In this post you’ll learn how to trigger email automation workflows and automate key processes to help you systematically grow your online coaching business.
by
Phil Beene
July 10, 2020
For online coaching programs, replacing repetitive manual touchpoints with automated email sequences is like transforming a rickshaw into a passenger bus.
Sure, both can get people from A to B, but one takes a lot less peddling, a lot fewer trips, and can help you take a lot more people to where they want to go.
So once you’ve validated your program and are ready to grow, it’s time to start looking at opportunities to leverage automation to help your business scale.
In this post I’ll show you specifically how Zapier (a platform that makes it easy to connect different apps and trigger automations) works, and how you can use it to streamline a few key workflows in your online coaching business.
The New Lead Workflow
Email campaign triggered when you capture a new email address that nurtures their interest in what you offer with valuable info about why your services/expertise are so important and impactful.
The New Prospect Workflow
Sequence triggered when a lead has been qualified as a good fit for your program or offering and reinforcing your value propositions until they have an “ah ha” moment and decide they need what you have to offer.
The New Client Workflow
Automation triggered when a prospect signs up for your program with the goal of keeping clients informed and engaged, and laying the groundwork for renewals and upsells.
And once you have these 3 email automation workflows in place, you’ll be able to:
Spend more time working on growing your business, rather than doing the same old repetitive tasks
Benchmark and measure success of your entire digital marketing funnel
Track success of targeted changes, iterate and optimize each step
Improve conversion rates and grow your online coaching business in a systematic and repeatable way
In short, if you put this system in place, you’ll have a lot of what you’ll need to predictably turn leads into clients, and grow your online coaching business.
Tools and technologies used in this post.
We love Zapier because there is no coding required, it has a free plan available to start and it’s affordable to scale. This makes it the best and easiest way to get started with business automations.
Nudge’s coaching platform also has a Zapier integration, and we will get to one specific solution for our Nudge Coaches out there at the end of this post.
No matter what email marketing platform you want to use: Mailchimp, Drip, ConvertKit, AWeber, Constant Contact, GetResponse (just to name a few), you will be able to follow the same steps to kick off powerful email automation workflows to streamline, scale and automate key aspects of your coaching business.
In this post, I’ll be using Mailchimp simply because it’s still the most popular. But the process for setting things up in each email marketing platform will be similar.
Let’s dive right into an example so you can see the nuts and bolts of setting up an automated email workflow using Zapier.
How to set up automations with Zapier
If you want to follow along as i go here, you can go ahead and create your free Zapier account here.
Once you log in, you’ll see that you can jump right in by searching and selecting the apps you’re using and connecting accounts, but let’s start with a specific example so you have a clear idea how these “Zaps” work.
Log into your Zapier account and we’ll start working from the prompts right in front of you on your dashboard.
In the field on the left, start typing “Nudge Coach” and select it when it appears. In the field to the right, start typing the name of the email marketing platform you use.
Then below those fields, two new prompts will appear.
In the dropdown menu on the left, we’ll choose ‘Client is added to a group’ as the trigger that will kick off this automation. In the field on the right, choose whatever you want to have happen in your email platform.
For our example, we’re going to ‘Add subscriber to tag’ because we have our email automation sequence set up in Mailchimp to send to only those individuals with the tag ‘mindful-steps’.
Note: If the clients who are joining your challenge group are not already in your email platform, you’ll want to select an action like ‘Add as new subscriber’ instead.
Select Continue and Zapier will now walk you through steps to match up the fields in Nudge Coach with fields in Mailchimp. This ensures the data transfers properly into Mailchimp each time a new client gets added to our new group in Nudge.
Choose your Nudge Coach account, select the Group you just created, and Zapier will prompt you to run a quick test before continuing.
You’ll want to create yourself an account in the Nudge app for clients so you can use your own account as the guinea pig to make sure the integration is working.
Hit Test & Continue and after a few seconds Zapier will grab details from the Nudge app account you just created and added to your Group.
If it’s successful you’ll be moved on to start matching up the fields that you want to pull into your email marketing platform.
Follow those steps carefully, run another test when prompted at the end, and if the results look correct, we’re ready to turn on your first automated email sequence!
Now when a new client is added to your coaching group in Nudge, they are queued up to receive your automated email campaign as they go throughout your program.
This exact Zap is what we will use for our 3rd essential email automation workflow below, “The New Client Workflow,” but as you’ll see, you’ll simply use different apps as the trigger that starts your New Lead and New Prospect Workflows below.
Other than a few minor tweaks, you’re just repeating the same process to automate your coaching business!
3 email automation workflows you need to grow an online coaching business.
As we dive into the 3 specific email campaigns you need for scaling an online coaching program, it’s important to understand where they fit into your overall coaching funnel.
If you’re not as experienced when it comes to marketing, we use “funnels” to visualize and measure the key steps of the journey clients take on the way to signing up and working with you.
In another post I dive deeper into setting up and optimizing your online coaching funnel for scale.
Here is a simplified coaching funnel that shows you where the 3 essential email automation sequences fit into the overall picture of growing your business.
Your business may have slightly different steps in the customer journey, but these 3 email automation sequences are virtually always relevant if you’re ready to grow and scale.
