How to tell if your business is ready for evergreen revenue

An evergreen funnel works like a sales engine inside your business. It puts your sales emails on autopilot so that you have revenue coming in consistently — without having to lift a finger to make those sales happen.

When sales are coming in automatically, it frees up your time and energy for other things. Maybe it’s that ambitious YouTube channel you’ve been wanting to launch. Or a massive new course you’ve been envisioning but just haven’t had the time to put together because you’ve had to focus on launches that get money in the door. Maybe it’s taking a four-day weekend because your mom is in town and you can.

You know, the reasons that you actually started a business in the first place.

You may be ready for the benefits that come with an evergreen funnel, but that’s not enough. Your business has to be ready, too.

How do you tell if your business is ready for you to flip the switch?

The Evergreen Launch Status Check

Before every shuttle launch, NASA runs what’s called a “launch status check”: a series of “go/no go” questions, all of which have to be “go” before the shuttle is cleared for takeoff.

Evergreen funnels work the same way. There are five systems that must be “go for launch” before you’re ready to proceed:

  • System #1: A successfully launched product
  • System #2: Consistent lead flow
  • System #3: An email tool that supports automated drip emails
  • System #4: A sales page with an order form
  • System #5: A launch funnel that converts at least 0.5%-1.0% of your broadcast list into buyers

Do you have…

RSE Flow

System #1: A successfully launched product

Before you launch an evergreen funnel, you need to make sure that your product is up to the challenge. To be evergreen-ready, a product needs to be something a customer can buy whenever, wherever, and get the value the product promises. We recommend that a product earn at least $10,000 in a single launch before it’s considered evergreen material.

System #2: Consistent lead flow

Before your evergreen funnel can go to work converting leads into sales, there need to be leads to convert. That means having a healthy flow of organic traffic coming into your site.

What does “consistent lead flow” look like? If you plot your monthly leads out on a line graph, and what you get is a roller coaster of unpredictable highs and lows, hold off on evergreen for now. Otherwise, your evergreen funnel will just replicate the same problem.

RSE Curve Bad

RSE Curve

System #3: An email tool that supports automated drip emails

An email automation tool is to an online entrepreneur what a tennis racket is to a tennis player, or a guitar is to a musician. It’s not the source of the greatness, but it’s damn near impossible to make greatness happen without it. For an evergreen funnel, you need an email tool with automated drip email functionality — with plenty of analytics built in that let you track how your campaign is performing when you check in now and then.

Our recommendations for email tools to look at: Mailchimp and ConvertKit.

System #4: A sales page with an order form

An automated sales funnel doesn’t get you much if it’s a dead end. That’s where your sales page comes in. Since you’re going into evergreen with an existing product and an existing funnel (we’ll get to that in a minute) you should have a tested and working sales page and order form ready to go — no major alterations or adjustments required.

System #5: A launch funnel that converts at least 0.5%-1.0% of your broadcast list into buyers

We always recommend taking an existing, functioning funnel and switching it to evergreen, rather than building something from scratch. Why? Because the goal of an evergreen funnel is to automate what already works.

Building something from scratch, without confirming that it gets the results you’re looking for first, is the opposite of that. It’s playing pin the tail on the donkey with your business, and there’s a good chance that it will create more problems than it solves.

Why the high bar?

You might be wondering at this point: Why can’t I build an evergreen funnel now and figure out how to direct traffic into it, or how to optimize conversions later? Answer: it’s your business — you can do what you want.

But here’s the reality: If your product and your launch funnel aren’t working, an evergreen funnel isn’t going to make it any better.

We have products here at  I Will Teach You To Be Rich that we haven’t put into “evergreen mode” because they don’t pass all five of these checkpoints yet. But we’re okay with that. We know that taking the time to get it really right before we go evergreen will more than pay off in the end.

The beauty of an automated evergreen funnel is that once it’s set up, you’ll reap the benefits for years to come.

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