Creative news

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

Dec 11, 2024

Have you ever tried running on Sand? In all honesty it's a disaster. You're putting in twice the effort to get half the distance. This is exactly what it's like with the gaps in your sales pipeline. Unfortunately, too many course creators have to deal with this issue.

In making a course, you're giving your business an opportunity to connect with more people with your expertise, but how long has it been since you looked at your pipeline to identify the gaps and opportunities that aren't being tapped?

Take a look at the course creator pipeline for some tips and inspiration.

Skip ahead:

Prior to diving in the importance of personalization

As you check out the pipeline below, you'll notice an emphasis on individualization.

People often believe that an automated process is an impersonal one. However, in actual fact there is an innumerable number of ways to make automated communication more sensitive and personalized, while also improving quality and efficiency.

Find out how to take strategies that will not only fill the gaps in your current one-to-many pipeline, however, they also present opportunities for personalization that are sure to please customers and your prospects. And don't forget to keep an eye out for the methods and tools that could aid in bringing these personalized pipelines to life and without consuming your valuable time.

The pipeline

    Prospecting    

This phase is all about capturing the interest of your targeted audience, but this can be a tough phase for course creators. Consider the following suggestions to ensure that you're addressing people who are interested with the right offer:

Inbound marketing calls for you to create content, for example, blog posts eBooks guides, videos, and anything that will pique the attention of your intended audience. It's likely that you're already doing this but ensure that you're implementing an effective SEO strategy to back your content. Optimizing your content to be found by search engines, in turn, enhances this part of your workflow and boosts the effort you're putting into creating the content. The search engines are crawling every piece of content you make to serve it up in outcomes, and the more optimised your content more easily your intended viewers will locate you.

Forms and landing pages If you're not making use of these effective tools, the prospects you're attracting by your excellent content may be left undiscovered. This is among the largest gaps you'll encounter. In order to close this gap and avoid losing prospects who you've tried to connect with, use landing pages to tell a clear story about the solution you have developed and utilize forms to collect contact details from lead leads that are highly interested. Store those leads in your CRM and nurture to make a sale. When we talk about nurturing leads, this brings us to our next sales pipeline.

    Lead nurture automation    

When it comes to nurturing leads, doing it manually will result in a surprising quantity of gaps. Why? Since every time an important nurture message is forgotten and a gap is created where leads are lost. This often happens without teams not even being aware of the harm caused because they're taking care of other things. This is why you need automatic nurture routines.

Utilize business automation software to design nurture programs that comprise of all the outreach that you require to get your customers through your sales funnel. In the case of a user who fills out a request on your site Business automation will automatically initiate a welcome message with resources to are of interest to them, and then push to the next step in your sales process. When it's activated then your customers will be able to receive the right messages precisely when they're looking for they need them. You and your staff don't need to lift a finger because nurture is taking place on a regular basis.

There's a chance that you're already using automated lead nurturing but that doesn't mean you're immune from gaps. You must ensure that you're not missing any steps in your automatic routines by incorporating valuable information throughout your emails and texts. The most efficient things to include are:

  • Customized email to announce your business
  • No cost eBook
  • Sneak preview of your course as well as customer testimonial
  • Helpful articles related to their areas of interest (Your Small Business CRM could help)
  • Webinar invitation for free
  • Exclusive discounts

All of these resources are dedicated to providing value for your leads, which is a priority for this phase in the pipeline. The most appealing aspect of this process is that the tools you select to provide leads with could be automated. This means the absence of gaps, lower time spent on manual tasks for you, and a consistent experience for your 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 data from your automatized nurture routines. The data you collect will guide the process of qualification so that you can segment your most interested leads who want to buy your course.

Automatic lead scoring was designed to rapidly and efficiently make your leads with high intent with no manual input from the team or you.

An optimized, efficient qualification phase looks something similar to the following: Business automation and CRM software tracks every contact's interactions with your brand, such as how often they open your emails, which hyperlinks they click on, which kinds of forms they complete and so on. After that, it awards points for every positive action, subtracts points for negative actions, tallies these up, and determines which leads are most likely to move on to the next step with your brand.

    Webinar or live event    

A live event that is an element of your pipeline can be a fantastic method of serving a large number of people in one go however in a manner that's personal and fun. After you've decided which leads you're most likely to be will be, you can automatically separate them into their own group. The rest of your leads will follow an alternate nurture route until they're ready, but your most qualified leads will be invited to a free webinar.

