What Exactly is an Online Challenge?

A Challenge is a type of online course that has a fixed calendar start and end date. The main difference between a challenge and an online course is the way students get access to the lessons.

The idea of an online challenge is to deliver new content to participants on set calendar days. Generally, challenges are shorter than online courses and are aimed to help students achieve a clear goal in a few days.

In online challenges, you can schedule the dates when your course will be available to students, together with the release date of every single lesson. With Heights Platform, you can create challenges where each lesson will disappear for students after a set period of time that you can customize.

Everyone who purchases an online challenge will gain access to the course and go through the lessons at the same time.

Compared to other types of lead magnets (PDFs, eBooks, downloadable digital products) online challenges solve the problem of engagement that most free or low-cost lead magnets suffer from.

Using a challenge as a lead magnet helps students build a habit of engaging with your content by logging into your program and completing lessons in the challenge. This way students familiarize themselves with your products and your brand, making it easier for you to build loyalty and upsell other products in the future.

In other words, going through your challenge lead magnet can then help to carry that habit of engagement onto your flagship course or coaching program, since students are already familiar with your brand, teaching style and online course structure.

Benefits of Challenges as Lead Magnets

There are many use cases for online challenges, one of the most common is to use them as a lead magnet to attract clients, collect their email addresses and introduce them to your program.

In general, challenges offer many benefits to both the creator and students. They are highly engaging, interactive and help participants achieve their goals in a short period of time. As students go through the challenge together, it helps you create a feeling of community and promote interaction among the group.

Let's now see the benefits of using challenges as a lead magnet:

• Extremely Engaging: challenges are well known for their ability to engage participants from start to end. Students are highly incentivized to attend the course lessons as those are released on a daily basis and potentially expire after a set time. Compared to a classic lead magnet such as an eBook, digital product or downloadable PDF, a challenge is much more engaging and interactive.
• Collect new Leads: an online challenge has the potential to provide high value to its participants. If offered as a lead magnet, you will be able to collect email addresses of potential customers and kick-start interest in your brand.
• Upsell your Main Products: it is hard to upsell other products using a PDF as a lead magnet. Most of the time, visitors who sign up to get a lead magnet will simply download it, save it on their computer and often forget to open it, making it hard for you to drive them into your program. An online challenge offers a great opportunity for you to keep reminding participants about other services you provide. Heights Platform also lets you create an upsell page at the end of a challenge to get customers to purchase your main online course immediately upon completion and offer a great discount!

How to Use Challenges as Lead Magnets

Before describing how to use online challenges as lead magnets, let's clarify what a lead magnet is and how it works.

A lead magnet is a product (in this case a digital product) that is given away for free with the purpose of collecting prospects' contact details for future promotions.

This promotion strategy is increasing in popularity as it is getting harder to collect potential customers' emails: by offering a valuable product for free, you are justifying asking for a prospect's contact details. Potential customers can download or access these digital products once they have left their email addresses or some more personal information.

Overall if done well lead magnets can provide a win-win situation for both you and your customers.

As the creator, what should you do after someone downloads your lead magnet?

Once you get the email address of your potential customers, make sure to add them to your email list so you can start promoting your business with email marketing.

If you are interested to learn more about lead magnets and how to collect leads, check out this article from our blog: How to Create a Great Lead Magnet That Converts to Promote Your Online Course

The most common examples of lead magnets are PDFs, guides, tutorials, videos, live streaming recordings, eBooks and so on. But why not offer challenges as lead magnets?

The idea of using an online challenge as a lead magnet is a simple one. All you need to do is create your challenge and offer it for free or at a very low price.

A challenge destined to be used as a lead magnet should be different from a challenge you are planning to sell at a high price. While you should try to make your lead magnet valuable, it is important that you do not "give away" too much information.

At the end of your challenge, potential customers should feel as they received high value from the course, while still knowing that there is more you can teach them in your premium-priced services.

Once you have created your challenge, it's time to start promoting it and collect leads!

Publish the challenge on your website, share it on social media or run paid ads. Using paid advertising to market a lead magnet will be cheaper and easier compared to running paid ads to get people to purchase a $1000 online course.

Create a Challenge with Heights Platform

Until now, there has never been an easy way to create and run an online challenge. Creators would have to manually release each lesson, notify students with an email and there was no option to make a lesson expire, or restart a challenge easily.

Heights Platform is the first online course software to design an easy solution for creators who want to build and run multiple challenges.

With Heights Platform Challenges you can:

• Easily upload content to your challenge
• Select the dates when the challenge will be available
• Set each lesson's expiration date
• Automatically send an email to students enrolled once a new lesson is released
• Have a comment section under each lesson to engage students
• Seamlessly restart a challenge once its finished, simply by changing the start and end date
• Upsell other courses, membership sites or digital products at the end of the challenge

While before all of these actions had to be done manually, now you can run online challenges easily and get started in minutes!

You also have the option to set up an upsell page at the end of the challenge (see an example in the picture above). Once students complete the challenge, they will be redirected to the upsell page and invited to purchase another product from your program.

You can choose to upsell an online course, a bundle, a digital product or even another challenge. You also can set a special price for your leads to maximize sales.

This way, all the efforts you put into creating and promoting your online challenge as a lead magnet are not lost and you get a better chance of gaining new customers!