The Best Way to Promote and Sell an Online Course During Black Friday
9 minute readBlack Friday is a great opportunity for creators and online entrepreneurs who want to increase their sales.
This date has been symbolically recognized as the start of the holiday season, or better more, the time for holiday shopping.
To keep up with the competition, many businesses start promoting their Black Friday deal at the beginning of November. So how can you compete and make your deal stand out when there are so many businesses vying for your customer's attention?
In today's article, we'll share our tips for online course creators to get ready for Black Friday, how to create a deal and how to promote it.
Getting Ready For Black Friday
Before you start worrying about creating the perfect deal, there are a number of things to consider first.
Does your online course have product-market-fit?
If this is the first time launching your online course, make sure that there is demand for it. Depending on where you stand with the creation of your program, you might want to start doing this sooner or later.
For instance, if your online course is not launched yet and you have no audience, you should start this step months before Black Friday.
If this is the case for you, we recommend building an audience before you launch any special deal: 5 Tips to Grow Your Business With Content Creation and Build an Audience Around Your Online Course
Assuming that your online course is already launched and you built an audience around it, you could start thinking about Black Friday at the beginning of November.
Create Your Black Friday Deal
Once you have tested the demand for your online course and built an audience, you can start focusing on creating your unique offer.
This can vary depending on your course, niche and goals. Let's see what the most popular deal choices among course creators are:
#1. Offer a Discount
The most popular Black Friday deal is probably offering a discount. This is the easiest and most used way to promote a retail product, but it can also be applied to online courses.
You might offer a 20%, 30% or even 50% discount on your online courses or membership site access.
When can you discount?
Discounting has its pros and cons. It can be a great way to build excitement around your program and drive up sales significantly.
However, it is not for everyone. The biggest drawback of discounting is that it can affect the perceived value of your product in the eyes of your customers. This is less of a problem for physical products and retail stores, as the value of the product is clear regardless of its price.
But it can be a problem with online courses, as your potential customers cannot see the content of your program before buying it.
Discounting works better with high-ticket online courses or bundles. If you are selling your course for $1000, a 20% discount won't affect the perceived value of your product. However, if your course is priced at $30, lowering its price, even more, can impact the way your customers see it.
Membership sites and subscription-based programs can benefit from discounting as well. You could set a discount for annual access as opposed to paying monthly fees. For instance, if you sell a membership site access at $30/month, you could offer a discount on your annual fees only (i.e. $300/year). This is beneficial for both you and your customers: they can save money and you can secure more annual sales.
How to Discount Your Online Course in Heights Platform: Heights Platform allows you to create coupon codes for your students, to provide discounted or free access to your program. Simply create the coupon code, name it as you like and assign it to your preferred course within your program. Once you apply a few settings, you are ready to start promoting your coupon code to your audience!
As an alternative to coupons, you can also simply reduce the price temporarily for new customers, without worrying that it will affect existing customers paying subscription or installment plans.
#2. Add Value
Discounting is not the only alternative to drive up sales during Black Friday. For online course creators, adding extra value to a course can even be a better option.
You could add an extra lesson, a complimentary live call, a free digital product, access to a discussion or community and so on.
Try to find out what your audience wants and what they need to achieve their goals and add it for free to your online course for the duration of your Black Friday deal.
This strategy is great for many reasons. First of all, you don't run the risk of lowering the perceived value of your online course, which could happen if you discount too heavily. Furthermore, it is extremely easy to add a bonus to your online course and it won't take up too much of your time. Finally, your audience will appreciate the extra attention and will be more likely to share your great deal with their peers.
How to Add Value Using Heights Platform: Heights gives you full flexibility in how you structure your online course or membership site. You can add unlimited digital products, message boards, challenges and so on. Heights also let you bundle different products together, creating the perfect deal for Black Friday, which brings us to our next point:
#3. Create Bundles With Different Offerings
Similar to adding value, you could also combine different online courses together in a bundle. This strategy can be used together with a discount to make your deal even more powerful.
If you have multiple product offerings, creating a bundle can be very easy and offer great value to potential customers.
Bundles are becoming extremely popular among creators thanks to the flexibility they allow. Let's see how you can get started with bundles:
Set Up a Bundle in Heights Platform: Creating a bundle in Heights Platform is so easy!
Bundles are a great way to offer discounted access to a collection of content in your program, but there are many other uses and pricing models that can be configured using bundles:
- Powered Up Online Courses: Sell a course package including a course, project, and private messageboard, plus potentially a bonus digital product download or coaching service. We believe the most successful online courses offer more than only the course itself. Creating a bundled package of interactive learning content like this provides more value to your students.
- Discounted Packages: If your messageboards and projects are public and your courses are sold separately, you could create a bundle of courses to offer discounted access to customers that purchase all of your courses at once.
- Tiered Pricing Plans: Courses can be added to any number of bundles allowing you to create multiple pricing plans for each of your courses. For instance, you might sell the course on its own as the base tier, then have a bundle that includes the course, an extra private message board, and digital product download as a bonus. Finally, you might offer a bundle as a third-tier that includes everything in the previous bundle, plus an additional digital product that is a one-on-one coaching service.
