Creative daily

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

Dec 11, 2024

Have you ever ran in sand? In all honesty it's a disaster. You're putting in twice the effort for half the distance. That's the situation when you have holes in the sales funnel. Unfortunately, too many course creators have to deal with this issue.

When making a course, you're providing your business with the chance to engage the masses with your skills however, what was the last time you took a good look at your current pipeline and identified any gaps or untapped opportunities?

See the sample course-creator pipeline below for tips and inspiration.

Skip ahead:

Before we get into the importance of personalization

As you check out the pipeline below there is a focus on personalization.

Most people think that an automated process is an impersonal one. However, in actual fact, there are an infinite possibilities to ensure that automated messages are thoughtful and personal as well as improve the quality and efficiency.

Find out how to take strategies that will not only fill the gaps in your existing one-to-many pipeline however, they also present opportunities for personalization which will please your customers and leads. And don't forget to keep on the lookout for techniques and technologies that will aid in bringing these personalized pipeline phases to life with no expense to you.

The pipeline

    Prospecting    

The next phase focuses on capturing the attention of your intended audience, but this can be a difficult time for course developers. Consider the following suggestions to help ensure you're reaching your intended audience by offering an appropriate offer

Inbound marketing requires the creation of content for example, blog posts eBooks guides, videos, as well as anything that can draw your target audience's interest. Most likely, you're already creating content, but make sure you're implementing an effective SEO method to support the content you write. Optimizing your content for search engines, in turn, improves the efficiency of this stage in your process and increases the effort you're putting into creating content. Search engines will be crawling everything you write and serving it as outcomes, and the more optimised your content, the easier your target people will be able to discover you.

Formulas and landing pages: If you're not using these tools to your advantage, the prospects you're attracting 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 prevent losing leads that you've worked so hard to get make use of landing pages that convey a compelling story of your solution and use forms to gather contact information from leads with high intent. Store those leads in your CRM and nurture to make a sale. Speaking of nurturing leads, we are now in our next sales pipeline.

    Lead nurture automation    

When it comes to nurturing leads, manually can result in a shocking number of lapses. Why? Because every time an important nurturing message is not remembered, a gap forms where leads are lost. It's not uncommon for teams to do this without not even being aware of the harm created because they're managing other tasks. This is why you need automatic nurture routines.

Make use of business automation software in order to design nurture programs that comprise of the various outreach efforts you need to move the people who visit your website through your funnel. In the case of a user who submits a request on your site the business automation software will initiate a welcome message that will provide resources that are of interest to them, and then push to the next step in your sales process. When it's activated the audience will receive all the necessary messages precisely when they're looking for to receive them. You and your staff don't need to lift a finger because the nurture process is happening automatically.

You may already be utilizing automatic lead nurturing, but this doesn't mean that you're not susceptible to lapses. You must ensure that you're not missing every step of your automatic sequences by including valuable content within every email and text. A few effective things to consider include:

  • Personalized email to introduce your company
  • A free eBook
  • Sneak preview of your course as well as client testimonials
  • The most useful articles about their areas of interest (Your Small Business CRM could assist)
  • Webinar invitation for free
  • Exclusive discounts

All of these resources are designed to provide value to your prospects as a top priority for this phase in the pipeline. One of the best aspects of this process is that the tools you select to provide leads with could be automated, resulting in zero gaps, less effort for you to do and an enduring experience for your leads.

    Lead qualification    

When people begin to interact with your messages The qualification process begins. It's easy to improve and streamline this stage of your process by collecting important data from your automatized nurture routines. These data points will help inform your qualification process so it can be able to identify the most engaged leads who want to buy an online course.

Automated lead scoring was designed to quickly and accurately make your leads with high intent without involvement from either the team or you.

An efficient, optimized qualification phase looks something like the following: Business automation and CRM software monitors every customer's interactions with you, which includes the frequency they check your emails, the links they click, what kinds of forms they complete and so on. After that, it awards points for each action that is positive and subtracts points from bad actions, then adds them up and signals the leads most likely to move on to the next step with your business.

    Webinar or live event    

A live event that is part of your one-to-many pipeline is a great way to serve a lot of people in one go, but in a way that is personal and enjoyable. Once you've identified who your most qualified leads are, make sure to automatically divide your leads into groups of their own. All other leads will follow a different nurture path until they're ready. However, those who are most qualified will be invited to a free webinar.

