Thinking about, Okay, where am I reaching these people? How am I
selling the membership to them? And then how am I getting them to stick
around? Those are three separate things to think about, and at the moment,
the main people you're reaching are on meetup. Those people are there for
free things. Starting to think about where else can you find people who are
like your ideal client, the person who actually values investing in a membership like
this. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I
read all the books, downloaded all the freebies, and did all the courses,
But it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action that my business had its
first million dollar yere. Imperfect Action is about doing things before you're ready,
prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward even when you're not sure
you're doing it right. On this show, you can expect mindset advice,
actionable marketing tips and strategies to build a business that brings you more profit,
more freedom, and even more joy. You want the list to get my
daily businesses. Every day, I'll send you a bite sized prompt designed to
help you grow your business in a more intentional way. Sign up at Steph
Taylor dot co forward slash DBB or at the link in the show notes.
Hey, welcome back to a Perfect Action. This is episode eight hundred and
three. Today is a live coaching call with a student of mine, a
listener of my podcast, who has been challenged with something that I know comes
up for many of you, where she has grown her audience with a lot
of people who are there for the free stuff, but then the minute that
she asked them to pay for something, they dropped off. And I think
that she has so much value that she can offer to her audience. But
the problem there is, of course, how do you get them to see
the value and how do you get them to pay for something that is super
super valuable but they've previously got for free. Now, if you are struggling
to position what you offer to your audience in a way that they see value
in it, if you're struggling to convert the freebee seekers into paying customers and
clients, this episode is going to be a huge one for you. I'm
so excited to coach Hannah through these challenges, So let's jump into the episode.
All right, Hannah, welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm super excited to
have you here to workshop a challenge that's been coming up for you in your
business now. I'd love it if for our listeners you could please tell us
what you do and give us a little bit of an overview of what the
challenge is that's been showing up for you right now. Yeah, absolutely,
thanks for having me. So I my passion is bringing women together. So
I currently do in person and online events for women. I was doing them
in person while i was living in the States, and now I'm doing extended
traveling, so I'm only doing online events. And I've had a bit of
a challenge with how to create sustainability with my energy and my time with the
events I create, but while also providing an income or like a back and
forth so that it's worth my time and my energy and investment that I put
into these events. In person, it's been much easier for me to sell
tickets for so currently I do a monthly online Women's Circle and it's going great.
I have regular attendance, and at one point I was doing it three
a month, and I had a I tried to create a paid membership so
it was super low eleven bucks a month and women could join all of the
circles or one, and it bommed. I went from fifteen hundred members in
my group down to forty in one night, and so it was like so
crushing, and not many people were joining. My attendance dropped as well once
I started charging, and so then I went back to doing free events.
But now I only do one a month because it feels like I can do
one a month and give it freely and I love it and it doesn't feel
too draining while still not making any money from it. So that's basically my
dilemmas. I would love to create more spaces and do more events for women
to come together, but do it in a way that is sustainable for me
to do on a regular basis. Oh, there's a lot, there's so
many different directions we can take with this. And also I want to I
want to mention that it's quite normal that when you stop charging for something that
they've been receiving for free, that the number of people in that group is
going to decrease significantly, because if they've been receiving it for free for so
long, the perceived value of it is this thing should be free, and
then suddenly when you stop charging for it, they're like, but hang on,
it was free five minutes ago, why should I charge for it now?
And that's why they most likely left, whereas the forty people who stayed,
they stayed because they were getting at least eleven dollars a month's value out
of that. Yeah, part of it was that I was using platform meetup,
and Meetup is primarily like a free event space, right. People go
there for free events, and so when I added the membership, I added
it to meetup, and that's why all these people were like, I'm a
part of all these groups and they're free, and now you're charging me eleven
bucks. So I looking back now, I see that was part of the
dilemma with the forty people who signed up. Have you heard from any of
them or have you spoken to any of them about what it was that they
that made them want to sign up? Not individually. I didn't reach out
to them individually. But the feedback that I get on the reviews on there,
as well as just verbally at the events is the people that come to
the events receive value, they love it, want to come back, and
so I usually don't have a problem with maintaining those and a lot of those
fifteen hundred. If I'm just being honest, I didn't have fifteen hundred people
at my event every time, right, A lot of them were just like
bystanders that were watching. So yeah, that's did I even answer the question?
Yes? So when they say they got value out of it, what
kind of value are they getting? Like? What is that? Rather like
we know what the event is, But when they walk away from that event,
what do they have now that they didn't have before? Connection? They
have a space where they could share their story and be open and vulnerable and
not feel judged or changed. The majority of the words that I feel that
I hear is like safety, connection, community, like feeling not alone.
