Listen/read my debrief of my 2 summits and bundle

Erin Kelly [00:00:01]:
Hey, hey. It is a drippy October morning. I'm out for a walk with my rain hood up, and I'm gonna do a long awaited debrief of my second summit that I ran earlier this year. So I have now run two low lift summits, which is what I'm calling them, because summits usually are a lot of work and they kind of make people grit their teeth when they think about running a summit. And so my challenge to myself was like, how can I make a summit that is as low lift as possible that anyone can run and get the benefits of the list growth and the credibility and the market research and just like all that good stuff. And I'm really happy with what I came up with using a combination of hello, audio and member vault. So the first summit that I ran back in January, I challenged all of the assumptions, and it was ungated. It was evergreen, so there wasn't anything anyone had to sign up for.

Erin Kelly [00:01:05]:
It was all, it all lived on our blog. And we saw a huge spike of traffic after that first summit, or like during. And then after that first time, we didn't have any affiliates. We didn't have any like fastpass, no, like revenue generation kind of activity, just the content and the sharing. And it was organic sharing. Again, there was no affiliate sharing, and it still worked. It worked really well. And one of the things that I noticed with the first summit is that because it's evergreen and ungated, we're getting, and this is intentional, is that we're getting SEO benefits from it.

Erin Kelly [00:01:47]:
And the other benefit is that I saw that the speakers were actually still sharing their session months and months after the summit ended, which I thought was really cool. So while I really enjoyed that, and I think I might do something similar in some kind of partnership where there is a specific SEO keyword string that I'm trying to rank for potentially doing something like that with some collaborators and having them actually share blog posts on their sites so that I'm increasing the backlinks to this content and having like a pillar post on our blog. It's like all the stuff that you need around this keyboard, right? So I think that's how I might pivot how I did that first summit, because it was very low lift in terms of getting the content from the speakers and getting it out and sharing it with our audience, but there wasn't the trackable list growth. And I also did not see a huge spike in trials. Now, my example and my scenario is going to be a little different than yours because I am running a SaaS company, which is a software as a service, and that is higher friction for people. Maybe they already have a tool that they like. Maybe they don't know enough about membervault yet. There's a huge friction around signing up for trials just because people have that, like, oh, I'm not ready yet.

Erin Kelly [00:03:18]:
I don't want to waste my trial time and I'm not like fully committed yet. And so I think for most people, if you had a really great opt in that you were maybe doing like a pop up for and really looking for conversion optimization on it for your evergreen ungated summit, I think that could actually probably convert really well, just for me, because at the time, the thing that I was really pushing people towards is the trial. I didn't see a huge spike in trial sense. We saw a lot of traffic and that's great. And there was a lot of really great feedback from our existing account owners. And that's something that I always look at is like, what, what efforts can I make will be good for traffic and list growth and also retention efforts. So engaging the member of our audience who are already paying us and really standing out as a cool community to be a part of, and that we create really good content and we connect them with really cool people, et cetera, et cetera. Right.

Erin Kelly [00:04:26]:
So that was very successful. So definitely was a fan of it to the point where I was like, okay, let's do this again. And let's do a little bit, take a little bit from the standard summit playlist. So I decided for the second summit that we would go with gated. So people had to actually sign up for the content. And what I did, and I paid my speakers. Both times I paid my speakers. What I did is I told the speakers, okay, it'll be free during the promotional window.

Erin Kelly [00:05:00]:
And then after that ends, it's actually going to flip to a paid product in membervault for us. So a little like micro course around recurring revenue. And what I did is I added a toolkit into that summit around like, okay, here are the different categories of recurring revenue. And then this is how you actually set those up inside of Membervault. So that it's not just theoretical strategy, it's the theoretical strategy, insights about what's working for someone and how to build it in memorable. So that has continued to sell. So it turned into a $9 action lab. After the end of the summit, we got over, it was like over 260 new conversions for the gated summit.

