When Should You Go Evergreen?

A coach asked me this question the other day.

And to give you a little bit of context: She was doing live webinars with the goal of going fully automated and evergreen once the webinar was converting.

She asked:

“I have assumed that I need bigger numbers and more ad budget before going evergreen… is that correct? I want it to go evergreen when I know it works to get calls booked… I would love to have a minimum of 4-5 calls a week with our current capacity.”

And here’s how I responded:

“For evergreen, it’s more about producing results you’re happy with. And then scaling that up.

A bigger budget at this stage helps you learn faster and find winners more quickly. But it also means more risk. Because you won’t know exactly how well a webinar performed until after each promo period ends.

Here’s my concern if your goal is “getting 4-5 calls booked”:

You could throw $2,000 into Facebook ads and produce one booked call. But I’m assuming that doesn’t make business sense for you.

Technically, your webinar would be getting calls booked. But it might also bankrupt your business.

Instead, what you need is a benchmark to measure your webinars against.

You want a clear way to look at each week’s webinar stats and go: “Green light, or red light?” Turn it evergreen, or keep optimizing the live version?

In this case, the benchmark I recommend you use is “Cost Per Booked Call”.

In other words:

What is the maximum you’re able & willing to spend to get a potential client to book a call on your calendar?

Let me break this down step-by-step:

• Let’s say it costs you $10 to generate a webinar registrant
• And let’s say 1 out of 4 of those people attend your webinar (i.e. a Webinar Show Up Rate of 25%)
• That means it costs you $40 to generate a live attendee
• If 1 out of 5 of those attendees books a call with you (i.e. a 20% Webinar Offer Take Rate), that means your Cost Per Booked Call is $200

Okay, so we know your Cost Per Booked Call. But we don’t know if that cost is worth it yet.

So let’s give that number some context:

• It costs you $200 to generate 1 booked call
• Let’s say on average you enroll 1 out of 5 prospects into your coaching program (i.e. a 20% Sales Enrollment Rate)
• That means it costs you $1,000 to generate 1 new client
• And let’s say each client you enroll invests an average of $5,000
• Your return on ad spend is 5x ($4,000)

And let’s say you’re happy with a 5x return on your ad dollars.

In the scenario above, you’d know you have a winner if you’re booking calls for less than $200. With a clear measure for success, you can continue to optimize your webinar until you get below that number.

Then when you do, you know you’re ready to go evergreen and scale up.”