Create A Sales Funnel for an Art Therapist

A sales funnel is a series of steps that you guide your customer through from their initial visit to your website until their final purchase. In the case of an art therapist, a sales funnel is the process from the time your potential client finds your website through to when they make their first appointment.

The funnel is the metaphor that suggests how you guide your potential clients through your therapy practice marketing. A funnel holds a specific shape and has a clear entry and exit point that material flows through. This is similar to how you market to your potential clients – their entry point is usually a visit to your website and the exit point of the sales funnel is when they book an appointment with you. Your exit point may vary depending on the type of income you earn. Other exit points of a sales funnel for a therapist might include the sale of an ebook or a customer purchasing a workshop that you are running.

A funnel has a shape that is typically wider at the top and narrow at the bottom. Continuing with the analogy to sales, typically a wide funnel refers to many people visiting your website at the start, however, by the time you have walked your website visitors through your sales funnel, only a few of the original readers will eventually become potential clients. Your audience becomes narrower/smaller with each step of the sales funnel as your information becomes more specific to your ideal client.

A sales funnel can also extend beyond the first sale or booking to ensure that you have good customer retention where your clients feel confident in continuing to use your services on an ongoing basis.

Sales funnels help you develop your marketing and sales process into an organised series of purposeful steps to find new clients for your art therapy practice.

Through these series of steps, your sales funnel needs to attract potential clients and then present your art therapy practice as a helpful solution so that your potential client feels confident in taking the step to reach out and book an appointment with you.

Sales funnels can be a complicated process if you run a business that has a variety of products and services that you provide to a wide range of clients with varying demographics. However, if you run a smaller business such as an art therapy practice, your products and services are generally defined to mostly client sessions. You also may lean towards helping clients who meet a specific demographic.

Your art therapy practice has limited variables with regard to services and clients and therefore your sales funnel can be kept relatively simple. If you are new to sales funnels and marketing your therapy practice, you should try and keep your sales funnel simple so that you can direct your limited time and financial resources to your marketing strategy.

If you complicate your sales funnel, you will start to invest time and money on different strategies and often miss the opportunity to assess how effective they are in attracting new clients to your therapy practice.

An example of a sales funnel could be:

Facebook Ad >
    > leads to a landing page on your website >
        > leads to an offer to your reader to download a free exercise in exchange for their email address >
            > sending emails educating your readers about your private practice and how you can help potential clients >
                > sending emails detailing how to book an appointment >
                    > a client booking an appointment

In this blog post, we’re covering the details on how to create on primary sales funnel for your therapy practice. Over time, as you become more confident with your marketing strategy, you can begin to develop additional sales funnels to reach your potential clients.

To develop your first primary sales funnel three important steps that form a part of your overall strategy:

1. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

Attracting your ideal customer entails finding your customer and then positioning your therapy practice as an answer to solving their problem. When seeking a therapist, your potential client is looking for a therapist who can meet their requirements around appointment times, cost and your approach to working with clients.

These issues should be addressed in your marketing materials and made clear to your potential clients through your website or other offline marketing platforms.

We’ve created a free Ideal Client Checklist to download. This will help you identify your ideal client to market to in your sales funnel.

The checklist covers important topics such as:

• The benefits of identifying your ideal client
• Serving your clients
• Demographics to assess
• How to assess your current clients

2. ASK YOUR CLIENT TO TAKE ACTION

The first step is attracting your client to your website, however, eventually, you need to ask your client to take action in the form of booking an appointment with you or making contact with you to discuss any further details.

This is another opportunity for you to communicate to your potential client that the process of booking appointments and contacting you. You should address any potential barriers your potential client may start to formulate in their mind including the time it takes to receive a response, the process to book an appointment, and how easy it is to start working with your client including any administrative steps required.

3. WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR CUSTOMER TO DO?

Asking your client to take action is an integral part of your sales funnel. Some of the most common actions you can request your client take are:

• Book an appointment
• Contact you for further details
• Sign up to your email list
• Purchase an ecourse (if applicable)
• Purchase a product (if applicable)
• Download a free offer

Ideally, you do not want your website visitor or potential client to visit your website and leave without taking a specific action that will further increase their desire to connect with your therapy practice.

The good thing about creating a sales funnel is it allows you to develop a very specific set of steps in your marketing activities. Defining these specific steps can help you develop your strategy with a purpose that can help limit doubt and confusion in your mind in terms of what you need to do to start marketing your therapy practice.

HOW MANY SALES FUNNELS?

You will create a sales funnel for each income stream in your business. For example if you run private therapy sessions + group workshops + sell ebooks + sell art kits, then you should have a separate sales funnel for each income stream.

If you have one sales funnel that includes all income streams you can potentially confuse or alienate your potential customers/clients as you may have clients who are only interested in private therapy and not interested in an ecourse, whereas you may have community groups who are interested in workshops but not private sessions. By creating a separate sales funnel for each income stream, you can ensure that your marketing message for each income stream is specific to the customer who is interested in that product.

To start with, create only one sales funnel so that you can learn the mechanics of how sales funnels work. The sales funnel you should create first should be based on the income stream that generates the most income for your therapy practice. If 80% of your income is derived from therapy work and 20% is derived from group work, then it makes more sense to create your first sales funnel that focuses on your private therapy work.

Below are the most important steps you need to take to set up your sales funnel:

CREATE A SALES FUNNEL FLOWCHART

The first step is to create a visual representation of your sales funnel. Start by drawing a funnel shape that has a defined top, middle, and bottom section. Remember as you create your sales funnel, that you are starting with broad information and will refine the information as you develop more understanding about how your potential clients may find your practice.

