SFR 164: Are Webinars Dead?

Sales Funnel Radio

What's going on everyone? It's Steve Larson, and this is Sales Funnel Radio! And today, we are gonna talk about webinars.

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My name is Steve Larson and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

What's up guys, hey, okay first of all... I know I got a rubber fish in my hand. We'll get to that in a second... this is called a hook ;-)

Hey, I’m tired of the question, and I think this has been a bit of scare that has happened across the internet, as you guys know, (or if you haven't known), Google Chrome no longer allows auto-playing videos on page load.

What that means is that for everyone who's like, "Hey are auto webinars dead?" I wanna address that question today, 'cause I'm getting it from a lot of my personal students, for coaching that I get from other people that I fulfill on - I get it a lot of places. I even see other gurus saying things like "Hey, webinars might be dying."

Let's talk about this, okay...

So two things here:

#1: the answer's "no!"

#2: I actually wanna drop in and I screenshotted my stats from our webinar over the last month. I grabbed it from the last month - simply so you can see what's been going on for us because the Chrome update has been out longer than a month.

So what I'm gonna do is share with you guys.

We just barely turned on ads for this funnel, we re-turned them on three weeks ago.

Now if you don't know, I have several strategies for how I get traffic inside that funnel:

The first way I get traffic is, I do a lot of Dream 100 stuff and that's actually where this fish is coming in - we've got 100 of these, it's a full-size fish, a full-size trout and we're shipping them out to people in the next two weeks or three weeks.

What we're gonna do is we're inviting them to “fish-slap the crap out of the old ways!” Ha-ha get it? It's talkable, it's not expensive. Please do Dream 100. Anyway, so Dream 100, that's the first way.

The second way is with affiliates. I treat Dream 100 and affiliate stuff in two separate strategies - they are not the same strategies.

With Dream 100, they're existing influencers, they have big lists already, right. I go in, and I'm like "let's do a joint venture together, I'll split 50/50 with you."

With affiliates, they may not have a big list yet, but they're willing to go promote, they're willing to push it out there, right, and I give them a percentage for going out and selling.

To get the affiliate thing off the ground, I launched a program recently called affiliate outrage. It is a free program that teaches people how to make money as an affiliate, selling anybody's products, but all the examples I use in the training are for my products - so hopefully inadvertently they actually go and start promoting my products.

I had about 15 or 16 other massive, massive experts come in and teach courses that were for free - normally you'd have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for this.

For our Dream 100 strategy and we had like 20 or 30 people reach out to us a few weeks back and we've got our JVs setting up. We're doing all that now - it's a lot of fun.

We also have the affiliate traffic, that's coming in.

The third way I do it is publishing; I have a podcast show dedicated to my major products.

So there's a podcast show for this very webinar funnel that I'm gonna share with you guys right now.

Then number four is ads.

Do you see how many things I went through before I got to ads!

Ads are usually the thing that people run into first. I'm not saying not to - I'm just saying there are other ways to do it, okay.

So what I'm gonna do is go in and show you guys exactly what we've been doing - and when I say "show," I mean I'm gonna talk about it.

For those of you guys who are in iTunes right now, just know that I'm holding a 12-inch massive rubber fish!

For those of you guys on youtube, you guys can see it.

Anyway, awesome stuff okay.

I have my phone here, I just took a picture of my screen about three minutes ago before I started this, and these are the actual live stats. Here's the thing you have to understand about webinars right now; "yes, chrome shut down the auto video playing thing," but did they really?

The answer is "no," okay! That's gonna be maybe controversial depending on who you ask, but the reason for my answer is:

In Clickfunnels there is a feature in the native video element where I can still have the video autoplay - I just can't have the sound autoplay. So the page can load and start playing the video - all they did was put a film over top of it that says, "Turns On The Sound."

So I still have audio playing videos in my webinar funnel. My auto webinar funnel is still autoplaying - you just click "Yes" when it asks "Would you like to autoplay?" If you block pause - the video starts playing on page load - they can't pause it.

However, what we've done is change the text on the film they've put on top of the video. The film is kind of dark and slightly transparent, so they can see the video playing in the background, but I have the text say, "Click to join live session in progress."

When they click- the sound turns on and the film goes away, and it picks up right from where it is right there. So if they don't click, they're not seeing it from the beginning of the webinar - which is awesome.

I've actually been using it to my advantage; I put things on the actual page that say, "Hurry! Click above to join session in progress." I have an arrow down below saying the exact same thing. I pre-frame.

