→ We did the 2025 Digital Business Model training last month and it was SO good, I’ve had so many of you ask me to do it again. So, I’m doing it! I’m teaching it live one more time on October 23rd at 3pm EST: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/model 

So you did a webinar and barely got any sales. Those leads must be poor quality, right?

Wrong.

I just dove deep into our most recent launch data, tracking every buyer back to how they found us and how long they’d been around. 

Turns out 80% of our buyers had been on our list for 6+ months. Some since 2020. They’d joined multiple free challenges, attended webinars, opened emails… and only NOW bought.

They weren’t poor quality leads. They were building trust. And in today’s trust recession, that’s exactly what we need to expect.

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on what this data means for YOUR marketing strategy, why playing the long game is the only game that works anymore, and how to actually stay profitable while you’re building that trust.

Key Takeaways

• Why your “failed” webinar probably worked—how to tell the difference between poor quality leads and leads that just aren’t ready yet.

• The trust recession reality—we’re living in it, and people need 30+ touchpoints before buying. I break down what those touchpoints actually need to be (hint: it’s not just content).

• How to stay profitable while playing the long game—my exact approach to using low-ticket offers to offset ad costs while building your list for future launches.

 ___________________________________

More ways Embodied Marketing can support you:

If you’re ready to hand off your entire marketing strategy (from funnels to ads to copy) and finally get the expert team you can trust, apply here and let’s talk: helpmystrategy.com

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

You’ve gotta build the list. You’ve gotta build the warm audience. You’ve gotta play the long game. And there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there that compare themselves to business owners like me who have been in business for 10 years. It’s normal in business in the beginning to not be profitable. But for some reason in the online space, people quit their business over that.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Moved by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you’re having an amazing week. It’s almost my birthday. I can’t believe I’m turning 31. I know it sounds young, but to me it actually sounds really old.

So much of like my story is like young mom and. When I turned 30, it was kind of like a big deal to me. ’cause I, I know this sounds really crazy, but I don’t feel like I was where I fully wanted to be by 30. Which sounds crazy, right? Like, that’s so critical of me. But I don’t know. Once I turned 30, it was like, I’m not really in my twenties anymore, and it didn’t feel as much a part of my story.

But I know I’m still young compared to a lot in business, but I’m excited this weekend we are taking my kids to see Garth Brooks. If you follow me on Instagram, you know my youngest is. Obsessed with cowboys, and I mean like obsessed. Like every single day he wears button down shirts, bandana, bolo tie, cowboy boots, and he is done this for the longest time.

And in this obsession, he started listening to Garth Brooks, Toby Keith, because he would ask our Alexa to play cowboy songs. So he knows every Garth Brooks song. Every Toby Keith song, we take ’em to T-Ball and they do a walkup song and all the kids are playing like, you know, we will Rock you and like standard songs.

Nope. My kids playing like. Red, white and blue by Toby Keith, or he didn’t even wanna do like, should have been a cowboy. He, he’s like choosing these specific songs that he loves. So when I saw that Garth Brooks was coming to Austin for the F1 race, I’m like, we have to go. We had to buy tickets to the F1 races in order to go to Garth Brooks, which I don’t really have an interest in the F1 race, but my oldest does and my husband does.

So. That’s what we’re doing this weekend and I cannot wait for my little cowboy to get to go see Garth Brooks. ’cause out of all people, that is exactly who should go see Garth Brooks. He knows every song, every word, he sings them. It’s so cute. It’s so fun to watch. Kids like have their thing. But this one has lasted for so long.

Like my kids have gone through many phases of like being a ninja or being into dinosaurs or whatever. But this one is like. Very embodied in my little Willy. All right. Today I wanted to do a more marketing focused podcast, and this is kind of inspired based off of some data that I was looking at in my company and a prediction that I have and kind of where I’m prioritizing some of our marketing assets in terms or resources, in terms of like our strategy and what I feel is gonna work.

This will be relevant to a lot of you, maybe. Some of you, you’ll have to look at it a little differently depending on your business, but it’s definitely the data piece is relevant to everyone, which is, so we were looking at our last launches data. So I launched my new program, ignite, and we were looking at the data of, we track like every single lead and every buyer, where they came from, like how long they’ve been on the list, how they first joined the list, what they did, you know, as their last touchpoint.

