In this post I’veoutlined to you our 7 step, 2 hour webinar funnel process. You’ll be able to build a funnel which attracts traffic and subscribers to sign up for a live or recorded training event. You’ll then be able to increase attendance as well as webinar sale conversions conversions.
At Sell Your Service we use webinars every single month to sell our coaching, courses and other information products. But we’ve also used webinars to sell other products and services.
- Physical exercise training equipment
- Board games
- Mentorship programs
- Accounting services
- Insurance programs
- Custom wedding artwork
- Car hire services
- And many more
Webinar funnels are absolutely outstanding for converting subscribers into sales. You can either use it for your own funnel building products. Or you can offer it as a service to your customers, to help them sell more of their services and products.
Funnel Troubleshooting Flowchart
So before we begin I want to talk about our Funnel Troubleshooting Flowchart. If you build funnels, you know that they break. What I’ve created here is a simple flowchart that lets you see exactly what’s broken in your funnel AND of course, how to fix it.
From low subscriber lists to poor sales, everything is covered. You can get your free Funnel Troubleshooting Flowchart sent straight to your inbox below.
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I love webinars
Some people like to buy after reading a sales letter. Others buy after a phone call. Some will wait for special offers. Webinars are another fantastic tool to add to your arsenal and if you can build webinar funnels successfully, you’ll hardly want to sell using another method.
Webinar funnels might LOOK very complicated. but they are far easier than you might realise. In fact, they’re so fast to set up that we use them in lieu of other sales methods now.
Webinars tie it all together
If you’re currently trying to help your customers sell more products, and you’ve got emails, Facebook remarketing and blog content all mixing together, but you’re struggling to convert sales, you might want to look at webinar funnels.
Training someone on a call and building good will is a fantastic lead into closing a sale. It doesn’t matter about the price of the product, webinars have been used to sell $19 ebooks to $100 000+ consultation programs.
Attention economy
It becoming harder and harder to capture and keep your audience’s attention. Sales letters can be ignored or skimmed, email campaigns can be unsubscribed. But a webinar means you have a captured audience for 60, 90 or 120 minutes (we’ve even seen longer). The best part is that the longer you hold their attention, the more likely they are to buy.
Evergreen sales
My favourite part of a webinar funnel is that we can automate the delivery after it’s recorded. This means I can drop the webinar training into a email campaign or traffic campaign and sell on automation.
How to build high converting webinar funnels
What do we mean by “high converting”?
1. Don’t build the webinar presentation/slide deck first
This is the biggest mistake that people make when they start a webinar. They know what they want to sell or teach, so they start to build the slide decks.
The reason this doesn’t work, is because you’re making assumptions about what people want to learn. Even if the topic is the same, the language and wording might be different.
Last year when we started running regular training webinars, we set up a webinar called “how to sell more marketing funnels to your customers”. I was 100% positive that everyone would want to join.
Instead, I had hardly anyone sign up. I had spent all that time on the slides and presentation, only to have 2 people sign up and watch.
2. Email your list and ASK them what they want to learn more about
Instead of building your deck, find out what people want to learn. Shoot an email to your list, or ask your Facebook group about what THEY want to learn about.
Tell them that you’er putting together some new training and you’d love to know what they need help with.
We sometimes leave this as an open question, inviting someone to tell us what they’re struggling with.
Hey David
I’m putting together some brand new training and I want to make sure it’s perfect for you. Can you tell me what you’re struggling with at the moment? What are you working hard on or worrying about?
Mike
Other times we’ll send them 3 options, but still asking them what they need help with.
Hey David
I’m putting together some brand new training and I want to make sure it’s perfect for you. Can you tell me which of these is a priority in your business at the moment?
1. Finding new leads for your business
2. Increasing revenue in your business
3. Focus and motivation
Mike
Finally, I’ll sometimes ask what their goals are for the next 3-6 months. The reason we keep the timescale shorter is because longer term goals have less immediate desire.
I prefer the open ended question as the respondents will often phrase problems or goals in a manner that hadn’t occurred to me. The might even present a problem or goal that I hadn’t thought of.
3. Create your squeeze page
Using my responses I’ll create my squeeze page. We use Beaver Funnels to build out our funnel structure and the content. We then use Beaver Builder to build the pages.
As you can see from this example page, the pages are pretty basic. Nothing too complex. We focus on the benefits of the call, the time and date of the live webinar and ask for their email and name.
Once the squeeze page is built, we’ll create a webinar event in Zoom and add all the tags we need in Active Campaign.
You might want a countdown timer on the page so that people know it’s a live event. The countdown builds scarcity and also is a great reminder of how long people have before the call.
4. Build a confirmation page
This part is CRITICAL. You MUST have a confirmation page. This is the immediate redirect after someone signs up. It’s not good enough to have a message saying “thank you signing up, we’ll send your details to your email”.
