Empower your Travel Industry with high converting funnels for Travel Industry

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you can recreate that empathy they have an asset schol that enables those conversion rates to be so high because you're you get to listen to your the person you're selling to and hear their specific objections and hear what's going on in their life Welcome to the creators Adventure where we interview creators from around the world hearing their stories about growing a business today we're going to share a copyrighting process that anyone could apply to their business to get more sales hey everyone I'm Brian maaly the founder of heights platform let's get into it hey everyone we're here today with Abby Prendergast she has over a decade of experience in freelance copywriting and is the founder of the AP process a specialized methodology for creating High converting sales funnels and helping course creators increase conversion rates and make more sales Abby welcome to the show hi Brian thank you so much for having me it's a pleasure to be here yeah so my first question for you is what would you say is the biggest thing you did or are doing that helped you to achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy o good question um I mean I I kind of always knew that I wanted to to do freelancing entrepreneurship in some capacity like I wanted that freedom like not having to to work for someone else go to like an an office in like 95 every day um I mean at the beginning it was just the case of kind of taking any any job that paid where I got paid to write and I I guess the the freedom came when I started owning what I do and saying yes I have something to offer I have something to offer my clients um I care about upskilling I care about offering the best service to my clients and that really is what empowered me to then charge more and of course when you charge more you take on fewer clients um you have more time to do the things you enjoy and I think that's really when I started to feel like yeah no I I I do have the freedom in my life that I actually wanted to um as a freelancer as opposed to just being a freelancer kind of scrambling for spare pennies yeah yeah true I'm curious like you said that you kind of always knew you wanted to be a freelancer can you point to like any any specific things or feelings like did you ever have a more tradition job or how how did that exactly work for you no I didn't um I can remember like in school um speaking to one of my teachers and I was just really frustrated because like you know we we were like 17 and we'd have to put our hand up to go to use the the toilet the bathroom or whatever and I was just like this is like ridiculous and she was just like well you know you're always going to have to follow rules like when you you know you working at a job there's always rules and I was just I just remember thinking why why I don't want that like I want to I want to be my own boss I want to make my own rules and so just straight away like I was already looking at ways I could make money online I mean I did I did go to university I did kind of start down that traditional um route but I was freelancing throughout that and by the time I finished I was just like I you know I'm just going to I'm just going to keep doing this um and see how I can make it work yeah that's great yeah um I mean I went through a similar Journey myself and for me yeah in like the last uh years of high school like I was just over it um and like same kind of idea why do I have to do these things and I think it's a great question for an entrepreneur to ask themselves like why not why can't it be something different and for me at that time it wasn't um so much about like the the rules in the same way that you mentioned for me what was something it's like I just wanted to be done with it and and do things that I enjoyed and so in my senior year of high school like I had organized it so I had the classes that um for at least one or two quarters of the year I was going into school and I'd be there at like 7:30 and I would leave at 9:30 like I had like 2our school day because I already did all my other classes and like I could have taken other like math classes or science or whatever but I just wanted to go home and like figure out my business or or do something that wanted to work on and um it was uh it was an interesting experience with that because like no one had done that everyone had taken like these study break periods like throughout the years to like space all that out and I never took any of those so I could just leave early and so like CU I asked like the the guidance counselor in the school I was like so if I have those this extra periods I can take this early release can I take multiple early releases and just leave really early and you're like I guess you could and so that's that's what I did and then um I went just right into my business out of high school but it was like for me I was thinking like it it wasn't like natural in the sense of like oh I'm just going to do this I know I'm going to do this but it came from actually like a worry of like everybody's trying to figure out like what they're going to do I don't know what I'm going to do I have to figure that out and I felt like I really needed to discover that for myself whereas Maybe other people were more laidback and like oh I'll go to university I'll go to college then I'll figure it out and so the the desire to figure that out um earlier um because of my own like worries about it um probably helped me move forward faster um but yeah I think that's that's interesting and I think creators should ask themselves why not um so was it always like conversion copywriting or more regular copywriting like what you what got you into conversion copywriting specifically yeah yeah I mean it was it was