And so that's most people leave feeling good. I do a check and at
the beginning of each event and end the of each event, and it's always
all the warm, fuzzy feelings at the end. I love that. So
what they're really buying from you isn't They're not buying the online women's circle.
They're buying connection and community. Those are the two big selling points, and
that ties itself really beautifully into some kind of membership. But the membership itself
needs to be positioned around this is, however, many dollars per month for
the connection and the community that you've been missing, and I think it needs
to include other components. It can't just be the Women's Circle and that's it,
because clearly if that's something that they've been receiving for free, and we'll
talk about we'll talk about where you're finding these people as well in a minute,
because I think that the people you've been attracting in are maybe the people
who are not your ideal clients and they're not valuing what you are delivering.
But I think there's definitely room there to create some other kind of membership where
yes, the Women's Circle is part of it, but it's not the only
thing. And then whether you continue to deliver the free one once a month
as a way to bring people in or maybe it's a it's like a trial
for the membership, so when you give it, when you're delivering it,
it's this isn't a free event. You're getting to experience a paid event for
once, a one off, paid event for free. Essentially. Uh Okay,
Yeah, I was kind of thinking that I still wanted to go towards
that membership path and feel like that makes the most sense for what I'm creating.
I want women that join to get to know the other women that are
there, and it not just be they go to one circle, right,
And I feel like that's what a membership creates, is the reliability and the
consistency and getting to know everyone that joins. But I felt the same way
as you're saying that it didn't feel enough to just do the circles. And
I've gone back and forth with what else to add to it, but I
feel like kind of stuck with what else I can do to like beef it
up. So do you still have those forty members? So now I am
not I'm just doing free on meetup. And so I have like about seven
hundred people joined in my different meetup groups, but none of them are paying.
It's all free. Could you? But do you still have the email
addresses for those forty who were paying? I don't have any email addresses.
Now, Oh is this a is this a thing that happens with meetup?
You don't get the email addresses? Yes? Oh no, we need to
change that. I know it's oh yeah, So whenever, now, so
going forward, whenever you run any of the free events, there needs to
be some way of collecting their email addresses, and it might be that you
create some kind of free bee and at the start of the event you say,
you know, this is where you can go to download the workbook for
tonight's session or the soundtrack for tonight's session, or something like that, so
that you are getting their email addresses. Because if you're relying on an external
platform like meet up, it can block you, it can delete your account,
they can disappear. You don't have the ability to communicate with those people.
And having that ability to communicate with those people who are buying from you
is so important, especially when it comes to this situation where it's like,
well, we'd love to be able to communicate with those forty people and find
out what made them join, what would make them stick around, what else
do they want from you, so we can put that into the membership.
So first step is let's try and get as many of those people off of
meetup and into your own email list. When you're building the membership, I
would suggest building it on a platform that's not meet Up. On one way,
you can actually have their email addresses and you can communicate with them,
and you're not relying on on an external party for that. Yeah, but
I would also recommend starting to talk to the women who are coming to those
free circles and asking them, you know what you tell me that you want
community and connection, what does that look like for you, and letting them
tell you. Maybe it's a Facebook group, maybe it's once a month.
They just want to I don't know. They just want to be paired up
randomly in groups in pairs of two and have conversations. Maybe it's like they
want a virtual almost like a speed dating, but like hanging out with each
other and they get to know people, finding out what that connection actually means
to them, because it's one of those really vague words where we say it
but a lot of the time we don't know what it means. Yeah,
And do you recommend a way to do that? Is like if I create
a Google forms or something for someone for me to send out too, because
I have a way to email a group, but I don't have their email
addresses. Yeah, so would that be like a good way to send that
out? Absolutely? And in that Google form, make sure you're collecting their
email address and also I would give an incentive for them to fill it out.
So what I've found works really well with my audience is I'll say,
if you fill it out, I'll donate five dollars to whichever charity was supporting
at the time on your behalf, and that usually gets quite a few replies.
If they're more motivated by like a free coffee, you can say,
well, I'll give you a five dollars Starbucks voucher if you fill that out,
But they have to give you their email address to be able to get
that voucher. So I would definitely be doing that. It's so challenging because
you've been doing this for free for so long that in their minds this is
positioned as something that is only free. So now it's finding out what will
then pay eleven dollars a month, which is less. It's two coffee,
it's nothing, It's like nothing. So outside of mate up, what else
have you been doing to reach these ideal clients? So online, I've been
struggling. Primarily it's just meet up or word of mouth, like so I'll
just talk to my friends or just be like, hey, you should join
the circle tonight or chat with people on Instagram. In person was different because
in person, I was, you know, I had community in the area
and they would invite their friends. I was paying for ads on event Bright
and all of those things, and so I never had issue people paying fifty
dollars for a ticket to come to an in person event. But when I
was doing in person, I also was like bringing in outside people. So
I hired a yoga teacher, or I hired an energy worker. I hired
just like different people outside of my expertise that would do the events with me.
