To achieve this goal we took all the steps to make the best and easy-to-use platform possible. We started to build the project on WordPress so we can easily scale into a course platform, manage and integrate complex email sales flow through groundhogg CRM and run dynamic upsells using woocommerce and areo checkout based on user interactions.
The Platform
This platform was a complete marketing and event-handling solution. With built-in one on one booking through Latepoint, al a cart course purchasing system, and monthly and lifetime membership portal to all courses and projects. It handled live chat and youtube streaming, an advanced calendar feature for live workshops and events, and a video course delivery system that handles progress and sync to the built-in CRM. It handled automated monthly payments, course tagging, lead tagging and an advanced notification system to let users pick when and what we should send notifications about.
Scalability
We knew we were going to save this project big per month but we didn’t realize how much. We had 5 major software componates we needed to leverage. A E-Commerce system, A CRM, A booking system, a live stream system, Video Hosting, custom emails and a membership system. For example lets bundle some major 3rd party SaaS services into one just to see how much a year it would have cost to go down that route.
- CRM – Mailchimp premium plan costs around $5,712 per year alone.
- Membership – Kajabi prumim plan costs around $250 m0, & $3000 per year.
- E-Com – The Basic Shopify Price is 51 mo, & $612 a year
- Emails – Gmail 5x per user $25 per month, & $300 a year
- Booking – Calendly 20 mo & $240 a year
- Video – Vimeo $14 mo & 168 a year
- Live Stream – Youtube – Free
- Total SaaS cost before tax = $10,032 Per Year
The only third party service we opted for was vimeo’s private video hosting because its simply more robust and fairly cheap so if you combine that with our flat rate hosting cost of $33 dollars a month which looks like $564 a year. Which means we abstracted all of that value and bundled the fire power under one roof and connected all the services to work together while also saving over $9,468 a year.
Marketing
This project featured over 69 emails, 116 segments, and 23 email flows that encompassed complete marketing automation such as automatically tagging users who have completed workshops or engaged in a free webinar, abandoned car, or read every email part of our Motivation Mondays email series.
We also built a dynamic Facebook bot that responded to user inquiries during our Facebook marketing campaign. The bot helped users navigate free workshops all on Facebook and automatically send automated information and content about free workshops and help over come objections and scale communications.
We also launch a youtube channel with free weekly content that drove traffic to our evergreen email list, workshops, and courses.
