The Webinar Funnel Framework We Use To Sell Our Coaching Programs

We've been working with a new client to help them launch a new product as part of their wider funnel. 

To give you some background into what they do. Our client is a therapist and now trains other therapists and practitioners on how to start their own private practice. 

Their students who enrol in their program are typically those who have just qualified as a practitioner or therapist, or who have had a business for sometime but want to learn current marketing techniques. 

Our goal was to build an end-to-end funnel that sold their lower end product and then upsell students into a higher end product. 

The lower end product is a self-paced course whilst the higher end product is a group coaching program. 

As we started working on the funnel, we understood that they had students who were taking part in both the lower end and higher end products. But you will see from this case study, in order for a sales funnel to be successful, it has to be able to sell well. Later on we will explain more about what we mean. 

Is Paid Ads Or Free Traffic Best For Launching A Sales Funnel?

Our client wanted to use Facebook Ads to start testing the funnel, but we suggested that as they already had an email list of over 500k subscribers that we start there.

This was a good idea to see how the funnel performed by using free traffic. That way we could see the potential for the funnel and if it would work when we ran paid ads to it.

Another issue that we had to work out with the subscribers was how to segment it. Subscribers included both B2C and B2B subscribers.

Some purchased our client’s other products but there was one particular segment that was of interest to us, which was the segment that included people who were therapists or practitioners and opted into an existing funnel to learn how to train as a therapist.

This segment was ideal, since it matched the customer avatar – that is, anyone who is a therapist or practitioner and wants to learn how to market their business.

Once the segment was identified, we went on to consider what the user journey would be like.

Key Takeaway: Test a new funnel on an existing email list or acquired traffic such as website visitors. That helps you to see how the funnel will convert before you take it to market with paid ads. Plus it is more cost effective and cheaper to test a new funnel on people that already know about you and are likely to buy from you.

Planning The Funnel And The User Journey

The funnel that we built was a webinar funnel. By using a webinar, we wanted to really provide value with high-impact educational content, that taught something and then lead the attendee into the pitch for the product.

This way it doesn’t seem like a direct pitch, but we could really touch on the pain points and challenges of the target audience and teach them what they may not know, so it makes sense that the next obvious step is to purchase the product.

As our traffic source was an email list, the journey for the subscriber would be to visit a landing page where a webinar was hosted. The call to action on the webinar was to purchase the product.

The result of this funnel over a period of two weeks however was a disappointing 8 sales.

To give you some context. We emailed 114119 subscribers. The email list had an open rate of 17% and a CTR of 3%. However only 39% of the webinar was watched and from that the funnel produced 8 sales.

It’s important to note that the main part of the funnel, which is the webinar, was where, in our opinion, the funnel broke.

Analysing The Performance Of A Sales Funnel

When analysing the performance of a funnel, we carefully looked at the different pieces to see whether it meets industry standards or if not industry standards, the standard for the business all over.

When we studied the average email performance rates for this client’s business, we saw that on average they had an open rate of 19% and CTR of 6%, so the performance of their emails for this funnel was on average.

We do believe that their email open rates could be improved if they cleaned their list because industry standards according to Campaign Monitor suggests that a high performing email list would have an open rate of 21% and a CTR of 15%.

The next problem for this funnel was the webinar.

The webinar was 46 minutes long but people were only looking at 16 minutes of it. This is important to note because the content of the webinar was such that the introduction of the product and the call to action came after the 16 minute mark.

If people were not looking past 16 minutes, they would not have known about the product in order to buy it.

Another problem with the webinar was that it was not persuasive. Our client wanted to promote their self-led course but the success rate of the course was very low.

The engagement rate in the course was also very low. So the question was, how can we persuade a group of people to buy a product that was not successful in helping the students achieve their desired outcomes?

And the answer to this question led to us pivoting and instead promoting a product that was more successful.

This teaches us two things, something which we say over and over again:

  • A sales funnel is only as good as the product it’s promoting
  • A sales funnel or paid ads will not solve a broken product

Setting Up The Sales Funnel

The first funnel promoted the sale of an ecommerce product via a ThriveCart checkout. This funnel started by promoting a series of emails to a warm audience.

Two emails were sent to the segment with the goal of introducing the product via a webinar.

The goal with these emails was to establish interest in the product by observing which subscribers opened or clicked on the link in the email to watch the webinar.

Subscribers who clicked on a link within the entire email campaign, were segmented as potential warm leads, since by clicking a link, it can be assumed that they were inspired by the email copy.

From the segment of people who clicked on the webinar link within the emails, we continued to send a series of five sales emails, to nurture and share more about the product to encourage them to visit the checkout page to purchase.

