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Setting the right price tag on your products can be quite challenging. Even more so is how to price an online course or a service. However, there is always that sweet spot where your course price is attractive to your learners and where you earn enough money by selling your courses.
Whether you are an experienced entrepreneur in the elearning market or a new edupreneur who’s ready to launch your online courses, we are here to help out.
There is no doubt that deciding on a price for your courses is of huge importance. Such a decision can help you achieve your business goals from making a ground-breaking entrance to the market to tapping a new market, promoting your brand, and increasing your overall sales.
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But the question remains, how much money can you make out selling online courses?
You can take the following quiz and see how much money you can potentially make with an online course!
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The challenge is real! There is no single solution for you course creators to price your online courses, right? As your business and marketing strategy needs vary, there are many phases that you have to go through until you find the most appropriate price tag to put on your courses.
To answer these challenges effectively, you will need to set up clear, specific, and upfront goals as to what you expect to get out of your course and in relation to your target audience. Clarifying the purpose of your online course can help you prioritize and make an informed decision in terms of expected profit and ROI for your course business.
Steps to consider when setting the right price:
Factors to Consider When Pricing Your Online Course
Your course is always worth much more than you give it credit for. That is because an online training course is the amalgam of your work, know-how, life experiences, years of learning, and education. What you are providing is a service for your potential students to share your knowledge, a highly valued commodity.
Generally, the base of your pricing should focus on the following 5 pillars:
Before getting down to business and analyzing the process of pricing your online course, we will make a quick walkthrough of these five pillars.
1Pricing Rule of Thumb
When considering the average cost of online courses, it’s a good rule of thumb to price most of your comprehensive courses well above $100. Reserve lower price points, below $100, for shorter or introductory courses. Smaller courses might have a simpler course topic, a smaller course content, or not a high added value for your target audience. Keep in mind that your whole brand identity as a quality educator is being mirrored in your price.
Some industries might come with lower price expectations. Plan ahead so that you can invest time to deep dive and research the competition, your target audiences, and your market for price benchmarks.
2The High Value of Education
Think of Ivy League universities. Usually, their pricing reflects their quality. Renowned universities such as Harvard, Oxford, and Yale do not ask for the same tuition as a community college; they do apply a premium price. Pricing is part of their strategy to maintain their image as a high-quality education destination, using that money to further invest in the quality of education offered.
3Social and Networking through an Online School
When using LearnWorlds as your online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting your online courses, you give access to your learners to a wealth of robust features that they can benefit from.
One of these most important benefits is the added value option to join a community of like-minded learners. A common ground for communicating, networking, and engaging with peers. It goes beyond the standard educational experience or the simplicity of a Facebook group.
4Education is Not Only the Material
If you were to sell an ebook, you would probably price it between $10 to $20 dollars, Yet, you are not selling an ebook, but you are providing your learners with a wholesome educational experience that consists of reading material, workbooks, worksheets, quizzes, exams, certification, videos, and so many more learning units.
An online course is meant to be interactive, easy to absorb knowledge, and much richer in terms of learning experiences.
💁Check our step-by-step guide on how to sell your online courses.
5Exclusivity of Content
Online courses offer valuable knowledge not found anywhere else. Your years of experience are reflected as a high perceived value-adding content in a multimedia format for your target audience.
In the bottom line, learners, students, and clients pay an amount of money to access something they value. It is their only opportunity to get into an exclusive community with high-quality knowledge you should price your courses accordingly.
How to Price Your Online Course
As is expected, not all your students will have the same goals when enrolling in your courses. Some of your offerings might be considered “bonus” or overpriced and not needed by some. So if you are wondering how to price your online course, a good way to go around is by introducing multiple courses or membership options and course bundles in different online course pricing tiers.
Different prices for the same products can also be used to test prices and give more options to potential customers. You can see the price point where people respond more.
Your end goal is to increase your conversion rate (e.g., more enrollments), and generate greater income. This can be achieved with different combinations of prices and student numbers. Testing different prices can help you see which ones hit the sweet spot.
Now let’s go over some of the most popular pricing models for online courses.
The 4 Tiers of Online Course Pricing
1Free
Not all your courses should be paid for. You can earn a lot more than an income by giving out free courses. Free courses can generate leads for your more expensive online courses or a way to showcase your expertise. It is the first point of contact to create a rapport. Who doesn’t enjoy good communication, creating relationships, and a sense of familiarity? This is a very engaging method that will help you sell more courses.
If your business is not only about education and training, then free courses can help you attract potential customers for your other services or products. Your next customers may be people whose first online course was a freebie you provided and that they appreciated. So, they proceeded with purchasing a paid online course from you to further benefit from your expertise.
