Show Notes:
Running a challenge is a great way to create a relationship with your audience in a short period of time, however, it’s only effective if they show up!
Even after already investing a lot of time and effort into getting registrants for your challenger and making all the necessary preparations, one monumental question remains: will they show up?
Thankfully, you have total control. In this episode, I’ll be giving you FIVE different easy-to-implement and effective ways to increase your challenge show-up rate.
At The JW Agency we’ve had dozens of clients run highly profitable challenges and the #1 area they all focus on is increasing the show-up rate. Why? The more who show-up and engage, the more potential buyers you have. They won’t buy if they didn’t show-up, didn’t gain value, and didn’t build a relationship with you.
A 5% increased show-up rate could be the difference in tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. So put your earbuds in, take notes, and increase your next challenge show-up rate!
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Share-worthy Quotes:
“You can incentivize people to be LIVE by listening, being one of the first people to take action, and getting something – that’s one way you’re going to get people to show up and engage with your content.”
“Facebook pop-up groups are important to create engagement, build likeability, trust, and credibility before a challenge starts.”
“If you implement texting as a reminder, and engagement tool, it works fabulously to get more people to engage and show up.”
“If people don’t show up and don’t engage in the content, then they won’t buy.”
“In a pop-up Facebook group, you’re actually training them to hear you, get the content, be around like-minded people, and show-up.”
Get the Transcript here:
Episode 21 – 5 Ways To Increase Challenge Show-Up Rates
Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies.
Hey, I’m Jess Walman, Facebook Ad, and Digital Marketing Expert. Welcome to the Ad Agency Secrets Podcast, where I help you take the guesswork out of your ad spend and replace it with profitability. Now is your time. Revolutionize your life and create the impact you desire all while freeing up your precious time. How? By taking a sneak peek at the exact methods that our full-service ad agency uses for our A-list clients while managing over $1 million per month in ad spend. Learn what is and is not working from Facebook Ads to copy, to funnels into your overall marketing strategy. Implement these tips and strategies inside your business today, and get ready to explode. Grab your coffee and get ready for the Ad Agency Secrets Podcast.
Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. So I have several agency clients that are running challenges just like you might be running a challenge. You might do it evergreen. You might have a challenge that you do quarterly or once a month. And one of the biggest things that you might be struggling with outside of ad cost or conversion on the backend which will totally be a separate episode is your challenge to show-up rate. You might get 200, 300, 1000, 2000 people to register for your challenge but if people don’t show up and don’t engage in the content, then they won’t buy. They won’t have that buy-in from learning from you, from growing, gaining that know-like-trust factor with you, and then being on the edge of their seat waiting for you to finally pitch your offer, which is really what’s going to happen.
So I’m going to talk about five different ways that you can increase your challenge registrant show-up rate. This is huge to increase your overall sales and profitability on the backend, which is, at the end of the day, why you are doing a challenge in the first place. So we’re just going to dive into all five of these right now, and you might already, let’s just preface this first. You might already be doing one or two of these, and that’s fantastic. You might be doing four of these, but if you can include if I can teach you one new thing today out of these five and you implement it and it increases; let’s say it increases your show-up rate by 1%, half a percent, whatever that might be, think about what that could do to your back and conversion rates.
What I’m going to show you is very inexpensive, if not free. They are super easy to implement and you’re going to want to do them right away. So let’s dive into number one, that is if you aren’t already doing this way, and this actually just helps to lead into the rest of these, to be honest with you: it’s providing the content of the challenge via a pop-up Facebook group. If you are, right now, you have your challenge and you are not providing this via a Facebook group, let’s say you’re doing the challenge with emails that they get every day for a week, or they go to a membership portal where they log in, wherever that might be, I highly, highly recommend that at least as of right now is what’s been working really well for our clients is having a pop-up Facebook group that people can join after they opt into the challenge.
And this pop-up Facebook group is only open during the time that the challenge is open. So let’s say you start your ads on July 1st and you run them for a week, and then during that time as I opt-in, you’re going to want people to join this group preparing for the challenge, and then the group will be open while the challenge is alive. So if it’s a 5-day challenge, then it will be open for those five days. And then as you have your open-close cart, let’s say you open your cart on a Friday and that’s the end of the channel, and then you close the cart to the following Monday or Tuesday, the group will be open then as well. And then after the cart closes, you will then archive the group.
This group is going to be huge in creating engagement, likability, trust, credibility before the challenge even starts. So before you even provide them a single piece of content, you are gaining their trust, they are seeing you as the expert and they are excited. And what you’re doing is you’re actually training them to come to the group, to hear you, to get the content, to be around like-minded people. You’re training them before the challenge even starts. This group is imperative to be a part of and is imperative to show up to. That is huge. So make sure you have a pop-up group if you don’t already have one, that will help tremendously.
