Growing with Your Audience through Tiered Courses & Memberships - Aimee Bagshaw

00:01 Hello everyone thank you so much for tuning into my presentation as a part of the Courses and Membership Summit. Let's get started. So today we're going to talk about growing with your audience through tiered courses and memberships. I'm excited to share insights on how tiered courses and memberships can significantly grow your business and deepen your customer relationships. 

00:27 For those of you not familiar with me, hello, I'm Amy. I am the owner of the Amy K Agency. I'm a lover of trashy TV, Marvel movies, Star Wars, which was even my wedding theme. I love jigsaw puzzles, house plans, and poutine. I'm a mom to three adorable rescue kitties and I live in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of British Columbia in Canada. I'm a course creator most well known for my Woo Commerce courses and my Points Frenzy corsets. 

00:57 I'm a creator and seller of commercial use Canva templates, and I'm a coach dedicated to helping aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey to success. So why tiered offerings? Tiered offerings allow businesses to serve customers at various stages of their learning and bonding journey, providing options that grow with their evolving needs. This approach not only increases customer lifetime value, but it also builds lasting loyalty and keeps people in your world longer. Customer journey and experience so, the customer journey in tiered offerings starts with discovery and extends to deep engagement through structured progression. 

01:41

Feedback is crucial at every step to refine the offerings and to ensure they meet the evolving needs of the audience. 

01:51 So, creating your strategy. First you want to do an audience analysis. Identify different groups within your audience, recognizing their unique needs and matching them with the appropriate levels of content. Design learning path so you want to develop a structured approach for each segment, beginning with basic information and progressing to more detailed tiers, clearly highlighting benefits and enhanced capabilities. At each level you want to establish clear goals, so define specific outcomes of each tier like skill acquisition, community enhancement and in depth training. Ensure each tier provides distinct benefits to justify the advancement. 

02:34 Selection of tools you want to choose platforms and tools that optimize the delivery and expansion of tiered content, improving user interaction and satisfaction. Ongoing improvement you want to set up a system to collect feedback from participants at each tier. Use this feedback to continuously improve and refine your course or membership offerings. So what is the benefit of tiered offerings? You're going to meet diverse needs, you're going to support continuous learning and you're going to maximize revenue. 

03:08 Tiered offerings build long term customer relationships by providing tailored learning experiences that grow with the user. So by meeting diverse needs, you're helping people at different levels in their journey. You're supporting continuous learning so that they stay in your world and they keep learning from you and maximizing revenue. I mean, let's be honest, we're all in this to make money and help people. So by keeping people in your world longer, it's going to help increase your revenue so the concept of tiered courses. 

03:42 So we've got level 1, which is like your lead magnet or an E book or something that's a low ticket item i would say 9$ or less. Then you've got your Tier 2 level, which is something like a kick start course or an entry level training of some kind. That's going to be more advanced than what you get in level 1, but it's not going to be super advanced and out of reach for someone that maybe money is tight or is on a budget, that sort of thing. And then Level 3, you want to think about your signature course or your advanced offering something that's more comprehensive and it's going to dive in deeper, giving lots of details. 

04:29 So here's an example of tiered courses that I have So my Woo commerce course, I have two level one options 1 is a lead magnet, which is absolutely free. It's a portion of the full ebook, which is a 9$ low ticket item so those are both the level 1. So the lead magnet gives a taste of how to set it up, but it kind of cuts out early and just gives like a taster. The full ebook, that's the low ticket, 9$ ebook. This in theory, if they're reading it through and following along, it will walk them through all of the steps for setting up WooCommerce on their WordPress site but then we've got our Tier 2 offering. 

05:18 So for me, that's my kickstart course, WooCommerce for WordPress Kickstart. And what that does is it's an entry level training. It's an over the shoulder video where I walk them through step by step showing you how to set up WooCommerce on your WordPress site in 30 minutes. And then we've got our Tier 3, which is my WooCommerce for WordPress signature course. And this is a full comprehensive advanced course so it's going to give lots of detail, lots of insight, and it's going to think about pain points and solve those problems for you. 

05:59 So diving into it a little bit deeper, Tier 1 is highly accessible. So our tiered course approach begins with a highly accessible entry point, a freely magnet or low ticket item like setting up the WooCommerce E, book this initial offer introduces newcomers to the basics of setting up their WooCommerce store or whatever training you are doing, providing foundational knowledge without an investment barrier. 

06:30 Your two is helpful and affordable. So for those ready to take the next step, you should offer something that is affordable or accessible and delivers a more handheld approach, like my Woo Commerce for WordPress Kickstart course. So this is priced at 27$ It's designed to help users fully configure their shop in just 30 minutes, providing a practical and quick solution to get their online business running efficiently. So it's literally going through every single setting in the shop, walking you through to make sure that you could have it fully set up and configured by the time you finish the training. 

07:09 We have our Tier 3, our comprehensive or advanced course, so for those aiming to take it to the next level or for more thorough understanding, you should have a more extensive training available like my signature WooCommerce course. So this course is 197$ and offers extensive training and in depth videos on personalizing your store, enhancing the performance and lots more. It goes through pain points, things that you know people think can't work on WooCommerce and I show you how it can work and it provides and it's with the tools needed to fully optimize their online business. 

