Given the recent changes to market conditions, businesses worldwide (particularly in SaaS) are needing to change their focus from growth at all costs to focus on efficiency and scalable investments across their business.
If you have been looking to focus on growth and efficiency in your business, selecting and implementing a Learning Management System can be a major contributor to those efficiency gains, but only if managed and measured in the right way.
Learn how you can optimize the value and impact of your LMS across a business from our VP of Sales here at Thinkific, Adam Jones:
1. Use your LMS to support multiple goals across your organization
Depending on what your priorities and goals are as a business, you can use your LMS to support different goals across your organization. For example, you can use your LMS for:
- Customer Education
- Lead Generation
- Employee Education
- Partner Education
- And more…
To maximize the value of your investment in your LMS, explore creating online courses to support each of the areas of focus mentioned above across your business.
Wondering where to start? Ask yourself where your business’s priorities might lie: Reducing customer churn, increasing product adoption, upskilling your employees, or more.
2. Increase customer retention with customer education
Having built a successful business already, implementing a customer success strategy around your products and services can and will help you take your business to the next level.
How? Your business can increase its revenue and accelerate its customer success with customer training at scale. By using your LMS to create an online course centred around customer education, you can improve your customer onboarding process, increase product adoption, and reduce customer “churn” rates.
Through online learning, you can support your businesses’ customers by educating them on your existing and new offers, improve customer retention, build a positive customer experience, and activate your customers and their product adoption faster.
Take Schudio as an example: A UK-based school website design company. Schudio’s team has helped over 500 schools and colleges keep a brilliant, active picture of life in their schools up to date online by providing them with carefully designed websites that allow them to manage their everyday responsibilities, communicate with parents, and empower their staff and students.
In 2019, Schudio launched its unique online learning platform SchudioTV. Schudio TV was built for customer education and product training purposes, hosting a wide variety of online courses with specialized content to help Schudio’s clients successfully manage their school websites and meaningfully connect with their communities online.
After launching SchudioTV, the team realized that there was an opportunity to offer more accessible, on-demand, best-in-class training through their LMS for parents and educators who support students with Autism and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
The results?
- Over 50,000+ enrollments
- 60+ courses
- Reduced customer onboarding times and support requests
The example from Schudio goes to show that you can make use of your LMS to help your business address your customer’s needs and go above and beyond to nurture them.
If you are looking to leverage your LMS for customer education, these are good questions to consider to create your online course:
- What is the critical action in your customer journey that initiates success, and can you increase the number of customers who reach it via online learning?
- Why are customers currently leaving or outgrowing your business?
- Is there a course that you could create to nurture your customers and go “above and beyond”?
- Can an online course be created in your business to alleviate customer churn?
Learn more: How Schudio is making accessible using Thinkific Plus
3. Use your LMS to generate new leads for your business
Differentiating your brand with educational content and courses that bring in new leads is a great way to leverage your existing LMS for lead generation purposes and transform leads into brand advocates by providing high-value education at every stage of the funnel.
Take Coastal Drones for example: A company founded by Kate Klassen that provides training for those looking to fly drones in Canada. Kate created online courses using her LMS to cater to different levels of drone certifications and attract several types of customers who are at different stages of their journey flying drones.
By bringing her teaching online, Kate was able to reach more students, earn more income, and achieve more location and time freedom as an instructor.
The results?
- 1,800+ Students
- 10+ Courses
- 2 Certification Tracks
If you are looking to leverage your LMS for lead generation, these are good questions to consider to create your online course:
- Who is considered the leader in education in your space, and how could it be you?
- What problems are your prospective customers facing? How can you help solve them?
Learn more: How Coastal Drones teaches the next generation of Canadian Drone Pilots
4. Educate and Accredit Your Partners Using Your LMS
You can also use your existing LMS to help drive sales in your business and improve your current onboarding process for partners and resellers to create and host online courses for partner education purposes.
Creating online courses for partners will allow you to keep your partners and resellers up to date and informed as your business continues to grow, ensure compliance and quality of service, and provide accreditation and certification options for them if you wish to do so.
Take Keap for example: an e-mail marketing and sales platform for small businesses. Because the company already had a successful business, it accelerated its growth by reaching into new markets and attempted to fit into new audiences by relying on its partners to advocate for the company and implement its platform on their behalf through Partnerships.
The results?
- A 30% reduction in Partner Onboarding time
If you are looking to create an online course for partner education purposes, ask yourself the following questions:
- What kind of knowledge can you equip your business partners with to ensure success?
- How can you leverage your LMS to support your partners?
- Is there a certification or accreditation you could offer in return for completing your online courses?
Learn more: How Keap reduced time spent on partner onboarding by 30% with Thinkific Plus
5. Educate your employees and save time and costs with your LMS
You can support your team’s onboarding, growth and development by providing them with thoughtfully designed and brand immersive learning pathways.
Providing engaging employee training in your business can help you reduce employee turnover, help your organization’s talent grow and develop, and create innovative ways to address your customer’s needs.
If you already have an existing LMS platform, you can further maximize its value by hosting your employee training courses on it.
Another perk? Building employee training online courses allows you to provide remote access to dynamic educational materials such as videos, quizzes, surveys and discussions that create a unique learning experience, and that your employees need to stay focused.
