Sales Funnel to Increase Online Course Sales

So, you’ve created an awesome course for your business and now you’re ready to sell it – that’s awesome. Have you thought about how you’re going get it out to the world? 

With millions of courses both online and offline available for as little as £10, and as much as £25,000 – it can feel like there is a lot of competition.

But let me tell you something, only YOU know what you know. Nobody has your exact experience, the exact knowledge in your brain and nobody will teach it like you.

You are unique, and you will attract those who are interested in your style. Think about what makes you different from the rest and double down on that.

Now let’s move on to the fun stuff – How to increase the sales of your online course. 

First up, let’s quickly discuss the overall strategy we will be taking with this. 

A funnel is a way to get your customers from A to B, whilst reducing marketing costs and increasing revenue. For this strategy we will be using the 4 step Inbound Marketing strategy, Attract, Convert, Close, Delight to keep it simpler and easier to digest for you. 

I will break the online course funnel into 4 simple steps, which you can customise to suit your business.

Step 1 – Attract

This is the more fun side of social media, attracting people to your brand through content creation and building relationships.

Create relevant and engaging content that demonstrates your expertise and gives your audience important nuggets of information.The key here is to give value to your audience and establish yourself as a leader in your field.  

Actionable Steps:

1. Create content that is related to the course topic – this can be video, text, audio. Choose the content medium that your audience tends to engage most with. 
2. Build your audience with those in your target market and where possible, start a conversation. 
3. Find what makes you different from others in your field. Is it your course content? Perhaps the way you deliver it? Do you have a specific niche? Have you got great results usually unheard of? 

Step 2 – Convert

Converting your audience is where they go from passive audience to a lead, by giving their email address or another piece of contactable information. 

This is where your tech skills come in. For this, you will need a landing page and a webinar provider. 

Create a training webinar that is like an “introduction” to whatever you are teaching in your course. At the end of this free webinar is where you will pitch your course to the students. Not just any webinar will sell a course, you need a structure. For further training on webinars, I recommend this.

Personally, l recommend an evergreen webinar as opposed to live. An evergreen webinar is constantly running (usually on the hour) and is available at any time to watch for your audience – whereas a live webinar does as it says on the tin. 

Next up, create a landing page where people can sign up for your webinar. You can use your current website software like WordPress but I prefer using this software as it’s simple and effective. If you get everything ready beforehand, there is no reason you can’t be making money from it during the 14 Day Free Trial of the software. 

Actionable Steps:

1. Create a training webinar that’s related to your course.
2. Create a landing page for your webinar and for webinar sales course. 
3. In each piece of content you produce for step 1, link to your webinar landing page and mention it in your videos as a further resource. 
4. Create follow up emails to webinar to direct people to the sales page 
5. Market your course.

Step 3 – Close

This is where the money comes rolling in, when those leads from Step 2 close into sales! 

Create a sales page for your course sales. This is where you will direct people at the end of the webinar to make a purchase of your fabulous online course. 

On this page, you should demonstrate the benefits that your audience will get from taking the course as well as testimonialsfrom people who have taken it. If you don’t have any testimonials yet, I’d recommend sending your course to 5 people in your audience who are members of your target market for review. 

The feedback from this can be very valuable, as well as a useful sales tool.

Actionable Steps:

1. Create a sales page
2. Gather 5 testimonials from members of your target market for your course

Step 4 – Delight 

Now you’ve made the sale, it doesn’t stop there. This is where you can increase sales from those who have already purchased, and encourage them to share your coursewith friends and colleagues etc. 

As the word Delight affirms, this is where you make your customers happy. This can be done through a range of follow up emails providing more value, 1-2-1 calls with yourself or a member of your team to see how they’re getting on or bonus resources. 

The sky is the limit with how you can delight your customers, but the end game is to get them to refer your course to relevant people. 

Actionable Steps: 

1. Create a referral programme for all of those who take the course. A referral programme is where your audience gets a % of the course price when somebody buys through their specific link. As it is being advertised by someone who has taken your course, they will be better to market it than someone who hasn’t. 
2. Create follow up email campaigns for your audience.

This strategy has been tried and tested in various industries, and once you have the whole process perfected you could be generating income for your business on autopilot. It will require tweaking in the early days so don’t spend too much on production until you are going getting on the right track. 

Each industry is slightly different and will react to types of content differently. This also goes for courses. If you are completely new to online marketing, it would be a wise idea to survey your previous customers to get accurate feedback on what to produce. Personally, I like to do this in strategy calls and put polls on Facebook Groups and on Twitter – the former gets more in depth feedback and the latter gives me more volume. I will be covering the research phase of your online marketing in another article – I didn’t want to make this one too beefy! Stay tuned..