07:52 They also took this into consideration when planning our memberships. So Tier 1 you want to think of like a low ticket or an entry level. So perfect for beginners or for those only interested in the basics. And then a tier two more advanced, you get more advanced resources, maybe there's personalized, support something that's for someone looking to dive deeper and take their biz to the next level. You can have three tiers as well for memberships it's just not something that I have so you could think of something more like a lead magnet and then it as level 1 you could do level 2 as the entry level course or low ticket offer and then tier 3 would move up to the advanced level. 

08:44 So tier one as an example is my template transformation hub. So this is perfect for beginners or for those only interested in PLR templates and MRR clipart someone that's only interested in like give me something that I can quickly customize and get it in my shop to sell. So that's what I do for this they get all access to my PLR templates. It doesn't matter if I release 2 or I release 10, they get all of them for 9$ a month. But then I take it to the next level with the PLR powerhouse and this is for people more serious or more advanced, or people that sell PLR. This membership will give them access to everything that's in my tier one membership, but it also gives them full access to my MRR template library, meaning that they can customize and resell it as PLR. 

09:40 And then on top of that, it gives them access to a training vault which will teach them everything to do with running APLR business. And then it also includes one-on-one Voxer support coaching, and then it includes crop coaching Zoom calls. So yeah, so it's more comprehensive they get more access to me, it takes more of my time, and they get lots of different training videos and they can even submit requests for new training videos. So this structure supports users as they grow from beginners to experienced creators. I'm thinking about creating a new course or a new membership. I always put it to paper 1st and I put my general idea down and what my goal is and what I want to teach. 

10:29 And then I look at how I can break that up into different levels so that more people can have access to it and so that people have a journey they can follow to learn as they go or to learn more when they're ready, that sort of thing so it's really important to kind of think about your idea and then look at a plan for it, not to put all your eggs into one basket, so to speak. 

10:54 Overcoming obstacles. So navigating challenges in tiered offerings, you want to keep your students engaged so using interactive elements and progress incentives to maintain interest across all levels so obviously this will look different depending on the level that you're looking at. A level 1, you know, is going to be pretty minimal, but you might have something that trucks the progress or a quick win at the end. Level 2, keep someone engaged, you know, maybe you want to give an incentive for completing different levels or maybe a certificate when they complete it. And Level 3 think would be the one where you would want to put more effort into this. 

11:41 And like the others, you know, you could do something that tracks their progress with quick wins along the way. Maybe you could do a challenge if they do it within a certain period of time, then they get X bonus or again, a certificate of completion people usually love those. Maybe you offer an incentive of promoting something that they create through that training. There's lots of different options, but you always want to think about how you're going to keep them engaged, ensuring relevant content so regularly refresh your courses and memberships with the latest insights and user feedback to keep material current and valuable. 

12:21 So you know what are the latest AI trends in regards to your topic? What are the latest trends in general in regards to your topic if there's something new, you want to update your course that way your students can feel confident that you are up to date and that you're giving them the most up to date information. And then you want to make sure you're adapting to need so you want to offer flexible learning paths and pacing to accommodate diverse learning preferences and speeds so for me, the number one is accessibility to me, that offers different preferences and speeds in itself and it also makes your product accessible so for me, what that looks like when I have video trainings, I make sure that I put closed captioning on all of them. 

13:07 I make sure that I provide a transcript with all of them. I do not charge extra because I believe that everyone, no matter the way that they need to learn, everyone should have access to be able to learn your product the way that they learn best. So I think that's really important and then adapting to needs also, I think it's really important, I guess this time into ensuring relevant content as well. It's really important to take feedback, so in every level of your trainings, you want to make sure that you're asking for feedback you know, was there anything that they felt was missing was there anything that they didn't like what do they love the most about it? You know, the things that they love the both the most, maybe you're going to expand on that. 

13:50 The things that they don't love, maybe you want to dig into that a little bit deeper and find out why they don't love it is it the way that you've laid up the training? Is it that maybe it's not a very clear training? Is it complicated and it should be split up into more right size trainings, that sort of thing. And also finding out, you know, in the feedback, what made them purchase it, what made them come back if they're buying a level 2 or Level 3. 

14:19 So getting that information and then using that information to actually tweak the different levels of offers and continuously doing that I think will really, really benefit you and benefit your customers as well in their learning journey. 

14:37 Well, thanks so much for joining me today. I hope that you've seen how careful planning and strategy can greatly enhance the value you deliver to your audience and help your business flourish at the same time. So here's to supporting both you and your students as you implement these strategies today. As a thank you for tuning into my presentation, I'd like to offer you my starter guide to creating tiered digital products as a free gift. This guide is packed with insights and practical steps to help you apply what we've discussed today. Grab your coffee and begin expanding your offerings now. Well, lastly, feel free to connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, or you can email me at Amy at the ADK Agency. 

15:24 I hope you enjoyed this presentation today thanks so much.