How Kate Ahl Uses Cold Traffic + Tripwires To Grow Her Pinterest Membership Site!
Today’s episode is going to be a great one! My guest today is Kate Ahl of Simple Pin Media. Kate is a great friend and is in a mastermind with my wife Jocelyn. She runs an incredible Pinterest agency and membership community of Pinterest marketers. I absolutely loved this conversion with Kate Ahl and I know that you will too.
In today’s Membership Masters Podcast you will learn how Kate built her Pinterest collective into an amazing membership community of people paying her nearly $100/month every single month. We’re going to talk about how you can use tripwires to convert more cold traffic into paying memberships. And, we develop a strategy live on air in true mastermind format for using order bumps to get more leads into your membership the day they opt into your email list!
What You'll Learn:
-
You can’t do it all. (7:30)
-
Sometimes the secret is a system. (18:30)
-
Don’t make course for things that change. (20:00)
-
Growing the rice v. buying the rice. (31:00)
-
Who is your audience on each platform? (39:00)
-
How to optimize your membership funnel. (43:50)
-
Using next steps to up-sell in your membership. (50:00)
-
Why should I use a free trial? (1:02:00)
Story Notes
Kate Ahl started in 2014 and back then she was just into organic Pinterest management. She would get clients and manage their Pinterest presence. Over 4 years the number of clients she had sky-rocketed!
Their community looked different. Their prices were increasing as more people started tp use them. They never wanted to be virtual assistants they wanted to be a high-level agency. As they pulled away what they noticed was that people still wanted their education.
She realized that if she was going to create a course she could do big batches of videos and a few days later Pinterest (which is ever-changing) could change everything again in a matter of days. So, she shut down all of her courses and realized she needed to find a different way to teach. That’s when she talked to Jocelyn about memberships - and it changed everything!
In May of 2019 she and her team started The Simple Pin Collective. She has kept an open enrollment and her business is growing exponentially!
You can’t do it all.
We are seeing more and more this year how much full-time employees and our team truly is. Right now we are cranking out a ton of content and our members are being served better than ever. All because we hired a team. Doing all of this is totally possible - but not without the team to help my wife Jocelyn and I get it all done!
Like Kate said, when you do too much you are destroying your creativity and growth for your business. It is super important to have those loyal team members to make your visions realities!
Sometimes the secret is a system.
Like Kate said, as online entrepreneurs we get sold this idea that there is a secret. Sometimes the secret is just somebody else’s system and you’ve just not seen it before. It’s not that it can’t be done it’s just a new way of thinking about things.
Courses are notorious for giving a thought or idea and people will be disappointed and felt like they didn’t get much out of that. Memberships are different though. Memberships allow you to continually have those learning moments and guide you forward in your online business.
You can control your membership but controlling your platform is 10x harder. If you’re teaching something that you’re not in control of and constantly changing you have to make sure you keep up.
Don’t make course for things that change.
If you sit down and look at everything that changes across platforms you’ll notice it’s a lot! How do you get around that if you teach about certain platforms or systems that change? Make smaller courses if you have to teach on something. And, 80% of your entire teaching can usually be broken down into the actual concept.
Ex. You may how to schedule Facebook posts ahead through the Creator Studio. You might not always have the display at the left of the screen. It may move to the right side corner tomorrow. Instead of giving specifics like that - say how to get there from a generalized standpoint. You could say, “Go to your Homepage. Hover over ‘Publishing tools. Find Creator Studio.”
Teach people the core of the things they need to know but leave room for curiosity so they can questions and keep coming back!
Growing the rice v. buying the rice.
Back in January Kate’s team started doing Facebook ads along with a series of opt-ins they already had. Kate has never had problem with growing her email list but they were afraid to put ad dollars behind it.
I love the analogy Kate used used here: “sometimes you have to buy rice instead of growing rice. Growing rice can take a long time and sometimes it’s just better to go to the store and buy it.”
Kate is trying to sell her smaller-priced tripwire products to get people into her brand and her teaching. It’s okay if things like this take time. You might be like Kate and have to fix things over time and allow the time to tell give you what works and what doesn’t.
Who is your audience on each platform?
We’ve made the mistake in the past trying to bring people from one platform to our podcast but that’s not always best. They don’t want to do that. They’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever it is because that’s what they like to use!
You have to serve your audience on each platform. People that use Facebook might not use Twitter. Utilize the optimization of each platform. Like the example I gave of what we call our “Quick Flips” for the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We can use Facebook to target new audiences by condensing video versions of our podcast and showing them a quick few minutes version of the show. It gives them enough to create curiosity without giving everything away.
How to optimize your membership funnel.
Kate has an awesome membership funnel! We’ve clicked an ad, we’re on her page, here’s what she’s learned about how to optimize her membership funnel:
- Funnels are not a nurture sequence. After her free content was given to her audience or traffic she had to think about, “what do they need next?” When she asked the question she is using the answers to create a $17 tripwire. So now they have her Pinterest marketing planner but now the tripwire is getting her strategy, examples, and a video to fill in the next steps gap. Then, she goes into an email sequence about how Pinterest is important for businesses. Lastly, she takes them into the membership where it ties everything in together.
- Using coupons for her monthly membership price that is given thorough her email sequences works really well for her. (Going from $97/mo to $87/mo). She reassures people they can come in or leave whenever they want and people really like that.
- Solving a common problem by giving image guide for Pinterest is a good way to bring people into another tripwire for Pinterest templates. That $17 tripwire leads people into her membership and how it can help coach them on the best images. As well as giving access to coaches to help support them. They use another code for this too which helps track the membership funnel they came in at.
Using next steps to up-sell in your membership.
When people sign up for a free trial into Flipped Lifestyle we tel them “your login will be ready in 15 minutes While you wait watch this mandatory video tour.” We take them through a 3minute tour of the community to get them hyped up. Then we prompt a next step up-sell. We remind them that they will not succeed unless they are committed. We prompt them to a quarterly upgrade at 50%.
37.5% of people used that in July alone - the could totally work as a tripwire too!
Why should I use a free trial?
We really value the culture of the Flip Your Life community and we let people know that from the jump. So, we take a credit card with the free trial. It makes it easier on the customer if they want to renew but it also lets us know who these people are. We let people know that use this because we have to verify someone’s identity if we are going to let them into our community. People get freebies from the course!
Dollar trials are better leads and people stay longer. Dollar trials are good filter for people that are going to become actual members. But, you can get so many more people in with the free trials and that’s why we choose that route. Even if the free trial people stay for less time we make more money over the course of a year.
Free trials are great for cold traffic because it’s for people that either don’t understand what you’re doing or don’t trust you yet.
Remember to subscribe and leave us a review to the Membership Masters Podcast here on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/membership-masters-podcast/id1519253634
You can also listen this week's full episode here on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/28WYzlvvWpAe2miPxip8Br
