Want to sell your offers on evergreen? What you need to know first

People often think that putting an offer on evergreen is easy. You can just add it to your website and let it be—hoping a few people will buy it each month. Well, it doesn't quite work that way. In today's episode, I'm sharing the common misconceptions about evergreen offers and what you need to know.

– Why creating a sales process for evergreen offers is just as important as it is for live launches.
– Why putting your offer on your website isn't enough to convert.
– How bridging the Magician's Gap is different between evergreen offers and live launching.
– Understanding the technical behind-the-scenes processes involved in evergreen offers.

 

 

What you need to know if you want to sell your offers on evergreen.

I hear this over and over again from my listeners, my email subscribers, people will say to me, Steph, I don't want to live launch.
It's stressful. It's exhausting. I just want to put my offers on evergreen and sell them like that. So I want to kick this blog off with a little bit of chat about the misconception. About what evergreen really is.

 

What is evergreen?

Evergreen is not putting your offer on your website and hoping that every month, a few people are going to buy it.
It's not this set-and-forget thing where you create your course, you put it on your website and you never have to touch it ever again. And it just generates these sales for you on autopilot. It's this beautiful passive income stream that trickles in without you having to think about it. That is not what evergreen.
Unfortunately, too many people think that that is what evergreen is and that leads them to create a course, put it on their website, and then suddenly they're not making any sales. And then they think, well, nobody wants my course, but it's not that nobody wants your course. It's that you don't actually have a sales process to sell the course.
So a true evergreen funnel is a sales process that uses automations to nurture people through a very similar journey that they would be going through if you were live launching it. You can call it a funnel if you like, you can call it a sales process. Whatever you want to call it. Essentially what it is, is if you think of like a little upside down shaped pyramid where a lot of people are coming in at the top, that's your cold traffic, and then people are moving through this journey.
And at each stage, fewer people, more people are dropping off until they eventually get to the pointy end, which is where a small percentage of the people who came in at the top are going to buy from you. So throughout this process, you are nurturing them, before they will eventually buy from you, before you eventually ask them to buy from you.
But nurturing isn't just a couple of emails. It's not just a little nurture sequence where you send a few emails about yourself and your hobbies and what you like to do in the hopes that that's going to build a connection and they're going to want to buy from you. Unfortunately, that doesn't sell. And your evergreen sales process still has to bridge the same magician's gap that your live launch would, except it's a little bit harder because now you're taking them on this automated journey rather than taking your entire audience on this journey in real time.

What is the Magician's Gap?

If you are new here, the Magician's Gap is, my name for the gap between where your ideal client is today and where they need to be to be ready to buy your offer. So right now, there are some misconceptions that they have about the problem they're experiencing. Maybe they don't believe that it's possible to solve the problem. Maybe they aren't aware of your solution. And essentially your free content is designed to bridge this gap to get them to the point where they are ready to buy. Essentially, you know, with Evergreen, it's the same as a live sales process, but now instead of having everyone going through at the same time, you have lots of people at lots of different stages of the journey.
For example, one of my offers is on evergreen, the Podcast Launch Plan. I have an automated webinar for it where somebody can register for the automated webinar. They get the cart open emails and they get bonuses based on when they registered for the webinar. If I were live launching it, everyone who would be registering for the webinar would be attending the same live webinar and their bonuses would all expire at the same date and time.
Or another example of an evergreen sales process might be that somebody downloads your lead magnet. Then they get added into your nurture sequence, which is automated emails. From there, they get a call to action to book a fitting call where you then jump on the phone with them and then they get to work with you. ─
Okay, so those are both examples of an evergreen sales process, but notice how they're very similar to what it would be like in a live launch. You're still taking them on that journey. It's not a set and forget and leave it. So we're going to share a couple of things you need to know about putting your offers on evergreen.

I love evergreen sales processes. I think they can be great for generating consistent sales. They have generated a ton of revenue in this business, but there are some things that you need to be aware of before you just jump in and start setting them up.

 

Putting your offer on your website and driving people to the sales page usually isn't going to be enough to convert.

I'm sorry. I know you want to, but it doesn't work. And look, it might work for the lower ticket offers that are a real no brainer. And there's a really strong sales page. You have a strong social proof and you have very little inherent risk involved in buying it, or in a situation where there is a really immediate pain point that needs solving.
For example, my friend Riz, who runs a business called Found Legal, she has a digital product called the Copycat Kit, where if somebody has copied your work, let's say they've gone and copied all of your social media content and shared it on their own page, you can buy her Copycat Kit and make that pain point go away very quickly.
But most of the time you're not dealing with an urgent, immediate pain point like that. And someone isn't just going to see your offer, read the sales page, and they're going to be ready to buy it immediately. Instead, they need to go through the sales process, a process where you are addressing their hesitations.
“Do I trust you” is going to be a big one. And once they do trust you, is this offer a good fit for me? Will this work in my situation? Is this worth the risk that I might waste my money, waste my time? I might risk failing again if they've already tried other things to solve this problem. When you live launch your offer a few times at the start, you can start to collect real intel about the hesitations that stopped people from buying and then you can preempt it in your evergreen sales process So when you go and set up that evergreen funnel, you already know they're gonna have these questions They're gonna have these excuses these hesitations So let me address that in my recorded webinar in my sales page in my emails that are going out.

