Evergreen is a big topic for many business owners. 

Whether you currently have evergreen offers or are starting to create one, it’s kind of an elusive thing that everyone strives for. We all want to relax on the beach while money falls down from the sky, but the reality is that evergreen is a lot of work. 

It takes a lot of time and work to set up your evergreen funnel. As great as it is, it’s not really a “set it and forget it” situation. You have to optimize it, keep an eye on it, and be willing to go in and look at the data to make changes accordingly. 

In today’s episode of Art of Online Business, I’m sharing 3 ways that you can increase your evergreen funnel sales. With the methods I am discussing, you can make the most of your evergreen funnel offer. 

You want to serve your customers in the best way that you can, and to do that, you have to put the work in. These tips will help you create an evergreen webinar funnel with integrity that meets your customers where they are and increases your sales. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The difference between live launches and evergreen conversions
• How to calculate your lead-to-sale conversion rate
• How often to look at your conversion rates
• Why you should shorten your open cart period
• The importance of revising your messaging to keep it current

Links & Resources:

• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

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How to Create Sustainable Visibility In Your Business with Mai-kee Tsang

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4 Pillars of Wealth Building for Online Entrepreneurs, with Salena Kulkarni

Transcript: 

[00:00:05] Speaker1

Hey my friend, welcome to the Art of Online Business Podcast. My name is Rick Mulwray and I’m an online business coach. I’m an ad’s expert, and most importantly, I’m a dad. And this show is where we help established online course creators and coaches create more profit, more impact with less hustle. All right, let’s get into it. I’ll write. What’s up, my friend? Welcome to the podcast. This is another quick tip episode here on the show and we just wrapped up our first in-person retreat for my accelerator coaching program at the time recording this. We just got back from Vegas a few days ago and it was so much fun. It had been two and a half years since we have gotten together, and the last time that we were together was literally the day before the world changed, essentially the second weekend there in March of 2020. And so it’s been a long time coming. And it was it exceeded our expectations. Big shout out to Shannon and Ryan from the social bungalow. If you’re not following Shannon on Instagram and on her email list. And Shannon is just amazing. The social bungalow. We did our event at Shannon and Ryan’s coffee shop. Bungalow, coffee. Not surprising if you know anything about me. You know I love my coffee. Well, anyway, on top of their coffee shop in Vegas, they have an event space. And we rented out the event space for a couple of days and we had our event there and it was awesome. 

[00:01:51] Speaker1

So much fun and already looking forward to our next live event here in San Diego later in the fall. So anyway, if you are interested in applying for my accelerator coaching program, if you’re pushing up against a lot of overload, overwhelming your business, you’re not getting the results that you want. You know, really, if you’re working too much, trying to figure out your team and your sales and marketing and your systems and processes, etc., then get in touch. It’s application only go to Rick Mulraney for US Accelerator and we’ll look forward to checking out your application. All right. So today I want to talk about increasing evergreen sales. And I want to I want to share three tips with you. Evergreen is a big topic for so many of you, right? Whether you’re doing it right now or not or you’re looking to start evergreen, it’s kind of that elusive thing where people think like, Well, I want to just evergreen my program or whatever it is that you’re selling, right? Because I want to sit on a beach and just toes in the sand and have money falling down from the sky on me. I’m picturing that right now and that is amazing. I love the thought of that. But you know, evergreen look, you know, the reality is, is evergreen is a lot of work. 

[00:03:10] Speaker1

And once we set it up as what I’m talking about, yeah, there’s time. It takes time to set evergreen an evergreen funnel up, but it’s not a set it and forget it. Right. It takes work. You have to optimize it. You have to keep an eye on it and you have to be willing to go in and look at the data and make changes accordingly. Right. And so the first tip I have for you in increasing webinar sales. So for this quick tip episode, I’m going to talk about an evergreen webinar funnel, right? So somebody you’re sending traffic to a registration page, somebody registers for your webinar, then for whatever the time is, they sign up for it. I’ll talk about that here in just a second. Whatever it is that you are offering it to them, whether it’s, you know, right in the thank you page or scheduling a time. That’s the funnel I’m talking about, right? They watch the webinar hopefully, and then you follow up with them with an offer. Same exact thing that you would do for a live webinar, but this is evergreen and that really leads me to this first point I want to make. One of the big questions I get is what is it good quote unquote conversion rate for an evergreen webinar funnel, right? And the answer to this is not so easy because this depends on so many different factors, right? It depends on like price. 

