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A Course Creator's Handbook to How to make up the holes in your One-to-Many Pipeline

Dec 11, 2024

Have you ever run on the sand? Simply put it's a disaster. The effort you put into it is twice that effort for half the distance. This is exactly how it is when you have gaps in your sales pipeline. And unfortunately, far too many course creators are faced with this problem.

If you're making a course, you're offering your company a perfect opportunity to reach more people with your expertise But when was the last time you took a good look at your pipeline to identify any gaps or untapped opportunities?

Check out the example course-creator process below for ideas and inspiration.

Skip ahead:

Prior to diving in: The importance of personalization

As you check out the next pipeline You'll see a strong emphasis on personalization.

People often believe that an automated pipeline is a non-personal process. However, in actual fact, there are an infinite possibilities to make automated communication more personalized and thoughtful and improve consistency and conversion.

Read on to discover strategies that will not only fill the gaps in your current one-to-many pipeline, however, they also present opportunities for personalization that will delight customers and your prospects. Don't forget to keep an in mind the techniques and technologies that will assist in bringing these customized pipeline stages to life, without costing you valuable time.

The pipeline

    Prospecting    

This phase is all about keeping the interest of your targeted viewers, however this could be an extremely difficult phase for course creators. Consider the following suggestions to ensure that you're addressing the right audience with an appropriate offer

Inbound marketing demands that you create content such as blog posts, eBooks guides, videos, or anything else that can pique the interest of your audience. Most likely, you're already creating content but ensure that you're implementing an effective SEO method to support the content you write. Optimizing your content to be found by search engines enhances this part of your workflow and boosts the effort you're putting into making the content. Search engines will be crawling whatever you create to display it in outcomes, and the more optimized your content is more easily your intended people will be able to locate them.

Landing pages and forms: If you're not using these powerful tools, the prospects you're attracting with your stellar content will be left undiscovered. It's one of the largest gaps you could run into. To fill this pipe and to avoid losing potential customers that you've worked so hard to get, use landing pages to provide a concise description of the solution you have developed and utilize forms to capture contact information from leads with high intent. Store those leads in your CRM and nurture leads towards making a purchase. In terms of nurturing leads this brings us to our second phase of sales pipeline.

    Automatic lead nurture    

In the case of nurturing leads, it is a manual process that can result in a shocking amount of gaps. Why? Because every time an important reminder of a nurture is lost there is a gap that leads can be lost. The majority of the time, teams don't ever realizing what damage has been created because they're juggling other things. That's why your pipeline needs automatic nurture sequences.

Make use of business automation software in order to design nurture programs that comprise of the various outreach efforts required to guide your customers through your sales funnel. As an example, when someone fills out a request on your site Business automation will automatically initiate a welcome message with resources to appeal to your customers and guide them toward the next phase within your sales process. When it's activated, your audience will get the right messages precisely when they require to receive them. And you and your team will not have to think about anything because the nurture process is happening on a regular basis.

There's a chance that you're already using automated lead nurturing, however this doesn't mean that you're not susceptible from gaps. Be sure that you don't miss the steps of your automated routines by incorporating valuable information within every email and text. The most efficient things to include are:

  • Personalized email to promote your business
  • A free eBook
  • Sneak peak of the course, and an accompanying client testimonials
  • Articles that can help with their interests (Your small business CRM can aid)
  • Free webinar invitation
  • Exclusive discounts

Each of these tools is designed to provide value to your leads, which is a priority for this phase in the pipeline. The best part of this approach is that the tools you select to nurture leads with can be automated, resulting in zero gaps, less time spent on manual tasks for you, and a consistent experiences for leads.

    Lead qualification    

When people begin to interact with your messages, the qualification phase commences. It's easy to improve the process and speed up your pipeline by collecting valuable information from your automated nurture sequences. The data you collect will guide the process of qualification so that you can segment the most engaged leads who are looking to purchase your course.

Automatic lead scoring was designed to speedily and precisely bubble up your high-intent leads with no manual input from the team or you.

An efficient, optimized process of qualification looks like the following: Business automation and CRM software monitors every customer's interactions with your brand, such as how often they open your emails, what websites they visit, the types of forms they fill out and much more. It assigns points for every positive action as well as subtracts points for any negative ones, adds them up and signals the leads most likely to make the next step in your company's brand.

    Webinar or live event    

A live event that is an element of your pipeline is an excellent method of serving a large number of people at once, but in a way that's personal and fun. After you've decided which leads you're most likely to be are, automatically segment the leads into their respective groups. All other prospects will be on different nurturing paths until they're ready. the most qualified leads will be invited to join a free webinar.