The second thing is now, the rest of what I’m going to teach you actually relies on this. Now the question is, how do you get people to join this Facebook group? Because you know that once they opt-in, you can send an email out, fantastic. How many people are actually going to read the email? How many people are actually going to see the little link you put: Hey guys, join the Facebook group? How many people are actually going to see it? It will be a small percentage. Open rates, it just varies. It could be 20 to 30%. It could be a little bit higher on that first email for sure, but you’re going to miss out on a lot of people. So I highly recommend having a link on the confirmation page after somebody opts in for the challenge to join the Facebook group. Sounds easy, right?
I’ve had several people come to me and say, hey Jess, I really want my challenge. I want it to self- liquidate and meaning, I want to sell a product on the thank you page after somebody opts into the challenge because I really want to try to “get my leads for free.” However, the problem is they say, hey, the show-up rate on my challenge was low. What can I do extra to get this show-up rate higher? And so I just let them know that you need people in the group. That’s where the challenge has taken place, and you’re having a hard time getting the group because the first thing that you do after the opt-in, instead of saying, hey, this group is where it’s happening. This is where you need to be. Don’t miss out, join the group now and you’ll get pre-concept before the challenge even goes live, but you’re not even saying that, you’re saying, hey, buy from me immediately. So I highly recommend that if you already have a thank you page and you’re doing something else on there to completely revamp it to really just have a single “Hey, join the group.”
Now, I did just actually have somebody bring this up to me and say, they saw somebody do where the top portion of the page said, “Hey, join the group.” and then right below it said, had an offer, had a sales product. Now, I haven’t tested it. I couldn’t possibly work. I do think though that you’re trying to increase that show-up rate on the challenge itself and you want to build trust, and if you’re already pitching to someone early, they may not feel that trust upfront to want to join that group to engage. So I personally, as of right now, would just say on that page to just have a big button that says to join the group.
Alright, so we’re going to go to the third one, which is prior to the channel actually starting. So before I do that, we already said we have the pop-up group, and then on the confirmation page, after they opt in to have a link that says “Join the Group”. Now, remember when you do that, it does not just join the group. You are reminding them why they’re going to join. In this challenge, we’re going to go live daily, we’re going to talk about this, this, and this. Remember, I’m helping you with this, this, and this, so join the group to get all the goodies. It’s a reminder as to what they’re going to get, not just, “Hey, join the group.”
So prior to the challenge start date, we always will run reminder ads with a link to the group in the ad copy. Again, let’s say you run as of July 5th to July 11th, which is a Monday to a Sunday, and on the following Monday, on the 12th, your challenge is going to start. So as people are opting in, Monday the 5th, Tuesday the 6th, Wednesday the 7th, et cetera, you also have an ad that is showing up to these people. I’ve re-targeted them saying: Hey, join the group. Again, when you actually joined the group, it is focusing on joining the group but you’re always leading with the pain and with what you’re going to help solve for them.
But Facebook doesn’t really want you to put ads to a group, so you can’t really put the link in the website URL. What we do and what has been working well is we put a link in the ad copy itself. Usually, we’re going to run this as a reach ad just to registrants. Now, retargeting is going to become a little more difficult because what retargeting those who, especially with the iOS update, but you can actually set there and upload lists and have certain retargeting based on your opt-ins. So you can actually have a custom audience pulling from your CRM of registering, so it’s completely up to date.
So you will actually, again, retarget those who opt into the challenge with a little reminder ad that this is a reach campaign. You’re going to spend, maybe if you’re lucky, depending on how many registrants you’re getting. Let’s say you’re getting in 20 to 30 a day and it’s been a few days, or 50 a day or a hundred a day or a thousand, it really just depends on how many you’re getting. It may not even spend right away. It might take a few days before it starts to spend because it needs enough people in there. So if you’re only getting a hundred people into this challenge, it probably will not work for you. If you’re getting them more than that then this is a possibility that could work.
So again, you have to have enough people actually joining the challenge in order for this to work. Otherwise, it won’t be enough spending. There won’t be enough people in the group for Facebook to spend money on. Facebook will not spend unless you’ve got a certain amount of people in the audience size.
So we’ll do a video of you and we’ll retarget people letting them know to join the group. That’s been really massive. Getting them in the group before the challenge starts and as our client, being in the group and answering questions beforehand and just creating some engagement beforehand. So again, prior to the challenge, starting running some engagement ads to just remind them to join the challenge with a link in the copy only.
