Customer acquisition is a challenge for self-employed trainers and academies! A free demo course can help you with this. Why you should have a free offer and how to build a successful acquisition course with blink.it is explained in the article:
Digital education is booming, not least due to the current Corona crisis. Self-employed trainers and educational providers in academies feel this as they sell their online courses to companies. The demand is high, but so is the competition for valuable new customers. You might also be wondering how you can stand out from the crowd of providers, gain new leads, and boost your course sales.
An easy and effective way is free demo courses. However, your knowledge is valuable. In the market, it is often said, "What costs nothing is worth nothing." Many trainers and academies are therefore hesitant to offer content for free. However, the concept is both simple and effective – if you implement it correctly! To successfully sell online courses, we will answer the most important questions about free acquisition courses:
Why should you provide your knowledge for free?
What content should be included in your free demo course?
And how do you create an effective demo course with blink.it?
1. Why should you provide your knowledge for free?
The main goal of a free demo course is to give your future customers an insight. In addition to concrete knowledge, interested parties get an impression of you as a trainer, your methods, and your goals.
In practice, free demo courses have three significant advantages in customer acquisition:
The "barrier" is very low. Signing up for a free course, initially without obligations, is easier for many people than directly making a phone call or scheduling a personal appointment. You should, of course, not neglect the second step, the direct contact. We’ll address that later in the section on "Content".
You have a unique selling point! Currently, free courses, especially among trainers, are still relatively rare. This gives your future customers the impression of a very modern and customer-oriented way of working – a clear plus for you.
You save time! Developing new promotional materials, keeping the website up to date, and searching for new sources or contacts often takes too much time. However, if your online course is already ready for sale, you can easily reuse the content. Your content is after all your finished showcase – so use and showcase it instead of constantly creating new content for your marketing!
2. What content should be included in your free demo course?
In the free demo course, ideally, you convey little knowledge but create awareness of a problem. Small snippets are perfectly sufficient. Your demo course should not replace the paid course, but rather serve as a kind of "teaser": The focus is on you and your training concept!
Selection: Which content should I choose?
Below, you will find a quick overview that helps you choose the right content for your acquisition course:
Well-suited for acquisition courses | Not suitable for acquisition courses |
Content that highlights you and your concept and creates awareness for the customer’s problem | Standard content with no relation to you, your specific concept, or the problem you can solve |
Theoretical content or fundamentals on the core topic of your online course | Practical exercises and transfer content – implementation tips are provided in the paid offer |
Teaser videos with a maximum of 1-2 minutes in length (excerpts from longer videos) | Long training videos or comprehensive presentations |
With these ideas, you can now go through your paid course. Consider which content meets these criteria and how much knowledge you wish to disclose before your actual course.
Length: How much content do I need?
When selecting content for your free demo course, you should consider how long your course should be. In practice, two concepts have proven particularly effective:
The one-day demo: This variant is very suitable if your paid course is a pure online course. You create a mini-version of your large course, for example by always selecting the first piece of content from each learning section. Depending on the scope of your course, you will have about five to ten individual learning contents in the demo course. Such a one-day course can be completed by your interested parties in just a few minutes, leading to a quick buying decision.
The one-week demo: A one-week demo course is the right choice if your course is meant to guide the learners over several weeks. An example of this is blended learning courses, which you complement with on-site events or webinars. Time your content so that your future customers receive 2-3 pieces of content per day. Also, include "blocker content" at the points where personal mentoring would occur if they purchased the entire course.
Some trainers or academies also offer longer demos lasting 14 or even 30 days. However, we do not recommend such long demo courses. After all, the interested party should decide soon. Moreover, corporate customers often face time pressure to quickly purchase a suitable online course. Often they decide already after a few hours or days. Therefore, do not invest your time in courses that are too long. Focus on short content that quickly convinces your customers!
Conclusion: How do I convert my demo course visitors?
Once the demo course is over, your new leads should of course become customers for your online course. And this is the most important part of your entire demo: The Call To Action, or the actual call to action in the course! What your CTA looks like depends heavily on your product or online course. Key factors here are the concept and price.
Some successful CTA ideas from practice:
For all online courses: "Sign up for the newsletter now" if you use this to regularly inform about news. Alternatively, "Recommend to colleagues now" so that interested parties can share your demo online course via social media.
Pure online courses under 500€ purchase price: "Buy now" or "View course selection now". For this, you need a connection to a shop system or a suitable overview on your website that you can link to.
Pure online courses over 500€ purchase price: "Book a phone appointment now" for further discussion or to create a quote. Alternatively: "Arrange a strategy meeting now" - here the focus is on customer follow-up. You can use an online appointment scheduling software that corresponds to the appointments in your calendar.
Blended learning courses: "Schedule a meeting for a customized offer now" or "Book a phone appointment now". For individualized, cost-intensive concepts with personal contact, phone calls are most effective.
3. How do you create an effective acquisition course with blink.it?
You now know why a demo online course is useful for you as a trainer for customer acquisition. And which content is best suited for your demo course. The last step is the practical implementation. We will show you an example of how your demo course for customer acquisition with blink.it can look.
The fictional demo course "Giving Good Feedback" teases a paid online course. This is a complete 4-week online program in which teams in companies learn to give and receive better feedback. Here's how the demo course is structured:
A short introduction video: The trainer welcomes the interested parties and briefly introduces himself and the topic.
Four short learning contents on the four focal points in the 4-week program. Each content (“Blink”) consists of a short video or graphic in which the respective topic is briefly introduced. The contents are kept quite general and do not provide tips for practical implementation yet.
The first CTA: “The 4-week program – Book now!”. Here, interested parties can directly purchase the course if they decide quickly.
The second CTA (Follow-Up): This content appears automatically 7 days after the course starts. This reminds interested parties of the course and the offer. Furthermore, a phone consultation is offered.
The appearance: The demo course is your new showcase! Therefore, you should also pay attention to the appearance. Here are 4 tips for designing blink.it courses. In this example, suitable preview images are embedded – a quick but very effective enhancement of the course!
And that’s it for the complete demo course for customer acquisition. You can set up the blink.it course so that every interested party can directly participate in the course without a personal invitation as soon as they have the link. You can easily share the link to the course, for example on your website, in a newsletter, or via social media. You do not need to create the individual blinks anew. You can simply copy them from your actual course – which also saves time. This way, you can create such an acquisition course in under an hour and use it directly!
Due to the simple and intuitive handling, a blink.it course is perfect for customer acquisition (and also for your other online courses): Your interested parties can immediately find their way around and can directly focus on your content.
