Course Lab – Episode 98
From Engagement to Enrollment (Monica Badiu)
Abe Crystal: Don’t think that marketing or emailing people consistently is this extra thing you have to do. It’s more like a core responsibility of your work. You have a responsibility to help people take action, right? If you’re just asking people to sign up for some free thing that you have and then not take any action to sign up for your course or to get coaching from you, that’s not going to help them. They’re not going to progress towards their goals.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m not in the studio with my co-host Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku because he’s on sabbatical. But he’s going to record the debrief with me when he gets back.
Today, we welcome Monica Badiu to the show. Monica is an email copywriter and copy coach. She specializes in sales copywriting for online course creators like all of you who want to send emails that speak to their ideal customer and generate conversions without using fear mongering or pressure. Welcome to the show, Monica.
Monica Badiu: It’s great to be here.
Ari: Awesome. So the question that I ask always to kick things off is give us a 30,000-foot view of yourself and how you came to the world of course building and supporting course builders.
Monica: Ooh. I’ve been in marketing for more than 13 years, and during this time, I’ve done everything possible. Like everything you can imagine, I’ve done it in one way or another. So maybe three years ago I decided to niche down on something. And out of everything, email felt the most natural, easiest channel to have a conversation, build a relationship with the audience and actually provide value because it’s like everybody can sell something, but each brand has a responsibility about how they sell something.
And if social media doesn’t do much like building a one-on-one connection with your audience, email marketing does. And that’s awesome if you’re really passionate about delivering value and having an impact in your audience’s life, then email comes as like, this is it. This is the best channel. You can do that without distractions. And if you do it in like an ethical way that really helps your audience, it’s also super, super profitable.
Ari: Awesome. So what I’d really like to kind of dig into with you is your recommendations for course creators and course builders as far as email marketing because I feel like the marketing part is the piece that most course creators are less excited about. Most people, I think are more excited about, yes, I get to create and teach and work with people, what do you mean I need to sell. So I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts as far as when someone has a course, has a program, where do you start with them as far as kind of supporting them in their marketing journey?
Monica: Great question. So for two years I have coached course creators’ data driven marketing group coaching program. And this was the biggest question ever. And the way I introduce it is like, this is a mindset choice. So you can’t expect people to just come towards you and just say, oh my God, this is perfect, I’m going to buy this. Or you can take proaction and decide that if you have a course that’s really, really valuable, that really has a very tangible outcome that’s proven to work. You don’t wait for people to find you because you have a mission to help the people who need your course. So it’s not even about selling at this point. It’s about, I have a mission and I have to find the people who need what I do, right? Because if you just wait for people, they’re not going to come.
And then the other aspect of this is you have a responsibility to help them take action, right? Because on a logical perspective, it’s like, okay, this sounds good, I’m going to do it. This is the course that’s going to help me learn Spanish. But they don’t do that. They sign up on your email list, they get your freebie. That’s amazing. But then nothing happens. And you have two choices. Just go radio silent and do nothing. Just hope that somehow, they will remember you. Or use email marketing to coach them, not towards buying your course, but towards making the steps required for them to achieve their goal.
So this is not about you making money off your audience because I know that doesn’t feel that good for many course creators. It’s not about pushing people into buying your course because this is like the ultimate solution to their problems. It’s really just about, you have a goal, I have a solution. It’s one of the many. If you want to achieve your goal, here’s how I can help you achieve that goal.
Ari: I really, really like that approach because it emphasizes value and relationship building as opposed to, I’m just here to market like, no, you’re here to build relationships with real people.
Monica: Exactly. And that is so empowering because it completely shifts the power balance because it feels like, okay, I have an email list, I have a product. These people are like victims, and I have to push my message and annoy them until they buy. And that’s how marketing has been for so many years, but not anymore. I mean, you have a choice.
Ari: I feel like there are a lot of course creators out there who, they start their journey, they build their course. They’re so excited and they have no one to market to. So even if they wanted to start sending emails out to people, they wouldn’t have anyone that they feel they can send out emails to. So what are your recommendations for people kind of at a starting point to start building their lists.
Monica: They’re going to hate what they have to say. Visibility. I mean, if you’re not visible, people are not going to know you exist. And if you’re visible, but you don’t have a clear call to action, they’re not going to know you have an email list. And I have worked with people who had a million subscribers on YouTube, but they didn’t really have a strategy to drive that traffic into their email marketing channel. So my advice is, if you already have visibility on social media, choose one channel and start promoting your lead magnet at least once a week.
