As a coach or course creator in 2022, you should not be in shortage of clients and customers. Statistics show that 6,900,000 students in the US take at least one course online. With the whole world hitting the reset button, there are countless unexplored avenues in both the business and personal development space where people are actively looking for coaching and support.
Then why is it still so hard to find clients for your coaching business in 2022 not to say in 2023?
The answer lies in coaches and course creators not being able to effectively market and stand out in front of their target customers.
One way to stand out is by giving consistent value over time to your potential and existing clients. Doing so will build trust, influence, and make your brand a figure of authority in the minds of your target audience. The best is that you can do it at a place they treat as their personal space and check every day - their email inbox.
Hence, as a coach or course creator, you need to master the art of email marketing and apply its nuances to build trust, influence, and authority. Doing so will ultimately lead you to create omnipresence in the lives of your target audience and get them as lifelong customers.
Every niche has its own features, and coaching and course industry has some as well.
Email marketing for coaches is very different from that of a commodity product. For starters, email marketing for coaches and course creators has a lot to do with personal storytelling.
As a coach or internet marketer creating digital products, your persona is your product. Since you are selling your time and skills to make others achieve a transformation, your personality plays a key role. And this personality can best be built and described by personal storytelling.
This is in stark contrast to any other product based email marketing. In a commodity product, email marketing mainly pertains to listing out the benefits of the product, followed by an offer.
So as a coach or course creator, how do you use email marketing to tell a personal story and connect it with your product?
Well, the idea is simple. Here’s how you do it:
Package this system with a name and offer, and present it as a course product to your clients.
Compared to other commodity products having a clear utility-based outcome, a coach or course creator delivers results that go deeper into an emotional level. They address various milestones in their customer’s roadmap to success.
This needs the building of trust and establishing relationships. This can be done by following an email nurturing sequence that focuses on being interactive, addressing their 3 AM pain points, and building relationships.
Start the nurturing sequence by introducing yourself and sharing your personal story, as mentioned above.
Next, tell them what they can expect from you in the coming weeks in the form of emails and the frequency at which they will receive these emails.
After that, start sending them emails that talk about your case studies and give value, all related to the final transformation that your target audience is trying to achieve. The goal should be to provide enough value in the emails that make your target audience move closer to their intended transformation.
Follow this up with some frequently asked questions or problems prevalent in your niche. Answer them comprehensively to alleviate any doubts about your ability in the minds of your audience.
Only when you establish yourself with case studies and value emails that position you as a trusted expert, you can start sending emails about your product.
The nurturing sequence is important. Do not ignore this step. Ideally, as a coach, you should send them one mail a day for the first 5-7 days to build familiarity and nurture them towards buying a low ticket product.
Coaches have to create and maintain a greater degree of presence in their prospect’s life via their newsletter.
Why so?
To answer this, let’s understand your customer deeper.
Your customer is ideally a prospect struggling at certain things in their lives, where your coaching can help them fix these specific problems. At this struggling stage, your customer is at a higher state of vulnerability. They are seeking hope and measures that can show that this particular problem can be solved. They are not only seeking the end transformation but also seeking emotional support.
As a coach or course creator, you need to approach this client from a place of empathy. You need to be not only their guide but also their emotional support. You need to alleviate the doubts and agony they have about the problem. You do this by being a constant presence in their lives that is forever guiding them through the turmoil and towards the transformation.
You need to adopt the nurturing sequence and share your successful client stories in the form of case studies. By filling any knowledge gaps they have about the topic and solving their burning questions, you stand out from the crowd.
Since you are basically assuming the role of a guide in the lives of your target audience, you need to be more active. You need to be a constant figure in their lives.
In contrast to other industries coming up with a sales offer on their utility product, you need to be the human presence in their lives, guiding them with empathy. With coaching, it is more subliminal where you have to dive deeper into their pains and agony and present your results as a human, communicating to another human, bringing empathy in your approach.
