How to retain customers for your online courses
Retain customers and ensure a stable student base for your online course is ideal to have more peace of mind and guarantee a recurring income.
Why retain customers is better than acquiring new ones?
Although the focus of a company always seems to be on winning new customers, the truth is that keeping the current ones returning results in a higher ROI and costs 5 to 25X less.
But how do you create a customer retention program that keeps your current customers engaged and happy?
We analyzed six strategies focused on building customer loyalty that the major brands are currently using.
From improving convenience to prioritizing customization, these are ideas that any successful team can realize and test today.
Strategies to retain customers
A customer retention program is a specific initiative or set of initiatives designed to enhance the customer and encourage them to buy again with your company.
If you don’t know where to start, here is a list of customer loyalty programs that you can implement in your business.
1. Onboarding
Onboarding is a program that aims to teach new customers how to use your product or service.
Instead of learning on their own, customers are taught by a company representative who customizes training to their needs.
When buyers use your product for the first time, they can become frustrated if they don’t understand how to use it quickly and end up giving up on your brand.
An onboarding program ensures that customers know how to use your products or services so that they can complete their goals in the shortest possible time.
Widely used in companies to train and retain employees, organizations can apply this strategy through online training, making the process more efficient and economical.
– Benefits of Online Corporate Training
Online courses that teach you how to use certain products and tools are also on the rise, proving that people often look for tutorial videos.
– Record tutorial videos: tips for getting the best result
2. Feedback
It is difficult to improve your business if you don’t know what your customers think about it.
To know what direction to take in order to improve your product, you need to get feedback from those who consume it.
There are a few ways to achieve this, such as asking your audience to take surveys, leave reviews and participate in user tests and focus groups.
– How to Get More Reviews for Your Business
After collecting the data, you should analyze the results looking for trends in customer behavior and problem points where you need to improve the user experience.
Then, share this information with the professionals needed to resolve the issues raised.
For example, comments regarding your site’s navigation should be passed on to the developer and web designer who created the page.
In the case of online courses, any comments regarding the content or the way the classes are organized should be analyzed carefully, especially if more people have highlighted the same subject.
– To do list to create online courses
Both aspects mentioned are very important for the satisfaction of your client and can cause a loss if they are not resolved soon.
By collecting and analyzing customer reviews, your company can efficiently handle criticism and improve the user experience.
3. Communication calendar
Even if your customers are not giving you feedback, your team must be proactive in communicating.
If your customers haven’t interacted with your brand in a while, you should contact them and reestablish your relationship.
Consider adopting a calendar to manage this communication, scheduling special dates and creating opportunities to sell more.
A communication calendar is a schedule that tracks customer interaction.
It informs the last time a certain consumer contacted your company and alerts you when existing customers do not interact for a certain period of time.
This facilitates the launch of promotional offers and proactive customer service resources.
– 10 Tips To Improve Your Customer Service
For example, if a student’s subscription is about to expire, you can send an email stating that he needs to renew it, taking the opportunity to talk about a new module you are about to launch.
Recurring students should hear about you frequently, whether to alert them about a launch, promotion or just to wish someone a happy birthday.
Remember: to retain customers, you need to show that you care about them.
4. Loyalty program
While it is important to focus on customers who are at risk of turnover, you cannot forget your loyal customers.
After all, nothing generates more dissatisfaction in a consumer than seeing several offers and concessions being made to new customers, while he, who values and invests in your product, earns nothing.
A loyalty program aims to reward customers for their continued loyalty.
The more they buy and interact with your business, the more they are rewarded, which can translate into discounts, special packages, free courses and more.
– Free online courses as a strategy to attract students
This strategy to retain customers is highly effective because it benefits both parties at the same time.
As long as you encourage them to continue making new purchases, your audience remains satisfied because they are enjoying the experience more than just your product or service.
And because your top 10% of customers spend three times as much as the rest of your buyer base, you want to make sure they’re more than happy.
– 5 steps to create a loyalty program
5. Corporate Social Responsibility Program
In an era marked by the need for social and sustainable actions, consumer concern with the behavior of the brands he buys grows.
In this scenario, your company needs to be more than just a product or service.
Customers analyze everything you buy, sell and advertise to your target audience.
If they feel any inconsistency between your brand’s messages and your actions, all of the authority and morale built by your brand can go down the drain.
Think about your core values and create a Corporate Social Responsibility program that focuses on a moral objective.
For example, if you create online courses in an academic discipline, such as mathematics, you can commit to offering a free course to students from a poor community or who face other situations that hinder their educational opportunity.
The same goes for any training course that can teach people of low income and education some profession.
No matter the “size” of your initiative, dedicating yourself to a goal bigger than your pocket is an excellent way to show that you are more than a product.
6. Newsletter
A company newsletter is a simple and economical way to retain customers.
You can use email automation to send updates and topics of interest to your audience to all your customers at once.
Although the purpose of the newsletter is not to sell, all content must be followed by a call-to-action with a link that will send the user to something related to the subject in question.
In addition, you can send the email using an RSS feed at a designated frequency, so you don’t have to update the content manually.
Although simple, newsletters remind your customers about your brand whenever they open their inbox.
Another essential factor for the success of this retention program is to maintain the frequency.
This helps your audience to get used to your messages and contributes to building a lasting relationship.
– How to create email campaigns with MailChimp
5 tips to retain customers and profit more
Most professionals have realized that building customer loyalty is much more profitable and less costly than attracting new consumers.
Therefore, in addition to the retention programs mentioned above, there are other practices related mainly to the relationship with the customer that you can adopt.
1 – Customer Service
Your customer service must be your differential. Other professionals can launch online courses similar to yours, any product can be reproduced by the competition, so the way you deal with your customers must be special.
To achieve this, it is important to know how to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Pick up the signals he goes through, listen carefully, understand his needs and preferences and offer what’s best for him, don’t try to push something he doesn’t need to profit more.
2 – Focused Strategy
To retain customers, it is necessary to know exactly who they are. Do not embrace the world, know who your audience is and outline a well-focused sales strategy.
To define your audience, answer questions like: Who are my potential customers? Where are they? What do they expect from my products or services? Having this information well defined is essential to direct your business strategy.
– How to create a Customer Journey Map
3 – Delivery
Sold? Exceed customer expectations. Don’t just deliver what he expects, that’s the basics, the best way to retain customers is to provide a high quality service with benefits he didn’t expect.
In addition to impressing, this creates a feeling of gratitude and debt, and makes the buyer want to repay in some way, either by pointing out your service to others or staying true to your company.
4 – VIP Treatment
As we pointed out earlier, it is common for companies to offer promotions and other bonuses to people who are not yet customers, as a way of attracting them. Meanwhile, loyal customers receive nothing.
Big mistake! Give those who are already your students VIP treatment. Contemplate the main responsible for your billing with special actions, such as personalized content, discount on new modules of your course, early access to launches and offers, among others.
5 – Follow-up
All actions you have taken to retain customers must be registered and monitored. For this, the ideal is to have a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and a team focused on results.
This monitoring allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses in your strategy and to get to know your audience better and better, which favors the development of more effective actions, achieving positive results in less time.
With a well-planned retention campaign, your online course can become a steady and recurring source of income in less time.
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– Learning Management System: What is it?
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