[00:04:38] Speaker1

Right. What is the price of your offer that you are making in your funnel? Right. What type of offer is it? Is it a course? Is it a coaching program? Are you offering a schedule of time on your calendar to come talk to you or your team or whatever, whatever that might be? Right. So there’s a lot of different factors that go into what is a good, quote unquote evergreen conversion rate. And across the board, when you are looking at evergreen versus a live webinar, expect all pretty much across the board all of your evergreen stats to be about half of your live launch stats, right? So if you convert on the webinar, let’s just say when you do a live webinar launch at, I don’t know, 10%, well then roughly when you do an evergreen funnel, you can expect about a 5% conversion rate. Same thing for like an opt in page, write to registration page if you’re registering at, let’s just say 42% for a live webinar. Well, again, you can expect about half of that. Right now, this is a rough estimate. Roughly half of that for Evergreen. But that’s not really the key that we’re looking at here in this first tip. This tip is I want rather than looking at what is the conversion rate on the Evergreen Webinar itself, I recommend going on the lead to sale conversion rate, and that is the number of sales that you have while you’re enrollment is open.

[00:06:27] Speaker1

Right. And by the way, do not go with this false scarcity of you can’t enroll in this program after this day when in fact, you can absolutely enroll in it right by somebody if you go back and opt in to the exact same funnel, depending on how you have it set up. Right when you are doing an evergreen funnel, I’m going to go off on a little tangent here right now when you’re doing an evergreen funnel. Do it with integrity, right? The offer should not be that this offer goes away and you can’t get it after tomorrow or whatever it is that you’re doing. An evergreen offer should really be some sort of maybe you have a special bonus that you’re offering them, right? You’re trying to get people to take action because it’s that action that they take is how you are actually going to help them with whatever it is that that they’re struggling with. Right. So maybe it is a special price reduction, which I don’t love the special with the price reductions, but maybe it is a bonus that goes away or whatever it is. Right. But you’re not saying, oh, this is closed after after today because this is evergreen, right? It’s not don’t do false scarcity like that. But anyway, lead to sale conversion rate. What you’re looking for is during your evergreen funnel, right? So like let’s just say I opt in today and register for your webinar and then, you know, I sign up for the webinar for tomorrow and then there’s an open, you know, the cart open period is like three days or what have you. 

[00:08:10] Speaker1

I say cart open is the special offer period is available for three days, right? So we’re looking at total number of sales during that time divided by the total number of leads. So you can look at it on a 30 day period, you can look at it on a quarterly period. Total number of sales divided by the total number of leads. That’s your lead to sale conversion rate. I am becoming less and less concerned with whether Evergreen or a live webinar, by the way, about the conversion rate on the webinar. Because look, our show up rates are what, between 20 and 30%, 30%, if you’re lucky. Show up rates on on webinars for the most part. Right. I know some people who have and we have people in Accelerator who have amazing show up rates that are definitely outliers. But in general, the show up rates are not very good. What I want to look at, what I want to see and one of the things I one of the first questions I ask when I’m trying to diagnose what’s going on with a funnel, what is the lead to sale conversion rate? Again this whether this is evergreen or live I really. 

[00:09:30] Speaker1

The conversion rate on the webinar or from like during the webinar time period. I’m not so concerned about that. I want to know how many people, how many sales were there divided by how many people signed up for the webinar funnel. And so I want you to optimize for that. Optimize for the lead to sale conversion rate rather than. The webinar conversion rate. And that is the first tip to increasing your sales because. When we’re looking at the total lead to sale conversion rate, again, it could be on the webinar, but it also could be your special offer open period, your open cart period, if you will. All right. So that way you’re looking at the big picture and breaking down the overall funnel. To figure out what part what part of the funnel, is there a breakdown for that we can use to optimize and thus increase sales? So a lot of people again, just to recap, a lot of people are looking at, well, what is my webinar conversion rate? Honestly becoming less and less in my book. And this has been this way for a while. I don’t necessarily mean yeah, it’s a stat I look at, but it’s I’d much rather look at what is the lead to sale conversion rate, total number of sales divided by total number of leads. And I’ll look at this on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis and a quarterly basis. 