When you participate in this online competition, you'll want to do three main things:

  • Provide value: Consider giving your participants a glimpse of an idea they could learn about in your course. It's an essential aspect of making your webcast worthwhile for them and deepening their trust in the course offerings of your brand.
  • Incorporate a Q&A section In this moment, unanswered questions could be a stumbling block that's keeping prospects from buying one of your courses, so it's essential to allocate time to provide answers. Also, since the live presentation will serve multiple prospects at a time, everyone in the group will benefit from questions that are asked.
  • Provide the CTA  to prevent a dead-end or an in-between, the webinar must conclude with a logical next step, which could be the ideal moment to encourage guests to make a purchase or make a time to telephone call should they wish to know more.

    Convert, or Follow-up    

Following the live event You'll be able to access the list of participants and you'll be able to contact those who are registering and then make your sales pitch.

It is the place where lots companies miss an opportunity. They don't realize that they've got a large number of people who are interested enough in their courses and products to attend their live seminar. A key element to make sure your pipeline is secure to follow up with contacts regardless of whether they took part in the webcast.

For those who attended the event, you can schedule an automated email for the day after the occasion. Use this message to thank your guests for taking part and provide the attendees with a special discount coupon code, and then send the link to your website so that they can purchase their items.

If you've got a number of people who registered for an event, but did not attend, be sure to send an automated message to them as well. invite them to the next live event, or email them a replay of what 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 an ideal world, all your contacts would convert after this step in your pipeline, but it's rarely the case. Do not fret, however! You can simply divide those who did not buy into another group so that you can continue to nurture them and provide value until the time is right for the next opportunity.

    Onboard    

Secured the new clients? First step: Happy dance. Step 2: Boarding.

Onboarding is a big deal and it's also a chance to be among the most common mistakes. To avoid any missed steps when you are onboarding, and also to cut down on hours of manual work choose to use an automated onboarding.

Automate every step of onboarding to ensure you won't leave new clients confused and unhappy following an purchase. The only thing you need to create is a campaign that's triggered by an order made by a student. Then, fill it with items that are necessary, such as:

  • Thank you and welcome to you email
  • Instructions on accessing their new account (ie. login details, steps to set up their account, etc. )
  • Materials they can use to get the most out of their new course
  • Invitations to a Group when their course offers group learning access or if you are part of a community with others students, they must join and collaborate with

Going the extra mile for your business and your customers

Your sales pipeline could end right after someone gets all the onboarding material, however this could result in lost opportunities and an unfinished process. If you're looking to improve your pipeline's efficiency for maximum success, think about rounding it up with these final details:

    Check-in    

Follow up with your new course registrants after they've had a chance to dive into the course and begin learning. You can send them an email with an online form that allows them to comment on their experience, or even inquire about their experience, along with and a link to your help webpage, as well as some instructional videos they might find helpful. After this initial check-in make sure to check their email inbox on a regular basis to remind the students of new materials for their courses or to thank them for reaching various milestones, or to request more information.

    Cross-sells and upsells    

One of the main reasons not to stop your pipeline too early is that you risk losing money. Happy customers often become loyal customers. So, make sure to make sure to include an option in your process to upsell or cross-sell your current customers.

Be sure to personalize your pitch to be pertinent and relevant to each customer. Make use of their courses currently offered previous downloads, their past courses, as well as other data you have about them to inform which cross-sells and upsells you can present them with. The more targeted your sales messages are and the more likely clients will act on them and become repeat buyers.

For example, if someone takes a social media marketing course from you, don't try to cross-sell them the idea of creating the podcast. Instead, encourage participants to join a brand new training course in advanced social selling.

    Collect referrals and reviews    

Another effective method for increasing revenue is to secure some good reviews as well as promising referrals. It creates a flurry of leads that you can add to your pipeline.

When someone completes any of your classes make the most of the satisfaction by sending them a note that thanks them for choosing your company and invites the user to review your course or recommend someone else who could profit from the course as well.

Let's discuss technology and next steps

When you modify this nine-step method to suit your particular business needs but there's one aspect that you must not forget the assistance of software. The best one-to-many pipelines hinge on having the appropriate technology. This is what allows you to perform this task over and over again, save hours in manual input as well as create an outstanding and consistent experience for your audience.

The following are the two key elements you must have in your tech stack to help you along the path:

If you're ready to take a leap and to find out exactly what gap is in your pipeline, take this free test. It can help you identify potential opportunities that you haven't tapped into in your customer lifecycle and guide you on how to remedy them so you can create a better customer experience each time.