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So you created a product you love, your list is growing with your perfect-fit customers but…
…there’s crickets. No one is buying your digital product.
What now?!
What do you do when your evergreen funnel isn’t converting well?
Evergreen funnels are amazing when they work well – who doesn’t love waking up to PayPal notifications, right?!
But when they don’t work, it can feel super frustrating. You want work-life balance and earning passive income with evergreen funnels seems like a really great way to achieve exactly that. You don’t want to have to be constantly launching new products and you don’t want to sound like a broken record mentioning your product in every email or social post.
So what’s the solution? How can we get that evergreen funnel working for you again?!
In this blog post we will be discussing some of the common reasons your product isn’t selling.
Reasons your evergreen funnel isn’t working….
You are attracting the wrong people
Let’s go right back to the start of your funnel to your blog posts, social media posts and your lead magnet.
Are you reaching people who are interested in your topic? Are you reaching people at the right stage where they need help? Are you reaching people at the perfect time for them to purchase a solution to a problem they are having?
So take a look at the content you are creating on your blog/social channels/Youtube channel/podcast and ask yourself who does it appeal to.
And dig deep. If you are selling an advanced gardening course it’s not enough to appeal to gardeners. Do they understand the basics? Are the ready for the next stage? Do they live in the right location? For example, someone living in a dry climate will need a different course to someone living in a tropical climate!
Ask the same questions about your lead magnet. Who is it you are really attracting?!
And if it’s the wrong people then you need to think about a new lead magnet and creating content that attracts the right people and repels those who are not a good fit!
You are not being clear on the problem your product solves
The most critical factor when someone is deciding if to purchase a product is knowing if it will help them to achieve a goal or solve a problem. You need to be super clear about what problem your product solves in both your emails and also on the sales page.
This is so important that it is usually the very first thing I address on my sales page and in the 1st email promoting my products.
Start with one of these questions:
Do you wish…?
Do you feel frustrated by…?
Do you struggle with…?
Are you feeling overwhelmed by…?
You’re not being clear on who your product is for
People need to see themselves clearly reflected in your sales copy and on your sales page.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try and appeal to everyone by being really vague about who will benefit from your product.
If you are clear about who your product is for, those people will sit up and listen.
They are also more likely to get results and rave about your product to their friends!
So if your travel photography presets are suitable for complete beginners who aren’t interested in learning editing and just need a quick fix then tell them that. Don’t try to appeal to everyone – stand out to those beginners!
You’re focussing on the features and not the benefits
Features are what you get directly from the product e.g. X number of modules, a spreadsheet, one-to-one support or a Facebook community.
Benefits are how those features will help someone to make a positive improvement to their life or goal.
For example the Facebook community will provide support, accountability and a great source of experts to ask your questions so that you never feel stuck without knowing where to turn again!
The spreadsheet will keep you organised and on track and help you to stay motivated as you can document your progress.
So try this. Write a list of all your product features and then complete the sentence with so that…
For example, ‘one-to-one support so that you can get feedback on your new business plan before you launch helping you to avoid potential problems you hadn’t yet considered that would slow your progress.’
Your funnel is too short
I see this commonly with people who are new to selling products. They worry that if they talk about their product too much or send too many emails, they will come across salesy.
But what happens is that people are busy and they don’t see the one or two emails that you send and they don’t purchase the product but have no idea they missed it. And because you’re afraid to mention it again, they never get the opportunity to purchase your awesome product.
Remember even sales emails can be helpful. I often teach inside sales emails or share inspirational stories.
At a minimum, you need to send 3 sales emails in your sequence over 72 hours. You might want to consider an extra email on the last day a few hours before the offer ends to remind them.
For more expensive products you will want to send more emails. For a product in the $200-500 range I would usually send 5-6 emails over 5 days. For something more expensive it would be more like 7-8 emails over 7-10 days.
Then you want to continue subtly mentioning your product in newsletters to keep it front of mind. Even if they don’t buy now, it will be the first product your subscriber thinks of when they do want to buy something similar!
So whenever I reference a similar topic in my newsletter I will link to my related product and usually add a PS. have you seen this product…
Your readers don’t know, like or trust you yet.
