What is an evergreen sales funnel

If you’ve been building your online business, you may have heard about setting up your evergreen sales funnel. But what is an evergreen sales funnel and how do you build one?

Basically, in very simple terms, an evergreen sales funnel is a sales mechanic, where you sell something – your course, template, workshop, membership, throughout the year. This means, anyone can find your offer and join it at any time, without you having to promote it.

It is different from a live launch – where your offer has a cart-open and cart-close dates. Everyone joins in that window and if they miss, they miss.

While live launches require active promotion, evergreen funnels work in background. They welcome people to your world, showcase your values, and promote your offers. Evergreen sales funnels do require upfront work and maintenance, they’re not set and forget mechanism. Now, lets see what you need to build an evergreen sales funnel.

Evergreen Funnel Pieces

Number of pieces in an evergreen sales funnel depends on how simple or complex you want it to be. At it’s core it needs 4 pieces:

1. Something free that solves one problem: You need a free resource (also called freebie) that you will give away in exchange for people to join your email list. This could be a checklist, swipe file, a tool, template, or any other resource that solves ONE specific problem for your audience. Read how to set up a freebie funnel with genuine deadlines.
   
   
2. A powerful email sequence: Once someone joins your email list, you need a sequence of emails (anywhere from 4-12) to deliver your free resource, introduce you, and sell your paid offer. As you can see, this sequence will introduce you, share your story/mission/values, and a combination of value + sales email. In sales emails, sequence will promote your offer – share how it solves the bigger problem related to freebie and why your audience needs it.
   
3. A sales page the emails point at: You need a sales page to showcase your offer. This should sell the transformation and handle objections from the audience. And obviously a way to take money. You can even do away with sales page and have it in Google docs but you need a way to accept money for your offer.
   
4. A deadline that belongs to that person: This is the piece that drives sale action. You need a deadline that holds true from email – sales page. You want these to be authentic and not reset on page refresh or cookie clearing. If you don’t have this, honestly I suggest you don’t run discount sales.

As you can see, there are a lot of important parts in evergreen sales funnel.

Why Evergreen Funnel needs Deadlines

In short because they drive action. Without a deadline, an email sequence is just a newsletter with a link in it. People read it, think “that looks useful,” and leave it to take action later. As we both know, that later hardly arrives.

That’s where deadline comes into play. When they see a deadline to an offer, they know they need to take action, which drives sales.

But important thing to keep in mind, you need a genuine, authentic deadline not baseless counters. What does it mean? Let me explain with an example.

Say, you are offering a 25% discount in your evergreen sales funnel. You write “your 25% off expires in 2 days” in an automated email.

Then your deadline tool has to be smart enough to know who landed when so that it can control their unique offer expiry. For someone who landed in funnel on Tuesday, their deadline expires Thursday, while the one who started on Thursday – for them offer expires on Saturday.

Apart from uniqueness, you also want deadlines to be unique. If you put a countdown on the sales page so when user lands on the sales page they will see the countdown. But that countdown resets when they refresh the page, or they clear browser cookies, or when they open it on phone or in incognito mode. This shows that the deadline is decoration. And a person who knows your urgency is fake does not buy at full price later.

A real evergreen deadline is tied to the subscriber, not the date and not the browser. It starts when they enter the funnel, it shows the same number in the email and on the sales page, and it actually closes something when it hits zero.

TimerPulse helps you add this authentic, genuine deadlines to your emails that stay true for each subscriber and devices.

Does evergreen funnel ever close?

So what happens when Evergreen funnel deadline expires? Honestly, this is up to you how you set up.

You can offer any of these options when your evergreen sales funnel deadline expires:

• A discount that reverts to full price
• A bonus that disappears (a template set, a walkthrough call, a bonus module)
• A payment plan that goes away, leaving only pay-in-full
• An enrollment window, if there’s any live or cohort element

While you may take any action, mechanics play an important role. When the clock hits zero, the offer page has to change.It can redirect to a full-price version, swap out the bonus section, or send them to a short “you missed it” page with the standard offer on it. If the discounted checkout link still works after expiry, you’ve trained your list to ignore every deadline you set from here on.

When to setup evergreen sales funnel?

Setting up evergreen sales funnel requires a lot of work upfront and it involves a lot of moving part. Typically, conversion rate drops when converted to an evergreen funnel. Here are few scenarios when not to setup your evergreen sales funnel:

1. If you haven’t sold the offer yet: Sell it live once or twice first. This will give you lot of information about what your people want. You need to know which objection actually stops people before you can write the email that handles it, and you can’t guess that from an empty inbox.
   
2. No audience: Setting up a successful evergreen sales funnel is a numbers game. You need traffic to convert them to buyers. If you list grows by 5-10 people a month, you will struggle to get returns on a sales funnel. Work on getting traffic first.
   
3. Offer type:if your offer is genuinely one-time, like a live workshop on a fixed date then setting up evergreen funnel doesn’t;t make much sense. Just run the launch. You can later set up an evergreen funnel with recordings + bonuses.

But if you have an offer that sells, a steady inflow of new subscribers, and no appetite for running the same launch four times a year, then setting up evergreen sales funnel can be game-changer.

What to set up first

Build an audience first. Once you’ve an audience, create an offer that solves their problems. Run it live with them, get their feedback – make it better, handle their objections.

Once you have an offer that solves their problems, write emails as they will be doing the big work. You can repurpose your live-launch emails in evergreen sequence.

Then decide exactly where the deadline should start. This is the part people get wrong at the setup stage: the deadline can begin on a link click in an email, or on a tag your email platform applies. Each one suits a different funnel shape, and not every deadline tool supports all three. Check yours before you build around it.

Then run yourself through the whole thing with a test address.

TimerPulse runs the deadline part of sales funnel: it creates one deadline per subscriber, consistent in the email and on the page, starting on a link click or when someone is added to your email list. Have a look.