How to Automate Sales With an Evergreen Email Marketing Funnel

Last Updated on November 15, 2022

An evergreen email marketing funnel is the best automated sales funnel that can break the feast-or-famine cycle and build steady, reliable, ever-growing revenue.

As I often say, one of the best things you can do for your business (and mental health) is to figure out how to stop exchanging your time for money. Your time is a finite resource, and if all you ever do is trade time for money, the amount of money you can make is finite as well. 

Automating as much of your business as possible is one of the ways to get off the hamster wheel of exchanging your time for money and get on the path to exponential revenue growth. 

One of my favorite ways to automate and grow an online business is with evergreen email marketing funnels. 

Once you get  your evergreen sales funnel up and running it will be working FOR you 24/7/365 with very minimal  continued effort on your part. You’ll have a steady, reliable stream of (mostly) passive income coming in, while your time is freed up to focus on the things that are most important to you. 

Benefits of an evergreen email marketing funnel 

I’ve covered this in more detail in other blog posts, but here is a brief overview of the benefits of using evergreen funnels, and why I’ve found them to be such a powerful tool in my own business. 

1. You can  reach and serve more clients than you ever could have with other business models. Your prospective clients will be  entering and moving through your sales funnel all the time — and there is no limit to the number of people you can have in your funnel, which allows you to serve as many people as you can attract. 

2. They’re not time-limited or time-dependent. When you live launch, you are limiting when people can buy. What if they aren’t ready when you launch? They just miss out on the great things you have to give! An evergreen funnel meets your client where they are, and when they’re ready, you’re there for them. 

3. They honor different types of buyers. Some people know what they want, take quick action, and never look back. Others need lots of information and time to carefully ponder and research every decision they make in order to feel comfortable. An evergreen email marketing funnel works for each of these buyers, and everyone in between, giving each person what they need to feel good about buying from you. 

4. They understand human nature, and work with it much more naturally. Buyers do what their instincts tell them to do — to act immediately on what is important (urgency), and to acquire what is limited (scarcity). You can build those two elements into your evergreen funnel, just like with a live launch funnel, and I can show you how to do it with complete integrity.

5. You’ll make more money. When you have a simple evergreen product — a product that is always for sale on your website — you’ll make sales, but you don’t have the magic of a funnel (the nurturing, the urgency, the scarcity) to help you drive sales. Setting up evergreen email marketing funnels is like adding rocket fuel to your evergreen product — your sales will soar.  

6. You’ll enjoy better work/life balance, and greater health and satisfaction. Live launching can be super stressful and taxing on your central nervous system (unless you love it, then you do you, boo). Setting up a steady, predictable, always-on evergreen funnel allows you to work at an even pace and break the feast-or-famine revenue cycle. You can plan your life — and actually LIVE your life — and know that your evergreen funnel will be chugging along in the background, making you money every day. 

7. You can ditch the patriarchal model of working and embrace a much more cyclical approach to work. Can we all agree to let go of the notion that being an entrepreneur means being in 24/7 “hustle + grind” mode? It’s an old, worn out, toxic patriarchal notion of work. 

Evergreen funnels create more room for embracing and incorporating feminine energy into how we work: respecting cycles, trusting our intuition, listening to our bodies, and honoring both seasons of “getting after it” AND seasons of rest as essential pieces of a successful work life. 

Making room for rest and creativity is a smart way to work. When you work with your body (instead of against it), you actually get way more done, and you feel way better at the end of the day. Evergreen sales funnels allow you to make a passive income without depletion, burnout, and sacrificing your health. 

Phases of an Evergreen Email Marketing Funnel 

Now let’s look deeper into the mechanics of an evergreen funnel. How are they set up? What are the stages? And what is each stage accomplishing for you and your business? We’ll start at the top.

Throughout your funnel, you are working to establish a Know, Like + Trust relationship with your potential clients. They need to get a real sense of who you are, and to feel that they can relate to you (and you to them), and they need to see that you’re operating with integrity. It only makes sense. We all want these things when we’re getting ready to give our money to someone! 

Top of the funnel: welcome + introduce 

This is the first stage of your nurture sequence, the awareness and discovery stage. Look at this stage as your introduction. Most people at this stage aren’t ready to buy (and if you try to sell to them, they’ll often feel overwhelmed and exit). 

Typically people enter this stage of your evergreen funnel by giving you their contact information in exchange for a small, free (but valuable!) gift — a report, digital tool, or training of some sort. 

People here are in the don’t-even-know-what-they-don’t-know stage. Your job is to give them a high-level overview of your business and what you have to offer, while reassuring them that you understand their problems, know what they are going through, that there is a solution, and (very important) that you can help them. 

Consider that they might not even know what their problem is; they just know they have one, and you might need to go so far as to tell them what their ACTUAL problems are. You’re showing them that you see them clearly and that you’re on their side. 

You’ll see the most people at this phase of your funnel. Because people don’t really know who you are yet, they’ll sign up for your emails, and some will drop off (unsubscribe or stop reading) when they realize on their own that you’re not a good fit. This is okay! 

Don’t worry about losing these people here! This is actually a good thing. You only want to work with people who are your ideal clients, and who you can actually help, so only focus on reaching your ideal clients, not everyone. Remember: we’re letting go of pushing, striving, and forcing. Instead, we’re allowing and going with the flow. The right people will make it all the way through your funnel and become customers. 

Middle of the funnel: nurture

This is the getting-to-know-you-better phase of your nurture sequence. 

In this phase, you’ll be providing even more valuable content. Educating the reader more about why they’re struggling and what solutions will solve their problems. Provide valuable, deep-dive, actionable content — don’t hold back here. Show off! Establish yourself as an expert in their problem and the solutions. 