As a coach, you need multiple sequences addressing different emotional and psychological pain points of your prospect, who can be at various stages in your funnel.
Other utility products will have a fairly straightforward approach and simply talk about the benefits of their products. At the end of the day, they are benefits that can be sold with a cookie-cutter approach.
Helping your prospect as a coach is more nuanced than that due to the human element and behavior based on what stage of the problem they are in. Thus, the need for high customization in messaging is needed, based on where your audience is.
Let’s dive deeper into this.
As a coach or course creator, you need to meet the client where they are currently at. Now, different customer segments will be at various stages of transformation.
Based on that, you need to create content that addresses every stage of transformation and present case studies accordingly. Next, you need to customize the messaging to such a level that you send the right messaging to the right people.
Utility products do not need this level of customization or segmenting. With utility products, it's basically a straightforward approach to pitching the benefits and describing what the product does. With coaching, it is more experiential and an arrangement of emotional and tangible outcomes.
Till now, we discussed why email marketing for coaches is vastly different from any other product-based marketing. The differences lie in coaches and course creators needing greater degree of personalization, nurturing, and segmentation than other products.
The best way to achieve and implement these elements in your email marketing is by using HubSpot marketing automation.
Here are some top ways that you can maximize your email marketing deliverables with HubSpot:
Being personal in your messaging is one of the most powerful tools for establishing influence. When you stop treating your audience as a random crowd and address them via their name and talk about their pains and struggles, you create empathy. This makes you stand out from the crowd as now your audience pays greater attention to you.
As a coach or course creator, you need to send personalized emails to your prospects and client list. But doing so at scale becomes a tough task.
So how do you go about it?
The answer lies with HubSpot marketing automation.
With the help of HubSpot workflows, you can issue personalized tokens that will enable you to show personalized content to your subscribers. As a coach or course creator, use this to your advantage by sending highly personalized emails to your target audience and create a position of empathy and influence with them.
You can use your email subscriber’s information in their contact records to automatically fetch them the most relevant subject lines, attachments, content, links, and CTAs.
Then, you can schedule your email campaign and hit the send button. The email will show up in your subscriber’s inbox at an optimal time based on their specific time zones.
This way, you can do personalization at scale by creating automated email workflows that address your audience as a person. You can create these email workflows that can get triggered when an audience member signs up from your email capture form, and address the personalization based on the actions he took through his journey on your site - clicking a particular page on your blog, clicking a particular link, and so on.
These personalized emails will instantly leverage your brand by establishing the initial rapport and building strong empathy.
HubSpot enables you with the ability to A/B test your different email campaigns.
Use this to test different parameters like subject lines that get the most opens and content/CTAs that get the most clicks and engagement.
With HubSpot, you can get really in-depth by finding out who exactly is engaging with your mail, the device they are using, the most popular links, etc.
This will paint the entire experience your audience is having and preferring in terms of your mails. Use this information to fine-tune your email campaigns and optimize them for higher engagement and an increase in course sales.
With HubSpot workflows, you can segment your audience based on their interaction with your content.
You can segment them based on the particular content they engaged with, the frequency of their previous purchases, and many other factors.
This segmentation and intel on your prospect’s behavior can help you send strong persuasion triggers that can help improve your course sales.
You can use the list segmentation tool to achieve this audience segmentation.
Apart from this, you can use another powerful HubSpot tool called smart content to fetch customized messaging for your target audience.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you are a weight loss coach and have a prospective customer living in the United States. Based on this information, you can segment this particular individual to your U.S. based list. Doing this will enable you as a coach to create custom messaging for your U.S. based prospective customer.
So, the next time this person lands on your website, you can leverage the smart content tool to fetch customized messaging. You can fetch custom images and content that appeals to his U.S. based lifestyle and culture.
Imagine how powerful this feature can get when you create multiple segments based on their persona characteristics.
So use this segmentation feature to amplify your persuasion.