Whether the course topic is about corporate training, invitations for speakers, writing jobs, or agency work, free courses can get you closer to making a deal.
Keep in mind though that “free” doesn’t translate to “cheap.” There is a common misconception about this. You should invest quality time in the course creation of your free courses, as they must reflect your brand’s quality. These free courses set the expectations for what the customer might expect from the paid courses.
You shouldn’t always offer free courses, but there are times when you should. Basically, you want to give away samples of what you’ve got so that someone will have an incentive to join and take a look at it.
You can offer, for example, a free mini-course before the launch of a masterclass or major online course launch. You can give out a free course so that potential customers can review the course and see if they want to pay for full access.
Other cases when you should give out a course for free:
2Paid Courses
This is the most commonly used pricing as it offers the most basics at a price that is relatively affordable. The price in this tier is usually low in order to meet the needs of customers who are just starting out but are possibly not sure how long they want to stay. Bear in mind that low prices attract low-quality customers, and investing too much in it doesn’t benefit your business goals altogether.
Most paid courses come with a one-off payment.
3Subscriptions
With subscriptions, you offer your customers a recurring payment option where they can pay for their membership on the course on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. These allow the possibility for more options to suit the financial needs and preferences of every customer.
A membership site provides gated content that gives access only to subscribers. Instead of selling one-off online courses, for example, you allow your students, clients, or fans to keep an active (paid) subscription in exchange for accessing offers, deals, and a community they can network. Membership sites work well with subscriptions and they have different levels of access to suit different preferences.
4Premium
For the premium course, you can charge your customers more and consider using payment plans where you can either pay once or pay for up to six months or yearly. You can go premium when you offer exclusive content or a more extended course offering more features or an advantaged course e.g. towards winning certification in the medical field etc.
Here are the most important reasons why you should start with a premium price in order to finetune your pricing:
Great Marketing Approach
A higher price will allow you more flexibility when giving our discounted courses with coupons, attract a better clientele, have fewer communication hassles, and reach a higher class of clients that can afford more expensive products and can expand your business.
Online courses are intangible products and should be marketed and priced as such.
Better Advertising Budget
Just selling the few first courses will enable you to spend more on advertising early on and attract more customers. A better advertising budget will help you keep up the prices and keep earning from your courses, thus creating a decent passive income with less work.
Do Not Compete on Pricing
The worst way to do marketing is by competing on pricing. You can do discounts to earn difficult or price-sensitive clients, but a price competition with someone who offers a cheap course is not a solution. People buy because there is a connection -aka an overall buying experience– they perceive a higher quality or find the solution to their problems in your services.
Partners and Affiliates
Partnering with others and affiliates will be more interested in selling a premium product than a cheap one, as they will be making a bigger profit for less work.
Better Education Experience
A smaller group of quality learners that can afford your premium course will provide a better experience for them. People tend to connect much more in groups of 7-9 persons, and even online learning can become crowded after a few dozen people in each course.
Focus on the quality of their experience and how you can offer personal guidance, training, and education to each one of your select students, and they will suggest you to more of their premium friends.
Higher Course Engagement
A higher price comes with a higher engagement rate. Learners will be more involved and interact more when they pay more. An impulse buy of a low-priced course is easily forgotten, but a premium course will get them engaged and focused on their learning objectives. An incentive that should also be part of the learning process.
💁 Find out how you can set your online course pricing with LearnWorlds:
Setting up an Online Course Pricing Strategy
Understanding who your customers are can help you decide on the price. Better yet, it can help you come up with a few great online course pricing strategies.
You need to delve into more specifics and look at other underlying factors:
Calculating the Value of the Outcome
The most important pricing point is the value your customers will receive. How much is the course, training, or knowledge affecting their lives?
Are you doing a course that will allow someone to get their dream job have a healthier and happier life or just get rid of mundane everyday issues? Taking the chance to think about this is crucial because it can help you put a price on the significance your course offers to the world.
Consider Course length
Sometimes, length matters. While most people will value high a course that brings them quickly to their results e.g. How to Fix Your Relationship – 2 hours of coaching; some courses for professional education might require hours of videos, assignments, quizzes, and activities. You should take into consideration both the value, the length, and your effort.
Research the Competition
Whether it is other online academies, universities, or training organizations, you should know your competition and what your clients are paying for it. Competing on pricing is not a good idea, but knowing what the market prices are in your niche can help you set up your course price accordingly.
A competitor can offer physical workshops, online training, courses in a marketplace, free YouTube videos, and email courses. Take a good look at the offering, where the free resources stop providing value, and where your competitor’s pricing begins. You can find a 10$ course on marketplaces like Udemy or Skillshare, but does it offer the same degree of depth and instructor interactivity with you?
