Online courses are now more commonly accessible than they’ve ever been.
Numerous platforms are offering online courses, several classes, and more participants, ranging from high school programs to degree courses to recreational activity courses and much more.
Nevertheless, with so many online courses available, it can be challenging to stand out.
If you’re experiencing difficulties attracting participants and expanding your courses, below are some strategies that will tell you how to increase online course sales.
How To Increase Your Online Course Sales
Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition
Investigate a few of the established online courses that pertain to your subject to get a sense of everything that is incorporated and the way it is offered up.
The primary objective here is to figure out how you’re going to set your course against the competitors in the market.
What aspects of your subject will you address that your competitors did not? What value could you add to your subject that the competitors do not?
Determine your unique selling proposition (also known as a differentiating factor) and highlight it on your course merchant site and also in advertising texts.
It also assists in having a solid response for people asking “How does your course differ from the other ones?”
Use Testimonials To Increase Social Substantiation
Even if your course is one-of-a-kind, there will almost certainly be several other, comparable programs offered.
Participants can select from a variety of learning portals, and it has become simpler than it has ever been for any individual to showcase their expertise and develop a course.
Even so, this makes deciding which courses are worth the effort challenging for learners.
Students ask others who might have already joined some courses about which one is the best in the same way customers read the reviews of products or ask around before buying something.
Your past and present participants’ feedback are among your most powerful tools for demonstrating and asserting the value of your course to prospective students and enhancing social affirmation.
To display your participants’ testimonials, you must first collect them. This task is simple to control with automated emails, and it’s simple to show these testimonials on your official site or homepage.
Select your testimonials wisely; they must be short and simple enough to catch your possible future students’ interest, but long enough to demonstrate truthfulness.
When you want to use text testimonials, it is beneficial to include photographs of your graduates after being granted their approval.
Video testimonials can deliver more details while also being more difficult to fake, making them even more powerful.
Stay In touch With Your Participants
Generally speaking, it’s best to gather testimonials soon after participants have completed your course, while the knowledge is still fresh in their heads.
Even so, in certain situations, following up with learners after a few months have gone by could be beneficial.
Such testimonials could be lengthier and more thorough in order to demonstrate the way your students’ lives have evolved as a result of having taken your course.
These kinds of testimonials, case studies, or lengthier videos can assist you in increasing your online course sales by demonstrating the achievements or outcomes that a student might have had.
Keeping this in mind, you might want to consider using a Q&A session script to direct the testimonial to specific details. Think about asking or sending them questions like:
- How has your lifestyle improved or changed since taking the course?
- What have you accomplished thanks to the course?
- What projects have you completed after taking the course?
- How has your career advanced thanks to the course?
Build Trust Through Your Skills And Certifications
Recent students can be extremely effective in explaining to potential new students how beneficial your course is and in increasing your online course sales.
However, potential candidates will be interested in knowing what qualifies them to train in the particular course.
You can distinguish your curriculum from competing products, develop credibility for your future students, and boost your sales by promoting your skills, certifications, and experience.
Your knowledge and abilities will be determined by the kind of subject you instruct. The following are some attributes you might want to highlight in your portfolio, on your course homepage, blog, or some other place where students will see them.
- Academic achievements
- Years of expertise
- Projects delivered
- Professional honors
- Collaborations with well-known industry figures
Have Some Free Content Available
Increasing online course sales by catching the eye of more potential candidates is one strategy. A further approach would be to increase the exchange rate of potential students to registered students.
One way to convert these prospective students into registered ones is to offer free downloadable material associated with what you are teaching.
The content available for download should provide your leads with a new strategy, tool, or input.
It should offer your leads a taste of your relative curriculum and reveal to them the things they should expect from your tutoring.
This downloadable content not only demonstrates the strong points of your curriculum, but also enables you to keep in touch with your prospects and provide them with additional details concerning your course.
They could be hesitant to purchase it right away, but you’ll be given more chances to persuade them. The kind, of course, you are providing will also influence this free digital content. You could offer a:
- A distinct tactic or approach
- Charts, grids, organizers, or other comparable tools
- Chapters from your book or a part of your course
- Template spreadsheets, valuable formulas, or other similar tools
- Checklists or guides
Email Marketing Can Help You Convert More Leads
Once you get connected to your prospective students, you can increase your online course sales with email campaigns.