And so we looked at all of our sales and we looked at like, which were new leads, which were old leads, and how long they’d been on our list. And 80% of our sales had been on our list for more than six months. Some. All the way back to 20 20, 20 21. And what we could see is they did a bunch of things. So like one buyer signed up like six months ago for my free challenge, then signed up for my free webinar that I did a few months later, then signed up for this webinar and then purchased.

So, you know, each time they’re being pitched an offer that was pretty much similar. Ignite was a new offer, but. Very similar to my expand program. Better but similar and it’s taking this and they participated. We can see in their contact they actually like opened the emails, participated in both of those launches and took that long to buy another one all the way back in 2021.

Has participated in five, six different free experience live launches that I have done and just purchased the program. Only a few of the sales. Actually came, like five of the sales, I think actually came a, you know, cold traffic add sale. So what does this mean? First of all, our program is higher ticket.

We sell it on a call. The founding member price was $4,000. Pay in full, that’s gonna go up to $5,000. So it is higher ticket. So that’s one thing to like take into consideration, right? Because with higher ticket, usually people do have to be more nurtured. But what does it mean? It means that people need.

More touchpoints, but not even just touchpoints. Like this means people need actual trust building experiences with you in order to get them over that edge. And not only that, but I hear people say like, everybody who signed up for my webinar just wants, you know, free information and is an is a poor quality lead.

And my response to that is, how do you know? How do you know it’s a poor quality lead? How do you know that those people aren’t gonna buy in the future? And so if you’re at the beginning phases of your business and you’re experiencing where you do a live webinar and you don’t get a lot of sales, or maybe one time you get no sales, it doesn’t mean it didn’t work.

If you are generating leads. And you are creating trust and a relationship with those leads, and they’re engaging in what you’re putting out. They’re coming to the webinar, they’re opening the emails, they’re engaging, they’re just not buying yet. That does not mean. They just want free information. And I think we go to this like, oh, they’re poor quality leads.

No, I think they are not trusting you enough leads. They haven’t built their trust for your brand and your business. And we know we’re in a trust recession. We know that people are lacking trust for companies and they are taking longer to make decisions. So if we know that we have to mold our marketing strategy around that, and we know that people take.

30 plus touchpoints before making a decision with a brand. But on average, those touchpoint, some of those touch points need to actually be like in depth experiences, free webinars, free challenges, something of value. Listening to a podcast is great, like. I think listening to a podcast regularly is, you know, your listeners, you guys, for me, there’s an intimate relationship that happens when you have me in your ear, you’re watching me, you know, every single week consistently, and you’re hearing things you know about my son’s birthday and, and different things that is equivalent to a webinar, but it’s an ecosystem and I’ve been talking about this for a long time and I think it is hard for people to wrap their mind around it because.

It requires patience. It also requires resources to have the time to be able to invest in the consistency in the long game. But the reality is I think that’s the only way to be successful moving forward, and I think long gone are the days where you can have a large volume of leads who just came across to your brand, convert into sales.

At most price points. I mean, maybe if you’re looking at a hundred dollars, you know, and those low ticket offers, you’ve gotta be able to convert cold traffic. You don’t, you, you can’t afford to have people have all those touch points, which is something I actually wanna talk about today is using lower ticket offers to potentially generate some revenue for the business and create ideal customers for the higher ticket.

Before I kind, I pivot into that. Let’s just recap and really think about, you know, I have a large amount of data in my business, so you can learn from that because we spend a good amount on our ads. We get quite a lot of leads into our different live launches. My marketing’s pretty topnotch. My messaging’s pretty dialed in.

I have a brand, I have a following. And so the data that we get really is very representative of the reality of this industry. And then not only that, I see clients and I see, you know, behind the scenes of, of a lot of big launches. And I’m consistently seeing the customer journey take longer and. When you think of it that way and you think of the person going through that experience, you probably could relate and be like, oh, I did that.

You know, on the other things that I bought, or some of you’re listening going, oh yeah, I was that buyer when, you know, I signed up for your program, Emily, where I had listened to your podcast a bunch. I signed up for a couple of things. I did your freebies, and then I finally bought your program. The key is that I continue to show up and create consistency.

