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How to promote your online courses with email marketing?

Let's find out what email marketing is and how newsletters can increase sales of online courses

Whether you've just created an online course or you're in the business of reselling eLearning courses produced by others, your main goal is to make sure your potential customers find the course and buy it. And, if you've tried this before, you'll know that this is the hardest part.

There are many promotion tools available, each with its own characteristics. In other articles, we have already talked about, for example, the power of copywriting and the importance of choosing the right words to present the course (for example, when choosing the title); the extraordinary potential of video marketing, for example, to create trailers that capture the attention of the audience; or, again, the importance of word of mouth and the support of testimonials and former clients.

In this article, we will focus instead on the possibilities offered by email marketing. Newsletters, in fact, are still one of the main tools to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing strategy that uses email as a way to communicate with your audience.

In the common imagination, email communications are associated exclusively with promotional or advertising messages. In reality, a good email marketing strategy aims to build strong relationships with your audience and addresses much broader goals: inform, educate, gain customer loyalty, increase brand awareness, acquire and cultivate new leads.

The benefits of email marketing for sales

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels and can have big impacts on your bottom line. In fact, emails give you the opportunity to reach a large number of users in a very short time, at a very low cost and to communicate with your customers in real time. Moreover, you can easily analyze sending statistics and monitor the results of your email campaigns.

But that's not all: by collecting your customers' data (both demographic and purchase habits), you can create customized campaigns (for example, a special offer for their birthday or a message about the release of a new product they had shown interest in).

How to leverage email marketing to increase sales of your online courses?

Although email is a marketing tool, remember that your main goal should be to create an ongoing connection with the customer or potential customer. So use it to build interest in your brand and strengthen the relationship with your audience. In other words, avoid abusing the trust of those who have subscribed to your newsletter by bombarding them with irrelevant or exclusively self-referential emails.

In order to realize a successful email marketing campaign make sure therefore to:

  • identify your target audiences and their needs;
  • send well-designed and relevant emails to your target audience;
  • provide a value proposition (in the case of an online course, your value proposition should explain to your recipients what benefits they can gain from your course. For example, explain with practical examples how the course will simplify and speed up their work tasks);
  • alternate between different types of content: company news, offers, new product launches, personalized emails, etc;
  • include clear and visible calls to action.

The advantages of an LMS with an integrated Newsletter module

There are several email marketing platforms on the market to choose from. But, if you deal with online courses, know that you have an almost always cheaper alternative: choose an LMS (learning management system) that has an integrated Newsletter module.

This will allow you to use a single platform for both the delivery and management of courses, as well as for the preparation and sending of your newsletters (also automatic).

DynDevice LMS, for example, is an extremely versatile eLearning platform that allows you to exploit the full potential of email marketing to promote your online courses. Specifically, you can:

Import your database of contacts

With DynDevice LMS you can easily import your database of contacts in special data tables (Dyn-Table) that you can then use to send your emails. Specifically, you can send your messages to all recipients of the data table, or only to some of them through the application of special filters.

Send automatic emails

With DynDevice LMS you can create fully customizable automatic notifications and send them to your customers depending on the actions they perform in your LMS or other settings you have configured.

For example, you can automatically send course invitation emails containing the credentials to access the platform, reminders of course deadlines in which to urge trainees to complete the training on time, or even end-of-course notifications to which you can attach the certificate of the training carried out.

Inform your audience of the release of new courses

Thanks to the convenient visual editor, the DynDevice LMS Newsletter module allows you to easily create customized emails to inform your audience of the release of new courses.

In this way, your entire database of contacts will be promptly informed of the news and will be able to preview the content and benefits offered by the course.

Propose the activation of free course demos

DynDevice LMS also allows you to activate free demos of online courses to give users a taste of the course. Through the platform, you can then create custom emails in which you can invite your contacts to activate the demo version of your courses to see for themselves the quality, both from the point of view of the technology of use and educational content.

Create discount coupons and send promotional emails

Thanks to the eCommerce module, with DynDevice LMS you can create discount coupons (promotional codes) to encourage your customers to purchase your online courses and monitor their actual use. For example, you can offer a percentage discount (e.g. 10%) or a discount in value (e.g. 10 euros) to be applied to the total expenditure or the purchase of a specific course. And, thanks to the Newsletter module, you can easily create promotional newsletters containing the discount coupon and send them to your contact database or specific segments.

In this case, remember that your main goal will be to drive the user to immediate conversion. Therefore, make sure that your email is clear and direct and illustrates the features of the promotion. In particular, we recommend that you set a coupon expiration date (to push the user to action) and highlight the call to action.

Once the coupon is received, the customer can proceed with the purchase directly from your eCommerce and, by entering the appropriate code, the shop will automatically apply the discount and recalculate the total.

Create up/cross-selling campaigns to those who have already purchased a course in the past

Up-selling and cross-selling are sales techniques that allow a company to introduce its customers to the full range of products/services it sells. In particular, up-selling consists of offering a client a more complex good or service than the one previously purchased. Cross-selling, on the other hand, consists of offering an additional product or service to what you are about to buy or have already purchased.

With DynDevice LMS you can, for example, create DEM (Direct Email Marketing) promotional up-selling/cross-selling campaigns to inform your customers of the availability of a specific course or a course related to those purchased in the past.

In addition, thanks to the management system of the validity and expiration of the courses integrated in DynDevice LMS, you can send special emails to notify users of the imminent expiration of the training previously carried out and invite them to purchase the related refresher course.

Consult the sending statistics and integrate them with Google Analytics

For each newsletter sent with DynDevice LMS, you have detailed statistics that allow you to know who read the email (and when), who clicked (and what), what is the percentage of reading, what are the most clicked links, etc..

But that's not all: you can also see detailed statistics for each user in your database of contacts, examine the history of the newsletters they've received over time, which ones they've read, which ones they've clicked on and where specifically, etc.

Finally, to each link contained in the newsletters, the platform automatically assigns special parameters thanks to which you can check, on Google Analytics, the progress of your newsletters as "Campaigns".

Create and send surveys

The DynDevice LMS Newsletter module allows you to create surveys (open or closed-ended) and send them via newsletter to your recipients. Once received the email, the user can answer the questions directly from the message, without being redirected to third party sites. Also in the case of surveys, as for emails, an advanced notification system is available.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator 


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