Deadline Funnel

Deadline Funnel is a powerful tool that helps you run evergreen or time-limited marketing campaigns and use scarcity to increase conversions.

It's essentially a standalone software that you'll integrate with your page builder and email marketing tool to create these campaigns.

In case that's the first time you hear about an ?evergreen campaign?, let me explain that first to understand why you'd even want to create that!

An evergreen campaign is a campaign that can potentially be automated and run on an on-going basis based on the customer?s interaction and where they are in your funnel.

Now, practically, if you're a course creator, why would you want it and what does that look like?

Let's say that you're currently running your course with a closed cart strategy. Meaning that you close it for most of the year but open it for enrolment with a big launch every now and then, to create scarcity and urgency for people to enroll.

This is a popular strategy for course creators, but can be both risky and exhausting.

Risky because you're betting you're year?s revenue on a few big launches instead of having a constant flow of revenue.

And exhausting because? well if you've ever done a launch you know why!

That's where evergreen campaigns and Deadline Funnel comes in!

With a tool like Deadline Funnel you'd be able to simulate a limited time ?open cart launch? for users throughout the year, based on their action in the funnel instead of doing it for everyone a few times a year.

So you could setup an automated webinar funnel, which can be the triggering event for a user to get into that launch sequence with timers and links expiring after a set amount of days just for them:

Ok, now that hopefully it makes more sense what Deadline Funnel could be used for, let's get into the review!

One thing to understand before getting into the features, is that Deadline Funnel doesn't really have any competitors?

The closest in the market right now is Thrive Ultimatum, but that's only for WordPress websites and won't take care of the email side of things and timers?

Here is a breakdown of Deadline Funnel main features:

Campaign type

When creating a new campaign, a great thing with Deadline funnel is that you have a choice between 3 different types of campaigns: Evergreen, Hybrid and Fixed:

This is very useful because that means you can also see Deadline funnel for your regular campaigns and add scarcity to it!

The evergreen campaign will be the one that's based on the user's specific action, the hybrid is a recurring campaign (weekly, monthly,...) and the fixed campaign is for a specific period (e.g Black Friday).

Each of them are rather intuitive to set up although it takes a little bit of time for you to wrap yourself around it, and sometimes grabbing a pen and paper and drawing the timeline and what you want to have happen in the campaign can help!

Floating bar and pages rules

After setting that up, you'll be able to pick which page you'll want the floating bars to appear on.

Here is what they look like:

You can of course customize these to your liking for each page in your funnel, with a user-friendly interface in Deadline Funnels. It's not a lot but that's really all you need to be able to change.

This is also where you decide what they ?after deadline? redirection will be. So essentially where will be people be sent once they?ve missed the deadline (it could be a waitlist page for example)

If you don't like the floating bar, you can also simply embed a timer on your page or have some dynamic text show:

You can also choose to not use any of these and just have the redirection set up for these pages after the deadline.

Emails timers

The second part of making your campaign evergreen or simply synergic with the rest of your funnel, is setting up email timers.

With deadline funnels, this is just a small snippet of code you'll embed into your email campaign.

You can easily edit their appearance to make it look on-brand and not too salesy

You also have a range of templates to choose from to get yours looking good and can also translate ?days? ?hours? etc to another language if you need to.

There are a lot of in-email timers out there and I found Deadline Funnel ones really flexible and easy to adjust.

Lastly with these, you can edit the appearance they'll have after the deadline expires

This can be one of the templates above or your own uploaded image? or simply nothing.

When everything is done and setup, you can use the built in Test tool to make sure everything is setup correctly!

Advanced settings

A few more mention for some of the advanced features of Deadline funnel.

One of them is the pre-launch, which is a setting allowing you to control which pages people will see depending on whether their Deadline Funnel tracking has started yet or not.

This can be useful if you want to force a redirect for people that are tracked to land on a page and not be able to go backward in your funnel.

Lastly, you'll be able to implement tracking for sales of your Deadline funnel campaign, which will be triggered by your cart.

This will enable you to test different variations of your evergreen campaign and see what works better! Useful for A/B testing.

Now, understand that by nature, Deadline Funnel is a complex tool.

So wrapping your head around how it works also entails you're understanding why using it is also a big opportunity.

But the platform has a very user friendly interface and back-end:

It's easy to quickly see all of your campaigns that you can even organize in categories and color-code.

There is a step-by-step checklist for all new campaigns, based on on a Blueprint you can pick from the start, helping you integrate the platforms you're using

On the front-end, as mentioned before, all of the campaign's elements are easy to customize and therefore appear more organic for the user (that won't really know you're using Deadline Funnel).

I particularly appreciate all of the videos and tutorials available to setup any part of your campaign which simplifies this complex tool for almost anyone to pick up and use.

Deadline funnel is an advanced tool for advanced online course creators, and therefore people being able to leverage it.

Its pricing reflects the potential value it could bring to your online course business:

It also comes with a 14 days free trial.

Keep in mind that scarcity is one of the few tested and proven techniques that really stood the test of time to increase revenue.

Now, again this is probably not a tool fitted for beginners that won't be able to generate enough traffic to justify the expense.

It's also hard to compare Deadline Funnel?s affordability, since as mentioned before there are no real competitors on the market right now.

There is no community per se for the platform.

The tool does have a solid user base (over 3,000 as per their website) but there isn't really any place to hang out with them?

On the other hand, the company has a podcast and a lot of useful information for you to know more about using evergreen campaigns.

That plus the extended documentation that as I mentioned before I found particularly useful to use the tool.

And if anything, there is a live chat you can use 24/7 as well as booking a time with the team to go over your specific issues and get it resolved!