[00:11:07] Speaker1

So that is tip number one. Look at the lead to sale conversion rate rather than just the webinar conversion rate. Now this leads me to tip number two, and that is shorten your open cart, quote unquote, period on your webinar, on your evergreen webinar funnel. So generally, if you do a live launch, right, and you know how I feel about live launches, if you’ve been listening to the podcast here for a while. Yes. Do they have their place in your business? Sure. Right. But should we be doing one or two and relying solely on those as the health of our business? Heck no. Unless you’re doing cohorts. I did a whole episode about that, ruffled a whole bunch feathers with that. But anyway, if you’re doing Evergreen Webinar Funnel OC and you’re used to doing a quote unquote open cart period for your enrollment of five days, seven days or ten days, you should not be doing ten days. Right. I want you to cut that in half. Okay. Now, I realize I just gave you a whole bunch of numbers. I want you to think about shortening your open period. Post webinar for when somebody signs up for the webinar right to know more than 3 to 4 days. I actually like that. Three day is kind of a sweet spot. Now, granted, this is always something that you should be testing, but the open cart period on an evergreen webinar funnel is not should not be in my book and what we’ve been seeing for a long time now, we get better results when you shorten that quote unquote open cart period. 

[00:12:58] Speaker1

Right again, like when you do a live launch, it’s like five days or seven days or what have you. I like that three days, maybe four days open period to get whatever that special offer is that you’re offering in your funnel. Right. And so this also begs the question, well, when does that three or four days. When is let’s just say you do in three days. When does that three days start? It starts from when somebody either if you have your webinar on the thank you page of when they register, it starts as soon as they register. Right, because they’re going to get right to the webinar on the next page or if you’re offering different times for them to sign up and let’s just say they sign up tomorrow, then you’re three days starts from the webinar that they signed up for. I’m trying to work this out in my head, visualize this. So if I register today, right, for your webinar and I register for a time tomorrow, then your open cart period, if you will. Begins tomorrow. Speaking of that, this is another bonus tip here, right? If you were offering different times.

[00:14:12] Speaker1

So if you’re using know, I don’t care what evergreen webinar tool that you’re using and you’re offering different times, I would not offer beyond 48 hours. Sometimes I see people offering. Now, obviously, there is there’s always, always exceptions to to this. Right. So like, if you’re in the teaching space, for example, you’re you’re going to want to give multiple days in multiple options to make sure that you’re offering. Times and days that work for teachers. Right. This is knowing your audience, which is going to lead me to the next tip here in just a second. For the most part, I would not offer beyond like 48 hours. So, for example, if today is a Wednesday, when I’m recording this right now, if I go to your registration page to sign up for your webinar. I’m going to see, you know, times for today. I would see like a on demand time, if you will. Like I can watch it right now and then I could, you know, a couple other times, then I could schedule something for tomorrow or the next day. So tomorrow’s Thursday and Friday, I would not go beyond 48 hours. I would even say, well, I would just I would keep it not be on 48 hours. Because if I’m registering today and you’re giving me the option to schedule like five days out, there is zero chance I’m watching that webinar because it’s too far out from when I’m registering. 

[00:15:41] Speaker1

So keep it to within 48 hours of the times available that you’re that you’re making available. Okay. So that’s that’s tip number two is no more than so you’re open cart, quote unquote. However, you know, again, this is not false scarcity, right? Whatever your special offer is, no more than 3 to 4 days from when the webinar is that they’re watching, they’ve signed up to watch. It’s a big mistake that I see a lot of people make. I’ve had several students when they move to the 3 to 4 day open cart period from the 5 to 7 days that they 

were doing previously on Evergreen. Just shortening that time up has increased sales because again, Evergreen is a different ball game than live. So that’s tip number two. Tip number three to increase your Evergreen Webinar sales is to revise your messaging to align with what is current with the people that you serve that you’re wanting to help. Here is what I mean by this. So much changes, right? It is June of 2022 and already in the first five and a half months of the year. So much is going on in the world. If you’re if you have one topic that you are teaching and you are not revising it. Based on whatever your people are going through. Then you are missing out on serving your audience the way that they need to be served. 

