When it comes to selling your product or service, you don’t have to rely on live launches all the time. Even if you have periodic cart open and close periods, an evergreen sales funnel can help you create more consistency in your sales and avoid the burnout that often comes with using a live launch model.
Live launches do have advantages: They can maximize your initial sales and encourage engagement through personalized interaction, and they give you the chance to test-run your offer and sales funnel so you can make improvements before the next launch.
But live launches also require a lot of work, and it’s nice to have other options like an evergreen sales funnel—especially once you’ve refined your offer. With alternatives, you have the freedom to decide on the best route to take based on your product or service, ideal client, and work style.
Plus, going evergreen can have a lot of benefits in its own right, such as:
More consistent sales and a steady income stream for your business.
Less energy spent planning launches and creating new assets, as you’ll be able to rely heavily on automation.
The opportunity to experiment with your marketing strategy, since one week of bad sales won’t be the end of the world.
An easy way to build your list thanks to all the new people coming into your sales funnel.
The chance to capture impulse buyers who don’t have the patience to wait until the next launch.
Creating an evergreen launch funnel doesn’t mean you need to abandon live launches, either. They can provide you with a powerful baseline, allowing you to choose when you want to implement a live launch. And we’re all about choice.
But, like most great strategies, you’re going to have to put in a bit of effort up front to reap the long-term rewards. Despite the promise of less work and pressure to perform, developing an effective evergreen sales funnel still requires some effort and a great deal of strategy.
If you’re considering going evergreen, here are six easy steps you can follow to make your new funnel as successful as possible.
What is an Evergreen Sales Funnel?
Before we get into the creation of your new launch, let’s get a high-level view.
The good news? Structurally, an evergreen sales funnel is very similar to a live sales funnel. It has many of the same components and follows a similar pathway.
Just as a review, here’s what you’ll be creating (we’ll dive into each element in more detail later on in this post):
Traffic-Generating Content
You can’t have a launch without people to launch to. The first and most important element of your funnel are the people who enter it. From a content perspective, this means thinking about what initial content people see that interests them in the topic of your offer.
Sales Vehicle
How are you getting that traffic to stick around and learn more? Are you using a webinar? A free or low-cost challenge? A masterclass? The options are endless, but only certain ones will resonate with your audience.
Email Sequence
You’re going to want to stay in touch with your prospects as they’re considering your offer. Email is the way to do it.
Sales Page
This is where your offer lives. Evergreen sales pages are a little different from live pages, but their key components are the same.
Now that we’ve covered the big picture, let’s talk through how you can take all of your live launch materials and use them to develop a complementary evergreen sales funnel.
6 Steps to Help You Create an Evergreen Sales Funnel
1. Identify Your Goals
Before you take any actions toward developing your evergreen launch funnel, you need to revisit your overall goals. Going from a limited sales window to ongoing availability will change what’s needed to bring in the same amount of revenue for your business.
The best way to determine appropriate goals for your new sales model is to work backward from your revenue target. Based on how much revenue your offer needs to generate, you can figure out:
- Whether you need to adjust the price of your product or service.
- How many sales you need to make each month to hit your target (e.g. number of course enrollments).
- How many leads you need to bring in to make your desired sales.
- How much engagement you need to create (and where) to generate the number of leads you need.
If you are going to continue to have live launches, build those into your overall plan. Just remember that you’re going to have to rethink how the live launch is structured, too. You’re no longer playing with a limited-time window for your offer and will have to find new ways to incentivize your audience.
Once you’ve identified new goals to aim for, you’ll have a solid set of benchmarks to help you figure out what’s working (and what’s not) when it comes time to evaluate your evergreen sales funnel‘s performance.
2. Evaluate Your Live Launch Content
With your new goals in mind, the next step is to look over all your existing live launch content—like your sales pages, launch emails, social posts, and sales vehicle—and decide which pieces can be carried over to your evergreen sales funnel.
This is made easier when you have all your content stored and organized into a content inventory, so if you haven’t already done so, this is a good time to create that resource!
When making a decision about what content to use in your evergreen launch funnel, look at any available data to see which pieces have been most successful—just as you would between live launches. That way, you can be sure that your evergreen funnel starts out as optimized as possible.