 

You still needs to bridge the magician's gap like you would in a live launch.

While in a live launch, you would probably spend four to six weeks or so sharing that free content, like maybe on a podcast. Uh, if you have a blog, you might be sharing it there. You're sharing that free content. That's bridging this gap in your evergreen sales process. You need to bridge it some other way.
For example, a lead magnet, a launch specific lead magnet. It needs to be really strategic and you can put the content, the kind of content in that lead magnet that is bridging that magician's gap. If you design it strategically, maybe you have a recorded webinar. And just like the same as a webinar that you would teach in a live launch, it's not about trying to demonstrate how much you know, and it's not about trying to deliver so much value that they're like, Oh, this is so valuable.
I have to buy it instead. It's there to bridge the gap. It's there to bridge that magician's gap. And I know to you as the expert, that doesn't feel like valuable content. Believe me to the person who is watching to your ideal client. That is super valuable content to you. Maybe it doesn't because it feels so obvious.
You don't realize that other people don't know that, but to them, it is super valuable. Another place you can bridge that gap is in your email sequence. So all of your email sequences, actually, so the nurture sequence that they get after downloading your lead magnet in the emails leading up to the automated webinar time session that the cart open emails, so the emails that they get after their webinar session. So while the live element of the evergreen launch isn't there, and it might be less stressful because you aren't having to show up live and deliver that webinar live, you still have all of the same components. Plus you also have the added tech nightmares that can come with duct taping together all of the automations that keep it running. So it's not necessarily easier than a live launch.

 

You still have to drive people to the evergreen funnel.

Okay, so if we think of that funnel as the little upside down pyramid where the pointy end is the people who buy and the top end, the widest part, is the new people who are coming into that funnel, you still need to be filling up that funnel with people.
You still need to be driving people into it, which means that you still need to be sending emails to your list to get them into the top. You still need to be running paid ads or doing podcast interviews or guest speaking or teaching to others audiences showing up for your audience. They're not just going to magically come across your evergreen funnel and boom, it's done.
You still need to be getting it in front of people. And when you are live launching, what I like to think of it of live launching as is this little sprint where I'm showing up. with full energy for a really limited period, and then I can chill for a bit. Whereas with evergreen, you need to make sure that it's in your marketing calendar to regularly be sending people into this evergreen funnel. Otherwise they won't just find it and then convert.

 

Setting it up and getting it dialed in can be quite a long process.

You do need to be tracking the numbers from your evergreen funnel. You need to be looking at them ideally weekly, but at least once every two weeks, especially if you are running Facebook ads, because when you are running Facebook ads, the costs can shift pretty quickly and the funnel can go from being really profitable to running at a loss quickly. So you want to be looking at that all the time. We want to know how many people did we get into the funnel and to the top of this funnel this week, how is each step of the funnel converting, what is the over overall revenue from this funnel versus the expenses like paid ads? What was the overall profit?
If it's converting well and it's profitable, then we know, okay, great. We can dial this up. We can spend a bit more on ads and get more people in because we know it's going to convert. If it's not converting well, or if it's running at a loss, then we know we need to tweak something. We need to fix it. It is definitely not a set and forget kind of thing, which I know some people believe that evergreen is like this beautiful passive income stream where you set it up once and it's done and it just ticks along in the background, but no, you need to still be looking at it. And you still need to be looking at the numbers and tweaking it all the time.

 

Setting up an evergreen funnel is so much easier if you live launch the offer first.

At least once, but ideally a few times. When you live launch your course or your program or your membership, you have a whole bunch of people going through the whole sales process at the same time.
And that gives you feedback. You know what questions they're asking, you know what hesitations they have. It gives you intel. You can find out why they didn't buy. And it gives you data because you can see how each step in the journey converted. And then once you have those insights, then you can tweak it and you can improve it before you spend weeks setting up the entire funnel and connecting together all the tech. Because setting up the funnel is going to look something like recording the webinar. Automating all of the deadlines, automating all of the emails, automating all the sales pages. And this can take quite a while to do. And once it's set up, it's not that easy to tweak it. So I've been putting off re recording one of my evergreen webinars for about a year, because once I've re recorded, I know that's going to change the length of the webinar, which then impacts all of the deadlines in the sequence, which means I then need to go and change all of those deadlines and make sure that everything is correctly set up tech wise.
It's not an easy task. So the podcast launch plan is on an evergreen funnel. It converts really nicely, but I got it to the stage because I did about seven live webinars over two or three months for this offer, and I made sure that those webinars were converting really well before I prerecorded it.
I wanted to test all of the different things I could test. Before I sat down and pre recorded the webinar, I wanted to test the messaging, different bonuses, all of the different things, just to make sure that it was fully optimized and doing it live, testing it live was much quicker than pre recording it each time because once you've live launched it once.
The hard part is done, right? Once you've written the sales page, the emails, you've done the webinar, it just becomes a matter of tweaking it. And then you can live launch it again and again and again. And when you're really happy with it, then we go and pre record, set up the sales page, set up the emails, automate all of that.

 

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