5 Elements to Grow Your Subscription Business for Online Education

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Let’s review five essential elements that you should implement to maximize online course subscriptions.

Quality Content is Number One

The subscription business begins by providing quality material. To convert your single-dimensional training sales into a multi-dimensional approach and make your training business an income-generating subscription machine, you must ensure you are ready for content.

This means that you have plenty of continuous sources of recurring quality content.

The content plan you make — the kind of content you can produce in the next six, twelve or 18 months will assist you in determining what types of subscriptions you can offer.

For instance, if you’re producing courses for certifications that are large in scale that involve a lot of courseware and tests and a long cycle of production, You’d be better off taking into consideration one of these options:

• A tiered subscription where customers who have reached a certain degree of certification are provided with the following certification level at reduced prices; or
• An annual subscription that grants an entire group of students in the same group access to your training material for a specific period and pushes them towards the test that awards their certificates.

Use Alerts and Notifications

Consider your biggest customers – the giant companies who pay you tens of many thousands to help you train your employees. Wouldn’t it be great to be notified when the seat licences of your clients have reached an arbitrary threshold or when the contract has reached a vital renewal date so that your sales reps can get to work?

This is the reason for automatic notifications, which aim to ease the task that is managing and selling and upselling customers. Imagine your top customer has reached an average of 75% use for your training. This is a chance to inform them that they might be interested in doubling the number of their licences, so nobody gets refused.

In addition, when you are two months from renewal, it might be beneficial to take a proactive approach by contacting them and informing them of the deadline for renewal on time to avoid a delay in service.

Show What Premium Looks Like

As we’re discussing the topic of your most important clients, it’s no surprise that you’d like to offer them a superior service that is a cut beyond the standard. When it comes to training, this could mean that they can have a custom learning portal with the brand that is theirs alone such as logos, colours, and layout.

It is possible to dedicate time to the creation and maintenance of those. Then, you can apply intelligent templates that permit users to modify the look by using checkboxes and uploads of photos.

As you create an automatized “panorama” of brands – various styles for different customers, you should also consider the websites students visit to learn online. Rather than using a domain that includes your company name, your top customers deserve an environment that reflects their name: “learn.bigcompany.com”.

Make Sure You Capture Payment

To run a successful subscription management software for online courses, an essential factor in ensuring the success of your subscription is the automation of “dunning.”

Two common scenarios with subscriptions are when the credit card on file expires or the purchase fails because the credit card owner has reached a limit. In either of these scenarios, the automatic renewal process doesn’t occur.

Dunning management offers an automated method to let you retry cards, as an example, in set intervals following the first failed transaction. The capability to do this will reduce subscribers’ amount of time and result in higher revenue.

Instead of cancelling the subscription you lost, you can try and regain it once the credit card number is changed or the credit limit has been eliminated.

Use the Magic of Bundles, Coupons, and Membership

With the ability to bundle and manage coupons and member management, you’ll be able to open the door for your marketing specialists to experiment with all kinds of innovative programs in search of even more revenue from subscriptions.

These aren’t standalone programs; they are more of a way to boost the revenue from your subscriptions by growing sales in one particular region or offering your subscribers incentives through discounts.

Bundling, which I’ve mentioned earlier, can offer clients access to a predetermined sequence of courses at a lower cost than what they would be able to afford each class on their own. It could also be “a la carte” – items they’ve picked themselves from a selection of courses that you’ve designed to be based on a specific topic.

Utilizing coupon management lets you make campaigns to promote specific courses of instruction by giving discounts that are limited in time or bundles.