Hello, Hello friends, it's your host, Ellen Yin. Welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google. This is actually our 25th bonus episode, since we started implementing this at the beginning of the year. So that's pretty exciting. And you'll notice that in the last few bonus episodes, we've expanded on the case study that we cover in our Monday interviews. So I thought I would continue with that this week, just because I have something that I can add to the conversation that I had with Sarah and Annette.
If you haven't yet listened to their episode, make sure you tune in first. But in essence, we talked about how they added urgency to their free workshop funnel in order to increase their funnel conversions by 50%. And this type of funnel, this free workshop funnel, also commonly known as a free webinar funnel, a free masterclass funnel, a free training funnel, it could be any one of those things, it's just when someone opts in and gives you their email in order to access a recorded training, if it's evergreen, or live training if you're doing it live. And then at the end of that free training, typically you are inviting somebody to join your program. So it's a way to sell someone into your program. And this is a funnel that we're quite familiar with.
We had an evergreen webinar funnel for almost three years. And so you know, we did a lot of tweaking and testing and improvement over that time, just like Sarah and Annette are currently still doing in their business. So I wanted to add in a few additional things that we didn't get a chance to cover in their case study but are things that we have tried in our own free workshop funnel that has helped improve conversions in case that is a funnel that you are currently using in your business or planning to use in the future.
So the first thing, if you remember, Sarah and a net had clarified that the way they track their funnel conversions, they are looking at the number of people who buy their program out of the people who are leads, and they count a lead as anyone who obviously opts in gives their email to access the training. So if you're looking at webinar conversion rates, and let's say they say we have a 2% conversion rate, that means for every 100 People that opt in to watch the free workshop, two of them end up becoming a customer. So 2 divided by 100 is 2%. So just keeping that definition in front of mind.
And with that, one way that we really saw the higher conversions right from lead to sale is increasing the number of people who actually watch your workshop or watch your free training your free webinar or free masterclass, however you want to call it we call it a masterclass. I'll just refer to it that way. And this is really key, but often missed by people, because we're so focused on top of funnel, right, we're so focused on how can we get more traffic to our webinar, Masterclass registration page, so that we can get more leads that we can get more email opt ins, we're so focused on that top number that oftentimes we're missing the mark, especially if you're doing this evergreen, if you have a recorded training that people are opting in to watch, we often miss the fact that many, many, many of the people who are opting in, never actually end up pressing play on the training for whatever reason, or maybe they watch the first few minutes get distracted and never come back to it. So if they're not actually watching the full training, how useful is that workshop or that masterclass really, in converting someone from a lead to a sale?
It's not useful at all right, if they're not actually consuming the content. And so this was something that we really started to zero in on and thinking, Okay, we get a really steady or I say we get I should say this in the past tense because we no longer have this webinar funnel. But this is fairly recent, like within the last year, right that we retired it so we got a really steady stream every single month of new webinar leads. But that was the drop off that we realized was creating a huge issue for us in terms of conversions, the fact that people weren't actually sticking around to watch the entire thing. So one way that we started getting more people to actually follow through on watching the free masterclass that they had signed up for is on the registration form. We added in an optional fields where someone can enter their Instagram handles so the required fields were their first name and their email address. When you're thinking about creating opt in forms, you really want to lower the barrier error to entry. So the less questions you ask, the more likely someone will actually complete the form. That's why we only ever require first name for most of these registration type of form.
So it's first name, email, and then we had an optional third field, which was What's your IG handle? This one was really helpful to us because we know that people are used to being sold to in their emails, they're used to getting mass marketing emails, but it always feels much more personal when someone messages you, in your DMS in your inbox on social media, one on one to check in on you, right? I mean, people don't really, we haven't really mastered the art of like mass marketing in in DMS, you can't really just like draft up one message and hit send across your entire followers list, right? It's not it doesn't function the same way as an email this so for someone to land in your inbox into your DMS, when I say inbox, I mean DMS for someone to actually take the time to message you individually, your likelihood that you're going to respond to that person instantly increases and the likelihood that person's going to see your message also increases. I know for a fact that I often, even if I'm not as great always about responding to every single DM I do tend to see them faster sometimes than I even do emails. So with that in mind, just by asking people for their Instagram handles, we were able to reach out to every single person that gave us their handle and just send them a quick message like, Hey, I saw that you signed up for my free masterclass. I'm so excited for you to watch this training. Have you had a chance to finish that yet?