originally just writing um like I love to write that's always just been what I've been drawn to like it started out as fiction and then um you know people aren't aren't hiring Freelancers for that so for at the beginning it was just it was mostly like blog post just content writing and then once I discovered copywriting um cuz I'd already kind of been interested in Psychology like I'm always interested in kind of what makes people tick how the human mind work so that seemed like a really curious opportunity to me to kind of partner psychology with my desire to write um and then through doing copywriting um yeah I was working with businesses enjoying it it's kind of combining these two skill sets and then um I started really caring about results and the question became how do I get the best results for my clients and that was when I discovered conversion copyrighting um for those of you that don't know conversion copywriting is research driven is data backed so um rather than kind of pulling messages out of thin air think thinking about what might convert it's about um actually going into the data doing customer interviews doing surveys data mining review Mining and finding those messages from your audience so you can then build that into your copywriting into your finnels um so that you can be fairly confident that it's going to connect and really minimize the guest work which increases the chances of getting results yeah so I'm thinking like from the perspective of a Creator who is like just building out a course or Community or some kind of sales funnel now and they're curious about like well what even goes into this process when you work with a one-on-one client could you walk us through like what are the initial steps that you would take and like mapping that out and like how how would you tailor that different for different types of clients sure so um my sign process and the the service that people hire me for most is called um day one Evergreen and it's essentially a funnel that's designed to sell you a course on autopilot um and then it has a customer feedback loop built into it so that I can then take the insights build that into the funnel so conversions improve um over time so when um someone would hire me to do that the first thing i' do is obviously chat to them like I always you know I I love talking to the creators because well I mean you guys know you've poured so much love and passion into your course and I want to hear that and I want to soak that up and make sure it's it pours on to the sales page I think when we're writing our own copy it can be difficult to translate that passion and we end up sometimes resorting to like marketing cliches when really like we've got something we've got something special and we need our readers to to feel that um so I always talk to the client and any other members of the team um and then I yeah I I I want you to continue but I want to just interject right there because I think that's a really good point that often creators have something really special and they don't know how to communicate it and they're talking to somebody else like you and then you realize like wow you just told me all these things I had no idea about that when I looked at your website but now now I know and so you can help them to make sure to actually communicate those things oh exactly or people they'll be talking and they'll be like oh yeah and I have I have this in my course and I'm like w w w well well you've just like skipped over that but I don't know anyone else that's doing that that's awesome can we talk about that a bit more and then as you go into it and it's like that should be your hook you've totally buried the lead there um that this is fantastic why are you not talking about that um but yeah I mean same I when I'm writing my own copy I always get other PE other copywriters to look at it because I know that when I'm too close um I'm going to miss stuff um so yeah that's the first thing talk to the client I always go into the course um and see for myself um I only work with course creators where I've I've been in the course and I really believe in it um that's one of that's just one of my values I believe in the power of copyrighting I've seen the power of copyrighting to sell courses so I want to be part of selling courses that I love and think are great um and then after I've spoken to the client the next step is to speak to the audience and that is where the gold comes in I mean you you you guys know like the the basics of marketing like you can you can start by talking about a problem um and then offer your solution like all that stuff but that problem is going to fall flat unless you're speaking in the language of your customer if if they can't contextualize that problem in their own lives then it's not going to resonate um so the best way to to get that copy is to just talk talk to talk to customers so I'll always interview like five to seven um people and just ask them like what was going on in your life when you when you purchased this and really dig just keep digging and and get that good stuff and the stuff that comes up it's it's amazing I mean it's like you like these conversations um yeah absolute gold like these interviews write the copy for me and then um I look at like the forums that people are like moaning on like when they're like for example if I'm writing a course on parenting I'll look at the mom forums and see okay what the they complaining about what language do they use um what do they what are they celebrating in the testimonials on similar courses H how do they quantify when um and it's a case of really assembling the copy not not necessarily writing it and actually using all that voice of customer to to craft the messaging and it's going to it will resonate because it's made up of your it's of your audience it's like the you the