Reasons Why You Should Give Free Access To Some Of Your Online Courses

The E-learning industry is vast and different course creators utilise varied tactics to make their courses more sellable. Every idea that you can come up with can be converted into a course with proper curated materials and some learning tactics. However, all courses do not end up with the same amount of popularity or profits. What makes popular courses different? How can you utilise user behaviour to make your target learners choose your course over all others?

This article focuses on one of the main strategies utilised by popular online academies to attract new customers or students. To lure in students or customers, this strategy simply provides them with crucial glimpses of the best assets of your course content. For example, if your course content focuses on programming languages then this strategy would require you to curate some short video snippets from some of the crucial topics included in the syllabus. Using this, you will be able to provide the students with a glimpse or taste of the learning experience involved with your course. This glimpse of your course can bring about a lot of results starting from lead generation to social media popularity.

Most course creators think that they need to securely lock down their content and keep freebies to a minimum. While this may make sense from a business perspective, user behaviour indicates something else entirely. Here, there is a compiled list of four reasons why you need to make some small parts of your course accessible to everyone freely.

1. Lead generation

   : Making short snippets of your course available to your target students via links or other formats is a very strong strategy for generating new leads. User behaviour dictates that people love to get a taste of what they are buying before making the investment. This applies to every form of online shopping. Free trials or short videos which link to a payment gateway for the full course enable you to direct students to your course. You may be allowing free access to some students but this is only to turn them into customers and hence generate more profits. The tradeoff from allowing free access to some course topics or videos is in your favour ultimately. To utilise this strategy you may choose to send out links to the free portion of your course through email, social media or other marketing portals.

2. Brand image and popularity:

   A number of students prefer to find out the teaching styles and other aspects of the course before they commit to it. Unlocking your courses allows them to go through all the course topics and get an understanding of the bigger picture. Additionally, the free snippets of your course may be used on social media to generate popularity and familiarise students with your faculty and their teaching styles. This generates greater reach for you and brings your course to the attention of new students. You can also utilise this same strategy to further your brand image and stand out amongst all your competitors.

3. Flexible learning path:

   Allowing dynamic access to your course topics and content allows your learners to navigate them as per their wishes and learn at their own pace. People do not feel pushed into buying your course. They try it out for free and then buy into your total course content. Hence the learning path becomes dynamic and easy for the students. This is a huge gain for online learners and most of them prefer to gain access to courses with these kinds of features.

Create Online Academy allows you to create and launch your courses in either format with free control over the accessibility of your course content. Along with a great LMS and free course creation tools, the platform also allows you to randomly choose whether you want to allow access to some portion of your course for free or lock it up and allow access only to students who have paid for the entire course. COA also allows you to choose whether you want your students to follow a strict learning path or dynamically choose the topics they want to learn from. These features are all part of affordable basic packages provided by COA so log onto their webpage today to create and launch your own digital academy or online course.