dark here. Anyway, so my question is the following: for about two years, I've been successfully running a membership and they reached, I think, around, over a 260 people at certain points, mostly relying on launches a few times year.

Yeah. However, and then the onboarding process was like more or less manual on that way. However, in the recent month I managed to automate everything hundred percent, like with like a hundred percent automation of onboarding, reminding for like late payments of wording and everything. Yeah. So now I am moving to evergreen option of growing the membership.I don't want to rely on launches and I want to listen to best practices from you about when it's always open.

Yeah. How to promote an always open membership, because I am like struggling to find the best way. 

Paul: Okay, cool. So does  anybody have a good evergreen strategy they want to share? 

Tazeem: Facebook Ads. 

Paul: So Facebook ads will definitely, that's going to drive in the traffic , so that'll drive in the cold traffic and be able to warm them up.  Through the years we did the launch life thing and, we do love, you know, certain elements 

Melissa: who loves "launch life"?

Paul: Does anybody?

Melissa: Some people do which is cool.

Paul:  Like a couple of summers ago we launched a course and made a little over $130,000 on that launch. We done $35,000 plus webinar, you know, sales and stuff, through the years as well. And, and the one thing for Melissa and I, even though like, we have people that we coach that do very well with launches and we help them with that because like their life and lifestyle is into it for them to do it in and go all in on those launches. And it has a lot of momentum when you do that.

And then when you have the evergreen model, the challenge for a lot of us is that when you're in the internet marketing bubble, you know, we're convinced that, you know, a lot of us that, you know, this, you know, launch like all in really serious, incredible inertia, you know, going in now that does peak and Valley things constantly.

But for a lot of us, it's not sustainable. Like we don't want to put all of our eggs in this basket and hope that I'm not going to have the right source of income in the next six months. If I don't launch this properly today and tell people I'm not going to open it for six months, like there's a gamble in that.

Now our three memberships that we have are technically all evergreen. So all of them make over six figures each. So we have, we ever "Paul & Melissa's Inner Circle" and that's a higher level membership, and that's more coaching  in hands on like doing these types of calls five days a week  There are. members now that, we only opened up, two to three spots a month.

So we just make people aware that the spot's available, I get on, since it's a high level in the investments, it's more, it's deserving of a discovery call. Like it's not set up in an automated process. It's very hands on because that's the experience,right? So the investments more. So that's how we had that one set up.

Now what we do have set up otherwise though, is for instance, like "Instaposts' that we have,  that's, Melissa's membership. And with that their social media prompts that, that people get, it's more of a subscription service. There's not a community element. There's not an influencer element. It's the service that's being provided.

Now with that, if you go to the front end, technically it's closed all the time. We don't go around telling people about "Instaposts" ,"Instaposts" ,"Instaposts"  to plus presentations that Melissa has done sends you two "52 Conversation Catalysts" as a lead magnet. Now give you a perfect example, right?

Cause I even said something to you this morning. So Melissa and I helped out a fellow membership owner that is doing a summit right now. And they want to help marketing wise for people that were do you know that the industry therapy, 

Melissa: movement therapy, physical therapy, 

Paul: Chiropractors, things of that nature as well So what this audience is not like our everyday audience that it's serving, but they are small business owners and they want to know how to get paid and organic traffic.

So I did, I did a talk, one pay traffic, Melissa did her normal talk on this summit. And what I noticed is her lead magnet, I think has like about 80 something opt-ins today.

Melissa: I was like, wow. Where did people come from? 

Paul: So, so it was like, so I was like, Oh, the summit must have launched today because her opt-ins like, cause we don't have any ads running or anything like that.

So all of a sudden we got the spike instead of getting a normal, like five to seven to 10 day, opt-ins where people randomly find her organically is that there,there was a spike today. So now what's going to happen is when they, when they go in there, they're going to get a, a backend offer, which will give them a onetime offer to come in to "Instaposts" on the backend.

And if they don't take that, it's okay. They're going to go into a once a week nurture sequence,which is just one idea, an email, one idea a week that they're going to get. But every 90 days they're going to have an evergreen scarcity offer of being able to come in to "Instapost" through the backdoor. So this evergreen offer runs for a year.

So what's interesting is we've seen this is that we get a small percentage because they didn't take the initial offer. So there's only a small percentage that takes the first offer in the evergreen sequence. We have a lot of people that take the, the second or the third offer because we they're now more indoctrinated with us.

They trust us more. They still have the same pain point. They enjoyed her give once a week because there's no call to action on those emails. It just slowly nurture. It's interesting cause we'll be like, Oh, like, you know, $299 just came over Stripe a minute ago. Oh, somebody just bought the year worth of, you know, the year subscription to "Instaposts".

