Course coupons, blogs or webinars alone won’t drive students effectively to pay and enrol in your courses. Sales funnels do that. With a sales funnel, you get to create precious content, send out targeted emails, and encourage people to sign up and buy your course.

Here’s how a typical sales funnel works:

A visitor lands on your course website either through an ad they see on social media or a website (Facebook or google ads), a google search or a social link. When they land on your site, they are now a prospect. This visitor might check out a few of your blog posts or browse through your course listings. While they do that, at some point, you must offer them upgraded content in exchange for a sign-up on your email list.

If the visitor decides to fill out the form, they then become a lead. Now you can market to this customer outside of your website (email, phone, text or all three). Leads tend to return to your website if you stay in touch with them and present them with special offers, new blog pieces, or other exceptionally useful messages. Maybe you could offer them a discounted coupon code.

The sales funnel narrows as visitors move through it partially because you’ll have more prospects at the top of the Funnel than buyers at the bottom. However, that also means that your messaging needs to become increasingly targeted.

AIDA is how Sales Funnels Operate (top to bottom)

• • • Awareness: You created a Facebook ad to drive people to your website.
    • Interest: You offer valuable content in exchange for lead capture.
    • Decision: Your content educates your audience and gently prepares them for a subscription or a purchase.
    • Action: You gave an offer that your leads can’t resist, and begin marketing to them again to boost retention rate.

     

Here’s how you drive sales faster using a sales funnel based on AIDA :

1. Build your website You have to know your course built, the website created, and the course page ready as a sales page before you start lead conversions. Once you finish, start your online academy, and you can start marketing your courses.

2. Drive traffic and build an audience with Digital Marketing and Social media Ads You need to build up your audience and mailing list to drive traffic to your website. Generating leads is the start of building an audience to keep in touch and nurture relationships with them. Nothing gets you more traffic and sales than Social media ads.

   Billions use it daily, so running social media ads is like fueling the fire. Get started with Facebook ads first, if you are not sure, and then you can branch out to other platforms as you learn more about running the ads, your potential customer, and other such stuff. This would allow you to focus your efforts and target your ads better.

. Build an Email list, Capture and collect email address, build an audience base, and start marketing your products and services to your potential customers. Email marketing is the basis of almost every successful business out there. Be it billion-dollar businesses or upcoming new startups. Once you understand how to set them up, it is very easy and simple.

 

That said, creating your online course sales Funnel is completely doable and necessary to meet your significant income goals. In this blog, we’ll summarise 10 steps, more or less in order of execution, that you must take to create a sales Funnel to drive students to enrol in your online course.

 

Helping to Sell Your Online Courses Better Is the Ultimate Goal of the Sales Funnel

In summary, the steps you take to create an online course sales funnel serve two goals:

• Creating a path for potential students to convince them to enrol
• Automate the sales processes largely

 

To start developing your Marketing funnel, start putting the content pieces together, and get started on educating yourself on google/ Facebook ads, etc. Once you’re ready, then it’s just a matter of systematising and optimising your online course sales Funnel.

Here’s what our experts have to say: Sales Funnels Masterclass: From 0 to 1000 paying customers.

Now, the Steps To Create Your Sales Funnel for your Online Course

#1: Define your niche (target audience)

 Defining the Target Audience is the first important step in setting up the Sales Funnel. Without this goal achieved, configuring a sales funnel would be a problem. Sending out willy-nilly tweets or emails with no real plan would waste time. To create the right content for the right people, you would require to know them. Here, you would need to do some research online.

# 2: Create awesome promo content 

For the people who are just starting to create a course, there’s time for them to think about repurposing some of the content they will create in the form of a blog, guide, videos, webinars, checklist, review articles, podcasts, LinkedIn opinions and so forth. Besides, you must take some time to write down exactly what your offer is about. How have you concluded the price of your course right? How your students get to gain from your course, etc.

# 3: Get social media handles

 This one’s very obvious, though. If you are still not active on Facebook or only use LinkedIn. Or have never Tweeted, please rethink your decision to stay inactive over there. Each social media handle tends to become invaluable over time and may serve slightly different purposes for your online course sales Funnel if activity on Quora presents you with an expert tag. Instagram lets you focus on the visual and emotional aspects of your course.

# 4: Create a high-converting website and blog 

On your website, refresh the content occasionally. Even if it means stopping where you are now and writing five blog articles immediately, do it like this at least once a week for the next 5-6 weeks. Rinse and repeat this whole thing.

# 5: Build an audience on a Youtube channel

 It all depends on how comfortably you create and edit your online promo videos to drive traffic to your website. This could mean starting by making a few simple videos to introduce yourself and your course to the audience. Later the topics could be shifted to demonstrate more authority on the subject and create some awareness around the topics.

# 6: Master Google and Facebook ads

It will help you promote your online course to target audiences within specific demographics and interests. Of course, these ad outputs depend on the budget, but it shall be a good idea to understand how these ads work and what returns you are expecting out of it.

# 7: Figure out how SEO works 

SEO is a huge topic, but it should not scare you off. That’s just the point in writing a hundred blog posts if your website and blog are not optimised for the search traffic that you want to drive to the top of your sales Funnel. For this, the main thing you need to do is to understand what keywords your target audience is searching for online.

# 8: Upgrade to email marketing 

There are many benefits of email automation. Marketers do adopt an automated email system to build their list of subscribers and people they wish to market to. Besides, this allows them to segment and intimately know their audience base well.

#9: Get enough data

Use all the possible ideas to collect the client database. It could be using social media or any other such channels, like commenting on blogs and forums, to drive viewers to an email collecting channel such as your website, etc. In general, you must think of a way to collect emails with any strategy you follow.

#10: Automation is the key

 Your automated sequence of emails shall reflect the different stages of the sales process. Ideally, automated emails should guide your prospective students from the “interest phase”, where they have signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a lead magnet through to the purchase of your course.

Actually, there should have been 11 steps to creating your sales funnel.

The 11th one is Rinse and repeat!

Create new content, target new groups, etc., periodically.