When you create courses and other learning material for customers and put it online, you expect to make money. You anticipate major interest as everyone seeks to learn whatever the course is designed to teach. The truth is you can have the most important knowledge to share and it won’t sell if you make some big mistakes. Here are seven common mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Creating the Wrong Courses
You must know what it is that your audience wants to learn. You can build a course or even a group of courses only to discover that no one is buying them. If you’re targeting a specific audience, you need to know what topics are important to them or what’s trending. To accomplish this goal, you will use analytics, which you can get with a learning management system. Even though it’s not the only way to get the information, it’s often the easiest.
2. Not Marketing Correctly
No one will buy your courses no matter how good they are if they don’t know these courses exist. It’s not enough to build them and put them on your website or in an online store. You must market them to those who would want to invest.
3. Not Getting Contact Information
The one thing about educational courses is you can sell multiple to the same customer. However, you’ll limit your selling ability if you don’t have an email or other contact information from your current or potential customers. Once someone exhibits interest in one course, you can introduce them to others.
4. Treating Every Customer the Same
Not every customer is going to be interested in all your online courses. It’s important to target your marketing and provide offers that will appeal to the specific people or groups. When you use a learning management system, you keep detailed information about what courses have been purchased. You can find out which ones were completed and if certificates were given out. This lets you know what courses might be the next sales for that group.
5. Not Pre-Selling
This idea goes along with marketing, but it focuses on pre-selling before the course is launched. If you try to do a surprise launch, you’ll find your sales are much lower than you would like. With educational courses, just like with most other products, creating anticipation will help your sales numbers.
6. Not Creating an Easy Sales Process
Buying a product online shouldn’t be hard. If it’s difficult for your customers, they won’t come back. They may not even complete the current sale. Make sure you have a user-friendly platform for your customers to use. It’s best to keep everything on a single platform which reduces the chances for error and other problems.
7. No Clear Description
You must make sure your intended customers know exactly what they’re getting with your courses. There should be a clear description of what they will learn and more importantly, how it will benefit them. If those courses fulfill certain education requirements, it should be evident. Let them know if they will receive a certificate of completion or if there will be a test. You can create tests and allow customers to download certificates on an LMS.
Determine if you’ve been making any of these mistakes and avoid them in the future. You’ll find you sell more courses online when you have a user-friendly system with clear information and targeted marketing.
