Once your students have finished your online course, does that mean it’s the end of the road? Learn how to continue their learning and increase student success with individual coaching sessions.
Do you have a successful pool of connections or even existing students, but aren’t sure how work with them to grow your business to the next level? Today you’re going to learn strategies on how to structure your sales funnel to extend it beyond selling online courses, providing additional value to your audience.
Watch our free video below with the CEO of Book Like A Boss, Nachum Kligman, to learn how to maximize your sales related to the value you offer your students.
What is the Goal of Your Course?
Is the course you’re currently teaching your students your end goal? Meaning, there’s nothing more for them to do after taking your online course?
Think about the purpose of your course, and assess what your end goal is. Are you passionate about leading people to help them get other jobs and work? Is it to just give education for free? Or are you just in it to make money? Write down all of your goals from a personal and professional standpoint, and how they connect to your online course. This is the first thing you should do as an online course creator: define your goals.
Challenge yourself to broaden your way of thinking. Goals that are written down are 10 times more likely to be achieved. So be sure to know why it is that you’re creating courses, write those goals down, and then take action to achieve those goals.
Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the foundation of everything you do. Before you create a course or start selling online, you need to be on top of your personal brand.
Picture yourself as a brand. Ask yourself, what is your theme, what is your messaging? What is your logo, or colour scheme? Whether you’re representing your business on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or your own website, you want to communicate a consistent personal brand.
Aim to present the same image of yourself, across colour scheme, messaging and taglines. Consistency will help you be memorable among your students. Building recognition is key to helping your business grow past the point of just online courses that your students can take, if that is your goal. Your online courses should relate to the brand you’ve built and reflect everything else about you online. It will build familiarity around who you are, and demonstrate that you take your brand and business seriously.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Before you can figure out how to bring your students further along your sales funnel, you need to understand what a sales funnel is.
A funnel is a system that helps track the stages that consumers or purchasers travel through to eventually make a buying decision. At the top it starts out big, with everyone who has seen or heard about you or your online courses. Aim to make the top of the funnel as wide as possible with strategic marketing tactics that will help get your brand out into the world.
As students enter the funnel, they also leave the funnel at various stages. It will get smaller and smaller as this happens. As a business owner, it’s your job to get your students all the way to the bottom of your funnel. While you might have thought that the bottom of the funnel is a student taking your online course, challenge yourself to think bigger.
How do you get your students or clients to continue their relationship with you? Make the funnel longer. The highest price points and top tier value you provide should all be situated at the bottom of your sales funnel. An example of how to extend the funnel would be to offer one-on-one coaching. This coaching you would only offer to your most loyal students, and be at a high price point. This would be positioned to only those who trust you, having gone through your funnel and received great value from your training.
Once you have a well established brand out there that people recognize, it becomes more likely that people will pay you $350, $400 an hour. It’s hard to charge those prices when first interacting with potential students, which is why the sales funnel is so important. This systematic funnel is where you get people to learn who you are and the value you can offer them, and it guides them through every stage until the end, where they becoming those paying customers looking for one-on-one coaching from you.
Take Your Students To The Next Level
What needs to be done to make your sales funnel longer and help take your students to the next level? Create a one-on-one relationship with your students. To do this, you need to have more opportunities to interact with them directly. Here are a couple methods to consider.
Social Media Groups
Social media is a great tool to use for this – you could create a private Facebook group. It’s free, and it’s a great way to connect other people who have taken your course with you and your brand. The most efficient way to make this group valuable is to only add your actual students who have completed at least some of your courses. Do not make the group public and easy to access, as this will cause it to fill with people who should be much higher up in the sales funnel.
Your group is a great way to keep in contact with your students, and begin interacting with them on a more personal, or one-on-one, nature. Use your email list and your Facebook group to find out who is really serious about your course. Invite them to a webinar about your courses and future updates, and consider making it free. Time is a student’s most valuable asset, so the more time they invest in you, the more they’ll want to connect and learn from you.
Workshops & Masterminds
Next, you could run a workshop or group mastermind. This is where you can start to charge people. Not everyone who watched your webinar will buy this workshop, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the sales funnel. Do these monthly workshops, because even if you only get 20 people to attend at $50 a head, that’s still an extra two grand a month. Host some in person events, and don’t be afraid to raise your ticket prices. This is the point of the funnel where your students are ready to have a one-on-one coaching session with you to make you their mentor, coach, or consultant.
By fostering these one-on-one relationships and focusing on helping your students succeed and build their business, and they’ll be more than happy to pay you the money you’re asking for.
Watch the above video to get your 30% discount code for Nachum’s Book Like A Boss content, and learn about more networking strategies to help grow your business.
Want even more strategies for getting the most out of your own online courses? Download the free Thinkific guide to creating and selling online courses!
