Have you ever thought about what your role really is as a course creator?
You’re really a coach or a guide for your learners helping them navigate and solve their challenges. You’re their coach through their entire life cycle of training, and your job is to guide them what to learn next at each stage of their progress. Being a genuine and authentic coach and guide to your learners will make upselling new courses to current students simple, because they’ll know you have their best interests at heart.
Think About Your Student’s Journey
In order to be a great coach or guide, it’s important to think about the journey your learner might take through your course catalogue and see if you can group similar learners together and take them through similar routes.
You might add groups of learners into various groups to form ‘personas’ – a set of people with similar preferences and needs, and you can then use these persona groups for your courses to guide learners through your various courses depending on their preferences or needs.
At the end of each course you could suggest to learners what their next course registration might be, and upsell the new course based on how you can continue to grow the learner, describing their next steps to build on the current course they’ve just completed. You might be able to sync an automated series of emails through your learner’s journey if your learning management system supports this kind of email delivery or integrates with your preferred email marketing software.
Make Your Learning Bite Sized
I’ve mentioned this previously that if you’re measuring the progress rates and completion rates of your courses, and you find that very few users complete your courses then your courses might be too long. When you break them up into shorter courses, and use learner journeys to navigate students through multiple tiers of courses you’ll find that your learners get better results because they feel like they’ve completed stages rather than being overwhelmed with a huge mountain of training to get through.
When you split up your courses, you could bundle them all together as one package at a one off price, perhaps create a subscription for the bundle on an ongoing basis and drip feed each course then at the end of each course completion, simply move users through to the next course automatically.
Take A Tip From The TV Industry
Other tips to help move your students through their learning journey is to use cliffhangers and sneak previews at the end of your courses, soap operas and TV series do this all the time, there’s a teaser at the end that taps into the viewers fear of missing out if they don’t watch the next episode or series. You could do the same with your courses by creating a quick overview of your next course showing some of the things it can do for your learners, and add it to the end of the current course, or include it in the completion email that’s automatically sent out at the end of your course.
Only Have One Course? No Problem!
And here’s a final thought for all the course creators out there that currently only have one course available. You can still help your learner navigate their learning journey, even if you have nothing else to sell to them. You could create a joint venture with other course creators to cross recommend complementary training in exchange for an affiliate fee, and perhaps the other provider might be able to do the same for you too. Just remember to declare that you may get paid for any recommended affiliate sales that are made through these kind of relationships
Where do you struggle when trying to upsell new courses to your users? Got a question – let us know!