3. Repurpose Content for Evergreen Use
Once you’ve decided which pieces to use in your evergreen launch funnel, it’s time to make some updates. While there’s likely a lot of content that can stay exactly the same for your evergreen funnel, there will also be plenty of changes you’ll need to make so you can use those pieces again and again.
Go through all your content—especially your email funnel, lead magnet, sales page, and social posts—and create a version that’s no longer time sensitive. This could be as small as line edits or as big as eliminating entire emails.
4. Use a Sales Vehicle to Generate Consistent Traffic
It’s worth noting that having solid traffic before you launch an offer (live or evergreen) is a good idea. The last thing you want is to spend a bunch of energy on a launch that no one hears about.
Assuming you have an audience in place, it’s time to make sure you’re continuing to nurture new traffic into your funnel.
Remember, your offer is part of a larger funnel. Just like a live launch, you’ll want some sort of sales vehicle to garner initial interest. This will likely be an opt-in of some sort, and it may even be the same one as your live launch! For example, if your live launch kicked off with a webinar, you might shift it to an on-demand, pre-recorded webinar that’s free for people to watch when they subscribe to your list.
And don’t forget to regularly drive traffic to your sales vehicle. By making sure your CTAs regularly direct your audience to your opt-in (such as a webinar), you can ensure that there’s always a steady stream of new audience members entering your evergreen sales funnel.
5. Automate, Automate, Automate
The best part about using an evergreen launch funnel is that you can automate a lot of your content. Hooray! That said, it takes a fair bit of strategy to make the most of automation and create as little work for you as possible.
Sales Vehicle
The most important part of your funnel to automate is your sales vehicle, because if you don’t, it’s going to suck up a lot of your time and energy (which defeats the purpose of going evergreen)!
When you run live launches, hosting a live webinar or training every once in a while isn’t a big deal. But when your sales funnel is evergreen and you need to attract new people all the time, hosting live events suddenly becomes much more time-intensive.
Fortunately, there’s an easy workaround. With evergreen software options like Demio, you can deliver a pre-recorded webinar at specific dates and times. That means you only have to invest time in your lead magnet once.
Worried that a pre-recorded webinar sacrifices too much of your personalized engagement with your audience? No problem—you can easily do a hybrid automation where you sandwich the webinar between a live introduction and conclusion. Ultimately, it comes down to what you think your audience will respond to best and how much energy you have available.
Email Sequence
Another part of your evergreen sales funnel you should be sure to automate is your launch email sequence. Thanks to programs like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and ConvertKit, you can ensure that you’re guiding the right people through your funnel at the right time using segmenting. We’re personally huge fans of ActiveCampaign, because it has robust segmentation and personalization options.
If there are people on your list who haven’t heard about your offer yet, separate those newcomers into their own segment and invite them to participate in your sales vehicle.
You can also create segments based on specific actions your audience members take—like clicking a link, attending an on-demand webinar, or visiting your sales page. That way, you can account for each person’s individual journey through your sales funnel.
6. Measure Your Funnel’s Performance + Tweak Accordingly
Unfortunately, nothing is truly “set it and forget it” in the marketing world. Once your evergreen launch funnel is active, you’re going to want to optimize it. Set aside some time periodically to review how each step of your funnel is performing.
Evaluating the effectiveness of your sales funnel is especially important when you go evergreen. Because if it’s not working, you’re going to lose consistent sales over time, which can really add up. To make sure your evergreen launch funnel is optimized for success, you should measure your performance over time and make changes based on what you find.
While there are many different metrics to look at, some good ones to consider are your funnel conversion rate, opt-in landing page conversion rate, sales page conversion rate, ad spending (if any) like cost per lead and cost per sale, and the performance of individual emails in your funnel.
Whatever metrics you choose, the most important thing is to use the data you collect! Knowing what’s working and what’s not will help you make your sales funnel the best it can be and ensure you’re hitting your goals.
Optimize Your Launch With the Help of an Expert
Whether going evergreen or sticking with your live launch model, there are a lot of elements to consider when trying to improve the effectiveness of your launch.
With our Launch Strategy Intensive, you can work with a strategy expert who will examine your plan step-by-step and offer personalized recommendations that will take your launch to the next level.