How to create an effective online course sales funnel

A course sales funnel is typically a journey or a set of hoops that a customer goes through for purchasing your online course. During this journey, the expert’s focus is to get as many users as possible.

Experts need a course sales funnel because of the rising competition in the e-learning market. A number of courses are launched every day and standing out can be tricky as it is. But a course sales funnel makes your efforts more focused and narrowed down.

💡 Steps to achieving a course sales funnel

A course sales funnel is a thorough and extensive process that leads to a final outcome. And there are 6 main steps to achieving it. They are as follows:

Step 1: Awareness

The number one step towards creating a course sales funnel is creating awareness.

Generally, there are two ways to make the target audience aware of yourself – organically or through paid methods. While organic methods are free, they are time-consuming, whereas paid ad campaigns are more rapid. Marketers use a mix of both to optimize their campaigns and get the best results.

An ad campaign along with organic content marketing can help you gradually increase awareness regarding your brand. You can do so in a number of ways like:

making social media posters
writing blogs and articles
optimizing all your landing pages for search
investing into PR and also making informative
educational videos or podcasts

🎯 Also read: How to Launch an Online Course Business

Step 2: Discovery

The next step involves establishing trust with your audience. You don’t want to sell them course just yet, rather at this point you should be coming up with ways to engage them, make your value known and build trust.

In order to achieve this, use lead magnets. A lead magnet is something a product owner gives away in order to get contact details of potential customers or leads. So, once you’ve become visible to your audience, throw in some lead magnets to get them curious and get their emails.

Now in order to get your hands on their emails while providing value and trust, you can use tactics like:

free e-books
free templates
free course samples (to corroborate with pre-selling)
free short video series
an online webinar/event/session

Try different ways to get your hands on the leads’ emails for your email list and don’t expect your visitors to turn into customers right off the bat. Remember: your course sales funnel is a process.

Step 3: Evaluation

Up until this point you’ve been in front of your leads, they might care not care, but they will start judging you with seriousness from here on. Do they need you or should they let go?

Similarly, you as a course creator should also see if they’re a good fit for your course. There’s a chance some of the people are probably wasting time. Once you have built up an email list, start sending out emails and come up with creative ways to approach your audience.

The purpose of these emails could to be to welcome your leads and get them on a fast-track to buying your course, or nurture and engage them over a month or two with quizzes, surveys, questions, blogs, and other tactics before you offer them to buy your course.

It’s about YOU giving them value at a time when most other people “sell”. Of course, at some stage you will need to sell, which is where we turn our attention next.

👀 Also read: How to determine course market fit for your digital course

Step 4: Intent

This step involves you as an expert instilling in the lead the thought of buying the course or in other words – creating customer intent. There are various ways to create customer intent, like using your private Facebook group to connect with potential customers, booking 1 on 1 calls, sending in surveys and questionnaires to fill and include them in the process more.

If your course is about, say Adobe Photoshop, share some lesser known facts about Photoshop with your leads. Try to give them an idea as to how useful this course can be for them. Your target here is to soft-sell and not lose the lead by a hard-sell approach.

Step 5: Purchase

In the last four steps, you did a variety of things just to get one thing from the leads – their trust. Your leads are now quite aware of you and what you do. In short, they have evaluated you and have to come to know a great deal about your offering. Now you can finally pitch your course directly, leave them with that option.

Make sure your sales pitch has a catchy heading, a story/anecdote about yourself, a detailed overview of the problems and pain points and possible solutions that could be achieved by buying your course. Moreover, add in a testimonial or social proof, a guide on how to proceed next with buying the course and an FAQ section.

💰 Also read: How to determine the right pricing for your online course

Step 6: Loyalty

Once you have customers, it is high time to channel them. Make them your advocates. Your existing customers can help you in innumerable ways. Their ratings, testimonials can serve as proof and bring in leads that trust you more and need lesser effort being converted.

Moreover, if dealt the right way, with the help of your existing customers, you can get a number of more customers over the period of time through referrals and rewards. Look after your customers, it’s the most important part of your course sales funnel!

That’s it, folks! Let me know if this was useful for you. If you have any questions, shoot them below 👇

ALSO, start creating your first online course today for absolutely FREE! 🎉 Simply go to 👉 www.airschool.com/teach 👈 , get access to your dashboard and start working!