If you don’t have visibility on any social media channel, start creating it. Start analyzing other ways you can reach in front of your audience, like going to podcasts or being part of a summit. Even running ads could be one way to build your email list. Although I suggest that you only do that when you know that you have a very high converting funnel. So you know that your course is selling, you know that your funnel is optimized for mobile, for increasing your average order value. It’s a more complicated decision, but start with visibility and start with call to actions.
If you don’t tell people you exist, and if you don’t tell people, hey, get this, or sign up for this webinar and you’ll learn about this, they’re not just going to decide, okay, I’m going to join his email list. That doesn’t really work anymore.
Ari: Right. And so it sounds like part of it is also, and I guess this is part of the research that people need to do, is it depends where their ideal clients actually hang out. You mentioned different social media platforms, and it’s really a question of who are your ideal clients. And then based on that, that’s where you should go.
Monica: Yes, personally, I’m doing this. I’m doing podcast marketing as a way to build my visibility and to build my email list as well, because you guys post, then they go to my website and they find a pop up with an invitation to download a freebie. So this is one of the way I do it. And something that works for me. Other people can just create more video content for their YouTube channel, TikTok even, that works as well. So it’s all a matter of where your audience is, who they listen to, in case of podcast marketing, and what’s the type of content you’re most familiar with or most comfortable with when it comes to creating that visibility.
Ari: Something that you mentioned that is of course a given is that they need something for them to opt into. So a lead magnet of some sort. But then once people are part of an email list, how often do you recommend promoting the course itself versus sharing content? How often do you recommend that people email? There’s a lot of uncertainty around that often.
Monica: There isn’t a one size answer. In my experience, I’ve worked with course creators for whom I wrote two email promotions per month. In one situation, I had to promote the same product 13 times over the course of about two years. So it all depends on how big your email list, how often you communicate with that email list, how good your course is. And then if you have multiple courses, let’s say you have six courses, you can promote one course per month and then repeat after the first six months.
But again, it does depend on a lot of aspects because if you don’t have a good brand reputation and people don’t trust you and you don’t have enough social proof for your audience to say, oh my God, look, an opportunity to get this course and see what it’s all about, you’re going to have to build other elements of your relationship before you even consider selling. So you’re going to have to demonstrate that you are someone who’s authentic, that you do have the qualifications to teach them something.
I’ve seen brands who struggled with this and the solution they used was, let’s just get more leads, more people on our email list, and if we throw enough content at them, they will buy, which isn’t the case. I mean, it works short term, but on long term you burn your email list and it’s very hard, maybe even depressing, to build a business that’s focused on quantity rather than quality. So to sum it up, it does depend on your brand authority, how good your course is, how many courses you have, how big your email list, and how many new leads you get in every month because that matters as well because if you push the same course six months in a row to the same 1,000 people or 2,000 people, obviously they’re going to get annoyed really fast because it’s like, this is the fifth time I’m seeing this. I’m not buying. So doesn’t that give you something to think about?
In terms of content emails you can send daily if you want. If you have enough content and if you feel justified in saying, I’m going to send this email because it’s going to be valuable to my audience. So there’s a clear goal there and clear value to your audience, you can send daily. If you don’t have enough time or you don’t feel really comfortable sending many emails once a week, it’s fine. And during the promotion you’re going to send more emails. I mean, who’s going to buy? If you send one email this week and another email the other week and another email three weeks from now. People forget.
Ari: And so I feel like there are a lot of people out there who their default will be a lot less than one email per day and probably even if it’s content email. So even closer to one email per week or every other week or per month. So what would be your recommendation in order to really build that brand authority and trust? What’s the minimum that people should be hitting their potential clients’ mailboxes?
Monica: I think at least once a week. But make it engaging, make it an email that’s going to shift their perspective in a little way, at least because that helps with brand recognition. Because in their inbox, it’s you and thousands of other brands. Some brands are very aggressive and even if they don’t buy from those brands, they will still recognize the name just because it appears in their inbox so many times. So you have to be very careful about the association your audience has with your brand in their inbox.
Is it something valuable? Do you train them to receive valuable content? Then they’re going to look for your content and they’re going to read it. Do you just deliver fluff and content that has nothing to do with your audience? Then they’re going to delay opening your email or just not opening it at all.
Ari: Okay. And so do you have recommendations for content that wouldn’t be fluff? I suppose it depends a lot on the target market, so it’ll change from market to market. But as far as kind of guidelines for people who maybe struggle to get an email out once a week, you mentioned something that shifts a perspective. Could you say a bit more about that?