At the top, you will include all the potential ways in which you can attract the attention of your ideal client or customer. This might include advertising, social media, networking (articles/blogs), organic search etc. Include all of the potential ways you think your ideal client may initially find you. You can use the information you already know about how previous clients have found your therapy practice.

CONTENT THAT YOU NEED FOR YOUR SALES FUNNEL

The second step is to create a list of all the content that you could potentially create to attract your client to your website as well as continue to stay engaged in your sales funnel. This content should be free to your client.

You can choose to make your content accessible to anyone who visits your website, or you can ask your client to sign up to your email list to receive the free item to download. Be sure that you make it clear to your reader what is required for them to receive the free content information so they can make an informed decision about whether they wish to provide any personal information such as their email address.

Look back over the sources of traffic that you identified in the previous step and write a list of potential content that might interest your potential client. This could include worksheets, exercises, videos, checklists, questionnaires, collage items, art images etc. This content needs to entice your potential clients to sign up for your newsletter.

If you are focusing on clients to book an appointment with you, you may want to include a checklist about how to look for an ideal therapist. Remember that at this stage your potential client is currently exploring how to find a therapist and they may be presented with many options that appear confusing to them. Your task at this stage is not to offer solutions on how to help with their primary mental health issues but instead to help them take the first step of finding a therapist amongst the choices that are available to them.

Deciding on the type of content to create may feel confusing at this point. It’s helpful to refer back to your original sales funnel strategy and ask yourself:

• What do you want your client to do
• How will you ask your client to take action

Therefore your free content offer should ask your client to download or sign up for your free offer.

CREATE YOUR FREE CONTENT OFFER

Now that you’ve spent some time on your sales funnel to work out the potential traffic sources and free content options that you will provide, it’s time to create the actual content. You may want to focus on one single free offer or offer a few different options to test which option receives the most attention. You can also start with one offer and then add additional options a few weeks later. It’s important at this stage to keep momentum while you build your sales funnel so create the easiest option to start with.

Your free content offer should be short and clear. If you make the content short, you will increase the likelihood that your reader will read your content and take action. It’s helpful to keep your free offer within 1-5 pages long depending on what the content is. Anything longer may result in your reader downloading the free offer but not taking any action because the task of reading the information takes too long.

Make the content available in a widely used format such as pdf, mp3, or jpg depending on your type of free offer.

CREATE YOUR LANDING PAGE TO YOUR SALES FUNNEL

A landing page is a page on your website where your readers arrive from the external sources we discussed above. This page on your website should contain the details on how to access the free content that you are offering.

This page represents the middle part of your sales funnel where your potential client or customer takes action. Your landing page should include information that informs your reader and encourages them to take further action to stay engaged with your private practice.

CREATE YOUR EMAIL SEQUENCE IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

This part of your sales funnel occurs in between the middle and the bottom of your funnel. This section represents the communication that you have with your client as you educate them about your private practice and how you can help them.

The communication in a sales funnel is typically delivered via email where you have a direct connection to your client. At any stage of this communication series, your reader can choose to opt-out of your email list if your information no longer interests them.

Your readers removing themselves is a natural process of your sales funnel and one that you should learn to embrace as a positive sign instead of a sign that your potential clients don’t like you. Your ultimate goal is to work with clients who fit your ideal client criteria so there is no benefit to keeping people on your list that don’t fit your list. For example, if you like to work with clients who need help with addictions then you will want your email list to reflect this. This means you can then focus your email content on this topic and know that your email list is benefiting from your email content.

The final email in your sequence should lead to asking your clients to purchase a product or book an appointment with you. This represents the bottom of your sales funnel where your client takes action to make the purchase.

Some of the tools you will need to create your sales funnel include:

• Art supplies if you are creating a visual sales funnel on paper. This is a planning process that you can create on paper or simply in a document.
• Software to write content – Evernote, Microsoft Office, Scrivener, Asana, Trello etc
• Image creating software – irfanview, Photoshop, Gimp, Canva
• Website
• Email provider – Mailchimp, Convertkit etc
• Social Media – to promote your landing page

NEED HELP CREATING A SALES FUNNEL?

We have detailed the step by step information about creating a sales funnel for a course in our Course Planner Package. The package is available in 3 different formats including:

• Evernote
• Microsoft Word
• Scrivener

Included in the Course Planner Package are 3 different sales funnels and the steps involved in marketing your course. Use the 3 different scenarios to build your sales funnel. You can use one of the examples included or use a combination. Your sales funnel should suit your course and your audience.

ADDITIONAL READING:

We’ve included some links to previous blog posts that will help you develop your understanding and strategy for improving sales and marketing in your private practice.

MARKETING:

• Where to find Clients for your Art Therapy Practice
• How to Build an Email List for your Therapy Practice
• How to Create a Free Offer to Build Your Email List
• Link List: Online Marketing Courses to Improve Your Marketing Skills
• Understand the Marketing Cycle of Your Art Therapy Practice
• What to do when you have no clients booked

PLANNING:

• BOOK REVIEW Six-Week Start-Up: A step-by-step program for starting your business, making money, and achieving your goals 
• How to Plan Your Marketing Strategies

PROFITABILITY:

• How Do I Create an Ecourse for my Therapy Practice
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Therapist Income
• Strategies to Increase Profit For Your Therapy Practice

SIGN UP below to download the FREE Sales Funnel Worksheet

You can also download an Evernote summary of the Sales Funnel Worksheet. You can access this Evernote document here and save the note to your own Evernote account. You can also view the Evernote document even if you do not have an Evernote account. Evernote basic accounts are FREE.

You can read more about Evernote in our blog post here: 10 Useful Tips to Use Evernote