Please resist the urge to sell here. It’s still too soon. You’re still in the early stages of building that know, like + trust relationship, and you don’t want to risk losing that trust by asking for too much too soon. (Patience, grasshopper.) 

Bottom of the funnel: sell

This is the final stage in your evergreen email marketing funnel, the sales sequence, where you ask for the sale. You might invite them to a webinar (with an evergreen funnel this will be pre-recorded, although you can also offer it live if that feels great to you), and on the webinar you’ll focus on closing the sale. 

Alternatively, you can offer a smaller purchase, to get them primed to buy your bigger-ticket offerings, and move them into another funnel. You can approach it in whatever way feels most natural and aligned for you. It all depends on your unique business model and products or services. 

How many emails go in each phase?

Generally, I suggest 3-10 emails in each phase, depending on how incrementally you’re working your way up to your main off and what the price point is of your main offer.

For example, if you have a high-ticket main offer, then you might have more “stair steps” in your sales funnel that might look like:

• Freebie
• Nurture/welcome sequence
• Offer of low-priced webinar
• More nurturing
• Move into promo of main offer
• Main offer with early-purchase bonuses
• Main offer
• Downsell to those who didn’t purchase
• Offer other ways to work together

All the while these sequences are in play, you’re making sure to move people into the appropriate corresponding funnel based on their response. So if they sign up for the freebie on your website but don’t take the webinar offer, you want to have a place to put them that makes sense with the level of interest or desire they’re showing. You’re not pushing your high-ticket offer on someone who isn’t ready.

I know that all of this can seem a bit complicated. And on the front end, it can be pretty labor-intensive. That’s just the truth. BUT — once you get it going and established, the amount of time it saves you will astound you.

PLUS — inside the Success With Soul Incubator, I literally give students my entire funnel to swipe and use and make their own. That’s right. You can just click a button and import all the emails I use. I’ve had Incubator students who say this one thing alone is worth the price of the program, because it saves them dozens of hours of setup.

Background tools that make an evergreen email marketing funnel work

If you’ve never built, or even peeked behind the scenes of an evergreen email marketing funnel, this may seem like voodoo magic right now. You might be wondering what actually makes all of this go. So let’s break it down even further and look at some of the tools you’ll use to actually set up an email funnel like this and keep it humming along. 

1. An email service provider (ESP). In your evergreen email marketing funnel, your email service provider manages all of your contacts’ information, sends out all of the emails on the schedule you set, and unsubscribes (filters out) or segments people not interested in what you have to offer. 

Our favorite, and what we use, is Kartra. It’s an incredibly powerful email marketing tool that will do all of this and so much more for your business. Read my full review and breakdown here. 

2. Countdown timer. Human nature is to procrastinate whenever possible. People need a sense of urgency, a sense of if-I-don’t-act-now-I’m-going-to-miss-out, or they’ll likely never make a decision. This is why you only offer your product (or bonus, or special offer) for a limited time in your funnel. To do this, you’ll use a tool called a countdown timer. We use Karta for this (yes, this too!), but there are lots of tools out there to integrate a countdown timer into your evergreen sales funnel. 

Please don’t feel bad about using this “scripted urgency” — you’re actually doing people a favor by giving them a gentle little push to make a decision they intuitively know is right for them. 

3. Your website. Your website is where you’ll put the sign-up form that people will use to enter your sales funnel. It’s where you’ll house some of the content (blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.) that you send in your nurture sequences, and where you’ll build your sales and purchase pages. I am a huge fan of WordPress, and it is the ONLY platform I recommend for hosting and building your website. 

4. Webinar software. If part of your evergreen email marketing funnel is a webinar or workshop, you’ll need some sort of software to create and share that. We use Zoom for our webinars and then send them out via Kartra, but another very robust webinar software platform is Demio.

5. Evergreen funnel software. There are also all-in-one tools that will do almost all of the above, and more, for you inside one tool. Like a one-stop-shop for building an evergreen email marketing funnel. Kartra is one of them, and another one of our favorites is DeadlineFunnel. 

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Depending on which tools you choose and your unique setup, you may have additional needs — but this gives you a good idea of the basic framework you’ll use when building your evergreen email marketing funnel. 

An evergreen sales funnel is the key to freedom in your biz

I’m ALL about teaching women how to work smarter, not harder. And I really truly believe (and have experienced myself) that evergreen funnels are a key component to building a more hands-off business that can serve your whole life. 

If you’re personally managing every aspect of email communications, you’re expending way too much energy. If you’re relying on live launching to make your annual sales, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of stress and unreliable results. If you’re trying to promote and sell on social media, you’re barking up the wrong marketing tree. 

Each of these approaches requires that you be “on” pretty much at all times. It’s not sustainable, and it will eventually lead to frustration and burnout. 

Along with rock-solid SEO on your (WordPress) site, setting up an efficient evergreen email marketing funnel is THE best thing you can do for your business, your revenue, your satisfaction, and your overall well being.

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Ready to master automated sales funnels so you can work less, earn more, and finally build the business of your dreams?

Inside the Success With Soul Incubator, we accomplish in ONE YEAR what it would take you five (or more) years to do on your own.

How? We focus on six key pillars of healthy, grounded business ownership — a framework that’s radically and refreshingly different from the standard hustle + grind approach.

In this FREE masterclass, Six Systems for Six-Figure CEOs, I’ll take you inside this framework and show you why the Incubator is THE place to create a soul-aligned business that serves your whole life.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Using an Evergreen Email Marketing Funnel