For most of us, the sale is often our end goal.
It's the focus of all of our onboarding, our nurturing, our meticulously tested sales pages, and the overall "customer journey" funnel.
It's also how we get paid 😉
But for our customers? The sale is just the beginning...
People invest in courses, books, etc. because they want to change something. They believe, by investing, that what you're offering will help transform something about their business or their lives in a way that's better than how it is now.
But you might be surprised to hear that 90% of people who buy online courses never actually complete them.
(For lower cost / "impulse buy" products, like books, I'm sure the rate is much higher.)
And it's one thing to complete a course or read an entire book, but what about actually doing something with what you learn?
It's depressing.
Digital product success rates are often in the low single digits.
Today I'd like to make a case for increasing customer completion and success rates by leveraging a post-purchase accountability sequence.
For the last few years, I've added email follow-up sequences to my digital products and it's worked out really well:
Many of my customers actually go through all my material
A very high percentage of sales come via word of mouth (I know this thanks to feedback loops I've set up)
Testimonials largely come in on autopilot
Refund rates are <1%
Last month, I overhauled how I'm providing automated accountability + feedback collection for my course, Mastering ConvertKit.
Below are all the details on what I'm doing now to increase success rates, and the reasoning behind it all...
As creators, we owe it to our customers to do everything in our power to help them succeed.
Getting someone to buy a course or a book, or signing up for a membership site, that's relatively easy to do.
And all the optimisations we make to our funnels, our pitch sequences, and our sales pages do a damn good job of turning more prospects into paying customers by selling them on "the dream."
But the hard part is to turning a customer into a success story, and seeing them transform away from the pain that sold them on your product toward the solution that you promised them in your sales copy.
We should all want super successful customers
Want to know the secret to getting referrals?
Do everything in your power to help make your customers successful.
Back in my agency days (10+ years ago, now!) we quickly realised that referrals from past clients resulted in our best deals.
And we wanted more of them.
We learned that just handing over a new website or codebase didn't actually ensure success.
Yes, we technically succeeded (we built the thing they needed), but for most of our clients, this was just the beginning.
Over time, they'd need to test their website with real people. They'd need to make changes based on what they were learning on the go. And they'd need to know how to safely maintain, manage, and adapt the thing we built for them.
We started doing two things that worked really well:
Every client had a series of "offboarding" meetings. We'd recommend how they should host and maintain our project, along with ensuring that they were set up for success once we were out of the picture.
When we handed off a project, we'd set up a series of calendar reminders. +2 weeks out, +4 weeks out, +2 months out, etc. This would help us proactively reach out to see how our past clients were getting along and make additional recommendations + pitch different ideas based on what they were experiencing now that their project was live.
Unsurprisingly, this helped us stay top-of-mind. And it led to more referrals and follow-up work.
These ideas stuck with me after I left the agency world and started selling digital products online.
Tackling the 4 "new customer" problems that creators face
I've recently overhauled my customer accountability programme for Mastering ConvertKit, and I'd like to share with you the general outline I'm using and the thoughts behind the touch points I've set up.
Let's look at the problems that I wanted to tackle with this overhaul:
#1) Shiny object syndrome
"This is exactly where I want my business to be! Even though I'm totally slammed with a million other things, I'm going to buy this..."
Buying is easy. Doing the work is not.
The course has a bit of an adoption curve in that a customer needs to first go through what I teach, and then figure out how to apply it to their specific business, and then they actually need to do the work (e.g. setting up email automations, writing email content, etc.)
The downside to a "do-it-yourself" online course is that someone can't just pay me money and I give them exactly what they need. However, many customers – whether they know it or not – often believe it's as easy as that.
What I don't want is for customers to buy my stuff and never actually log in to the courseware. I want to provide additional context that's officially outside of my courses that get customers to think about how they could apply what I teach to their own unique needs – while also encouraging customers to hop over to specific lessons and internalise what I'm trying to teach them.
The fix:
Create an accountability programme that serves as a "virtual course club." After someone buys, a regular series of emails will go out that go through each module and lesson. These emails will provide additional context into what I cover in the course, and provide hot links directly to various lessons + resources.
