5 Ways to Sell More Courses

September 20, 2021

So you’ve got your course up with the SamCart Courses App, and you’re looking to increase sales. We’ve got 5 simple ways to help you do just that.

1. Double Conversions With A Payment Plan

Have you ever wanted to buy something but got sticker shock when you saw the price tag? Some of your potential students may feel the same way. It’s not to say that your course isn’t worth taking or that it won’t provide value, but you want to eliminate as many barriers that might prevent folks from buying your course. One of the biggest things you can do is to break up that one-time hit into a payment plan! Allowing people to pay you in smaller chunks over time.

Let’s say you have a course that’s $500. Here are some payment plans you can offer:

  • 1 payment - $500
  • 2 payments - $250
  • 4 payments - $125
  • 5 payments - $100

In the end, you make the same amount of money. But a smaller up-front number cuts down on that sticker shock of seeing $500 in one lump sum. And if you want to take it to the next level, you could even make the price lower for those paying in full upfront. Making the payment plan option more expensive in the long run, and give your students an extra incentive to buy now.

So let’s say your course is $100. You can present these options:

  • 1 payment - $100
  • 5 payments - $25

Some people might be willing to pay $125 instead of $100, because paying $25 at a time might be more doable for them. So all of this is good, but what does the SamCart Database tell us adding a payment plan does to your conversions? On average, people who add a payment option increase their conversions by 17%. And that 17% is just a starting point!

In our biggest course launch ever, adding a payment plan doubled our conversion rate! We charged $1000 for the year but also had an option to make 12 payments of $100. This simple step brought in twice as many new customers. Keep in mind that the higher the number of payments increases the chance of having a failed payment down the line. So what happens if someone’s card expires or gets declined when trying to collect these payments? With SamCart’s Subscription Saver feature, SamCart automatically sends your students an email if a payment fails. That email has a unique link to get them to update their information and automatically collect those payments! It’s like having your own 24/7 sales team. This process is called “dunning”. The Subscription Saver feature has saved almost $500 Million for SamCart customers. You can learn more about our Subscription Saver here.

2. Sell More Courses With Order Bumps

If you give your customers easy opportunities to spend more, they typically will. And that’s exactly what SamCart’s Order Bumps do for you. Have you ever shopped online and were ready to complete your purchase, and just before you finalized everything you decided to throw something extra in your cart before finally checking out? Maybe you are buying a plane ticket, and at the last minute, you add in priority boarding so you’re on the plane first. Have you ever bought a new phone and decided to add on the extended warranty and a new case? Those are both order bumps. And your $500 new phone can quickly turn into a $700 order thanks to the extra stuff you added in before you bought! You can do the same with SamCart’s Order Bumps. Order Bumps are the “do-you-want-fries-with-that” part of your business. Who eats a burger without fries? Order bumps are quick, easy to add and don’t cost too much. They should be super easy choices for your customers.

Order bumps are the "do-you-want-fries-with-that" part of your business

You can go in so many directions with them, too. You can add a course as an order bump to other stuff you sell. Or make your course the main dish, and add side dishes like extra worksheets, bonus content, or even services as Order Bumps. Let’s go back to the SamCart Database, and see what it tells us about Order Bumps! Turns out, adding one single order bump can increase your average customer value by 31%. On average, order bumps convert between 35-40% of the time.

Order bumps increase average customer value by 31%

When it comes to order bumps, one of our favorite success stories is that of Nick Wolny. Nick is an author and media and marketing strategist who has written for magazines like Fast Company and Entrepreneur Magazine. Nick sells high-ticket items, but when 2020 hit, he realized many people weren’t in a position to order those expensive products and services, so he made adjustments. The first adjustment he made was switching to SamCart from another platform. Then he began offering some more affordable products and services and added order bumps along the way to make it easy and less intimidating to buy by removing that sticker shock of the more expensive stuff, even though it’s worth every penny. Here’s what his order bumps look like, pretty simple.

SamCart Order Bumps example from Nick Wolny

When Nick made this change it increased his Average Order Value (AOV) in his first month with SamCart by 110% from $76.25 to $160.21.

Nick Wolny doubles average order value with SamCart

Learn more about Nick’s Success here, or check out the video below.