people you're selling to are creating the messages for you yeah yeah that's a great way to Des describe it I think that it's it's so helpful to get that feedback and like you don't I think creators hear certain things like this and they think man I'm not really like analytical I don't I don't have this whole process of like calculating all these things and all the the data behind it and it doesn't have to be like that exactly like it's really just getting on calls responding to messages making sure there's a way that people can submit these messages and that way when you get that information like they're telling you like oh this was my problem and then you realized like oh like all these people say that this thing was their issue like now I can just say like this solves that issue and communicate it much better to them 100% like you don't need to be reviewing like thousands of Thal responses I mean you know you but it's it's really if you think about the most empathetic sales call you've ever had like the one where you were talking to a client and and they you just spoke to them like a friend and were and they opened up to you that call Will write your sales page for you better than any marketing Guru any any content you'll read go into that call and and use that is the the foundation for your sales page yeah yeah that's true that's great because like that's a call also that like creators like you've probably done that so you're you can make your your copy be similar um what would you say like the main marketing activities that course creators need to do if they want to increase those conversion rates apart from what we already talked about yeah so your sales page is I mean that that should be your best sales sales call in print as we just said um if you're selling a high ticket course or even a mid ticket course like 500 bucks like I I recommend having a webinar because it's it's an opportunity for your audience to actually see you to build that no like and Trust Factor um for them to get a feel for your energy and that webinar can actually replace the sales core I mean if you if you want to automate your sales which we all do we all have that dream of just waking up to the sales rolling in you know you have to turn your stripe notifications off because they're just pinging all the time like who doesn't have that dream um and to get that yes you do you need to automate it and a a webinar is just a beautiful way to do that because people can get that F view as they would in that sales cour and if you've done your research properly you can recreate that empathy they have an ass schol that enables those conversion rates to be so high because you're you get to listen to your the person you're selling to and hear their specific objections and hear what's going on in their life but if you you know if you if you do those calls before recording a webinar you can build again you can build that conversation and that empathy into your webinar and it can have it can have high conversion rates as well and then you get to actually step out step out of your business and and literally wake up to sales yeah yeah and that's something that I think is really great about this that it's easy to be overwhelmed as a a Creator and business owner and think of like well what is the next step but in this kind of business like there's almost always a clear next step of where you can continually optimize everything and like if you if you don't have a copywriter like yourself yet if you don't have this optimized sales page you can still do that webinar and that can help fix the holes in some of that copy because you'll get all these questions and then you'll realize like oh all these things I could be answering earlier on in the copy or I could be answering even in the presentation itself ahead of time and then as you said then you just keep iterating iterating and improving that and um then once you get to the point that you you really can't think of anything else to improve like it's probably going to be working out pretty well for you yeah absolutely and I mean on on the topic of that of of optimization um so I I love pre-recorded webinars cuz that that is when it is fully a automated like live webinars are awesome um but the whole idea of day one Evergreen is you don't have to continuously live launch and show up um it could be really draining and it could be a lot of pressure you can pre-record a webinar if you are willing to do exactly what you said and review the feedback and optimize so one thing I love to do is have a thank you page survey so most creators just treat their thank you page as like a dead end it's like thanks for signing up um but instead have have just a one question survey and I this is from jna weeb um actually coin's question um it's what was going on in your life that brought you here today and the amount of voice of customer you will get from that question it's it's what marketers will call a seducible moment so they've just got that free instant access so they're happy they're more likely to actually respond than if you just send a random email um and they they will tell you either the problem the desire and you can then build that voice of customer back into your webinar on the next iteration and watch your conversion ratees literally climb yeah that's great advice and yeah questions like that uh can be really powerful mhm so um you also work with like setting up funnels could you describe what you feel is like the ideal funnel for a course creator who has maybe multiple products yeah I mean oh the yeah the the ideal funnel who's to say it's it depends just obviously I'm say I mean obviously I'm going to say day and Evergreen because that's my funnel um so it's people sign up for a webinar and that webinar um they're they're signing up um because they want a transformation right so the transformation