Ways to raise prices without ticking off your customers

In the constantly evolving landscape of online education, raising prices for your courses is a delicate balancing act along with a challenging job. Increasing your course prices should not cross the limit of patience of your customers. It is the one thing for which you will have to first ensure the quality of your course and make an emotional bond with your online course buyers. 

Increasing the prices of your courses requires appropriate timing so that your customers don’t get frustrated with you and your services keep them satisfied. While it is a challenging job to seek the best suggestions to hike the prices of your courses, this blog will explore 12 ways to help you increase the prices of your courses without losing your customers to earn more profit in your online course selling. 

1. Create an Outline: Create an outline and stick to it from the beginning to the success of your business. Make a logical anticipation and calculation on everything from the budget to the quality of your course. Find out the trusted and reliable sources to get quality content and along with this make the strategies for the financial growth of your business. Making a pre-planned structure on how you will maintain the quality of your course and what will be the right occasions to increase the prices in your online course selling will help you once you start implementing those ideas in your business. 

• Assessing Your Current Pricing Strategy: Assess and think of all the factors which can be the reasons of making you increase the prices of your courses during your whole online course selling business. It can help you making a backup if you are planning to add extra study material or technological devices for your online classes. Assessing how much price increase will be appropriate will make your customers to not lose trust in you. 

• Offering extra services: Make a list of the services or products you can offer to your customers in the place of increasing the prices. You can make your content more qualitative or offer some more things related to their course. 

`2. Quality Matters: Quality content is the one thing that will be acceptable for your learners when you increase the prices. 

• Quality over Quantity: Don’t bulge up your course with a large material instead give priority to quality over the quantity of your content. Make your content high-quality and impactful with updated information and current affairs on the existing content or relating the concepts to real-world instances. Make your course attractive with interactive elements that can make your learners grasp practical things easily. Keep in mind that engaging, interactive, and informative content is the soul of your online course selling. Leverage your online courses with advanced devices and equipment so that you don’t face any hurdles to deliver the content to your learners. 

• Expert Guest Instructors: Inviting guest instructors who are prominent in the field of your subject, will keep your learners interested in learning more and more through your online courses. They can also encourage their friends to buy your course only for the reason that they are getting the opportunities to interact with the key faces of the industry. It will give a boost to your online course selling business in both the terms of fame and economics. 

• User-Friendly Platform: Investing in a user-friendly platform will make it easy for you to keep the learners engaged with you. The easier it is to navigate for your learners, the more likely they are to stay loyal to you. Optimizing your website according to mobile devices is a great way to keep your audience engaged with you. 

• Engaging Design: Make your website as visually appealing as you can and then position the content of your website appropriately so it is easy to navigate for the learners. The visitors to your website will see the website casually and when it feels appealing and easy to navigate, then they will decide to stick to it. Giving proper links to your course and other social media platforms will boost your online course selling, as they can easily find all the material in one place. 

3. Be Prepare for Potential Backlash: When you increase the prices, no matter if you have informed your customers earlier or not, you should be prepared to listen to their grudges and complaints both physically and online. Be ready to explain them why you needed to raise the prices of your courses. The below explained tips can help you in facing these types of backlashes during your online course selling business: 

• Communicate Clearly and Transparently: Clear communication is the key of mutual trust. It is crucial for the success of your online course selling business. Clearly convey your reasons behind the price hike whether its adding more quality to the course or sustain the business, transparency will build a strong emotional bonding between you and your customers.

• Gather Customer Feedback in Advance: Informing your customers about the price hike you are going to do and gathering their feedback will help you in understanding their pain points. You can provide them a detail of the improved areas and value added to the course which resulted in the price hike. 

4. Providing Incentives for Early Adopters: Incentives and perks are something people feel fine if you decide to increase the prices of your courses in your online course selling business. You can make them aware about your perks available for only a limited time. 

• Special Perks for Early Access: You can offer the current price for all of your customers if they buy your courses in the starting of the session. Offer perks such as downloadable content or focused customer support for those who buy your course just after you have announced the starting time of a session. 