1. The Lead Workflow
Congrats, you just captured a new lead on your website with that valuable freebie you offer.
So how are you going to turn that lead into a paying customer?
Lead capture starts the first of your email automation series, the New Lead Workflow.
The goal of the new lead workflow is to share additional content that’s highly relevant to someone who would benefit from your core offer until they are ‘ready’ to take the next step and seriously consider moving forward with your program.
As you’ll see in the next section, we’re using the offer of a Free Initial Consult as the next step in our funnel to “qualify” leads and make sure they are a good fit for our program before signing up.
With that in mind, here is a quick summary of the purpose and success metrics for your New Lead Workflow.
Purpose:
Nurture leads until they’re ready to book a call with your team.
Success metrics:
Conversions and conversion rate (how many people who start The New Lead Workflow book calls and become Prospects)
It’s important to note that the purpose of the new lead email sequence may not be to make a sale yet… at least not for your high-ticket coaching program if that’s your primary offering.
More than likely your leads just frankly haven’t quite seen enough yet to convince them to commit a few hundred dollars and a couple of months of their time. But that’s okay! They will just need a little more nurturing first.
The important thing is that by starting to standardize and measure the number of people getting to each stage of your funnel, you are creating a baseline.
Once you’ve done that - to paraphrase Instapage conversion rate expert Brandon Weaver’s take from this article on good conversion rates...
“A good conversion rate is one that’s higher than it is now.”
You can certainly search for industry averages to set goals, but the point he’s making with that simple definition is that your unique offerings are important context that don’t always fit neatly into industry averages.
If you set yourself up to get better all the time, you’ll eventually get to the goals you need to reach in order to make your online coaching business profitable.
Zapier trigger: Squarespace, Typeform, Instapage, Leadpages (whatever you use to capture leads)
2. The Prospect Workflow.
Once your first email sequence is up and running you’ll start to see a predictable percentage of leads take the next step and become prospects.
Here, we’re defining a prospect as someone who has booked a ‘Free Intro Consult’ to learn more about your program.
This definition of a prospect lets you use the act of a lead booking a call with you using an online booking system like Calendly or Acuity serves as a ‘trigger’ to kick off your next email automation campaign, your new Prospect Workflow.
You’ll want to use this call to qualify your prospect and make sure they’re a good fit, meaning they really need what you are offering them, and want it enough to pay for it now (or very soon).
The goal of your Prospect Workflow is to find a way to communicate your value in a way that will make your prospects say, “Ah ha! This is exactly what I need to get the outcome I’m looking for. I’m in!”
Purpose:
Present the desired outcome and clear steps that your program entails in multiple ways until your prospect sees the light and is ready to buy.
Success metrics:
Conversions and conversion rate (how many prospects become paid clients)
Zapier trigger: Calendly, Acuity (whatever you use for call booking)
3. The Client Workflow
Good news, when the Prospect Workflow works, you sign up a new client!
As time passes and more new leads enter this funnel, you’ll see a predictable conversion rate emerge from Leads to Prospects to Customers, which means you’ll be able to project forward how many leads it will take to hit your revenue goals.
As I showed earlier in this post, if Nudge is your coaching app, you can use the moment when your new client creates their Nudge app account as the trigger to automate your New Client Workflow with Zapier.
But if you want to build an even more profitable online coaching business, then there’s one more step to consider.
As a business with time-based programs (say a 3-month programs many coaching businesses offer), that generate recurring revenue, you need a strategy in place to achieve as many client renewals and/or upsells as possible.
Why’s this so important?
It costs a lot time and money to acquire clients. And it takes a lot less clients to become profitable if you’re able to extend the average lifetime value of each client from $500 to $1,000.
According to Harvard Business Review, depending on which study you believe it costs somewhere between 5x and 25x less to renew or upsell an existing client, than it does to attract and sell a new client.
That’s a crazy stat even if you believe the lower end of that estimate.
If you only have a single offering - say you simply offer your program for $200/month and have no other products or services available - then your goal for this workflow is clear as crystal…
Keep clients engaged and on track for their goals as long as possible.
But I’d also recommend adding a lower-cost Maintenance Plan to your list of options so that even those who reach their biggest goals with you have the option to stick around as a paying client and benefit from a little extra accountability to help insure they keep their hard-earned gains.
Maintenance Plans are a no-brainer and often an easy sell when your clients who know and trust you already also know that just a little extra accountability will keep them from falling back on old habits.
So here’s what to focus on for the Client Workflow…
Goals:
Client retention / renewal.
Upsell conversion.
Success metrics:
Renewal rate
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Zapier trigger: Nudge Coach
Conclusion.
Most coaching businesses are small businesses. And all small businesses have this one problem in common:
Too much to do, and too little time in which to do it.
Strategically building email automation into your coaching business takes repetitive tasks off your plate, so you can focus your time on the other critical pieces of running your business.
But saving time is not the only benefit!
Setting up the right automated email workflows will enable you to benchmark and measure success of every touchpoint with your potential clients on their way to becoming your ideal clients.
Turn reviewing your coaching funnel metrics into a weekly discipline, and you’ll soon find that you can iterate and improve on each stage of your coaching funnel with confidence, until your business is virtually growing on its own.
