Marketing automation for course sellers

You’ve already come a long way by creating an engaging and interesting course. But what if you could automate much of the heavy-lifting around marketing it, while saving time and reaching new customers in the process? Wouldn’t you want to know how? 

Here at Kajabi, we’ve made it our mission to help entrepreneurs and course creators quickly and easily build a profitable knowledge business. But real growth is only possible through marketing automation. 

By using automated sales funnels and email marketing automation, you can not only attract new customers but also retain existing customers and nurture those prospects who are still on the fence. Here’s how. 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation uses software to automate commonly repetitive tasks. These types of tasks can range from email marketing to lead nurturing campaigns and everything in between.

Marketing automation isn’t just used for the sake of efficiency and saving time. It’s also used to deliver a more personalized experience to the end user, helping to foster a greater relationship between a company and its customers.

Why should I start using marketing automation?

When we think of marketing automation, we often think of big brands that employ hundreds or thousands of people. They’ve got the manpower to craft, monitor, and monetize every single email and interaction. 

But marketing automation isn’t just for big brands. Small brands can execute the same strategies to deliver more personalized content. In fact, small businesses have a distinct advantage over their larger counterparts when it comes to marketing automation. 

Big brands are actually at a disadvantage. They’re so big, their interactions with their customers can feel bland and boring. Personalized emails from them can feel fake and forced.

Smaller brands, on the other hand, are uniquely positioned to use marketing automation to create a sense of authenticity with their customers. 

In the knowledge economy, you are the face of your business and your brand. And your students are at the heart of what you do. 

The courses you create are for and because of them. So it makes sense to nurture and cultivate that relationship via the channels that your customers are already using: namely email and landing pages. 

The goal, of course, is to create a personalized experience for each customer, welcoming and guiding them through every step of the sales funnel. But doing that manually would be time-intensive and definitely not the best use of your time.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. 

Marketing automation is designed to help free up your time while continuing to give your contacts — current students, former students, and prospective students — ongoing tips, information, strategies, and other reasons to do business with you. By using marketing automation, you still give your customers and prospects the same VIP experience, no matter where they are on their customer journey. 

Three steps to set up your marketing automation

You can set up marketing automation for your course or membership in just three steps:

1. Set up your email marketing automations.
2. Customize and automate your sales funnels.
3. Keep your existing students on track and involved.

1. Set up your email marketing automations

To quickly turn prospects into customers, you need to create a VIP experience for them. But as we mentioned above, it’s almost impossible to do that on a one-to-one basis. You need to set up email automations in advance that welcome, educate, and nurture your prospects until they buy.

Email automations are email sequences that you build and schedule in advance. They’re designed to create a personalized experience based on your visitors’ behavior on your website.

For example, if they sign up for a form, you instruct the software to add them to an email list. Once they’re on that list, they get an email marketing sequence that you’ve already set up for anyone who’s added to that list. 

• When they sign up, they get Email #1. 
• A day later, they get Email #2. 
• And the next day, they get Email #3.
  

Don’t worry if you’re not a copywriter or an experienced marketer. Marketing platforms like Kajabi provide beautiful templates that give you a starting point for your email campaigns. Just tweak them to fit your brand and offer

2. Customize and automate your sales funnels

The second step in setting up your marketing automations is to build a sales funnel, or pipeline, for your course. 

Fortunately, there’s no need to start from scratch. Even top marketers rely on templates and blueprints to lay out their marketing automations. And if you’re using Kajabi, we’ve done much of the legwork for you. Our pipelines are pre-made playbooks that are optimized to encourage your prospects to convert. 

Of course, you can make them your own by customizing every detail of the landing pages and emails in these blueprints. So you’ll have seamless marketing automations and funnels that reflect your brand and style. 

But the real value is the time you’ll save. With pipelines and blueprints, you’ll be able to set up a persuasive sales funnel in just a few clicks. 

This automation meets your customers where they are — whether they’re “just looking” or ready to buy — and continues to engage them until they take their next step with you.

Each pipeline acts as a framework that you can connect across different sales channels. Each one follows a “blueprint” designed to get the user to take the action you want them to take. For example, there are blueprints for lead generation, product launches, webinars and more, allowing you to attract and nurture prospective clients in a way that best fits your business goals. 

3. Keep your existing students on track and involved

One of the biggest challenges for online educators and course creators alike is keeping students involved and on track as the course progresses. 

The best way to do that is with a built-in tool like Kajabi’s Assessments. It tracks your students’ progress as they move through your course, making it easy for you and your students to know where they stand.

With Assessments, you can test your student on what they’ve learned and give them instant feedback. That saves you countless hours of grading while still giving you detailed analytics on how your students are performing and how well they receive your content. 

And like all good marketing tools, assessments can be automated to help segment your students and customers. It automatically tags students according to their answers, so you can instantly see which students need a bit more support and which ones need content that’s more advanced. 

Overall, assessments are a great way to not only judge the performance of your course or membership, but how the content is consumed by your target audience. 

Start automating your marketing tasks the easy way

Now that you better understand the benefits of marketing automation and how easy it can be to implement, the next step is to start creating your digital course or membership and putting sales funnel and email marketing automation to work for you. 

By nurturing your prospective, current and former students, you’ll not only be able to continue bringing in new customers, but you’ll also be cultivating a strong, reliable business relationship with the clients that you currently serve, and in the knowledge economy, there’s no more important foundation than that. 

Kajabi automations

Kajabi provides automations built in with our business and learning management platform. They can save you time and streamline your business. They can allow you free up time for more content creation or setting up your knowledge commerce business to bring in passive income.

Get started with your 14 day free trial of Kajabi now!