In this event it is important to do three things that are essential:

  • Give value to your attendees: You could offer your attendees a sneak peek of the concept that they will be able to learn more about during your course. It's an essential aspect of making your webcast worthwhile for them and establishing their trust in your brand's courses.
  • Include a Q&A session In this moment the unanswered question could become a stumbling block that's keeping prospects from buying one of your programs, which is why it's crucial to set aside time to provide answers. And since this live event will serve multiple prospects at a time, everyone is going to benefit from the questions that are asked.
  • Create the CTA  to avoid a dead end or gap, this webinar should conclude in an appropriate next step which could be the perfect time to invite attendees to complete their purchase, or to schedule a phone call if they still want to know more about.

    Convert or further Follow-up    

After the event is live, you'll have access to the list of participants and you'll be able to contact them accordingly and make your selling pitch.

It is the place where lots businesses make a mistake. They do not realize they've got a large number of contacts who are enthused enough about their courses and products to register for their online seminar. The key to ensuring your pipeline is secure to keep in touch with your customers whether or not they attended your webinar.

If you did have attendees, schedule an automated email the following day, after the event. Use this message to thank your guests for taking part and provide your guests with a discount code and send them to your website where they will be able to make their purchase.

If you've got a number of attendees who have registered for an event, but did not get to it, make sure to automate a message to them as well. Invite them to attend your 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 won't need to do anything and pay for your course when they're interested.

In a perfect world the majority of your contacts will convert to convert after this stage in your pipeline, but it's rarely the situation. Be patient, though! Just divide the ones who did not buy into a new group so you'll be able to keep nurturing them and provide value until it's time to make your next pitch.

    Onboard    

Did you secure some new customers? The first step is to dance happy. Step 2: Boarding.

Onboarding is a big deal and it's also a chance to be one of the biggest gaps. To avoid any missed steps in your 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're not leaving potential customers unsatisfied and confused following an purchase. What you must make is create a campaign that's triggered by an order made by a student. Then, fill it with items that are necessary like:

  • Welcome and Thank you email
  • Instructions on accessing their new account (ie. login credentials, instructions on how to setup your account, etc. )
  • Materials they can use to make the most of their course
  • Invitations to a group if their course package includes group learning, or if you have a community of other students who they can connect 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 this could result in lost opportunities as well as a non-finished process. If you're really looking to improve your pipeline's efficiency for maximum success, think about rounding it up with these final touches:

    Check-in    

Keep in touch with students who have just experienced the opportunity to dive into learning. In your email, include an online form that allows them to comment on their experience, or even inquire about their experience, along with a link to your support webpage, as well as some instructional videos they could find beneficial. After this initial check-in and review their email inbox on a regular basis to remind them about new course materials and to congratulate them for completing different milestones or simply to ask for more feedback.

    Cross-sell and upsell    

The main reason to not stop your pipeline too early is the risk of leaving money on the table. Customers who are happy tend to be regular customers. Therefore, you should make sure to include an option in the process of upselling or cross-sell current course customers.

However, remember to tailor your offer so it's relevant and appealing to each customer. Make use of their courses currently offered, past downloads, as well as other data you have about them to determine which cross-sells and upsells you can pitch them. The more targeted your sales messages are and the more likely clients will act on them as if they were repeat buyers.

In the case of example, if a person is taking a social media marketing class from you, don't attempt to convince them with a course on creating a podcast. Instead, invite participants to join a brand new training course in advanced social selling.

    Retrieve reviews and referrals    

A different method to increase sales is to get favorable reviews and trustworthy referrals. This creates a flywheel of fresh leads within your pipeline.

Once someone has successfully completed the course, capitalize on their satisfaction by sending them a note which thanks them for choosing your business, and also encourages them to leave a review or recommend someone else who could be benefited from your training course.

Let's talk tech and next steps

When you modify this nine-step process to align it with your specific business, there is one thing you can't forget software. The most solid one-to-many sales pipelines hinge on having an appropriate system. This is what allows you to carry out this procedure over and over again to save yourself time and effort on manual input, and create a stellar and consistent experience for your audience.

Two particular items you need to have in your tech stack to help you along the way:

If you're eager to dive in and want to find out exactly what holes are in your pipeline, take this free assessment. It will help you discover the opportunities you missed within your customer journey and show you how to rectify them in order to create a better customer experience each time.