Take Epoch Education for example: They are the national leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, offering over 50+ in-depth courses to educators, students, and corporations across the USA.
In March 2020 when a large part of the world shifted to a digital environment, Co-Founder Dr. Nancy Dome and her team offered online education through Thinkific Plus without missing a beat. This shift had a profound impact on the business and allowed Epoch Education to deliver more impactful content to a wider audience in record time.
Through Thinkific Plus, Epoch Education continues to offer personalized, engaging, and secure DEI training to their clients (including employees of large corporations) while improving the overall learning experience and enhancing their revenue.
The results?
- 119,000+ Enrollments
- 50+ Courses
- 2-3 New courses per month
Learn more: How Epoch Education exceeded 119,000 enrollments for their online DEI training
If you are looking to leverage your existing LMS for employee education purposes, ask yourself the following questions:
- How does your current employee education align with your brand?
- Are you providing employees with all of the information/ education they need to succeed?
- Are there existing training and onboarding processes that you could bring online to reduce time and costs?
- Are there any workshops or pieces of training your employees or employees of other businesses could benefit from, that you could bring online to increase accessibility?
Now, you might be thinking to yourself: there are so many options available for how I can leverage my LMS to support my business goals… Where do I start?
Ask yourself which acceleration path would work best for your business and what the current largest need in your business is and start there.
From Cost To Profit: Leveraging Your LMS For Maximum Value
There is currently a strong opportunity for your business to reach new levels of success with online learning by establishing yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your industry.
If you take full advantage of your LMS, offering online courses can help you turn it from a cost centre to a profit centre. The platform will pay for itself and help you generate additional revenue for your business/organization, and can even grow to become your primary revenue stream if you invest time and dedication in your online academy.
Take NCIP (The National Institute for Crime Prevention) for example: a global organization that has provided onsite Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) training to law enforcement officers, architects, city planners, and educators – among others – for more than 20 years.
When the global spread of COVID-19 began to take effect on in-person events and air travel, Joelle Hushen, Executive Director at NICP, knew the organization needed to quickly diversify its traditional revenue stream and training model to offer an online education option.
Through Thinkific Plus, NICP was able to transition 64 hours of in-person education to a flexible online environment in just over a month that now reaches more customers around the globe.
The results?
- 6 Courses
- 8 Countries served
- A diversified income stream
NCIP’s example goes to show that by leveraging your knowledge and expertise, you can create a powerful revenue stream for your business by hosting online courses on your LMS.
If you are looking to create online courses on your LMS for revenue generation purposes, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is your business’s biggest pain point right now?
- How can you leverage online education to equip your customers/partners for success?
- How can you leverage your business’s knowledge and expertise?
Learn more: How NCIP used Thinkific Plus to adapt and diversify its income during a global pandemic
Demonstrating Success: Tying Your LMS To A Business’ Objectives and Key Results
To demonstrate a measurable return on investment, it can be hard to tie Customer Education, Lead Generation and Partner education efforts to your existing LMS. One effective way to make a business case for your LMS and prove its effectiveness long-term is clearly outlining the goals you have for each online course you create, as well as metrics that demonstrate their success such as:
- Percentage of increase in product adoption
- Percentage of reduction in onboarding times
- Number of enrollments
- Course completion rates
- Percentage of revenue increase
- Number of certificates issued
Keeping an eye on these metrics will help you tie your efforts and investment in your current LMS back to dollars and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Reusing and recycling digital content to gain more value from your LMS
One sure way that you can gain more value from your LMS is by reusing and recycling digital learning content across different areas of your business to create online courses.
For example:
- Over at Later Media, the team repurposed webinars, FAQ sections and knowledge base articles to create their first online course
- The Echosec Systems team launched their customer education program and realized soon after that the educational materials they provided through Echosec Essentials could also help them effectively onboard new employees who needed to know details about their product to perform well in their roles.
Here’s a framework by Ayeda Solis, an SEO consultant that can help you understand what you need to do in order to repurpose that content you already have.
- When you have a piece of content first determine if it can be expanded on – this might be a case study, successful social posts, or other bite-sized content. Then, if it’s expanded enough, determine if you can reformat anything – i.e. a blog post into a video or book into multiple chapters and lessons.
- Then, if you don’t have something that can be reformatted, look at curating it together with other content – so if you have a one-off video on YouTube that could go into a course, maybe combine it with a lead magnet workbook or notes from your coaching program to make it more robust.
- If all else fails, look for content for a different audience that can be refocused on your students here. This might be from a presentation you did to train internal employees that would be beneficial for customers too, or if you work in multiple industries, refocus the content for one industry on the industry your course fits into.
- As a last resort, you can jump into creating from scratch. This takes the most time and for the purpose of getting your course up in a day, I recommend the above options first.
Once you take stock of your existing material, you can move on to creating your course and choosing a format for each lesson and learning support!
Now that you have learned multiple ways that you can leverage an LMS and build a business case for it, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you need different platforms for your different online learning and business goals?
- Are you getting the full value from your LMS right now?
- Is it time to maximize the value of your current LMS by creating new online courses or academies, or making the switch to a more efficient platform?
Gain the full value from your LMS by making the switch to Thinkific Plus today.
With Thinkific Plus, you can host multiple learning environments and build scalable online programs that your employees, customers, and partners will love: all in one place. Learn more about Thinkific Plus or book a call with our team to try it today.
