Course-sized sales...without the course?

If you’ve ever wondered the difference between breaking even or making a massive profit with your low-ticket offer – this episode is for you!


In this episode, we’re diving into:

  • two types of low-ticket offers (I typically only share this with our LLT Students!)
  • how to choose between the two
  • and one simple trick for constructing a low-ticket offer that is income replacing, rather than just a little list builder

Work With Justine:

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Transcript:

 Hello. Hello, you guys. So I'm really excited to bring this episode to you today because I have, for a really long time, I've talked about low ticket offers and I've said things like make CoreSite sales without the course. And I think when people hear that they feel really skeptical and confused, and they're not really sure what to think because often we're told that it low ticket offers are not designed to be profitable. Often they're called self-liquidating offers because the purpose of them is to simply liquidate your ad spend essentially. So they allow you to run an ad, grow your email list of customers, and then typically you break even, or maybe you make a small amount. And so when you're creating something with that mentality, then it makes sense that you would break even, and that they would not be super profitable. It also makes sense that if you already have your entire product suite built out, you have a course.

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Justine (01:29): Do you have a group program? You have a mastermind, you have, you know, really high ticket one-on-one coaching. Then it does make sense that you would create a low ticket offer as a way to simply run ads for free and build your list of customers and then send people through your funnel and send them up your value ladder. So when people talk about low ticket offers not being profitable, or they talk about them and say, well, you shouldn't really create them for the purpose of profit. I think that that makes sense when you're talking to somebody who already has an established business model already has an established value ladder. But what I want to share with you guys today is that it's absolutely possible to make core sized sales without the course. And the reason that I'm making this episode right now is because about three months ago, I transitioned my group coaching program into more of a course model. Justine (02:18): It's definitely still a hybrid between the, you know, weekly or biweekly group coaching calls along with the, the course curriculum. So I'd say it's a bit of a hybrid, but I essentially transitioned my group program into L I live launched it very like soft live launch. And then I turn it evergreen. And I now have ads up and running to this evergreen funnel. And I have, you know, not a ton, but I have a pretty significant amount of data to look at when it comes to the return on ad spend that I'm getting from my evergreen funnel versus what I was getting when I was running ads to my low ticket offer. And so I'm excited to share with you guys a little bit about what those numbers actually look like, and also just tell you a bit about why I chose to create a low ticket offer in the first place, because if you're listening to this and you're a service provider or your max that was one-on-one clients or you're just simply interested in low ticket offers, and you're wondering like, why do people even create them? Justine (3:16): I want to say that you absolutely can create them with the purpose of just breaking even so that you can run ads and grow an email list of customers. You can absolutely do that, but the way that you're going to design that kind of traditional self-liquidating offer is going to be different than if you intend to create core size sales without the course. And so I'm going to share with you two different ways that you can create your low ticket offer. These are the two ways that we teach inside of our program, launched low ticket. I'm happy to share them with you guys today, because I want to give you a bit of a mental picture as to how to go about creating your low ticket offer since they are quite the hot topic right now, lots of people are talking about and there are so many different ways that you can do it depending on what your goal is for it, right? Justine (4:02): And what your current business model is and what, what is the most important thing to you right now in your business? So I want to just tell you a really quick story about how I even ended up creating a low ticket offer. So basically in 2020, and you might resonate with this, if you are in a, in a service-based job right now, or service-based role in your business providing services one-on-one or, you know, one-on-one coaching. So in 2020, I was, I wanted to switch right from trading time for money to more scalable offers. And of course, everyone tells you create a course, right? Create a course launch it. That's the first thing you should do. So of course, I was listening to that. I created the outline and I had a lot of the resources already created from the fact that I was building funnels for my clients. Justine (04:42): And so I was putting everything together and it seems like an amazing course. I was like, this'll truly impactful, but it seemed really broad. I also, it felt weird. There was something about it. I didn't like I wasn't excited about. And then most of it was because mostly I wasn't excited because I was thinking, okay, so once that the, you know, the designing and all of this, the book, what am I putting in here once that's done, I have to learn how to live launch. I have to do up content. I have to do like list building content. I have to create a freebie. I have to nurture people. I have to learn webinars or a challenge. And then I have to like do all of this on certain days that I commit to publicly. And if you're listening to this and you're a mom, you're going to understand the difficulty in saying, oh, on May 6th, at 3:00 PM, I'm going to be in a good mood. Justine (05:29): And I'm going to do the first day of my live challenge. Like, it's tough to know that far ahead, that that particular time is going to work perfectly for that. And you put all this