This Free Training Had INSANE Stick Rates (Here’s Why)

In today’s world, everyone’s chasing short-form content – reels… TikToks… everything’s 90 seconds or less.

After all, that’s what’s supposed to work now, right? 

Only…

I just ran a THREE HOUR live training where 83.8% stayed for over an hour. And 54.7% stuck around for the entire thing. 

(And since we ended up running long… that means that 54.7% of folks actually stuck around for nearly FOUR HOURS). 

If you know anything about show-up and stick rates, you know just how wild that is.

(If you don’t… most people would be thrilled to get 35% to even show up in the first place…) 

And here’s the thing – this wasn’t a super polished, high-ticket, high-production event.

It was just me and two cohosts on Zoom. And it was totally free.

So how’d we pull off such epic showup and stick numbers?

I shot a quick video for you debriefing the event and showing you what we did:

https://youtu.be/4SGHGO8wbm8&list=UUlArOzhUBWBbxSMkZBCafcA

best regards,
Jeff

P.S. 83% and 54% are awesome… but I think we can push them even higher next time. I talk about how I plan to do that in the video too:

So everyone's absolutely obsessed with short form video but I just did a live training where I had 83.8% of the people stay for a full hour, for more than an hour, and I had 54.7% stick for more than three hours.

And this was not a paid training – this was a free training. We also had right around 50% of the people show up for that training so these numbers are pretty extraordinary. And I was incredibly stoked by them. I couldn't believe it. 83.8% for an hour – that's ridiculous.

83.8% of people doing anything, is like, almost never happens. But then 54.7% over three hours and we actually went a little bit long.  We went about 3 hours and 25 minutes so we have people sticking till the end. Absolutely ridiculous.

So how do you do that? Well, the way you do anything is, you put together a real marketing campaign. You create some great hooks. You create some great messaging and then you deliver that messaging in a way that people actually hear it.

Here's one of the big secrets, and this will make sense to you, is that we offered no replay. We told people right up front that there would be no replay – that this was a live only training – so right off that drove people that helped show up and that absolutely helped stick. We also built a great hook – we were delivering this brand new training that we call the launch matrix – it wasn't for newbies, it was for advanced people and it was all about how people really have long-term success, long-term repeatable success, how they build a launch engine, and how they set themselves up so that engine continually refreshes and renews itself over time.

So we had a great hook and then once we got on the training here's a secret – we delivered crazy value – and we got into that value very, very quickly. We also, because we had this matrix that we were revealing as the show went on, it was naturally an open loop. People wanted to see that matrix filled in. So it was a super cool training. I can't remember a training where I've had so much amazing feedback like that. The chat roll was crazy. Another thing we did and this probably didn't help to stick but it was a dynamic that I actually [have] been leaning into is, we turned off the public chat.

So we did this on Zoom webinar. A lot of you can have the chat where people can see everyone else chatting in a lot of ways. That's like a great entertainment mechanism and that I think can help people stick but I also think it makes for a horrible learning environment and it makes it difficult to keep people's attention and deliver a concise message. So we actually turned off the public chat. We told people that the public chat was turned off. We left the private chat on so that people could type in their questions, their comments, their answers, and myself, and my two moderators, my two co-hosts could see that and we would interact with people through that. So I think that interaction also helps so it was absolutely awesome. I'm going to continue to evolve this model – come up with different topics that we're going to test this model on – but boy it really, really worked well.

Yes you need to put together some great copy. We had a great copy on our registration page that absolutely crushed it. We had great copy in our emails that drove the show up and then we got people on and we put on a fantastic show with great content.

Now I will tell you that we weren't perfect. And when I say “we”, it was myself, and then my two co-hosts. We made mistakes. I screwed up. I actually started the broadcast and I had some smooth jazz playing in the background. I couldn't figure out where it was coming up from. Turned out I had been in Slack and I had one of those conversations with one of my team members and it was like the elevator music playing in the background and we literally started the broadcast and I had this music going. I couldn't figure out where it was. It was a little embarrassing so it wasn't perfect and here's a big lesson. What I would do in the future – instead of putting a thousand people on the broadcast, we'll just mail a tiny sliver of the list, put a hundred people on the broadcast and practice with a much smaller audience before we come back out and go. You know go full scale with the big audience but it was absolutely an amazing training. We did this to actually create a training that, you know, that ideally we're going to take this and turn it into a paid training.

So we first delivered it as a free training. We actually delivered it twice. There were no replays but we did it twice live. The second time of course was way better than the first time so there's another lesson for you. I mean, it should be obvious but you get better with a little bit of practice and just going from one, you know, one presentation to two – it creates an incredible learning.

You know after that, going from two to three, you'll learn some more and three to four you'll learn some more but it will be diminishing returns. But the learnings from the first one to the second one were so much tighter. We cut pieces out, we added pieces and it – the stick rate was even better the second time around – so if you're obsessed with making your videos 90 seconds or 60 seconds or 30 seconds or 15 seconds know that you can still do long form and long form will still work for you.

So I'm Jeff Walker. Wherever you're watching from, let's go get them this week.