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A Course Creator's Guide on What to do to fill the gaps in your One-to-Many Pipeline

Dec 11, 2024

Have you ever run on sand? In all honesty it's a disaster. The effort you put into it is twice that effort in order to cover the same distance. That's the situation when there are holes in your sales pipeline. It's unfortunate that too many course designers are faced with this problem.

When designing a course you're offering your company the chance to engage the masses with your skills But how long has it been since you looked through your course to see any gaps or untapped opportunities?

Check out the example course-creator pipeline below for tips and ideas.

Skip ahead:

Before we dive in the importance of personalization

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

Many people believe that an automated process is a non-personal process. In reality, there are an infinite possibilities to make automated communications sensitive and personalized, while also improving efficiency and consistency.

Read on to discover strategies that will not only help you fill in the holes of your existing one-to-many pipeline but also offer personalization opportunities that will delight your customers and leads. Keep an an eye out for the methods and tools that could help bring these personalized pipelines to life and without consuming your valuable time.

The pipeline

    Prospecting    

This is about getting the attention of your intended viewers, however this could be a tough phase for course creators. Utilize the two suggestions below to make sure you're reaching your intended audience by offering an appropriate offer

Inbound marketing demands you to create content, like blog posts, eBooks guides, videos, and anything that will pique the attention of your intended audience. You're probably doing this already but ensure that you're implementing an effective SEO method to support the content you write. Making your content search-friendly for engines improves the efficiency of this stage in your pipeline and maximizes the time you put into making your content. Search engines are going to crawl every piece of content you make to serve it up in search results. The more optimised your content, the easier your target viewers will discover them.

Formulas and landing pages If you're not making use of these effective tools and forms, the potential customers you're attracted through your amazing content could fall through the cracks. This is among the most costly gaps 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 provide a concise description of your solution and use forms to capture contact information from lead leads that are highly interested. Keep those leads in your CRM system and guide to make a sale. When we talk about nurturing leads, we are now in our second sales pipeline phase.

    Lead nurture automation    

When it comes to nurturing leads, manually can result in a shocking number of lapses. Why? Since every time an important nurture message is forgotten, a gap forms where leads can be lost. This often happens without teams ever realizing what damage has been caused because they're taking care of other things. This is why you need automatic nurture routines.

Make use of business automation software in order to create nurture campaigns that consist of all the outreach that you require to get your audience through your pipeline. In the case of a user who submits a request on your site the business automation software will launch a welcome series which will offer resources that interest them and push to the next step of your sales funnel. Once it's triggered then your customers will be able to receive the right messages exactly when they need them. Your team and you won't have to think about anything because the nurturing process happens in a way that is automatic.

You may already be utilizing automatic lead nurturing, but it doesn't mean you're invulnerable to gaps. Make sure you're not skipping the steps of your automated processes by incorporating relevant content throughout your emails and texts. A few effective things to include are:

  • Personalized email to introduce your business
  • A free eBook
  • Sneak peek of the course, and an 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 focused on providing value to the leads you are nurturing as a top priority during this stage of the pipeline. The best part of this method is that whatever you choose to cultivate leads can be automated. The result is zero 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's easy to improve and streamline this phase in your pipeline by collecting valuable information from your automated nurture sequences. This data will inform your qualification process so you can segment the most engaged leads who are looking to purchase an online course.

Automated lead scoring is designed to speedily and precisely make your leads with high intent without any manual input from you or your staff.

A well-designed, effective qualification phase looks something like the following: Business automation and CRM software tracks every contact's interaction with you, including the frequency they check your emails, what links they click, what types of forms they fill out and much more. After that, it awards points to each positive action, subtracts points for negative actions, tallies these up, and determines the leads most likely to make the next step in your brand.

    Webinar or live event    

Making a live event part of your one-to-many pipeline is an excellent opportunity to reach a wide range of people in one go, but in a way that's personal and fun. After you've decided which leads you're most likely to be are, make sure to automatically divide your leads into groups of their own. The rest of your leads will follow a different nurture path until they're ready, but those who are most qualified are invited to attend a free webinar.

