How to sell online courses: 5 tips from the Cademí team

You have something to teach.

And there's no doubt someone out there needs to learn exactly that.

That's why the online course market grows year after year. It's also why anyone who wants to sell an online course has to be ready to actually sell. The challenge is to stand out in the market and be the digital product people choose out of so many options. To help you, the Customer Success team at Cademí, Brazil's first Member Hub, shared some tips on how to sell more.

In this article, you'll learn:

• Why you should study the market
• How to define your audience's pain points
• Order bump and upsell strategy
• Card warm-up strategy
• How to handle cart abandonment

Follow these tips to sell online courses and sell a lot more

1. Study the market

If this is your first digital product, the best path is to validate your idea and understand the market. A good option is to start with a product related to the topic you want to cover, but at a lower price, to gauge interest and get your first leads.

For example, imagine you want to create an online baking course. Before that, create an e-book or shorter courses on specific recipes, which will cost less and take less of your time. Use them to test your idea and come to the baking course better prepared.

2. Understand your audience's pain points

A customer's pain point is really the challenge they face and that you can help with. But according to Nicole Yabiku, from Cademí's Customer Success team, a single pain point can be communicated in many different ways. And the subtle differences between those messages are where your sales challenge, and your sales success, lie.

So when you create ads, it's important to test and validate several pain points.

Let's say your first product, used to test the market, is an e-book of brigadeiro recipes. Your ad creatives could talk about, for example:

• Earning extra income;
• Discovering new recipes for a small business;
• Saving money by making them at home instead of ordering them;
• Common problems in specific recipes that will be solved (lime brigadeiro that curdles, white brigadeiro that sticks to the bottom of the pan, etc.);

And within each pain point, the copy, meaning the text that goes on the creatives, can vary too. Don't limit yourself to one pain point or to the first version of your message. Test and learn what works.

3. Order bump and upsell strategy

Once you've won the lead, you can work on increasing the value of the sale. To do that, you need products to serve as your order bump and upsell.

Think about a trip to the pharmacy. The candy by the register, right when you're paying, is an upsell. It's a product you just grab without thinking much. For a digital product, the upsell is something the customer immediately knows they'll need and sees as a great deal. In the baking course, for example, an upsell could be a kit of vanilla beans, since that ingredient is hard to find in supermarkets but very common in desserts.

+ How to use metrics to boost your online course results

The order bump, on the other hand, is a product your customer also needs but doesn't know it yet. So you have to create awareness to make the sale. Let's go back to the pharmacy. Imagine you asked for help finding a skincare product, and the clerk warned you that since it's an acid, your skin would get quite sensitive. So the best move would be to buy a moisturizer too. For the baking course, one option would be to point out how much time a brigadeiro rolling tool saves, along with an offer for that product.

4. Card warm-up strategy

With higher-ticket products, a common problem is the credit card declining the purchase. Not because of the credit limit, but for security reasons, whether it's the time of day or the amount on an unfamiliar site.

In this case, Nicole recommends the card warm-up strategy.

“Basically, the course creator runs a campaign before the launch offering a low-ticket product. It could be an e-book, a masterclass, some supporting material, and so on. The idea is that the person uses their card and builds a history, so that at the official launch this objection, which can lead them to give up, doesn't come up,” she explains.

5. Watch out for cart abandonment

Finally, an important detail for selling more is paying attention to people who go through the whole process but give up at the end. Cart abandonment is very common, and it pays to have a strategy for selling to this group.

This can mean cart recovery, through emails reminding people about the unfinished purchase or offering a discount, or investing in a downsell. In short, that's a cheaper product than the one the person was going to buy.

Remember the baking course and the brigadeiro e-book? At first, the e-book was a product to test the market. Here, it can be a downsell offer.

A Member Hub to sell more online courses

Besides all the strategies shared by Cademí's Customer Success team, another way to sell more is to invest in a Member Hub. Having a space that's 100% your brand, where your students find all your products, whether they've bought them or not, is a way to make new sales to people who are already customers.

If you'd like to learn more, visit the Cademí website or get in touch and talk to one of our experts.