Setting the correct pricing for your items can be difficult. Pricing a service like an online course is considerably more difficult. However, there is always that sweet spot where your course price is appealing to your learners while still earning a sufficient profit from selling your courses.
We can assist you whether you are an experienced eLearning entrepreneur or a fresh entrepreneur getting ready to launch your online courses. There is no doubt that determining the price for your courses is critical. This kind of a move can help you reach your company objectives, such as creating a ground-breaking market entry, accessing a new market, marketing your brand, and raising total sales.
The challenge is genuine. But isn’t there no other way for course designers to define prices? Because your company and marketing plan requirements differ, you must go through several stages before determining the most acceptable pricing for your courses.
To effectively respond to these issues, you must establish clear, explicit, and upfront goals for what you hope to gain from your course and in connection to your target audience. Clarifying the aim of your online course may help you prioritize and make an informed choice about your course business’s predicted profit and ROI.
Here is the high-level information about online course prices:
What these two pieces of information tell us is a little more complicated than it appears at first glance, but don’t worry, it’s not much. The standard deviation is large here, indicating that there is a lot of unpredictability in the data and that we can’t rely on our average for everything, but it’s not too high to be helpful.
To give you an idea, the average price of an online course ranges from $0 to $304. And you’re probably thinking, “Wow. That helps me zero since that’s a wide range.” While it isn’t as clean as our straight average, there are more data points below that limit the range even further, which we’ll discuss later. However, the core of our understanding is that we advocate $100 as a starting point for novice artists.
Even if it feels hazardous since you’ve never sold a product online before, $100 isn’t. It’s not so costly that most buyers can’t afford it, but it’s also not so cheap that you’ll lose money unless you have a Titanic-sized boat on sale. Alternatively, if you’re not a new creator and are attempting to price your next course, this range is a green signal to charge more than $100 for your course. Customers are used to seeing courses costing up to $300 and then some. Indeed, 89% of all online course fees are under $350.
So, if you’ve already begun to establish an engaged audience, why not test pricing that is higher than the normal range? I wouldn’t recommend going crazy but explore experimenting with the limits of your typical prices. Nothing prevents you from adjusting them later and re-launching them if they don’t work. If it works, you’ll have a completely different perspective on your audience’s desire to financially support your firm, as well as a potentially lot higher take-home profit. And the more courses you create that sell for that price, the better. In that vein, how many online courses should you intend to develop if you want to keep up with the market?
That’s a lot of numbers, isn’t it? There is no clear average in our dataset since it is so diverse and includes authors from every specialty. However, because the mode and median are so close, we can definitely state (again) that most online course costs are about $100, even for first-time authors.
Payment plans, which allow your consumers to pay for your online course in installments and so decrease the barrier to entry, performed well in our research. Look at this:
If you’re debating whether to include payment plans in your pricing strategy, we recommend only offering them for online courses that cost $99 or more. A payment plan for a lower-priced course, like too-low pricing or discount, has a non-zero probability of hurting the perceived value of your offering. That’s not to say you can’t; your niche may be unique, and no one understands your target audience better than you.
However, because all of our research shows that the most typical course pricing in the wild is at or around $100, you wouldn’t be charging more than your rivals or racing to the bottom line if you limited payment plans for your high-priced products. After that, remember how we claimed that selling a $100 online course ten times is simpler than selling a $10 course a hundred times? The same logic applies here; if you have financial objectives, which I presume you have, collecting your dues upfront will help you get there much faster.
Consider payment plans as a way to allow more clients to access your online course. It’s not a good fit if it doesn’t also open the door to earning a living for you. It must be functional for everyone.
You have revenue objectives, but they don’t correspond to what you believe you should charge. Is this anything you’ve heard before? Hopefully, you’re undecided between a high price and a greater price, but whatever price point you’re debating, the most crucial thing to do is verify it.
We’ll go through how to validate a price in greater detail in the following question, but the key point here is that your decisions are just half of the pricing equation. Your consumers — new customers, existing customers reacting to a price rise, and future customers — are all equally responsible for determining the price of your online course. If you establish such a cheap price that your items appear suspect in comparison to rivals, you will not achieve the desired return on your course construction.
Similarly, if your pricing is so expensive that consumers are continuously comparing their learning experience to the cost of your course and finding it wanting, you’ll have a lot of disgruntled clients. Finding your minimum and maximum pricing should be a long-term dialogue with your clients. Don’t undercharge for your course material, but also pay attention to your audience’s wisdom.
Believe them if they say or demonstrate that they will not pay for it. Fortunately, the opposite is true. This leads us to the following question. How to verify your pricing with your intended market: Learners come in many kinds and sizes, but their wallets and willingness to open them tend to be consistent across audiences. As a result, the easiest approach to determine whether your pricing point is appropriate for your target demographic is to ask them. Yes. Really.
A simple request on social media might work wonders. One of our favorite examples is John D Saunders, who told us about a novel method he employs to attract early investors. His pitch to his audience is straightforward. “Hey, if you’re interested in joining, I’ll develop a landing page for you to fill out and pay $7,” he says.
Those who accept the offer will receive a big discount off the full price of his upcoming online course on launch day. It doesn’t have to be a large community; it might be as few as 15 to 30 individuals, but it must be your target demographic.
