Creating your online class is hard work! You have already made a ton of decisions, from choosing your topic to creating your content, and everything else in between.
However, there is still one last important barrier to cross:
Pricing
LearnDesk practices open pricing. That means that you are free to set your own price and change it as often as you like. Neither does the platform discount prices via flash sales. This means that you have complete control over the price of your product and have the opportunity to use price as a strategic lever for your business.
Price your content correctly, and you will get loyal customers, increase sales, and build a great reputation. Price incorrectly, and you may drive customers away, reduce your revenue, hurt your bottom line, devalue your content, and impact the perception of your brand.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all pricing strategy that applies to every instructor and their content. There is no one formula or a single spreadsheet that you can use to appropriately price your content. This is because each instructor's content, market positioning, competition, and business goals are different.
Based on thousands of conversations we have had with instructors on pricing, we have observed patterns in the factors that instructors use to price their content. While every teacher's situation is different, pricing decisions seem to revolve around a few key considerations and questions that instructors need to answer for themselves.
Your fair and honest answers to these key questions can help you arrive at the appropriate price for your content.
1. What value does my content deliver?
Think about the value that your content can deliver to your students. If someone were to take your content and learn from it, how valuable could that be for the student? Will your student make more money? Will they enhance their brand? Will they save a lot of time? Think about all of these outcomes, and put a price tag on them. However, be careful to consider everything else that may be needed for the student to succeed as well. A single course may or may not be sufficient to bring the desired outcomes. If more knowledge is needed to help the student succeed then discount the value of your class appropriately.
2. What are my strategic goals?
It is important to be clear on what you are trying to achieve and what are your goals with classes right now. This is completely independent of what others are doing or even what you may have done in the past. Once you have your goals written down, use your pricing choices to help you achieve them. Your goals could be to greatly increase the penetration of your product in the market, to enter a new market, to elevate your brand, or even to impact the sales of your other products by cross-selling. Each of these requires you to make a different choice when pricing.
3. How similar am I to the competition?
Consider how similar your content is to other choices available to students. They may be other choices on the platform or off the platform. If your content comes off as something that is similar to others then your prospects will try to match your price with the price of other courses that seem similar. They will put your course in the "same box". Investing time in figuring out what is unique about you and your content is important. Ensure that your content pages effectively convey that and you stand apart from alternatives. Use the measurement of your similarity or how much you stand apart in your pricing decisions.
4. How is my product perceived?
More than anything, pricing really is about perception. Buyer decisions are not always logical. They are influenced by a number of factors unrelated to pricing. That could include perception of your brand, the way it looks, how it looks as compared to other products, and more. You should critically think about how your content is perceived by others. Think about low-cost measures you can do to change value perception. Then use an estimate of your perception to price your content. Pricing high can also positively influence the perception of products that people already consider to be high-value.