Learn how to create and build a more successful sales funnel that will enable your online course business to reach its true potential.
Making and fine-tuning a successful sales funnel is one of the most important steps in selling your online course. If you haven’t taken a close look at your sales funnels, you’re probably overlooking opportunities throughout your entire marketing funnel.
Today you’re going to learn what the industry’s top performers are doing to boost sales.
Watch our free video below with sales funnel expert Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, to learn how you can improve your sales funnel to achieve and even surpass your online course business’ growth goals.
4 Steps to Maximizing Your Sales Funnel
Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Client Profile
First and foremost you have to identify your ideal client profile. It’s really important to identify your ideal target and pinpoint everything you can about them – the more specific the better. Think of things like their age and demographic, where they hang out, their interests, what drives them emotionally. Taking stock of all of these things allows you to craft your ideal client profile. Don’t shy away from doing your research as this is the first step of your sales funnel.
Focus on building your ideal client profile, and then develop something very simple that can drive the point across. Using videos is a great starting point for creating a simple piece of content that can help you “drive the point home”.
Step 2: The Hook
When creating your videos or ads, you want to have ads that can cover the whole gamut – don’t limit yourself. From there, you need to sell the transformation inside the video and how you are solving the viewer’s problem.
The way to ensure this happens, is by crafting a perfect hook. You need to craft a creative story that is entertaining and funny enough to keep people watching. Viewers of your ads will most likely see them on Facebook or YouTube, where they want to hang out and have a good time.
Sell your product while providing them with some entertainment! You need to hook someone within the first five seconds, or they will just move on. This is key, and will play a lot into the success of your ads.
Step 3: The Landing Page
After you’ve hooked your audience, you need to send them to the right landing page.
Send them to a page where they can opt in, fill out their email address, and watch a video or go to an automated webinar. A great tool to help you do this is eWebinar.
Continue to give your prospective students even more value, and once they’ve opted into your email list, start to nurture them and build a relationship. Building relationships with your students is easy when you use an automated emailing system. Include a sequence anywhere from 6 to 12 emails or so. During these emails you’re initially giving them even more value while slowly leading into talking about the offer that you have.
Step 4: The Sale
Create a limited time offer that will expire within a few days as this will create a sense of urgency in your potential student, making them more likely to buy. Take them to another free training video, and be sure to put the offer in there too. Show your potential students that you can help solve their problems right now once they’ve applied.
If you’re selling a smaller or cheaper course less than $2000, you can also take them directly to a pricing page while establishing more urgency. Make sure that what you’re offering has an expiration date and that there are some added bonuses in the current package. You can use a tool like Deadline Funnel to help you put expiry dates on your offers.
Don’t Rely on Paid Advertising Alone
A great way to help keep your ad costs down is to not rely only on paid advertising. There are many different channels that you can use to your advantage that will help you create content to increase your product reach.
Think about blogging, YouTube videos, and podcasts as some examples. Creating your own content allows you to increase your company’s follower base, which is a great pool to dive into when searching for more potential students. If you create quality content, it will be shared on various social media platforms by different people, which is free advertising for you! Creating this kind of content allows you to really sink your teeth into what you’re teaching, and find the areas that you are the most passionate about.
Creating content also allows you to start creating a brand. Building up your followers and social media presence enables you to build your brand at the same time. The more people know who you are, the more you can charge for your courses. Reputation is everything, as it gives people a reason to go to YOU.
Once you’ve got traffic coming in from different channels and people have a reason to go to you, this will make you better at producing courses too! It may take you about one to two years to get your content machine running, but once you do you’ll be way ahead of the game. Don’t be afraid to give away free stuff, because it leads to building an audience that loves you and then you can sell higher ticket items like course bundles at $1,000-$10,000 a pop!
Further resources to help you
Watch the video above to gain access to another free video covering more details about how to structure your sales offers, and how to drive up your sales numbers. You’ll learn great tips, tricks, and strategies to add on to what you’ve just learned about sales funnels!
For more strategies for getting started creating your own online course, download this free Thinkific guide to creating and selling online courses!
Want to start implementing what you’ve learned into your online course? Thinkific makes it easy implement everything you’ve just learned with student success features built into the platform. Sign-up for a free Thinkific account and get started today!
