Marketing and selling online courses is something that a lot of online course creators struggle with. Maybe you can relate.
You’re the expert on your topic, driven by your passion and profession. After all, you did create an entire course about it, but you’re not a marketing expert. Consequently, your course has very few, maybe even no sales.
Statistics on the e-learning market size in 2021 indicate that mobile learning remains one of the fastest-growing markets in the sector. Last 2015, the mobile learning market was worth just $7.98 billion. In 2020, that number had risen to $22.4 billion. Experts predict that the mobile e-learning market will rise to $80.1 billion by 2027.
Having a great course or coaching program is just one of the requirements for succeeding as an online instructor. Another requirement is having a specific process for attracting and enrolling students in your course.
That process is called a sales funnel, and without one, enrolling new students regularly is nearly impossible. Integrating a Done for You Sales funnel for your online course, membership program, and coaching/mentoring business boosts your profit-driven by your passion.
The Sales Funnel and Your Business Driven by Passion
Not having a sales funnel for your online course is the equivalent of setting up a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert where no one will ever find it. Sure, it may be super-hot outside, and your lemonade may be delicious.
But if you’re not giving people a clear path to follow, and that leads to your lemonade stand, they will never find it. This “build it and (hope) they will come” approach rarely translates into sales and enrolments, at least in the real world.
Creating your online course is just the beginning of successful course business. What’s equally important to create an online course is selling the course.
Without a sales funnel, your promotional efforts are going to suffer. Your entire income depends on the effectiveness of your sales funnel.
But if you invest your time in building a Done for You sales funnel, you will start getting the attention of potential customers and encourage them to enroll in your courses. And that’s exactly what your business needs.
How does a Done for You sales funnel work for your coaching/mentoring business?
A successful sales funnel informs, attracts, and converts customers.
While there are many ways you can motivate people to enroll in your course, the best strategy follows this order:
- Create highly valuable content (Awareness stage)
- Send out targeted emails (Relationship-building stage)
- Encourage people to buy your course (Sales stage)
Each initiative serves a purpose and helps you build a dedicated audience who reads your blog posts, opens your emails, and makes a conscious decision to buy from you.
What tools do you need to build an online course Done for You sales funnel?
Once you’ve set up a Done for You sales funnel, it can run virtually on autopilot. It will continue to enroll new students into your course while you’re relaxing, watching a movie, enjoying a meal with your family, and even while you’re sleeping.
Here are some of the requirements for setting up a Done for You sales funnel:
1. Email marketing automation software
This sales funnel involves building a list of email subscribers and sending them automated emails, so you will need an account with an email service provider (ESP).
You will need a place to keep your audience and set up your email sequences. This is why you need an email marketing automation platform.
With the right automation software, you can collect emails, build your audience, and start marketing to them. It’s also effortless to set up automation to sell your courses for you!
2. Drive Traffic Source
While you bring traffic to your website, you need to build up your audience and mailing list to keep them coming back for more and getting your updates. The most effective way is through a good lead capture.
A sales funnel only works if people enter the sales funnel. To get those people, you either need an audience (your email list, blog readers, podcast listeners, social media followers, etc.) or a willingness to hustle and/or spend money on ads to get people into the funnel. Until you get people into your sales funnel, it won’t convert anyone.
A lead magnet is usually free content offered in exchange for the visitor’s email address and other contact details. Generating leads is the start of building an audience. Then, you need to keep in touch and nurture relationships with your leads.
3. A Dedicated eLearning Website
Before you turn leads into customers, you need to have your course built, hosted, and the sales page ready. Once you finish building your online school, you can start marketing to your audience.
4. Pick a Payment Processor
Last but not least, you will need a way to collect payments. The payment processor you choose is very important. A payment process like PayPal or Stripe can be connected with your course platform to collect payments through your sales page.
Make sure you check possible transaction fees and choose the processor that works for you. Once you connect the payment gateway with your sales page, you are ready to start reaching out to your audience.
5. Your Webinar software (optional)
Choosing a webinar software is optional, but one of the best ways to sell your online course is to host a live webinar to present your course to the attendees. To host a webinar, you’ll need an account with webinar software like Zoom.
11 Steps in Creating a Sales Funnel to Sell Your Online Course:
There are a lot of different pieces that make up a Done for You sales funnel. Here are ten easy steps to guide you in how to market your online course or membership site:
Step 1: Define and locate your target audience
Defining your target audience is always the first step in creating a Done for You sales funnel. You must have some idea of what people are interested in your topic, where they are hanging out online, and what motivates them to begin creating awareness of your course at the top of the funnel.
