How To Use ClickFunnels for Online Courses

Online courses are gaining popularity every day. We do more of our learning online than ever before, and that trend is only going to continue its upward trajectory. Online courses abound in every topic or field of interest, such as life coaching, athletic performance, business management, software development, health and fitness, and crafting. But, getting students to take your class can be tricky.

ClickFunnels for online courses allow you to get noticed in a sea of offerings and convince people to purchase your specific course. Having a sales funnel allows you to easily break into the field.

In this piece, we will cover how to leverage a sales funnel through ClickFunnels to optimize your conversion rate for your online course offering. Before you get started, make sure you have clearly defined what your business is going to be and what you need to get it going.

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Using ClickFunnels to Optimize Your Online Course

ClickFunnels are just what the name says, they will stream potential customers directly to you with just a click. Understanding these incredibly helpful tools will allow you to optimize your business and truly take off as an entrepreneur.

In this guide, we will take a look at different types of funnels you can use to help your users decide to buy a membership, what aspects to include in your funnel to increase the likelihood of success, and things to consider when preparing to launch. Let’s get started.

Why Offer a Course in the First Place?

You might be struggling with whether an online course is worth the effort or risk. Here are a few reasons why you should be offering one.

It establishes you as an expert.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of your reputation in standing out from the crowd of those offering similar services to you. Offering an online course makes you appear like someone who really knows your area of expertise well enough to teach it to others. This is a powerful tool for establishing trust and convincing your customers that you are worth the investment.

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It creates a sense of exclusivity.

Taking an online course makes your audience feel like they have an edge over their peers. You’re creating that sense of community with your viewers that your competition isn’t and leaving them with a sense that they’re getting something from you they won’t get from others.

This is an increasingly important element in generating leads and conversions in a crowded field.

It holds the attention of your users better than books and blog posts.

Online courses are intended to condense complex and nuanced information about an important topic down into bite-sized chunks that your audience can consume with ease.

Think about how many parts you’d have to break a complex topic into to deliver it as a series of blog posts. Or how hard it would be to write a book that would hold their attention enough to get them to read 80-100 pages.

Not all of us can write well enough to do that. But most anyone can record a video in which they talk about a topic they understand well with enthusiasm.

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Why You Should Be Hosting Your Online Course on ClickFunnels

So why ClickFunnels as a platform to host your online course? Well, there’s a good chance that you may already be using ClickFunnels for sales for your online business, and if so, it only makes sense to consolidate your online course hosting into the same platform. But let’s say you aren’t already a ClickFunnels user. Here are a few benefits to becoming one.

• ClickFunnels is easy to set up and use. You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge, and it’s specifically aimed at people without it. It includes landing pages, websites, email list management, and payment integration so you don’t have to worry about tying together and managing a bunch of different services.
• It’s easy to build and manage your landing pages on ClickFunnels. It has a great landing page builder, and you can easily integrate subscription management and payments for memberships.
• ClickFunnels is good at improving your average order numbers thanks to its sales funnel features. This will drive up your overall sales and help you cover your costs more quickly and scale your business.

Choosing a Funnel for Hosting your Course

The next part of your online course funnel strategy is which funnel you should use. There are plenty of wrong ways to go about pitching your online course to potential customers. Fortunately, there are several time-tested funnels that you can rely on. Here are three of them.

Content Marketing Through Alternate Formats

Dropping a reference to information offered by your online course in other formats, like your blog, is a great way to create leads with users already interested in the topic. This is especially true for creating a mailing list or linking to your online course landing page.

This approach can be a slow-growth strategy but can pay dividends over time. For instance, you can write a blog post that describes how to launch a new product online and then refer them to your online course on how to get your first sale in 30 days.

Click here for a FREE two-week ClickFunnels trial, a FREE ClickFunnels course, and over 10 done-for-you funnels!

Don’t neglect social media as a format for content marketing also. You can integrate your ClickFunnels with social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as a way to maximize your impact and track the effectiveness of your social media strategy.  YouTube is another space where you can promote your online course through related video content.

The Webinar

Webinars are live sessions you conduct with your users, generally through a video conference service like Google Meet or Zoom. You should be expecting to interact with your audience by answering questions. Hosting a webinar can really boost your standing in your chosen field of expertise and create an impression that you are accessible and engaging to your audience.

This approach does require a bit more repeatable effort since each webinar is aired live, and therefore it’s not a source of passive income where you create it once and it keeps working for you. However, it does have stronger messaging and you should weigh that against the value of the “fire-and-forget” approach.

Product Launch Spanning Multiple Videos

Setting a series of videos up that offer related information will help to whet your audience’s appetite for more content from you. These videos should offer useful information and not just serve as pitches for your users to buy from you.

For instance, if you are funneling for an online course on how to set up an online business, you might post a series of videos that explain the basics of how to get started, and then use that to generate leads for your course where you really drill into the specifics. These can be posted to YouTube for maximum reach.

The idea here is that this is a free offering to lead into revenue later. So be generous in sharing some of your secret knowledge with your audience to show them that you really do want to add value. They will reward you later with conversions for your online course.

The endgame here is to get people to subscribe to your course, so you are going to be setting up a membership funnel.

Key Parts of a Successful Funnel

All of the leads in the world won’t do much good if you can’t convert them into customers. So how do you ensure that your funnel has what it takes to convince your visitors to click the buy button?