You know, now that I am on where I am in my business, I have such a volume of warm traffic that our launches are always profitable, but that’s only most of the time because of our lists in our organic. If my ads, my goal is that my ads do two x return on ad spend. If they do that, I’m thrilled because then I got all these leads that will convert in future launches.

And I paid for them. If they even do one X I’m actually fine with that because the launch itself will still be profitable. I will get the sales from the organic. You’ve gotta build the list. You’ve gotta build the warm audience. You’ve gotta play the long game. And there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there that can compare themselves to business owners like me who have been in business for 10 years.

Like I’m gonna always have that on my side, meaning I have people who have literally followed me. Since 2015. Since 2016, and are still in my world, which is so cool and such an asset. And so the answer is your marketing ecosystem, which I’ve talked a ton about. I think I have a specific podcast episode on that, meaning you have a way you’re bringing new people in a way.

You’re nurturing them with content, with regular content, emails, with actual content you put out. You’re that media company that I’ve talked about. You host live events. And live experiences that both nurture existing audiences, existing leads, convert some of both warm and cold traffic. And you create this ecosystem that is constantly working towards those sales.

And I promise you, it will work. It will work. But you’ve gotta have the patience of building this up. And that’s where I think most people go wrong, because not only do they not have the patience, they struggle with the revenue side of it. Of like, if I am only going to break even or not make a lot. Off my investment because I’m building, you know, the leads and I’m building these things, then I can’t sustain it.

And the reality is that is the reality of business. I think in a lot of times. And it’s so interesting. It’s like in the online solopreneur space. Not many companies get investments or capital to start and they expect to be profitable out the gate because it’s possible to be, which is wild. And you know, I was talking to my brother who is a CEO of a a b, A therapy company, and he got into it because of this investor friend of my mom’s.

They have majority of the company, but they brought him in, he learned a ton. Anyways, he’s CEO, it’s a massive company now. And is wild. He’s like 27, but they took forever to be even profitable. Like the amount of investment in that company to me is insane. And he’s like so excited. He’s like, we’re finally turning a profit.

And he’s like two years in and I’m like, holy shit. You know? And that’s an extreme example because you’re dealing with insurance and there’s a lot of startup cost, but still it’s like it’s normal in business in the beginning to not be profitable, but for some reason in the online space. People quit their business over that.

And it is normal to have, even as you grow some months where you might invest more, I very, very, very rarely have a month that we are not profitable. But obviously there’s good and bad months, you know, from a profit standpoint. And I don’t say that to say like, I think it is possible out the gate to be profitable in an, in an online digital business, but I often think people set themselves up for failure with their expectations.

Of profitability and of, you know, return on investments because they don’t take into consideration that long game of building the list, building the audience, building that foundation, building that infrastructure that just does take investment. And so if you’re gonna learn anything from this data of mine, it’s that at a large scale, we are seen.

Leads needing a longer time to be nurtured. Relationship trust built, engaging with your content and then buying. And so if you have a webinar or any sort of experience where you didn’t get the sales you wanted, do not go to the conclusion that it means the leads are not quality, because I don’t think that’s the case.

I think that’s very rarely the case because here’s the thing, these leads are not gonna sign up. For this training or whatever you have. If they don’t want the help. Yeah, maybe there’s gonna always be a percentage of people who are too scared to invest. They’re not gonna spend the money. Sure. But are 100% of the leads not quality?

No, absolutely not. Like, and people say that without any evidence or proof. It’s just because they didn’t get sales. And I think that it’s because we need to play the trust and nurture game. Which brings me to, okay, we have to be profitable. You know, most businesses need to be profitable because most entrepreneurs and solopreneurs are living off of their business, so they need to be able to pay their own bills unless they have a job while they’re building their business.

I get it. I was in the same boat, like I couldn’t have started my business and been in the negative even the first month. I didn’t have investment to put in when I needed to make money. Which is also why I started as a service because I think you can do that a little easier than digital products. But anyways, if that’s the case, so how do we get more out of the leads we’re bringing in, and this is where I kind of have this prediction and where we are starting to look at this in our company of how can we leverage low ticket offers?

To actually use that to offset costs, like I don’t need it to be even profitable. I just need it to offset some cost. And if it can do that, then I can take the people in the low ticket offer and I can bring them into my higher ticket offer. Right now, I’ve already paid for them as a lead, so this could look like a trip wire, which I talked about on my training and that that’s now what I basically teach and ignite is you have your lead gen funnel with your small ticket offer right on the thank you page with the main goal to offset your ad cost.

