Have you ever tried running on sand? To put it frankly, it’s terrible. You’re putting in twice the effort to get half the distance. This is exactly what it’s like when there are gaps in your sales pipeline. And unfortunately, far too many course creators face this dilemma.
When creating a course, you’re giving your business a perfect opportunity to reach more people with your expertise, but when was the last time you took a good look at your pipeline to identify any gaps or untapped opportunities?
Check out the example course-creator pipeline below for tips and inspiration.
Skip ahead:
- The importance of personalization
- The pipeline
- Going the extra mile for your business and your customers
- Let’s talk tech and next steps
Before we dive in: The importance of personalization
As you check out the following pipeline, you’ll notice an emphasis on personalization.
People often believe that an automated pipeline is an impersonal one. But in reality, there are an infinite number of ways to make automated communications thoughtful and personal, while also improving consistency and conversion.
Read on to discover steps that can not only fill the gaps in your current one-to-many pipeline, but also offer personalization opportunities that will delight your leads and customers. And don’t forget to keep an eye out for the strategies and technology that can help bring these personalized pipeline phases to life without costing you valuable time.
The pipeline
Prospecting
This phase is all about capturing the attention of your target audience, but this can be a tough phase for course creators. Use the following two ideas to help ensure you’re reaching the right audience with the right offer:
Inbound marketing requires you to create content, such as blog posts, eBooks, guides, ads and anything that will pique your target audience’s interest. You’re probably doing this already, but make sure you’re also implementing a solid SEO strategy to back the content you create. Optimizing your content for search engines in turn optimizes this phase of your pipeline and maximizes the effort you’re putting into making content. Search engines will be crawling whatever you create to serve it up in results, so the better optimized your content is, the easier your target audience can find you.
Landing pages and forms: If you’re not using these powerful tools, the prospects you’re attracting with your stellar content will fall through the cracks. This is one of the most costly gaps you could run into. To plug this pipeline hole and avoid losing prospects you worked hard to reach, use landing pages to tell a clear story about your solution and use forms to capture contact information from high-intent leads. Store those leads in your CRM and nurture them towards a sale. Speaking of nurturing leads, this brings us to our second sales pipeline phase.
Automatic lead nurture
When it comes to nurturing leads, doing it manually can result in a shocking amount of gaps. Why? Because every time an important nurture message is forgotten, a gap forms where leads can be lost. This often happens without teams even realizing the damage being done because they’re too busy juggling other things. That’s why your pipeline needs automatic nurture sequences.
Use business automation software to build nurture campaigns consisting of all the outreach you need to move your audience through your pipeline. For example, after someone submits a form on your website, business automation can automatically launch a welcome series that will provide resources that interest them and push them toward the next phase in your sales process. Once it’s triggered, your audience will get all the necessary messages at the exact time they need them. And you and your team won’t have to lift a finger because the nurture process is happening automatically.
You may already be utilizing automatic lead nurturing, but that doesn’t mean you’re immune to gaps. Make sure you’re not skipping any steps in your automatic sequences by including valuable content in every text and email. A few effective things to include are:
- Personalized email to introduce your business
- Free eBook
- Sneak peek of your course and accompanying customer testimonial
- Helpful articles related to their interests (Your small business CRM can help)
- Free webinar invitation
- Exclusive discounts
All of these resources are focused on providing value to your leads, which is a priority for this phase in the pipeline. The best part of this process is that whatever you choose to nurture leads with can be automated, resulting in zero gaps, less manual work for you, and a consistent experience for your leads.
Lead qualification
As people start to engage with your messages, the qualification phase commences. You can easily optimize and streamline this phase in your pipeline by collecting valuable data from your automated nurture sequences. This data will inform your qualification process so you can segment the most engaged leads who are ready to purchase a course from you.
Automatic lead scoring was designed to quickly and accurately bubble up your high-intent leads without any manual input from you or your team.
An optimized, efficient qualification phase looks something like this: Business automation and CRM software tracks every contact’s interaction with you, including how often they open your emails, which links they click, what forms they submit and more. Then, it assigns points to each positive action, subtracts points for negative actions, tallies them up and signals which leads are most likely to take the next step with your brand.
Webinar or live event
Making a live event part of your one-to-many pipeline is a great way to serve a lot of people at once, but in a way that feels personal and engaging. So, after you’ve determined who your most qualified leads are, automatically segment them into their own group. The rest of your leads will continue along a different nurture path until they’re ready, but your most qualified leads will be invited to a free webinar.
