How Justin Welsh Made Over $650,000 of Additional Revenue by Personalizing His Course Launch

Highlights:

• Was able to segment 86% of all contacts
• Personalization + Segmentation helped radically reshape assumptions about his new product (community, “start from scratch”, etc.)
• A/B tested the launch, and the group that was personalized to converted 39% higher – leading to more than $650k in new revenue

Key Results:

• +$650,000 additional launch revenue
• 35,000 segmented contacts
• +88% increased sales page conversions

”I made more money. I delivered the right product. All because I had the right data.”

– Justin Welsh

Challenge:

Justin Welsh is one of the most prolific and successful online creators. With over 1,000,000 social media followers, he’s championed the “solopreneur” movement and is laser focused on helping people start or scale businesses that make great money while also focusing on the things that matter most (family, friends, and personal well-being.)

Since 2020, he’s made over $6 million by selling courses to his online audience – primarily through his email list, which currently clocks in at over 215,000 subscribers.

He came to RightMessage because he wanted to learn more about his audience and their needs. While he had a gut-level understanding of who was following him, he didn’t have anything concrete to work with.

Additionally, he was planning to release his new, flagship course (The Creator MBA) and was keen to better personalize his launch emails and increase his conversions, and he’d been told that RightMessage was the tool he needed to make that happen.

”And this is where the RightMessage team really came in. I worked with them to brainstorm: what’s the best information I can get from my audience, and how do we collect it? What do I need to learn from my audience to make it so I can present more relevant offerings at the right time?”

– Justin Welsh

Solution:

Step 1: Learn more about the audience

The first thing Justin did was segment his email list: What stage is their business? How does their business make money? What’s the business challenge that led them to follow him?

He used RightMessage to create a simple survey that he’d send all new subscribers, along with his existing list, too. It asks a few questions that will help Justin deliver more relevant content and offers to his subscribers.

What Justin really liked about our platform was that:

1. Even if someone doesn’t complete the full survey, what they do answer will be synced up to their record in his ConvertKit account
2. It was easy to create a visual flow of who should be asked what questions. He struggled to create a “one-size-fits-all” linear questionnaire, and RightMessage made it easy to create a more conversational series of questions.

”86% percent of people filled out the entire subscriber survey, which to me is absolutely mind blowing. And the big eye-opener for me was that this wasn’t just ‘birds eye view’ data that we’re talking about… all this data was pushed up to my ConvertKit account.”

– Justin Welsh

Step 2: Build the right product and the right offers

Shortly after beginning to segment his audience, Justin decided to create his next online course (The Creator MBA.)

He created an interest list where people could opt-in to hear more about his upcoming course, and used the RightMessage survey he created to also survey anyone who registered their interest.

”RightMessage is smart. If someone had already completed my survey when they first joined my list, they wouldn’t be asked the same questions again when they joined The Creator MBA interest list.”

– Justin Welsh

About 18,000 people joined the interest list, and Justin sent out weekly “behind-the-scenes” emails that were designed to keep his upcoming course top-of-mind and build up excitement around his launch.

He also began tapping into the segmentation data that RightMessage provided. Most of these emails were personalized to include some sort of custom “ask” that related some idea or concept of the course to the recipient’s unique situation.

This led to a deluge of replies that allowed Justin to really reshape what he thought The Creator MBA had to include. “I ended up adding a course community simply because the personalized asks I included in my emails led people to share that this was something important to them. I included this as a higher tier offering, which alone added over $280,000 in new revenue.”

By combining the hard data that RightMessage collected and pairing it with the qualitative Voice Of Customer feedback that these personalized behind-the-scenes emails prompted, Justin went into his course launch confident that he had created the right product to bring to market.

Step 3: Personalizing the launch emails and the sales page

Now it was time for Justin to cash out on the data he’d been collecting by making a clear case about why the individuals on his email list should buy his new course, The Creator MBA.

Launching an online course is something Justin’s pretty familiar with. But personalizing a launch was something he’d never done before, and he turned to the RightMessage team for advice on how to personalize the launch without 10x’ing the effort by needing to write dozens of email variations.

We worked with him to come up with two underlying segmentation dimensions that would pivot key emails in the launch sequence, and also change the most important elements of the product sales page:

Dimension 1. What stage someone’s business is? Have they started yet? Is it just a side hustle? Or are they full-time?

Dimension 2. How does someone primarily make money Coaching? Agency? Courses? Software? Something else?)

Within the launch emails, dedicated emails directly responded to the above two segment dimensions. For example, if your business is currently a side hustle you’d receive an email about exactly how the course would help you go full-time on your business and allow you to quit your job.

And on the sales page that the emails led to, core elements – like the primary headline, along with a few subheadlines – were then personalized. A course creator wouldn’t see ambiguous mentions of “your online business”. They’d instead see a lot of language about course creators.

”What we didn’t want was for you to get a personalized email about how this will help your agency scale or something, and then you get to the actual web page for The Creator MBA and it’s just the default, one-size-fits-all kinda thing.”

– Justin Welsh

Now let’s look at the results of this campaign:

Results:

Was it worth the effort?

All in, an additional 20 or so hours were spent segmenting the email list and personalizing email and sales page content. This time was spent mostly writing copy variants, like a variation of a “default” sales email that would speak more directly to someone who offered coaching. Setting up RightMessage and getting the data it captured into Justin’s ConvertKit account took only about an hour.

Over 150,000 segmentation data points were captured through the segmentation surveys that were created. Each of these individual data points were used to permanently enrich email list subscribers.

A controlled A/B test was set up so that we could measure exactly what effect personalization would have on the launch. Justin knew that personalized content would perform better – but, as a bit of a data geek, he wanted to know exactly how much better.

15% of his interest list was “held back” and delivered the default sales emails and shown the default sales page. The other 85% went through a personalized launch campaign.

The group that was personalized was 38% more likely to buy, and 118% more likely to complete a purchase when viewing the sales page that was personalized to them. This directly resulted in about $650,000 in new revenue.

The group that didn’t see any personalizations had an 8.69% purchase rate. The personalized group had a 12.01% purchase rate.

”I got all these emails during my launch that are like, ‘Yeah, you told me this stuff.’ That’s the magic.”

– Justin Welsh