There are numerous tasks to complete, such as selecting your course subject, looking up and buying recording equipment, choosing your course title, deciding what to include in your classes, deciding how you will produce your content, marketing your course, and everything else in between. You also had to make the challenging choice of setting the cost of your training at some point during that process. Read this guide to know about how to price your course.
This might be helpful: How To Create a Successful Online Course
Why is it so challenging to price your online course?
Pricing online classes won’t be easy for you if you’re like most online teachers. In reality, selecting a course price is one of the hardest and most confusing choices you’ll have to make out of all the stages involved in developing and marketing online courses.
Because they are aware of how pricing impacts a course’s worth and adoption, we think that this stage is one that many online instructors find difficult. It’s not a choice that ought to be made hastily, and it’s certainly not something that ought to be conjured up out of empty air without a sound plan of action.
Effects of pricing to understand how to price your course
For instance, the kind of marketing you use to advertise your school affects the kind of pupils it draws. (ie. targeting Gen Z with Tiktok tutorials). Your pricing plan is influenced by your ability to assist and care for your pupils as well as, of course, your ability to make money from course sales.
The dangers?
- If you undercharge, the apparent worth of your course will be diminished. (and severely limit your revenue potential and marketing abilities in the process).
- If you charge too much, you’ll probably have to lower your price, which appears awful.
In our Facebook group as well as among online teachers in general, the topic of how much to charge for a lesson is frequently discussed. Unfortunately, there isn’t a universal answer we can offer to every teacher who poses this query.
What we can do, however, is release this in-depth guide, which was created using our team’s insights and experiences as well as the results of numerous price-related discussions with other online teachers.
The issue with offering your online training for a cheap price
There are a few circumstances—which I’ll discuss later in this article—where offering your course for sale at a discount or even for free is acceptable. But before that, I’d like to go over some of the major arguments against offering your training for cheap.
You are unable to pay for course advertising
Without promotion, it is feasible to start and expand a course (as Brian Gordon did with his Exam Success course), but it is undoubtedly much more challenging. When you set your online course’s price cheap, you instantly reduce your capacity to spend money promoting it and realizing a profit. (ROI). In actuality, when you charge for advertising, you run the risk of losing money rather than making money when you have a cheap course fee.
Let’s examine an illustration:
Let’s imagine that your training sells for $50. Spending money on advertisements (such as Facebook Ads) leads you to the conclusion that your average cost per lead is $5 after a few campaigns have been run. Just to be explicit, a lead is someone who shows interest in your course but has not yet made a transaction (for example, by clicking on your ad or signing up for your email list).
Let’s presume that your conversion rate from prospects to customers is 5% to continue this scenario. As a result, you sell 1 course for every 20 prospects you generate (20 x 5% = 1). A single transaction worth $100 requires $100 in advertising because each lead costs $5.
It causes you to become unmotivated to advertise
Selling online classes for a cheap price encourages laziness in marketing. Consider this. Would you devote a lot of time and resources to promoting your course if each purchase only brought in a few dollars? Most likely not.
Never assume that individuals will purchase something simply because it is inexpensive. (we can thank Groupon for killing that train). People want to be sure that the item they are purchasing has worth and want to know precisely what is included in it. They won’t just pull out their credit card and purchase from you without thinking, just because the price is cheap.
Here are 20+ Best Online Course Platforms for you.
You lower the perceived worth of your training
You generally get what you spend for both online and offline. This means that offering your course for a cheap price significantly lowers its perceived worth since the majority of purchasers think this is the case. If the cost is low, the quality must also be low. Your intended demographic will likely assume that.
Sales will be greatly influenced by how valuable your online course is viewed, and pricing it too low will undermine that impression. Your training fee will have a psychological impact on your target market. Positioning your training as the top alternative in your market is preferable from a branding standpoint.
A rush to the lowest results from price competition
There will always be someone who can undercut the price you establish for your training. Price competition alone leads to a downward spiral. Customers who stick with the vendor offering the lowest price are not the ones you want, in any case. Avoid wasting your time by attempting to help these individuals. Concentrate on promoting your course to people who will appreciate its worth and who won’t cancel their buy and request a refund as soon as they discover a comparable course that is less expensive.
Online learning is equally beneficial to in-person learning
To be explicit, online training is not any less beneficial than in-person instruction.
