Staying connected with your students is crucial in building a successful business teaching online.
And, one of the key components of every successful online business is automation. Being able to automate certain aspects of your business can improve the rapport you have with your customers, build trust and have them coming back to buy from you.
Selling online courses is no different. It's a lot harder to engage with your students and build the necessary rapport without the right tools.
One of such tools is email automation.
If you've ever had to send emails or any other form of electronic messages one by one, you'll start to see how tedious and time consuming the process can be.
This is time you can put into other productive tasks such as creating more online courses or spending valuable time with your families.
Your next best option might be to hire extra hands but then you always have to look over their shoulder and micro-manage every single step of the way.
Say hello to email automation.
But before you get confused about what email automation is and how it can help you sell more online courses, let's take a closer look at the concept of email automation.
What is email automation?
Email automation is the process of creating emails that are delivered to your target audience at a predetermined time without having to manually do it yourself.
You set it up once and forget about it. The email automation system takes care of sending out your emails at the right time without any human interaction.
Email automation is the backbone of all email marketing strategies and it's the reason why almost all email marketing software comes equipped with one form of automation to make your email marketing needs stressfree.
Being able to automate your emails is a huge timesaver. It will help you as a content creator focus on what matters most, creating more content.
How does email automation work?
If you've ever signed up for a free ebook or webinar and received an email 30 minutes later, and another after 24 hours and a third after 72 hours, that is email automation at work.
Most email marketing software allows you to create a sequence of emails that will be sent out at a specified interval to people who opt-in for your offers. And so does Kobocourse (more on this in a bit).
This type of automation allows you, the content creator to focus on driving traffic to your free offers, generate more leads and sell more products while the email automation sequence focuses on building rapport with your new audience and driving them to take action.
Selling online courses with an email automation system in place allows you to upsell more courses, get feedback from your students and grow your audience without having to send a single email when it is all set up.
Insights gathered from your email automation system can help you optimize your email marketing strategy giving you more insight to create better-converting emails.
Benefits of email automation
There are several benefits of setting up an email automation system to sell more online courses and I'm quite sure you're excited to give it a try.
While this is not an exhaustive list, it will give you a better understanding of how email automation for online courses will save you time and repetitive task while helping you sell more online courses.
- Email automation as the name implies is automatic and does not require any human intervention.
- Automating emails will help you nurture new leads, build rapport and trust towards your brand.
- Email automation will help you build brand awareness.
- Email automation helps you eliminate all forms of human errors resulting in catastrophic loss of revenue.
- It helps you save time so you can focus on other tasks.
- Automating emails will help you promote other services that are relevant to your business without having to hire a sales team.
- It will reduce your overall advertising spend and increase revenue by converting cold customers to warm and eventually, paying customers without any extra effort from you.
- Email automation will help you promote new courses to an audience that is familiar to your brand.
- Email automation will help you create a unique user experience for your student's by guiding them through a well laid down journey in the course of their relationship with you.
As you've guessed, there are many more benefits of email automation and focusing on them will make this article excessively long.
So without taking too much of your time, let me show you what email automation is on Kobocourse and how you can sell more online courses using our email automation feature.
Email Automation on Kobocourse
While most online course hosting platforms like Kobocourse are not designed to be email marketing tools, we understand that as a creator, you need to build better rapport especially with people less familiar with your brand.
We also understand that managing several online platforms just to sell your courses is tedious and expensive, that is why we decided to build a robust email automation system that helps you build the necessary rapport to convert cold students to paying students.
On Kobocourse, you can create an email automation sequence that sends out emails at intervals of 3 months from their first opt-in.
All email sequences are created per course and you can have up to 10 email sequence for each course.
Why do you need email automation to sell more courses?
Selling online courses requires 3 key components;
- A system to create awareness and drive traffic to your online courses.
- A way to generate leads using free courses, webinars or free masterclasses.
- A way to engage with your cold leads and convert them to paying students.
While you can schedule email autoresponse and send emails to your students directly on the Kobocourse platform, we understood that an automated system will greatly increase your conversion, earn you more money and ultimately, make you happy to on the Kobocourse platform.
Let us take a look at two different scenarios.
Scene 1: Without email automation
Assuming you have uploaded a free ebook on Kobocourse to help you generate leads in anticipation of your masterclass course.
You constantly have to log into the Kobocourse platform to send out emails trying to promote your masterclass. While this may not be stressful in any way or form. It still requires time and effort on your part to get it working as you'd like it.
Selling ebooks online can be hard but it shouldn't be only if you know the right strategies to help you sell more. This free guide will help you understand the proven strategies you can deploy today and start earning more money from your ebooks.
10 Creative Strategies to Sell Your Ebooks Faster
Scene 2: With email automation
Let's think about the previous example but with automation in mind.
You can upload your free ebook and this time around, set up an email sequence that will be sent out once someone downloads your free ebook.
You can set up an email sequence that first, introduces your brand while saying thank you for downloading the free ebook.
Next in the sequence can be an email following up on their progress and maybe point them to a free resource on your Instagram or blog.
Right after that is another email promoting your masterclass course with a discount coupon and extra worksheets, talk about building a simple sales funnel without lifting a finger.
Every single part of the system is fully automated from the very beginning.
Sounds like something you'd like right?
How to set up your email automation on Kobocourse
To create your email automation on Kobocourse, you will need a premium account. Please visit our pricing page for more information.
Create an account if you don't already have one or log into your account. Make sure your account has been upgraded to a creator account, this will allow you to upload and sell courses on the Kobocourse platform.
On your creator dashboard, click on courses and click email sequence and shown below.
Locate the course you want to set up email automation for and click on Email sequence from the dropdown menu as shown below.
On the email sequence form, provide the following details;
- Email Sequence Title: This is a human-readable title to help you identify the email sequence. For example, Email sequence 1
- Email Subject: Provide the email subject. This can include the [name] placeholder for a more personal email message.
- Email Body: Provide your email body. You can also include the [name] placeholder in the body of your email.
- Select Interval: This is how long the email stays before being sent to the student. Select an interval specific to the position of the email sequence.
To add more email sequences (max of 10), you can click the add button as shown above and a new email sequence form will be added. Fill out the details as before and continue to add more email sequences until you are satisfied or you hit the maximum of 10.
Once you are done, hit the save sequence button and your email automation is ready to start working while you focus on other important tasks like creating more online courses.
As students sign up for your courses, your email sequence will be queued and ready to start dispatching your emails at your predetermined intervals.
You can set up email automation for all your courses on Kobocourse and create a unique user-experience for students who sign up for your courses.
This will help you engage with your students better, build your brand and ultimately, sell more online courses.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, email automation is the backbone of any email marketing strategy. Your ability to automate your marketing processes means less time worrying about how things should work and more time doing what you love, teaching and earning money.
At Kobocourse, we are committed to helping content creators like you earn more money without having any coding skills and our email automation system supports our beliefs.
Feel free to share your ideas on how we can make Kobocourse work for you in the comment section. We are always happy to hear from you.
