The Only Black Friday Checklist You Need To Sell More Courses

Ready to boost your online course sales this Black Friday? This four-phase checklist will help you launch and promote your course.

American consumers spent $8.9 billion online during Black Friday 2021.

With such impressive figures floating around, it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out if you’re not selling courses by the bucket load on Black Friday.

Coupled with the ever-increasing demand for massive price cuts, discounts and deals, many businesses feel pressured to lower prices to please their customers and get more sales. 

But the truth is, there are many ways to run a successful Black Friday campaign without devaluing your course and your expertise.

This is the season for catching new customers, upgrading existing customers and turbocharging your revenue. You just need to know how to do it the right way.

In this blog, we’ll break down our ultimate 4-phase Black Friday Checklist to help you create an irresistible online course offer that will not only boost your sales but will attract and unlock new audiences. No wild discounts necessary.

This article contains tips from our recent webinar sales funnel course with Neil Patel – plus free templates, examples and more.

Here are the four phases to launching your online course during Black Friday:

• Phase 1: Get product-market fit for your course
• Phase 2: Create your premium offer for Black Friday
• Phase 3: Launch your course: Sales and marketing
• Phase 4: Experiment, grow, and scale

PHASE 1

Get product-market fit for your course

The crucial first step to creating an online course product is to get product-market fit – that means finding a good market and creating a product that can satisfy that market.

Before you build your sales funnel, you need to make sure there’s a demand for your product. Your Black Friday promotion is going to fall on deaf ears if you don’t have an audience for your online courses.

At this stage, you might have a ready-made course or you’re looking to pre-sell your course before you’ve created it. The main goal is to test your product.

Define your audience

Building a successful funnel starts with good foundations – knowing exactly who you’re selling to and what they want. Start with a basic understanding of your audience and then refine your knowledge of your ideal customer as you gather more data on them.

Knowing your target audience will help you identify exactly how your product helps solve their problems. You can use this knowledge whenever you’re creating content, talking to customers and producing marketing materials.

Get our ultimate guide to how to define your target audience – plus templates and workbooks to take you step-by-step through the process.

Validate your course idea

Option A: Pre-selling

Imagine this: you spend months creating an online course only to launch to crickets. 

To avoid this worst-case scenario, run a test to confirm that your audience will be interested in paying for your knowledge – this is called “validating the demand.” 

If you don’t have a ready-made course, we suggest pre-selling your course. This gives you the chance to find out what your audience wants before pouring time and resources into creating your course. 

(If you need some inspo on how pre-selling can work, check out Ellen Daly’s customer story where she made over $70,000 USD in her first few months of launching her course.)

If you’re pre-selling your course, consider running your first test as a live cohort experience to allow you to gather real-time feedback from your students. This lets you craft your content based on your student’s needs and tailor your every lesson to them.

When you’re done with your first live course, you can then repurpose the recorded videos and refine your course content further – adding more value with every launch.

Read our ultimate guide to pre-selling your course here,

Option B: Beta test a ready-made course

If you’ve already created your course on Thinkific, we still recommend that you conduct a beta test launch to gather feedback from at least 10 students. You can choose to sell this course or simply run it for free to test your content.

When you test a course, it’s really important to collect feedback from your students. This will help you refine your course based on what your students liked and disliked and what they want to see more of in your course content.

Find 5 ways to validate your online course concept here.

PHASE 2

Create your premium offer for Black Friday

When you’ve confirmed that there’s a market for your course and people will pay for it, it’s time to move to the next phase – turning it into a premium content offer that lets you charge your ideal price.

Here are 4 ways to create a premium offer:

1. Use value stacking
2. Add limited offer bonus products
3. Make course bundles
4. Offer coupons

Use value stacking

You don’t necessarily have to discount your offer to run a Black Friday promotion. There are loads of ways to promote your online course without dropping your prices – and value stacking is one of them. 

Instead of slashing your rate, value stacking helps your customers see exactly what they’re getting for their money. This method lets you group several benefits together into one premium offering, giving students the perception that they’re getting more bang for their buck. 

For example, if you’re currently charging a flat rate of $100 for your course, you can use value stacking to increase the perceived value of your offering – and demand a higher price.