time and effort into a launch and then to have things come up that then make it just this not fun experience. And at the time I was not in a position to say in three weeks on this day, at this time I am going to do a Facebook live or I'm going to do this or do that. And so the idea of actually going through a live launch and doing all those things just did not fit with the season that I was in, in my life. And so I was talking to one of my friends and we were voice noting, back and forth. And actually her name's Emily Walker, she was on the podcast. Justine (06:11): She was the very first guest on this podcast. And she is a learning designer. She's so much more than that, but in general, she is a learning designer and she helps people like take their genius and turn it into digital offers and courses and all of those amazing things. And so I said to her, you know, what I was frustrated about and kind of what I didn't like about the idea of the course in that actually there was this one funnel, the digital product funnel that I wanted to focus on. And I just wanted to take everything out from that and sell that on its own. But it would be too small for a course. And she was like, oh, well, why don't you just create a toolkit? And I was like, what? And it was, it's like the clouds parted. And I saw like, wow, there's this other model? Justine (06:52): And I had created traditional self-liquidating offer funnels for my clients. And I had seen them work wonders in their businesses. So I'd seen what these little funnels could do in other people's businesses. So I knew the power of them, but I'd always been exposed to them from the perspective of like, okay, you know, if we profit, that's great. But the point of this funnel is just to run ads for free. And so I never really looked at them as being something that could stand on their own and essentially be a business model in and of themselves. Like, could I actually just sell a really powerful toolkit and not do anything else? And that was when it hit me that this was my new like challenge. My new personal challenge was how can I create something that is so irresistible? It will sell to even totally cold traffic, totally cold audiences. Justine (07:42): People who even click on my Instagram, but don't actually know anything about me, people who I run ads to. And at the time I had never run ads, but I knew that was something I wanted to do because I wanted to accelerate the growth of my business and did not want to post 24, 7 or beyond stories all the time. It just wasn't what I wanted for my business. And so I was thinking to myself, okay, how can I actually create this toolkit in a way that's going to make core size sales without the course. And so this brought me to a point where I was looking at a traditional self-liquidating offer funnel. And then I was also thinking about, well, what would this mean though, if it stood on its own. And so I came to two terms that I was looking at it on a piece of paper. Justine (08:28): And one of them said, is this a guiding offer or is this a standalone offer? And so I was looking at what I wanted to include in my tool kit. And I was looking at my product suite, which at the time was essentially just my one-on-one services. And I thought to myself, well, am I using this to guide people to my one-on-one services or not? And the answer was that, no, I did not want to do my one-on-one services anymore. I, I wanted to create more high touch programs and things like that in the future. But at the moment, no, I didn't want my toolkit. I didn't want my low ticket offer to be guiding anyone anywhere that was sort of the stop at that time. And so I sat there and thought, well, no, this is actually a standalone offer. And so the traditional way that you create a self-liquidating offer sort of went out the window for the most part, because I wasn't interested in breaking even. Justine (09:21): I was interested in making core sized sales without the course. And so the best way that I typically describe to my students, and I'm going to share with you guys right now, when you're thinking about creating a low ticket offer as a standalone offer. So you very much intend to likely transition away from your one-on-one services or your coaching, or at least step back a ton from those and have your low ticket offer, be something that is income, replacing, be something that makes you core size sales without the course. Then what I want you to think is okay, if I was going to create a self paced course, something that didn't necessarily have coaching calls, because it's just going to be a fully self-paced course, it's going to have a fairly narrow result, right? It's going to have a sort of medium mid-level transformation. If you were going to create that self-paced course, what would be in it, would there be phases? Justine (10:18): What would be the framework that you would use to get people results? What would that look like? And first you can go ahead and actually map that out to yourself as if you were going to create it. Of course, once you have that mapped out, then you would look at it and think, okay, you don't look at it and think that it's a piece of pie, let's say it's lemon merengue pie. So you're looking at this course outline as a piece of lemon merengue pie. And for many, many years, people just ate pie, right? As it was, everyone was like, here's a piece of lemon, merengue pie, here's your pie. And people ate the pie. It was delicious. Everyone was fine. And then suddenly someone decided to create a deconstructed pie. And they said, well, we're going to serve this pie with the crest over here. Justine (10:58): And the Marangu over here. And then the lemon custard over here, we're going to serve it like that. And this is actually going to be just as delicious, but it's a different experience and people loved it, right? There's a lot of people who loved it. And then there were some people who decided to still get the full piece of lemon merengue pie, but there was this whole new group of people who either didn't know that they love deconstructed pie because they had never had it before, or they had had, you know, they would eat their crops, like leave everything else. Right? So there's somebody who already would pick through things. And so