How Visual Automations Helped Me Restructure My Funnels and Make More Sales
I was a ConvertKit customer before I was an employee. I signed up, ready to grow my list and my business with the most powerful-yet-easy-to-use email marketing tool. I set up some forms, some basic sequences, and then I got hired on the Customer Success team (PS- If you have any questions about Visual Automations or anything ConvertKit related, you can ask me at help@convertkit.com. I’d love the hear from you!).
My side-hustle
I teach people how to get the most out of their masterminds. I have had some amazing and really powerful experiences in masterminds, and I credit it to taking some very specific steps: I would prepare for my hotseat, prepare for other mastermind members’ hotseats, and I would always create concrete action plans after meetings.
I noticed other people, including my own mastermind members, weren’t doing this, and thus feeling like they weren’t getting any value out of them. So I put together some resources for my own mastermind group, and then, in true mastermind fashion, they encouraged me to share them publicly.
But since becoming a ConvertKit employee, my ConvertKit account had been woefully neglected. My inspiration came in short bursts, followed by long periods of inactivity.
Most of my incentives, products, and sequence content is from before I started at ConvertKit, and have been edited or tweaked only when I had some creative inspiration — and then they were left to run on their own.
I’m grateful that with ConvertKit, my forms and sequences can run with little interference, enabling me to spend most of my energy on our customers’ accounts. But I knew it was time to start putting a little extra effort into updating them.
When we started working on Visual Automations, I knew it would be a new way of thinking, and I was determined to take what I had set up and restructure it so it was automated and effective– something I didn’t currently have.
Re-thinking my incentives to create targeted sales funnels
The first thing I did was map out what I was currently doing in ConvertKit– and realized it was a mess.
For a long time, I had an eBook for sale called “How to Start a Mastermind.” It was $30, and it made a few sales, but it never clicked with people the way that I was hoping. I think there are a couple reasons for this, but the most important one was that it was too much information.
I tried to write a definitive guide to masterminds, but that’s not what my audience wanted, and I didn’t know how to sell it. It was too broad because I had created it with information for multiple segments of my list instead of creating one niched down product for each of my list segments.
I decided to gut this eBook and turn it into three small products to serve each segment:
- “Do I need a mastermind?”- A free course to teach the basic concept of masterminds.
- “The Hotseat Handbook”- A $10 guide to getting the most out of your hotseat during a meeting.
- “How to Lead a Mastermind” -A $7 guide to being a leader of a mastermind group.
I now had three distinct products for three distinct customers. This made it a lot easier to work backwards and design my automations to sell these products separately.
How I created new marketing funnels with Visual Automations
Visual Automations are a creator’s new best friend. We think visually, we work visually, and now, we get to truly understand our Subscriber’s experience visually.
Before, I thought about my ConvertKit account in discrete parts: Forms in one place, Sequences in another, Automation Rules over there. Now, I had a chance to see all parts come together as a whole to understand my Subscribers’ experiences– particularly the gaps in content I currently had.
So when I started using Visual Automations, I started with the ideal flow of the subscriber.
A new subscriber would read a post, opt into a form about the topic of one of my eBooks, get a few emails, and purchase one of my products. And with that, I had a simple goal I could structure my automations around.
Here’s what my new automation looks like:
Hotseat Handbook Visual Automation
Opt In: A Hotseat Prep Template, from this article on Medium
Goal: Purchase “The Hotseat Handbook”
Now that my opt-in had a clear goal, I had to re-structure my sequence to do some selling. I simplified my calls to action and streamlined my emails toward my goal: purchase The Hotseat Handbook.
I represented my goal with an event at the end of my automation: When someone gets the “(C) Hotseat Handbook” Tag. Setting it up as an event meant that it would pull any customers out of the sales funnel, so I wouldn’t continue to pitch them to buy.
Sucess with Visual Automations
With this set up, I stepped back. The beauty of automations is that they don’t need a babysitter. I get modest traffic to my Medium article thanks to the SEO benefits of misspelling a word everyone also misspells, so I just let it do it’s thing.
It feels obvious now, but I didn’t know if it would work. It felt right, but trying to sell products with a modest list always has some uncertainty. The most important thing is I just keep trying new things and this, like everything, was an experiment.
After a few weeks, I got my first sale. And the next day, I got another one. And the next week, another. It’s a simple success, but a thrilling one. Visual Automations helped me better connect with my Subscribers, which helped me increase my sales.
When’s the last time you mapped your Subscriber’s journey?
Try it today with Visual Automations and see what points you can improve to increase your sales!
