Selling online courses is a great way to grow revenue from new and existing customers, especially if your company is already in the business of selling training or other eLearning content. However, it can be a difficult transition to make for many companies. To do it successfully, most companies need a Learning Management System, or LMS, paired with an eCommerce solution.
If you deliver classroom-style instructor-led training as well, you may need a solution for that too. And, most importantly, all these pieces of the “learning ecosystem” need to play nicely together to enable a seamless flow of information and to avoid bogging your team down with manual administration.
In this blog post, we explore the tech landscape for selling and delivering eLearning, blended and instructor-led courses. We will also highlight some of the benefits of using an LMS and eCommerce solution to streamline course delivery, including how this integrated solution can provide greater value to both course creators and online learners.
Using an LMS To Deliver Courses and Content
A learning management system is used to organize, deliver and track educational content. For organizations that deal in learning, they are essential. Despite this, many organizations that sell training or courses have yet to include an LMS to assist with selling memberships, delivering content, enrolling users in courses, setting up class schedules, or performing other time-consuming managerial tasks.
This is a significant missed opportunity for many companies that don’t realize their eCommerce platform can be integrated with an LMS. This combination creates a powerful platform that can sell and efficiently deliver learning content all in one place.
Using an LMS in coordination with eCommerce tools can significantly enhance the user experience for your customers, leading to more repeat purchases, a larger community of learners, and more courses sold overall.
These are a few of the main benefits of using an LMS to support your company’s eCommerce efforts:
- Training Orientation: Learning management systems are designed for delivering learning content. Other delivery methods available to companies looking to sell courses simply lack focus on training, and often leave the customer on their own once they’ve purchased a course. By incorporating an LMS, attendees and learners can be given the information they need and course content can be efficiently delivered. For example, you can set pre-requisites for a course or run live training events with tickets and admission tracking.
- Analytics: Data is essential in the business world today. Data helps you make better decisions and prove the value of your offerings to your customers. When selling training courses it’s highly beneficial to include an LMS that’s capable of reporting on the success of the specific courses and programs you sell. Instructors, students, or companies who purchase these courses should have some level of access to this data in order to measure learner success and the effectiveness of the courses. Additionally, your team can measure this learning data across your courses to assess where your courses might be able to be improved. Working to continually improve your courses enables you to make sure that the courses you’re selling stay fresh, relevant, and continue to provide an engaging experience for learners. These are all important to maintaining repeat purchases and seeing return on investment.
- Advanced Access Control: Learning management systems are designed to provide flexible access to courses. This is typically superior to what is natively available with eCommerce platforms where back-end settings are often limited or user experience is less-than-friendly. By integrating the two, you have increased customization options to do things like offer access to courses for limited timeframes, to select groups of people, as branded mini-sites for big customers, and much more.
- Easy Proof of Learning: Assessment and proof of learning are often as important to customers as the content itself. Not only can learners access evaluations and data of their learning efforts while completing a course, but an LMS will convert passing grades or completed courses into certifications, badges, or other rewards that acknowledge proof of completion. In fact, many learning management systems can manage this entire process automatically.
- Simpler Compliance: In the same way that certifications are important to customers, so is compliance. Some training content is required for compliance purposes. Tools like e-signatures, reporting and compliance dashboards make offering compliance-ready content easier. This can be a major value addition, especially for enterprise customers.
- Scalability: Good quality eCommerce solutions are already scalable. However, your content delivery may not be scalable in the same way. The right LMS can offer an immense amount of flexibility, scalability and customizability for your content. Using an LMS provides more opportunities to expand your content offerings.
In short, using an LMS to deliver content gives you a powerful toolset for managing your courses. If you’re in the business of selling training online, an LMS is a must-have.
Using an LMS To Train Your Team
Additionally, organizations that sell training can benefit from using an LMS to support their own learning needs. Ensuring that all your employees know how to work with your systems, support customers, and achieve success is essential for any business. An LMS can help you achieve better results from your own team members.
In much the same way that an LMS can help you offer more to customers, it can help you get more from your own internal training efforts. You can track participating, completion, assessments and more to ensure that your content is doing its job.
Training is an important part of running a successful business. No matter what you sell, having team members who are well-versed in your systems, catalog and procedures is invaluable. Using an LMS can help you achieve superior training results.
Learn More – Register for our upcoming webinar
Join eThink and our partners at Arlo for a webinar on August 28, 2019 at [time] to learn how you can promote, sell and deliver your courses and training events more easily with an eCommerce and LMS pairing.
This webinar is a must-attend event for any training managers and administrators that:
- want to start selling eLearning but don’t know where to start
- are already selling some eLearning but need to grow sales and reduce manual administration
- or those looking to find a more integrated way to manager eLearning and instructor-led training.
Click the image below to register:
Discover more about learning management systems and how your business can expand its training programs by pairing an LMS and eCommerce solution. eThink and Arlo can help you master your educational content delivery with a fully-managed eLearning solution. Contact us for more information, or click below to request an individual demonstration!