Monica: So I have, let’s call it a framework. It’s context and relevancy. So if I send an email this week to my audience, how is that email relevant to the context they’re in right now? What’s happening in their lives around them with the people they follow on social media, with, maybe the authors they enjoy, with the economy, with your health. So what’s happening in their current context that I can tap into with a message that is valuable and relevant to their situation.
So let’s say my audience is made of moms who have kids in kindergarten. And January is awful because all the kids are getting sick. It’s exhausting to be a mom with a toddler who’s going to kindergarten. So I would say, well, hi, mom, congrats. You’ve survived the second week of January. Our kids are just going back into kindergarten after the winter holiday, but they’re coming back home with all kinds of nasty viruses. So how can you survive this period? How can you work with your exhaustion? What’s something you can do to not feel worse?
So you start with the context. You acknowledge the problem, you acknowledge where they are in their lives, and you try to deliver something that’s going to help them shift perspective. You can say something like, your kids are not going to be small for the rest of their lives. Soon, they’re going to be able to be with other kids without catching everything, and you’re going to be able to go back to a life that seems more normal. So as you navigate this challenging time, we’re here with you and we’ve created this free meditation or affirmations to help you calm down when it feels like everything is upside down. Take a deep breath, mom. You’re doing amazing. We’ll talk soon.
So context, relevancy, and something valuable, and that makes your audience feel understood and seen and appreciated for where they are right now. Because lots of people, they’re doing email marketing that says something like, oh, you have a problem. Fantastic. I have a solution for you. With this course, all your problems will be solved overnight, which is not realistic.
Ari: Well, it’s not realistic and it’s not helpful. I mean, in that what, the framework that you mentioned really focuses a lot on the person that you’re talking to as opposed to your own needs as the marketer. Something I often say to people I work with is nobody really cares about your product. They care about themselves and whatever’s going on in their own lives. And so, are there any kind of big mistakes that you see people often making or kind of key things that people often miss when they’re working on this?
Monica: The one is not emailing like, you got the lead, they signed up for your freebie, and then you do nothing with that prospect until Black Friday or your next big launch. That prospect is going to go cold; you’re going to forget who you are. This happens to me all the time. Like I go into my inbox and it’s like, who is this person? Unsubscribe. So you need to be consistent with how often you email. If you can’t email twice a week, at least email once a week. And that way people can become familiar with your brand, what you do. They can associate your emails with a specific kind of outcome.
The other one is when it comes to like a launch or a promotion, they try to like get it done really fast. So it’s like three emails all over the place or super vague and it’s like, okay, I sent those three emails and then I’m going to go hide because I’m afraid of the feedback I’m going to receive. So, of course, when you only have like three emails and you have that kind of pressure in your head, it’s very hard to focus on delivering something of value and actually taking your prospects through the stages of like awareness, consideration and all of that because you don’t have time. It’s just like three emails.
So reducing your promotions to flash sales all the time is not the best way of doing it. If you make it longer, you have enough time to build the awareness, to deliver your message, to talk about stories and testimonials and all of that. And that also allows you to write emails that are not super salesy because you have enough time to just like walk your prospect, just guide them, take them by the hand and show them. So here we have this and here we have this. And meet Adi. He’s a student of ours here. Talk to him, hear his story. So there’s so many other ways you can promote the course when you feel peace of mind, right? Because you have enough time and you’re calm and you’re not pushy and you’re not aggressive and you’re not under any pressure to deliver the pitch. Deliver the pitch.
And the final one would be not using segmentation. You could have the best emails. It won’t matter because your emails are not going to reach the inbox, they’re not going to be seen. So like the easiest way to begin with is just having two segments on your email list. One is people who have engaged with your emails in the last 30 to 60 days and the other one is a segment of people who haven’t opened anything beyond 60 days. And you send your campaigns to these two segments individually. That helps the Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo whatever. It’s sending some signals that you’re not just collecting leads and treating them equally, right.
It’s also going to help your open rates, your visibility in the inbox. And every maybe six months, clean that list. If they’re not engaged, reengage them. And who doesn’t open the emails? Remove them off your email list. Clean your bosses. I mean, it doesn’t really help to have a big list if they’re not engaged. I mean, you’re just going to end up paying a lot more for your email provider and it’s not going to be a profitable asset for you to hold 50k people and only 10k are actually engaged.
Ari: And so tracking your metrics then is very important, it sounds like.
Monica: Oh, yes, definitely. So open rates and click through rates, but also engagement, like how long people are in your email, what do they do in there? Do they hit unsubscribe or not? How often? But it’s important to take a look. Maybe once a month. I just go and clean out my email list. I go into Active Campaign, I select, okay, who hasn’t been opening my emails beyond 30 days and I just remove them off my email list.