So number four is during the challenge, running reminder ads again. Now that you’re in the challenge, let’s say you’re running a challenge on Monday through Friday. Every single day, you’re going to have the one ad that’s running, so one ad that runs Monday through Friday, that’s the schedule of the ad set. And the ad is going to say, I always like to start off the very top XYZ, whatever the challenge name is. XYZ challenge is live. Put emojis wherever you want, and then underneath that is where you’re saying, we’re going live at 1:00 PM EST in the group to talk about blank, blank, blank. So if you’re ready to get more sales or reduce your ad costs, or whatever it is, click the link below and don’t miss the live training, whatever it might be.
And again, I didn’t focus on joining the group just because we’re going live, it was more about what they’re going to learn, the time that they need to be there, and then the link so that they actually go. And that runs through the challenge until the end of the challenge to get as many engagements as possible during the challenge. So again, first, you’re going to run ads prior to the challenge, then you’re going to run the ads during the challenge.
I had another client, actually, they’re consulting students and they were concerned because they said they have people showing up but for some reason, like day three to day four, they could just see a drop. Day 2 was a good show up rate, day 3 was a good show up rate, day 4 just dropped. And so one of the things that they’re incorporating right now is having a secret word or a secret message on that day to say, hey, I’m going to say a secret word tomorrow during the live training. If you’re one of the first 5 people to comment below in the live with that word, you’re going to get XYZ, whatever that might be a worksheet, something that is obviously relevant to what you’re teaching, and this is going to prompt more people to show up because they can’t just show up later and watch it and get this, they have to be live.
So any way that you can incentivize people to be live by listening and then acting right away and being one of the first people to take action, that’s how you’re going to get people to show up and engage. So I highly recommend having something like that. That was kind of my fifth one. There’s actually the sixth one, that’s actually probably one of the most important ones that I feel like a lot of people actually forget to do or set up and have in place, is text reminders. If you don’t have text reminders in place, you’re massively missing out on people showing up on your opt-in page.
You’re going to want to ask for the phone number. You will not make that mandatory or required. If you do that, you’re going to have a lot of people not opting in. It’s just the way it is. But if you make it not required, you will actually have, we have a lot of people who have 70+ people opt-in and actually entering their phone number even though it’s not required. So definitely having that phone number and then having follow-up texts like an immediate text day before, and maybe even 15 minutes or 30 minutes prior to going live, and then every day before you go live is doing that text again like, hey, we’re going live in 30 minutes or in 15 minutes, whatever it might be.
So that text message, anytime any of our clients start including text messages because a lot come to us and say that they don’t have that implemented at all. I don’t necessarily have a tool because different text messaging tools that you can use and we have three or four that our clients use and they all seem to work pretty decently. But if you implement texting as a reminder and engagement tool, it works fabulously to get more people to engage and just show up because who isn’t on their phone. You’re probably honestly on a phone right now, listening to this podcast episode. We’re always on our phones, and so if you think about how many times do I check my email a day? I try to avoid it, to be honest with you. So probably once a day, maybe. Maybe twice if I’m going crazy, but how many times is my phone on me, and how many times I may actually look into every single text message that comes in? All the time. I don’t like having any unread text messages and I’m always looking at them and determining if I’m going to take action or not, and there’s a quick link and it’s something important that I actually want to do or listen to or take action on, I’m going to click it and I’m going to go. The texting is huge, if you don’t have that in place, put that in place. It really is not that difficult to do. It just may take a minute to set up, but it really is going to be so worth it.
So those are five ways to increase challenge registering show up rates, there are definitely a few more and we’ve had people. I’m just sharing one real quick right now. I guess this might be six or seven we’re doing now, but they’ll send personal messages and texts with video. Now, this is a little harder to do and you can do a video that that’s not super personal. It’s just like a video to them, but it gets into just your face more before the challenge, so when you do your emails, you’re doing a video and it just creates that trust factor a little bit more just that people will want to engage and show up. You can customize it as far as seeing their name because if you’re having hundreds of people to join a challenge, it’s not really what you can do but you still can do a nice personal video, and sometimes they do that on the text messages. They’ll do a video where it’s like, hey, I’ve got a quick message for you, and they click the link and like, hey, I’m so excited that you joined the challenge, and then you can send them where they want to send them. There are definitely multiple ways to increase your show-up rates in your challenge, which is so important to increase your sales in the backend, which is really the whole point of the challenge. These are just a few ways that you can implement. They should be pretty easy to implement. And implementing just one of these is really going to help you tremendously. If you weren’t doing any of these and you implement them all, it’s going to make a massive difference so I’m excited for you to dive into these and implement them. And thanks again for showing up today, guys. I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Bye.
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