In this event it is important to do three main things:

  • Offer value: Think about giving your participants a glimpse of an idea they could be able to learn more about during your course. It's a crucial element of making the event worthwhile and deepening their trust in the course offerings of your brand.
  • Include a Q&A session: At this stage, unanswered questions could be a stumbling block that's keeping prospects from buying one of your programs, which is why it's essential to allocate time to respond. Since this live session is designed to serve multiple potential customers simultaneously, all in the group will benefit from questions that are asked.
  • Create a CTA : To avoid a dead end or an in-between, the webinar should conclude in the next possible step which could be the ideal moment to encourage attendees to complete their purchase or make a time to conference call in case they want to learn more about.

    Convert or further Follow-up    

After the live event, you'll have access to the list of participants to allow you to communicate with those who are registering and then make your pitch for sales.

It is the place where lots of businesses miss a step. They forget that they have a whole group of potential customers that are interested enough by their offerings and training courses to sign up for their online event. A key element to make sure your pipeline remains airtight is to contact your contacts whether or not they actually took part in the webinar.

If you did have attendees the event, you can schedule an automated email for the day after the event. Use this message to thank them for their participation by providing them with an exclusive discount code and send them to your site where they will be able to make their purchase.

If you've got a number of attendees who have registered at your event but couldn't attend, be sure to send an automated message to them, too. Invite them to attend your next live event, or email them a replay of what they didn't attend, however you may also add a link to your checkout page so they won't need to do anything to purchase the course once they're interested.

In a perfect world the majority of your contacts will convert to convert after this stage within your pipeline, however this isn't always the scenario. Do not fret, however! Simply segment those who didn't make a purchase into another group so that you're able to continue nurturing the prospects and offer value until you are ready for your next pitch.

    Onboard    

Secured the new clients? First step: Happy dance. Second step: Onboarding.

It's a huge deal to be onboarding however, it is also known to be among the biggest mistakes. In order to avoid any missteps when you are onboarding, and to save hours of manual work, opt for automatic onboarding.

Automate each step of onboarding to ensure you don't risk leaving new customers confused and unsatisfied immediately after making the purchase. The only thing you need to do is set up campaigns that are triggered after the purchase of a course. After that, you can fill it with the necessary elements like:

  • Thank you and welcome to for your email
  • Guides to accessing their latest account (ie. login credentials, how to create their account and so on. )
  • Material they could use to maximize the value of their course
  • Invitations to a Group in the event that their course includes group learning, or if you are part of a community with others students, they must join and collaborate with

Go the extra mile to help your customers and business

The sales funnel could close when someone has received all the onboarding material, however that would result in missed opportunities as well as a non-finished process. If you're looking to improve your pipeline's efficiency to be successful, you should consider completing the process with these final elements:

    Check-in    

Contact your new course registrants after they've had a chance to dive in and start taking classes. You can send them an email with a form where they can comment on their experience, or even inquire about their experience, along with a link to your support page, and some tutorials they might find helpful. Following this first check-in and review their inbox periodically to notify you of any new courses or materials or to thank them for reaching different milestones or simply to solicit comments.

    Upsell and cross-sell    

One of the main reasons not to close your pipeline in a hurry is to avoid not making enough money. The most satisfied customers are likely to become repeat customers, so include a step in the process of upselling or cross-sell your current customers.

Be sure to personalize your message to make it relevant and appealing to each individual. Use their current courses previous downloads, their past courses, as well as other data you have about them in order to decide which cross-sells and upsells you can present them with. The more tailored these sales pitches are and the more likely customers are to act as if they were repeat buyers.

For example, if someone takes a social media marketing class from you, don't try to cross-sell them a course on creating podcasts. Instead, encourage the student to attend a course on advanced social selling.

    Collect referrals and reviews    

A different method to increase sales is to get favorable reviews and trustworthy referrals. This will create a flow of new leads in your pipeline.

After someone has completed one of your courses, capitalize on their positive experience by sending a thank you message that thanks them for choosing your company and invites the user to review your course or refer someone else who could be benefited from your training course.

Let's talk tech and what's next

As you customize this 9-step process to align it with the specific needs of your business but there's one aspect that you must not forget software. The most solid one-to-many sales pipelines depend on an appropriate system. It's the only way to be able to carry out this procedure repeatedly, save hours on manual input, and create a stellar and constant experience for your clients.

The following are the two particular things you should include in your technology stack to aid you in your way:

If you're ready to get started and would like to find out exactly what gap is in your pipeline, then take this complimentary assessment. This assessment will allow you to identify the opportunities you missed in your customer lifecycle and show you how to remedy them so you can achieve an optimized satisfaction for every customer.