During this online event, you’ll want to make sure you do three main things:
- Provide value: Consider giving your attendees a sneak peek of a concept they might learn about in your course. This is a pivotal part of making this webinar worth their time and deepening their trust in your brand’s courses.
- Feature a Q&A segment: At this stage, unanswered questions could be a stumbling block that’s keeping leads from purchasing one of your courses, so it’s crucial to set aside time to provide answers. And since this live event will serve multiple prospects at a time, everyone in the group will benefit from the questions asked.
- Provide a CTA: To avoid a dead end or gap, this webinar needs to end in a logical next step, and this could be the perfect time to invite attendees to complete their purchase or schedule a call if they still want to learn more.
Convert or further follow-up
After your live event, you’ll have access to a list of all registrants so you can communicate with them accordingly and make your sales pitch.
This is where a lot of businesses miss a step. They forget that they have a whole group of contacts who are interested enough in their courses and products to register for their online event. The key to ensuring your pipeline remains airtight is to follow up with contacts whether or not they actually attended your webinar.
For those who did attend, schedule an automated email for the day after the event. Use this message to thank them for their participation, provide them with an exclusive discount code and send them to your website where they can make their purchase.
If you have a group of people who registered for your event but didn’t make it, don’t forget to automate a message to them as well. Invite them to your next live event or send them a replay of what they missed, but you can also include a link to your checkout page so they can skip a step and purchase your course if they’re ready.
In an ideal world, all your contacts would convert after this step in your pipeline, but that’s not always the case. Don’t sweat it, though! Simply segment those who didn’t make a purchase into a new group so you can continue to nurture them and provide value until the time is right for your next pitch.
Onboard
Secured some new customers? Step one: Happy dance. Step two: Onboarding.
Onboarding is a big deal, but it also happens to be one of the most common gaps. To avoid any missed steps in your onboarding and to save hours of manual work, opt for automatic onboarding.
Automate every step of your onboarding so you don’t risk leaving new customers confused and unsatisfied right after a purchase. All you have to do is set up a campaign that’s triggered by a course purchase. Then, fill it with necessary items, such as:
- A welcome and thank you email
- Instructions on accessing their new course subscription (ie. login credentials, how to set up their account, etc.)
- Materials they can use to make the most of their new course
- Invitations to a group if their course package includes group learning access or if you have a community of other students they should join and collaborate with
Going the extra mile for your business and your customers
Your sales pipeline could end right after someone gets all their onboarding materials, but that would result in missed opportunities and an unfinished process. If you really want to optimize your pipeline for success, consider rounding it out with these finishing touches:
Check-in
Follow up with your new course registrants after they’ve had a chance to dive in and start learning. Send an email featuring a form where they can share their experience or ask questions, a link to your support page, and some tutorials they might find helpful. After this initial check-in, consider popping into their inbox periodically to notify them about new course materials, congratulate them on completing different milestones or simply to ask for more feedback.
Upsell and cross-sell
A major reason not to end your pipeline too soon is that you risk leaving money on the table. Happy customers often become repeat customers, so include a step in your process to upsell or cross-sell to current course customers.
But remember to customize your offer so it’s relevant and appealing to each person. Use their current courses, past downloads, and other information you know about them to inform what upsells and cross-sells to pitch them. The more tailored these sales pitches are, the more likely your customers are to act and become repeat buyers.
For example, if someone is taking a social media marketing course from you, don’t try to cross-sell them a course on starting a podcast. Instead, invite them to take a new course on advanced social selling.
Collect referrals and reviews
Another expert tactic to boost revenue is to secure some positive reviews and promising referrals. This creates a flywheel of new leads in your pipeline.
After someone has completed one of your courses, capitalize on their experience by sending a message that thanks them for choosing your business and encourages them to leave a review or refer someone else who could benefit from your course too.
Let’s talk tech and next steps
As you customize this 9-step process to align it with your specific business, there is one thing you can’t forget: the help of software. The most solid one-to-many sales pipelines hinge on having the right technology. It’s what will enable you to execute this process over and over again, save hours on manual input, and create a stellar and consistent experience for your audience.
There are two specific things you should have in your tech stack to help you along the way:
- Learning management system to build, organize and house your courses
- Business automation software to help you automate your one-to-many sales pipeline
If you’re ready to dive in and want to know exactly where the gaps are in your current pipeline, take this free assessment. It will help you discover any missed opportunities in your customer lifecycle and show you how to remedy them so you can achieve an optimized customer experience every time.
