How to host online courses with ClickFunnels
Learn how to host online courses with ClickFunnels and find out why you should use ClickFunnels to promote your online course.
When creating and selling online courses, it is crucial to have an efficient system that will help you sell.
The importance of sales funnels to infopreneurs
If you are an infopreneur, you don’t have the luxury of a storefront that many retailers can rely on to make sales. You don’t have sales clerks talking with your visitors, encouraging them to try on clothes and make purchases.
Infopreneurs rely on sales funnels to educate their audience about their problems and present them solutions through their products and services. (READ: What is a sales funnel?)
Infopreneurs need a reliable tool for building high-converting, effective, and beautiful sales funnels online. The best tool to use for this purpose is ClickFunnels. (READ: What is ClickFunnels?)
ClickFunnels was founded in 2014 by Russell Brunson and is a marketing software that enables you to build customized funnels to help you achieve your business goals.
One of the best features of ClickFunnels for infopreneurs is a password-protected membership area where you can host your online course videos and other assets to deliver to your buyers.
Although ClickFunnels does not advertise themselves as an online course host, it still provides a way for infopreneurs to host and deliver online courses to their paying students.
The benefits of hosting an online course
Digital courses are investments that business owners are willing to make to expand, all the while offering a unique interactive experience versus merely picking up a book or digging through yet another blog.
Here are some reasons why you should consider hosting your own online course.
- Expertise
Being an expert in today’s competitive marketing world matters. At the same time, creating and selling a digital course strengthens your business’s expert status. When you can educate your users through a digital course, you can establish yourself as a significant player in the industry.
- Interactive and not boring
Books and blogs can bore your users. This is true for budding business owners who spend a lot of their free time sifting through blog posts and reading marketing materials.
Digital courses provide an opportunity for you to experiment and spark users’ interest using visual components like video, illustration, and infographics. These components can help the user feel like their learning passively, unlike doing all the legwork of researching and digging through content.
- Feeling of exclusivity
Digital courses offer a feeling of exclusivity, which is essential to today’s buyers. After all, the information provided in such courses should be legitimately helpful and allow users to break new ground in whatever their industry may be in.
By providing exclusive education at a reasonable price, your audience will walk away happy and better off they were before.
Why choose ClickFunnels to host your online course
- Maximize membership
Since you are already paying for ClickFunnels to create your sales funnels, there’s no need to purchase a second online course host platform to host your videos and other assets. Furthermore, once you introduce another online platform into your overall system, you will be dealing with a system that needs to communicate properly for it to work.
- Ease of connection
If you use an online course host separate from your sales funnel software, you need to connect them properly to operate correctly. When you’re using ClickFunnels, there is no breakdown in your process. You’re doing all the marketing, selling, and delivering inside the software. There is no lost revenue and confusion for the customer in accessing the program.
- Keeps all the pages in the same domain
When launching an online course, you need to buy a domain that matches your course’s name. This is where you will build your sales funnel. In this way, the visitors who search for and find your course can go through your funnel and purchase.
When you use a separate host for your online course, you cannot host the course membership area in the same domain. You will need to use a different domain or subdomain. It can confuse students who want to remember their login information in the future but can’t easily find it.
Since you’re already using ClickFunnels to host your online course, you can create a membership area in ClickFunnels in the same domain. This will keep your branding accurate and make things less complicated for your audience.
Get our FREE course on funnel building and marketing. We'll deliver it straight to your inbox!
Learn about how to build and market your funnels for your business. The course includes a full tutorial on how to use ClickFunnels.
Hosting your online course using ClickFunnels
Assuming you’ve decided to create an online course and have its specifics laid down, one crucial question remains: How do you host an online course using ClickFunnels?
The answer is simple: Build a funnel and your audience will come.
Choosing a funnel
There’s no single right way to craft a funnel when it comes to selling a digital course.
On the one hand, it reassures you that you have options for reaching your buyers but it can also leave you at a crossroad when it comes to getting started.
Here are some simple means of funneling users toward your course.
- Multi-part video course
Users are naturally attracted to how-to articles and guides. However, they are even more drawn to videos providing similar content. These videos give the user a means to soak up information. They are ideal for getting your users’ interest and giving them an introduction to your course.
When your videos provide valuable information, they serve as a money magnet straight into your funnel. Your users want more.
Of course, this approach requires you to put in initial investment in creating videos. However, don’t be afraid to put in the work and give away some of your secrets in the process.
Another benefit of a multi-part video series is you can upload it on YouTube and passively continue to attract visitors even after the initial launch.
- Webinar Funnel
By sharing your knowledge and insight in the form of a webinar, you put your experience and business on top. Unlike the multi-part video course, webinars require you to interact with your audience in real-time and answer questions on the spot.
A successful webinar can strengthen your status as an expert and offer a platform for your digital course.
- Strategic Content
Digital courses provide an alternative to written content. However, there’s no reason you can’t leverage your website’s blog when marketing your course.
Using strategic content, you can bring more users into your list who would serve as the perfect course candidates.
Over time, these strategies will work to lead your users to your list and make them prime candidates for your online course.
The fundamentals of launching a digital course
The following are some of the fundamentals of a funnel for your email marketing campaign and digital course.
- Money-back guarantee
The money-back guarantee boosts the legitimacy of your online course. The longevity of your guarantee is up to you. You can use the traditional 30 or 60-day guarantee.
If you’re feeling confident about your course, you can offer a 200% guarantee. The type of guarantee you provide is entirely up to you. Just make sure that your course is backed up by one.
- Create scarcity
When you promote a limited number of slots or you open a course for a limited time only, you provide your leads with the push they need to sign up.
When combined with scarcity, leads are more confident to click-through since they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
- Urgency
By offering exclusive bonuses such as a 20% discount for signing up within 24 hours, users are likely to waste their time or skip out on your course.
Money-back guarantees, scarcity, and urgency can be used throughout your funnel. However, they are most important to the email marketing piece.
If you feel confident that everything’s in order (your course is ready to sell, you have a means of generating leads, and an email campaign to seal the deal), what’s next?
You need to stay engaged during the launch by:
- Replying to their comments.
It’s vital to respond to questions and comments as quickly as possible, especially if they come from warm leads. Make sure to monitor your blog and the social network (including Twitter and Facebook mentions). These are easily accessible and are natural means of reaching out to businesses.
- Having a live chat available.
Live chats can build trust and ease the minds of hesitant buyers who are likely to drop off in the shopping cart. You may want to hire a virtual assistant to pull this one-off. However, if you’re only running a small operation, you can run this piece of the funnel from your smartphone.
- Setting up an email support system.
Make sure that you have email autoresponders set up as well as some sort of frequently asked question section of your blog or website which details common concerns of products such as price point, subscription fees and dates and so on.
Hosting an online course in ClickFunnels is pretty simple when you follow the steps above. Spend time and make an effort to launch your online course successfully.
