An Automated Funnel for a Training Company
The result — $15,000 a month. Selling a training program in the self-development niche
About the project
An automated funnel for a training company. The result — $15,000 a month. We built a system of automated sales.
At the start of the project, the company had no tool for selling training programs or attracting an audience. Sales happened at random. The situation was made harder by the fact that the company worked in a very narrow, specialized niche that few people knew about.
How to build an automated funnel earning $15,000 a month. Step-by-step breakdown
How we did it
Built several appealing lead magnets and set up an opt-in system for the mailing list.
Came up with and tested versions of the first product, whose value outweighed its price by a factor of 10.
Built an appealing presentation of the company's core product and worked out the monetization.
Built several email series, each solving different tasks at each stage of the funnel.
Connected all the necessary systems, configured the bots, tested everything and launched traffic.
Mapping out the automated funnel
We started by sketching out and planning the whole scheme on a board.
Planning board: products, lead magnets, sequences and prices for the whole funnel
Building the lead magnets
We built three different lead magnets: a book, a mini-course and a psychology test. For each one we set up a dedicated landing page and a short email sequence, a follow-up chain of emails.
For an audience of self-development training buyers, gamification matters a great deal, and the psychology test proved that brilliantly. Once again. Gamification wins, and the test gave us the highest conversion rates.
We didn't cut corners — we built a genuinely good test: an expert, a designer and a developer all worked on it. The test took three months to build, and it turned out really engaging. The result was simply outstanding — we got a subscriber cost of ~$0.23. And that's without counting the retargeting ad campaigns!
There's a certain attitude toward a lead magnet as "just some freebie," but that's not quite right. If a person gets something useless from you, even if it's free, they'll toss it aside and forget it in no time. You have to look at a lead magnet as a sales tool and a carrier of your packaging.
Psychology test: landing page and versions of the results
The first sale
Right after opting in to the mailing list, we set up a first-purchase offer. We tested several offers and ultimately landed on two that worked: a book and a film. We made several purchase offers out of them and looped them into a retargeting ad campaign.
Retargeting deserves a note of its own. Overall, this tool raised the funnel's profitability by 40%. At least, that's what the analysis of our traffic sources showed.
"We sell the book, we give the film": the page shown after opting in for the mini-book
Selling the core product
Anyone who made the first purchase was immediately offered the psychology course. The main emphasis was on a video presentation of the info product — that's still probably one of the most powerful sales tools in an automated funnel.
We followed up with anyone the video didn't impress (or didn't fully close) using blog ads featuring client case studies.
Upsells in the order: blocks on family relationships and scenarios
Follow-up sequences
The funnel's architecture is built so a person can go through it in any amount of time. Either all at once, buying every offer, or over as long as 6 months, warming up gradually in the funnels.
When I first started working on this project, my goal was simply to build a subscriber list and get the incoming traffic to pay for itself. But along the way I realized just how powerful an automated system you can build with even the simplest technical tools, ones available to any beginner marketer.
Now that chatbots have entered the picture too… Friends, we're living in interesting times. Stay tuned for more great case studies!
Retargeting + email: the ad and the order page for the book with the film
The final result
A comprehensive approach let us build a powerful sales system — $15,000 a month.
This automated funnel became the first loop of Lab8's larger system: after this we built database engagement and automated newsletters, a sales department and a launch pipeline worth $647,721. We build funnels like this as part of marketing automation — and the audience research behind them is described in the guide "How to Run Customer Development".
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George Ryzhenko
CEO, Digital Experts
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