Ari: Oh, wow. Okay.
Monica: Yes, it hurt. The first time I did it, it really hurt. It’s really hard to let go of things. But if they don’t open, I mean, what’s the point on having them there?
Ari: Okay, and those different metrics that you were talking about, their email service provider will essentially provide all those metrics within it.
Monica: Yes, yes. I think there are some service providers who even alert to when your open rates are underperforming, when you have lots of unsubscribes. So you can rely on that for sure.
Ari: And are there any benchmarks that you feel comfortable sharing or does it change too much from industry to industry as far as open rates, click through rates, those kinds of things. What people should be looking out for?
Monica: It’s a hard question to answer just because, yes, there are variations depending on your industry and even depending on your history. Like how long have you been emailing? How big is your email list, how stale is your email list? For instance, there are people who have open rates of 20% and that’s good for their industry. But I see people who have open rates of 60%.
Ari: Oh, wow.
Monica: And that’s amazing.
Ari: Yeah.
Monica: Yeah. One of the clients I work with, it’s insane how much brand authority he has. I mean, his open rates are through the roof, 60%, 80%. And even with promo emails, it’s fascinating to see that. Whereas you’re going to find people who have 10% open rate. And this goes back into that idea of segmentation and really cleaning up your email list because you could have an open rate of 80%, but you only have like 100 people who are engaged, right? Or you could have a list of 100k and a 5% open rate because most of them are not opening or even receiving your emails.
In terms of click through rates, same thing. Some people see 1%, 5%, other people see 20%. It depends on the type of content. So if it’s a content email, then that’s going to have a bigger open rate or a bigger click through rate. If it’s a sales email, you’re not going to see much of an amazing click through rate just because when you’re asking people to buy something, there’s more friction and more caution. So you’re not going to see, wow, 50% click through rates on a promo email. Although that would be amazing.
Ari: That would be amazing.
Monica: On subscriptions, I think it’s like under 1% per campaign. I think that’s normal. Again, it does depend on where is your audience coming from. Something that I’ve seen with many people is that when they invest money in ads for lead generation and they are targeting you off and they’re getting like an influx of leads, but then when they send a promo, those people aren’t buying because they’re not the best fit for what you’re doing or they don’t speak the language. That has happened before.
So if you do a Google search, you’re going to find common benchmarks from, I know, Active Campaign, Drip, Convert Kit. All of them have their own benchmarks. You can look at that and evaluate how you stand against those numbers. But most importantly is to look at your email list. Is it clean? Is it engaged? Where is your audience coming from? How often are you emailing? And only after you look at your data for maybe two months, you can say, okay, I’m underperforming and I have to work on my subject lines. Or maybe I have to work on my deliverability issues because I have lots of people on my email list, but I’m getting a high bounce rate, which means that people, they’re not getting your emails. So not an easy question to answer.
Ari: But I find this context extremely helpful. And so it sounds like what people should really be looking at is their trends versus themselves. Are their open rates trending up? Are their click through rates trending up? Is their engagement trending up? And that’s what they want to be looking at versus, okay, what is the exact benchmark I’m trying to work against because that’s just a very, very complicated question. There isn’t a good answer to it necessarily.
Monica: I mean, you’d need to maybe compare yourself against other people in your industry. So if you’re a language course creator and you sell English courses, then compare yourself with the benchmarks from other language course creators who teach English. And ideally, you guys have the same audience and that makes a lot more sense than trying to compare your business with, I don’t know, someone who sells financial courses or someone who teaches how to use Canva. Different audiences, different brand affinity. It’s a more complicated discussion.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you. Any last thoughts that you’d like to share with our audience?
Monica: Don’t be afraid of email marketing. I mean, if you created your business because you truly believe you’re teaching something that can help other people, don’t be afraid to use email marketing to convey that mission and focus on making it authentic. Like, this is who I am, this is what I believe in, and here’s how I think I can help you. Just don’t be afraid to try it. It’s a very interesting change when you kind of start using marketing as an actual communication channel rather than just selling.
Ari: Awesome. So where can our audience go to learn more about you?
Monica: So you guys can find me on LinkedIn or on my website. It’s my name, monicabadiu.com. And you’ll find lots of interesting blog posts there, including case studies.
Ari: Thank you so so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I really appreciate everything that you’ve shared and the kind of tactical view that I think will really be helpful for a lot of the course creators listening to this.
Monica: Thank you for the opportunity, Ari.