But I haven't done any of that online, and so I just feel
like it's wide open in an overwhelming way for where I can go. But
then you know, it's like I just, yeah, I'm not really don't
really have a huge base. I don't have an email list. I have
like two hundred people on my email list, but I don't ever send emails
out. So that's my confession. Yeah, wow, Okay, we need
to work on that. So you mentioned you brought in people with different expertise
to your live events. Could you do that online as well? If you
want to create a membership, could you have a guest come in each month
delivering some kind of special event. I could. I mean, I still
have those connections and I have a lot of people in my life that do
have skills and talents that I don't. But yeah, I just haven't gone
down that path yet, and I think that would be a great way to
add more value to what I'm already creating for free. I also, I
don't know if it's necessary that you need to add loads more value. I
think it's also part of it is positioning it so that they see the value
that's inherently there, and that might be really challenging with the people who have
been who you've attracted through meetup. Since you mentioned, yeah, that meetup
is mainly for free events, I suspect that I suspect that you might need
to start looking elsewhere for people who come into the membership once you start charging
for it again, which I think I think, I mean, forty people
out of fifteen hundreds not terrible. When it's fifteen hundred people who were there
for a free thing and then you started charging for it and forty of them
stuck around, that's actually not terrible. That's four that's about perspective, bringing
percent three percent I don't know my math right to maybe two and a half
percent. That's not bad. And I'm assuming also that you probably didn't send
them a huge amount of emails talking about the membership selling it to them.
But the issue that I struggled with is the forty people stayed and then the
circle attendance was like five or under. That's pretty typical though, and I
think that's me not fostering the community as well, like with emails and things
like that. It would be because now we're averaging like fifteen to twenty five
per circle. But then when I was doing the paid, which I wanted
more people to stay and it built that those relationships, and instead I felt
like when I did the paid it just went and then like four people would
show up. That's probably also a sign of the fact that it was just
it was still really early, you know, like over time at the start
it might be really small, but then over time that's going to grow,
and it's just a matter of persistence and setting a target of each month I
want to get ten new people signed up, well twenty new people signed up,
and thinking about, Okay, where am I reaching these people, how
am I selling the membership to them, and then how am I getting them
to stick around? Those are three separate things to think about, and at
the moment, the main people you're reaching are on meetup. Those people are
there for free things. Starting to think about where else can you find people
who are like your ideal client, the person who actually values investing in a
membership like this. So for example, maybe you can get in front of
those people on podcasts that they're listening to. Maybe you can collaborate with somebody
who's in a who has a similar audience but isn't a competitor. So maybe
you could go and deliver an online women's circle to somebody else's membership, and
the call to action could be download my free ebook or come and attend one
of my free come to attend the seven day free trial for my membership,
and in that seven day free trial they get to attend one of your women's
circles. So the understanding from the start is that the women's circles are not
free, but if they can come to one free as part of the trial
for the membership, yeah, that's a great idea. So it sounds like
the first thing I need to do is to create some sort of freeb that
I can give out to receive emails, but also as a way to get
people to join in on the circles themselves or the membership, yes, and
that freebee. I would actually start with step one, which before that would
be to survey the people who you've got, because then that'll help you to
understand what kind of freeb to create for them, how to communicate it,
and then you can collect the email addresses through the survey and through when you
create that freebee. So then starting to grow that list. You can launch
that membership now if you want to, but I would suggest launching it off
of meetups so that you do have the flexibility to move it so you don't
always have to be tied to that platform and not have the email addresses and
everything, and bringing in people with different expertise to teach to those groups.
But then also thinking where outside of meetup can you bring those people in.
Is it podcasts, is it teaching to other people's memberships, is it speaking
at events? And then thinking about from there giving them that call to action
to come and download your freebie or to come and try out a women's circle
that's part of your membership that is usually paid, but they can do it
as a free trial this time, then giving them the call to action to
join the membership and then making sure that the people who are in the membership
are you're regularly talking to them, You're finding out what do they need to
stick around, what would make the super valuable for them, and really working
on retaining them in there. Yeah, and then for it, like creating
that space for the membership outside meetup makes sense to me as well, because
I actually there are so many things wrong with that platform that I don't really
want to be on it anymore. But do you recommend like doing it on
my own website, because I feel like some people don't really want to go
to a website or do that whole thing for a membership, or use something
like a Facebook group or a Discord group or something like that. If you
want to go for the really like the easiest way to do it would be
a Facebook group and then the events happen on Zoom. The only thing with
the Facebook group is then you manually when you know when people's payments fail or
if they cancel, you manually then have to go and remove them from the
group. Yeah, that's the only thing. Discord. I think you can
set up automations where they get removed, but Facebook you can't. However,
with Discord, they then have to go and download another, whereas Facebook,
they're probably already using Facebook. M M. Yeah, I know. The
issue is I'm not using Facebook, but I am using Discord, and so
like, I don't want to download Facebook. I would rather just stick to
dismay. You can ask in the survey, you can give them a few
options and find out what they would prefer. That's a great idea, Okay,
So it could be Facebook, Discord, I don't know, Telegram or
WhatsApp because you can have communities in there now as well. And then maybe
option for is like a completely separate platform on a website. Okay, that's
a great idea. Yeah, figure out what people are willing to join.