Here’s an example of a course package:

• 30 hours of training
• 3 free workbooks
• 5 templates
• 15 minute consultation call
• Exclusive course community access

By outlining exactly what your students are getting and adding benefits like access to your course community to your package, you can increase the perceived value of your course and build a Black Friday promotion that generates a buzz around your brand.

Example: Ellie Diop, Ellievated Academy

Ellie Diop uses value stacking throughout her online course business to add value to her offerings. Here’s an example from her Millionaire Mommy Blueprint Masterclass.

What’s inside:

• 5 Millionaire Mommy Training modules
• Millionaire Mommy Hotel Ownership module
• Mommy to Millionaire Workbook
• Pay Your Kids job description template
• Millionaire Mommy Facebook Club Access

Rather than just offering her course on its own, Ellie uses calculated value stacking to make her audience feel like they’re getting extra value from the course materials and modules.

Learn how Ellie Diop made 7 figures in less than a year with Thinkific.

Add limited offer bonus products

To enhance your course offering for Black Friday, you could also add limited-time-only bonus products to drive your audience to make a purchase immediately.

Some bonus product ideas include:

• Exclusive content like a video or e-book
• One-to-one calls
• Personal or group coaching sessions
• Live feedback on an assignment
• Access to a private group

To make the offer more enticing, use the power of scarcity in your sales strategy. For example, if you’re running a limited time offer for group coaching sessions, cap the offer at just 30 participants so your audience has an incentive to be quick and secure their spot. 

You could also try a cohort-based course that only accepts enrollments up to a certain date. This encourages potential customers to make a purchase now so they can join the next cohort and avoid missing out.

Make course bundles

If you have more than one online course, consider bundling two or more of them together and selling that bundle for a better price than if they were purchased individually.

We get it – you might be reluctant to water down the perceived value of your course with discounting. But when done well, offering a bundle discount to incentivize your customers to make bigger purchases can be a really effective strategy.

If you’re still not convinced, check out this example.

Example: Kat Norton, Miss Excel

Six-figure course creator Kat Norton uses bundles to sell more courses in her Excel-focused learning academy Miss Excel.

Kat offers three courses priced individually at a price of $738. But students can purchase them all together as a bundle for just $497.

With this offer, students win because they’re getting more content for less, and Miss Excel wins because bundles increase the average revenue per customer.

This doesn’t devalue the perceived value of her courses – it just acknowledges that many students will want to purchase several courses and rewards that action with a lower price.

The best part? Happy customers will come back again to purchase more of her courses in the future!

Check out the full Miss Excel case study here to see how Kat grew her business from scratch.

Creating product bundles in Thinkific is really easy. You simply create a new bundle like you’d create a new course and then select the courses that are part of that bundle.

For Black Friday, you can create a bundle that’s public for a limited time only. When your Black Friday promotion is over, you can set that bundle as Private so it’s no longer visible. This helps create urgency for your customers – and lets you go back to selling your courses at their regular price when the deal is over.

Offer coupons

As well as bundles, coupons are another great way to incentivize your audience to make a purchase.

With Thinkific, you can create a coupon code in seconds to discount your course by a specific percentage or dollar amount. You can (and should) set a limit on the coupon so that a limited number of people are able to use it – or set an expiry date so the coupon no longer works after a specific day.

Both of these options help to create a sense of FOMO among prospective customers and give them an extra nudge to purchase your course right away.

If you need more help with pricing your courses, read our ultimate guide to How to Price Your Online Course.

PHASE 3

Launching your course: Sales and marketing

By this stage, you should have a premium offer that you’re ready to take to market. Here are the basics on how to market and sell your online course over Black Friday and beyond.

Related: How to Market Online Courses

Step 1: Designing your course sales page

If you want to sell more online courses this Black Friday, you’ll need to create a high-converting landing page.

If you’ve chosen to pre-sell your course, you may already have a sales page set up but it’s worth revisiting it to make any updates and see how you can enhance your content.

Your sales page has one goal – to persuade the reader to sign up for your course. That’s it. Every word on your sales page should contribute to achieving that goal.