If you just start sending out emails and tweets with no real plan, your efforts will be wasted. You need to know that you are creating the right content for the right people. It might help to keep track of your target audience research in a document or spreadsheet.
Some places to research your target audience include:
- Facebook groups – search for groups and join. Initially, just read comments and take notes about who's asking questions, commenting, and gather intel. Then begin offering advice and any free valuable input or resources.
- LinkedIn groups – Do the same as for Facebook groups. You can also search for influencers and try to connect with them on LinkedIn.
- Twitter feeds/hashtags – Make a list of relevant hashtags to use. Follow potential target audience candidates and comment and like their postings. Hopefully, they follow you back.
- Instagram hashtags – same strategy as for Twitter
- Pinterest – If it makes sense, look at what people are pinning related to your topic and its popularity.
- Reddit – Look at threads
- Quora – are people asking questions and commenting about your topic? Who are they?
- Other online forums – There are forums out there for just about any topic if you look hard.
- Purchase lists or market research – if you have money to blow, you can create surveys on Survey Monkey and use their database to find your audience.
Step 2: Develop More Content to Promote
Through developing your online course, you should have the basis for some initial content to promote. Certainly, if you are just starting to create a course, then now’s the time to think about repurposing some of the content you will create.
It would be best to start writing blogs, guides, checklists, review articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, opinion pieces on Medium and LinkedIn, and so forth. Make sure to create one or more lead magnets in this phase, such as guides, checklists, diagrams, etc., that you can leverage to collect emails later on.
If you haven’t done this – now’s the time. There’s no getting around using content to build a following. Just have a search for some of the most successful courses and instructors, and you’ll find that these instructors have a lot of content out there.
Content also includes developing your final offer, that is to say, your course. Take some time to write down exactly what your offer is.
- What is the price of your course?
- What are the benefits and outcomes for students?
- What problem does it solve?
- Why should they buy a course from you?
You will need this in the future when you create your email campaign.
Step 3: Open social media accounts
Each social media will become invaluable over time and may serve slightly different purposes for your sales funnel. On Quora, you can answer questions as an expert and create awareness at the top of your funnel with your target audience.
For example, becoming an expert on Quora that answers questions will help get your name out there. You can eventually start including links to your website or course (in moderation) with your answers.
On Instagram, focus more on the visual and emotional aspects of your online course business brand.
Step 4: Create a Website and Publish Blogs
Once you’ve identified a specific problem that your target market is searching for a solution to, the next step is to publish free content that helps them solve that specific problem.
The idea behind this step is to provide value to your target market upfront for free (by sharing content that helps them), earning their trust, and positioning you as an expert in the process.
Your content doesn’t necessarily have to be a blog post, either. If you want, you can publish a podcast episode (audio content) or perhaps a video. The type of content you create is not super important.
The important thing is that the content you create helps your target market. Try to create the best piece of content on the web about that specific problem that you identified.
Your blog post’s problem that helps them solve should not be the ONLY problem that your course helps them solve. It should be just one of several problems that your course addresses.
So your blog post helps your reader, but it also unpacks a greater problem (one that your course is the solution to).
Step 5: Create a YouTube channel
As with other steps in the sales funnel process, this one can take a while. Still, it’s a necessary evil or benefit, depending on how comfortable you create and edit videos.
You can easily start by creating a few simple videos that introduce yourself and your course to help establish your topic authority and create awareness.
Also, you can create a handful of brief videos covering a simple topic, whatever you are comfortable with. Remember, for this strategy to work in every YouTube video, you should refer people to your website and/or course landing page and vice versa.
Step 6: Learn about Facebook and Google ads.
You can use Facebook ads to promote your course to specific audiences that have certain demographics and interests. It depends on your budget, but it’s a good idea to understand how these work and what returns you might get from using ads before you need to do it.
Step 7: Get SEO savvy.
SEO is a huge topic. You need to know a minimum amount about SEO to ensure your content development efforts are not wasted. There’s just no point in writing a hundred blog posts if your website and blog are not optimized for Google (and Yahoo, Bing, etc.) search traffic that you want to drive into the top of your funnel.
The main thing you need to do is understand what keywords your target audience is searching for. If you’ve done your homework creating course titles and landing pages already, this should not be a strange concept.