• Loyalty Programmes: Loyalty programmmes are widely used by companies to make their current customers consistent with them. You can also follow this tactic in your business of online course selling. You can reward the customers who are choosing your services for a long time. You can follow this trend of loyalty programmes by providing them discounts, exclusive content or professional guest meet and so on. Appreciating the loyalty of your current customers can greatly help you in mitigating the potential dissatisfaction of the increased prices. 

5. Managing the Package Sizes: Managing the package sizes according to the increased price proportion is the best way to be prepared with the backup for the backlash your customers can have when you increase the prices. Restaurants and food companies follow the practice of reducing the serving sizes when the ingredients’ cost is high in the market while the customer pay the same amount for his order. You can follow this practice in your online course selling business. 

• The best time to increase the prices of your courses is when your customers are most satisfied with you. However you can provide your courses with some additional stuff like an exclusive webinar if they notice this thing. 

• Bundle Package: You can bundle multiple courses together with some discount. This can encourage your customers to be benefitted from this offer and purchase more courses. This can make you profit in two ways. First, you will not have to face any negative impact from individual customers related the increased prices and secondly it will make you more income. 

• Segmentation According to the Potential of Your Audience: You can make different segments for your customers. You can make some premium packages with high-prices after studying a specific segment of your customers on the basis of their will to pay. Other than this you can keep your other course packages with moderate prices. 

6. Enhanced Customer Support: An enhanced customer support can be the backbone of your online course selling business. Underestimating the value of clear communication between you and your customers can cause you a big loss. Considering the value of clear and transparent communication is of great significance specially at the time when you are increasing the prices of your course packages. 

• Hiring Customer Specialist: You can keep a dedicated team or an individual for instant customer support so that they don’t feel ignored if you are not able to listen to their queries or answering their comments. A dedicated person for customer support can give logical answer to the individual customers regarding the reasons behind the increased prices as well as taking the angry customers back in your trust. 

• Engage in Dialogue: Choosing a specific platform for your business of online course selling, where you can easily address the queries of your customers through Q&A sessions or webinars will be convenient for both you and your learners as they have a specific platform in their mind when they want to communicate with you. It will also help them to focus during the class in comparison to choosing other social media platforms such as Instagram for going live to interact with your learners, which can cause them distractions to get lost in the visual appeal and algorithm of the platform. 

7. Adding Fees: Adding fees of additional stuff rather than directly increasing the prices of your actual product or service will do the job for you without making your customers notice it. Many utilities companies including small businesses  follow this tactic, when electricity and gas prices go high. You can also follow this tactic in your online course selling business. 

• Offering Personalized Coaching: If you have a sharp eye in observing the strong and weak sides of your learners, you can offer one-on-one coaching or mentoring sessions with the instructors with some additional fee for personalized attention. 

• Certified Courses: It is a great way to increase the prices of your courses by taking the fee on certified courses. People like to mention it when they have certification in something. Take advantage of this and create some certified courses on the subsets of your core subject. 

• Providing Additional Resources: Some people like to read books whether it is an e-book or a physical one. Gathering fee on providing some additional resources such as e-books, guides or other tools is a great way to secretly increase the prices of your online courses. 

• Live Events and Workshops: People become excited about meeting or seeing someone physically who is a renowned personality in his respective field and they are also ready to pay a big amount for this. We all know how much popularity the singing concerts go. You can take your online course selling business to new heights by following this strategy.  Organize such live events and workshops physically featuring the key personalities in the fields of your courses for a high amount. 

Conclusion: 

There will be a number of times when you will have to increase the prices of your courses during your online course selling business. Doint this task effectively without making your customers notice it is a work of art and great intelligence. It requires a thoughtful approach while prioritizing customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving the quality of your content, maintaining a transparent communication with your customers and adding value to your courses are the things of paramount importance in order to make the increasing prices of your courses justify to your customers. 

Well-executed price increase is not only important for the sustainability of your business but also for reinforcing the perceived value of your educational services in the eyes of your customers. Execute these strategies and take your online course selling business to the next level.