The 12 Pointer Checklist To Brighten Your Sales This Festive Season

Your learners have already started their Christmas & New Year shopping, and they’re yet still around browsing and searching for what they want for themselves or to gift to their friends and families. So, you must make a final pitch now to sell your online course to them this festival season.

It’s never too late to sell an idea: Start now There are times when Santa is late or just that people still haven’t got around to completing their year-end shopping. Festival Seasons and last-minute shoppers are inseparable. As shoppers shift from the high street to online shops, e-commerce sites are an all-time favorite with buyers. Festivals have become the norm and people are more than happy to buy. We should continue to see this trend grow.

No matter what you decide to do, it’s never too late as long as you create and communicates your offers to your audience well. With the final stretch of the festival season drawing to a close, it’s time to quickly strategise for the final sales round. By talking strategy, for now, it means revisiting your course library, rolling out flash sales, and becoming more interactive on forums, and webinars. In this stage, review these super-valid questions, to begin with :

How many courses do you want to sell and how many more?
How much do you think you might be able to sell?
What would help you reach your goals?

And then here’s what to do next:

Spread the word: Fuel up your marketing channels

Every business is becoming an online business, so this is the year you’ll want to reap the benefits of starting your own online course business. If you’ve already started promoting your online course through your social handles, Google, Facebook, and Instagram, then this is the time to add your ad spend budgets and go for the bang before the year closes. Start promoting your brand and showcase your brand to your audience. And to the audience that has engaged with you over the year, show them the ads for your course again.

Most course creators market their promos through Facebook and are able to track the performance of their ads via the Facebook pixel integration on Knorish. Using the power of Facebook several academies have already made 6 figures in income in just a few weeks’ time. Here’s one such social proof:

Showcase your Academy: Your Landing Pages

Next on your list to encourage your learners to buy is to create well-optimized landing pages. Nothing turns a buyer off more quickly than an uninspiring landing page. Here’s what you need to watch out for while you run a quick check on yours:

- Your landing page should have detailed information while you gently guide your visitors to buy your course.
- Make it still more interesting by using enough high-quality images, course glimpses, and suggested cross-sell and upsell course library with confidence-building tips.
- Short headlines rock.
- Check page loading speed.
- Have one CTA so that customers don’t get lost but spread it out across the page.
- Absolute minimum sign-up forms are the norm.

Study your competition: How are they selling?

Competitor analysis helps you keep tabs on whom you are competing with. In the process, you end up learning what they are doing better and what is working from them, mistakes you are making in your business. and so forth. It’s a fact that even your most loyal customers can quickly turn to your competitors if they got a better offer from them. The most practical way to keep tabs on the competition is to subscribe to their email list, scroll through their FaceBook Ads on Facebook Ads Library, and study their ads and promotions.

Roll out Discount Offers: Vouchers, 1+1 Free

The success of discount coupons can be easily measured because you can always go back and see how often a discount code has been used. While vouchers allow people to use them when and however they want to use those. Here, it’s important that you set the validity period to drive quick call-to-actions. During the festivals incentivize your customers. Drive repeat purchase client base.

Next comes the Upselling. Who wouldn’t be happy to get two gifts paying for one? Festival season is the time to upsell. Here is an example of this marketing strategy:

“Would you like to gift a cooking course for your Mom?” With this question, the other tempting courses are strategically being played on your checkout page.

No wonder, online platforms, too, can do upselling if they articulate well.

But, at the same time, upselling should be there to support the customer experience, not interrupt it. Whether it’s the customer testimonials running on your landing pages or automated emails. Now is the time to rack your brains. Meanwhile here’s how you can:

Add a discount coupon to your course on Knorish.

Last-Minute Sales: Create Countdown Campaigns

Regardless of which social media platform you use for promoting your online course business, your email campaigns, Facebook promos, and other communication should talk about your sales. Set a perfect example of creating enough urgency.

Market Ready Your Campaigns: Webinars, Promos Abandoned Cart Mails

Promotional messages flood everyone’s inbox during the festive season. With all of this noise, finding ways to stand out is crucial for your brand. So, mind your step. You must still educate your customers anticipating that their preferences might have been different.

And there are chances that people have already bought their gifts by now. Still, there are some last-minute shoppers you’ll come across who are still window shopping. How you present your brand is entirely up to you. Well, the best part about an online course is that you don’t have to worry about its packaging or delivery.

However, providing information for this last-minute gifting idea to others is entirely your responsibility. So, go ahead and get to talking about it.

