5 Beautiful Benefits of Hosting a 5-Day Challenge
Mandy was a health and wellness coach who specialized in working with postpartum women who wanted to return to their previous fitness level. She loved helping her virtual clients change their lives, but she often found herself frustrated because she was constantly looking for new clients.
She wanted a way that she could regularly fill her coaching classes without needing to constantly market them. That’s when Mandy’s friend—who was an online marketer—suggested hosting a 5-day challenge.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, a 5-day challenge is a challenge where you invite participants to accomplish a goal over the course of five days. For example, a popular home organization coach might host a 5-Days to Clutter Free Closets Challenge.
Each day during the challenge, the host will share tips and advice on how to clear out those household closet. At the end of each day’s lesson, she shares a quick homework assignment and invites her participants back to her Facebook group where they can share pictures of their progress.
After the challenge, the coach invites her participants to sign up to work with her virtually. This means she has a convenient sales funnel of new clients that are continually joining her business.
Now, hosting a 5-Day challenge might sound like a lot of work. But once you set it up the first time, you can run it again and again. The only changes will be that you stop in and interact with a new round of participants on Facebook.
Besides helping you find new clients, here are five more beautiful benefits of hosting a 5-day challenge for your community.
Grow Your Mailing List
A mailing list is a valuable asset for an online business owner. That’s because email has a return on investment of $38 to every $1 spent (HubSpot). Not only that but you own the rights to your email address.
When you build your business around a social media platform, you don’t own the contact information for your followers. The platform does. This means that if you get mistakenly marked as a spammer and your account is deleted, you have no more access to your followers. All those hours you spent pouring into your social media account are gone.
Unless you were working diligently to build an email list. Then you can still keep in touch with your followers and fans. You can continue to do business as usual without having to worry about filling your client funnel.
Re-Engage Your Subscribers
You might be thinking that a 5-day challenge sounds lovely. But your email list might be dead or close to dying. You rarely send out messages and when you do, you get a lot of unsubscribes and more than a few confused replies.
A 5-Day challenge can be the perfect way to re-engage your subscribers. Not only is this free for them but it gives them a chance to interact with your brand again, reminding them of who you are and why they value your products or services.
Of course, not every email subscriber will necessarily want to receive messages from you about the 5-day challenge you have coming up. What you can do is email your main list. Let subscribers know that if they don’t want to receive messages on this topic, they can opt out.
Then use your mailing service’s tagging feature to automatically tag those users as “not interested in (challenge)”. When you go to message your subscribers in the future, you’ll select the option to exclude subscribers with that particular tag.
Build Your Facebook Community
Another advantage of this approach is that you can build your Facebook community. While you never want to rely exclusively on social media to find your clients, you can use it to build a community of like-minded clients who love working with you.
You can do this by encouraging your subscribers to share their progress on your social media group. It might be wise to start a special challenge related hashtag so you other participants can easily follow threads that are related to this topic. For example, if you’re hosting a Clutter Free Closet Challenge then your hashtag could be: #closetchallenge or #clutterfreecloset or #nocluttercloset.
As your participants post, relationships within your community will begin to form. They’ll ask questions, cheer each other on, and share tips or advice. You might even find some of this inspires you to create more content for your members!
Another benefit of doing this is that members of your Facebook community might see the challenge and join your mailing list. This allows you to grow your subscriber base even more, resulting in more potential clients.
Turn Your Community into Action Takers
An online community is only as strong as its action takers. If you have a community filled with people who never act on your advice and recommendations, then you have a dead community. It’s not truly growing, and it needs to be pruned.
You can use the 5-day challenge as the opportunity to look at how many subscribers you have and if they’re truly engaging with you and your business. If not, you may want to consider pruning them.
Members that are never active in your Facebook group or subscribers who are never opening your messages are taking up valuable space. Consider creating a guideline for yourself such as “subscribers who have not opened an email for 6 months are deleted”.
At first, deleting members who aren’t engaged with your brand might feel scary. But keep in mind that these people are not truly interested in what you’re offering. If they were, they would be taking action by reading your messages, replying to you, or engaging in the Facebook community you’re building.
When you’re done pruning, you’ll be left with fewer people, but it will be a more valuable list of subscribers and members since you’ll only have the action takers. These are your true fans and the people you really want to serve!
Profit from Additional Offers
While you might host your 5-day challenge for free, that doesn’t mean you can’t profit it from it. From the very beginning of your challenge, you need to be seeding in opportunities for clients to make purchases that will get you profits.
How you include these opportunities is up to you. But one good idea is to add affiliate offers where relevant to your challenge. For example, during your closet challenge, you reference a closet organizer. Don’t just mention it. Link to your favorite one on Amazon or another site.
If a tangible item isn’t appropriate, suggest a digital one. For example, if you’re doing a 5-day digital scrapbooking challenge, affiliate link to your favorite site that sells scrapbook paper bundles.
The important thing with these suggestions is to pick items that you know are of good quality and that will be helpful to your audience. If you do this, they won’t get angry at your recommendations. They’ll thank you for them!
Host a Challenge Today
It doesn’t have to be difficult to host a challenge. Once you have a framework, it’s easy and fun. In fact, you can run your challenge again and again over the course of several years if you want.
Not only is this enjoyable and profitable for your business, it serves your community, too. That’s a win-win-win!
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