Alternatively, don’t be scared to join Facebook groups or delve into subreddits related to your expertise to locate your target audience and online course topic. Social media and forums are excellent free resources for connecting with your target audience and verifying product ideas. Just be mindful of their policies.
Those communities, like you, do not want someone spamming their social areas with repeated commercial pitches. Get to know individuals, provide useful answers to inquiries, and be an active listener whether you’re reading postings or discussing in a group. The more you provide the group first, the more likely they are to accept your pitch and, eventually, your goods.
A higher price point has a lot of attraction, and we advocate starting closer to $100 rather than further away, although different pricing tiers work for different producers. Are you just starting out and have a small email list of friends and family? Then start cheap and gradually, with your pricing anchored around the median.
Consider establishing a mini-course if you want to optimize your audience building so you can charge a higher fee later. Email courses, which are often the format mini-courses take, are an excellent marketing technique for both new and experienced authors. Reuven Lerner, a senior artist who transformed his offline education firm into an online platform, began with email courses to grow his audience and email list. Despite having several other courses under his belt, he still delivers free programming email classes to this day.
Premium pricing necessitates an equally premium marketing strategy. The higher the price tag, the more difficult it will be to drive enrollment, whether your audience is fresh new or has been a fixture in your life for years. We advocate investing in email marketing at the very least, whether you’re delivering a free online course or a four-digit (or more!) course.
However, especially for high-priced online courses, you should use your email list to market, construct case studies on your clients, and collect testimonials for your sales page. Consider this: if you see a lemonade stand on the side of the road for a quarter, you’re unlikely to wonder why it’s so cheap. If you saw the same lemonade stall charging $25 per cup, you’d have a lot more questions before buying.
Your buyers want to know that the course material will be worth the price. Assist them in seeing this in as many ways as possible. In addition to testimonials for your landing page, including templates and worksheets (or workbooks) in addition to videos and text is a terrific approach to boost the perceived value of your course. Printables are a simple and frequently cheap technique to increase the attractiveness of an online course.
Your course is always worth far more than you realize. This is because an online training course is a compilation of your work, knowledge, and life experiences, as well as years of study and education. You are giving a service to your future pupils by sharing your expertise, which is a highly desired commodity.
As a general guideline, you should keep most of your courses at or above $100 in price, with lesser costs below $100 reserved for minor courses. Smaller courses may have a simpler course topic, less course content, or provide less value to your target audience. Remember that your whole brand identity as a quality instructor is reflected in your price. Some industries may have lower price expectations. Plan ahead of time so that you may devote time to researching the competitors, your target customers, and your market for pricing benchmarks.
Consider Ivy League colleges. Their cost usually reflects their quality. Renowned colleges such as Harvard, Oxford, and Yale do not charge the same tuition as a college or university; instead, they charge a premium. Pricing is part of their goal to retain their reputation as a high-quality education location, with the money used to further invest in the education provided.
When you choose Trible as your online course platform for producing, marketing, and advertising your online courses, you provide your learners access to a plethora of sophisticated features from which they may profit. One of the most essential advantages is the opportunity to join a community of like-minded learners. A shared space for talking, networking, and connecting with others. It goes beyond the typical educational experience or the ease of use of a Facebook group.
If you were to sell an eBook, you would most likely charge between $10 and $20. However, you are not selling an ebook; rather, you are providing your learners with a comprehensive educational experience that includes reading material, workbooks, worksheets, quizzes, exams, certification, videos, and a plethora of other learning units. An online course is intended to be interactive, easy to learn from, and considerably more diverse in terms of learning experiences.
Online courses provide unique knowledge that cannot be accessed elsewhere. Your years of experience are represented in your target audience’s perception of high-perceived value-adding information in a multimedia style. In the end, learners, students, and clients pay a fee to gain access to what they value. Because it is their sole chance to join an elite community of people with high-quality expertise, you should price your courses accordingly.
Before you do anything else, you should set income targets for your online course. Create a goal number for anything you want to achieve with your business. Assume you want to earn $5,000 from your online course. Keeping this in mind, if you keep your pricing point at $100, you’ll need 50 individuals to purchase your course to meet your target. But what if you decide to charge a higher price of $250? In such an instance, only 20 individuals need to sign up.
And if you charge $500 for your online course, you just need to sell to ten individuals. Can you see where we’re going? By establishing these objectives, you may have a better understanding of how many individuals you need to sell to in order to consider your launch a success.
On average, you may estimate that at least 2% of your email list will buy, so use it as a good starting point. If you have 1,000 individuals on your list, 20 of them are likely to buy. To reach your target of $4,000, you must sell your course for at least $200.
Despite the awful pun, these are the most important findings from our data study, aside from the data itself:
Remember that if your initial online course pricing does not work for your target audience, you can always adjust it. The only thing that is unalterable is the past. Your show, your regulations, and your prices will determine the destiny of your company.
Nailing the Price Change Talk: Effective Messaging Strategies, Tips & Templates
Learn how to effectively communicate price changes to your customers with our expert tips. Balance customer trust and loyalty while scaling your business!
Digital Creators in Education: Tips and Strategies for Success
Uncover what it takes to be a successful digital creator. Learn how to build your online presence and monetize your content.
How to Successfully Sell Your Digital Products on Amazon in 2023
Master the ins and outs of selling digital products on Amazon with our simple guide. Learn the best practices and practical strategies for success.