See if other course providers offer low, medium, or high prices for their courses, and try to understand why. Is it the value of the offering, their branding, or something else behind it? Your competitor’s price is your starting point, and from there you can price more or less depending on where you want to position yourself.
In some cases, your competitors might have set a price expectation. You can work with it by:
Investing in branding and industry credibility or authority plays a huge role in selling and pricing. The more people value your personal (or company’s) brand, the more you can charge for your training courses. Being a published author, an industry expert, speaker, getting reviews and media exposure can help to increase your prices.
Intro videos on the landing pages or free sections/courses can also increase the familiarity of the students with your brand. Guest posting on authoritative sites and getting featured in podcasts will also increase your branding.
Create Income Goals
Regardless of what personal goals you hope to achieve, you need to set some income goals for your courses. Is your goal to get some money on the side with minimum effort or get this into a full-time business, and what would need to achieve that?
Initially, you should calculate any expenses for equipment and services you might need and then set specific goals for:
As you would imagine, income goals inform your pricing strategy. Think of your current customers and network. If you have an emailing list of one thousand business contacts, how many do you expect to convert to paying students?
You can go with a conservative calculation such as 1% or if you have done business before them and you know that they could be interested, you could expect more. Would that 1% be enough to make your income goals with a 50$ pricing or a 300$ pricing? The cheaper the price the more sales, but less total income. See the below table of expectations as an example for 1000 email list contacts:
| Price ($) | Conversion | Sales | Total ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 10% | 100 | 1000 |
| 50 | 5% | 50 | 2500 |
| 100 | 3% | 30 | 3000 |
| 100 | 2% | 20 | 4000 |
| 500 | 1% | 10 | 5000 |
One good tactic you can use is pricing highly at the beginning and getting the high-spenders early on, but later share a discount coupon to the ones that did not buy, increasing your total income potential, just be careful not to share the discount with the customers that paid in full.
Low Pricing
During a pre-launch, an early sales period, or a testing period, you can have a lower price. This will allow you to collect testimonials, feedback, and some early clients and budget to use later on.
A deadline before a price increase is also helpful to push potential customers to buy earlier, especially if they are price-sensitive. Discounts should be a last resort for difficult customers but may also backfire and undervalue your course. However, avoid massive discounts and long-term discount periods.
In the following instances ,a decrease in price is considered to be a smart move:
When you have a deadline before a price increase: deadlines give a sense of urgency. If you are doing a webinar or preparing for a new launch you can offer an early bird special offering a discount on a limited time – first-come, first-served basis.
When you want to acquire a new customer: sometimes putting a discount as a last resort can work to get new customers and increase your course sales.
High Pricing
More often than not, it’s better to avoid pricing too low. Why? There are a couple of reasons:
It makes you abandon your marketing efforts altogether: when charging too low it is tempting not to market your course. However, whether it is that way or high price, you still need to promote your courses in the best way possible.
It reduces the value of your course: it is easy to claim that a cheap course is also cheap in value. In fact, there is a psychological effect that makes us think so.
It takes the same effort to sell a course at a higher price: why charge your course at a low price when you can charge much higher and carry out the same effort upon launching it?
The Real Secret to Pricing Online Courses
Whichever price you decide to go when determining the price of an e-learning course, make sure to keep evaluating the quality of the course, your brand, and market trends. Test your price again and again until you find the perfect equilibrium.
Holidays and discounts help you drop your price and see your audience’s response, while exclusive content or testing a new price from a hidden page can test your audience’s willingness to go higher. Creating surveys, feedback questions, and focus groups are also great for asking directly your customers what they think of your price.
But, let’s be honest, anyone would prefer 5 of $500 rather than 100 sales for $10. When pricing online courses, you can either go for the masses or an exclusive set of premium students. You can even offer different levels of courses for different prices and see what works for you.
Best of luck setting up your own pricing strategy!
FAQs
How much do online courses cost?
The cost of online courses varies widely depending on factors such as content depth, course length, instructor expertise, and target audience. On average, online courses can range from as low as $50 for short, introductory lessons to several hundred dollars or more for comprehensive, high-value programs. Premium courses with certifications or specialized knowledge may even exceed $1000.
Why is pricing your online course so difficult?
Pricing an online course can be challenging because it requires balancing perceived value, market demand, and profitability. Factors such as competition, target audience expectations, and the cost of production and marketing also play a role.
How much should you charge per course?
The amount you charge per course depends on the course’s value, target audience, and market research. A general guideline is to price smaller or introductory courses below $100, while more comprehensive, in-depth courses should be priced above $100, often ranging between $200 and $500 or more.
Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.
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