A thank you/confirmation page outlines everything that’s going to happen. You could even have a short video explaining what’s going to happen and thank them for signing up.
At this stage, we usually use Zapier to send the contact information to Zoom as our webinar provider.
5. Drive your audience to sign up
Now it’s sign up time! You can use emails from your lists (our favourite method) to sign up your list to a webinar. You can also use remarketing, cold traffic, JV launches and organic social to get sign ups.
We typically promote a webinar for a month before the call. We’ll usually send 2 emails a week to anyone who hasn’t signed up.
My advice would be to start with one traffic source and use more as you get better. Otherwise you’ll overwhelm yourself with too much to do.
This is also where you’ll want to WRITE your follow up emails. But more on that later.
6. Remind people closer to the time
Zoom has a feature that reminds people who have signed up when the webinar is.
You can send automations, campaign schedules or whatever works for you. As a rule we send 3 reminder emails.
- 1 week before at the time of the call
- 1 day before at the time of the call
- 1 hour before the call
Make sure you do this as you’ll increase the number of people who turn up.
7. Present for 45-60 minutes and sell for the last 30
Webinars aren’t complex, but they do require a structure. We have a template that we use and if you want to learn more (and download the slide templates) click here to read about our webinar sales/presentation process.
The webinar process works for your services and products as well as your customers.
The overall format is that we’ll educate and teach for 45-60 minutes and then sell on the back end of the call. Interestingly, people DON’T drop off when you start to sell to them. They’re committed to learning and they want to know more.
Make sure you have a super easy link or even a button to drive people to the final sale.
8. Follow up with all attendees
MASSIVE MASSIVE MASSIVE point. Do not skip this. Even if your slides suck and your squeeze page barely converts – THIS is what will make the difference.
Follow up with all attendees. We send emails over 3 days to anyone who joined but didn’t buy.
- 1 email the day after the call
- 2 emails on the 2nd day
- 3 emails on the 3rd day
No, your attendees won’t think you’re overdoing it, they’ll thank you for checking in with them
First we’ll remind them that the replay is available. Then we’ll start to remind them of the problems they have, which we can solve. Finally we’ll end on the future pleasure they could have when they buy.
If you have genuine scarcity in your product (price increase, limited spaces etc.) then remind people of that too.
9. Post the recording to a delivery page
Upload the recording to a delivery page. Again, it doesn’t have to be intricate, just the main video and links to any resources you talked about on the call.
Also, remember to put a link to the product!
10. Send non-attendees to the delivery/recording page
Anyone who signed up but DIDN’T attend needs to be sent the delivery page/recording.
Use the same follow up method above to drive more visitors to the page and get them to convert. Keep the sales follow up emails in place too, so they know what they’re missing out on.
11. Turn the squeeze page evergreen
Now, we can turn the squeeze page evergreen.
First, we’ll remove the countdown timer from the squeeze page. Remove any mention of it being a live call and replace the language with words like “recording” and “training”.
You can do the same with the confirmation page, changing the live format to an evergreen model.
Again, using Beaver Funnels we’ll create one funnel for a live webinar and just change the pages, rather than build a new funnel from scratch.
Set up an email to deliver the recording page to anyone that signs up. Similar to a squeeze page/squeeze funnel, we don’t want to redirect people to the content straight away.
12. Send the squeeze page to everyone else
Now we can drive more traffic to our evergreen sales page. We’ve got all the emails and content ready to go.
We like to create a warm traffic audience in Facebook to drive traffic to our squeeze pages.
We’ll also create an email automation sequence to drive new subscribers to the delivery page if they’ve signed up to another lead magnet/optin.
13. Automate the follow up emails you sent
Finally, we’ll automate the follow up sales emails that we sent to anyone that signs up. After 2 days of signing up, we’ll send the same follow up emails.
You might need to make a few tweaks to the copy, but overall they should be ready to go!
Funnels break – you can fix them
If you build funnels, you know that they break. What I’ve created here is a simple flowchart that lets you see exactly what’s broken in your funnel AND of course, how to fix it.
From low subscriber lists to poor sales, everything is covered. You can get your free Funnel Troubleshooting Flowchart sent straight to your inbox below.
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Building high converting webinar funnels
Start with asking your audience what they want to learn, it’s easier to create your sign up emails and squeeze page when you use language that they use.
When you create your squeeze page, remember that we’ll use that exact page to turn evergreen and promote in future. Write your follow up emails at the same time you write your sign up emails and just set them to send in the future.
I absolutely love webinar funnels. I love converting them into evergreen content and driving new traffic to the squeeze page. This way, I can build a growing sales and content series for my customers.
Remember, funnels break and it’s tough to see why. Sometimes we only see the symptoms – like low sign ups, no sales or poor revenue. That’s why we’ve created our Funnel Troubleshooting Flowchart to identify where you can increase conversions!
Sign up below and get it sent straight to your inbox.
