5 Brilliant Ways to Extend Your Training Course Using SMS Texts

There are about 7 billion mobile subscriptions in use worldwide, and every one of those plugged-in mobile users is a potential student for your online education business. Creating an online course is an accomplishment in itself, but how do you continue your relationship with your subscribers – and encourage them to keep exploring your educational catalog – after the initial lessons are completed? With an impressive open rate of about 98 percent, SMS messages are efficient, relatively easy, and offer an immediacy that email and phone calls simply don’t. Here are 5 tips for extending your training course with SMS:

Inspire Continuing Education

Education is a journey that never ends. Ensure your students continue learning from you – especially if you plan on producing courses with increased difficulty – by staying involved with their day-to-day studying. Period push notifications and texts that direct students back to small, bite-sized lessons will foster both inspiration and loyalty – after all, if they’re getting a steady stream of on-topic information from you, why would they need to go anywhere else? Automated SMS messaging will help you organize this continued education and send interactive texts including surveys, quizzes, and blurbs that encourage your audience to continue the conversation via one of your online communities.

Offer Exclusive Deals on New Content

When you send out SMS messages to current or past enrollees you already know that you have an audience that’s at least a little interested in your product. Depending on the source, various experts estimate that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from 4 to 10 times higher than the cost of keeping an existing one. Clearly it’s both more economical and more efficient to focus a significant percentage of your energy on your existing audience. Do so by offering text coupon codes or links to in-app or online discounts that reward loyalty or celebrate birthdays, subscription (or business) anniversaries, and holidays in an exciting way, and students will respond.

Relating Past Lessons to Current Events

Part of justifying the price of your course is building perceived value. While things like printed material and follow-up videos are exciting, these items also cost money, and you have to start considering what the return on your investment will be. You’re not looking to hike your product price, so the smart answer is to somehow add value without boosting your expenses, and sending texts that make your curriculum seem more valuable is a great way to do that. Help keep your course top of mind and the content within relevant by sending texts that link previous lessons to current events or offer up expert quotes that validate specific parts of your curriculum. Not only are you keeping the channel of communication between you and your students open, you’re also reminding them that what they’ve learned has continued interest and value.

Reminders

People are incredibly busy. When you’re on the go, scribbling reminders on Post-it notes just isn’t going to work, but you can use SMS messaging to nudge students in a much more dynamic and productive way. Sending SMS messages that remind students that they need to finish their registration or take a particular quiz gives them a nudge no matter where they are, and that sort of omnipresent assistance is practically priceless. One marketing study found that SMS campaigns have over 7 times greater performance than email campaigns – when you’re happening to encourage students to take (or finish) an online task, what’s better than a captive audience?

Get Feedback

Soliciting feedback through SMS has the added benefit of allowing you to identify your influencers and concentrate your future efforts on the people who are most likely to use your service again. By sending out a text that asks for a response, you can gauge who is still feeling a connection with your school and, by extension, with you (useful when you’re deciding on whom to concentrate future marketing efforts), and you also have the opportunity to garner feedback that can shape future coursework. Ask how you’re doing and how you’re doing better, see what students think of potential course ideas, and let them know that their opinions are being heard.

There is some valuable information on the internet designed to help you understand and implement the best ways to become an “edupreneur”, but once you find a niche and gather an audience you have to figure out how to maintain your new-found status quo. By using SMS to extend your training course, you can connect with your students and grow your business in surprisingly meaningful and exponentially satisfying ways.

Author Biography

Sophorn Chhay

Sophorn is an inbound marketer specializing in attracting targeted visitors and generating sales qualified leads. Through Trumpia’s mass text messaging automation solution he helps businesses and organizations communicate effectively with their customers or members. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.