4 Ways to Increase Course Signups to your WPLMS Website

Cost effectiveness and extensive reach to end users are two reasons for education providers shifting their focus towards the eLearning space. An online LMS allows e Learning providers to dodge expenses on  aspects such as infrastructure, faculty, support staff etc while maintaining the quality of education. Furthermore it serves as an excellent channel to take education to a student’s doorstep.

The recent migration wave to e Learning systems has resulted in the WPLMS theme emerging as one of the most popular online LMS in the WordPress domain due to the comprehensive functionalities it offers.

Based on customization requests that we have received however, the one major concern for WPLMS users is their inability to travel the distance between the online LMS and the end users.

The three aspects to look at while dealing with this issue are  consumer behavior, marketing, and search engine optimization. In this post I am going to deal with the first aspect in the list i.e. consumer behaviour.

4 Ways to Increase Signups to your WPLMS Website

Making small changes to the way you sell your courses can significantly increase course signups to your WPLMS website. These changes can either be in the pricing models or in the in the way the courses are grouped. Lets take a look at the 4 ways in which these results can be achieved.

1. Create Bundled Courses

• From the customer’s point of view there are two advantages of buying bundled courses. The first is that he is saved from the effort of going over and reviewing descriptions for multiple courses.
• Furthermore, buying bundled courses also reduces the cost for the buyer as discounts are often offered on such products.
• Hence, the likelihood of customers signing up for bundled courses is higher than that for individual courses.
• Courses in your WPLMS website can be bundled together using the Product Bundles plugin. This plugin will allow you to bundle various courses offered on your website and sell them as a single product.
• While creating bundled courses definitely helps to increase course signups to your WPLMS website, an important thing to bear in mind is that there should be some logic towards bundling any set of courses together.

 

2. Allow Students to Create their own Bundles

• A variant of the above method,  this option to increase course signups to your WPLMS website provoides more power to potential students as it allows end users to create custom course bundles.
• So while creating predefined bundles definitely helps, a better option would be to allow students to choose the courses they want to take and create and purchase their own product bundles.
• This not only allows users to save money and time on every purchase it also gives them the flexibility of choosing only the courses they require, a option that was not available in the previous method.
• Potential students can be allowed to create their own bundles with a plugin like WooCommerce Custom Product Boxes plugin which allows users to select courses associated with a particular box and purchase it as a bundle.

3. Sell Courses as Subscriptions

• Imagine you want to buy all the courses on a particular subject and you have two options to make the payment. The first is a down payment of all the courses at once after which the courses will be made available to you and the second is an option to subscribe to the courses and pay as you receive the courses. Which one would you prefer? I am guessing your have chosen the second option….so would I!
• A subscription model provides users with the flexibility to subscribe for courses and pay for the courses as they use them. From the LMS owners perspective this not only ensures recurring payments but also helps to retain students thereby helping you to increase course signups to your WPLMS website.
• A subscription model can be incorporated into the WPLMS system with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin by WooThemes which makes it easy to create and manage products with recurring payments.

 

4. Sell Courses as Installments

• A variation of the above method, selling courses as installments allows users to make payments over a pre specified period beyond which they can will have complete access to the courses. This feature can be achieved by tweaking the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin to incorporate the installment feature. You can take a look at an approach for this here.

While the changes are extremely minor they can make a significant difference in the number of signups to courses on your website. The primary reason for this is the improved user experience. The one golden rule that I have come across time and again is that any process on the website should be as simple as possible for end users. And the above four techniques do just that.

You might say that there is still a chance that the user might bounce off from the website to before signing up to a course. Well, yes! That is definitely possible. In such a scenario here’s one last pitch, provide an enquiry form on the course page using which a potential student can get more clarity on  a particular course or bundle of courses.

If there is any way in which you can add to this post or if you have any questions please feel free to connect with me in the comments section.

Until then, Adios!