There are many people out there who are interested in enrolling to an online course or two. Perhaps they would like to expand their knowledge on a certain topic, learn a new hobby, or get a degree, and an online course seems like a great way to do it. But when it comes down to actually registering for the course, they don’t follow through. How can you motivate people to take your online courses? How can you attract students to your online courses and convert them from curious visitors into registered students?
More often than not, it’s the fear of failure that holds people back from enrolling to online courses. Many times, this fear is masked by doubts — will the course will be a worthwhile investment of time and money?
If you can demonstrate to potential students that they can be successful and that the course will deliver great benefits to them, they will be more motivated to sign up. So, how can you help your prospective students to overcome their concerns?
By using testimonials properly and effectively on your course pages.
Here are 4 ways to use testimonials to motivate students to enroll in your courses:
1. Show testimonials from past students on relevant course pages
Displaying testimonials from past students on every course page is a very powerful technique for influencing prospective student enrollment.
Many websites that offer online courses display their testimonials on their homepage or across all course pages. But if a student who is interested in studying graphic design sees testimonials related to computer programming, then the testimonials will most likely fail to make the desired impact.
If you want to motivate students to enroll to your courses, then each course page should showcase relevant testimonials by students who studied that particular course.
The motivation to register can also be driven by building trust with your potential students. If they see your testimonials and believe that they are 100% legitimate, then they will feel even more inclined to register with your course as opposed to one of your competitor’s courses. You can do this by associating each testimonial with the profile picture of the person who wrote it and a link to his/her social media profile.
2. Star Ratings
It is important to use a customizable testimonial widget that offers the ability to add star ratings, where each person can rate the course on a scale of 1 to 5. A star rating adds a quantitative element to the testimonials.
This is beneficial because it draws attention and shows potential students in a glance how the course is being rated.
Of course, not each and every testimonials is going to get 5 stars, but don’t let this worry you. Having a few 3–4 star reviews can actually be a good thing, as it shows that the testimonials are legitimate and gives greater weight to all the positive reviews.
There is also a great SEO benefit here if the star ratings is properly marked in the code of the page in a way that Google will show it in the search results. Spectoos is a powerful testimonials platform that manages all your testimonials in one place and also allows you to unleash the SEO power of your testimonials automatically.
3. Sharing is Caring
By placing social sharing buttons on each course page, you provide students with the ability to share information about the courses via social media and attract more students.
For example, let’s say someone took a course from Sugarcraft School about designing birthday cakes and posts pictures of her incredible creations on social media. Her friends might want to know where she learned how to make her amazing cake designs. Thanks to the student using the social sharing buttons, her friends can easily learn more information about the cake design course and even sign up, themselves.
As basic as this may seem, it is actually quite a powerful technique because every time your course page gets shared online, it is a form of endorsement by a fellow student.
4. Using Testimonials in Your Email Marketing
Using email marketing can help you maintain relationships with existing and past students. But sending emails, alone, is not enough to motivate them to enroll to additional courses in the future.
Your emails should be informative and to the point, offer new & relevant courses for them to consider using a clear call-to-action. However, you should also include relevant testimonials within the emails to help people make an educated decision as much as possible.
Make sure to segment your email list in a way that would allow you to send highly targeted and personalized messages to the right audience. This would result in better open rate, better click rate and eventually better conversion rate on your course pages.
If you run an online course business and want to implement what you have read in this article we welcome you to give Spectoos a try. Spectoos is a holistic solution designed to deal with all your testimonial needs from a single place.
Sign up for a free Spectoos account and start making your testimonials work for you, today.
If you have any questions about how Spectoos can help your online school, please feel free to contact us. We would be more than happy to answer any and all inquiries.
Originally published at Spectoos.