[00:17:33] Speaker1

Right. You’re not you’re under serving them based on what is current for them right now. A perfect example of this is in the teaching space. Right. We have lots of teacher entrepreneurs in my accelerator coaching program and GS. The teachers have gone through so much over the past couple of years. Right. And I hear it firsthand. My younger sister has been a teacher for 25 years now. If you’ve been having one message to the teachers that you serve and it is not relevant to what is current for teachers right now, you are missing an opportunity to be relevant to your audience and to serve them for where they’re at. Right. And this isn’t just in the teaching space. And this is one of those things where I feel like I shouldn’t have to include it in like, hey, here’s a tip to increase sales, right? Because this is fundamental marketing, fundamental running a business, serving your audience, the people that you want to be helping with, helping, and that you are in business to help serving them for where they’re at. So many times people get stuck on one topic that they teach on their evergreen webinar. And, you know, it ain’t changing. It’s not changing at all. It needs to be relevant to what your audience is going through. And so if you’re noticing that your results are dropping, first and foremost, always break down all the stats along the funnel to see what the red flags are, what are the issues there. 

[00:19:14] Speaker1

And then if you see that the results are just kind of dropping for no reason, I would 100% look at what your offer is on the webinar. Whatever it is that you’re selling can be the exact same thing the whole time. But what your webinar is, the topic, what you’re teaching, and that needs to reflect what your people are going through so that you can be helping them in as irrelevant a way as possible. Right. Because again, if you’re sticking with one topic and you’re not making the effort to understand what your audience is going through right now, you were under serving them. So this is a way to increase your sales. Again, it sounds so funny for me to say this out loud, but. Make the effort to be relevant to your audience, serve them for where they are at. Okay. So, my friend, those are the three tips. Oh, by the way, let’s give you a bonus tip. And this is one that a lot of people ask about when. Doing an evergreen funnel, doing an evergreen webinar funnel is, well, should I offer the webinar on the thank you page? Meaning don’t use an evergreen webinar software. They just register. Yeah. I want to watch this on demand training and there it is on the thank you page. So I register, go to the thank you page. 

[00:20:41] Speaker1

Boom, the training is right there. Write your show up rate quote unquote is going to be huge because it’s right there. They’re landing on the page. But then you also have to be tracking how long people are watching the videos or the webinar, whether you’re doing that on the thank you page or not, you may be watching that because that is very telltale on. How good your webinar is. Right. And so this is something that I like to test out, right? So whether it’s on the thank you page right then and there, hey, you signed up for it. Here’s the training. It’s available for a certain period of time to get this the special offer that you have. Test that out. If you’re using a webinar software tool, a lot of our students right now are getting great results and I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. But with Stealth Seminar, they’re getting great, great results with stealth. And so if you offer times. Number one, make sure that you offer the opportunity for people to watch it right then and there, because if they’re registering, they’re like, Yeah, I want to watch this right now. Don’t make them wait for it. Make it available to them. Make it easy, remove the barrier for them. Right. And then I would offer some times and the times that you’re offering need to be local to the user. And again, you have to know your audience.

[00:22:11] Speaker1

One of the best times for your audience to be watching and then and then offer them a few times not going out more than 48 hours. So my friend, those are three tips to increase your evergreen webinar conversions. Number one, focus on the lead to sale conversion rate rather than the webinar conversion rate, because then when you’re doing that, then you get to look at the entire funnel and figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and optimize accordingly. Number two, make sure that that quote unquote open cart period is not your normal live launch open cart period of five, seven, ten days or whatever. 3 to 4 days max. I like that three day sweet spot. Again, test it. And then number three, third tip. Revise that messaging so that you are aligning with what is current with the people that you serve. What are they going through right now? Because I would be very surprised that what they’re going through right now is the exact same thing they were going through even maybe a month ago. Right. So you’ve got to do the work, got to put the effort in to understand your audience. And I shouldn’t even have to say that. But it is crucial. Got to do it. It’s why you’re in business. Thank you, my friends, for listening, as always. Appreciate you. Until next time, be well and I’ll talk to you soon.