During this online event You'll need to make sure you do three things that are essential:

  • Give value to your attendees: You could offer your participants a glimpse of an idea they could learn about in your course. It's a crucial element of making the webinar worth their time and establishing their trust in your brand's courses.
  • Include a Q&A session at this point the unanswered question could become the obstacle that keeps potential customers from purchasing your courses, so it's essential to allocate time to provide answers. And since this live event is designed to serve multiple potential customers at a time, everyone is going to benefit from questions that are addressed.
  • Provide the CTA  to prevent a dead-end or gap, this webinar needs to end in a logical next step, which could be an ideal time to ask participants to purchase or make a time to telephone call should they wish to find out more.

    Convert or further follow-up    

Following your live event You'll be able to access a list of all registrants to allow you to communicate with the attendees in a timely manner and create your sales pitch.

That's where the majority of businesses miss a step. They do not realize they've got a large number of contacts that are interested enough by their offerings and training courses to register for their online webinar. The key to ensuring your pipeline remains airtight is to contact your contacts regardless of whether they participated in your webcast.

For those who attended the event, you can schedule an automated email the following day, after the ceremony. Use this message to thank your guests for taking part, provide the attendees with a special discount coupon and direct them to your website where they can purchase their items.

If you've got a bunch of people who registered at your event but couldn't attend, be sure to automatically send a note to them, too. invite them to the next live event or give them a replay of what they missed, but you can also include a link to the checkout page of your site so they can skip a step to purchase the course once they're interested.

In an ideal world, the majority of your contacts will convert after this step within your pipeline, however this isn't always the case. Be patient, though! Just divide the ones who did not decide to buy into another group so that you'll be able to keep nurturing the prospects and offer value until you are ready to make your next pitch.

    Onboard    

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

The process of onboarding is important, but it also happens to be among the biggest mistakes. To prevent any omissions when you are onboarding, as well as to avoid the time of manually completing your onboarding choose to use an automated onboarding.

Automate each step of your onboarding so you're not leaving potential customers unsatisfied and confused right after an purchase. What you must make is create campaigns that are triggered after an order made by a student. Then, fill it with the necessary elements, such as:

  • A welcome and thank for your email
  • How to access their brand new courses (ie. login details, steps to set up the account, etc. )
  • Material they could use to maximize the value of their brand new course
  • Invitations to a Group if their course package includes groups learning or you have a community of other students they should connect and collaborate with

Going the extra mile for your customers and business

Your sales pipeline may end when someone has received all necessary onboarding information, but that would result in missed chances and a sloppy process. If you're really looking to optimize your pipeline to be successful, you should consider completing it out with these finishing elements:

    Check-in    

Keep in touch with new course registrants after they've experienced the opportunity to dive into taking classes. You can send them an email with an online form that allows them to share their experience or ask questions, an address to your support page and a few tutorials they could find beneficial. After this initial check-in make sure to check their email inbox on a regular basis to remind them about new course materials, congratulate them on completing various milestones, or to request more feedback.

    Cross-sells and upsells    

A major reason not to end your pipeline too soon is to avoid losing money. Customers who are happy tend to be loyal customers. So, make sure to add a step to the process of upselling or cross-sell to current course customers.

However, remember to tailor your offer so it's appropriate and attractive to every customer. Make use of their courses currently offered as well as past downloads and any other details you can gather about them to inform which cross-sells and upsells you can pitch them. The more targeted these sales pitches are and the more likely customers will take action as if they were repeat buyers.

If, for instance, someone is taking a social media marketing course from your company, do not try to convince them with an online course about the idea of starting a podcast. Instead, encourage them to take a new class on social selling that is more advanced.

    Collect referrals and reviews    

A different method to increase sales is to get positive reviews and promising referrals. This will create a flow of leads that you can add to your pipeline.

When someone completes the course make the most of the satisfaction by sending them a note which thanks them for choosing your business, and also encourages the user to review your course or refer to someone else who might be benefited from your training course.

We'll talk about technology and the next steps

If you are able to customize this 9-step procedure to fit your particular business needs There's one element you can't forget: the help of 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 time and time again to save yourself time and effort in manual input as well as create an outstanding and consistently-quality experience for your customers.

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

If you're eager to take a leap and to find out exactly what holes are in your pipeline, then take this complimentary assessment. It can help you identify any missed opportunities throughout the customer's lifecycle, and show you how to rectify them in order to ensure a superior customer experience each time.