the beauty of creating something, a toolkit or a low ticket offer that is a standalone offer is that you can think about it in terms of giving them just as much of a transformation, just as big of a result as a self-paced course, but you're allowing them to choose their own adventure. Justine (11:49): And so you're saying to them, Hey, I've got this offer you. And then if they go ahead and take you up on that offer, you can present them with another low ticket offer and then another low ticket offer. And so you've essentially deconstructed yourself, paced course, put it into something that gives people a ton of choice. People love choice. They can choose their own adventure, but because you don't have to go through all, all of the expenses of figuring out how to live launch, create a webinar, create a webinar funnel, and then potentially run ads to that webinar, which is very expensive compared to running ads directly to a sales page for $37 offer. You're actually going to end up being pretty much just as profitable and generating pretty much just as much revenue as your self-paced course. And so I will tell you guys from my personal experience that right now I am selling a course. Justine (12:52): It's a L it's not a self-paced course in that I do provide two calls per month. However, based on the data I have right now, which is only about three months of data, so I will update you guys again. But as of right now, and the data that I've had from releasing this course to my warm audience, to my existing email list, which I didn't have when I had my low ticket offer, I did not have an email list, releasing it to them, putting it on evergreen, and then starting to run the ads there, which holy heck you guys, like I have a background in building funnels. And that was no joke. That was serious business, creating that funnel. And took a lot longer than I expected it to. So that's up and running and I'm looking at the data. I'm looking at my return on ad spend, compared to my return on ad spend to my low ticket offer. Justine (13:46): And you guys they're pretty much the same. They're pretty much the same. And with my low ticket offer, I didn't provide any support. It was way less time to create and launch. And it was such an easy sell. It's so easy to come on to stories or make a post talking about this laser-focused result. You can get someone for $37 or $47, or even $97, right? If you have something that's low ticket that provides this amazing result, you're going to get the reaction from people initially of like, oh, that can't be true. Right? And then they check out your sales page. They see that you have all these testimonials and then they're like, wow, maybe she's serious. Maybe she can get me that result for this, this $37 they purchase. They get the result and they send you all these love notes. And then that builds a ton of momentum. Justine (14:39): And then even when someone comes to your Instagram profile at midnight, right, it's $37, it's a bit of an impulse buy. They see all these great testimonials and then it has this effect where it just snowballs. And so even if you are running ads to your low ticket offer, you're still making so many organic sales effortlessly while you sleep right. While you're with your kids, all the hands-off, you know, terminology that we can use. And it's essentially bringing you in the same, if not, and I'm going to say this, if not more, because at this point, my low ticket offer has been more profitable. Then my course, as of right now, it's only been three months. I get, I will update you guys a little bit later and let you know how it's going. But overall from this experience, and the reason I even wanted to create this episode is because I knew in my gut from the beginning, when I wanted to make that shift from services to digital products that I did not just in my heart, I did not feel like going through a traditional live launch and course, and the calls and the six weeks of support and all those things that go along with it. Justine (15:43): I intuitively felt overwhelmed by it. And I wanted another way. I wanted another way to benefit from those core sized sales, without having to learn how to live launch, build my email list, be on stories 24 7, learn webinars like create the webinar funnel and then also have to provide either like a free Facebook group to kind of grow the excitement before the launch, and then have a paid Facebook group for my course. Like it was just way too much. Instead I wanted to build a low ticket offer funnel and the products on my own time. And then launching, it was simply hitting publish, right? Hitting publish. Now it's live. And then sharing it with a couple of simple posts on Instagram, low cost ads. And then it was hands-off. And of course there's maintenance and things that you do each week to make sure that it's, you know, like it's still running and you tweak it, you optimize it. Justine (16:32): And there's obviously ongoing work that goes on, but I'll tell you from firsthand experience. And because it's so fresh in my mind that the experience of selling my low ticket offer the sale itself is much easier. And the return on ad spend is pretty much the same, if not at this point a little bit better. And on top of all of that, there's no time from you. Other than if you're a solopreneur, you might be answering some emails, but the revenue that you generate from your low ticket offer, well, after the cost of ads, what you actually get to take home, you can use to hire a VA, which is what I did. So it was completely hands off, had a VA managing the inbox. I would pop into the ads manager every couple of days and check on things. But overall there wasn't much to do. Justine (17:18): And the biggest thing I had to work on every day was my mindset. My mindset around money doesn't have to be hard. That was something that took me all last summer to accept that I could be making this kind of money with my low ticket, offer someone else's managing the inbox, someone else's managing, all the things that go along with the day to day. And all I'm doing is opening up my phone. I see these love notes from people who have loved the product. I'm making course sales without the course, I'm not working with clients anymore. And so the biggest work to