Maintaining an active community around your organization requires consistently providing your audience with a variety of valuable engagement opportunities. For training and skill development-based organizations, this means offering courses that are both valuable and accessible. You can accomplish this by offering your audience online courses.
Online courses allow all of your audience to learn from your organization, independent of their physical location and ability to travel. Plus, with your audience’s busy everyday schedules, quickly taking online courses may be the most convenient option available.
Of course, deciding to offer online learning opportunities is only step one. From there, you’ll need to determine how you’ll plan and market your online courses. To help get you started, this article will walk through five strategies:
- Conduct market research.
- Make registration easy.
- Leverage SEO.
- Create multiple payment plans.
- Offer discounts for repeat customers.
Getting off to a strong start will position your organization’s online courses for future success. However, keep in mind that selling e-learning courses is not a set-it-and-forget-it situation once you have a few core processes set up. Be sure to monitor your data and stay up to date on advances in your field to continually offer your members the best e-learning experience possible. Let’s get started.
1. Conduct market research.
Ensure the courses you are selling are ones your audience wants to buy. This may seem obvious, but it’s not uncommon for organizations to have assumptions about what their audience wants that don’t quite line up with their needs. For example, a business might assume that their audience is tired of online classes and clamoring for in-person instruction, whereas in reality, they may actually prefer virtual courses.
You can get a better sense of what types of courses your audience is interested in by conducting market research. Here are a few methods you can use to gain a fuller perspective of your audience and industry:
- Conduct surveys. The most straightforward way to learn what courses your audience wants is by asking them. Send out surveys that ask questions about their preference regarding course content, format, and availability.
- Analyze competitors. If organizations similar to yours are already offering courses, keep an eye on their course model and results. Take several factors into account when analyzing competitors, such as overall market size. For instance, if a competitor is finding great success with a course, there might be an opportunity for you to offer something similar, but it may also be not worthwhile if they’ve already attracted your target audience.
- Keep an eye on industry trends. Stay up to date on what skills are in demand for your industry to ensure you are continually offering your member’s high-value courses. Additionally, check out trends related to professional development to discover what learning methods and types of courses are most in demand.
As your course program grows, continue to keep up with changes in both your industry and audience’s preferences to ensure your courses remain in demand and valuable. Survey your course participants to learn if your current offerings are meeting their expectations and what you can do to improve further.
2. Make registration easy.
Effective marketing for your courses will take time and effort, so make sure that the registration process is easy and not another obstacle for your potential participants. To accomplish this, your registration form should be accessible, to the point, and quick to complete.
To create an effective registration process, consider investing in course registration software. The right platform will equip you with forms designed to create a user-friendly registration experience. Regpack’s course registration software page offers insight into a few features to look for when assessing registration platforms:
- Mobile-friendly. Your course participants live busy lives, and many of them will appreciate the option to fill out your registration form on the go. Ensure that your registration form can adapt to mobile, desktop, and other devices.
- Automatic billing options. When participants first register for your courses, include an option to enroll in automatic billing. Doing so will ensure they never have to re-enter their financial information or miss a payment, providing uninterrupted access to your courses.
- Conditional logic. You should strive to keep your forms short and easy to fill out. However, if you need to ask many questions, conditional logic can help significantly reduce your form’s length. With conditional logic, your form will adjust based on your participants’ previous answers. For example, when a participant is choosing their courses, you might prompt them to choose what skills they are most interested in. Then, your form will adjust to only show courses that are related to those skills.
If your courses are part of your business’s professional development program, a lengthy registration form may make registrants view your courses as a hassle. However, optimized, dynamic forms can set the right tone from the very beginning, energizing them for their future courses.
3. Leverage SEO.
You can promote your courses directly to customers you already have through email marketing. However, if you’re interested in expanding or want to attract a new e-learning focused audience, you should consider launching a digital marketing campaign. Specifically, you can gain and leverage new organic traffic to your website through your courses by following effective SEO strategies.
SEO is a long-term strategy that will require patience when getting started but can lead to long-term increases in traffic to your courses. Here are a few ways you can start optimizing for search engines:
- Target specific keywords. Ensure your website’s key pages, such as your course information pages, target keywords that are relevant to your product and are terms users are likely to search. Additionally, make sure the keyword is specific to increase your chances of ranking well. The search results page for keywords such as “online courses” will likely be filled with well-established organizations and universities that are difficult to compete against.
- Add location information. Even when marketing online courses, you can improve your odds of appearing in the search results of people who live near you by adding location information about your organization on Google.
- Follow proper page format guidelines. Search engines prioritize pages that follow correct formatting conventions, as they are more accessible and easier to navigate. This means ensuring your headers follow each other in descending chronological order and each page has a title.
To make the most of SEO, you’ll need to understand your audience’s search intent and how it will relate to your organization. Fortunately, online courses tend to have a fairly obvious search intent. For example, people interested in taking a course will commonly search for terms related to skills they want to improve, such as “public-speaking training” or “javascript online courses.”
However, you should also be aware of searches that users might try before looking for a specific course. For example, someone interested in earning a certification might first search for “desirable job skills.” Creating content at a variety of levels can help you attract new potential customers early on in their research.
4. Create multiple payment plans.
Let’s say your business wants to offer a variety of courses when you first launch your online course program. There are a few highly-focused courses, as well as longer options that can help participants earn certifications. With a variety of courses, you will also likely have different price points, some of which may be more affordable to various segments of your audience than others.
You can earn revenue and give your audience a way to access the courses they need with payment plans. This provides benefits for both your business and participants. For your business, you can receive a predictable, steady cash flow through your payment plans. You can choose a registration software that allows you to see your future income through your payment plans as well, allowing you to plan your budget.
For your participants, they will be able to pay for their courses more slowly over time. This can be especially helpful for career-related skill training courses as participants may be relying on your course to help improve their job search or advance in their current careers. Then, after taking your course and securing employment or a higher-paying position, they can complete their payment plan with ease.
Ensure your training management software allows you to create custom payment plans, so you can give your audience options. Take note of which payment plan each participant is on so you can track their overall progress and get in touch with them if they miss a payment.
5. Offer discounts for repeat customers.
Once you have completed your first round of online courses, don’t let interest in your offerings falter. Instead, continually market your courses to attract new customers, and try out customer retention strategies to maintain the audience you currently have.
You can re-interest customers who have already taken your courses by routinely creating new offerings that will help them further advance their skills. For repeat customers, you can even consider offering a discount to encourage loyalty to your online training program.
AccuData’s guide to loyalty email marketing recommends getting in touch with customers to re-engage them through direct, one-on-one messages about your organization. Providing perks such as discounted prices can incentivize your participants to re-join your program, helping to build a long-term relationship with loyal customers.
When reaching out to previous customers, you can create more effective, targeted messages by referencing their past experiences with your courses. Maintain careful records of their data, and take the time to clean your database to ensure your data hygiene is strong. Errors such as missing or incomplete data can happen over time, and reaching back out to your customers can also be a chance to clean up your data and rectify these mistakes.
Creating and selling online courses will require a dedicated effort from your business to succeed. Ensure you are giving yourself the greatest chance for success as possible by carefully researching your audience and investing in the right tools for your program. Good luck!