We always would lead with that very simple, first opener question, because we're just trying to start a conversation, right, we're just trying to help them make use of the resource that they signed up for. So that's the easiest way to just kind of keep track of who isn't isn't watching. And I kid you not guys more than 50% of the time. I can't remember the exact percentage, but it was definitely more than half the people who would respond would say, oh, no, I haven't had a chance to watch it. Even if they opted in a week ago, or 48 hours ago, it could be any time between when they first opted in to seven days, they still may not have actually sat down to watch the thing yet. And so just having that extra layer of accountability, where we're checking in with them and saying, Oh, no worries, we totally get it, we want to make sure you get a chance to watch the training, because you're going to we would like reiterate some of the key things in that training that they were interested in.
And then we would always ask them, will you have time to watch you know, tomorrow or today or some you know, something that creates that sense, again, that sense of urgency or accountability for wanting to do it? And if they said yes, you know, I do have time to watch, let's say tomorrow or on Friday or this weekend, we would then ask a follow up question. Awesome. Would you like me to circle back with you then and see if you have any additional questions that come up for you after watching the training, and nine times out of 10 people were really grateful for the opportunity to get that additional support that they need. So they were like, yeah, definitely check back in with me this weekend. And let's talk. So this is just such a great way to go above and beyond in serving people before they've ever even purchased. And it allows you to ensure that more of your leads actually watch your training, which will thereby Of course, increase your conversions.
Now in tangent to that something else that kind of started to spark more conversations in the DMS because not everybody would provide us their Instagram handle when they registered, right. So another way that we try to initiate those conversations or get those conversations to come to us in bound if we weren't the ones actually initiating is in the training itself, there would be a section where I would walk them through this quick exercise, something that could be done right there. And then while they're watching in real time, so the key here is it needs to be an exercise or an action item that takes ideally less than two minutes for them to complete. If it takes any longer than that you're going to run into some hurdles. And in seeing people actually do the thing, right. So in our case, we walked people through how to reverse engineer their first $10,000 month if they sold a one on one service. So we kind of walked them through the math of that. And then I would ask them to DM me their specific numbers that they came up with because it's unique to every business, right.
And the way that we taught it, there was actually one magic number that kind of dictated, I guess the entire marketing strategy, you build your business around. So every person at the end of walking through that exercise with me would have a different number. And so I would ask people to DM me their number. And then we would start a conversation from there. So through that additional call to action, we got some other people into our DMS that maybe hadn't given us their Instagram handle initially. So that was another great way that we started to have that same type of conversation. It just had a different entry point.
And again, all all of this is really leading back to the opportunity to have that high touch where you can give someone the opportunity to ask a question that they may not have initiated on their own. Sometimes people are watching, especially if you're doing evergreen workshops that can be watching the training in a question might come to mind. But it might feel a little bit scary or just something that is not a priority for them to message you that question right off the bat. But if you give them another easy way to start a conversation, then you can take on the burden of guiding them through, okay, are there any additional questions, and you can be the one to kind of lead them through that process. So we also found that worked really well.
Now the third and final tip I wanted to share here is, as you know, in Sarah and Annette's episode on Monday, they really talked about how using the tool deadline funnel really helped them and creating urgency for people to make a decision and take action, right, which I mean, we universally know is true for humans, like it is helpful when you give people parameters, or timeframes that they have to complete something because their likelihood to do it is much higher. Now in Sarah and Annette's case, they were applying that deadline funnel to people's decision to join the program. Because if people joined within a certain time before the countdown expired, they would get to save a significant amount of money on the program enrollment fee. And they would also get some additional bonuses if they paid in full. So that was kind of how they apply the urgency, you can also apply urgency at a different point in the decision journey. So it doesn't always have to be at that point where they're making the decision to buy or not, it could be earlier in that consideration process.
