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So, you’ve got an online course or are thinking about creating one. You’ve heard the stories of course creators having to turn their PayPal notifications off because their phones wouldn’t stop pinging (bless their little cotton socks). Now you want to know if the stories are true and if you too can experience the fist-pumping joy of waking up to sales every day.
Having worked with 100s of course creators and generated millions of dollars for my clients, I can confirm that there is truth to the stories. You can make sales while taking a nap, walking the dog, or binge-watching your favorite show on Netflix. Sadly, it’s not as simple as putting up a sales page and waiting for the sales to roll in. There are a few non-negotiables you have to implement first.
Keep reading for an evergreen sales expert’s guide to selling the shitake mushrooms out of your online course.
5 steps to automate your online course sales
If you want to get total strangers leaping at the opportunity to enroll in your online course, you have to create a funnel. Put simply, that’s a system to take people from “Who is this person?” to “Holy smokes! I need this course!!“.
Here’s the funnel I use for my clients, which I call Day #1 Evergreen. Use it to win customers and experience what it’s like to make sales while you’re sipping your oat milk latte (mmm, delicious!).
1. Host an on-demand masterclass
Before you win customers, you first have to win their attention and inspire them to engage with you. It’s a big ask to expect a stranger to buy your $997 course so you want to start by asking them to take a smaller action: signing up for your free masterclass.
Fortunately, you don’t have to host your webinar live. You can pre-record it and give people the option to watch on-demand. After all, in the age of Netflix and Amazon Prime, instant access is what people have come to expect.
As for what you’ll talk about for 45 minutes, you should align your webinar title and topic with the promise you make in your online course.
For example, if your online course promises people they’ll be able to speak Spanish fluently in three months, your webinar title might be: Three simple tricks that will get you speaking Spanish fluently in 90 days.
Make that title even more delicious by busting a worry they have around achieving that outcome. For example: (even if you’ve been Duolingo-ing for years!)
By the 30-minute point of your masterclass, your new lead should feel confident that achieving that outcome is possible, even if they’ve tried and failed in the past. This is when you’ll pitch them on crossing the finishing line with your online course.
2. Create a limited-time offer
There’s a reason people still queue up outside Apple stores every time a new iPhone gets released. It’s the same reason you can sit on a piece of work for weeks and then bust out an entire project the day before the deadline.
Urgency drives action. And if you want to legitimately wake up to sales every day, you MUST optimize your funnel for this psychological fact.
A limited-time offer creates urgency because it expires after a set window. For example, potential customers have seven days to save $300 on your course or they have to pay full price. If discounts aren’t your thing, you could offer a free 1:1 session with you but ONLY if they enroll within five days.
You can use a tool like Deadline Funnel to create this urgency without compromising authenticity. The offer begins when prospects sign up for your webinar and expires once their unique timer hits zero. It truly is one-time only (even if they sign up for the webinar again).
3. Write “OMG you get me!” emails
Allegedly, people need to see your brand seven times before they buy from you. This means if you only promote your course at the end of your webinar, you’re potentially missing out on some of your best customers.
Every day your limited-time offer runs, you should be sending out automated emails to your new leads about your offer. These emails should talk about:
- The amazing outcomes they can achieve
- The painful problems your course solves
- The worries they have (and how your course overcomes these)
For best results, create your emails out of voice-of-customer. Interview and survey your customers so you can collect the language they use to talk about the outcomes they want and the problems they want to solve. This is how you’ll create those delicious “OMG you get me!” moments that make customers feel you understand them (PSA: understanding drives sales!)
Every email during your sales window should send leads to a long-form sales page. This page should show them everything they’ll get in your online course and the impact it can have on their day-to-day lives.
4. Flood your masterclass with traffic
You can have the best funnel in the world but if people don’t know it exists, you won’t get sales.
Once you’ve set up your funnel, the next step is to invite people to watch your webinar. If you have an email list, send them invites. If you have a social media following, post about your masterclass there.
The goal conversion rate for a Day #1 Evergreen funnel is 5-10%. That means for every 100 people who sign up for your webinar, you should aim for 5-10 of them to buy.
To make daily sales, you need – at minimum – 10 people signing up for your masterclass every day. If you can’t do this organically, you might want to consider running ads (but that’s a topic for another time).
Pro tip: Spend 15 minutes setting up a ManyChat funnel on Instagram to invite good-fit leads into your funnel. When people comment “MASTERCLASS” on your post, they’ll automatically receive a DM inviting them to sign up for your masterclass. It’s hands-off for you but can help you multiply your course sales.
5. Make a plan for blissfully simple optimization
The biggest mistake I see course creators making when they create their evergreen funnel is that they treat it as “one and done”. They expect to record their webinar, whip up a few emails, and then instantly make sales. If only it were that simple.
The reality is, the vast majority of course creators won’t set up their funnel and instantly convert 10% of leads into buyers. The likelihood is that you’ll have to experiment and optimize a few times before you start seeing the profit you want.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a PHD-level CRO to improve your funnel for dreamy conversions. You can build customer feedback into your evergreen funnel so you can dial in your messaging based on what your audience tells you they need to hear from you to buy (pretty nifty, right?)
I recommend building 10 customer feedback points for maximum conversion power. However, you can start by embedding a one-question survey onto your thank you page after people purchase your course. This should ask the question:
“What inspired you to take the leap and enroll in [course name] today?”
The responses will tell you what features won over customers and what desired outcomes they bought your course to achieve. Use them to ensure you’re talking about what customers care about in the same language they use.
While I can’t guarantee you overnight success, I can guarantee this:
The better you get at listening to your customers, the better you’ll get at compelling prospects to buy from you.
Customer feedback is at the heart of profitable optimization and while the income you make might not be 100% passive… once you dial in your messaging, you sure as helvetica can wake up to sales every day.
