John Ainsworth With Data Driven Marketing

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:13] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have John Ainsworth and he is with data driven marketing. Welcome, John.

John Ainsworth: [00:00:25] Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about data driven marketing. How are you serving folks?

John Ainsworth: [00:00:33] What we do is we work with course creators who’ve already built an audience online that might be SEO traffic or a YouTube audience, something like that. And we help them convert people from in their audience to buying their courses.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] So how did you get into this line of work? What drew you to this crowd?

John Ainsworth: [00:00:51] I used to work in fitness marketing, and what we found was that we’d fill up all of our clients so we’d have kickboxing clubs or gyms or yoga classes and we’d get them full and they wouldn’t need us anymore. So I started looking. It kind of sucked because they don’t need you. They don’t pay you anymore. So I started looking for clients who would have unlimited capacity. So if we did an amazing job, we couldn’t fill them up when we found course creators. We’re just great to work with. They’re experts in their field. They love to share. They tend to have built up an audience through years of sharing free content, but they’re no good at the marketing funnel email marketing side of it, so they’re not making as much money as they deserve.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:29] So at what stage of a course creator do you typically work with? Is it somebody that maybe just left the corporate world and heard about this course creation kind of idea and said, Hey, I can do that? And I have an audience of, you know, me and my wife and, you know, my friends and I want to do this. Is that a prospect for you or is it somebody who’s already kind of been doing this for a minute?

John Ainsworth: [00:01:53] Yeah, someone has been doing it for a little while. There’s definitely a lot of people out there who work with people who are getting started. And there’s some great ones we don’t. We work with people who tend to have been doing it for a few years. They’ve been sharing videos every day, every week on YouTube, or they’ve been writing blog posts for years trying to build up their audience, and they’ve started making courses as well. And that’s the kind of point that someone will tend to be a good fit for us.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:15] And then what audience size is that point? Is it 100? Is it a thousand? Is a 10,000?

John Ainsworth: [00:02:21] We need someone to have an email list size of like ten or 20,000 to be a really good kind of fit to work with us. Some of our clients have got a bit less than that. Some of them have got hundreds of thousands. So in order to get that, they have to have an audience size effects on their website if maybe like 30,000 visitors a month, if it’s a YouTube channel, maybe they’ve got a few hundred thousand views a month. That kind of scale is the kind of people we work with.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:48] Now, do you have any advice for the people who aren’t ready for you yet but would like to be? Is there some things they could be doing to build to get to that level?

John Ainsworth: [00:02:58] I am not an expert in building an audience, but I do know that it’s a lot of work along a long, kind of hard process. One of the things I do know about it that’s a really big deal is choose really carefully what medium you’re going to use, you know? Do you like being seen? Do you like being on camera? In which case YouTube could be fantastic? Or do you hate it? In which case definitely don’t do that. And maybe you should be better off with a podcast, or maybe you love to write, or you really like that process of hiring writers, in which case blogging could be great. So if you want to get into a SEO side of things, build up an authority site, then go to Authority Hacker. They’ve got a great course about it. So like there’s different places to kind of start based on what style is going to fit for you.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:44] Now, early in your career, you mentioned you were able to fill up fitness centers. Did they already have an audience that you were able to just maximize or were you creating this filling them up from scratch?

John Ainsworth: [00:03:55] Yeah, there we were, filling out from scratch. So they already had great classes, but they didn’t have any kind of an audience, really. So what we do is Facebook ads and when you’re running a local business like an actual in-person, honest to God, somebody turns up in a specific place and something happens kind of business. Facebook ads in that area we found to be incredibly effective. So we could manage to fill up a kickboxing club, for example, with using Facebook ads, pointing people to make an inquiry tend to be for their kids. After they made an inquiry, it was somebody would text them and it tended to be in the evening because that was the time when the mums were around to look at what time their kids could do. Then they would get them to come in for a free session and then from there they would sign up. So there it was like we’re creating the whole thing from scratch. But it’s. It’s more expensive nowadays with Facebook ads, especially for selling courses.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:48] And a lot of these courses aren’t looking for a hyperlocal solution. They’re looking for a kind of worldwide solution.

