How To Sell Online Courses And Training By Webinar
It can be a difficult time for people selling eLearning services. Industry events are being canceled. That, unfortunately, includes the local events and meetup groups where you generate leads. But now isn’t the time to throw in the towel. Thanks to video conferencing and webinars, business relationships, like personal relationships, can continue to thrive.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can leverage the internet to sell eLearning services amid the COVID-19 crisis. I will show you how to create a marketing funnel based on strategies that work right now to sell high-ticket information products and courses. Let’s start at the beginning.
How To Create Your Webinar Funnel
I’ll assume for the duration of this article that you are already offering an eLearning course or service. If you haven’t, you’ll find plenty of great articles on the topic of how to find your niche. Assuming, as I am, that you have something to offer, let’s get technical. Running a webinar involves dealing with a couple of moving parts. There are up to six separate pages for your webinar sequence. The graphic below shows you how those pages connect within the context of a marketing funnel.
Here’s a quick overview of each of those pages:
- Registration page: covers why you should sign up for the webinar (There needs to be a clear value proposition here.)
- Thank you page: expectations about what the person who registered needs to do
- Holding page: a page with a timer for people who turn up to the webinar early
- Webinar: rather self-explanatory
- Sales page: here’s where you provide your offer
- Social proof page: you can run retargeting ads for people who visited your social proof page, but didn’t purchase
The registration page, thank you page, and sales page are essential parts of the funnel. You’ll need to create these pages yourself. The holding page and social proof page are optional extras. They are good to have, but not essential.
I’ll cover 3 of these elements in more depth. We’ll start by looking at the registration page.
1. Your Registration Page
The registration page is the entry point to your marketing funnel. All you’re trying to do is get people who have expressed an interest to sign up for your webinar. There are some good templates you can follow. To start with, you’ll need a nice headline that grabs people’s attention. Below the headline, you’ll have a couple of bullet points. These are the main benefits that people who attend the webinar can expect. Finally, you have the registration button.
Here’s an example registration page for an online course.
You can see how all these parts come together. The design of the page is simple enough. This is important because you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with a complicated design. You can add a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency if you choose.
2. Your Thank You Page
Once a person registers they are directed to a "thank you" page. On this page, you will want to set expectations. You should have a set of bullet points that reiterate the following:
- When the webinar will be held
- What you will learn from attending
- A link to the webinar
If you choose, you can create a short video to thank people for signing up for your webinar. A short video is a nice way of engaging with the person who signed up and introducing yourself. This is optional.
3. The Final Sales Page
The final page you need to create for your webinar funnel is a sales page. The sales page is where you’ll send people who attended the webinar and are interested in purchasing your offer.
Here’s an example of a sales page used by Alex Becker to sell an expensive information course. It follows a standard long-form sales copy formula.
The sales page should include the following:
- An explanation of the service
- Fast action bonuses: products you get if you purchase now
- Countdown timers to add a sense of urgency to your offer
- Testimonials, testimonials, testimonials
Fast-action bonuses are an effective way of increasing conversions. The bonuses are specifically for people who attended the webinar. If you put a time limit on their availability, you’ll add a sense of urgency, which will boost sales. As a final note, the number of testimonials you use should be proportional to the price of your course. The more expensive the course, the more testimonials. You’ll need a landing page builder to create your sales page. That covers the main bits of marketing material you’ll need for your webinar funnel. Alongside the sales pages, you should also create an email registration sequence. A registration sequence is a series of reminder emails you send to people to make sure they don’t forget about your event. If you don’t send a reminder, then people are more likely to forget they signed up.
How To Create Webinar Slides That Engage And Sell
We’ve now covered how to make your webinar funnel. Let’s focus on the webinar. You need to make your attendees stay until the end, and hopefully convince them to purchase your course or invest in your services. Your webinar needs to be engaging and entertaining.
Start by establishing credibility in your niche. Mention who you are. Presenters will often share a character arc or the journey of how they reached their goal. You can also share case studies of people who attended previous webinars. Once you’ve established your credibility, explain what your attendees can get if they stick to the end of the webinar. And then explain the additional benefits of your services.
The main part of the webinar is where you share some valuable information. Two-thirds of the webinar involves selling the course and covering the benefits. Wrap up your webinar by mentioning the exclusive bonuses attendees can get if they purchase the service now. Don’t forget to include a question-and-answer portion at the end of your presentation.
How To Promote Your Webinar
There are several ways you can promote your webinar. For instance, you can promote it on your website with a hello bar, an exit-intent popup, or even a blog post.
One of the best ways to promote a webinar, if you haven’t already got an audience, is a combination of LinkedIn and targeted email outreach. Start by defining who you want to connect with. Then search for people who fit your customer persona through LinkedIn.
Build up a list of a 100+ people. You can search for their email addresses on LinkedIn or with an email finder. Use an email verification tool to get their address and then send your pitch. Mailshake has a great 7-part email outreach guide that covers some of the intermediate and advanced aspects of cold email outreach. It’s free and comes highly recommended.
You can also ask the people you’re communicating within your personal outreach to forward your message to anyone who might be interested in the event.
Presentation Tips
Presentation is everything in a webinar. Just think about it. What good are your engaging and entertaining slides if the presenter doesn’t engage or entertain in the first place?
But don’t get me wrong. Of course you don’t have to dress up as a literal clown to do this (in fact, you should dress appropriately since in these cases, appearances are everything) or eat fire. There are ways to be an effective presenter without losing your dignity. Just follow these tips:
- Introduce yourself and tell your story
- Give the audience the content you promised
- Be serious when discussing the primary content
- Throw in a few jokes here and there to lighten the mood
- Give them a reason to stay until the end—for instance, a door prize
- Provide a Q&A session
- End with a suitable Call-To-Action (CTA)
Although you’re following a structure in your presentation, make sure you don’t make it seem this is the case. You have to be engaging and not look like an actor or an actress who is reading from a script.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 crisis has impacted our lives. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can no longer do some of the things we used to do before the virus. The thing that differentiates humans from animals, after all, is our intellect and our wonderful capacity to adapt.
So if you can’t sell that eLearning service the way you used to, leverage the internet and use that webinar as a platform. For some, it can take a little bit of getting used to. I can assure you, though, that you can still get those conversions if you do this right. And if you follow these marketing tips to boost your sales, too, you can achieve your business goals.