that you offer in your course that's how you pull them in with the webinar and inside that webinar you give them you give them the what but you don't give them the how so you tell them what the steps are and then um you're kind of closing the gap between where they are and where they want to be and then right before you pitch you widen that Gap again and then that's where you offer the how as part of your solution um and then following the webinar a sale sequence I um I I'm a fan of urgency or rather I have this love hate relationship with it like I get really turned off by the urgency you know when you see a sales page with a countdown timer and then you hit refresh and it com yeah but I I do I mean I have just seen conversion rates improve when you have some kind of urgency built in um so what I recommend is is creating a limited time offer even on your automated funnel which is BAS essentially 7-Day window when they sign up the the countdown starts um because it's I mean it's not it's not urgency it's more like saying to them like hey look you took action um you sign up this webinar you show me you're interested in achieving XYZ um and to show you why I care about you achieving that here here a discount or something um that you can get during this limited time window and you can use a to like deadline funnel which tracks cookies across devices so even if they sign up with another email address it won't it won't reset that timer it truly is like a one time offer and yeah the the difference in conversion rates um I've seen people go from literally like 1% conversions to 5% conversions just by adding that urgency and as a copyright it kind of paint to admit that cuz obviously you want the messaging to do the heavy lifting but yeah I do I do really advocate for having some sort of urgency built into your funnel um and doesn't necessarily have to be a discount it could also you can just build in the urgency around what's going on in their life as well um like what's the cost of inaction um you can do that with messaging but you need to give um customers like a reason to act now not 6 months from now yeah like in our own marketing we always try to think think of like well what are what are our reasons that we have like right now like and and you want to Stack either as many of those or this strong reasons that you have as possible and like when you don't have reasons like that's when you have to like give discounts like the discount then becomes the reason and so like that's an easy one to do but that involves lowering your price in some way and combining that with urgency then can can really work one of the the interesting things not to get into like my own software too much but something that I like is like if you want to have like a program where it's kind of Evergreen but it's more separated into like cohorts like let's say like people can always enroll but like you have four main cohorts throughout the year then you could still have like a very similar launch process and marketing process but then what we do is we have a feature where people can always buy it and they can pre purchase for the next like cohort launch period but then they won't get access until that time of when it actually opens and that helps you as a Creator because if you are going to be involved in like checking through like students and members like what they're submitting and everything then you kind of know everybody's at a certain place as opposed to like completely Evergreen where like random people are completing random lessons and you kind of have to figure out when you get a support request like where is this person even at you know that like okay well this cohort launched like a week ago so like anyone asking me questions now is roughly at this stage mhm and but it stays Evergreen because people can buy it anytime so the launch happens and then the next one is immediately available for purchase but then like you said it also has some of that urgency because like if you wanted to take it right now like now you missed it now you can still buy it but you have to wait until like a month later before you can actually get in with everybody else and so there's some time emergency and um I think that's another way to do it like if you're a creator that that wants to approach it that way there's so many ways you could approach it really yeah yeah like I I just had a client who's a a career coach and I set up a day when everg final but she has life cohorts um and it's like well that's perfect because there already is urgency there um but also there's the urgency around the fact that the people that she's coaching are trying to navigate the job market they need to land a job I mean that's very obvious urgency to tap into it's just about like obviously doing it sensitively like you don't want to like shame people panic people into buying but um you know en encourage them to be like upfront and about um about the what really is at stake um if they make a decision versus if they just keep putting it off yep yeah so can you tell us maybe any stories you can think of about maybe a launch that didn't go the way that you wanted it to and like any experiences that you had and like being able to like later turn that around um yeah I I mean I have a story about a launch that didn't go as we planned um and that was actually what inspired they went Evergreen so this was a Creator um I'd worked with before we'd got we had a successful finnal for one of her programs um she had an audience and then we built out this epic live launch funnel with three webinars like all these up selles down sales fast action bonuses like just all the bells and whistles um and we were we were psyched for it we were like this is this is going to be like a high six fig launch for sure um and then when on the day the first webinar came um arrived it was uh