Choosing an online course platform can be a bit overwhelming, but stay tuned because today I’m sharing the best course software for content creators.
The 4 main problems content creators have with online courses
If you are a content creator who has entered the world of online courses, I am willing to bet that you are facing at least one, if not all, of these four problems.
- Not enough people are finishing your course. You’ve spent time and money creating a course that you are proud of, but nobody finishes it. They purchase, they log in but then they just kind of fall off the grid.
- For those people who do finish your course, they’re not actually getting the transformation that you promised on your sales page. And you just can’t figure out why this is happening. And because they aren’t getting results, you’re not getting testimonials which means you don’t have social proof. That makes it harder to get people to enroll in your course in the future.
- You know you want to improve your course, but you don’t know what or how to improve it.
- You don’t have enough people enrolling in your course or you aren’t making enough money from your course.
These are the problems I hear about frequently and most, if not all, of my clients are facing at least one. If you are facing one of those four problems, you are not alone. I’m going to introduce you to the best course software that solves all of those problems. It’s my personal favorite and I’ve been using it for several years.
Solutions this online course platform provides to these 4 problems
Solution #1
The solution to the first problem is that you probably don’t have enough gamification in your course. It isn’t enjoyable for your people to go through the course so they aren’t finishing it.
Solution #2
The solution to the second problem where people are not actually getting a transformation is LMS features.
LMS stands for Learning Management System.
These are features that actually help your people learn. It’s one thing to watch a video and understand what’s being said while that video is there or read a transcript. It’s a completely different thing to remember what you learned weeks, months, or years later, and to actually have it transform your life.
Solution #3
The solution to the third problem is to track what people are doing in your course, and be able to get reports back so that you know exactly where the problems are. You’ll know where they’re getting stuck and what you can improve in order to help them.
Solution #4
And the solution to not getting enough sales in the first place is to let your software do the selling for you. You can essentially sell without selling.
If you would like to learn more about these solutions, then keep watching, because I am going to tell you all about a software called Accessally. This is my very favorite online course software. I’m going to show you, not just tell you, what it looks like inside of a course that was built with Accessally and how it solves these four problems for you.
Why Accessally is the best online course platform
What is GAMIFICATION?
Let’s jump into how Accessally can help you solve that very first problem of not enough people finishing your course.
Gamification is the reason our teens get addicted to video games. There’s constant feedback and rewards that are constantly coming at them while they’re going through that video game. There is a big goal at the end, but there’s also lots of little goals as they’re working their way through the entire video game.
This is what we want to do inside of your course. We want to consistently reward people for engaging with your course. This is going to increase their motivation to learn. Immediate rewards makes learning less intimidating. It provides students a regular sense of accomplishment. Instead of having to wait until the end of your course to feel like they accomplished something, they’re getting that fix over and over and over again throughout your course.
This improves the overall learner experience and it can really help reduce buyer’s remorse. People might think your content is great, but if they aren’t enjoying working their way through it, they will regret purchasing your course. They’ll be thinking to themselves, “Oh cool, another course that I purchased and didn’t finish. What a waste of money.” You do not want your people to feel that way about your course.
Examples of Gamification
Let me show you some examples of how Accessally helps you to Gameify your online course.
1) Badges. If somebody goes through your first module, you can give them a cool little award that looks something like this that says they have graduated and they are now proficient in that topic. You can give them a badge for getting a great score on a quiz. You can give them a badge simply because this is the first course they’ve taken from you. You can make these badges public which allows other students to see, and that can help increase their motivation through some accountability.
2) Points. You can give them points for anything and everything that they do. You can give them points simply for logging into your course. You can give them points for completing the checklist for watching a video or for visiting a certain page. Anything and everything you can imagine, you can award them points and then allow them to exchange those points for prizes.
So we’ve got three different levels here of rewards. We’ve got the reward of finishing the course at the end. We’ve got the reward of being able to claim a prize halfway through the course, and then we’ve got miniature rewards every single time they engage with your course.
3) Rewards. We can give them surprise rewards, rewards that aren’t linked to the number of points that they, but that weren’t on the sales page. I do this in one of my courses. When somebody finishes a particularly difficult module and finishes the quiz, I automatically send them a $5 gift card for a sweet treat. It’s a complete surprise, but it motivates them to come back and continue learning. They know now that there are surprise rewards along the way.
4) Leaderboard. You could create a leaderboard and this leverages that competition that’s in many video games. They want to be at the top of the leaderboard so they’re going to keep logging in, checking to see where other people are and they’re going to want to move forward.
5) Certificates. You can give them certificates that they can print out. This can be an actual certification where you certify people and then allow them to come teach others what it is you’re teaching. It can also just be a certification that they can print out and put on their wall that says, “Hey, I completed this course!” That can provide a strong sense of accomplishment.