And like I mentioned heavily at the beginning, the more people you get to actually watch your free workshop or training, the higher your conversion rates will be naturally right, because the more the more opportunities you actually have to sell. And so you know, just thinking, I mean, logically, if you have 100, people sign up for your training. And on average, only 20 people actually see the training, you really only have that pool of 20 people. So if you know two of them by your conversion rate is going to feel low. But in reality, it's because only 1/5 of the people that you had the opportunity to invite to your program actually ever got the opportunity, right. So if you could even double that if you could even increase, you know, from 20 people watching your training to 40 people watching your training, assuming the conversion rate stays relatively similar, you may actually see your enrollment numbers double almost overnight. And so what I'm saying here is that the deadline piece of it, you can apply to that point in the consideration process.
So for example, you could place a deadline around how many hours or days someone has the opportunity to actually watch the free workshop or free masterclass that they opted in for. So especially if you're doing this as an evergreen webinar funnel, right. Instead of giving people unlimited time to access the training, at any point after they've opted in, which naturally leads to procrastination, as we saw with our own data, when we would ask people you know, even up to seven days after they had opted in, Hey, did you have a chance to watch it? And more than half of them said, No, I haven't. So we knew that people were struggling with actually sitting down to just watched the free training that they had opted in for. So knowing that if we place a parameter around the free training, and we say, Okay, once you've opted in, you have 72 hours to watch this free training or 48 hours or 24 hours or however you want to place it right, you have X amount of hours to watch this training for free. After that, when you go to try watch the training, you'll no longer be able to access the page where the training is hosted. Right?
I think that is such an effective strategy because it actually makes the free training itself feel more valuable, right? It's like I have put so much value into this thing that I'm offering to you for free. But only if you also recognize the value and are willing to commit your time to watch it. Like I'm not asking you to invest your money. But I am asking you to invest your time in order to receive access to this. And if you don't if you choose not to take action on that, that free training is no longer available to you. Right? And so if you maybe don't feel as aligned with wanting to apply a deadline to someone's decision to buy or not, but you like the idea of adding an element of urgency into your funnel, maybe you just take that urgency element and like I said apply it to earlier in the consideration process like creating an expiration date around the free training itself. You can also do this with replays for live trainings right?
If you're hosting a live webinar or a live masterclass live workshop, what have you, you could also say, Hey, if you're not able to make it, we're happy to send out the replay, but the replays going to expire in 24 hours. So again, it's getting people to actually commit to doing the thing that they said they wanted to do when they signed up for the opportunity to watch your free class. All right, that kind of wraps up the three main things that we implemented into our own free workshop or free webinar funnel that really helped us increase conversions. And it's just a, you know, a complimentary, I think perspective to what Sarah and Annette shared in their episode on Monday. So I hope this was helpful to you.
If you're enjoying these bonus episodes, being kind of like an add on to the case study on Mondays, where you please DM me at @MissEllenYin and let me know that you like this format. Earlier in the year, we were testing just kind of doing more off the cuff bonus episodes, I did a lot more behind the business episodes, talking about things that were going on in real time in our own business or things that were inspiring me as a leader, as a CEO, as I'm just going throughout this year. So we haven't done a bonus episode like that in a few weeks now or maybe even a few months. So if you're liking this current format, where each bonus episode is related to the same week's guest interview case study, we can totally you know, continue to run with this format. But if you miss more of that behind the business type of conversation, where you know, the topic for the bonus episode can vary week to week. Please also let us know that you would like to see more of that come back because we really want to make sure ultimately that this extra content this double dose that you get of Cubicle to CEO each week is of maximum benefit to you.
So anyways, we have a fun episode coming your way next week, celebrating our 200th episode on the show, which is going to be so so so cool to celebrate that milestone with you all and 200th episode as an 200th Guest interview or Monday episode. And I'm just so excited that some of you all are part of that episode as well. So keep your ears and eyes peeled for that episode dropping on Monday. And I will check in with you then.
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