6 Secrets to increase your online course completion rate
It’s likely that 85% of your students are not finishing your course. This means that your clients are not receiving all the value from your course and don’t see real change in their lives. Thus, they are less likely to recommend the course. What can you do about it?
Tincuta (Tini) Nitu, our podcast guest is here to help. She is an online course creator that also helps other coaches and creators create, deliver, and optimize their online courses.
In this article, we will present Tini's 6 secrets you can implement right away to increase the completion rate of your course. In addition, this article will teach you how to structure courses wisely to deal with any motivational dips, build desire throughout the courses, eliminate doubt and indecision, create exciting & balanced action steps, and embrace simplicity. As a bonus, you will also learn how course creators can ethically raise their prices.
1. Structure the course, starting with the strongest element
Start with the strongest and most important module. You might have dealt with clients who have seemingly endless resources of motivation and enthusiasm right at the beginning of a course or project. They’re ready to give it their all. This is the perfect moment to teach your clients the most important part of the course while they have momentum. Even so, after a strong start,drive inevitably starts to fade away. Here you want to anticipate any motivational dips that might come up. You can prepare your strategy to spark motivation by asking and reminding your clients why they signed up for it in the first place.
2. Eliminate doubt and indecision as much as possible
“Motivation goes out the window when doubt creeps in” (Tini). You want to give your clients only a few options in terms of actions they can take to achieve their goals. Don’t overwhelm them. Secondly, provide relevant examples, and thirdly, create a simple scenario that helps them see themselves clearly in that situation to understand what action to take. Here Tini shares a great example of one of her guests who instead of telling his audience that there are many methods to outline a course, just went in and said "Hey, this is my method, and this is what I teach”. This simplifies the process and doesn’t overwhelm clients with options.
3. Build desire throughout the course
What would make you want to take action on the course material? What do you need to know to do it? Ask yourself these questions while creating the course, because that's exactly how your clients think. There are different perspectives and ways to look at things so you need to explain the reasons behind your choice of information and why you're suggesting this action step at this moment in time. Explain why your method works.
4. Simplify, simplify, simplify
As a course creator, one difficult question that you need to answer is: What should you include in your course and what should you leave out? Tini's signature style "is geared towards simplicity and cutting through the fluff" so she uses the following framework to decide if a piece of information is essential to the course or not.
· Tell people why it's important to do and to know this
· Explain what you want them to know
· Tell them how to do it
Easy right? If you still feel like everything is relevant Tini shares 2 ways to make sure that this is truly the case. You can tune in and listen to them here.
Tip: you can also create a bonus section of the course with extra helpful information that is trimmed from the abridged version.
5. Create exciting and balanced action steps
Create balance and alternate between light and heavy action steps. Tini explains this by using an example from the nutrition world – adding more fiber to your diet. A heavy action step for today is to eat more fiber. You have to do some research, go, buy and cook the food that will add more fiber to your diet. Tomorrow, however, you do a fun quiz that makes you aware of how much fiber you are getting. Both activities have the same goal but the latter one is the light action step as it requires less effort. Alternating between them and surprising your clients keeps the excitement. It's all about balance.
Tip: Be aware that people are motivated in different ways and propose various ways to measure progress and results. Find more about this by tuning in to the podcast episode.
6. Nail your outline
You want to engage, connect and embark with your clients on a journey and you can do so through the following list:
Step 1: Clarity
Ask yourself What is the course about? Who is it for? What does someone get from taking the course?
Step 2: Connection
Set clear intentions about the message that you want to convey, why you want to spread that message and how you want people to feel after taking your course.
Tip: Testimonials are a good way of checking if you are achieving your targets
Step 3: Flow
Help your clients embody the feelings and message that you want to convey. There shouldn’t be moments where they stop and think about the next step, everything should flow.
Bonus: How to ethically raise prices for your courses
Tini started pricing her course at 35$ and now she reached 3,000$ on some of her courses. Amazing, right?! So if you feel like the amount of work you put into your course and the quality is not reflected by the price, how can you ethically increase prices for your courses?
In short? By updating your course so it's easy to justify a price increase. This can mean adding anything that brings extra value to the course, from faster delivery to bringing on a collaborator.
Watch out! On this journey, some talented coaches experience impostor syndrome. This means that even though they have the right skills, knowledge and results to prove it, they still have a hard time internalizing their success. So if you are one of them, don’t worry. An easy way to solve this is to go out there, buy other courses, and have experiences to better understand what the market looks like and where you can position yourself. You can find out more about impostor syndrome in our seminar with Jordan Hardgrave.
Well done! Now you’re ready to use these secrets and help your clients finish their courses!
Listen here to Tini's podcast episode to learn all about increasing the completion rate of your online course 🚀
If you'd like to find out more about Tini, ask her any questions about the article or learn how to ethically raise your prices, check her Pensight profile here.
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