Interviews and news

The Course Creator's Guide on How to Fill the Gaps in your One-to-Many Pipeline

Dec 11, 2024

Have you ever run in the sand? Simply put the experience is terrible. The effort you put into it is twice that effort for half the distance. This is exactly how it is when you have the gaps in the sales funnel. Unfortunately, more course makers are faced with this problem.

When making a course, you're offering your company the chance to engage more people with your expertise however, what was the last time you had a look at your current pipeline and identified areas of opportunity that you haven't yet tapped?

Check out the example course-creator pipeline for some tips and inspiration.

Skip ahead:

Prior to diving in the importance of personalization

If you go through the following pipeline, you'll notice an emphasis on personalization.

People often believe that an automated process is a non-personal process. But in reality, there are an infinite possibilities to ensure that automated messages are thoughtful and personal, while also improving consistency and conversion.

Read on to discover steps that can not only fill the gaps in the current pipeline that is one-to-many, but also offer personalization opportunities which will please your customers and leads. Don't forget to keep an on the lookout for methods and tools that could assist in bringing these customized pipeline phases to life without costing you valuable time.

The pipeline

    Prospecting    

This phase is all about capturing the attention of your intended audience, but this can be an extremely difficult phase for course creators. Use the following two ideas to make sure you're reaching the right audience with an appropriate offer

Inbound marketing calls for the creation of content such as blog posts, eBooks guides, videos, as well as anything that can draw the attention of your intended audience. You're probably doing this already however, make sure that you're implementing an effective SEO strategy to back your content. Optimizing your content for search engines, in turn, enhances this part of your process and increases the effort you're putting into making the content. Search engines will be crawling everything you write and serving it as outcomes, and the more optimized your content is, the easier your target audience can find them.

Landing pages and forms: If you're not using these powerful tools that you're drawing in prospects through your amazing content could be left undiscovered. It's one of the biggest gaps that which you may encounter. To fill this pipe and avoid losing prospects you worked hard to reach Use landing pages to tell a clear story about your product and make use of forms to capture contact information from lead leads that are highly interested. Keep those leads in your CRM system and guide leads towards making a purchase. When we talk about nurturing leads, this brings us to our second sales pipeline phase.

    Automatic lead nurture    

If you are looking to nurture leads, doing it manually will result in a surprising amount of gaps. Why? Since every time an important nurture message is forgotten, a gap forms where leads are lost. The majority of the time, teams don't not even being aware of the harm caused because they're taking care of other things. The reason your pipeline requires automated nurture sequences.

Utilize business automation software to build nurture campaigns consisting of the various outreach efforts required to guide the people who visit your website through your funnel. In the case of a user who submits a request on your site, business automation can automatically launch a welcome series which will offer resources that are of interest to them, and then push to the next step within your sales process. Once it's triggered the audience will receive all the necessary messages at the exact time they need to receive them. You and your staff don't need to lift a finger because nurture is taking place on a regular basis.

You may already be utilizing automated lead nurturing but it doesn't mean you're invulnerable from gaps. You must ensure that you're not missing any steps in your automatic processes by incorporating relevant content in every text and email. Some of the most effective items to consider include:

  • Personalized email to introduce your company
  • Free eBook
  • Sneak peak of your course and accompanying customer testimonial
  • Articles that can help with their areas of interest (Your Small Business CRM could help)
  • Free webinar invitation
  • Exclusive discounts

All of these resources are designed to provide value to your prospects, which is a priority during this stage of the pipeline. The best part of this method is that the tools you select to provide leads with could be automated. This means no gaps, less effort for you to do and an enduring experiences for leads.

    Lead qualification    

As people start to engage with your messages The qualification process begins. It is easy to optimize and streamline this stage of your workflow by acquiring valuable information from automation of nurture cycles. These data points will help inform the process of qualification so that you can identify your most interested leads who are looking to purchase a course from you.

Automatic lead scoring was developed to rapidly and efficiently create high-quality leads without any involvement from either you or your team.

An optimized, efficient qualifying phase is similar to the following: Business automation and CRM software monitors every customer's interactions with you, which includes how often they access your emails, what hyperlinks they click on, which types of forms they fill out and much more. After that, it awards points for every positive action as well as subtracts points for any negative actions, tallies these up, and determines those leads who are likely to make next steps with your brand.

    Webinar or live event    

A live event that is an element of your pipeline is a great opportunity to reach a wide range of people in one go, but in a way that's personal and fun. After you've decided the most suitable leads are, make sure to automatically divide your leads into groups of their own. Your other leads will follow an alternate nurture route until they're ready. However, your most qualified leads are invited to attend a free webinar.

