Communities are getting a lot of paid members just through skool. Both the discovery page and visits to profile page are working great for people to find out about your stuff. People are clicking of profiles almost as much as on posts. It’s wild.
One of the strongest ways to convert people from a free to a paid community is to have a self-selection process in your free community. This comes in the form of some course / webinar / any type of content really where you give value and then have a CTA to go check out the paid group if they want more help. Personalization is what you sell to people in your free community. If they see value in what you do, and they need a problem solved - they will pay for you to help them solve it. You can’t possibly give custom tailored help to all the people in your free community. Your free community becomes a lead magnet. This is the most common pattern for skool games winners and people that are top in the discovery page.
The group funnel is: traffic → free skool → DM and pinned posts to VSL / webinar in your classroom → CTA to call / join paid group. The pitch to the paid thing is in the classroom and it doesn’t even look like a pitch. More people will watch it because they don’t really expect to be sold to. To make your webinar look even less like a webinar, make it look like a module as much as you can. Divide it up into smaller videos, tell cool stories and give value - and then send them to the sales call / paid group. 5 short videos are enough. Every step in here is extremely efficient. You get people into a free thing, the DM and pinned post make it so that almost 100% of the people go watch the webinar and then you send them to a call which is the most efficient way to convert them. Or if you’re selling a lower ticket, you send them straight to the paid group.
The biggest factor to conversion is your about page. Especially the price, obviously. Some free groups convert at 80%. Low ticket prices (up to 50$) convert at like 5%, but once you go over 100$ it drops significantly. To optimize conversion you need to optimize price. To optimize price you need to test different prices. The more frequently you analyse price, the more profitable you get. In other words, once you figure out the best price that works - you make more money.
High ticket conversions don’t really change once you are in the thousands of $. But when you’re selling low ticket, any change you do can impact a lot.
The ranking on the discovery page is based on engagement. It’s about amount of people in your group and how much they engage with each other. They look at number of new members, so if you continuously add new members each day that’s good. They look at number of posts, numbers of comments and number of likes. Think of all of these as activities. Recent activities have more weight than activities in the past. So if you get a surge of new members that all interact with each other, you’ll rank higher - but if that happened a month ago, it will matter less. Keep this in mind when writing “value posts”. You want to write posts that drive engagement, not articles about stuff no-one cares about. There’s a difference between “value posts” and valuable posts. Value posts are: “6 things that … nobody cares about”. Valuable posts are: “I’ve done work, I’ve spent money, I’ve taken risks so that you don’t need to do that - and here’s what I’ve learned”. It’s a bargain on time. Don’t put a burden on your members by posting 5 “value posts” a day. Nobody wants to read your opinion piece about something they care even less about.
The members won’t do the work for you from the start. Be more mindful about engaging inside of your community. Comments on your guys’ posts. Write posts with polls in them so people have more ways to engage. Make it fun.
Retention is more important than acquisition. You want to be able to go get customers, but you don’t want to have to go get customers. Focus on retaining the people you sell, and your business will grow like crazy. When Alex looks at companies, he’s more interested in how much it grows from word of mouth and how good they are able to retain customers. Most of internet marketing focuses so much on selling because they don’t know how to keep anybody. But the people that make the most money just don’t lose customers. The people that make the most money have a better product. A good product that retains customers is always better than killer marketing that gets a lot of customers. You want to talk to the customers that stay to learn what they want, and you want to talk to the customers that leave to learn why they did.
Aim for less than 10% churn for a low-ticket community.