How to Upsell Your New Courses to Existing Learners: Tips & Tricks

With each online course, it is a tough deal to find new students. But what if there was a way to upsell or cross-sell the new courses to your existing students? Yes, it’s possible and has a high success rate. Why? Well, your students already know you and the value of your learning. Thus, it is fairly easy to upsell your new courses. But there are some technical issues as well like, 

• As students are familiar with your platform, you don’t have any specific surprise factor. You need to think and create a surprise factor. 
• The chances of exhaustion from just finishing one course might demotivate them to hop on a new one. 
• Their topic of interest might differ as they already gained what they were looking for from one course. 
• It is possible that they did not like your teaching pattern or course module to feel like coming back. 

However, these are just a few hiccups down the road. Don’t worry, with our quick tips and tricks, you can build an efficient upselling and cross selling strategy. But first, what’s the difference between the two? Let’s get to know that. 

What are Upselling and Cross-Selling? 

Upselling and cross-selling of courses apply to the group of students or learners you already have on board. 

Upselling: This is the method to encourage customers to opt for a higher-priced plan that would give them additional benefits and features. Instead of buying a single course, you can encourage them to buy a bundle that is priced high and gives them access to 3 inter-related courses for overall development. 

Cross-selling: This is the technique where you suggest other related courses. This increases the overall value of their cart. Just like at McDonald’s, the cashier suggests that at just a few more bucks, you can get a meal with these extra items. 

Leverage Email Marketing Campaigns to Retain Students

You definitely use email marketing software of any sort or your membership tools to send announcements and updates of your online course platform. 

Now, this is your first space to promote other related products. To do this, you must understand what your students want or what they’ve been most involved in. Get into the psyche of your students – who and why they might be interested in your courses? Use their past enrollment history, grades, and interests to pick the right students to suggest relevant courses.

Based on this segmentation, you can shoot various email campaigns suggesting targeted courses. 

Email Headings are important as every business is trying to get the audience to open theirs up. Here are some practical tips on how to optimize your email headings:

• Get creative with ads (use trust signals and numbers, explain unique benefits).
• Instead of placing the name of your course in the email, state its main benefit (e.g. “How to become more productive in 7 days” instead of “Announcing the Boosting productivity course”).
• Clearly state who this course is for (e.g. “New groundbreaking course for teachers”).
• Create urgency with headlines like, ‘Welcoming the Last Batch for this one-of-a-kind course.’ 
• Show your authority of the field or topic with a copy like, ‘The only course you would ever need to become a fitness instructor.’ 

Use Internal Community or Landing Pages

Utilize your LMS’s online community to broadcast and market your other offers. When students are using your website for studying, you can use tools like pop-ups and landing pages to drive them toward your other offers. 

Try to find out how you can create an upselling funnel with your course builder or membership software. Those can be ads in the admin bar, public wall announcements, and even automated messages in the private messaging system. 

For example, with the ARMember WordPress membership and course builder plugin, you can leverage the feature of the User Private Content add-on. This can help you communicate with each student personally and provide them with the offer they need. With personalized offers and messaging, the chances of generating a sale increases. 

Offer Loyalty Programs or Discounts to Current Students

If you truly value your current student base, you must show them that. This can be done by creating a special loyalty student tier that offers a new course every month at a fixed rate. You can also provide special discounts to the students to get related courses. 

For repeater customers, you can create a dedicated coupon code that can be applied only by them. These strategies encourage existing customers to act faster and enroll in new courses. Making your current students feel special and valued is one of the best ways for retention. 

Track Analytics and Use A/B Testing 

Are your students completing the course they are opting for? What’s the reason for not finishing a course? Or is it a trend among students to drop a course at a certain point? What’s that point? 

Check analytics and get answers to all such questions to understand where the actual problem lies. Is the teaching technique too hard or boring that the students get turned off from the course? 

If the issue is from your end, make sure to resolve it. Try to change the teaching pattern and make the course more engaging. Use A/B testing for the course content or marketing to study which version gets the most views. 

Addressing this concern is crucial to increasing course completion rates and encouraging upselling of your new courses. Based on the results of A/B testing and studying the analytics, you can tweak your marketing and course module to get the best performance. 

Focus on the Tutor to Boost Student Enrollment

Have you fetched a star tutor for the new course? Or perhaps it’s you with fresh new ideas and a different approach? Marketing the tutor’s personality and approach plays a significant role in course enrollment.

You must be thinking about how to place a bigger focus on a tutor when you advertise your new course.

For example, you can write course descriptions that capture the tutor’s personality and make the course sound truly approachable. You can go ahead and share personal stories or experiences that reveal the tutor’s character, expertise, journey, struggles, and learning. It can be a ‘Know our Tutor blog’ or a video with snippets from the tutor’s life, journey, and teachings. 

Also, instead of focusing on the course details in the course announcement, demonstrate how the tutor’s personality enhances the learning experience and smoothens the learning curve. 

Use Humor and Storytelling in Social Media Engagement

Social media is another powerful platform where you can put your courses in the spotlight and give them maximum exposure with the utmost creativity.

It’s the space where you can freely use emojis, tricky questions, humor, and storytelling to evoke curiosity from existing learners. 

1. Create short videos with the main course benefits and introduce your teachers.
2. Create engagement surveys related to the course topic.
3. Post images evoking interest in the future course. 
4. Create quizzes and personality tests to understand more about your audience and suggest them with related courses. 

It always works better with a multi-step strategy in social networks, so try all possible methods to get your students interested.

Provide a Sneak Peek at Your Offering

Your current students have dedicated their time and money to your platform. They deserve all the special treatment. One such way is to provide them early access or a sneak peek at what you are building. How will this help you? 

• There might be some improvements that can be implemented to give an edge to your course. Your current students can help you identify that. 
• There are different teaching and recalling techniques that your students would know better than you. With their limited access, you can get suggestions on this stuff and make your course better. 
• The students will feel involved in an important aspect and thus, increase their sense of value. This will build a strong relationship and tighten your community. 
• Students are going to post about such a privilege and increase the hype for you with ‘something big is coming soon.’ This will do your marketing for you. 
• The current students, having been involved in the creation process, are wired up to hop on to the new course as they know what to expect and how the course is tailored as per their suggestions. 

Wrapping Up the Upselling of Courses to Existing Students

Valuing and retaining your existing members is always going to be cheaper than finding new ones all the time. You must consider the following steps to best leverage the upselling and cross-selling techniques. 

1. Deliver and promise new, improved learning experiences within new courses.
2. Give exclusive discounts to existing learners.
3. Advertise your course with a focus on the tutor’s personality.
4. Use Analytics and A/B testing models to finetune your techniques.
5. Get creative with social media content.
6. Give special access to gain insights.

More tips & tricks:

• Exploring Membership-Based Podcasts: Strategies and Tools
• Best Marketing Strategies for Your Online Coaching Program
• Best FOMO Marketing Strategies