I guess we all agree that learning online is effective and affordable. Still, the adoption is slow. One of the key reasons for that is the lack of awareness about the same.
Most people who built online courses are essentially teachers and hence are not well versed in marketing them. When I started teaching my online CAT coaching course couple of years ago, I knew absolutely nothing about marketing. During the last couple of years, I have learnt about a bunch of useful tools and websites which can help other teachers market their courses better. I will like to talk about a few of them today.
Live Chat – If you have a blog or a website where you have either hosted the course or you are selling it, you absolutely need a live chat plugin. While it might not possible for you to remain online on it 24×7 but whatever time you are able to spend on it – it will help you immensely. Talking directly to the students you can clarify a bunch of their doubts about the course. A lot of them are apprehensive about online learning as well. Talking to a human can give them the much needed additional confidence. You can use Zopim, Olark, or LiveZilla for the same.
Newsletters – While social media is the buzz around town but when it comes to sales, nothing beats email marketing. The easiest way to reach out to people is via newsletters. Now you might be wondering about two things:
a) What will I write in the newsletter?
b) How do I send out newsletters?
Writing a newsletter is no different from writing a blog. While there are plenty of ways of writing a good newsletter, please understand that as far as marketing is concerned – an average newsletter is a much better option than sending out no newsletters. The content of the newsletter could just be a collection of your blogposts or some of the content that you have curated. To send out professional looking newsletters with a minimum amount of effort, you can try out MailChimp.
Social Payment – In today’s world, you cannot really ignore social media. It is really difficult to get people to talk about your courses on social media. It is even harder if you do not have money to promote posts or hire a dedicated social media manager. But there is something you can do. Figure out some interesting bits from your online course and give it away as a free download. But give it away only to those people who share information about it on Facebook / Twitter. To ensure, the same you can use paywithatweet, socialpay.me, or Transact Socially.
I hope that you found this post useful. Do let me know what you think about. If you have any other ideas / suggestions to help improve sales of online courses, do share them with the community via the comment section.