John Ainsworth: [00:04:55] Absolutely. 100%. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:57] So then the strategies have to obviously be different.

John Ainsworth: [00:05:00] Yeah. Yeah. All the principles in marketing always stay the same, but the actual strategies, the tactics, the details of it vary enormously depending on when it is. You know, ten years ago it was different to what it’s like now. And if you’re doing it for courses, it’s completely different if you’re doing it for an in-person business. All of those things vary enormously.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:17] So now when this established course creator is out there right now and then maybe like you said, they’re great at creating courses and they have really compelling information that more and more people should be paying attention to. What’s the pain they’re having? Do they even know they’re having a pain if things seem to be progressing, are they just or is this one of those situations where they could be doing better if they knew some things and they don’t have to settle for maybe the slow kind of growth that they’re experiencing?

John Ainsworth: [00:05:46] Yeah, exactly. So a lot of these people, they don’t realize that this work around funnels and email marketing is the thing that they they could be doing that would make this enormous difference. What they what they do realize is they’re not making as much money as they feel like they should be doing. They feel like something’s not quite right. They tend to have heard of this funnel idea and they know that email marketing is the thing that you probably should do, but they don’t really get how it would work. So what we’re tending to do with these people is show them this is the potential of what you could have. And it’s it’s not generally something in our market that people are searching for. We’re kind of having to explain to them this is the possibility, this is where you could get to.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:24] So that first the first must have in these situations or you have to have an email list at with whether you’re kind of wringing out as much juice from it as possible, you have to have it. And you’re feeling that they’re kind of under utilizing it.

John Ainsworth: [00:06:42] 100%, 100% until utilizing it. Yeah. And generally so we need people to have an email list. We will even help them to build it if they’ve got a big enough audience. So if they’ve got, let’s say, a YouTube channel with a few hundred thousand views a month but they’ve never built an email list will help them with that part. But the email list is where you make the money from these things. That’s where the money’s in the list. And this is a phrase that’s been around for a long time, but not everybody really understands how true it is. And so what most people do is if they even if they have a list, is they will send out a promotion two or three times a year. And when they do, they have a big spike in sales. But they worry that if they do that too often, then they’re going to have their email subscribers unsubscribe, be annoyed and not want to hear from them again. And so the trick is how do you make great email promotions that you can send out that people love to receive, that contain useful content, that are a fabulous, a helpful people like getting them and make sales at the same time. And if you can do that, then you can send up these promotions much more often and you can make a lot more money from your business.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:43] So you help them kind of create that kind of content, or you teach them how they do it themselves.

John Ainsworth: [00:07:51] Yeah, we do both. So we, we work on, we have a group coaching program where we, it’s like a done with you service where we will teach people how to do it and then they have a go at it. They do their best shot, we review it, we give them feedback, help them to improve. And then we also have a service where for bigger businesses, generally, people who are like $1,000,000 a year or something where we will actually do the whole service for them, we’ll write the emails, we’ll write the sales pages, we’ll set up the automation, all of those kinds of things on their behalf.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:20] And like, what’s your kind of personal best success story in terms of they were at X and then we got involved and they were at X plus.

John Ainsworth: [00:08:32] So a couple that come to mind, we had somebody recently who was making a few thousand a month from her co sales, but she had already had a big audience and had a big email list but wasn’t using it. And we got her up to an average of about $60,000 a month within, I guess, four months, something along those kind of lines. And we’ve had somebody else who was doing maybe 20,000 a month and we got them up to 170,000. So the increases are quite fun. You know, it’s quite a dramatic increase from what people are at before.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:03] So it’s just a matter sometimes of just kind of leveraging what you already have. Like you already have what you need. You’re just not communicating in an effective manner to get the most out of it.

