How to use Substack to create conversions
Use Substack's unique features to turn lurkers into clients
Substack is a unique social media platform.
👇🏽 Here’s how to leverage it to create conversions.
Today, I’m going to walk you through how I use it to turn leads into clients, optimizing for the Ideal Client Profile that Pat Sgro talks about in his Coach Marketing Sucks newsletter.
Common digital marketing advice takes you through the typical buyer journey:
Capture attention with a post
Get people to download your lead magnet & join your email list
Nurture people over time, up to 12 months
What people get WRONG most of the time is that this method optimizes for tire-kickers. Who wants to work with people who need to be convinced over the course of a year?! We don’t want to work with them!
💪 We want to work with people fired up about you, your solution, and implementing your solution in their life and business.
According to Pat, when he analyzed his lead conversions to his coaching program, 76% of his conversions occurred within 4 days — 2 weeks of his leads first hearing about him. The rest, 24%, were nurtured over several months.
🤯 I don’t know about you, but this was mind-blowing.
People with cash, who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work, and who have business experience, often have been thinking about your solution for a long time already, but they just needed the right epiphany-triggering content to run through their subconscious mind to give them the a-ha’s they needed.
All of this is credited to Pat and his work, I take no credit. You should seriously check out his foundational Youtube series for this, it’s incredible.
The reason I believe this works is because this is literally my own behavior.
I don’t wait around. I’m here to grow my business, y’all. When I’m ready to buy, I buy.
The most recent coaching program I bought, a $20k sales bootcamp from The Salesgirls, was bought 5 days after I learned about them from an ad and attended their in-person summit in my town. I had been struggling with sales for a while, and their summit created enough epiphanies in my brain that, with enough social proof, buying was a no-brainer.
I recently bought a $10k coaching program from Jessica Zweig, that, after being on her email list for years, I saw that she was making 1:1 coaching less available next year. I hopped on a call, bought that day, and the rest is history.
👇🏽👇🏽 What this means to you:
Instead of optimizing for the 24%, optimize for the 76% of people who want to buy from you quickly.
They have the cash.
They have the time.
They have the experience and grit.
They want to buy.
The things they need from you are called Epiphany-Triggering Content. They need to be led down a series of a-ha’s that help them understand that you have the solution, and the best one for them.
What are those a-ha’s?
What questions do they need to ask themselves that they’ve never thought of before?
What considerations do they need to take on to understand that you can give them the solution they’ve been craving?
Instead of dripping them this over time, give them content that they are going to binge.
Surely you’ve binged content before. You find someone’s Youtube channel about a topic you’ve been obsessed about for a while, and all of a sudden you blink and it’s 10 videos later. Or 30 reels later.
The best way to engineer where they end up is to give them that engineered series of Epiphany-Triggering Content that will lead them down the yellow brick road.
Enter, the [Start Here] page, new to my Substack. See how it leverages content that is now laid out in a particular order to take someone from 0 to hero quickly? I have been creating content over the past few weeks for this express purpose.
Substack is great because it has Pages (under Settings) that you can customize.
You will see how I have engineered a road by which someone who has never heard of me will learn everything they need to know about what I do, why I do it, and the outcomes they can expect to get.
I also begin the qualifying process by calling out exactly who I want here, and if you’re not that kind of person, this corner of the Internet is not for you.
Now, according to Pat, there is a final step to this equation that I have not added yet. To find out what this is, you’ll have to watch his foundational Youtube series. ;)
Use Your About Page
Another page to leverage include your About page.
This is a good place to not just introduce yourself with a picture (especially in the context of what you do for your clients), but also what people can expect to get from subscribing to your Substack (free, paid, founding), etc.
On the About page, I also offer a free gift as an incentive to subscribe (based on feedback, I have chosen it to be the customizable Lucidchart timeline I use for my clients).
Do lead magnets work?
Some say yes, some say no.
All I know is that the person who wants to DIY is probably not my ideal client. I want them to subscribe anyway.
If they want to purchase something later, totally fine.
But I’m optimizing for that 76%.
Use A Client Wins Page
People constantly have asked me for testimonials and client wins.
Instead of directing them to Vimeo links individually, I want to send prospects a single page where all client testimonials will be housed. This is currently on my Substack as a Client Wins page, and it will be replicated on my website when it gets built.
In the meantime, if anyone from social media or Substack lands on my Substack site, they will get a chance to not only get indoctrinated through the [Start Here] sequence, but they can also scratch their testimonial itch by checking out the Client Wins page too.
This thing is ready to deploy.
How are you using Substack to convert leads?
What other features of Substack are you enjoying that you’d love to share?
👇🏽 Hit the like button and leave your comments below!
Much love,
Renée
Optimize for the 76% — couldn’t have said it better myself.
And yes, like you said, once you see it clearly in your own behavior it can really help to understand the prospects perspective as you create your own rabbit hole for people to follow, and binge, and have epiphanies.
Appreciate the mention Renee 🙏🏽