This is one of the most powerful features of HubSpot. Behavioral-based targeting can help coaches and course creators send emails to buyers based on their past and recent behavior on your site. For example, if your prospect has already bought a lower ticket offer, you can send email upsells about your higher ticket course or offer a one on one coaching program. Since the person has already bought something from you, they will be more likely to buy the upsell.
As a coach, you can leverage this feature to make your target audience go up the value ladder.
A value ladder is a sequence or line-up of offers that increase in price and value as a customer goes through them. Every step of a value ladder represents a milestone or transformative experience for the buyer. This starts from initial awareness corresponding to a lower ticket offer to a premium offering giving a completely transformative experience.
When a person starts going through your value ladder by purchasing a lower ticket offer, you can leverage their action to offer them a highly relevant upsell.
This upsell should be connected with the low ticket offer but promise results that move your prospect further up the value ladder. Typically this upsell offer will make the audience get the transformation faster and better.
Use and leverage this value ladder by retargeting your buyers with relevant upsell emails via HubSpot.
Behavioral retargeting growth hack to maximize profit: Along with offering upsells via email, you can also leverage it even during the actual buying process. You can do it by using DepositFix’s one-click-upsell feature.
Here’s how to use it:
While a customer is buying your low ticket offer, put an option to add another relevant product as an upsell to the low ticket offer. With DepositFix, your customer can add the upsell to their checkout by a simple tick of a checkbox. The price amount will re-adjust automatically and include the price of the upsell. This feature can be a real profit maximizer for coaches and course creators.
HubSpot can be used to build multiple funnels simultaneously for your coaching business.
You can create and schedule specific nurturing sequences based on the lead magnet your audience signed up for.
This way, you can nurture them through the buyer’s journey by sending a highly targeted nurturing sequence based on their lead magnet interest.
Using HubSpot, you can use multiple such nurturing campaigns simultaneously, thus leading to higher conversions in terms of course sales.
Another great advantage of HubSpot is its ability to fetch in-depth analytical data to get accurate information on your team’s marketing performance.
You can use this information to analyze what worked in terms of your email communication strategy and avoid the ones that flopped.
Till now, we went through how HubSpot can help you optimize the email marketing campaigns for your coaching business.
Next, let’s take a look at DepositFix, and how it compliments HubSpot in maximizing your profit and put more money in your bank with its income-generating payment page features.
This is one of the most interesting features of DepositFix. Like we previously discussed, DepositFix has a special feature to add a 1-click-upsell while a customer is about to buy a product. Coaches can leverage it but adding a relevant mid-tier upsell on a low-ticket course product. An example can be selling a short crash course with an upsell to a mid-tier course product.
DepositFix gives you the ability to send Thank you emails to people who purchased your product. This is a good way to create goodwill and generate trust, assurance, and gratitude for the customer’s purchase. As a coaching business, you can leverage this email marketing feature to give your customers the next step. This can be a mail asking them to keep an eye on your next mail having the course access. This way the feature can be used for gratitude as well as assurance that the course access is soon to be mailed.
DepositFix uses the power of HubSpot’s multi-touch attribution reporting to help you understand how your email marketing activities are generating revenue.
DepositFix enables you to have the feature of data sync from DepositFix to HubSpot. DepositFix provides data to HubSpot like contact info with payment fields, deals, and more. Leveraging this data, you as a coach can create detailed insights and reports about your performance inside HubSpot.
This can lead to a better understanding of customer behavior, and ultimately more course sales.
Leveraging trust is an important factor in maximizing course sales. You can customize DepositFix to match your brand aesthetics and design language. This will create visual consistency throughout your customer’s experience with your brand, thus increasing trust for your coaching brand.
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing and sales tools you have in your coaching business. With the combined duo of HubSpot and DepositFix, you can leverage the maximum out of your email marketing campaign. This can lead to maximizing sales revenue for course creators.
Click this link to book a free demo for DepositFix.