John Ainsworth: [00:09:15] Yeah. If you’ve already spent years building an audience, you’ve built trust with them, you’ve made great courses, but you’re just not doing this fundamental bit in the middle of getting the people from your audience into your email list. Get the email list too, by offering them other things that they might want to buy as well. Then you’re leaving most of the money on the table. So those people and there’s lots of them out there, have already done a vast amount of the work, but they just aren’t they aren’t making the most of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:39] Now are they’re in this kind of funnel strategies, are there. Kind of some things you can teach the audience right now, or there are some must do’s. Is there some low hanging fruit that anybody could do right now to kind of maximize the funnel that they already have at their disposal?

John Ainsworth: [00:09:56] 100%, absolutely. And this is true. Whether somebody is in e commerce or the selling courses or they’re doing a software business, it even works to a certain extent in service businesses, too. And that’s to use two different tactics called order bumps and upsells. And I’m going to talk about it from a course point of view, but you can kind of translate this to work for other other areas. So the order bump is a checkout page thing. So someone’s on the checkout page, they’re putting their credit card details in. And at that stage you have a tick box on that page where someone can get something additional. So if you’re selling somebody a course, a good one to have is an additional workbook that goes with the course. So let’s say your course is $99. The workbook might be $37 something along those kinds of lines. And about 30 to 60% of people will buy the order bump if you do it right, which adds about another 10 to 20% revenue. To that sale. And you can do this across all of your. All of your different products and therefore you increase revenue of the whole business by 10 to 20% just from this one tactic, which is crazy, but it’s true, and virtually nobody does this. It’s built into almost all checkout software, but nobody uses it.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:11] And that. And so this is just something it’s just literally one line of text.

John Ainsworth: [00:11:16] Yeah. Like it might be three sentences, you know, probably three sentences about the most you would need here. And what you’re just saying is this work, would you like to get the workbook that goes with this? It is on discount right now, 40% off if you buy it as a bundle with the with the course that you’re getting. Only time you can buy it at this price. Like that’s not exact copy, but like that’s the kind of thing that you would be saying something along those kind of lines, you’re going to add another 10%, 20% to your revenue.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:46] And it could be something that’s already part of your course right now that you’re just throwing in for free, that you just charge for it.

John Ainsworth: [00:11:52] Yeah, absolutely. As long as it’s not something that’s integral to getting the result, but something that maybe makes it quick or easier or is a nice accompaniment, you could take it out as being a bonus and add it in as an order bump, and that will tend to work really well. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:05] Now, you mentioned upsells. How does that differ?

John Ainsworth: [00:12:08] So upsells is the same basic concept, but it’s done in a different way and it’s important to understand which one is which, so that when you’re setting it up, you know what you’re doing. The order bump is on the checkout page, the upsell is on the confirmation page. So somebody has already put their credit card details in. They’ve clicked submit, maybe they got the order bump, maybe they didn’t. The next page that they see that confirmation page at the top of it, you will say your order has gone through. You’re going to have a great time with this course. It’s going to really help you to get the result that you’re after. The next step after that is going to be X. So let’s say they bought the beginner course. The, the next step is then the intermediate course. Would you like to get the intermediate course now as well? And then that is going to be a discount of 40% off right now. And it’s the only time you’ll see this offer. And about another ten or 20% of people will then buy that additional course. If you have a really good sales page and you’ve set the right offer up and all of those kind of details.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:07] So then so you’re not selling them the workbook, you’re selling them access to the next part of your roadmap for your your customer journey.