- Multiple Subscription Plans: While you can create a subscription membership program using the paid enrollment option, bundles allow you to create multiple subscription membership plans inside one Heights Platform account.
#4. Partner With Another Creator
Starting a partnership for Black Friday is another great way of increasing sales and promoting your online course to an external audience.
You could create a group offering where customers get access to both courses with one payment.
If you already know other creators in your niche who are not direct competitors, partnering with them can be extremely beneficial for both of you and your audiences. A partner can give you access to their audience and help you spread the word about your online course, while students who get your partnership deal receive double the value!
If you don't have any contacts of creators in your niche, try doing some market research and create a list of potential partners to contact. Check out different communities of creators in your niche, Facebook groups, forums and so on.
What to consider before starting a partnership:
- Is that creator a direct competitor? You may want to avoid creators with an online course too similar to yours. Try aiming for online courses that could complement your content and provide even more value to your students. For instance, if you were selling an online course about Digital Marketing, a great partner could be a creator that focuses on SEO, or Graphic Design.
- How big is their audience? Try aiming for creators with an audience similar to yours. While a larger audience would be great for you, it might be harder for you to convince those creators to partner with you.
- Do they offer quality content? You might want to purchase your partner's online course or ask them for a content sneak peek before creating a partnership. It is important that their content matches yours in terms of value and quality, as your customers will associate you with them.
How to Promote Your Online Course Black Friday Deal
Once you created your Black Friday deal, it's time to promote it!
It is important to create a "buzz" before your launch your deal, so don't start at the last minute. The weeks before Black Friday are the perfect time to start promoting your deal to your audience.
Let's see a few ways you can implement to market your offer:
Create a Deal Landing Page
Whether your offer is ready or not, having a dedicated landing page can help you drive up excitement and traffic.
The goal of your landing page is to sell your deal and clearly communicate what your offer is about to potential customers.
Here are a few components to include in your landing page that can help you increase your sales:
- A catchy headline and clear copy: make sure you are clearly describing what your course is about and stating your value proposition. The goal students will achieve at completion of your online course should be extremely clear. Try adding some urgency to your copy to compel sign-ups. Here are some tips on naming your online course: How to Choose the Perfect Name for Your Online Course
- Visual Elements: add pictures, a sneak peek of your content, and if you have - a video.
- Clear Call to Action: a CTA (call to action) refers to the link button where visitors can purchase your deals. It is important that all your CTAs are clearly visible and accessible anywhere on your landing page to make it easy for your potential customers.
- Social Proof Elements: if you have collected reviews from your past students, add them to your landing page to reinforce the value of your offer. Here are some tips on how to collect reviews for your online course.
- Collect Email Addresses: if your deal is not live yet, you could add a place for potential customers to add their emails and get notified about your Black Friday offer.
- Refund Policy: add sentences like "Money Back Guaranteed" or "Risk-Free" to inform your customers about the refund policy and reassure even the most cautious buyers.
- Contact Information: not many creators give their contact details on their sales page. Proving a way for potential students to reach out to you can offer them a feeling of security and improve your image as the creator.
Send Out Multiple Newsletters
Your email contacts should be the first to know about your deal. Send out multiple newsletters before the big day to create excitement about your upcoming deal.
Here is an example of a possible email structure you could follow to promote your offer:
- Email 1 (2 weeks before Black Friday or even earlier): Announce that something big is coming
- Email 2 (a few days later): Reveal the upcoming offer
- Email 3 (a week before Black Friday): Launch the offer
- Email 4 (on Black Friday): Offer reminder
- Email 5 (A few days after): Offer ending - last chance
The above is just an example of how you could run your email marketing campaign for Black Friday.
If you use a similar template, remember to segment your audience to avoid spamming them. For example, if someone buys your deal after the launch, remember to not email them again with constant reminders.
Check out this article from our blog to learn more about email marketing: Guide to Email Marketing to Promote and Sell an Online Course
Other Ways to Promote Your Black Friday Offer
Promoting your Black Friday deal is essential if you wish to increase your visibility and sales.
There are countless ways you can use to promote your online course. From sharing the deals on social media to using paid advertisement.
We wrote a guide on how to market an online course, you can apply all of these strategies to your Black Friday deal as well: A Complete Guide on How to Promote Your Online Course and Boost Sales
If you do not want to spend money on paid advertisement, check out this article from our blog: Get Your First $100k Without Paid Ads: How to Grow Your Online Course Business Organically
Conclusion
Black Friday can be a great opportunity for creators to grow their audience base and increase their online course sales.
As a creator, you could choose to offer a discount, add value to your online course by offering extra free content, group your courses into a bundle and start a partnership with another creator.
Whatever deal you choose for Black Friday, make sure you are promoting it correctly! Set up a landing page for your offer, send out multiple newsletters to your contacts and share your deal using your favorite marketing strategy.
If you are looking for the perfect online course software, don't miss Heights Platform's Black Friday deal!
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