do when you have a low ticket offer that is up and running, working is working on your mindset. And this isn't just me. This came up with one of our students in launch, low ticket, who replaced her copywriting income with her low ticket offer. Justine (17:57): And she said, this is a lot to get used to. It's like, I know people think the funnel is hard. The ad is hard. Like all those things are hard. Yeah. It takes work to get it up and running for sure. But once it's up, the hardest thing is to deal with your mindset and to make improvements on your mindset. I promise you guys. So I wanted to make this episode for you guys. So you could hear a bit about my journey because I like you heard that I have to create a course, a self-paced course. That's the first thing you need to do. You, you can't create low ticket until you have high ticket. I don't think I mentioned that on this episode, but that was another thing I heard was that until you have high ticket, there's no point in creating low ticket. Justine (18:33): If I would have listened to that advice, I could be working in service work. I would not have had my first multiple six figure, 12 months span in my business. I wouldn't have a team. I wouldn't have a podcast. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be anywhere as close to where I am right now. Thank goodness. I didn't really seek out people like more advice, because if I would have heard from even a couple more people, don't launch low ticket until you have high ticket, I don't even know where I'd be right now. And so if you feel called to launch something that is a bit more of a strategic bundle or a toolkit, or you know, I, I don't love mini course. You guys, I don't love that because it just, it gives the effect of like, oh, it was just this little thing that, you know, it might be a familiar term for you. Justine (19:16): So let's say mini course, if you feel more drawn towards that stuff, then let me just tell you that you can launch those and you can make course ICLs without the course. And on top of that, you are going to grow your audience much more quickly. You're going to be serving hundreds of customers every single month, instead of tens as you would with a course. And so you're after obviously the income, but if you're after more than that, if you're kind of in that stage where you don't really have a massive audience or a massive email list, or you're not really on the map for anything specific, if you kind of want to put yourself on the map and you know, actually have an email list to email every week and have an email list to send that your podcast too, that you've been wanting to create this podcast. Justine (19:54): You're like, well, who am I going to email it to every week? Right? If you have all those thoughts right now, and you've been drawn to creating something smaller, I just want you to know that it's completely possible to make those core sized sales, put yourself on the map, grow your audience, grow your email list, filled with customers. And in an, in a future episode, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about what it's like to actually sell to those happy customers on the backend, because that's another massive benefit of this kind of offer. But right now, I just want to leave you with the fact that your business is yours business. And there is a huge place in our businesses for strategies that are tried and true and have worked in other people's businesses. But there's also a time and a place for listening to your intuition. Justine (20:33): And if you're feeling called to create something that isn't the typical recommendation that people are giving you, I want you to stop and think about, okay, well, what is some evidence that it has worked for somebody else and start to look for that supporting evidence rather than running to that marketing guru. Who's saying, this is the only way to do it, or this is what your product suite should look like. Or this is the right way to do it. Because to be honest, anyone who tells me there's a right way to do anything, I run the other way, because it's never that you need to follow this specific cookie cutter thing. There are things that were, there are things that seem to not work as much as other things, but at the end of the day, if you're creating something from a place of service and expertise, you can't lose. So you guys, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you have any questions or any big takeaways, I'd love to hear from you send me a DM on Instagram and I'll see you guys in the next episode. Justine (21:25): Thanks so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Wella podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, I would love to hear from you on social media, feel free to take a snapshot of today's episode, share it in your stories and be sure to tag me so that we can connect. You can also send me a DM. My inbox is always open. If you had some major takeaways today, I would love for you to take a second, to leave a review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show and that way we can all work together to create our well life. I'll see you guys in the next episode.

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Justine Haveland About Portrait Image (1)

Hey, I'm Justine!

I started my online business journey in 2017 as an Infusionsoft Certified Partner, helping small businesses automate their sales and marketing.

 

After helping 100+ small businesses, I noticed that almost all of them had the same problem. They bought courses that promised to help them build an automated sales funnel, but all they got was strategy and confusing templates, and no implementation help at all.

 

So, I decided to package up what I was doing for my clients, in a step-by-step system, called Funnel That Sells, and sell it at a crazy, no-brainer price of just $27. FTS went on to help over 2000+ small biz owners DIY their very own automated funnel, in less than 9 months.

 

(OH and add 2000+ customers - not freebie seekers - to our email list)

 

Funnel That Sells turned my hourly service biz into a multiple six-figure, scalable business in less than a year. Now I help other service providers turn what they know into scalable offers - through my programs and coaching.