John Ainsworth: [00:13:17] Yeah. If you’re selling a membership and they’ve bought one month, you might sell them three months worth. If they’ve bought the basic course, you might sell on the intermediate one. If you’ve sold them a challenge that you do, then it might be buy three more challenges. It’s like whatever the next logical step is after what they’ve already got.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:35] So now as part of your service, it’s not only just kind of maximizing the revenue that you can possibly get from what you have, but it’s also increasing the amount of subscribers because that’s at the heart of this whole thing. Right. And I think this is an important note for the listeners. Your email list, you want to capture as many emails so you can have a personal relationship with all your people. If you’re leveraging a third party app like Facebook or LinkedIn or one of those other places, YouTube even. The relationship isn’t with you, really. I mean, it’s kind of with you, but you’ve got to move them off of that platform into your own in order to really kind of maximize the revenue you can make from these people.

John Ainsworth: [00:14:23] Yeah, 100%. Because if you have it, if you just rely on Facebook, at some point, Facebook is going to change their algorithm. And you’ve seen that many times over the last ten years, the reach that you used to have, you don’t have anymore. You could get kicked off some platform. But also email is where people make purchases from. They tend not to buy from somewhere on social. So it’s not like nobody does it, but it’s it’s a much lower percentage of people who will watch your YouTube video and then go buy something straight from that. But you can get them from the YouTube video onto your email list, the email list to the sales page and going to buy. And that that converts much better now.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:02] We know that these third parties change the rules when it suits them. Do you have any data to for the listener that doesn’t really understand this? Like if I’m on Facebook and it says I have whatever, 10,000 or whatever, 1000 friends or followers or whatever it is. In actuality, when I post something, a thousand people don’t see it. Do you know, like what percent would see anything I’m doing on that platform or LinkedIn or any of the other platforms?

John Ainsworth: [00:15:33] Yeah, I went on Facebook. It reduced and reduced and reduced and it’s an enormous thing. I think it went down from like 60% of people who were following. You would see it if they were on at the right time down to like 2 to 5%. I don’t know if those are the exact numbers, but it’s something in that kind of ballpark. It really is very small.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:54] And that’s the same for pretty much all of them. Linkedin, all those like like you could think that you’re like, Oh, I have all these followers and friends or fans or whatever, but in actuality only a minuscule amount is seeing anything you’re doing unless you pay that platform to get in front of more of your own people.

John Ainsworth: [00:16:13] Yeah, 100%. What they do to begin with is they make it work really, really well to get everybody on there and build the platform and grow the platform and make everybody want to use it. And then after a while they’re like, right when we need to start making money from it and they reduce the amount of people who are going to see your content and less you pay for it. And I think that LinkedIn is is not at the extreme that Facebook is at and, you know, different platforms at different stages with this. But everybody is you know, everybody gradually does go through that process.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:43] Right. It’s one of those examples that if you’re not paying for the service, then you are the product.

John Ainsworth: [00:16:49] Right. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:51] So then you’re going to make you pay at some point for access to the the list that you’ve built within that platform. Unless you take it offline and take control of that yourself and then communicate to these people in the manner you want to when you want to.

John Ainsworth: [00:17:08] Yeah. And the email list is the one that you own. It’s like that belongs to you and not to Facebook and not to Google and not to Microsoft or anything like this. It’s like, that’s yours. So you control that and it’s really, really important.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:19] I think it’s critically important. And I think that’s a misstep that a lot of entrepreneurs make by relying on this third party because they think they’re killing it there, when in actuality they can change the rules whenever they feel like it.

John Ainsworth: [00:17:32] Yeah. Yeah. 100% affect clients who lost massive Instagram followings over some kind of a mix up, a mistake or what have you. And they had to start again from scratch. And now what obviously we do and we’re working with them is make sure we get more of those people off onto their email list so that they have Instagram and they hear from them in email.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:53] Now, do you have any advice for people who want to increase the amount of email subscribers they have on their list? And I’m sure that this advice is good for anybody, no matter the size of their email list is today. Even if you have none, these this kind of information could help them get more. So is there some advice you have like these? Okay. These are the top tips to get more email subscribers.

