Earlier today I sent out an email announcing a webinar on how to create webinars that sell…
Here’s the registration link if you’d like to check it out. (It’s definitely filling quickly!)
As you can imagine, I’m thinking a lot about webinar campaigns right now.
And there’s a key word in that sentence: campaigns.
Most people focus on a different word there. Most people are ultra-concerned about the webinar itself.
The webinar is important — yes.
But ultimately it’s my experience that the total campaign is by far the most important element.
I still remember getting this lesson from Brendon Burchard…
And I know he’s far from the first or only person to teach it. But he said it in a way that stuck with me, many years ago.
Most advertisers think in terms of “the advertisement.”
Good advertisers think in terms of “the advertising campaign.”
When I got started as a freelance copywriter, most of my clients followed what was then the standard online direct response model…
— Create a sales letter, with order form.
— Create emails to direct traffic to the sales letter.
— Send out those emails, and hopefully make some sales.
You can’t blame them. Just a few years before most of these clients buttered their bread by sending out one-shot sales letters through direct mail. You’d rent permission to mail a few thousand names, and you’d send your sales letter to those people. You had one shot to make the sale, and your promotion succeeded or failed based on that.
There were more sophisticated marketers — notably Dan Kennedy and his students — who would send out multi-touch sequences, such as Dan’s famous 3-step sales letter sequence. (I wrote about this in my article, What marketer Dan Kennedy discovered when he was deep in debt…)
But for the most part, the main goal was to get your one-shot sales letter in front of prospects.
Heck, I even had clients who put the whole 5,000-word-plus sales letter into an email.
When we turned it into a campaign though, that’s when sales went up!
One of my first big successes inadvertently became a campaign.
You see, we created it just like any other one-shot sales letter.
But then it did really well.
I got a call from the client…
Them: “Roy, this thing is selling so well, we’re concerned about making sure we take care of customers.”
Me: “Well, send out an email that says you’re pulling down the offer, and then put it back up once you’ve taken care of this first wave of customers.”
Them: “We’ve never done that before. It seems disingenuous. Like a marketing trick. We’re going to leave it up for now.”
A day later, they call again…
Them: “Roy, we’re following your advice. We’re going to take this down for now. We need a couple emails that tell people to get in before we pull the offer.”
Suddenly it went from a one-shot with a couple announcement emails, to a campaign with a real deadline.
They sent out the announcements to officially pull the offer, and actually generated an even bigger wave of sales leading into the deadline.
They broke their sales records for promotions built around one-shot, because they accidentally turned it into a campaign.
This is a lesson I took with me…
And, in fact, it’s part of what motivated my Campaign Map that turned into what I’m going to teach on the Webinars That Sell webinar.
I figured if we could stumble into a campaign built around a sales message, we could have even more success by planning it.
I just had to find the right opportunity. (I was newer as a copywriter, so clients weren’t falling all over themselves to take all my advice… yet.)
So I was working with another client, and we generated a couple smaller wins in a row by doing one-shot campaigns. Again, email to sales letter to cart, without much of a structure built around it.
Then, I had an opportunity.
They had a service that was not open all the time. They wanted to reopen it to their customer and prospect lists.
The simple act of having an opening meant there would also be a closing. I heard “campaign” and I got to work.
Now, we didn’t even have a webinar yet. This one would be another sales letter.
But I built it in much the same way.
We planned a campaign to announce it. We planned a campaign to drive engagement with our main sales message. And then we planned follow-up messaging around the offer, to coincide with closing registrations.
This was a high-priced offer, so the sales added up quickly.
We sold over $1 million worth of that service, which again was a record for this client.
Then I did it again…
At this point, I was ready to do a webinar. Plus I had the clout to get the client to do it, with very little pressing on my part.
So I sat down and created the Campaign Map. (I still have that original, and used it when creating the Campaign Map PDF I’ll give away free when you attend my Webinars That Sell webinar.)
I thought about all the elements that would go into the campaign. What to do before the webinar. What we needed to do during the webinar. And what to do after the webinar, to maximize sales.
Then, a hiccup.
The client gave me almost ZERO control over what they’d talk about on the webinar itself.
I helped them nail the topic.
And I could give them what they needed for a call-to-action at the end.
But the webinar itself would be all content, and decided without my input.
Not an ideal scenario. So I set out to control everything I could control, for the best possible outcome.
I busted my butt to get as many people signed up beforehand as I could. And based on my campaign structure, I got as many to attend as possible.
(Too many, in fact — because their site couldn’t handle the load of 10,000-plus people loading the same html file that was a wrapper for the video hosted through a robust streaming platform.)
Then, I had a clear plan for where attendees would be directed after the event. Plus how to communicate with people based on whether or not they attended.
Again, it was all campaign thinking that did it.
And despite many challenges, we generated over $400,000 in sales of a much lower-priced product than the previous campaign, and got a ton of NEW customers who hadn’t purchased from them before (which turned out to have a very high lifetime value as well).
This is like a secret weapon for generating sales (or leads)…
At the time I was doing these campaigns, I wasn’t nearly as good of a copywriter as I am today.
And yet, we were able to sell a ton of these different products.
Not because of the quality of the copy.
But because the campaigns around the copy did what they needed to do.
That’s a powerful lesson, that can help you make way more sales, pretty much right away.
And if you’d like to apply it to creating webinars that sell — for yourself or your clients — here’s that registration link again.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