6) Pop-ups. This is a fun one. When someone completes a quiz, a module, or handful of other things, you can automatically have a pop-up show up that says, “Hey, virtual high five. I’m so proud of you.” This makes their course experience a two-way experience where they feel like they’re engaging with you and you were there recognizing their accomplishment.
7) Community. You can create a community in side of your course. This is set up very similar to Facebook but without all the distractions. It allows people to engage with one another inside of your course. They’ll find others who are going through the same thing, trying to learn the same things they’re trying to learn. It is motivating.
These are the things that you can do inside of Accessally. You’ll find some of these things in other online course platforms, but I have not found them ALL in any platform except for Accessally.
What are LMS FEATURES?
What about those people who are finishing your course, but they’re not actually getting the results? What’s the problem there?
Well, we aren’t teaching them on a deep enough level. When we add features that really help them learn:
- It is going to allow them to make more efficient use of their time.
- It’s going to increase the retention of what they’re learning.
- It’s going to bring loyalty as well as repeat customers because they feel like they got to interact with you in the course. Even if it’s all automated, they feel more like they’re interacting with you.
- It takes teaching beyond just the facts to helping them to actually apply what they’re learning and really let it sink in.
How to create a Choose Your Own Adventure experience within Accessally
Now, this doesn’t work for all courses, but it does work for many. Sometimes your course is linear and they have to take module one before they can complete module two or three. But if that’s not the case, you can allow them to choose their own way through your course.
Every time they finish a module, they’re then allowed to pick the next module that they would like to work on.
- We can create a bookmarks. Bookmarks of where they’re at in your course. So they logged back in and there’s one button that takes them to exactly where they left off. As well as video bookmarks, where they can click on different parts of the video and be taken right to that point. That can be really helpful if they need to go back and review later. It allows them to very quickly find that piece of information that they know they watched. But they don’t know exactly where it was.
- Allowing your users to take notes and then saving those notes for them inside of their program on a separate page. They can be watching a video and there’s a little box next to the video where they can take notes, but there’s also a page where they can go to find all of their notes for all of the videos.
- Objectives list. This is actually one of my students, and my client’s students, favorite features. This is surprising to me, but it really is one of their favorites. It allows them to check off where they are in your course, giving them a list of to-dos after they watch a video and they can check that off. It allows them to log back in and press the button that takes them right to where they were and they can see what they’ve done and what they haven’t done without having to remember. It removes the mental pressure of remembering exactly what they still need to do which really increases their chances of actually doing it and actually learning.
- Progress bar. People love this. They love knowing how much longer they have until a lesson, module or course is finished.
- Printable transcripts. I know we live in a digital world and these are online digital courses, but sometimes having something you can print out, read and annotate is very helpful. It is an oft requested feature that I have inside of the courses I’ve created, or those I’ve created for clients.
- Next is homework. Do you give your people homework? This can be as simple as them answering a question for you. Or as robust as having them actually complete homework and then upload it to send to you online so that you can check it and give feedback.
- Quizzes. These are one of my very favorite things to add into a course. You can set it up so that students have to complete a quiz before they can move on to the next lesson or module. But you don’t have to do it that way. I most often use quizzes as self assessments so that people can really check their own learning and determine if they need to review before they move on to the next step in your course.
If your software does not do this for you, I highly suggest you look into using Accessally as your online course platform.
How TRACKING & REPORTS can help solve these problems
You now know that you need to add some more gamification or some more LMS features. But where do you start? Which one is going to have the biggest impact?
That’s why you need tracking and reports. You need a way to track what people are doing or what they’re not doing, and then to see reports that group that all together for you so you can see trends.
When you get this, you’re able to encourage students when they lag behind and help them to finish your course.
You’re able to determine your contents’ effectiveness. If people are all failing a certain quiz, you know that the content you created is where the problem is.
It helps you to increase customer retention because you can see where people are falling off in your course. Maybe they make it through the first three modules, but they never really get to module four, five and six. You can determine where students are getting stuck.
Accessally allows you to set up log-in reminders. It tracks when people are logging in and then you can email them reminders and say, “Hey, we haven’t seen you for awhile and we miss you. Here’s a link to this course that you purchased _ months ago. We’d love to see you in there again.”
You can track quiz results. You have the ability to download all of your students’ responses and see, not just which quiz they’re struggling with most, but which questions inside each quiz. That will help you improve your content so that they actually are learning and not feeling discouraged. They’ll continue going and get the transformation and the result that you promised them.
This amazing course software also allows you to see progress stats. You can see how many people finish module one or module two or module three. You can also see churn. This is good if you have a membership, or even a payment plan for your course. You’ll know exactly where people are falling off. Where are they leaving? What is keeping them from coming back again and again? If your current software does not give you the opportunity to see all of these stats. Then you need Accessally.