When we analysed the last emails in the funnel (those sent to all the clickers), what we found was that the engagement rate was poor.

In one email we had an open rate of 16% with a CTR of 6.47%.

In another email we had an open rate of 4% and a CTR of 0%.

Our conclusion from this campaign was that the clickers of the webinar video were not very inspired by the actual webinar and so were not excited to receive further emails about the product from us.

When we relayed our observations to the client, they agreed that the product was not the strongest and this reflected in the performance of the webinar.

Pivoting And How We Rescued A Failed Funnel

As our first launch didn’t go as we expected, we decided to try a different funnel to a different product (a coaching program) and this is where things became pretty interesting.

We decided to pivot to promote the coaching program instead, since previous students had excellent results and their testimonials would prove that.

Our client wanted 30 sales to call it a successful campaign. We therefore had the task of building a new funnel for this product and here's what we came up with.

We promoted the product to people who were already familiar with the brand. They had some previous interest and we considered this to be a decent audience with a high likelihood of converting properly.

The funnel would therefore go like this.

A series of seven nurturing emails were sent to this segment with the goal to book a call to talk to a sales team about the product.

Launch with webinar product mockup

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Although we recommended that we should send the audience to an ecommerce page to purchase the product directly, the client preferred to use their sales team to test how that would perform.

In our opinion using a sales team should only be used where it would contribute value to the overall sales process. In this case, we thought that it would make the journey more difficult for the subscriber to purchase the product if they wanted to.

We also suggested that we give both options to the subscriber in our emails, but the client decided otherwise.

How We Increased Our Sales Close Rate To 100%

Here’s what happened.

When people booked a call with the sales team, we found that they were not adequately trained on the product to answer questions about it.

We also found that they were not able to properly manage subscriber’s objections to the product.
This affected sales and there was a conversion rate of 43% call taken to sale.

Now some might say that this is an excellent conversion rate, but what we did next boosted the conversion rate to 100%.

We thought that since the sales team were not properly trained on the product, if we hosted a live webinar and answered all the questions that subscribers might have about the product and show them examples of previous students who performed well, that this may have an effect on conversion rates.

We therefore hosted two subsequent webinars, that explained more about the product and also reassured subscribers about what they were getting and how we could help them. They were also able to ask any questions and get the answers to help them address any concerns.

After hosting the webinar and from the comments that we saw in the webinar itself, we knew that if we included an ecommerce option, that this would make a difference.

We therefore suggested this to the client and we decided to test it and see how it would perform.

As expected, the percentage of sales closed increase to 100% and our checkout page had a conversion rate of 10%. According to FindStack, an email funnel can produce on average 2-5% conversion rate from webinar attendance to sales. As we were able to achieve a 10% conversion rate we were pretty happy with this.

In the end, the final results for this funnel was 35 students joined the coaching program.

Wrapping Up

From this campaign we were able to rescue a failed launch and turn it into a more successful one, by focusing our efforts on promoting a product that provided good outcomes for students and also one where we could leverage testimonials and reviews from students.

We were also able to turn around a potentially poor campaign outcome by hosting a live webinar and interacting with subscribers to help get them off the fence with any concerns that they may have.

This alone made the case for why live webinars are powerful to help conversions.

The Lessons We Learned

Sometimes automation doesn't work

The client wanted to automate this funnel as much as possible. Whilst we can see that this makes sense and is the goal for most businesses, automation should only be considered when the user journey has been perfected. In our client's case, subscribers had questions and objections that could not be answered by automation, until we really understood what they were.

Which is why when we set out to build a funnel, we get it to the point where it is converting and then consider automating it at a later date.

Leverage an existing audience to test products

The second lesson we learned is that we did not need to turn to paid ads if we already had an audience that we could test a product on. Paid ads is an amplification tool and should only be used if you have the budget, but if not, once you have a proven product that has been tested on an existing audience, ideally who is familiar with the brand.

Every business needs a good product

Finally, the third lesson we learned is that a strategy will always fail, if we do not have a good product.

People want to buy products that will help them and in a crowded marketplace, they're looking for products that are proven to work for them. In this campaign we used testimonials of past students to demonstrate that the product worked.

Author: Dawn-Marie Nesbitt

Dawn-Marie is a digital marketer and Chief Marketing Officer to several start-up brands. She runs the blogs winclientswithfunnels.com and iamdawn-marie.com writing articles on marketing strategies for readers in the coaching industry. She has contributed to several online webinars and podcasts to train small business owners on digital marketing strategies including She Owns It, The Hustle & Heels Ladies Lunch Conversion Webinar, The Practitioner Marketing - Marisa Peer Webinar and the Bring More You To Your Work Podcast. Connect with Dawn-Marie on Twitter and LinkedIn.