One marketing tactic that digital entrepreneurs love to use is challenges. And there’s no doubt that they *can* be a lot of fun and extremely useful…when they are used properly.
Despite a lot of business owners swearing by this strategy, the way many people are using this tactic often ends up dissuading people from buying—aka the exact opposite of what they set out to do in the first place!
Here we look at some ways that paid and unpaid challenges are not used effectively and end up acting as a roadblock to people making a purchase. We’ll also explore a different way to approach challenges, which captures potential buyers’ peak excitement, without draining all of your time and energy.
Why Peak Excitement Matters
When someone first encounters you and your offer—what it is that you can give them and how you’re going to solve their problem—they’re at peak motivation and peak excitement.
But every day (or even hour!) after that initial peak engagement, their excitement decreases. It’s one of the reasons you hear about lists being “stale.” People are excited when they first get on our email list, but the longer they stay on the email list, the less engaged they are. And unfortunately, motivation can dwindle pretty swiftly—even after just 10 days after getting on your list, it’s possible they can become stale!
Let’s say someone’s signing up for a five-day challenge. Day one is where you’ll likely see the most excitement. Why? Because there’s still a good amount of buzz around this new offer. But as the days pass, you’ll start to see attendance dropping off. And by the time that you actually make your offer, there’s probably only a few people left, leaving you with little chance of exceeding a 2% sales conversion.
The trouble is—just like with live launches—a live challenge forces people to show up on a specific day, at a specific time, and that’s not necessarily conducive to their schedules. Live challenges put people on our timelines and what works for us, rather that what works for them. Inevitably, excitement drops off if they can’t attend on the days that they need to attend.
And this is only if your challenge happened to start at the *exact* moment of peak excitement—which is not the case for most of people. A lot of digital entrepreneurs tell their audience, “Oh, in a month, I’m going to have my challenge,” or—even worse—“In three months or in six months, I’m going to have my challenge.”
By forcing people to wait to hear about the solution that you have for them, all you’re doing is burning up their excitement and motivation. It’s easy to think, “Well, I’m teaching, and they find that really valuable” but teaching does not get people to buy (and this is the same problem that we see with webinars).
Learning is not inspiring. In fact, learning by definition is something that requires energy. Don’t get us wrong, it’s certainly very important and there absolutely should be learning in our courses and programs. But when we’re teaching people, we are draining people’s energy. And by the end of our challenge, all we have is people at low excitement.
So if you’re wondering why you’re not getting those high conversions and seeing that same excitement that you saw on the first day—it’s because you’ve slowly eaten away at all their motivation.
Do Paid Challenges Increase Motivation?
Some challenges require a small fee upfront. Those are what we call paid challenges. And you might think that because someone has put money down, they’re more likely to show up. While it’s true you might see a few more engaged people, it’s still the same problem: Their motivation shelf life is decaying day by day, in exactly the same way as someone who signed up for a free challenge.
The other problem with paid challenges is that you burn up excitement and motivation by getting them to make that purchase. Purchases use up a ton of energy. When someone makes a purchase, they think, “Oh, I took a big action. Now I don’t have to do anything more.” Most of us have bought courses or challenges, and found our brains thinking, “OK I bought it and now I’m done.” But obviously, that’s not true!
As online business owners, we have to have things in place within our programs to get people to take action and to get people to use the things that they’ve paid for.
When people pay for things, they value them more than if they get them for free. But just because they paid for something doesn’t mean that they will then put a lot of value to it. Quite frankly, a price point like $27 or even $97 is not a huge amount of money when you’re looking at five days of engagement.
You might increase the number of people that attend on the first day but you’re still going to see that drop off because it’s not going to stop them from losing that excitement and engagement. It would have to be a huge amount of money in order for them to be so bought in that they’re willing to stay for all of it. (And it’s unlikely you’re going to charge thousands of dollars just for a challenge; that’s going to be the cost of your full program!)
The main problem with paid challenges boils down to this: If they’re burning up energy making the decision to buy your challenge, then that’s energy they don’t have to make the full purchase!
It used to be a trope of digital business that if you wanted to get people to buy something big, you would sell them something little. Say you sold them a $7 e-book, the idea is that they’d be more warmed up to buy something big (some people call it a trip wire). Many of us online business owners believed this for a really long time—but it’s not necessarily true.
Think about it: You wouldn’t go to a restaurant and say, “Oh, I paid for this appetizer so now I’m more likely to buy the full meal.” Buying one little thing doesn’t make it easier or make us more amenable to buying something bigger later on. If anything, it can trip us up because customers might put off buying your bigger offer until they’ve really made the most out of this challenge. Alternatively, the little purchase might solve their issue or make them think they have enough to be able to figure out the next step on their own.
The Problem With Live Challenges
With live challenges, you’re spending a LOT of time giving your energy and attention to people who haven’t yet paid you! And fundamentally, you being live is *not* what makes the difference between someone making a purchase or not.
People can get as excited about our offers and view us as experts just as much from recordings as they can from seeing us live. People can get to know, like, and trust you from many other paths.
Trust is about the consistency of your messaging across all your channels—like your email, your social presence, and what your website is saying. Is your messaging consistent across all of them? Are customers getting to see you across all your channels in a way that helps them get to know who you are and what your offer is? You can build that trust via consistent messaging across every channel that you’re on, not just in your live challenge.
The Advantage of Automated Challenges
Automated challenges give as much value as live challenges and people can watch them when they actually have time. When we make it valuable and they take the time to watch it, we don’t eat away at their initial excitement.
Again, it’s crucial that when people first get on our lists and first engage with us, they need to get our best offer. And we should simultaneously nurture them and sell to them with our best messaging.
There will always be people who are not ready to purchase. That’s why we use our automated challenges as part of our sequence to re-excite them before another sales period. We see people throughout our sales circuits re-enter an excitement bump when we do things like use our automated challenges.
Our Circuit Sales System students know that we have all kinds of enhancements that we add in, but the key is we are using challenges to re-energize people before a sales sequence and not burning out their excitement from that initial peak. At that peak of motivation, we always give them our very best sales message and nurturing at the same time. We don’t make them wait for five days of a challenge. It all happens immediately and with urgency attached to it.
If you love your challenges, in no way are we encouraging you to eliminate your challenges altogether. We simply want to give you some different ways of looking at challenges and a different approach to the ones that you’ve likely been exposed to. Our aim is to spark some ideas about a different way for you to use your challenges that is SO much more effective.
It also gives you the opportunity to look at your challenges and evaluate whether they really are what’s best for your business and what’s best for your audience.
Watch More
In this episode from the Energize Your Online Business podcast, tune in to discover what Nicki and Kate find to be the most effective and efficient ways to maximize on the success of challenges.
Your Turn!
What have you found to be difficult with live and unpaid challenges? We’d love to hear from you! Tell us in the comments below.