Deconstructing my $72,000 sales funnel
I love finding a good deal, don’t you? It makes my day when I find an educational product that won’t take much time for me to complete, but it results in a noticeable transformation. OR I love when I find a product I highly value at a discounted rate!
That’s exactly how I feel about the automated evergreen sales funnels in my business. The funnels themselves take a good amount of time to create, but once they are ready to go, they take little time to maintain – and they generate thousands of dollars in revenue for me!
In this article, I’m going to show you the ins and outs of my most successful automated, evergreen funnel. You’ll see exactly how it works and how it’s fueled with traffic.
Traffic is key.
You can have an amazing sales funnel, but if you’re not driving traffic to it, then it will go unnoticed and won’t generate the income you want.
What is an automated evergreen sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a process that helps someone discover you, your brand, your products, and then, eventually, make a purchase with you.
Traditionally, with a sales funnel, your prospective customers would find you on Google when searching for a specific topic and click the article to check out your website. From there, they will go through your content, see the products you offer, and purchase through a check out system. Lastly, you deliver the product to them, whether it’s a physical item you ship or a digital item they download.
An automated, evergreen sales funnel is a system that runs on its own.
In my automated sales funnels, you don’t necessarily need to interact with me or my customer service staff for any part of the buying process. The funnel is automatically fueled with traffic steadily flowing in, and I don’t have to touch it in any way.
This is the beauty of automation!
How a sales funnel works:
Cold traffic becomes prospects when people initially find your content and flow through the top of your sales funnel.
This traffic moves into leads once they opt into one of your free offerings, such as a workshop, an email newsletter or a free download.
The leads are eventually converted into customers once they purchase a product or service from you.
How the sales funnel is fueled with traffic
Like I said before, TRAFFIC is EVERYTHING to a sales funnel. So, how are prospective customers discovering me and my brand?
The main way is simply that they are searching for something on YouTube like, “How to start a successful YouTube channel.” From their search, they may find one of my videos, watch it, like it, and follow me. This is how my brand gets discovered.
Additionally, prospects could find a blog post of mine in a similar way by searching on Google or Pinterest.
The ultimate goal is for the prospective traffic to opt into one of my freebie offers or my email list so I can begin to nurture our relationship and build a know, like, and trust factor with them (more on this next).
My most effective automated sales funnel
Today I’ll be walking you through the automated sales funnel that sells my YouTube strategy course, which teaches aspiring YouTube creators to get their first 1,000 subscribers and get monetized in 3 months.
As people discover me through the different traffic sources, if they review my content and want to find out more about the specific topic I’m sharing, they could potentially become a lead.
Here’s how we gain leads on YouTube:
Prospects can click into the description of the specific video they are watching, and within the description will be a few related freebie resources for them to opt into. Some examples include:
Youtube workshop (an on-demand recorded workshop that leads can watch on their own time)
Channel launch checklist (digital download)
Here’s how we gain leads on my website:
Prospects can visit my website and click on the programs page. From there, they may see Creator Fast Track and want to learn more, so they click that button to move to the sales page and sign up for the waitlist. This sales funnel is closed most of the time and opens up periodically for a few days to allow prospective students to enroll.
What happens when someone becomes a lead?
Well, this depends…
Where a lead goes next depends on what free offering they opted into.
#1 – If a prospect signed up for the CFT waitlist
When prospects signs up for the CFT waitlist and become leads, they will be moved into the top of the waitlist automation in Convertkit, which is our preferred email marketing software.
These leads will get a series of emails that promotes the free YouTube workshop to them.
These leads will keep getting those emails even after signing up for the workshop so they stay excited and show up to watch it.
A day after the workshop, these leads will be moved into an evergreen pitch sequence sharing more about Creator Fast Track, my YouTube class.
#2 – If prospects sign up for the workshop directly
When prospects signs up for my free YouTube strategy workshop directly, they are moved into our automation in Easywebinar.
The workshop is hosted in Easywebinar itself, and the software manages the whole sales system inside.
These leads will begin receiving event notification emails, which entail three reminder emails promoting the workshop, what they will get from watching, and why they should show up.
If at any time leads in the CFT waitlist sign up for the free YouTube workshop, they will be moved into Easywebinar to receive the reminder emails.
#3 – If prospects sign up for the channel launch checklist
When prospects signs up for my free channel launch checklist, they are moved into our general welcome automations within ConvertKit.
These leads will be introduced to my brand because these prospective customers are coming into my funnel with the least knowledge of me, what I do, and how I can help them.
The general welcome sequence begins to promote CFT and prompts leads to sign up for the course waitlist.
If leads sign up for the waitlist, they will get an email saying they are on the waitlist. Additionally, they will remain in the regular email automation.
Once the general welcome automation is completed, leads will then be moved into the CFT waitlist automation.
Once in the waitlist automation, they will begin to have my free YouTube workshop promoted to them.
No matter which way they enter into my automated evergreen sales funnel, all these leads have been warmed up and know how I could help them grow a successful YouTube channel.