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First, you need to have a strategy for gathering leads through a mailing list. Offer them something for subscribing. Maybe it’s a free mini-course, or an ebook, or a newsletter. Make sure that something has real value for them so they’re convinced it’s worth it to hand over their personal information.

Next, make sure your funnel makes use of these features when it makes sense. These are tried-and-true ways to add value and persuade your leads to close the deal.

Create a Sense of Urgency or FOMO

Ever gone car shopping and talked with a sales associate?

Usually, at some point in the encounter, you will end up sitting across from each other at the sales desk where they make their pitch. “It just so happens that we’re running a manager’s special today only. If you buy this car today, I can knock 5% off the top. But only if you buy today! If you walk out that door, I can’t offer you this deal when you come back.”

This doesn’t always work for large purchases like cars, but it is still effective in getting you to have to consider the offer with a sense of urgency. Transfer that logic to your online course and you can also create that sense of urgency in your potential customers by offering that 20% discount if they purchase a membership in the next 24 hours or that free consultation if they buy in the next three days.

Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

If this strategy seems old, it’s because it is. It’s old because it works really well. Think about it from your own perspective. Aren’t you going to be more likely to commit to a purchase when you know the seller is guaranteeing a refund if you aren’t satisfied?

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Considering how much fraud is taking place online, it is not hard to see why most people want to make sure they aren’t risking their money if their investment turns out to be a bad bet. You will convert many more sales when you take away the fear of losing money on a product they won’t know works for them until they try it.

As long as your course offers real value, you shouldn’t have to worry that people will abuse this offer. Sure, you might have a couple of bad actors taking advantage of you, but you’ll reap the benefits of standing by your product with higher volumes.

Limit Availability to Create Scarcity

There’s a story a well-known life advisor has shared about how a member of his staff brought his family several boxes of sugar-and-fat-free cookies that they absolutely loved. The life advisor never got a chance to try them because his family ate them all up. So he paid her for 60 boxes to make sure there were enough for them all to enjoy. Pretty soon, his pantry was full of boxes of cookies no one was eating. The lack of scarcity suddenly made them less appealing.

Limiting the number of users for your online course or making it available for only a limited time can be a powerful tool. This can be the driving force behind many consumer’s decisions on whether or not to buy.

Launch Your Online Course

OK, so you’ve got your funnel set up and it’s sublimely positioned to convert your leads into sales. You’ve got your course videos recorded and edited, and any supplemental course content at the ready. You’ve got a money-back guarantee and your strategy for driving purchases optimized. So now it’s time to launch your online course.

But hold up. You need a strategy for this too. Launching an online course can be a wild success or a disappointing failure depending on how you go about it. Having a plan also helps you to avoid the stress so many marketers experience in the lead up to their product launch. Having every step mapped out ahead of time will keep you from feeling overwhelmed.

Click here for a FREE two-week ClickFunnels trial, a FREE ClickFunnels course, and over 10 done-for-you funnels!

Be Engaging With Your Customers

Engaging with your users is a critical part of your online course launch process. This means:

• Supporting your sales funnel at all levels, including purchasing issues, accessing the course material, etc.
• Listening to and acting on customer feedback.
• Answering questions from your users in short order (preferably in real-time).

The “real-time” part of this equation can be the hardest to manage. It’s important because customers aren’t limited to one geographical area anymore, they are spread out around the world.

You should be aware that if you aren’t responding to your customers in real-time, your competitors are. That immediacy is something that your users have been conditioned to expect and they will seek it out elsewhere if you aren’t providing it.

This means your launch will involve some extra hours on your part to respond to customer needs during that initial period. You might consider hiring a virtual assistant to help you manage customer feedback and answer basic questions.

Have a Strategy for Customer Engagement

It’s essential to have at least an email response to customer questions if not a live chat available. There are services for these sorts of things, as well as auto-responders to help manage email contact. It is also extremely advisable to have a frequently asked question section on your website to address the most common questions to expect.

Click here for a FREE two-week ClickFunnels trial, a FREE ClickFunnels course, and over 10 done-for-you funnels!

Live chats can help hold a user’s hand during the purchase process and ease them through the most vulnerable part of the sale. These do a lot to establish trust between you and your customers.

 You can leverage a service or hire an assistant to help you with this, but be sure to vet whoever is handling a live chat for you carefully. Relying on poor quality service to respond to your customers in real-time this way could cost you.

Follow Up On the Leads that Didn’t Click Buy

Of course, not everyone who visits your landing page is going to go all the way through to the end of the buying process. These users might not have closed the sale for you, but you shouldn’t just forget about them.

Instead, you should target them with that extra little push to remind them your course is still waiting for them. Here are some users you should be targeting for follow up:

• Those who visited your landing page or website and didn’t purchase the course offering.
• Users who got all the way to add your course subscription to their shopping cart and then dropped off.
• Users who bought a course or other product or service you offered at some point in the past.

Each of these types of users requires a different, targeted message that is designed to entice them back to your online course sales funnel to get them to buy again. This will often be through email but can also happen through targeted online advertising such as Facebook ads. The enticement could be a discount or an offer for something extra on top of the course purchase.

Try Out a ClickFunnel to Boost Your Online Courses

At this point, you should have a reasonable understanding of how a ClickFunnels sales funnel works to help you promote and convert sales for your online course offering. You can try out ClickFunnels for free before you commit, and in the process, you can even collect some great resources to help you get started, including some funnels you can use in promoting your course.

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