Sales funnels and how to use them to sell courses

Online courses are a brilliant way to earn additional income by monetising your existing knowledge and helping others reach their goal.  However, when you’ve built your course, how do you actually get it in front of people who want to purchase it?  You use a sales funnel!

A sales funnel is a process that takes your potential customers through a journey from awareness to purchase.

By providing value and building relationships at each stage of the funnel, you can eventually convert leads into paying customers.  Although the term is a lot more relevant in the digital age of the internet, the process has been around for decades.

There are different types of sales funnels that you can use to sell courses online. One type is the Inbound Sales Funnel. This type uses advertising and content marketing to attract potential customers. 

The other type is the Outbound Sales Funnel. This type of funnel attracts new customers by contacting them directly. It uses email and telephone marketing to provide information about your product or service.

Although you can use both types of sales funnels to sell online, you should initially choose one type and stick with it to better monitor the results before switching and trying something different.

Let’s take a closer look at the structure of a sales funnel.

What are the steps in a typical sales funnel?

The four main steps in a typical sales funnel are:

Awareness: This is when someone first becomes aware of your product or service. At this stage, they may not be familiar with your brand yet but they have some sort of problem that needs solving. They could be reading an article, watching a video or hearing about you from somebody else.

Interest: Once they’re aware of you, they show interest in what you do and how it can help them solve their problem(s). They might sign up for your email list, follow you on social media or visit your website regularly to find out more information.

Consideration: The next step is consideration, where prospects start evaluating different options and comparing them to see which one will best meet their needs. If you’ve done a good job at the previous stages, then hopefully by now they’ll be considering purchasing your course as the solution to their problem!

What factors will lead them towards choosing one option over another e.g. price/ value proposition etc.

At this stage people are looking for more information about what each option can offer before making their decision – so make sure all relevant details (including pricing) about your course are easily accessible on whatever platform/website it’s being sold from! You could also highlight any unique selling points or bonuses here too if applicable

Decision: The final step is when they make their decision and purchase your course! Hopefully by now you’ve managed to build up enough trust with the prospect so that they feel confident in making a purchase.

Post-Purchase: A bonus step you should always keep in mind.  Once someone has purchased your course, it’s important to follow up with them and provide any support they may need to get started or continue learning. This could be in the form of email newsletters, an online community or even 1-on-1 coaching.

It’s called a sales funnel to make you think of the shape.  With a funnel you have a large opening at the top, and it narrows to a much smaller opening at the bottom.  Above the opening of your funnel is the general population.  Your aim is to get those people into the top of your funnel, and some of those people will travel down and eventually make a sales (the bottom of the funnel).

A lot of people will used paid adverts targeting their ideal customer to help fill a funnel.  Another option is to establish yourself as the expert in whatever your course focuses on via content marketing.

What is content marketing? 

Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, informative content to attract and engage customers. Content can be anything from blog posts to video tutorials to social media posts. The goal is to create a relationship with your customers that enables you to sell them products or services.

This isn’t a quick solution, it takes time to build up what Google have termed E-A-T, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

If you can demonstrate to search engines that you are an authority in your area you’ll be rewarded with traffic from people interested in learning more, you’ll start to have traffic entering the top of your funnel.  Content marketing helps create relevant and useful content that attracts and engages customers.

Content marketing can be used for advertising purposes, but it also has many advantages that make it more effective than traditional advertising methods.There are three main reasons why content marketing is so powerful:

• It builds trust. When potential customers see that you’re actually willing to share your own thoughts and experiences, they begin to believe you’re an expert in the field. This builds credibility and strengthens brand loyalty over time.
• It creates a positive association with your brand. When people see that you care about providing quality information, they tend to associate your brand favourably. In other words, good content leaves a lasting impression on people and can even help increase sales volume down the road!
• It engages consumers on multiple levels. By writing engaging articles, you not only capture reader attention; you also pull them into the story by providing valuable insights and tips along the way. This makes them more likely to take action – whether that means signing up for a course or sharing your content on social media networks

The goal of content marketing is to engage and compel readers to take action by either visiting your website or engaging with one of your social media posts.

Content Marketing Videos 

An increasingly popular method of establishing yourself as an authority is by creating helpful video content, which can attract a large audience looking for information on your topic.  You need an interesting topic that your audience will want to learn more about. Second, you need good presenting skills to create engaging videos that keep people watching.

And finally, you need a sales funnel that can help you turn interested viewers into paying customers.  The video will be freely available online, and while a platform such as YouTube can result in an income via advertisement payments, it’s far more sustainable to turn viewers into paying clients.

Creating Written Marketing Blogs 

The second option, which is generally the preferred option most people start with, is to create blog posts on your topic that help establish you know what you’re talking about.

As with videos, you need to understand what your audience wants to know.  Unlike videos, researching and writing is something that can be hugely sped up by the use of AI-driven tools.

The benefit of AI tools is they can act like an assistant, helping you with everything from creating an ideal customer persona to actually writing draft content for you to polish up.

Creating an Audience Persona

A key element to any type of selling is understanding who you are selling to.  To do this you can create an audience persona.  An audience persona is a generic, imaginary person that you use to understand your target audience and what they are interested in.

I mentioned above that AI can help with this process, let me give you an example.  I use a platform called CrawlQ, which is focused on creating content that appears to a specific audience. 

Let me give you a quick example: let’s say I want to work with online coaches.  After answering various questions and combining AI suggestions with my own knowledge I’ve built an ideal persona:

Alice is a 38-year old Life coach and has a course hosted on her website. She wants to make 6-figure income selling her courses but has no knowledge about sales and marketing. She is keen to learn about social media marketing and sales funnels to grow her business.

With Alice in mind I start to research what topics would be of interest to her, ultimately deciding to write a blog post that helps explain what a sales funnel is and how it can be used to sell courses…ie this post!

Next up I work with the CrawlQ AI, called Athena, to write the blog post.  If I get writer’s block I can ask for help.  For example, let’s say I’m not sure how to explain the benefits of an AI writer: I’d write the heading and then ask the AI for benefits.

You can see in the above image that I’m asking Athena what the benefits of using an AI writer are.  Let’s see what she cam up with.

Benefits of using an AI writer

There are many benefits to using an AI writer.

• AI writers can help you produce high-quality content quickly and easily.
• AI writers are able to generate content that is both engaging and interesting for your audience.
• An AI writer can quickly produce high-quality articles on a wide range of topics, so you can be confident that your essay will be of excellent quality.
• By using an AI writer, you can save time and money – never have to worry about finding a suitable writer for your academic needs again!

How cool is that!  I tweaked the suggestions, just as you would if someone handed you a draft article, but I hope this helps demonstrate how AI can speed up your content creation process.

And speeding up the content creation process is key.  It can take 100 to 200 posts and 2+ years for a website to start seeing a good amount of natural traffic. 

Let’s say you go for a minimum of 1500 words per post, that means you’ll be writing 150,000 to 300,000 words!  All of a sudden, having an assistant help you write content becomes a lot more appealing.

Hiring external writers

If you’ve no time to write so much content and no desire to learn how to work with an AI writer, there is another option to consider: hiring external writers. 

You can find a number of writers available online; my personal recommendation is We Write Blog Posts, who have always produced exceptionally well-written content for various websites I run.

Note that to get the best results you should still go through the process of figuring out your audience and what they’re interested in.

To learn more about external writers, see this article about hiring writers.