3. Add One-Click Upsells

One-click upsells are the “since-you-bought-this-you-might-be-interested-in-this-as-well” part of your business. Right after someone places an order, SamCart lets you show them one (or a few!) other offers. And here’s the kicker, due to some fancy technology, your customers can purchase more stuff with just one single click of the mouse. That’s the power of Amazon but for selling your own courses, services and more. And SamCart’s database tells us that adding just a single one-click upsell increases your average customer value by a whopping 68%! Upsells give you more space to pitch the extra product just how you would a main product or service you're selling.

One-click upsells are the since-you-bought-this-you-might-be-interested-in-this-as-well part of your business

One-click upsells tend to be more expensive than the originally purchased product or service, but it’s totally up to you. What makes one-click upsells great is that your customers don’t have to input their information again! SamCart has everything stored on file, and you get the reap the rewards. That’s a huge deal because the last thing people want to do after going through the purchasing process is to go through it again. Sell your course as a one-click upsell when someone buys other stuff. Or you can upsell high-priced services, additional courses, workshops, live event tickets, monthly memberships, and more. Someone who combines order bumps and one-click upsells can really knock it out of the park. Christie “The Health Coaches’ Coach” Miller is someone who did exactly that. The extra sales were a big part of why she has been able to make over $1,000,000 using SamCart without a website. When we interviewed Christie, her sales were at $400,000. She admitted she wasn’t even sure what to offer outside of her main offer at first. "The SamCart part was the easy part. The harder part was, ‘What do I have, and what can I create as an order bump’"?

One important thing she did was make sure her order bumps and upsells were relevant to the main offer in order to make the decision easy for the customer. “What we created was just such a good match to the prime offer that it was a no-brainer.” Christie’s “free money” from a one-time flash sale has become part of SamCart folklore. “We added an order bump, a $47 order bump and then a $97 upsell, and we increased the average sale price from $297 to $374, and it brought in an extra; I believe it was like $13,600 or $13,800. I gotta tell you. That’s as close as you can get to free money.” Check out Christie’s story in the video below where she mentions to our co-founder, Scott Moran, how much she cringes at the thought of how much money she lost by not using order bumps and upsells.

4. Create Bundles

Everyone loves a good bundle. Getting a video game console as a gift is cool. Getting a video game console bundled with extra controllers and a handful of games is how you become the coolest kid in school. With SamCart, you can create your very own bundles to make your offers more attractive to your customers. Using SamCart’s payment options feature, you can easily create bundles around your course. So customers can choose between something like a Basic/Gold/Platinum plan for your course. Add extra downloads, or “done for you” materials like worksheets to entice visitors to pay up for the higher-priced bundles. But however you construct your bundles, SamCart makes it so simple for your customers to quickly choose the one that is right for them. All from one very simple page.

5. Make Receipt Offers

Everyone opens their receipt email after a purchase, but no one thinks to use their receipt as an opportunity to drive more sales. Honestly, a lot of other services don’t give people the option to do this. SamCart lets you customize your receipts, so you can give out links to go buy your other offers. You can do things like add a coupon code to make things more attractive. Let your customers stay in “buying mode”, and keep promoting other stuff you want to sell. You can give your customers so many opportunities to say “yes” to you.

  • Opportunity #1 - When people are on your main offer page
  • Opportunity #2 - When your order bump comes up right before check out
  • Opportunity #3 - When your one-click upsell comes up after check out
  • Opportunity #4 - When people open their receipt email

So to recap, here are 5 things you can do to sell more courses, and double your profits...

1. Add Payment Plans to give customers payment options. 2. Add Order Bumps before checkout for easy, impulse add-ons. 3. Add One-Click Upsells after checkout to create shopping sprees without the need to input payment information again. 4. Create Bundles to give extra value, and sweeten the deal. 5. Make Receipt Offers to keep people in “buying mode”.

Sell More Courses and Earn More than the Competition

If you’re ready to see how more than 19,000 businesses have used SamCart to sell more than $2 billion of their own products, goods and services, stop by SamCart.com and grab a free demo today. Talk with a real member of our team seven days a week, and get answers about how SamCart can help you.

Get A Demo Of SamCart Today

Also, we'd love to see you over on our Facebook page. We're over 30,000 strong in there. It's a great place to connect with folks using SamCart from all levels of experience.

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