Erin Kelly [00:05:50]:
And I give access to our entire list. So these were people who were not on our list, or it was a secondary email address and they didn't realize they already had access, you have to always account for that. And there was a lot of engagement. People really, really liked it. And then I ended up with a paid product at the end. So I did have a quote, unquote fast passy kind of thing in that I was pushing people to sign up for a membervault account because anyone that signed up during the promotional window would get the recurrent, would get to keep access to the recurring revenue summit content forever. And again, there's a lot of friction with tools. So that did not convert the way that I wanted it to.

Erin Kelly [00:06:38]:
I think I just have to admit that there is like a step or a couple steps in between the lead gen and them actually signing up for a trial or for a paid plan. And so that is what I will definitely change with future summits is I will not have signing up for membervault be the like, fast pass type revenue generation. It'll be something else to kind of like nudge them into signing up for a trial and then converting to a paid account. So that's something that I'm just like, okay, I learned this lesson twice now. Like, it's just, it's too much friction. So for you, if you do it differently, I would say that the fast pass, where someone buys like, continued access, having it be, you know, access to the thing and something extra, would probably convert really, really well. And that's how I would do it next time as well. The thing that I learned with the second summit is you.

Erin Kelly [00:07:35]:
I got to just like, rinse and repeat my automations for speaker management and for the actual summit from the first summit. And so it made it even easier. So that's what I'm always looking for with systems. It's like, okay, after you set it up the first time, if you do it again, is it that much easier? Is it going to get easier and easier? And I definitely feel like that's the case with this low lift summit strategy. It's something that you can do every quarter or even every month if you wanted to. You just have to be careful not to like, exhaust your audience and fatigue them. But I think if they're like really small summits that are, and maybe not even call them a summit, but that are bringing together some people that you think your audience could benefit from their expertise, that, like, is a great compliment for your expertise that is around a very specific topic, ideally a topic that is going to be bringing people to the top of the funnel for your paid offers. Like you don't want to be doing list growth with people who are not going to be a good fit for your paid offers.

Erin Kelly [00:08:44]:
So that is definitely something that you can do. I have all the automations inside the launcher Summit Action lab, and Membervault makes it really, really easy to manage your speakers and to gamify the actual summit, or if you call it an event or whatever it is, works really, really well to simplify it and make it that low lift experience. And you get the speakers to actually submit the audio through membervault so that you're not having to like do manual follow ups and all this stuff. So I'll say this, I also have run a bundle now, and the bundle had affiliates. I went ahead and did like an affiliate giveaway and we had over 40 people participate in the bundle. So we had over 40 affiliates. And although only probably about 20 of them, actually 25 of them actually ranked with conversions. So not everyone was like getting involved in sharing, and that's fine, but we had affiliates and we also had sponsors.

Erin Kelly [00:09:57]:
And I would definitely combine that with my next summit. I would definitely consider having a sponsor, if not a couple of sponsors, and also affiliates because it definitely, I think the affiliate piece definitely was a big contributor to the success of the bundle. So we had over 800 people, new people for the member vault list, sign up for the bundle through affiliates, which is amazing. And I don't want to do another bundle just because there were so many moving parts that would be hard to streamline even with a system. And it was just so much work. Like I can get 800 leads in other ways. Now, the interesting thing that I've noticed is that summits seem to generate a lot of peer. This is totally from the gut, something I've anecdotally noticed.

Erin Kelly [00:11:05]:
Summits seem to really generate a lot of credibility from peers, people reaching out and wanting you, the host of your summit, to be involved in their summit. I mean, I got swamped both times with like six or seven plus invites to be involved in other people's summits right after or during the promotion of my summit, which is, that was really interesting, the bundle, and I still haven't quite figured this out, the bundle, I didn't have that experience, but I had a lot of people. We saw a huge spike in trial signups and we saw a huge spike in conversions to annuals. And this was without any promotions driving people to upgrade to annual. So I thought that was really interesting. I need to do more research on why that might have been. But anecdotally, during the bundle promotion period, it was pretty wild how many conversions we got. And again, there was nothing actively pushing anyone to convert to a paid plan.

