If you're a course creator, you're in a prime position to lean into automation and use it to save time and drive ongoing sales. In this article, we'll discuss how to automate online courses, the importance of email automation, and how to leverage both to engage your students and keep them around for the long run.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a way to use software to handle repetitive marketing tasks automatically. This can include sending emails, posting on social media, and tracking customer behavior. It helps businesses save time, stay organized, and reach their audience more effectively without doing everything manually.
Marketing automation ties to course creation by streamlining the process of promoting, managing, and engaging with students. It helps course creators by automatically sending out promotional emails, scheduling social media posts, and nurturing leads with tailored content (among many other things).
Once students enroll, automation can handle welcome messages, course reminders, progress updates, and feedback collection.
We’ll talk more about email later, but look at how easy it is to automate a welcome email for new students. This is happening in the background as more people sign up. Meanwhile, you get to spend your time creating more course content.
This automated workflow ensures that every student gets timely and consistent communication, enhancing their learning experience while allowing you, as the course creator, to focus on developing great content instead of managing repetitive tasks.
Let's take a look at how to use automation to market your online course and telemarketing data effectively engage the students taking your class.
How to automate online courses
There are plenty of different tools and techniques you can leverage to automate your online course. Here are a few ways to begin folding automation into your course creation and promotion process:
Choose the right platform: Use an online learning platform like Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi. These platforms handle a lot of the heavy lifting for you, from hosting your course materials to processing payments. You can set up your course once, and the platform takes care of enrolling students, delivering content, and tracking progress.
Distribute drip content: Set up drip content to release your course materials gradually. You can schedule lessons to be released at intervals, like once per week, instead of giving students access to everything at once. Setting up a dedicated cadence for content keeps students engaged and helps them absorb the material better.
Automated your emails: Create automated email sequences that guide students through the course. This could include welcome emails, reminders to complete modules, encouragement when they hit milestones, and follow-up emails to gather feedback once they’ve completed the course. More on this later.