I don’t need this to make you a ton of money. I just need you to build leads and be able to pay for some of the leads, and that’s amazing. Then we bring them into your core offer, but also I’ve looked at, you know, small priced workshops that you could throw in just for some extra cash to pay for the leads you’re bringing in.

Maybe it’s like a really low ticket membership. We might be exploring that option ourselves. I don’t wanna say too much on that, but. Something that I don’t really care about the money that it makes, I wanna bring people into it to add that to my ecosystem, to build the trust, to bring them to my core offer, and simultaneously cover some more expenses, right?

Cover more ads, spend my ads Very rarely, don’t at least break even or do two x. Minimum, but if I could pay for, you know, more of that expense through a low ticket offer, great. Someone asked me in our Done with You program, you know, they said, I’ve had a lot of success and I, I’m in this place where like I feel like I can’t scale my ad spend, but I wanna make more sales and I’m building my leads and I’m, you know, getting my, you know, two x return on ad spend.

And so their profitable is just like, the profit isn’t as much as I want it to be for my business. What can I do? And that’s one of the things I said. How can you get more sales outta the leads you’re bringing in? That may be how do you improve your sales conversion to the existing offer, or is there a down sell?

Like it’s pretty easy to put on a one time, 47, 90 $7 workshop. Something that you can do to these leads, to this audience that you’re building and generate revenue. Now I wanna note on that, ’cause someone else asked me this, should I just do a paid workshop? Should I do a paid webinar? Because that will get serious people.

And my answer was probably no. Because if you are doing that and you put it out to cold traffic, the likelihood of them signing up is a lot lower. So you’re gonna get way lower volume. ’cause the trust isn’t there. So they’re not like, yeah, sure, let me sign up, you know, and pay $47. I have no idea who this brand is.

So now, instead of getting free leads. Where you maybe covered them with a trip wire product, but they went to a freebie first and building your list, you’re now making the pipeline so much smaller. So generally, I use low ticket offers on the thank you page. Of a lead gen, simple lead gen funnel to help offset ad cost or they can be used as downsells for people who didn’t buy the main offer.

They can also be something you put out to your list, to your warm audience and generate some cash and try to lead those people in. So we do that where I’ll do sometimes some paid workshops or our Black Friday sale, but like that’s all to my audience. It’s not for the purpose of bringing in more leads.

That’s not his job. Its job is to help capitalize on the leads and the audience we’ve already brought in. In the best way possible. And then anybody who buys those things, helping them ascend to my core offers. So my core offers are still the main focus. At the beginning of the episode, I said, this won’t be relevant to everyone because not every single one of you listening to this should go create a low price product.

But it’s just to, to start thinking about that. I do think with where the economy is and where. The industry is that low ticket, high value, easy to deliver offers are going to be a good thing to incorporate in your strategy. But not from the perspective of a massive revenue generator. That’s where people get in trouble, is they implement a strategy with the wrong intention and then they think it doesn’t work and they stop it.

And so when people try to launch a down seller or have a small priced offer and they drive cold traffic to it, or they think it’s gonna be this big revenue generator. And then it’s not. They’re like, oh, it didn’t work. No, your intention behind it was off. Like the reasoning behind what you were doing and the why behind it was off the actual strategy could have been good.

It’s just like where you put it in the customer journey and how you were looking at it. It’s same thing when people look at their content and they say, oh, my content isn’t driving sales. My content isn’t driving business growth. Well, I don’t think content’s main job is to do that. I think it’s to nurture, right?

So if you go into it thinking if I create a bunch of content, it will grow my business and increase my sales. And then when that doesn’t happen, you’re like, oh, content posting content is not working. Content doesn’t work for me. No, your goal with the content was off, and so therefore it’s not working because the purpose behind it had misalignment.

So with this, I want you guys to be thinking about your ecosystem, how you are looking at your marketing as a whole. Are you leaving? Space and potential and understanding that it might take longer for a lead to convert to a sale. And maybe for you looking at how could I leverage small price digital products to cover some of my expenses and create ideal customers for my core offer?

And maybe you’ll find something there to implement in your marketing strategy. Alright, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in and I’ll talk to you next week.