Here are the key elements of a top-performing landing page:

1. A compelling headline – Effective headlines clearly state both the offer and your unique value proposition. Your sub-headline then fills in the blanks by adding key details.
2. Visuals – Eye-catching images or an introduction video grabs readers’ attention.
3. A unique value proposition (UVP) – Think of this as an online elevator pitch. Who is your course for? What does it help them do? Why is that beneficial to them?”
4. Copy – Create great sales copy that tells a powerful story and compels the reader to take action.
5. Urgency – Add trigger words and phrases like “now,” “limited time offer,” and “act today” to compel sign-ups from readers.
6. Risk Reversal – Include a money-back guarantee or a free trial to convince customers to take the plunge,
7. Social Proof – What are past students saying about your course? Add social proof like reviews and testimonials to reinforce the perceived value of your offering and build trust.

The success of your landing page is measured by the conversion rate from visitors to customers – if it’s not converting, it needs tweaking.

Learn more about how to build a compelling sales page here.

Step 2: Launching your course

What is a course launch?

A course launch is a marketing campaign that’s sent to your existing audience and serves to build awareness and facilitate enrollments in your online course within a set period of time. Course launches are typically done over a period of 3-4 weeks via a series of emails or social media posts. 

They usually consist of three phases that take as many people from your audience from 

Unaware → Problem aware → Solution aware → Most aware

The three stages of a course launch are:

1. Creating awareness and building hype
2. Official launch/cart open
3. Countdown and cart close

Each stage is essential to increase the chances that your audience will be receptive to your sales pitch – and encourage them to purchase your course.

1. Creating awareness and building hype:

In the first step, you need to begin by addressing your audience’s problem with NO mention of your course whatsoever. 

For example, if you teach dog training, you could share a listicle of the top ten signs your dog needs training – and that’s it. You should not be doing any direct selling of your course or leading customers to your sales page yet! 

At the very most, you could drop hints that you’re working on “something big” and that it will be launching soon, but ultimately this phase is about priming your audience and getting them into the right mindset for your course launch.

If you jump in immediately with a sales pitch, you risk losing your audience as they’re not ready to hear it. Be patient!

2. Official launch/cart open:

Now’s the time when you can start directing customers to your sales page. Your campaign focus at this point is to get as many people as possible to purchase your course. This phase will be the bulk of your launch campaign and can be broken down into further steps:

1. Launch
2. Problem
3. Solution
4. Benefits
5. Social proof & FOMO
6. FAQs & Risk Reversals

Get our step-by-step guide to launching your online course here.

3. Countdown and cart close:

In the last 2-3 days of your campaign, you’ll want to ramp up your communication with your audience. The aim is to keep your course top of mind right before you close your sales to convince any interested people in your audience to make a purchase.

If you’re familiar with that last minute feeling, you’re not alone. Many of us – your customers included – leave things until the last possible chance before making a purchase.

That means you need to signpost when your offer is closing and how long your customers have left to buy. A countdown clock on your landing page is a really effective method to drive the message home.

When should I launch my online course?

As a general rule, you should only launch your online course once you have a finished product that you’re happy to sell to your audience – beta versions are fine, but your course shouldn’t be missing entire modules or other large components. 

The exceptions to this are if you’re using a drip schedule to release your content gradually over a number of weeks or if you’re delivering the content live. In these circumstances, you can continue to work on your course content as you go – so long as you have a clear idea of what needs to be done week-by-week.

Step 3: Automate your funnel with Lead Nurture:

Automation means setting everything on autopilot. You can automate your sales funnel when you know that it’s working. Automation will help you save time and scale its impact on your business. It’s like doubling down on a bet you know will win.

Many creators and infopreneurs try to jump straight into marketing automation – but automating something untested isn’t a good idea. Skipping to automation too early could mean committing to something that isn’t going to help you grow your business. When you’re just starting out, sometimes you need to be more hands-on before you can automate and scale.

Example Funnel: Build a simple webinar sales funnel

If you’re creating a sales funnel for your course for the first time, you’ll want to start simple, experiment and grow over time. Here we’ll outline how to get started with a webinar sales funnel for your new product.

The most important thing is to create your basic funnel and then refine and test each part of the process as you go. Here are the 3 steps:

1. Create your webinar

For course creators, free webinars are a brilliant way to introduce new customers to your course and generate more sales.