You can also pre-frame in the confirmation email, you can pre-frame them in the actual page ahead of time by saying, "look, you're gonna join a session that's actually going live, you're gonna join a session that's starting right in the next few minutes - it will autoplay."

I don't know what the big scare has been about because we're still doing it and it's been awesome.

So let me share with you guys actual stats, that sound good?

I might offend a few people when I say that sort of thing, 'cause they're like "Ah, but it's not true autoplay." WHATEVER! I actually like it. It's a micro-engagement before they actually go and actually watch it. It's been amazing actually.

I've actually really enjoyed this whole feature. We're actually using it to our advantage. I'm not gonna fight it, "let's just go with the flow and use it to our advantage." Instead of fighting it, there are these little micro-engagements before the page loads.

I'm like, "Hey, once you get in there make sure you click soon because it will be playing and you wanna be able to turn your sound on and make sure everything's set up."

It's just one extra step of micro-engagement, and we seem to have more attentive attendees.

Alright so I got my stats here. I'm gonna walk through my stats real quick. This is from June 21st through July 23rd, 2018, so just over a month starting from today just about a month in the history.

We have about $3.35 earnings per click. Not bad! Remember that we turned ads back on about three weeks ago.

Let me run through our page in the last month:

The registration page has 1798 unique page views. 1800 people have seen that page uniquely in the last month.

63% have opted in. A 63% opt-in rate on an auto webinar funnel, you guys, I can barely even get that on a live webinar funnel!

Usually, when you go from live webinars to auto webinars, you get a drop in conversion rates. Mine went up!

We also are selling it harder, we've put a whole bunch of testimonials on it recently, and it's just really boosted a bunch of stuff.

Anyway, so 63% opt in rate, that's pretty huge.

So 1100 people have opted in. For those of you guys again who are listening I'm looking on my phone right now. So we're just reading the stats right here.

A 63% opt-in rate, that's ridiculous! From that, we have on the auto webinar funnel - I get about an 8% purchase rate.

So from those who actually register, there's a drop off from those who register. Right after they register, they get sent to a self-liquidating offer, and that's actually selling quite well.

Only 10% of people actually see it. It's a little over 10%, maybe like 15%, about 15% of the people actually see the self-liquidating offer, actually click over to the actual order page, but it's a 35% purchase rate.

It's pretty crazy, so overall when compared with the other, it's maybe more like 10% purchase rate from the actual traffic coming on in, which is pretty great for a self-liquidating offer.

If you guys don't know what that is, it's self-liquidating, meaning, we have spent about $2000 in ads, just testing stuff - we're turning things back on slowly.

We spent about two grand in ads in the last month, we have made about $1700 in sales on that self-liquidating offer. So we are literally right now just about breaking even on all of our ads spent for that funnel. That's crazy, okay, that's crazy.

We don't have all of the targeting ads turned on. We haven't even really started making new ads. I mean these are all great signs of a fantastic webinar, it's been awesome, and we had great successes with them too.

I've loaded just tons of awesome case studies and testimonials from that product just in the last like three weeks, and that's really helped a lot as well, anyway.

So again, we only turned ads on about three weeks ago, so this is over the last, so for about a week there, there was not much going on in that funnel for I don't know, like a month.

There was lots of other stuff that was going on; I was building, putting things together.

We had 17 sales from $2000 in ad spend, but that ad spend was also liquidated; so we're putting a dollar in ads, guys, and we're getting three or four back out. It's more like, the four, yeah, about four dollars back out, but we're also liquidating on the dollar, almost. Isn't that crazy!

Remember we're keeping it tiny, this is not like huge, overall, the funnel's done about 19 grand in sales. And the average cart value is...

We're getting another $114 per purchase because of the self-liquidating offer. Which means for about every two people who buy the self-liquidating offer, one of those people, or the third one, is buying the actual full program. That's nuts!

Anyway, so are webinars dead?

Oh my gosh, let me just take this fish and just help you guys. "No! They are not dead, let me fish slap the crap out of that belief."

People are like, "Webinars are dead, they're dying, "do you think it's gonna happen?" No I don't, I don't think they're gonna die. I think you're gonna have to adapt.

I think you'll have to add one extra little step here and there, but I actually think it gets a better purchaser.

What I've been noticing is that the people coming in are buying. They've taken one extra little micro-commitment before they actually see the webinar, and they're actually better buyers, and it's been awesome. So none of this has been a detriment to us.

At first I was freaking out too, I was right along with everyone else. I was like, "but you know what, maybe..." And so we started looking at it, and so yes, we have auto webinars running to Facebook ads.

