5 Easy Ways to Better Monetize and Humanize your Online Course

The best way for you to have a successful online course is to make a meaningful connection with your students. In this blog post, we’ll show you not only how to humanize the process, but the tools that make this easy and provide you more income along the way.  

We need to shift our focus

If you work with online classes, you’re familiar with the common topics that get thrown around. Terms launch formulas, buyers’ journeys, ways to monetize webinars, and countless types of funnels are all subjects that have flooded the young industry. 

All of these approaches to marketing and making money have their rightful place and have contributed to the enormous growth in eLearning as a business, but we need to be looking for ways to better connect on a human level with the folks taking the courses. This will be the metric of success when looking to monetize moving forward and if you only focus on the buzz term mentioned above, you’ll be left behind. 

Humanize or Die

Mark Schaefer’s recent book, Marketing Rebellion, is built around the idea that “the most human company wins.” In the world of online courses, humanizing your approach can lead to a much better experience for your students, a far superior final product, and is probably the best way to monetize things moving forward. 

Online courses have a lot of obvious benefits for creators and students, but they don’t come without their hitches. Students can miss the face-to-face interaction and motivation that comes with traditional classes while creators might not be getting the right kind of feedback they need to grow. 

In the end, online courses can leave creators and students alike feeling isolated and disconnected. Acquiring new skills and sharing knowledge without the necessary element of a personalized touch has contributed to an incredibly low completion rate for nearly every online course out there. 

So, how can content creators warm up this colder side of courses and what should prospective students be looking for in their experience? This is where the importance of humanizing things comes in. As the online course market evolves in leaps and bounds, we’re going to start seeing a shift in the KPIs that win all of the focus. Instead of talking so much about single-day-launch numbers or new leads, we should be praising things like retention rate, repeat students, and highly engaged communities built around online courses.

While online entrepreneurs are trying to become the next Pat Flynn, Pat Flynn is more worried about his thank you card metric.    

This new focus doesn’t mean we should forget about earning an income in order to live a passion. Actually, these new metrics will be the path to the most financially successful courses going forward. 

The exciting thing is that the technology behind a solid online course platform like Hotmart has evolved over the last few years in a way that has made humanizing things much easier and directly profitable. 

So, here are 5 easy ways to personalize your course while ensuring yourself more income. Not only will building these features into your course help improve everything about your product, including the bottom line, but all of these ways come with tools that help make the humanizing of your course, well, automatic =). 

1. Onboarding with 3 must-ask questions (Hotmart Members Area Message, Online Service)

Embracing new students after they’ve bought your course is an essential step to creating a strong connection. It’s also your chance to better understand what’s working in your marketing plan. 

If you don’t already have a great email marketing provider integrated with your course platform as a base of your onboarding, you should. Personalize it as much as you can. Or, just use the Message tool in Hotmart’s Members Area. Here, you can send out broadcast or individual messages to new cohorts or specific groups of students.   

The first assignment to give new students should look something like this:

Your students need to see these questions as an inspiring way to start their journey with your course. By doing this, you’ll make a huge impression with your personalized touch and also get essential feedback on what is working with your marketing plan. 

Some other ways to creatively include these questions would be for students to respond to them when they join your exclusive community on Hotmart Sparkle (see tip 5). Or, go the extra step and set up a video chat via Online Services. Reserve one hour a week to schedule several 5-minute chats with new students. These quick sessions can pay off big with VIP students, especially if you plan to offer coaching as a strategy of your business in the future.    

2. Track student progress and make sure they are meeting their goals (Hotmart’s Members Area)

If you’re using Hotmart’s Members Area for your course, tracking the progress of your students is a breeze. You can quickly check out how different cohorts or individual students are doing and how engaged they are with your product. 

If you notice that there are several students that seem to be losing interest at the same points of your course, it’s time to humanize and make your course better. Reach out to these students via Members Area Message and remind them of their goals when they signed up for your course (remember the 3 questions?). 

Beyond reengaging these students with a personal touch, it’s time to reevaluate the parts of your course that are losing students for you. Take out the low-impact parts or try offering that information in a different format. When you’ve tinkered with these sections enough, it will be time for the 2.0 version of your course that will be even more appealing and easier to sell (and Hotmart’s Members Area makes it easy to upload those files).    

3. Get Feedback, Give Social Proof (Hotmart Ask / Product Page)

In addition to making it simple to track student progress, Hotmart’s Members Area also makes it easy for you to get direct feedback. Throughout your course, use Hotmart Ask to find out how you and your students are doing. Set up survey questions to keep your students engaged and reflective about why they wanted to take the course to begin with.   

With these responses in hand, you have a playbook to make your course and marketing better. Showing that you have actual students obtaining the transformation you’ve promised (social proof) in your marketing is gold to prospective buyers. Set your Product Page up to automatically display your positive feedback and take away any final objections buyers might be having. 

4. Level up Knowledge with Paid or Free Extra Modules

Now that you have a vested interest in tracking progress and getting feedback, take things to the next level with some extra content. Imagine a student who is flying through your course material, loving every second, and BAM, you offer them bonus material that goes beyond anything you had promised. Or, maybe you have a student who is in over their head and having a tough time getting through your course. Why not offer them an extra module or two to catch up.  

With both of these examples, you’ll have happier students with this strategy. You can give them these extra modules for free, but by having it as a paid module, your students will better understand the value of the material you are providing and are more likely to invest their time in something they’ve purchased.  

5. Create a Bonus Community (Hotmart Sparkle App)

Building a tribe around your course or brand is a no-brainer. Having that tribe talking and sharing within the same app your course is hosted is a creator’s dream come true. 

Hotmart Sparkle not only lets your students take your course whenever and wherever they want, but it also gives you the opportunity to offer a bonus community. Students who purchase your product can get access to a private group where they can interact with other students to clear up any questions, share extra information, and get 100% of the content the creator wants to provide. 

Nothing is more human than our yearning to be a part of a tribe, and no eLearning app feeds this desire like Hotmart Sparkle. Using the public and private options for communities is your best way to convert your audience into your tribe and then your lifetime customers. 

So, there you have it. 5 easy ways to take care of your students and your bottom line. By shifting your focus onto these features, you can build an online course that your buyers will connect with at a whole new level. Talking about your next launch and KPIs linked to dollar amounts will still be important, but these types of things will follow if you first take better care of the people that are fulfilling your dreams of monetization.

If you are still in the process of building your online course, check out the SmartCourse Maker. There, you’ll be walked through the creation process in a series of videos and emails that show you how to put together your course on a budget.