How to Increase Online Course Sales Without Breaking the Bank

The ultimate goal of most external eLearning courses is to sell as many courses as possible. But if your course isn’t selling as much as you would like, what do you do? There is a simple three-step process that you can follow to increase your online course sales without breaking the bank. 

DON’T Throw Money at the Problem

Before we get into how to increase online course sales, it is important to mention what not to do. Do not just increase your expenditure and hope it works. It is unlikely to work. All you will do is spend more money, reducing your ROI. 

On a similar note, you don’t necessarily want to reduce your course price either, although that may be a good idea. We’ll touch on this in point two. 

Step #1 – Stop or Slow Down Your Current Efforts

The first step to take depends on whether you already have sales. If you don’t have any sales, stop your marketing efforts entirely. If you have some sales but not enough, then slow them down significantly. 

The idea here is that what you are doing is not working. If you keep following the same path, you won’t get better results and will just be wasting money. If you don’t believe us, check out this blog post on how we suggest calculating the cost of eLearning development. Remember, both hard and soft dollars count. 

Stopping or scaling down your current efforts is a break that gives you time to reflect and change whatever is necessary. 

Step #2 – Give the Course Away to Five People & Get Feedback

For the next step, you need to ensure that at least some learners have looked at your course. If you haven’t made any sales yet, then give it away. Ideally, you want to give the course to about five or so people. 

If you already have a handful of people who bought the course, you may not need to give it away. Instead, you can talk to those people. 

Your goal here is to get feedback from the people you give the course to. Don’t rely on a survey; actually, talk to them. have a short 15- to 20-minute conversation. Use this as an opportunity to get feedback about the course itself and your marketing. Ask about the sales funnel. 

The ultimate goal is to figure out why the course matters for the learners. Does it help them overcome a specific challenge? What want does it fulfill? You can then use all of this information in your marketing efforts going forward. 

Remember that these people will not have necessarily completed the entire course. However, they should have completed at least a portion of it. 

Step #3 – Simplify Everything

Finally, take the knowledge from the people who did your course and simplify everything. This is especially true for your sales funnel. A nice simple option is to offer a free giveaway to get an email address and email opt-in. Then send a short sequence of five to seven emails for the sales to funnel educating your audience and providing value to them first before you get into the pitch. 

Conclusion

If you are struggling to find buyers for your course, don’t fret. There are just three steps to how to increase online course sales. Pause what you are doing, give free courses to get feedback, and simplify your sales funnel. You should quickly notice an improvement.