How I transition leads into my promotional sales funnel
Once leads are warmed up through one of these different avenues, they are ready for some sales emails promoting Creator Fast Track. This, again, is fully automated – I don’t have to do anything manually for them to enter into the sales funnel.
This warm lead receives the CFT Pitch 1 tag in Convertkit once their entry automation is completed. This will push them through a 72-hour sales sequence, which is a series of two emails each day for three days, including the replay from my on-demand workshop.
Here’s what the series of emails include:
The first email tells them the benefits of being successful on YouTube and why they should work toward that goal.
The second email is a case study of a video creator who hit 1,000 subscribers (and beyond) using the CFT method.
The third email answers some frequently-asked questions.
The fourth email contains more student testimonials.
The fifth email asks them why they haven’t signed up yet, talks about a few different problems they could be facing that’s preventing them from pulling the plug, and provides a few solutions to those hesitations (leads would only remain in this sequence if they haven’t signed up for the course yet).
The final email gives some urgency letting leads know that the registration period is about to end, and it’s their last chance to sign up before doors close for enrollment.
How does a lead enter the student system?
At any time throughout the automated sales emails, if leads click the button to enroll, they will be moved to the sales and checkout page. This page is combined and gives more details about the program, shares the bonuses included with the specific package, and is the place to check out and buy the course.
We also include an additional offer, or an upsell, customers can add to their order at checkout.
Our registration process is fueled through our payment processing system, SamCart. So here’s what it looks like:
Once customers complete their registration on the checkout page, SamCart (which is integrated with ConvertKit) will tell ConvertKit to give students a specific tag that pushes them into the student automation.
From there, ConvertKit will give students a tag that integrates with AccessAlly, the premium WordPress plugin we use for building out our course materials and managing users.
Students then get pushed into an email series giving them access to the Creator Fast Track course. The first email includes a link to the course, username, password, any bonuses they received, and a link to the private community.
The automations don’t end there, though. The student will begin to go through a long email series that slowly sends them emails throughout the three-month program to help them stay focused and on track.
Where does the sales funnel go from here?
The funnel doesn’t stop there, though!
We see a decent conversion rate with this automated sales funnel because, of the people who received the webinar promotion and registered, about 30% show up to the webinar live (at their scheduled time), and about 5% of those attendees purchase live during the webinar recording.
Everyone who signs up for the webinar goes through the 72-hour sales email sequence that I shared above, and roughly 2% of people join CFT through this promotion period.
However…
Some will click the link to join the course, go to the checkout page, but not complete the registration process. We call this an abandoned cart, and we have an automation set up for this scenario as well.
If prospective customers moves to the checkout page, begins filling out the registration, but stops for any reason, they receive a follow-up email asking them if they have any questions or if we can help them decide if CFT is the right course for them.
This will convert a few more leads who were on the fence, but we still have quite a few people whom we consider “hot leads” that didn’t purchase. In order to keep them in the sales funnel, and keep the course top of mind, we give the automation a two-week delay, and then we let them know we are opening up enrollment again and send them through another promotion period.
This is a simple process:
If they didn’t already sign up for the YouTube webinar, then we promote it again.
From there, everyone goes through a 72-hour evergreen sales funnel with fresh, new emails (CFT Pitch #2). Within these emails, I share the same ideas as before, but I emphasize different things in different ways and also incorporate new stories and testimonials.
In this second sales period, we see another small percentage of people sign up for the course, and at this point, we have a pretty solid conversion rate of around 4-6% from those who originally signed up as leads.
Though live webinar conversions are typically higher, having an automated, evergreen sales system that I rarely have to touch, is gold in my business.
What is a 4-6% conversion rate? Of 100 leads who sign up for one of the automated sales funnels, about 5 purchase. That's a great conversion for this mass marketing technique!
It could stop there, but we actually have one more step in place for those who haven’t purchased yet!
What happens to those who still haven’t purchased?
Once leads finish the second 72-hour promotion period without purchasing the course, they are moved into the CFT evergreen newsletter automation.
This is a long-term automation, about a few months long, and once they finish the 3 months, they go back through the newsletter sequence from the beginning, and it just keeps repeating from there. This works well because, by the time they go back to the start, they’ve forgotten the content of the initial emails anyway.
The newsletter is a series of helpful, educational tips or videos on how to grow on YouTube. Every few emails we promote either the free workshop or the course waitlist to them. If they don’t register for either, then nothing happens, and they remain in the newsletter funnel.
If they do sign up for either the workshop or the course waitlist, they will go through the relevant sales email automations.
Once those emails are finished, they move into a third promotional sequence for CFT (CFT Pitch #3). This automation is essentially the same as the first pitch sequence, but in order to push them through it, we needed to create a third way for them to be entered in. We’ve found that the first sales pitch converts the best, and, just like the evergreen YouTube newsletter, it will have been a long time since they’ve seen the initial CFT pitch #1 emails that they won’t remember these are the exact same.
That's it! That's how we created our most popular and most profitable automated, evergreen sales funnel, and I hope it gave you an idea for what you can do in your own business to create a passive stream of income.
If you want to go through this particular automated, evergreen sales funnel, join me in my YouTube workshop and see how it all works!
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