Erin Kelly [00:12:04]:
So this was something about the experience. And again, I like added all of our membervaults list to the bundle so no one had to sign up for it. And so I think that there was just like so much goodwill. I definitely had quite a few people reach out to me and say how good it looked and that Membervault looked so good. And so I think that that was definitely a piece of it. And also just, you know, that we organized something that was so big that was really helpful to our account owners and their businesses. I think there was like a lot of things at play there. But interestingly enough, it's not like I got that huge wave of peers reaching out and asking me to be involved in their events.

Erin Kelly [00:12:47]:
There was a few, but not the same level as when I ran a summit. So I think the next one that I might do is kind of a hybrid of my experience between the summit and the bundle, and that I will have sponsors, I will have affiliates, and I probably will use at least a portion of the sponsor revenue to go towards Facebook ads to further increase reach and then also use that sponsor revenue to pay for the affiliate gifts so that it is basically free traffic generation for us. I mean, obviously you have to take into account time spent by you and time spent by your team if you have one. But the summit strategy is so much easier than the bundle strategy that in the bundle strategy, the way that I did it. So possibly a microbindle would work in the same way that a micro summit does. And I'm totally using that phrase from Wendy Breakstown, who patented it and or I should say came up with it. I don't know that she patented it, but that is her phrase for how she runs her summits because she does something very similar to mine and that they are very small summits and their audio, and so she calls them micro summits. And so I call mine low lift summits.

Erin Kelly [00:14:11]:
And that low lift is coming from how much you can automate using membervault and your email tool, which makes it way easier to put together. You don't have to do calls, you don't have to do a lot of manual follow up. And now you have this resource that you can share with your audience and grow your audience. And if you do sponsors and so kind of fast pass, you also have revenue generation. So definitely, especially if you're not wanting to run paid ads. I think that a Lola summit is the best way for you to grow your credibility and grow your list in a way that isn't going to just completely suck your soul like doing the bundle did for me. So I have very splashy results for the bundle. And all of my contributors were like, oh, this is such a great bundle to be a part of and I would love to do another one with you.

Erin Kelly [00:15:04]:
I'm like, nope, not doing that again. And again. I might in the future potentially come up with some kind of like hybrid, but I will not be doing the bundle, the mega bundle, like I did with this one, even though it was successful. So first summit ungated evergreen, second summit gated and then turned into a paid product after the promotional window ended where people could get it for free. And so people lost access if they didn't either buy it or upgrade to a paid plan. And I totally could have sold to that list a little bit harder than I did. I was going into other promotions and so I didn't, I didn't optimize that as much as I could overall. So that's something that would definitely make sure that I like, have the space or this is what I tell my clients to schedule those emails before you start the promotion.

Erin Kelly [00:16:01]:
Because promotions always take more energy than you think, especially if you're like, like an introvert. It takes more energy than you think it's going to. And so you kind of run out of energy at the end of the promotional window and you don't follow up with your leads as much as you probably should. So that's something that I would definitely change. And again, like, I want to be fully transparent here. Like it is low lift, but promotions definitely, like where you're like sharing on social media and you're interacting with the affiliates if you have them, or your contributors and your emailing, your list and you're responding to emails from your list and you're looking for opportunities to like nudge the people who are interested in buying. Like, that all takes so much mental bandwidth and energy. So definitely I will be adding even more resources to this action lab or to the launch your summit action lab.

Erin Kelly [00:16:58]:
If you're listening to this on the your questions answered private podcast, I will be adding that into that action lab. If you're listening to this through the action lab, then know that I will be adding more resources over time to this, even more than there already are, just to help the lift on the promotional piece, because that is definitely, that can be an energy suck. But everything that you do costs energy in your business, so it is definitely a much, much lower lift effort than most traditional summits. So I highly recommend it. Especially if you're not wanting to do paid ads and you want to build your credibility and relationships with other business owners. I think a low lift summit is the way to go. I would go with gated, not the ungated, and then figure out how you can make the most use of that content after the promotional window has ended. And consider doing sponsors and affiliates because it definitely boosts your results.