Breakdown: a $10M webinar funnel

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Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. I run The Feed, the largest newsletter growth agency - 2x a month I share short reflections with my clients and other operators.

Zero formality or ads - just a guy sharing learnings from running paid ads & launching digital products for operators doing $50k-$5M / month with newsletters.

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My buddy Niels Klement sells a $2,997 software product to cold traffic on a live webinar.

Perspective, his company:

This is pretty genius: The webinar sells a year of their software up front so they break even on ad spend and user is effectively free.

(hello, negative CAC, everybody’s favorite term in newsletters).

Think of companies like beehiiv and Substack that had to raise millions to get to $10M+!

And for good reason - it can take 6-12+ months to just break even on the dollars you spend to get a customer.

Perspective found out that you can take a $47/month product and sell it for $2-3k by adding in bonuses like templates, community, and other “done-with-you”-esque offers that actually help the customer realize the full value of said product.

This is how you take a low-ticket offer and turn it into a high-ticket offer, enabling you to…

The single best way to sell high-ticket is a webinar/workshop.

A webinar is effectively a 90-minute sales call with 100+ people at once.

You give your best pitch one-to-many, every time. People buy directly, and anyone who still wants a call shows up pre-sold, so you get to close layup sales.

It works for 3 business models:

Niels walked me through his entire funnel on the pod - ads, registration flow, slides, bonuses. We also have multiple clients spending $50k-$300k/month profitably on webinars right now, so I want to walk you through 4 things:

At its peak, Perspective spent $30-50k a week on its core webinar.

They keep 50-100 ads live at any time in this ad library, run campaign budget optimization, and let Meta decide where the money goes.

Winners are rare, so they squeeze them.

Their creative director cuts 6-12 variations of each winner in the same week: new hooks on a proven body, new creators reading the same script, the founder in a new setting.

Two of their winning angles:

Direct problem call-out. "Don't waste days building landing pages," then straight into conversion data.

It's a remix of a creator collab, and it spent ~$200k, 2x the original, because "landing pages" reached people who never use the word "funnel."

The competitor call-out. It names people using ClickFunnels, GoHighLevel, or Meta lead ads to build quiz funnels, jabs that they're doing service delivery on hard mode, and asks for 31 seconds. It spent $62k.

A typical webinar landing page converts at 25-40%, and cost per registrant usually lands at $8-15.

If you're asking the right qualifying questions (see below - revenue, team size, what they sell), expect the higher end.

You're paying to filter out people who were never going to buy.

The 3 conversion events I've seen work best:

A healthy show rate is 20-30%.

I told you to advertise 7-8 days out last year when I hosted the Own The Inbox summit with beehiiv.

With a lot more data, I've changed my mind - people who register 3-4 days before a webinar show up best.

So run webinars weekly, or better, twice a week on Wednesdays and Sundays. Your ads never have to turn off, and every registrant is always 3-4 days from the next session.

Then stack show-rate tactics:

One of our clients was stuck at an 11-12% show rate.

We put all three of these in place and it doubled.

They now spend $30k/month profitably on webinar ads that weren't profitable before - same offer, same ads, same webinar.

Niels opens with high energy. He calls out names in chat and confirms the workshop is live.

Then comes the promise, the proof, and a reason to stay until the end. (He calls it a bribe. Always bribe people to stay!)

His rule: list the beliefs people hold that need to change, so that by the time you make the offer they're thinking "this is for me."

The 3 beliefs his Instant Conversion Masterclass set out to change:

Only then comes the offer - a 12-month plan with ad strategies, templates, a partner program, and extra funnel slots.

You don't need a $250k/month ad budget to find out if webinars work for your offer.

Use what I’ve written about here and run a small test:

You can make $15-20k on the back of $3-5k in spend if you have an offer that’s $5-15k (particularly useful for anyone using webinars to close clients).

What you're looking for depends entirely on how you've priced the offer:

Don't price in the middle.

Perspective sells $2,997 annual plans straight off the webinar to cold traffic and it works - but they're the exception, not the rule.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to add webinars to your sales toolkit.

Look at where companies are spending money and time right now.

They're all buying the same thing: trust.

It's the ultimate moat, and you either pay for it with money or with time.

Webinars are simply one of the most efficient vehicles to take a cold lead from Meta and build such a vast amount of trust in a short period of time that they’re willing to pay you thousands of dollars for your product or service.

That's the letter.

- Nathan