How To Set Up A Sales Funnel For Your Online Course With LearnDash
online course sales funnel

How To Set Up A Sales Funnel For Your Online Course With LearnDash

Using the LearnDash LMS to sell courses online is a great way of making money through educational content. If you have expert knowledge to share on a subject, then there are people who are willing to pay to learn from you. However, to make your online course business a success, you’ll need to market your courses effectively.

One of the best ways to sell more courses online is to implement a strong sales funnel. A sales funnel is a mechanism for guiding potential customers through the buying journey to increase the chances you’ll make a successful sale.

So, how can you create a strong sales funnel with LearnDash? This guide will explain what exactly a sales funnel is and how you can build your own sales funnel with LearnDash to sell more online courses.

If you need help implementing a sales funnel to your LearnDash site or need to add in some extra features of your own – get in touch with our LMS developers!

What Is A Sales Funnel?

The sales funnel is a marketing concept that maps out the customer journey into different stages on a funnel diagram. This can help you to understand what customers are thinking and doing at different points before making a purchase. 

In mapping out the customer journey in this way, you can more effectively plan and invest in the right marketing activities and channels to reach customers at different stages. Essentially, a sales funnel helps you to choose the most relevant messaging and sales techniques for each stage of the buying journey to influence potential customers to make a purchase.

conversion funnel

The stages of a sales funnel are generally split into Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action segments:

  • Awareness: This is when people first become aware of your product and can be influenced to look into it further. Building awareness means making your online courses more visible – for example, through SEO, advertisements, and referral schemes.
  • Interest: If your courses solve a problem or offer value for the prospect, they’ll start to take interest and begin researching more about it. At this point, you should be using lead magnets like forms and downloadable PDFs to get the prospect’s email address, which you can use to send them more information about your courses.
  • Decision: Once you’ve firmly secured the prospect’s interest and they’ve learned more about your courses, they will begin to decide whether to make a purchase. At this point, you should try to interact more directly – direct messaging or Q&As, one-to-one calls, social media interactions, or personalized offers can help here.
  • Action: Once the customer has decided they’ll purchase your course, you need to ensure that they follow through on this decision. CTAs on your website, marketing emails, and automated abandoned shopping cart recovery can remind them to buy your courses even if they stop mid-purchase for any reason.

As well as the initial purchase, it’s important to apply the sales funnel to existing customers as well. You need to ensure that your customers keep coming back for more, so a separate sales funnel for retention is also essential.

Why Are Sales Funnels Important?

Building a strong sales funnel is essentially a way to organize and manage your marketing more effectively. By having a specific plan of action to keep advancing prospects through each stage of the buying journey, you can greatly improve conversion rates and sell more courses. 

Breaking the customer journey down into different stages also helps to assess which of your strategies are effective and which are failing. The number of prospects will gradually decrease at each stage (hence the funnel shape). However, if you notice steeper losses at particular stages, you’ll know you need to improve your marketing strategies at this stage.

Analyzing how many potential customers are at each stage of your funnel at a given time can also help you to more accurately forecast sales for that period, which can help you to budget more effectively. 

All in all, a sales funnel is simply an essential tool for ensuring you are effectively marketing and selling your courses. Implementing a strong sales funnel will therefore lead to better overall conversions, sales, and profits.

How To Set Up A Sales Funnel With LearnDash

The best way to set up a sales funnel with LearnDash is by using a dedicated sales funnel plugin. Two of the best examples are WooFunnels and CartFlows. Both of these plugins work with any WordPress site, making them ideal for LearnDash users. 

Setting Up An Online Course Sales Funnel With CartFlows

CartFlows is a sales funnel builder for WordPress with over 200,000 current users – making it one of the more popular options for sales funnel creation. CartFlows includes a variety of great features that can help to strengthen your sales funnel at various stages, including: 

  • A/B Testing – test two pages against each other to see which gets better results in terms of views, clicks, conversions, and other metrics to help increase success rates
  • Conversion optimized page templates – avoid trial and error by building pages based on tried-and-tested high-conversion templates
  • Lead generation tools – Landing pages and forms to help gather email addresses and generate leads
  • One-Click Order Bumps & Upsells – Encourage customers to buy additional courses or purchase special bundles with a single click at the checkout
  • Focused checkout layouts – streamlined checkouts that reduce the risk of cart abandonment
  • Abandoned cart retargeting – identify when a customer fails to complete their purchase and send an automated reminder
  • Insights – in-depth analytics into visits, conversions, conversion rates, and revenue at each stage of the sales funnel

All of these features can help you to build a more effective sales funnel, giving you the tools to attract more leads and more efficiently guide them to the next stage. 

