I’ve lifted a HUGE weight off my shoulders since I published the Five Email Marketing Automations Every Business Needs!
This course has been years in the making!
Ok, changing gears… As I mentioned in the course, I wanted to provide frequent updates on the course and it’s marketing as I’m also trying to be as transparent as possible by sharing the challenges, updates, and changes I make along the way. The goal for this is to show you the behind the scenes of it all.
I believe this transparency will help and encourage businesses as you’ll see that we all run into the same issues and challenges.
To get started I want to announce that the course already has 2 paid students! Oh yeahhh!!! Because of Udemy’s stats and reports, it’s not too clear where they came from, but it’s exciting to see sales come in the first week!
Course Changes
It’s been a little over a week since the course was launched. During this time I updated the following to the course:
- Title: I changed the title to include the year in it. This now reads, “The 5 Email Marketing Automations Every Business Needs 2020“. I did this to see if the year would increase student signups. So far having the keywords “Email Marketing” and “Marketing Automation” in the title has helped me rank for these in the search.
Tip of advice: Have a clear title for your course that includes your main keywords. (This tip probably applies to anything SEO)
- Course Description: Someone on Reddit asked “why should I listen to you?” when commenting one of my posts promoting the course. This was a great point! I had info about myself and my experience in my Instructor Profile but, who really goes there!? So I also added a section towards the bottom of the course description to introduce myself and to share a bit more about my expertise.
- Promotion Image: My course image was made with Canva and I think it got the job done. I had read that it’s important to have an eye-catching image for your course though. My course image stood out, but it wasn’t very descriptive. The image, really is the first thing you see when browsing through the courses so I decided to add text to the course image. Not just any text, I added the main keyword of the course, “Automations” (See below). Has it worked? I don’t know yet, the change is too soon. I’ll update you next week!
From this…
To this!
- Promotion Video: I added a promotional video because Udemy has posted that course with a promotional video get 5x to 10x more signups! Since adding the promotional video I haven’t received any new students. I think this video can be updated and done much better. I tried to rush it just to get it out, but rushing it was probably the issue.
- Course Price: When you market a paid course, Udemy doesn’t allow you to choose a price point higher than $34.99 to get started. Once your course gets some exposure, you unlock the other tiers, giving you the chance to charge more for your course. Having more tiers, I decided to push the price of the course to $49.99. It’s also too soon to tell how this change has affected the course.
Marketing The Course
When it comes to marketing I started by telling close friends about the course and posted about the course a couple of times on my LinkedIn page.
I also created a Google Ads account and built a Search and Display Campaign. Doing this was a bit scary as “email marketing” and “marketing automation” are some of the most expensive keywords I’ve worked with. Costing around $20 to $60 a click for main keywords.
To lower the cost per click while still targeting the right audience I chose to go with long-tail phrases like “email marketing automation course”, averaging out at $1.36 a click.
For the display campaign, I created Custom Intent Audiences first. Creating these audiences you can target people based on keywords they’ve searched in the past or even websites they visit.
For example, one of my audiences has all of the Udemy URLs of the top marketing courses in them. So anyone who visits any of the top marketing courses will start to see my display ads as they navigate through other sites.
The display ads are working alright… but again, it’s too soon to tell and from my experience on the results so far, I have a feeling I have a long way to go before I get these fully optimized.
So far the CTR for display ads is a little over 1% and the cost is only $0.05 per click.
A few other issues with Google Ads and Udemy…
- There is no way to track conversions from ads. (I am not able to install a conversion pixel)
- The course metrics on Udemy are extremely delayed.
- I am not able to track bounces, time on page or any other related stat to optimize the ads.
I’ve also read that in most cases Google Ads doesn’t work as it’s too expensive to get conversions. The suggestions I’ve read mention to have a few courses to sell before trying to use Google Ads. This way if you get a student signup for one course, it’s likely you can cross-sell your other course to increase the ROI.
Coming Up
This week I plan to update the Promotional Video to something I’m proud of, and I will continue to spread the course through my own social reach on Linkedin and Reddit. I will probably pause Google ads if I don’t see conversions overall as it’s extremely hard to track. And I will probably make the course free to generate at least 30 student signups and as many reviews as possible.
I read on Udemy that if you are able to get 25 student signups within the first 30 days of your course, their algorithm will kick in and showcase the course more often.
If you know of anyone that could benefit from this course, please make sure to share it!
Anyways, thanks for reading, if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to pitch in, please comment below!
More to come next week…