Email marketing campaigns will aid in highlighting the advantages and strong points of your classes. It will also assist you in showing your prospective students the ways your course can support them and persuade them to buy it.
Think about the composition of your email messages thoroughly. Add testimonials from former students, in addition to useful tools and course previews.
Experiment with various subject lines to determine which one has the best results. Segment your readership, if possible, to tailor information to the requirements of various audience members.
Leverage Your Own Online presence
You could sell your course on an already established platform or through your personal official site. An already-existent platform could lower your earnings, but it could also expose your course to the customer base of the platform.
Presenting your course through your own official site will enable you to retain 100% of the earnings and offer you greater control, however, you will not have direct exposure to the audience of an established platform.
You could also employ both of these approaches if you are capable of doing so.
Having your personal site to promote and sell your course has additional benefits.
You will be able to improve the SEO on your course landing page and also connect with potential learners who are looking for the knowledge you offer.
You will also be able to optimize and check your homepage to determine which setups are most effective. To increase conversion rates, you could also include personal testimonies on your main page.
Develop A Social Media Marketing Plan
When used smartly, social media can provide you with a direct link to your customer base. Assess your target audience when developing your social media marketing plan.
Consider which platforms your target audience is mostly using and what social media posts associated with your course they are searching for.
Determine what type of content your course performs better with—text, images, graphs, clips, and so on—as well as which channels are supporting this type of content.
For your social media marketing plan to work with your lead selection phase, link your social networking pages to your digital downloadable files.
Your social media will assist you in boosting the visibility of your downloadable content, generating more leads, and eventually increasing your online course sales.
Launch A YouTube Channel
YouTube is the world’s second-most popular search engine following Google. On a regular basis, millions of users check Youtube for “how-to” video content.
Youtube clips can even outrank web pages in the search engine results of many browsers.
Create a YouTube channel for your scope of study and regularly post valuable video content. In your video explanations, provide a hyperlink to your site or course.
Create A Youtube Course Promo Clip
Make a short promotional video for your course and upload it to YouTube. To reach a wider audience for your course, you might also want to create several promo clips, with each having a different headline.
Keep in mind to have included relevant keywords associated with your subject in the title and description of your videos so that they rank among the top results for such terms.
In every video description, provide a link to your online course or official site. If your promotional video performs well, think about placing advertisements for it on social media or even with Google Ads.
Host Your Own Podcast Series
Starting a podcast concerning your subject is an excellent way to develop a customer base of individuals who have an interest in that subject matter.
Everyone who wants to listen to your podcast has the prospect to enroll in your online course.
On every podcast episode, offer useful advice on your subject, and towards the end of every episode, also prompt people to check out your site and read more about your online course.
Uploading your show to platforms like iTunes and Google Play can help you reach a large number for free on a recurring basis.
This is an excellent publicity method for your course and brand as a whole.
Participate In Podcast Interviews
Conduct some research to discover podcast shows that are closely linked to your subject matter and find audiences that might be keen on joining your course.
iTunes is an excellent resource for finding podcast shows. Add a couple of search terms associated with your subject into the search function and compile a list of the podcast shows that come up in the searches.
Prior to actually contacting the hosts, review the descriptions of the podcasts – it’s best to listen to several of their episodes too – and send a personalized message to the podcast hosts, presenting yourself and clarifying the reasons why you believe you would make a perfect match for their show.
Keep in mind that the goal of a podcast interview is to offer important information to the audience members. Your interview mustn’t sound like a tv commercial where you are trying to sell your online course.
Inform the listeners of the ways they can contact you and find out more about what you offer through your course.
Implement Strategic Advertising
Advertising is a great method for reaching your intended audience, but it needs to be done with caution to keep a favorable ROI (return on investment).
There are numerous places and methods to advertise your courses, and the one you will select will depend on the product you are selling, the people you are trying to attract, and the kind of media they’re inclined to consume, among other aspects.
Check out the following advertising strategies and think about the ways they might benefit your sales:
- Search ads (ads that appear on the first page of Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines)
- Display advertisements (ads added to several third-party websites)
- Advertisements on social media
- Trade journals
- Trade fairs
- Printed Ads in a newspaper or magazine
- Affiliate marketing
The Bottom Line
In this article, we have offered you some valuable tips and tricks on how to improve the sales of your online course.
The most important takeaway from this should be that you should focus more on what your prospective students need and what you can offer them that they cannot find elsewhere, rather than simply making your offer sound like a selling pitch.
