This blog post will take you through the major milestones to setting up a funnel and course on FG Funnels.
The “Hazing” – Basic Setup.
Most people hate this part, and we don’t disagree. This is the most annoying part of setup. It’s hard and techy and all we can say is do.not.quit. Hire someone from our hireamarketer.com site if you don’t want to deal with the headache. It has to be done once when you first get an account, and then it’s done!
No matter what you want to do first, these are your basic setup processes.
- Customize your profile in your settings. Make sure your user permissions are set to see memberships and funnels. Don’t forget our getting started post!
- Get your domain hooked up in the app. Here’s a great article on why we use Cloudflare. Once in Cloudflare, it’s simple to pull into FG Funnels.
- Integrate Stripe (the payment processor) in your settings.
- Hook up your email provider. There’s a post about Mailgun that may be useful.
- Hook up Twilio (you have to send us your key) if you plan on using text marketing.
All of these steps have walkthroughs when you click on HELP LIBRARY > GETTING STARTED. Additionally, we have a few tutorials on email setup in our free hacks + tips course.
I’m Ready To Set Up A Course.
So if you want to get a course up in FG Funnels and have a simple sales funnel attached, here are the basic steps. Please note you can have people buy right in the members area but it’s not as robust a sales area so most people prefer to build a funnel for it. That’s what these instructions are explaining.
Course Area
- Go into the members area and set up a product.
- Customize + style the product. Add your course material.
- Don’t forget to go into the settings and set up the overall look (and domain) of your course area.
- You’ll also want to check out the help article about how to customize the welcome email when someone signs up for your course. Click on HELP LIBRARY > MEMBERSHIPS > How To Customize Membership Welcome Email
Funnel Area
- Go into the Funnels area. Clone one of our templates. You can watch our team member Nuno do a simple setup using Minimal.
- Add your copy to the long form sales page.
- Then setup a product on the order form. Set the price.
- In the settings of the funnel, set your domain.
- In order to connect the sales funnel + order form to the course you made, we’re going to use a Trigger.
- Triggers simply connect things. So you’ll make a trigger that says with someone buys off that order form, grant access to that course.
By now you have a course setup and a funnel setup! Don’t forget to use the help library inside the app.
Connecting a Nurture Sequence or Abandon Cart Sequence
- When selling a course in a funnel, there are two points where you might want an email campaign – during an abandon checkout, or once they buy.
- You can do this by creating an email campaign under marketing. Setup your emails, texts, etc.
- Once it’s done, go into Triggers and set a trigger so if someone opts-in, they get the abandoned cart sequence.
- Then set a second trigger that says if they buy, REMOVE from abandon cart and put them in fulfillment sequence instead.
- You can also have your triggers add tags as well for easy searching through contacts.
- There are lots of help docs on how to use Triggers in the HELP LIBRARY. One tip is to look at the triggers that came with the Simple Collection for other types of funnels. We did a walkthrough so you can see how they function.
Do I Need A Pipeline?
Pipelines are a visual way to see where a customer or lead is in the process of your funnel and offer. For a course, you more than likely wouldn’t use a pipeline. You could of course, but it would be short. It’d simply be ABANDON CART > PURCHASE. And you’d create triggers to move the contact.
More than likely a pipeline is most useful for application funnels, high touch services, and coaching. For a course, it’s probably overkill.
How Do I Email My Students?
If you’d like to email your students, it’ll be important that you create a tag when they sign up (with the trigger I mentioned up above). This way you can easily email students by doing the following:
- Go to Contacts.
- Filter by tag.
- Click SEND email or SEND text.
- Write your message and hit send!
What if you want to send them a reminder email every week for 8 weeks about a live Q&A call?
- Create the campaign for 8 reminder emails that fire every seven days.
- On the day of the first call about two hours before, go to Contacts.
- Select all students.
- Click ADD TO CAMPAIGN, and it will now fire off that campaign that has 8 emails, and will go off each week about 2 hours before the call.
What If I Do Elaborate Pay Plans and Peoples’ Cards Fail?
We do recommend that you use a service like Chargedesk, which connects right to Stripe for updating payment info, etc.
It will also send reminders and whatnot if payments fail. This is handled outside of FG Funnels.
This isn’t necessary if you only have a few students, or you just do one set price. It’s only needed if you have a lot of students and don’t want to manually follow up with people whose payments fail.
You can also get fancy and remove access to the course automatically through a zap if their billing fails.
What Other Fancy Things Can I Do?
- Add forms and/or surveys at the end of milestones in the course that trigger email campaigns or other sequences. It can even unlock other offers (use the triggers function).
- Deliver a handwritten note through a service like handwrytten by triggering a zap that sends the info over after they buy.
- Send a note (through a trigger) when a user logs in.
- Use a trigger to create a task to one of your team members to welcome the new student in the FB group.
As always, don’t forget all our channels of support!
- HELP LIBRARY (inside the app)
- OUR FREE COURSE (inside the app under tips + tricks)
- 24.7 ticket support
- Live chat Monday through Friday 9-5pm PST
- Weekly Office Hours in our FB Group
- Our Hireamarketer.com site for premium providers.