If you create your website in WordPress, it provides SEO guidance, so there’s good news. That said, don’t get too hung up on SEO; it takes a good while to understand and get good at it. Just keep working at it.
Step 8: Adopt an email system.
We’ve all received automated emails multiple times a day when we forgot to uncheck the box. You’ll need to ask your target audience to join the ranks of these knowledgeable marketers by adopting an automated email system to build your list of subscribers and people you wish to market to.
These systems are typically very easy to use and set up and allow you to segment your audience lists and more. Get to know yours intimately since there are dozens of options for automating emails and building email lists.
Step 9: Gather emails
Depending on your personal and professional situation, how you collect emails will vary widely. There are some commonalities, though. So how do you gather emails? Generally, think of a way to collect emails with anything you are doing.
Let us count the ways. Here are some ideas:
- Use social media and other channels, such as commenting on blogs and forums, to drive viewers to an email collecting channel such as your website.
- Include a subscription opt-in link for your blog/newsletter with every email you send
- Website lead magnet, blog, or newsletter subscription email capture
- Ask anyone remotely related to your topic for their email, i.e., private message through Twitter or Facebook.
- Friends and friends of friends (referrals)
- Family and extended family
- Colleagues
- Customers
- Fellow hobbyists or fellow students (i.e., in a language or yoga class)
- Ask for good ole fashioned business cards (i.e., collect them in a jar at your place or a friend's place of business!)
- Put out sign-up lists (online and offline), such as a newsletter.
- Opt-ins/email registration popups on all web pages
- LinkedIn contacts
- Purchase email lists (last resort)
Step 10: Automate email & social media messages.
Your automated sequence of emails needs to reflect the different stages of the sales funnel process, as depicted in the diagram above.
Ideally, automated emails should guide your prospective students somewhere from the “interest phase,” where they have signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a lead magnet to purchase your course. This requires a good bit of thought to create the right messaging, frequency, and content offer.
A good place to start when creating your email sequence is your end goal. How will you get people to buy your course? What will it take? The answer to these questions is called “nurturing.” It’s what you do via automated emails after someone has shown interest in your topic.
Depending on your sales funnel cycle, free content that you could offer throughout several emails includes:
- Invitations to webinars
- Previews of your course, i.e., the first 1 or 2 lesson modules
- Links to new blog posts
- Send them directly to your course landing page by:
- Offering a free trial (make sure it's for a limited time!)
- Offering them discounts/coupons
- Over time, those who try and don't buy have a separate course of emails to ask them why they are not buying?
- Offer a quick survey for them to answer, for example. At least you are keeping them engaged.
Here’s an example of how an automatic email campaign might flow:
- Week 1: Welcome email – Thanks for signing up; you are valued, introduce yourself/your story, invite questions/feedback, explain what's coming and what value they can expect
- Week 2: Teach something valuable
- Week 3: Teach something valuable, offer a "freebie" download via the website
- Week 4: Give something of value (did you like that freebie? Here's more!) and hint at the course you are offering
- Week 5: Provide a success story or two or three from your course
- Week 6: Think of common challenges to purchasing your course (price, length, difficulty) and address these. Pitch your course again with a limited time offer.
- Week 7: Reminder, limited-time offer expiring! Reiterate benefits.
Don’t forget: Always offer in every email the option to opt-out of future emails. It’s the law, and it’s just good business.
Step 11: Track results
Lastly, your email system should tell you how successful your emails are. Use this information to tweak and improve them over time. You should also track your blog posts, Twitter followers and Twitter activity, Facebook ad success, etc. Infusionsoft is a great tool for this kind of thing.
Although it’s a little bit more advanced, Google Analytics also helps you to track your revenue sources better and gain a comprehensive understanding of where your money is coming from.
This can be done through the use of unique client IDs and Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. When integrated, developers can measure user activity, match online and offline behavior, and send data to both the data and server.
Use Your Sales Funnel to Enroll New Course Students on Autopilot
The world of online courses has grown exponentially in recent years, and it looks set to continue booming despite the increase of digital businesses. In a market that’s still developing, you could position yourself as a leader in your field of expertise with the right blend of insight, organic search, and targeting.
To effectively tap into this world of potential revenue streams for educators, it’s vital that you effectively optimize your sales funnels and track conversions to fend off mounting competition. Schedule a consultation with us today and start selling your online course automatically with a sales funnel.
