Have you heard of Employee Referral Policy?
It’s that awesome system which encourages employees to refer qualified professionals for all open positions at the organization. In return, the organization rewards employees with monetary compensation for every referred candidate who is recruited.
The organization earns themselves a qualified candidate, the person referring earns money and the one being referred lands a much-needed job.
That’s what you call a win-win situation!
As for me, I really like the arrangement and as always I am running an analogy between this and a WordPress based website! Particularly speaking an eLearning website.
What to Expect from this Post?
The primary goal of any eLearning system is to increase sign ups to the courses available on the website. There are varied ways to be able to do this. For instance providing discounts, publicizing the courses through newsletters, social media marketing. In fact, I have written a post on ways to increase course sign-ups in WPLMS that covers most of this. Today, however, I am going to concentrate on one particular method, a method that was not covered in my earlier post – Affiliate Marketing.
I’ll be focussing on implementing the affiliate marketing model in WPLMS and LearnDash, two of the most used LMS plugins in the WordPress domain and my personal favorites.
What is the AffiliateWP Plugin?
The AffiliateWP plugin is much the same like the employee referral system explained above. The difference though is that it is used in a WordPress based online environment.
Using this plugin you can create affiliates, who can then market your website through various means. If any student signs up for a course using their affiliate Id they are given a predefined amount as the commission for the referral purchase.
The plugin has been integrated with several third party plugins. The ones of interest at this point though would be the eCommerce plugins. As of today, AffiliateWP has been integrated with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, iThemes Exchange, JigoShop, WP e-Commerce, WP EasyCart and Shopp.
The plugin is rather straightforward and supported with elaborate documentation which makes setting up the plugin rather effortless.
How to Increase Sales on an LMS Website with AffiliateWP
Introducing affiliates to your website will immensely assist you in increasing the website’s visibility thereby increasing the traffic. These two in combination will lead you towards the final goal of increasing sales on your LMS website with AffiliateWP plugin.
Who can be an Affiliate?
Well, if I have to answer this question in just a sentence then I would say – “just about anybody”. Mind you, that is how it is. Although, today I am about to discuss two types of users that will particularly help you make better conversions.
The two magic users are ‘Existing Students’ and ‘Instructors’. Let’s take a look at how these users will help you boost your eLearning website sales significantly.
Instructors
Instructors make for a set of key users on an e-Learning website and can become a good source of increased income.
But LearnDash Doesn’t Have an Instructor Role
Now some of you might argue that while WPLMS has an instructor role included in their theme one can’t say that about LearnDash.
That’s where I’m going to beg to differ. While LearnDash does not have an instructor role in its core plugin it does have a recently introduced add-on – Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash – that does much the same.
The plugin allows Instructors to create courses, lessons topics and quizzes. Additionally instructors can approve assignments for created courses and download reports for student progress.
If you are a LearnDash user worried about not having the Instructor role then you can put your worries to rest with this plugin.
Going Back to the Affiliates Feature
Moving on.
The Tiered Affiliate Rates system must be used in the case of Instructors too as it works just as well here. However, you should definitely steer clear from the Credit System as an Instructor might not necessarily want to purchase courses from your website making the credits useless for him.
However, Discounts is another feature that can be implemented here. Now, what do I mean my discounts?
Essentially, you must generate discount coupons in your chosen eCommerce system. These coupons can then be assigned to affiliates. Now using these discount coupons Instructors can attract more students to sign up for courses. An instructor can be shown the discount coupons available using the Show Discount Coupons Add-On.
This way you can increase sales on your LMS website with AffiliateWP plugin.
Existing Students
While this set of users as affiliates might not make sense to you immediately, they are the perfect people to have as affiliates.
Why?
- They are using your courses. They are the best people to promote the courses and your brand. Others will trust them.
- Covering part of their course expenses through affiliate commission is tempting, which makes them spread the word about your courses.
In fact, this might just prompt them to sign up for more courses of their interest. To make the most of this, you must also consider compensating students with credits instead of money for the affiliate commission. A Credit System would allow students to accumulate credits as affiliate commission which can be later utilized to sign-up for more courses on your website.
To further UP the game you can include Tiered Affiliate Rates whereby various compensation levels will be defined based on the number of affiliates. For example. 30 credits will be awarded for 5-10 referrals whereas 50 credits for 10-15 referrals and so on.
With that, you have made one of the most important stakeholders of your website a good source of marketing and have increased course purchases on your LMS website with AffiliateWP.
Why the AffiliateWP Plugin?
Some might wonder what’s with my affinity to the AffiliateWP plugin. Well, I have my reasons for my strong rooting.
- We are using it on the WisdmLabs website.
- It has been developed by Andrew Munro and Pippin Williamson who are great developers and the makers of Easy Digital Downloads an extremely popular eCommerce plugin. (which we again happen to be using)
- Great plugin support from the developers. (saying it from experience)
What are you waiting for then? Start inviting people to become affiliates on your website and increase course sign-ups with the AffiliateWP plugin.
Adios 🙂