In order to use CartFlows to create sales funnels with LearnDash, you’ll also need to install WooCommerce and the WooCommerce for LearnDash add-on (which you can download from the add-ons section of the LearnDash LMS menu on your WordPress dashboard). Once you have these set-up, you’ll need to create different products for each of your LearnDash Courses. You can set up funnels for both free and paid products (courses).

Cartflows integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, allowing you to easily create sales funnels for each of your listed products. All you have to do next is install the CartFlows plugin on your site, which is available for free. There is also a Pro version available for $299 per year for an annual license or $999 for a lifetime license.

Installing CartFlows is simple – all you need to do is download the program files from your CartFlows account, then upload them to your WordPress site. Once you’ve done this, you can head to the new CartFlows tab on your WordPress site to access its various sales funnel features, including ready made sales funnel templates.

Setting Up An Online Course Sales Funnel With WooFunnels

WooFunnels is another highly-rated sales funnel builder plugin for WordPress. As with CartFlows, WooFunnels offers a wide range of different features that can help you to build and improve your sales funnel. Some of these include:

  • Opt-In Pages – templates for pages with opt-in forms that gather email addresses and contact details for marketing
  • AB Testing – allows you to test different pages against each other to see which is more effective, analyzing everything from buttons and headers to checkouts and landing pages
  • One-click Upsells – set dynamic rule-based upselling offers that appear at the checkout depending on different factors, purchasable with a single click
  • Rule-based Order Bumps – Set rules to enable cross-selling at checkout depending on the customer’s cart items, cart total, and other factors
  • Abandoned Cart Tracking – automatically identify abandoned purchases and follow up with the customer to reduce lost sales
  • Simplified Analytics – easily understandable insights into pages, views, conversions, revenue, and more
  • Automation – WooFunnels offers a variety of automations through Autonami, an automated customer relationship management (CRM) system

Using these tools, you can begin to improve your sales funnel by gathering more leads in the early stages and more effectively influencing your customers at the Decision and Action stages. 

WooFunnels offers a variety of pricing options, mainly split between “solopreneur” and agency price plans. Solopreneur plans enable WooFunnels for a single website and cost $199 per year for WooFunnels alone, or $299 per year with Autonami. 

Agency plans allow you to use WooFunnels with up to 30 sites, and also gives you the option to pay for a lifetime license instead of an annual one. It’s $299 per year or $999 for lifetime access to WooFunnels on its own. If you want Autonami included as well, then it’s a steeper $499 per year or $1799 for a lifetime license.

WooFunnels integrates with LearnDash allowing you to set up automations using LearnDash actions as triggers. For example, you can use WooFunnels to use a Free Course as a lead for a sales funnel that will help you increase conversions. After installing and activating the plugin, you can quickly get started using WooFunnels’ range of page templates and tools. In this example, you can select a funnel with an opt-in page for users to download the free course. All you have to do is assign or link a course to your opt-in page, so that users are enrolled to the free course after they opt-in. After users opt-in, they can receive an email with additional offers, helping you make more sales. You can also create a coupon that users can access after completing the free course, which will give them a discount on a paid course.

WooFunnels Vs CartFlows: Which Should I Pick for An Online Course Sales Funnel?

Both WooFunnels and CartFlows are great options for building your online course sales funnel, offering a robust selection of tools and features. Overall, the better option will depend on your specific needs and budget. Whichever you choose, both WooFunnels and CartFlows are reliable options for building a powerful sales funnel, with a wide range of useful features available in each.

Creating An Online Course Sales Funnel

Setting up a sales funnel is essential if you want to successfully sell your courses online. Your sales funnel can help you to generate more awareness and interest in your courses, as well as convince more of your potential customers to buy your courses. Using a plugin like CartFlows or WooFunnels to add new features to your WordPress site is a great way to strengthen your sales funnel. In doing so, you’ll be sure to start selling more courses in no time! If you need help enhancing your e-learning site’s e-commerce features or customizing LearnDash to improve your course sales, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of LMS developers.

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