Customer experience is everything, whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or an online course or school. But how you foster a positive customer experience is a different beast for online stores than it is for in-person retail. Simply put, it’s too easy for customers to simply leave your sales page if they don’t have a great customer experience from start to finish. Online courses have a high ROI when executed properly, but course creators need to know how to invest in their customer experiences, so they can keep customers long enough to inspire a purchase. Let’s explore some tips to improve your Black Friday marketing strategy and customer experiences just in time for the shopping rush.
New challenges facing course creators
The online course market was already highly competitive before the COVID-19 pandemic, but these days, online courses and learning is more prevalent—and saturated—than ever. This certainly isn’t a bad thing. After all, online learning is more popular than ever. But it does mean course creators have to work to stand out from the crowd.
Black Friday is coming up, and it’s traditionally a way to earn massive profits through discounts and special marketing pushes. If you want to make the most of this Black Friday, you need to do better than offer flashy ads. You need to offer a stellar customer experience.
Customer experience could determine whether someone sticks around on your website or clicks away to visit one of your competitors. Online selling means capturing attention within seconds—challenging, for sure, but perfectly doable with the right tips.
Improving customer experiences for Black Friday
Let’s take a look at some of the best strategies to entice prospects to your course and turn one-time customers into loyal repeat buyers.
Revamp your website
For starters, you should take a hard look at your website and streamline any elements that are cluttered or difficult to navigate. If your landing page or your course selection pages are clunky or hard to read, people will click away in favor of your competitors. For a more comprehensive audit, you may want to hire a freelance graphic designer with web development experience to help improve your UX and aesthetics.
You can expect to pay at least $25 per hour for an experienced freelance graphic designer. This may be well worth it, if you host a website outside of your Teachable school. Plus, you’ll earn more profits from having a top-tier, easy-to-navigate website than you would with a cheap and unattractive website that drives customers away.
Leverage automation for fast responses
Next, don’t be afraid to leverage tech tools to guarantee a quality customer experience. Automated chatbots on your website are a great way to answer quick questions if customers are trying to find a specific course or what it costs.
While you don’t want to rely too much on bots, it’s important for the Black Friday rush. This tool can help engage visitors and keep them on your website, increasing your likelihood for customer conversion. Automation can also help in other ways, such as monitoring key metrics during big selling times.
Be present for personal communications
Remember, chatbots aren’t the end-all-be-all for customer service. You should be at your desk and ready to go on Black Friday. This way, you can answer any in-depth or technical questions about your courses. Personal communication—such as live chatting with web visitors or responding to emails or DMs—shows that you’re dedicated to providing a good experience.
Make sure you’re available to:
- Help people find your courses they can make use of
- Upsell and cross-sell
- Answer any complex customer service questions
- Provide refunds if necessary
Even if it costs you in the short term, being quick and agreeable to refund requests makes it more likely that people who leave your site will come back in the future.
Offer competitive discounts
Naturally, any good Black Friday marketing strategy will involve at least one solid discount. With this in mind, offer competitive discounts for your courses by looking at your competition and seeing what they are offering for similar courses.
Then mark your courses down, either as single discounts or in bundles, to make your online offerings even more attractive. This tactic will make your customers feel like they’re getting a great deal for choosing you instead of others.
Make your site easy to find
Let’s say that someone searches for courses through Google rather than responding to an email message or other advertisement directly from you. In that case, your website needs to be set up to gather organic traffic, especially on Black Friday.
Make sure you have a:
- Domain name that is easy to remember and spell
- Brand name that is easy to remember
- SEO plan to help your site rank highly Google
Choosing the right domain extension is also crucial. The domain extension you choose could affect where your website ranks when people search for courses or other related keywords. All of your courses should be easy to find within a few clicks, and the more you get your site out there, the easier this will become. For example, you can leverage backlinks to sell courses and boost website traffic by partnering with other industry players.
Improve course navigation
This last tip relates to the courses you offer rather than the website where people can purchase them. The best courses are those that are easy to navigate and understand. With this in mind, you can improve the customer experience for people who purchase your courses by taking a quick look through them and revamping course navigation systems.
For example, if it’s tough for a customer to follow your lessons or flow in a given course, they are less likely to continue through the course from start to finish. This could cause them to ask for a refund. But if you audit your courses and make sure that they are easy to navigate, customers will be more satisfied with their purchases.
Of course, other customer service concerns still affect your courses as well. For example, you’ll need to be on the ball when it comes to customer questions or technical support on Black Friday. Answering questions quickly and helping people access and enjoy your course materials may earn you future profits by inspiring people to come to you for all of their educational needs.
Closing the deal
All in all, improving your website and course customer experiences will do wonders for boosting your online reputation, drawing long-time customers to your brand, and making the most of the upcoming Black Friday sales period. Check out successful examples of courses you love, and adapt your own Black Friday marketing strategy accordingly.
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