John Ainsworth: [00:18:15] Yeah, 100%. So what you want to have is some kind of a lead magnet. And the lead magnet is like a compelling offer that someone gets if they subscribe to your newsletter. And so it it should be something that people can get value from very quickly. So one of the best ones that we’ve seen with any of our clients was a company called Paintball, and they teach people digital painting techniques. And what they gave away was some free brushes for in Photoshop. So if you download it, you can just upload it into Photoshop. Now you’ve got the brushes, you can use them whenever you want. You don’t have to read the e-book. You don’t have to take the course to get the value. You get it immediately. So anything that you can come up with or anything that you’ve already got that is going to be useful and valuable to your to your potential subscribers. And they would want to subscribe to our newsletter and get that kind of resource. So that’s the first step. Once you’ve got that, you want to promote that all over your website and all over social media.

John Ainsworth: [00:19:07] So let’s say you’ve got you’ve got a website that’s got a decent amount of traffic coming through already. You will put that lead magnet on the home page and you’ll put it on your blog pages. And if it’s a long blog post, you’ll put it top, middle and bottom, and you’ll put it in the sidebar as well. So you’re putting it everywhere and saying to people, This is the next step to take. This is the thing that is going to be useful to you and is, is there’s a reason why you should subscribe and then you can make a few different graphics that you would then put up. And let’s say you’ve got an Instagram following every 10th post might be promoting that free resource that you’ve got, or maybe you’ve got a few free resources and you don’t just use the same post each time to promote it, but have like different benefits or angles or have you and you make some graphics up about that as well. So put that just in lots of different places. Have a great lead magnet, tell people about it and point to it constantly.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:58] So if you do that on a regular basis, then you’re going to build your list and then maybe you’ll get to the level where you can hire the data driven marketing folks, right?

John Ainsworth: [00:20:09] Exactly. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:10] Now, the name of your company is data driven marketing. I’m sure that’s on accident. How important is it to analyze the data that every website is kind of generating and most people are probably not paying that much attention to it? Like, is there a way to use the data to really figure out what is my ideal customer? I might think it’s this person, but the data is going to maybe tell a different story and maybe I can use that data to help me communicate more effectively to the people that are resonating with my message.

John Ainsworth: [00:20:47] Yeah, the 100% is it’s not the simplest process to go through, but it’s very important. To understand this. So one of the things that we do and you don’t even have to do this from your your website’s a little easier to do it from your email list to send out surveys to people. So surveys to customers and surveys to potential customers and to different surveys we normally do. And what we’re looking to do is understand them, you know, what are their problems? What are their pain points, what are their desires? What is it that they if they bought something where they’re happy with it, what did they like about it? Did they tell other people about it and ask all these different questions? And from that, we build something called a customer avatar. And a customer avatar is a. Like a. Simplified version of your your ideal customer of the person, the most typical customer that you have. And it’s a summary of all of those different answers you have. You’re not trying to encapsulate every answer from every survey into the customer avatar. You’re trying to just create a version that allows you to think of this as a person. And then when you’re writing your emails or you’re creating your courses or you’re doing any marketing work in the future, you can imagine you’re talking to that one person. It’s much easier to imagine talking to one person than your whole audience. But if you’ve done the customer avatar, well then by talking to that one person, it will appeal to the whole audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:06] Now what is. Do you have an example of maybe the biggest kind of aha moment one of your clients had? Like maybe they thought, Oh, our audience is this type of person, and then you do these kind of surveys and they’re like, Well, yeah, there are a little of those, but there’s a lot more of these over here.