we we waited people started coming into the room and then five minutes in we realized there were only I think like 25 people in there it was like a 3% shop rate so all the hundreds of leads that she' bought on Facebook just didn't show and we were we were shocked I mean she was obviously gutted like and fair play to her she kept that energy up throughout that webinar for those 25 people um but that experience really that was what made like moved me away from live launches and I was like okay yeah they they're so fun like they can be a great cash injection like it's fantastic when they work well and you see the money rolling in but it's also it's a lot of pressure to put on yourself um and that me as a copywriter cuz I you know I'm invested in my client success and it's like when their year like the yearly income is dependent on this one launch um all it takes is one broken link and people can't get into the zoom room and then you've like hundreds of thousands of dollars of predicted Revenue are just gone so that inspired me to to build day one Evergreen to leverage like take all the principles of live launching that are so effective build it into a de uh an evergreen funnel and then build that customer feedback component in so that I can continue optimizing so rather than live launching every time we need like a cash injection just more looking at the funnel how can we optimize this to make it more effective and create like sustainable predictable sensible growth rather than just putting everything into like these 7-Day windows that may or may not go as planned yeah yeah personally I do enjoy the Evergreen process better as well and maybe it's partially just cuz my business being more software than courses is that like we want people to always be signing up but like even for myself personally like I rather be just continuously improving the product and working on that rather than like having the feel it's all building up to this and then as you said like one thing going wrong it just puts a lot of stress on the whole thing yeah and things are changing so quickly like you can do a live launch collect all this data like you could have like an amazing copyrighting course like that you launched last January and then chat GPT comes out and then everything has changed so what are you going to do do you wait another year to test the messaging whereas if you have an evergreen funnel you can start testing straight away and optimizing straight away um so everything's always like as fresh and up to date as possible um which is yeah just another reason why I love Evergreen yeah you get like you get the feedback loop like immediately which I think is great like not only for marketer but also for a Creator to just allow you to keep iterating on everything yeah and like as you said as well you want it to be available all the time and I think as the course Market gets increasingly saturated more and more people are going to say like okay like I I like this course but I can't buy it now and I going to go somewhere else like we are in an instant gratification world you know we could order something on Amazon Prime and it's there on your doorstep like the next day or even the same day so I think um yeah that's another downside to live launching like fair enough if you're like Amy portfield and you've got this amazing huge audience that's totally loyal to you but for most of us um people are probably going to go elsewhere other than like maybe a small percentage of your most loyal people like you're better off just giving your audience what they want when they want it yeah yeah and like you said like the the marketing and everything building up to it like we've we've suffered from the same thing before of like we get all these leads and we're like great this is awesome we found these really cheap leads on Facebook and then it turns out oh they that's why they were cheap leads they don't do anything and um so like yeah it's it's hard to like only find that out so much later um versus like just continuously working on like okay we're steadily getting more and steadily growing so I agree with that MH we saw from your Instagram page that you love traveling and you worked as digital Nomad for quite a while how would you say traveling um has influenced your approach to business and copyrighting I love that question no one's ever asked asked me that before yeah so I mean that was also going back to the original question that was part of why I got into this because I love to travel and obviously you can't do much of it if you're working a 9 to5 um but traveling yeah definitely has made me a better copywriter because like I've just had so many conversations with different people and I think traveling really taught me how to listen um you know like at first when you know when go going to Vietnam the first time and it's amazing and beautiful and then like there's only so many like mountains you can see before you're like okay it's another Mountain but people like every person that I've met has had a different story and like yeah I just I it honed my ability to listen and that's so useful when I'm doing customer interviews and I'm like trying to understand like put myself in the mindset of of the customer um and then also just like the The Faculty to wonder like I think traveling really keeps that alive it's something we will have as kids and as we become adults and kind of you know we get more bitter and jaded um I found that yeah traveling it just keeps me like excited about the world and what's going on and like that's the stuff that I want to be absorbing all the time because coffee like it needs to you know it needs to be have color it needs to be exciting if you're bored writing it people will be bored reading it so I think yeah th those two ways um I I believe madebe a better copyright there yeah yeah that's great um