In this event, you'll want to ensure you've done three important things:

  • Provide value: Consider giving attendees an overview of the concept that they will learn about in your course. It's an essential aspect of making your webinar worth their time and establishing their trust in the courses of your company.
  • Include a Q&A session at this point there's a chance that unanswered questions can be an obstacle that prevents prospects from buying one of your courses, so it's important to schedule the time needed to answer questions. And since this live event will serve multiple prospects simultaneously, all is going to benefit by the queries that are asked.
  • Give the CTA : To avoid a dead end or a gap in the presentation, this one must conclude with a logical next step, and this is the perfect time to invite attendees to complete their purchase or make a time to call if they still want to learn more about.

    Convert, or follow-up    

When you've completed the event is live, you'll have access to an inventory of the registrants so you can communicate with those who are registering and then make your sales pitch.

This is where a lot companies miss an opportunity. They do not realize they've got an entire group of people who are enthused enough about their courses and products to attend their live webinar. One of the most important things to do to ensure that the integrity of your process is to keep in touch with your customers whether or not they actually participated in your webcast.

If you did have attendees, schedule an automated email for the day after the occasion. Send this email to say thank you the attendees for attending by providing them with an exclusive discount code and send the link to your website so that they will be able to make their purchase.

If you've got a bunch of people who registered for your event but didn't make it, don't forget to send an automated message to them too. Invite them to your next live event, or email an email with a replay of the event they did not attend. You can also include a link to your checkout page so they don't have to go through the entire process to purchase the course once they're interested.

In a perfect world every contact would be converted after this step through your pipeline. However, this isn't always the case. Do not fret, however! You can simply divide those who did not decide to buy into another group so that you can continue to nurture the prospects and offer value until you are ready for the next opportunity.

    Onboard    

Did you secure some new customers? The first step is to dance happy. Step two: Onboarding.

It's a huge deal to be onboarding however, it is also known to be among the most common mistakes. In order to avoid any missteps during your onboarding process and to save the time of manually completing your onboarding make sure you use automatic onboarding.

Automate each step of your onboarding process so that you don't risk leaving new customers unsatisfied and confused right after an purchase. The only thing you need to create is campaigns that are triggered after an order made by a student. Then, fill it with necessary items for example:

  • Thank you and welcome to you email
  • Instructions on accessing their new account (ie. login credentials, instructions on how to create your account for the first time, etc. )
  • Materials they can use to maximize the value of their new course
  • Invitations to groups in the event that their course includes group learning access or if you have a community of other students who they can connect and collaborate with

Going the extra mile for your business and your customers

Your sales pipeline could end when someone has received all necessary onboarding information, but this could result in lost chances and a sloppy procedure. If you're really looking to optimize your pipeline for success, consider rounding it up with these final elements:

    Check-in    

Contact your students who have just been able to get in and start studying. You can send them an email with a form where they can comment on their experience, or even inquire about their experience, along with an address to your support page, and some tutorials they could find beneficial. Following this first check-in, consider popping into their inbox periodically to notify them about new course materials or to thank them for reaching certain milestones or solicit comments.

    Cross-sells and upsells    

One of the main reasons not to end your pipeline too soon is the risk of not making enough money. Customers who are happy tend to be regular customers. Therefore, you should include a step in the process of upselling or cross-sell to current course customers.

However, remember to tailor your message to make it relevant and appealing to each customer. Utilize their current course offerings as well as past downloads as well as other data you have about them to determine what upsells and cross-sells to make. The more tailored these sales pitches are better, the more likely customers will take action as if they were repeat buyers.

In the case of example, if a person has taken a social-media marketing course with you, don't attempt to cross-sell them the idea of starting podcasts. Instead, invite participants to join a brand new course on advanced social selling.

    Collect referrals and reviews    

Another effective method for increasing the revenue of your business is to obtain good reviews as well as promising referrals. It creates a flurry of new leads in your pipeline.

After someone has completed the course take advantage of their learning positive experience by sending a thank you message that thanks them for choosing your company and invites them to leave a review or refer another person who may be benefited from your training course.

Let's discuss technology and next steps

As you customize this 9-step method to suit your particular business needs, there is one thing to remember the assistance of software. One-to-many sales that are the most effective pipelines depend on the appropriate technology. This is what allows you to perform this task over and over again to save yourself time and effort of manual input, as well as create an outstanding and consistent experience for your audience.

There are two particular things you should be able to include in your tech stack that will help you on your way:

If you're eager to get started and would like to find out exactly what gaps are in your current pipeline, you can take advantage of this no-cost evaluation. It will help you discover the opportunities you missed throughout the customer's lifecycle, and guide you on how to fix them to achieve an optimized customer experience each time.