5 Tools to Build the Perfect Evergreen Sales Funnel (so you can sell your online course without launching)

You need to sell your online course and perhaps you’ve tried a webinar or a 5-day challenge in the past, but the thought of constantly live launching makes you want to go crawl underneath a rock!

If you’re looking for ways to sell your online course without doing a live webinar, or showing up in a Facebook group every single day for a 5-Day Challenge, then you’re in the right place.

This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click on one of the links and end up purchasing the product, I get a small commission in return (at not extra cost to you!).

What’s an Evergreen Sales Funnel? 

It’s simply a sales funnel that runs in the background of your business on autopilot.  

When a visitor comes to your website or the landing page for one of your lead magnets and signs up, you add them to your email list, and then they are added to your email nurture sequence which promotes your online course.

Most successful evergreen sales funnels also have paid ads running in the background to keep their offer at the top of their prospect’s mind, answer objections, and encourage purchase. 

With an evergreen sales funnel in your business, you don’t have to constantly do a live launch like a webinar or a 5-day challenge where you’re stressed and exhausted from all the work involved.

Basically, it’s just an automated system using your website or a landing page builder and your email service provider (and a few other tools that we’ll talk about here!) to sell your online course.

My online course business primarily runs an autopilot. Around once per year, I do a live launch like a virtual summit with a webinar, but for most of the other months, my sales are driven by my evergreen sales funnels.

I absolutely love evergreen sales funnels because they allow me to focus on what I do best which is serving my students and creating content.

I will walk you through the exact tools you need to create this high converting, stress-free sales funnel in your business (so if you hate live launches, you’re in the right place!).

What Does an Evergreen Sales Funnel Look Like?

I’m partial to a recorded webinar for an evergreen sales funnel, and highly recommend using video in your funnel to quickly build that know, like, and trust factor.

In a live launch, your prospects are seeing you live. You may be doing a 5-day challenge where you’re showing up in a Facebook group for five straight days. Or you may be doing a series of webinars where they’re seeing your face in the webinar and on Facebook lives during your launch.

When you’re promoting your online course in an evergreen sales funnel, you still need that video component.

That’s why I love a recorded webinar or a video series for evergreen sales funnels.

Here’s what a 4-part video series evergreen sales funnel looks like:

You still need a traffic source which can be Facebook and Instagram ads, traffic from Pinterest or you can drive traffic from your content marketing like a blog post or your podcast. In fact, I like to use all these traffic strategies to drive sign ups to my evergreen sales funnels.

Once the visitor opts in for your video series, if you have a tripwire, offer it on the thank you page. I’m a big fan of tripwires to help subsidize your ads, but most importantly, gain an instant customer.

Now is the time to start your video series. This is simply a series of videos that you’ll send out via email during a specified time. The content in your emails and on your video landing pages should be moving your prospect toward the sale.

Toward the end of your video series, you’ll introduce your offer with your sales page and continue to market your online course until the cart closes.

Now, let’s talk about the tools to build the perfect evergreen sales funnel (so you can sell your online course without launching).

Tools to Build the Perfect Evergreen Sales Funnel

Tool #1: Landing page builder (that can host videos)

Whether you’re setting an evergreen webinar funnel, an evergreen video series or even an evergreen challenge funnel, you need a landing page builder that can host your videos. Personally, I use Kajabi. for all my landing pages and it works great. The best part is I also use Kajabi. to host my online courses, so I don’t have to pay for a separate software for my landing pages!

Want to see an example of a landing page (created in Kajabi) in my ad workshop video series?

Tool #2: Email service provider (that can handle sequences and automations)

I think it goes without saying that you need an email service provider for your evergreen sales funnel. The two that I recommend are ConvertKit and Active Campaign.

The main thing to evaluate when you’re considering various email service providers is to look for one that integrates with your landing page provider and can handle sequences and automations.

Here’s what that looks like with Kajabi (my landing page software) and ConvertKit (my email service provider) in my business.

Here is where I’m sending the new subscriber to my email service provider, ConvertKit

Below is an example of the automation I set up in ConvertKit that tags the customer with the purchase/opt in, then starts the email sequence.

Below you can see that I have a 28-day sequence set up with 16 emails. This sequence builds the know, like and trust factor throughout the month and promotes other products and services that the customer would be interested in.

Tool #3: Evergreen countdown timer (so you can create urgency and FOMO with your offer)

Creating urgency is one of the most important elements of an evergreen sales funnel. Your prospect will sit on the fence and not make a decision about purchasing your online course until they are absolutely forced to.

You may have experienced this in one of your live launches. Most of your sales come at the very end and right before your cart closes.

This is the same for an evergreen sales funnel.

But you may be asking….is the deadline a true deadline? Or am I just creating a “fake” deadline because people can go through this funnel and buy at any time?

The best way to handle this is to offer a price discount by the deadline or a bonus offer that your prospect only gets if she purchased by the deadline. This drive the FOMO (fear of missing out) that creates urgency and convinces your future students to purchase or else they’ll miss your awesome course.

The best solution I’ve found to do this is Deadline Funnel. You can add Deadline Funnel to your landing page and integrate it with your email service provider to add the timers in your emails.

They basically track when someone visits your landing page (that’s when the clock starts). When you set up Deadline Funnel you tell them how long you want to keep the offer open and when it expires, you can direct the visitor to a new landing page (without the price discount or bonus).

Tool #4: Social proof pop-up (to add real-time social proof)

Did you know that 92% of your prospects going through your online course sales funnel will read your social proof including online reviews prior to making a purchase decision?

Social proof will help boost your sales because it eases the mind of your future students by letting them know that others are purchasing your online course. Your future students want proof from their peers that your online course (and you!) are trustworthy.

Both social proof and FOMO work. But how can you display social proof? Studies have shown that customers don’t necessarily trust website reviews that a firm puts on their sales page or in their emails. One way to display social proof is through a social proof tool like Provely.

When someone signs up for your online course, they show “proof of purchase!”

Tool #5: Facebook Pixel Code (so you can retarget your website visitors)

Here’s the deal. Whether you have a live launch or if you’re running an evergreen sales funnel in your business, you still need traffic going through your online course sales funnel. Unless you get thousands of visitors to your website every day and get a steady stream of opt ins every day, you’re still going to need to run paid ad traffic source to sustain your online course business.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, you’re getting a hundred of new leads every single day. Paid ads will allow you to retarget these leads and convert them into paying customers through low cost retargeting ads. With your Facebook pixel, you’ll be able to run an ad campaign to retarget your leads and walk them through the purchase process.

The bottom line…

Make sure you have your Facebook pixel on all your landing pages, thank you pages, sales page, etc.

There you go! 5 tools to build the perfect evergreen sales funnels so you can sell your online course without launching.

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