Oh, that's cool. We were, you know, out in the yard, you know, it's like, you know, so, so if you look at it, when we have an evergreen, a lot is think like the slam dunk right now, like what can we do to make the salary now? And yes, we do always want the immediate income, but that's like being on the one side of the football field and trying to throw a hail Mary across the field every day, we're trying to make this perfect throw with every single person that comes in.

Now, what we ended up doing is we, when we try to do that hard sell and that immediate sell, we leave behind 99.9% of the rest of the people. Those people would eventually potentially become a client if we actually move them slowly down the field. So when you do evergreen, don't just think of right now, think of the lifetime value of this person.

You should have a nurture sequence behind the scenes because what happens is as time progresses, that pipeline gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And you just randomly, like every week we do no ads right now, cause we're re we're gonna rebrand "Instaposts". It sounds too much like Instagram, so it's gonna have a new name, a new logo, and we're going to reposition it.

And we will relaunch that. That'll probably be in about a month and a half, that, that we'll do the relaunch of it. So right now we're just allowing it to do what it does. And we have like sales that are coming in passively because she just goes out and she does these gives and she just leads people to the lead magnet. So we're not actually going out, promoting the product directly.

People come upon the product after they've been influenced by her. Does that make sense? I'm just wanting to give you a variation 

Melissa: When you have a really good solid lead magnet that leads into the product. It's just, it's a no brainer for people. So it's, this is all part of the systems with the evergreen too. It just having a really solid free give, leading them into your nurture, which is going to be things that are related to your membership.

And then the membership just makes like natural sense. So, But it's, it's definitely, it's more of like a, a long, long game with, I would say for, for evergreen, but  we're enjoying it because like Paul said, like all of a sudden it's like, Oh, someone got "Instaposts" and we're not doing crazy launches all throughout the year.

So yeah. 

Paul: So, And just keep in mind with evergreen, the best thing that you could be doing. Like if, if we were going to take this up a level, which we'll do after we do the rebrand is retargeting. So it's like, it's not one thing just to get the initial audience in. It's the retargeting that you're doing because you guys noticed that if you, if you truly take the time to understand like Facebook ads,  if I had any of you go to a specific web page, then that means I have 180 days that you create a social signal on Facebook, that I can then control your newsfeed for the next six months.

So instead of me hitting you over the head every single day, saying, buy my thing, buy my thing. I can purposely take you through a process slowly because I can own your newsfeed. I can slowly drip on you. And if you've never bought Brian Cialdini's book "Influence" , that's what 99% of everybody in the internet marketing space leverages off of just get the source and get the book and understand that when you understand the human psychology and the reasons why people make decisions and you leverage that book, make one of your ads per influencing element that, that he teaches in the book. Because then what you do, you don't have social proof.

You have law of reciprocity. You'll, you'll, you'll just go down the list and you'll knock off all the psychological triggers that hold people back. And there'll be more indoctrinated before you ask for the sale, because all of you guys do this, you all buy $2,000. Cause we do it too. We all buy $2,000 courses left and right.

And we're like, we know what's going on. We know this is the funnel. We know it's the launch, but it's cause why they do it because there's social proof. There's all these testimonials and case studies there's "Oh, I see myself in that person. Cause they struggled well."

Yeah. Cause they know the limiting belief you have. And that's why that person's on the case study is the knockdown, your living belief, which 30,000 other people.

But what it is is everything's tightened in a small timeframe. So what you want to do is the same things, but allow that person to experience it on their own. You're just the piece that you're missing is just the crowd mentality, the timeshare element, where 20 people ran to the back of the room to sign up and because of social proof and you see there's 20 people running and you're like: "Oh, they're reasonable people. I must run over there too."

 Like that's, that's the only piece that's missing in the evergreen, but you can still knock down the psychological barriers. You're just, you're going to do it in a little bit more of like a space fashion, but just don't go for the hail Mary all the time, like look for the, try the hail Mary.

And when they don't buy, just make sure you have those steps, you know, the, the sequences behind it. 

Orest: Okay. Thank you. So it's basically a funnel before a payment after the first step. Okay. Thank you. 

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funnels are, you know, We used to call it lead followup, like in the real world, you know what I mean?

You know, back in the day we used to say, you needed to have at least seven to nine touch points with somebody before they're willing to buy. And then when we get online and we totally trashed that and we're like, okay, let's come up with something new. We want everybody to buy the thing. And then the moment that we see them. We had to come back and realize that we're still human beings and still have same human behaviors.

So when you understand that, go back to what you learned before you went online and don't abandon the fundamentals because that's actually what gets people to convert. That's all of us did it. Cause some of you bought that $2,000 thing cause  you didn't buy it the first time you bought the second time you went through the process and then you felt comfortable enough.

The second time around you look like a great conversion and help the ads and everything, it looks great. But you were looking at the thing for the last seven months and you knew you were going to buy it before they came up with it. Cause they already knocked down all the pillars before, before you showed back up again.