Adding an evergreen webinar to your revenue stream is a great way to increase consistent cashflow in a relatively passive way.
While there’s generally a lot of work in the set up phase, once that’s done, your webinar and funnel can produce a consistent flow of cash with minimal attention from you and your team.
To be clear, it is important not to underestimate the front end work and the time needed to get an evergreen funnel consistently performing for your business, but that’s what this post is all about.
Failing to appreciate the heavy upfront workload for building a webinar is perhaps the biggest shortcoming I see when people think about evergreen funnels. There’s a huge misconception that you can record a webinar once, write a funnel, and then turn on the revenue.
The reality, however, is often very different.
So let’s unpack the four steps to creating a high-converting evergreen webinar funnel.
1. Create and test your webinar offer
Start by identifying a topic and specific offer you think will convert well. As with all offers, consider what your audience most wants and needs from you – remembering that what they want may not always be what they need! This plays an important role in your positioning — they have to want what you’re presenting bad enough to sign up so you even have a chance to get them to the offer stage.
After you’ve created the content for this, test it out and then test it some more. You want a webinar that converts prospects into buyers before you go to the effort of setting up the evergreen apparatus, your conversion rate will vary based on whether you’re focusing on warm or cold traffic. But, most evergreen offers eventually target cold traffic where a 1-2% conversion rate is pretty typical. So until you’re presenting to warm traffic and seeing consistent sales, you will want to tweak and retest before starting the evergreen process.
2. Add a follow-up sequence
The selling generally isn’t limited to just the webinar! Most effective evergreen funnels include a timed offer that continues the selling process. This sequence also generally includes some sort of urgency and scarcity to help drive sales. These are two essential factors that help convert prospects into buyers because they give a reason to join now instead of some indeterminate time in the future.
Your sequence will generally be relatively short since you’re creating urgency. It’s likely to be in the 3-5 day range and will immediately follow the original webinar. You’ll want to email your prospect frequently during this timeframe while still focusing on the know, like, and trust factor that is so important to conversion. This often means you’ll send one email each day and then several on the final day.
Start with a sequence that has the pieces you want and then test it out. Look at some hard data here once you have it before making any decisions about subject lines, copy or click through effectiveness.
Be sure to keep track of what’s happening before and after any changes so you know the impact of what you’re doing. You don’t have to go crazy here; a spreadsheet and consistent updating are enough to get you started.
3. The right tech tools to sell authentically
One of my pet peeves is timed offers that don’t truly end because there aren’t the right tools in place. If you tell your prospect they only have three days to buy at a special price, then you need to consistently deliver on this. If they can come back any time and claim the discount it will hurt your credibility with them.
Similarly, my preference is to never pretend the training is live by adding a fake chat or fake participants. Many choose to do this and that’s definitely their prerogative, but it really turns me and many others off when they see this.
I’m also not a fan of the emails that urge you to show up early, because they might run out of space when in fact they have unlimited spots with their delivery tool. Of course, not all audience members will be savvy enough to know the difference. But, some people will and you only hurt yourself when you don’t present your offer authentically.
My favorite tech tools to use in evergreen funnels are EverWebinar and Deadline Funnel. EverWebinar sets up the delivery features of the webinar. It also easily integrates with many landing page builders and autoresponders. Bonus: it’s relatively affordable to use!
Deadline Funnel allows you to set up expiring links and redirects so your offer is accurate. It also integrates nicely with landing pages and most autoresponders, it allows for both link based timing and opt in based timing- I find it relatively easy to setup and they’ve got great customer support too. It’s also an economical tool to use for your funnel which is an important factor.
4. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic
The last thing to consider once you have the first three steps in place is: how you’re going to get your offer in front of people? No matter how good the funnel is, if no one sees it you aren’t going to get any sales. So, finding a consistent way to drive traffic to your sign up pages is a necessity.
Once you understand your cost per lead and your cost per sale, you can make some reliable choices about how much revenue to expect based on your ad spend. Then, you can comfortably spend larger amounts of money on things like Facebook ads or Google adwords campaigns.
You can also work the evergreen sign up into your regular content marketing plan for regular traffic. By consistently posting on social and including mention in blog posts, you’ll also drive organic traffic to the funnel.
Pro-tip: Consider having specific entry points in the funnel that match the traffic source so you can analyze your results more accurately. Cold ad traffic will generally convert much lower than organic traffic that seeks you out. Warm traffic that already know and trusts you will also convert differently. This can be as simple as using identifiable links and tags at the entry point, or you can build entirely separate funnels if you have that capacity.
Overall, building an evergreen webinar funnel that performs is not impossible but it does take more time and effort than you might anticipate. Set yourself up to succeed by planning for this and allowing adequate time for testing and tweaking before turning up any ad spend for traffic.