Yeah, guessing. The one advantage I will say to having it in Facebook
is that because people are already logging in and checking it, you know,
once a day or once every two days, then they're more likely to see
the stuff that's in the community, and they're more likely to then engage.
Whereas if it's on a platform like Discord and they're not already using Discord,
then they have to open it up and they have to actually mentally remember,
oh, I have this community in this other app, and I have to
open the app to go and check it. That's why I saw the issue
with a website as well, is you're not getting notifications from a website.
You're not and most people are on their phone. You don't want to pull
up a browser and have to do something like that. Because I would love
to do the events as well as have like a chat area where people can
connect and message, and like I have an idea to do like friend dates
like you said, where I pair someone with someone else and like that's their
friend for the month, and to have set up at least one other zoom
call or something where they connect. So that's that's something an element I would
like to add, and I think I could do that on any of the
platforms. I love that. That's great. Yeah, and put that into
the survey as well, ask them what their thoughts are on that, because
the way that they the words that they use, the language that they give
you in that survey is going to really help you to write the copy when
you're selling it. So I mean, I presume in the past, when
you charged eleven dollars a month for it, there wasn't a sales page.
It was probably just the made up page is that right. Yeah, So
when you do it again, you can put a sales page on your website.
You'll have their email addresses and your email list, so you can send
them you can choose, you know, for the first week of every month
they can join and then it's closed for the rest of the month until the
first week of the month, and in that first week you can send a
few emails, you know, in that and in those emails, we're really
showing them what's in there, Like what's the value for them? Why is
this something that they need to invest in right now? What does this mean
for the rest of their life, not just for like the ripple effects into
the other areas of their life, not just the fact that they're going to
make friends and it's going to be that connection, but what does that actually
mean for them? Like, it doesn't mean they're going to be happier.
All of that kind of stuff can go into your sales page and those emails
that you then send to your list. But I think if you're getting eleven
people of top, you're getting forty people at eleven dollars a month without a
sales page and without having sent emails out, that's a pretty that's pretty awesome.
So you're onto something there. It feels like it felt like such a
loss, but it's great to hear that there it was a when in some
ways. And yeah, and I am thankful that, like the women that
join are so dedicated and I see the same faces and then I see new
faces, and so I know that what I'm creating is something great and I
feel really fed by it, and so I want to keep doing it in
a way that like I'm not just draining myself because I'm just giving, give
and giving and not getting something back to for my time, you know.
And absolutely, and I'm sure we probably have some listeners who are now like
where can I find this? Because I need this? Where can I find
your website? My website is Hannahsoulmrie dot com and Soul is sol So we'll
link in the show notes for that as well. Okay, do you have
any final questions or anything like, is there anything that's still unclear or you
do you feel like you know what you need to go and do now to
implement this. I'm really glad I can listen back on this. Just a
side note, because I feel like so many things you threw at me that
we're amazing and I'm glad I'll get to listen back. But it sounds like
you're mostly recommending that I faster my email list and not so much have to
focus on Instagram and all of the social media side, which is great news
to me. Yes, oh, absolutely focus on email list and focusing on
getting in front of other people's communities where they might already be paying for other
things, other offers, and not necessarily somebody who's just searching for freebies that
people who value investing in themselves. I think that's a huge opportunity for you
as well, to find those people who do actually value investing. Yes,
yeah, well, thank you so much, Chef. I appreciate all your
help. You are so welcome, and thank you so much for being so
open and coachable and for sharing so much with our listeners today. This is
a great episode. Definitely do go back and listen to it again, because
I know when you're being coached in it, you're like, oh, there's
so many ideas. So I really hope that this does help and I'm excited
for you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All Right,
that is it for today episode. If you haven't already hit subscribe. Make
sure you hit the plus button in Apple Podcasts or the follow button in Spotify,
and you'll get each new episode straight to your podcast app every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Catch you next time.