yeah I love traveling myself and uh been to to more than 30 countries and stuff in the past 15 years or so and it's uh yeah definitely so helpful for like creative inspiration um just as an education as you said like being able to learn so much about the world and I also love just like meeting the people and like for me like if we would get an Airbnb trying to get one where it's like we know that the host would somehow like be in involved or whatever like those were the ones where it was the best experiences for me um like I remember this one um my wife and I we went to Budapest and like we didn't even plan it we were like let's where do we not go in Europe Budapest okay whatever let's go and like no no real thought beforehand we went there and I think maybe originally we were going to stay for like a couple weeks and like we love the place so much like after like I think it was like only 24 hours or so we were like let's extend it and like we asked the host can we extend it for like 2 months and uh we spent like the summer in Budapest and the host was so nice that like he had this beautiful place but he was like yeah this is just one of my places and he was an entrepreneur and he was like a story writer and everything and um he took us out to like go have lunch and told us all about the city and everything and like that those kind of experiences like were worth like so much and really so helpful not only as a learning experience but just enjoyable and inspirational while traveling as well yeah no totally yeah I yeah I can think of experiences like that as well just like and people yeah just take take you into their homes as well like I I remember like at the beginning when I was when I was a a freelancer emphasis on the free um and people would just like take me into their homes let me crash on their couches and just like that kindness and that generosity and it like I don't know I just feel like Joy is so good for creatives like getting that that joy that connection like it's yeah like I said it's just it's inspiring it it keeps you alive excited to to yeah yeah definitely I mean I my analogy to like people who haven't traveled is kind of like if you just stay in the same place the whole time it's like you're playing a video game but then you never leave level one and it's like well it might be a nice level but like don't you want to see the other ones and that's that's the kind of the way that I look at it so yeah um yeah that's great love it um you mentioned you work with some high-profile clients can you share like any standout lesson or experiences from collaborating with them um yeah sure so I'm trying to think who I've worked with um I I worked with Amy forcefield that was amazing um she has been like a dream client of mine since I started in the cour world really um I just think yeah she she's amazing um that that what I learned from that was um I think what an organized team looks like because she has her assign AB board all the project workflows everyone she has systems in place to make sure everybody's collaborating in the best way um and that was really interesting for me because a lot of my clients in the past have been kind of solar preneurs maybe I'd speak to their VA their designer um everything was a bit more peac Meed so um yeah that was inspiring cuz I was like yeah this is how I want my business set up um and then I I worked for copy hackers I'm currently a coach inside freelancing School the copy hackers program um where I'm learning all the time like from speaking to other Freelancers seeing their problems and I mean writing for jna wee because she's she's my favorite copywriter she mentored me um and getting her feedback on the the stuff I write that's just so valuable I'm just like literally kind of like watching the Google Doc when she pops up see what she's going to say and obviously the validation as well from from writing and when she when she does say yeah all good no notes I'm like oh um but yeah so th those two clients definitely stand out for me as ones that I've really enjoyed working with and just learned a lot from um yeah being in their world seeing how what goes on behind the scenes yeah that's great all right well one more question for you and that is on the show I like to ask every guest to have a question for the audience so if you could ask our audience anything something you're curious about something you want to get people thinking about what would that be yeah okay so yeah I mean we touched a little bit on urgency and I talked about those like countdown timers and I'm I'm really curious about about this at the moment about how people respond to like stuff like urgency and all bonuses and when you know when you see those like really overinflated values of or the bonuses it's like okay like sure the checklist you made on Cameron 10 minutes is worth $22,000 um so I'm just like Curious what your pet peeves are um when you're buying courses um I think most course creators enjoy buying courses um yeah is there anything that you see in marketing that gives you the ick that feels uncomfortable that you just wouldn't do um I would love to know that yeah it's a great question curious about that as well all right well Abby thanks so much for coming on the show before we get going where else can people find you online um you can find me on LinkedIn LinkedIn is my main platform um I love connecting with people on there and chatting so please do feel free to send me a request um slide into my inbox um I am on Instagram I'm very new so um I would appreciate some some love over there like as I struggle to grow my following um and then if you are interested in creating sustainable growth um with an automated funnel um I have a webinar um which you can grab on my website which is APD content. co.uk all right awesome thanks so much thank you it's a pleasure being here