The Best Course Software Will Do the Selling for You
If you’re not making enough money from your course or it’s simply not selling, the solution here is to let your software sell for you.
So what do I mean when I say sell without selling? Well, when you allow your software to do the selling, you are going to increase the lifetime value of your customer. We spend so much time and money trying to find new customers, but what if we sold to our existing customers instead?
Curiosity can do the selling for you. When you let your software do the selling for you, you decrease that ick factor that none of us really love. What if you could do a little less of that?
When the course software does the selling for you, it also increases your family time.
Examples of selling without selling
- Exceeding expectations. A lot of times, when we build a course, our goal is to simply meet our customer’s expectations. But what if instead we focused on exceeding them? We do that through gamification and LMS features. The online course world is well enough established that people expect to have videos, slides, transcripts, workbooks, and maybe even online groups or zoom calls. But what they don’t expect are badges, points for prizes, leaderboards, certificates, homework, notes, bookmarks, quizzes, video messaging, objectives. All those things are ways that you can exceed their expectations.
When we exceed expectations, people talk. So there are two ways we can make people talk about our course. One is to fall short of their expectations. Then they’re going to tell people to avoid it. They’ll say things like, “You don’t want to take this course” or ” This course was not worth the money. It didn’t meet my expectations of X, Y, Z.”
We can also get them to talk by exceeding their expectations. If you’ve gone into a business, online or offline, and your expectations have been blown out of the water, you talk. You tell people about it. If you can do this then you will get more enrollments thanks to referrals.
2. Auto collect testimonials. What if, inside of every single lesson, you have an opportunity for people to tell you exactly how that lesson helped them? All they have to do is click a button and a form appears where they can tell you “this was so awesome because of X, Y, Z. And it helped me do this…my family is now so much better at _. This blew my mind.”
This can happen as soon as they have learned something from you. They’re thinking about it, it’s top of mind and they can tell you right then. You are far more likely not only to get testimonials, but to get quality testimonials. The best way to sell is through social proof. You won’t really have to talk about it at all, you just let other people talk about your course for you.
3. Improvement. When you game-ify your course, there’s always something more you can add to it, right? You’re not going to go add all of those gamification and LMS features tomorrow, but you could pick one or two and then increase your price. Then you could add three or four more and increase your price. This gives you the opportunity to increase your price authentically.
A lot of times, you’ll see people say, “Hey. Next time I open for enrollment, it’s going to cost twice as much” but nothing really changes about the course. That feels really inauthentic and a little bit slimy.
But what if you really are improving your course? Gamification and LMS features give you the opportunity to consistently improve your course over time, in the ways that are going to actually help your students.
4. Cross-selling dashboard. This one’s my favorite. What if you have icons for your different offerings? Say you have three, the one someone has access to is in color and the others are black and white. That brings some curiosity. They’re like, “oh, well, what is this other thing that I don’t have access to? I want to do that.” They’d click on it and if it’s black and white, they’re taken to a sales page or even directly to an order form. This allows your online course software to do some of that selling for you.
5. Funnels. This can be kind of a slimy word in the industry, but it doesn’t have to be. Accessally allows you to sell to somebody who was already purchased from you. You can add a little order bump where there’s just a little checkbox on their order form where they could add something else. About 30% of your people will say yes to that.
You can also do one click upsells. If you don’t want to send them to a sales page or an order form, you can simply have a button that says “I want to purchase this.” Because they’re an existing customer and their credit card information is stored, it’s just a one-click and they’ve purchased. That makes it really easy for them so they don’t have to go through the arduous process of a sales page, order form, entering their address and their credit card information and all of that, they can just click and purchase.
6. Affiliate programs. You can have your students become affiliates so that when they tell their best friend about your course, they get a kickback. You could also approach other business owners, who share the same audience as you, but maybe teach something slightly different. Ask them if they would like to earn money for promoting your course and then the software inside of Accessally tracks it all for you and tells you exactly how much you need to pay them every month.
They can log in and see all of their stats. How many people have come through their link? How much money they’ve earned? You don’t have to get into the mess of making special coupon codes where you have to go back and count how many people purchase with that coupon code and then calculate out how much do you owe them. None of that. Accessally will do it all for you.
If you want to make more money from your digital course, but without the ick factor of selling, Accessally can really help you do that.
Alright, we’ve solved all four problems. If you have any questions about Accessally specifically, or about these problems in general, I would love to hear them. If you are interested in Accessally, and it feels like it might just be the right solution for you, you can learn more by visiting MistyDMarsh/accessally.
If you’re interested in learning more about how important tech is for your online business or courses, then you might be interested in this post where I talk about how to use tech to drive your business growth.
