The Price is Right! — 3 pricing strategies to sell more Online Courses.
How much do you charge for a course?
If you have launched your own course you will already realise that this is not a simple as it sounds.
If you are coming from an academic background or a professional training company you may already have a good idea of what the market will pay for your training course.
But for most individual course creators it can be very difficult to understand how to price your course.
Are you leaving money on the table because you are charging too little?
Are you losing sales because you are charging too much?
So here are our top 3 tips for pricing your course in a way to get more sales:
Tip 1 — Price according to student outcome NOT your effort.
Gordon Ramsey is famous for his TV shows, books and aggressive attitude but when you go to eat in his famous 3 Star Michelin restaurant, it will cost you £130 for a 3-course lunch (without drinks). Don’t get me wrong Scallops, Dover Sole are all exquisite produce but Caramelised Apple Tarte Tatin — is still an apple, butter, flour and sugar no matter how you construct it!
The cost of the ingredients DO NOT ADD UP to the price of the meal! Even if you take into account the fixed costs and overheads in such a fine restaurant, a single lunch cover does not cost £130 ($150).
You are paying for two things. Your experience as a diner and Gordons intellectual property (IP) in his menu creation, the taste and presentation.
Many course creators make the mistake of pricing their course based on how many hours they took in creating it. This is wrong! Don’t charge for the ingredients charge for the experience.
To become an expert in your chosen topic, you will have spent years perfecting your knowledge. The experiences you can share can save any student many hours in not making costly mistakes.
…and this is value!
Consider what the student will be able to do once they have completed the course. How much more will they be worth in the job market? How much money could they make (over a lifetime) by implementing the training you have given them? How much time and money have you saved them?
What is the financial equivalent to the student of completing and implementing your course rather than not taking it?
Now consider your IP and the years of investment you have made becoming an expert and factor that into the monetary value the results from this course will being the student.
Now you have a much clearer idea of what to charge.
Don’t be scared if this seems too expensive, as starting big is a good place to start….
Tip 2 — Start big and run discount offers.
It’s better to have a course priced in alignment with its TRUE value to the student than trying to go cheap.
It is easier to lower your price than it is to increase it!
The great thing about Teachable is that you can create coupons which means you can run discounts to your email list to see if a change in price affects sales or not.
One of the best ways to do this (without being disingenuous) is as prospects enter your email sequences for the first time (probably after they opt into your Lead Magnet) offer different levels of discount to them.
Keep changing your discount offer until you get the highest number of sales conversions per hundred signups.
By offering a “new subscriber” a discount coupon, you can ensure that you only display this discount price to that new email subscriber and you don’t fall foul of publishing different discounts online.
Each subscriber will only see one email of this type so changing the coupon for the next 100 subscribers will not affect your integrity with existing subscribers.
Using this “split test” approach will help you arrive at an optimal price.
Tip 3 — Break your course into smaller chargeable modules.
When launching the Teachable Course for a data presentation client we had a challenge that the course was going to be sold at $497. As this is a professional course this is about the equivalent of a days workplace training.
The course content comprised of three main sections.
Therefore to make the course more digestible we separated each section into a new mini-course. This way we could price each new mini-course at $197 which would make the course worth $591.
This produces an effect called “price anchoring” which shows the comparable benefit of one price next to the other…
Pay $591 separately or $497 for all three now.
Not only that, but you also have the option of selling individual mini-courses to your mailing list who have not bought your full-price product.
If you add a monthly instalment (fixed-term subscription) you can lower price barrier to entry even further.
Split the payments over 6 months to $98.5 per month and the reaction to the size of the original price is reduced.
Pricing Strategies
In order to ‘make it’ selling courses online, you have two real strategies: sell lots of courses and make them cheap or sell a great course for a large amount.
Depending on how competitive your niche is and how much content you have to offer will determine which is better for you.
But one thing is certain, to get your pricing right is a PROCESS not a single one-time decision.
Happy Course Selling.