Ari: Awesome. Monica Badiu helps course creators enroll, engage and educate audiences through customer centric email copywriting. You can find her monicabadiu.com. That’s Monica B-A-D-I-U dot com. All right, awesome.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: Alright, Ari, lots of really interesting stuff on kind of a different topic today. So what stood out for you in terms of copywriting and marketing?
Ari: Well, a lot. This was a very different episode for us, but I’m hoping very, very useful. Many things stood out, but I think one of the important things that people hear all the time, but I don’t think really do, is this piece around connecting with their audiences on a regular basis and being consistent about it. And so something that she mentioned a few times is emailing once per week, being consistent, that’s the minimum and kind of doing it. So I feel like that’s a lesson. There isn’t a lot to that. Yes, you want to be thinking about the content that goes into that and all those pieces and adding value, but staying visible and keeping that visibility top of mind and kind of always being there, I think is super important.
Abe: Yeah, it’s easy to forget that people don’t really know that you exist. It doesn’t matter how helpful your expertise is to the vast majority of people on planet Earth, you are invisible.
Ari: And it’s up to you to change that.
Abe: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it just goes back to the idea that simple does not equate to easy. The basic concepts of marketing and becoming visible to your potential customer. It’s not difficult, it’s not complex, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do. It takes a lot of focus.
Ari: Yep.
Abe: I think a helpful way that she framed it is that don’t think that marketing or emailing people consistently is this extra thing you have to do. It’s more like a core responsibility of your work. You have a responsibility to help people take action, right? If you’re just asking people to sign up for some free thing that you have and then not take any action to sign up for your course or to get coaching from you, that’s not going to help them. They’re not going to progress towards their goals.
Ari: Absolutely.
Abe: The other piece that again, is just going back to sort of core elements of marketing. But this he really drove home is you can’t do this in a vacuum either. You can’t just write about what’s interesting to you. That’s better than nothing, for sure. But what makes copywriting and marketing effective is that it’s grounded in your customers context. So just going back to who is it that you’re serving? What is the context of their life or work, and what are the questions and needs that come out of that context? An interesting spin on that is, as you create marketing content or as you write emails, what can you acknowledge about what’s going on in the lives or the thoughts of your customers so that they feel that they’re connected to you?
Ari: And she summed it up really well in the three words to keep in mind, you know, context, relevance, value. That’s what you want to have in every single email. Another thing that stood out to me is just the importance that she puts on metrics and tracking those metrics, and also really important. A lot of people feel like the bigger the list, the better it is. But it’s really not about the size of the list, it’s about how engaged they are. So list size really is just a vanity metric. What you want to be looking at is how engaged they are. Are they actually responding? Are they actually opening your emails? And if people aren’t, remove them from your list. It’s okay to remove people who are not engaged because it’s just hurting you to keep them on.
Abe: Yeah.
Ari: So when Monica was saying that she cuts people who didn’t engage or open emails in 30 days, I think that can make sense, especially as things have changed with different rules for the different email providers and email services. 30 days feels a little aggressive to me. I would go with something like 60 days, but the thought behind that makes a lot of sense. And while some people might ask as part of a joint venture or something like that, how big is the list? Someone savvy will ask, what are your open rates as well?
And so if my list is 1000 people but I have 5% open rates, that’s a lot weaker than I have a 500-person list but a 20% or 25% open rate. And so the more engaged people are, the stronger the list. And a savvy joint venture partner will know to ask those questions to assess how engaged the list that they might be partnering is. Because at the end of the day, it can be great for me to partner with someone with a giant list, but if no one’s opening the emails and it’s basically worthless, that is all I had.
Abe: Yeah, me too. A nice set of reminders for people who feel a little bit stuck or anxious about moving their course marketing forward.
Ari: Yep.
Abe: Monica Badiu helps course creators enroll, engage, and educate audiences through customer centric email copywriting. You can find her monicabadiu.com. That’s Monica B-A-D-I-U dot com.
Thank you for listening to Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co-founder and CEO of Ruzuku, here with my co-host Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Once Upon a Business and Making It. This episode, of Course Lab, was produced by Cynthia Lamb. Post production was by Marvin del Rosario. Danny Iny is our executive producer. If you don’t want to miss the excellent episodes coming up on Course Lab, follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you’re enjoying our show, please go ahead and leave us a starred review. It really does make a difference. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.
Abe: All right, Ari, who have we got coming up for the next episode?
Ari: Next episode, we have Kay Adams. Kay teaches professionals and lay individuals how to utilize journal therapy, which is really, really cool.
Abe: Yeah, super interesting topic. And she’s been teaching it for a long, long time.
Ari: Yeah, it was a really fun interview, and I’m really looking forward to people hearing it.