Again we got the Dream 100 stuff going, which we're about to do a ton of joint venture webinars with people on this product.

Affiliate outrage, that's going awesome, and that really hasn't even started turning on yet, as the time of me filming. Meaning, about the first week of that program, I just teach people how to set stuff up and kinda get things running inside their accounts to get things going, and then we get into actual promo strategies.

So as the time of me filming, that part has not actually turned on yet, so affiliate's not even touching it yet.

I also publish like an animal which has helped tremendously - a lot of buyers come from that.

And then we have the ads we've got running.

Those are like my four major traffic strategies that I just always fill slots in for them.

So hopefully that's helpful, so that's some of our stats. So we're still doing great on the opt-ins, still doing great on the purchases.

On a live webinar funnel, you're doing pretty good if you get a 25% show up rate to the webinar.

On an auto webinar funnel, because it's starting in the next ten minutes, right, the actual show up rate is significantly higher. We have about a 50% show up rate, which is awesome.

And then several people come back in for the actual webinar replay, and that's where a lot of purchases come through as well, so anyway we're doing a lot of little cool things like that.

I just wanted to show you guys and walk through that a little bit, and answer that question 'cause my strong opinion is absolutely not, they're actually not dying, but it does mean that you as a marketer, just add one extra little step in there.

It's already native to Clickfunnels. Just go turn on the button, okay. That's all you gotta do. Maybe go inside the actual email or the first page, registration page and say, "make sure you check your sound, click to turn on your sound so you can actually hear the session in progress," you know stuff like that, that's totally fine.

Another thing that's really helped a lot; we just put in this really cool chat element so people can chat with cool people that are in there. We're adding in live closers to the thing. Things that we'd do anyway, regardless if Chrome stopped it or not.

So it's my strong opinion that the answer to this question is, "Absolutely Not! Webinars are NOT dying!"

If you think they are, at least take the webinar script and use it in other places.

We're taking that webinar script, one of the things we're gonna be doing here in the next month is grab the webinar script and repurpose it.

I don't always wanna buy through a webinar. Personally, I don't like always buying through webinars. I actually like buying through a product launch funnel - that's one of my favorite ways to purchase something on the internet... or I just go to the order page and buy it.

If I know it's a great product, I'm just gonna buy it. I've done that many times. Some of you guys have done that with my stuff as well.

So webinar, right that's one way, product launch funnel, same script, different delivery.

I can take that same script, and I can go and make it a blog post.

I can make that same script into an audio program and have people listen to it.

Dean Holland actually takes his webinar script, and he turns it into a free plus shipping book. That script is gold!

So if someone's like, "ah, webinars, they're dying!" First of all, "no, I don't agree with that at all."

Number two, figure out other ways to deliver that exact same script - it doesn't have to go through a funnel. The funnel isn't the script. Does that make sense?

The funnel's not the reason that they do the buying. The funnel does the closing on the actual internet. So just deliver the same material differently. That's one of the things we're doing.

I'm very cognizant of the fact that there's a lot of people who will buy through webinar, but then you take the same script and just repurpose that crap.

Go around and put it in other places. Understand that there are other ways people prefer to purchase.

So, are webinars dying? No! First of all, number two, just take the same thing and blast it all over the place. I am super passionate about this. “Whoa, Papa Larsen's coming out a little bit here!”

You can take the webinar script on stage. Every time I've done that thing on stage we make money, and we close fantastically well - usually like, anywhere 20-30% of the room, which is pretty average, depending on the room, 'cause some people in the room are kinda crazy.

But most of the time I can usually close 20-35, 25-30%, it's in that range whenever I get on stage with it.

Russell Brunson usually does 40-50%! He closes half that room, baby. We'll get there soon.

So those are my answers to that:

#1: Webinars are not dying

#2: If you really feel that way, just start taking the same script and deliver it in different ways.

Don’t blame Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is not gonna stand in the way of me delivering my sales message to people who do actually want to purchase my products. So take that thing and just repurpose it.

Hey guys, hopefully that's helpful. Again this is my invitation to “fish slap the crap out of that question and move forward with confidence.”

It’s my opinion from my own results on just one of our webinars. We have a second one launching here soon for another product.

They're doing fantastic, so I don't know what the big scare has been.

So anyway, that's my answer. Maybe it's a little spicy for some people, but whatever ... Those are our stats - those are our numbers. We've been making money.

Alright guys, thanks so much, I'll talk to you guys later.

If you guys have enjoyed this, please share it, comment, tell me if you agree, and I'll see you guys in the next episode, bye.

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