Spread the word for your festive offers via email, on social media. Run full-fledged advertising campaigns according to your budget.

Gorgeous graphics and visuals do their job. That could be your banner ads or simply changing the banner images on your homepage, you really don’t have to be a graphic designer to make one. You could just pick a snippet, edit it yourself and roll out your campaign on Knorish.

Running a “jaw-dropping” last-minute sale promo on your popular courses is sure to attract learners to your course site. Once you have reached your audience and informed them that they are there for the deep discount, there’s a chance they’ll pick up your other courses on their way to the checkout too. But, still don’t overdo it!

Use Interesting Banners, Hero Images: Advertise Well

Roll Out Your Email Marketing: Right Time Now

While you do the e-mail marketing, address your total customer base that must include your previous students, the ongoing classes, etc. The kicker?

With a great email marketing strategy and tool in place, you can schedule all your emails and campaigns in advance for the courses with reminders, saving you time and inconvenience, if any. Just make sure that your email database is of high quality and that you have consent from customers to send them your promotional emails. Send “warm-up” emails, talk about what is going on in your store, and word them really well. Most importantly, don’t forget to thank your customers when your sale ends.

This way, when a customer adds a product to their cart but leaves your store, you can use a compelling email as an example to bring them back to complete their purchase. After all, (Source – Red Bubble) We’ve all been there when we spend time looking for gifts online diligently, adding a few things to our shopping basket.

(Source – Red Bubble)

Our shopping gets interrupted by a phone call or the doorbell rings. Or we change our minds when we’re not sure yet. We simply forget about the shopping cart. Now’s the time for you to remind your customers of the courses they’ve already added to their shopping baskets. For that crafting, a brilliant abandoned mailer promo is half the battle won.

Recommended Read Articles: How to sell courses with a high-converting Email marketing strategy?

Integrate Instant Chat: Let People Reach You

You should be easily reachable by customers and your potential customers during Festive season sales. The last thing you want is to lose a sale because a potential customer couldn’t get his query resolved quickly enough.

Make Refunds Easy and Hassle-Free

Be the business that cares and goes above and beyond the call of duty for their customers.

Well, communicate your return policies and offer refunds where you can. This might just convince on-the-fence customers to pull the trigger since you show confidence in your product.

Do away with some of your stricter policies for a limited period. After all, this is the season for exchanging gifts. If your return and exchange policies are too tough, buyers won’t feel much encouraged. So share that guarantee of a refund with full confidence because you know your courses are high value.

You have an option to integrate Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics on your site. So now’s really the time to use it and retarget your audience. If not already done, here’s the link to Integrate Facebook Pixel on your site. The great thing about retargeting is that you’re able to reach back to people who may have forgotten about your course and wouldn’t have checked out your festive offers otherwise.

These tools also allow you to drive better sales with better analytics into the performance of your ads. These are powerful tools that will help you understand your shoppers even more. So if you’re not set up with Google Analytics on your site yet, or you just want to ensure you’re using it correctly, check out this FAQ:

Google Tag Manager Integration.

After-Season Sales: Strategize for the Next Year You have this opportunity to turn seasonal shoppers into year-round customers. Your relationship with festive shoppers needs not just end after the festival season is over. Instead, take all necessary steps to nurture and maintain your relationship with the new customers you acquired during this festive season.

Keep your customers engaged year-round. Be active on social media and send out post-sale emails to your subscribers without fail. If those shoppers, late-minute festive shoppers didn’t sign up for your email list or follow your social media accounts, then creating a retargeting option might be your next to-do list. Learn what has worked for you this year to carry forward your learnings to 2021.

Here’s to the Successful Year of 2021 ahead!

So, here you’ve made it. Between learning by doing experiences, planning and implementing marketing efforts, keeping checklists lists, holding Festival sales, offering discount coupons, and enticing last-minute shoppers, by now, you have enough information to plan out a great last-minute push and ring in the new year with many sold-out courses.

The data and learnings you’ll have would be invaluable for the next festive season by all means. You’ll be able to get orders coming down the chimney if you study the kind of courses that grabbed a lot of attention from your customers, what marketing and sales strategies fetched max revenue for your course business. So, this knowledge, experience, and hard work shall last for many festival seasons to come.

Festival season is an excellent time for your online course business to learn from your experiences as well as its successes. The lessons you learn will have their own distinct value.

That’s where it’s important to track everything and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Hopefully, it puts you in a better position to succeed in this and many holiday seasons. Stay motivated and ambitious, set realistic expectations, and remember to enjoy the ride.

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