Your subscribers need to feel comfortable with you and also see you as an expert who can be trusted before they will spend money with you.
This is why the welcome and warm up emails are so important.
So ask yourself if you are doing enough to warm your audience up?
(For more expensive products you will need to do even more of this.)
- Do you show your personality in your emails?
- Are your stories relatable?
- Do you ever share your vulnerabilities (perhaps your before story?)
- Do you position yourself as an expert?
- Do you share free content that helps back up your level of knowledge?
- Do you share examples and case studies? (your own and also potentially students or customers.)
- If you have related qualifications, do you mention them?
- Do you share valuable tips? (Even better if those tips are something they’re unlikely to have heard elsewhere!)
There’s no reason to buy NOW.
This is the biggie.
You can do everything above and STILL not make many sales and there’s a simple reason for that.
You haven’t given them a good reason to buy right now. There’s no urgency.
Think about it this way. Let’s say you do a little online shopping and you spot a dress you like but you can see it’s new stock. It’ll probably be there for a while. What are the reasons you might buy this immediately?
- You need an outfit for an event coming up soon
- It’s on sale and the discount ends soon
- There’s only a few left in the colour you want
- You can see they’ve already sold out of some sizes
If you can see it’s new stock and you won’t have an event to wear this to for a while, you’re probably going to leave the tab open and ‘come back to this later.’ But how many times have you done that and then not gone back to buy the dress? Maybe you forgot about it? Maybe you saw something better?
People are busy and so every decision gets filed into a ‘I need to decide soon’ file or a ‘I’ll come back to this another time’ file.
If you want people to take action and prioritise their purchase decision for your offer, you need to give them a reason to do this.
I’m not a fan of false urgency e.g. countdown timers that reset when they reach zero or limiting places on a self-directed learning course. Those things look sleazy and damage your credibility.
But a time sensitive discount or early bird bonus? I am ALL for them!
In fact I almost never buy anything that isn’t on sale. I’m a terrible procrastinator when it comes to decision making. A little urgency is pretty essential to get me to take action! I love getting a last minute reminder email!
And even if you’re more decisive than me and you buy things without that extra urgency, you can guarantee you have lots of people on your email list who are poor decision makers like me!
How to add urgency to your evergreen funnel
Adding a time sensitive discount into an evergreen funnel is fairly easy to do but you will need a tool to do it!
Essentially you have a sale page with a discount and a timer that counts down to zero. When it reaches zero it diverts to the regular sales page.
The tricky thing here is to get the funnel to work in sync with your emails and to make sure the offer is delivered at the right time no matter when someone joined your email list.
The tool I recommend for this is Deadline Funnel.
At the point of writing this, there are only two tools that are designed to do exactly this and Ive tried both.
Thrive Ultimatum is a plugin. It’s triggered by someone joining your email list through Thrive Leads (another plugin.) You can’t sync it perfectly with your emails but it works to a point. However I found it difficult to use, glitchy and frustrating at times – like when I wanted to put other people through the same funnel that signed up via a different source!
Deadline Funnel is a little more expensive but works perfectly. It syncs with your cart checkout sales page and emails and it’s triggered by you adding a tag to that subscriber in your email service provider (or adding them to a group if you use a tool like Mailerlite.)
I bought Thrive Ultimatum initially but moved to Deadline Funnel last year and haven’t looked back since. Yes it’s slightly more expensive but the costs are paid for by extra sales. Depending on your offer price, you will probably only need one extra sale a month to cover your costs.
Our pick for adding urgency to funnels
Deadline Funnel
Deadline Funnel creates scarcity and urgency in evergreen marketing campaigns by offering discounts and time-limited bonuses specific to that individual’s journey.
Add to any sales page even if you host your sales pages off-site. You can even add countdown timers to emails to increase conversion rates and help you to sell your products on autopilot without endless stressful launches.
Pros
- Can use on any platform
- More robust than Thrive Ultimatum
- Integrates with emails and countdown timers
Cons
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I will be releasing a course ‘Fearless Funnels’ soon about how to set up evergreen urgency funnels (including both product and affiliate funnels) so if you think this might help you to finally get your evergreen funnel selling like hot cakes, make sure you register for the wait list below.