John Ainsworth: [00:22:24] I generally haven’t seen that. It’s much more nuanced with the kind of way that this has tended to work. What will what we’ll do in there is we’ll find out that the pain point that somebody they might understand who their audience is, but the pain point that they solve isn’t the one that they thought it was. What happens for a lot of people who are running businesses is they’re so close to the thing that they’re doing that they understand it so well that they think other people do as well. And really, other people aren’t trying to solve problem X, they’re trying to solve a deeper, more fundamental problem. So, for example, someone’s learning languages. The whole point for them is not getting better at the language. It’s, let’s say, being comfortable in a work environment when they have to travel or it’s being able to talk to the in-laws or it’s not feeling ashamed when they go to the supermarket and actually knowing the right words to say and fitting in. And that’s then the thing that actually matters to the prospect, the reason they actually buy. And once you understand that, then you can talk to that kind of pain point. You can discuss that. You can show how what you do is going to solve it, reassure the customer that you understand the situation they’re in and that you’re going to solve that problem for them. It tends to be that kind of level of stuff that people are learning now.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:38] I bet you got a lot of that insight when you had. We’re working with fitness centers because people don’t necessarily join a fitness center for the obvious reason. There are a lot more nuance to that experience.

John Ainsworth: [00:23:51] Yeah, 100%. So when we were working with trying to fill up those kickboxing classes, for example, what we’re looking at is it’s the moms who are actually doing the marketing, too. It’s not the kids who are going Now, what is it that the mom wants out of it? Why does the mom want the kid to go well, is it because they want the kid to stay fit? Is it wanting to lose weight? Be more confident? Is it they want to get them out of their hair for a little while? Like, what’s the thing that the parents are after in that situation? And that’s what you need to focus on. Is it that it’s a safe environment, that it’s going to be comfortable, you know, and so learning all of those kinds of things allows you to actually have the right message and then and then get the right kind of results from people.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:32] And it’s not asking, like, it’s not the obvious thing. A lot of times you have to go layers and layers deep and you have to ask why a few more times to get to the heart of this.

John Ainsworth: [00:24:43] Yeah, 100%. It’s. It’s really a. All of the top level stuff matters, but you need all of the deeper levels as well. You know, one of the things that we found I’d to work with getting cancer patients into physical activity and what the the technical reason like from a doctor’s point of view of why they should become more active was because if they got more active after they had got cancer, they were more likely to do well through the treatment, through the surgery, and they were more likely to prevent the cancer from coming back. But you couldn’t use that in your marketing for it because if you said to people. If you do physical activity, it’s a chance of it stopping the cancer from coming back. Then people interpreted that as, If I don’t do it, then it’s my then it’s my fault of the cancer comes back. And so it had a really negative kind of PR effect, so you couldn’t say these things. So instead what you had to do was you had to talk about the fact that it was going to make you feel better and give you more energy and some of the slightly lighter things. But you also couldn’t talk to people about doing it during treatment, even though that was the time when it was vitally important that people were active because everyone’s so tired during cancer treatment that they refused and they wouldn’t necessarily they wouldn’t hear it. So we would have to write to them two months after treatment finished and tell them we had some free support for them to come and get active. So all of these little nuances and details about like what actually is going to work for your audience is super important to understand so that you can talk to them in the right way.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:18] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s a website?

John Ainsworth: [00:26:24] So the best place to go is course profit i-report.com. And there’s a form there. And you fill in a few quick questions. And what we’ll do is we’ll figure out for you a personalized plan for your course business. We’ll figure out how much extra revenue you could make, what step to work on. First, we’ll send you training on how to do it. We’ll do a loom video where we talk you through the whole plan. So it’s not an automated thing someone from my team will go through and actually do that for you. It’s totally free. And then if you look like you’re a good fit to work with us, if you have the right kind of business and the right amount of traffic, etc., then we’ll drop you an email to say, let’s jump on a call and we can talk it through some more. And our whole service is based on only paid, based on results. So we, we’re quite picky about who will work with to make sure they’ve got the right kind of audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:11] Well, congratulations on all the success, and thank you so much for sharing your story today.

John Ainsworth: [00:27:17] Oh, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:19] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on High Velocity Radio.