Once you’ve validated your course offering, you can create a free webinar to sell it. This is your #1 marketing asset, so it’s important to spend time outlining your webinar to make sure you’re providing genuine value for your audience.

Find out how to create a free webinar for your course here.

2. Produce an email campaign

When you’ve outlined your webinar campaign, you’ll need to get people from your email list into the webinar so you can deliver your killer sales pitch.

This is where email marketing comes in – and it’s one of the most important parts of a successful sales funnel. Try starting with a flow of 9 emails first and then work your way up to a more complex campaign.

Get our exclusive webinar email flow templates here to help you start.

3.  Set up a closing strategy

Your closing strategy comes right after your sales pitch in the webinar. This is where you direct leads to purchase your product. There are a few options for closing a sale. 

You can direct customers to:

1. A purchase page
2. A course sales page
3. A consultative sales call

You can choose to use a single method or try using a combination of strategies. For example, you could push webinar attendees to book a consultative sales call with you and send those people who missed your webinar to a sales page. 

A sales call is a really effective way to sell more courses – by talking to your customers one-on-one, you’ll be better able to understand their problems and how they can benefit from your product, while also gathering useful feedback on your target audience for the future.

Get our free spin-selling script and template here.

4. Launch and test

By this point, you should have everything prepared for your launch campaign: your webinar, email funnel, and closing strategy. 

Test the entire funnel first as a customer before launching it. You can send the email to a friend to help go through the entire process and ensure there are no typos, missing links, or barriers to making a purchase.

Step 4: Drive more traffic to your sales funnel

Creating a sales funnel is great – but you need to drive traffic to your funnel for it to be effective.

Without a steady stream of new traffic, you can’t keep testing your sales funnel. If your current traffic strategy is not working (or if you don’t really have one to begin with), here are a few strategies from Neil Patel to help you grow your traffic.

1. Paid advertising:
   1. Pay-per-click advertising
   2. Facebook advertising 
   3. Facebook retargeting ads and then integrate Google Pixel with Thinkific
2. Social media:
   1. Facebook Groups
3. Partnerships
   1. Partner with another brand and send a dedicated drop-in email
   2. Be a guest on a podcast or start a podcast
   3. Recruit affiliates to promote your course for a commission

NOTE: Paid advertising is a great way to get more customers fast but it’s a strategy that’s only recommended once you have product-market fit, a sound understanding of your customer and you’re willing to spend time and money honing your strategy.

Related: 57 Ways To Market Your Online Course & Increase Sales in 2021

PHASE 4

Experiment, grow, and scale

Once you’ve built a sales funnel to sell more courses, the next step is to keep experimenting and optimizing your funnel for higher conversions. 

This is where you can start implementing more advanced tactics like building partnerships to help you transform into a 7-figure business. 

Analyze and experiment

Before knowing what elements of your sales funnel to experiment with first, it’s important to find the problem areas to help you focus your efforts. Analyze your funnel to see where customers are dropping off and identify the barriers stopping people from making a purchase.

It’s important to set up ways to get feedback on your course and your brand from your students – like feedback surveys and interviews. With that in place, you can then launch and sell your course knowing you’ve created a feedback loop for yourself to help you improve your course post-launch.

Check out our ultimate guide to How to sell online courses for more tips.

Scale up

Building a successful online course business doesn’t happen overnight. Most successful Thinkific creators started from humble beginnings – and a lot of testing – before they were able to build their full sales funnel and start scaling their business. 

If you’ve reached this stage, congratulations!

Once you have your perfect mix of promotional activities that convert your audience into paying customers, it’s time to grow and scale your business. This is where you can take a funnel from $10k or $100k to $1M and more.

At this point, you should have been testing out your main traffic strategy and gaining traction. To grow your business, you’ll want to start diversifying your traffic strategies to drive even more traffic to your automated sales funnel. You can also start scaling by introducing and upselling new products.

Read our full guide to taking the next steps to scale your business here.

Ready to launch your course for Black Friday?

Use this Black Friday checklist to get you ready for launch day and sell more courses! The trick is to keep experimenting and refining your offering, gathering as much feedback as possible from your students along the way.

This post was originally published in 2022. It was updated in August of 2023 with more information.