You offer great elearning products. That’s the first step. However, in order to have a successful e learning program, you have to create and deploy a successful marketing program. Your goals will center around the following:

• Creating engagement on social media
• Boosting traffic to your website
• Earning great reviews and referrals
• Getting email subscriptions
• Converting more customers

The challenge is that it can be difficult to do this while also creating and sourcing great educational content and dealing with the daily tasks of operating your business. Fortunately, there are ten marketing hacks that can make this process a bit easier.

Entice Your Target Audience With a Free Trial

There’s a reason that businesses offer limited time trials or send out free product samples. It’s a technique that works. First, and most importantly your audience gets to preview your elearning content. This is your opportunity to prove that your courses are worthwhile. You might even consider offering a very basic course or certification program free of charge.

Offering a free trial is also a bit of a psychological trick. Have you ever taken a free sample then felt guilty for not making a purchase at a store? When you give a potential customer something, that creates a sense of obligation. Now this may not guarantee that they will make a purchase. However, they may feel obligated to pass your name onto someone else or start following you on social media as a means to ‘pay’ for the freebie you’ve given them.

Streamline Forms For Subscribers And Customers

Form frustration is a real thing. The longer it takes to fill out forms and the more unnecessary the information you are collecting, the more likely people are going to bail. This can lead to fewer conversions and fewer subscribers. Streamline forms so they are easy to fill out. Here are a few techniques.

• Use cookies to fill form fields out for customers
• Only require the minimum fields required to complete a subscription request or fill an order
• Make fields that aren’t necessary optional and move them to the end of the form
• Use a progress bar to let users know how far they have to go before they are finished
• Use drop down fields that allow users to select information rather than type it out

Remember that it’s more valuable to make sales and earn subscribers than it is to gather extra information for marketing purposes.

Make it Easy For Happy Customers to Review And Refer

Positive reviews and word of mouth referrals are very important to the success of your elearning program. Potential customers don’t want to hear what you have to say  about your classes. They want to hear from other students who can verify that your courses are worthwhile.

Your best bet is to find ways to make it easy for customers to provide reviews and referrals. One thing that you can do upon course completion is provide students with links to review sites. Another option is to offer an incentive, such as a discount on a future course, for referrals. Of course, never dismiss the simple but often effective tactic of identifying happy customers and simply asking them to tell their friends or leave a positive review.

Make Social Sharing Easy

Yasin Aberra who is the CEO and founder of Social Market Way has some interesting insights in the deceptively simple marketing techniques that are often missed. He says, “There are so many methods that are touted as the guaranteed way to create engagement and drive traffic. As a result, people over-complicate things. In the meantime, taking a simple step such as making it easy to share your content can result in large amounts of engagement over time can have measurably positive results.”

Let Successful Students Share Their Accomplishments

When students finish your courses, don’t reward them with only a simple, printable certificate. Instead, give them a digital certificate that they can use immediately. Provide them with options to share their successes in your classes on social media. This goes for certificates of completion, but also when they meet course milestones or progress in other ways.

By doing this, you benefit students by giving them opportunities to share their accomplishments. In addition to that, you also create a small marketing opportunity each time they do so. Basically, it’s word of mouth advertising embedded in an opportunity to share accomplishments and mastery of new skills.

Use Data to Prove Your Courses Are Worthwhile

Have 100% of your students finished the courses that they ordered? Do employers state that their workers have benefitted from completing your e learning program? Maybe you  have other data that backs your claims with numbers.

If you do, share that far and wide. Go with case studies and other evidence based research to prove that your e learning program is more than worth the price of tuition. Remember that potential customers don’t want to know that they can benefit from your courses. They want to see proof via numbers, case studies, and infographics.

Broadcast And Rebroadcast Your Content on Social Media

Until someone is actively looking for an online learning opportunity, they may have no reason whatsoever to interact with you on social media or through your blog. This means that your content is only valuable and relevant to those who are engaging you at any given time. Unfortunately, unless you make an effort to share and broadcast your best content on a regular basis, it’s going to be missed.

Use a content calendar along with online promotion tools to ensure that your content is shared and promoted across multiple social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Don’t be shy about promoting older content that  you know adds value and is relevant to potential customers. Finally, pay attention to what is trending. If you have blog content or social media posts that are relevant, don’t be afraid to broadcast them.

Link Your Website in Social Media Profiles

When people are looking you up on social media, be sure that they can connect with you on your website or blog. The best way to do this is to link your website on your social media profiles. This can help to drive traffic to your website as well as creating an opportunity for engagement and creating brand awareness.

Provide Incentives to Subscribers

When people are willing to subscribe to your email lists or follow you on social media, they deserve extra attention and consideration. Reward your subscribers with access to gated content, special offers, and other perks.As long as they are willing to engage,they deserve access to your brand by way of special access and other perks.

Solicit Feedback From Learners

Go beyond reviews and testimonials. Ask your clients for direct feedback by using polls and surveys. You can then turn the results of these into charts or infographics to display on your landing pages and share on social media. The result will be increased trust that can improve both traffic and conversions.

These ten marketing hacks should help you pave the way to more conversions, referrals, engagement, and traffic. Each one is actionable and relatively easy to apply. Pick a few out and test drive them, then measure the results. Chances are, you will see positive changes before long.