The method of delivery of an instructional product has less of an impact on its perceived worth than other elements like:
- The instructor’s knowledge
- The topic’s precision in relation to your students’ requirements
- Degree of learning customization
- The importance of the result or outcome that your training aids your pupils in achieving
For the simple reason that it is more practical and allows them to learn at their own speed, some people even prefer to learn online.
Read How To Create Profitable Online Courses.
Selling a cheap course requires the same amount of work as selling a pricey one
At a lower price range, it is only slightly easier to convince someone to purchase. Pricing is only one factor in the psychological turning point for making a purchase, but reductions and pricing can help. It takes time, effort, and frequently money to generate leads, nurture them, and ultimately offer to them. Selling a cheaper course won’t likely vary much from the process you walk them through to purchase a costly one.
Lower rates draw consumers of lower grade
Consider the number of novels you’ve purchased for between $20 and $30. Consider the number of those novels that you actually completed reading. I’m guessing not all of them. We’ve all been there, so don’t feel terrible. We appreciate the goods we purchase in direct relation to the amount we pay for them as consumers. The same reasoning holds true for online classes.
When someone purchases your course for a cheap price, there is a greater likelihood that they won’t finish it, and an even smaller likelihood that they will apply what they learn. Why? mainly because they have less at stake.
How this guide will help you to understanding how to price your course
We have a lot of data to help you out here because Thinkific presently runs tens of thousands of online classes on just about any subject you can imagine. At this point, we have a fairly decent understanding of what pricing your online course successfully and unsuccessfully entails. This essay is lengthy, so you might want to get yourself a cup of caffeine before reading it.
Don’t set your prices too cheap at first to understand how to price your course
When you first start out online instructing, it can be challenging to avoid the urge to offer your courses for a bargain price. Perhaps you lack the self-assurance to demand a high fee. Perhaps you don’t yet have a lot of material for your training. Maybe you don’t know how much your intended audience will spend for your training.
Perhaps you don’t have a sizable crowd or email address to which you can advertise your course. Whatever the situation, we completely understand. The same factors that led Greg to sell his LSAT training for only $29 more than ten years ago still apply today.
Select and market only to customers who respect the sort of content you are producing to understand how to price your course
There are undoubtedly a ton of web tools available that cover the same material as your course, including articles, ebooks, podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks, white papers, and SlideShare slideshows. Knowing this, you may be wondering why someone would spend a high price for your course when there are so many other options available that are free or cheap.
Yes, there are a good number of people who don’t mind wasting countless hours of their precious time browsing through unpaid content online. These are the individuals who, however, are unlikely to end up purchasing material from anyone.
Some individuals regularly purchase multiple courses from cheap course markets (where courses typically offer for $50 or less), but they never finish them. In the realm of online schooling, it’s tragic.
Considerations for how to price your course
Don’t base prices solely on length
Many online educators believe that in order to demand a high price for their course, they must make it extremely lengthy. This is not correct at all. The duration of your online education shouldn’t affect how much it costs to take it. Depending on the worth of the material, the price.
This is where duration comes into play if you have a lot of value that is described in great depth (therefore making a lengthy course). However, avoid extending it merely because you can. Do not develop 7 hours of training if you can educate someone to achieve their desired outcome in 3 hours.
Look at your competitors
Some will advise you to compare the costs of rival courses and set your own price somewhere in the center. This is poor counsel. Based on the worth you offer your students, set the price for your training. This covers every aspect, such as your coaching and encouragement as well as the importance of the result you assist them in achieving. Don’t solely base your course pricing decision on what your rivals charge for their classes.
If you’re going to study your rivals, do it purely to confirm that there are people out there who are willing to pay to learn about your subject. Do it to verify market demand rather than to determine the price of your training.
Measure the outcomes your pupils can accomplish
Tell your pupils how much you plan to assist them save before you start. Tell them how much time you’re going to save them. You make the cost of your training seem like a no-brainer by putting a dollar amount on the benefit that you help them accomplish. For instance, if taking your course will help someone get a particular job or get promoted at work, that is an outcome that can definitely be measured.
Conclusion
Payment options make courses more affordable for those who cannot pay the entire cost up front by allowing students to pay for the course in installments. Order increases are extra products that students can buy at a reduced price to add to their order.
