5 Ways to Increase E-learning Subscribers By Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is essential when a brand is trying to promote a new course and trying to get more eLearners to subscribe. Fortunately, if a business is providing a good experience to their existing customer base, they may find that their customers will do some talking for them. This can lead to new leads and eLearning subscribers. It can also provide you with a high ROI!

What Is Word of Mouth?

Before we dig into how you can increase your eLearning subscribers, let’s discuss what exactly we mean by word of mouth.

We quite literally mean, one person telling another person about something. It’s the conversation between people. In a marketing setting, however, it more specifically means one person recommending a product to another person. Like a referral, for example, a new fine dining restaurant in town.

Word of mouth isn’t merely just an ‘in person’ conversation either. With the increased use of the internet, smartphones, apps, and social media, word of mouth can happen on a variety of channels at any given time.

General Tips for Increasing Word of Mouth

Now that you have the basics down, let’s check a few ways you can increase your word of mouth referrals and get more eLearning subscribers. You’ll soon see that there are plenty of things you can try that are also relatively easy to achieve.

1. Customer Service

In the case of getting more subscribers from word of mouth, you’ll find that providing good customer service to existing subscribers and customers is the key. Even if you run into a few bumps in the road, the service you provide is the most crucial determining factor for most people and this applies to get people to subscribe to additional learning opportunities as well.

Example: Let’s say you offer online training and certification to channel partners and customers. HubSpot offers marketers with different training modules and certificates. Let’s say a marketing company takes their courses. They faced a snag as some of the training material did not load properly. HubSpot was able to help them out, and get them going. It’s highly likely that the marketer would tell their coworkers to sign up for the course too.

Read More:- 5 Ideas to Create Engaging eLearning Courses

2. Respond to Reviews

Reviews are great fuel for your brand. You can use them as a tool to increase your word of mouth, fix complicated situations, and as a way to promote yourself. In most cases, people do their research. If they are looking for a business or service, for example, they are highly likely to read a few reviews to see what others have to say. Your responses to any negative reviews can be exactly why someone clicks on your site. 

The way you respond to any negative reviews will determine whether someone clicks on your site or not. You can also use reputation management tools to monitor and address feedback effectively, ensuring that your brand maintains a positive image and trustworthiness.

You can trigger this traffic to see a popup to register for a free eLearning course. This would give them a little taste into what you can do for them. Since they have been intrigued by your reviews, and can possibly learn a little more about what you do, they will likely be intrigued to subscribe.

3. Simply Ask for People to Share 

Many businesses use learning management systems for their internal training. So getting subscribers might not make sense, because training may be mandatory for all employees. But, you can use a learning management system in other ways, which might require you to seek out subscribers.

Read More: Best Learning Management Systems (LMS)

You may want to ask your employees to share your eLearning course with outsiders. For example, you may have certain employees tied to certain customers or client accounts. If you ask your employees to share these courses or quizzes with their accounts, they will.

And, the simplest way you can do this is by creating a quiz for them with a good online quiz maker and then asking them to share the results of that quiz.

Read More: 15 Best Online Quiz Maker Software

Another Example would be if you hosted eLearning courses for customers, you can ask them in a recap email to share your courses with their friends. You may find that they share with a fellow employee of theirs or even with a partner business or a customer of their own.

Learning experiences make great topics for word of mouth. So if you prime people to refer, you might find it’s the best and easiest way to acquire subscribers.

4. Make People Want to Share

Gamification can be a huge motivating factor in word of mouth. You can create a game out of it, to get people to share. Are there incentives at stake? Do they get public recognition? Or will they earn a discount, gift card or something fun in return? Point systems in such instances work really well. You may offer 1 point per referral, 5 points for every referral who signs up, etc.

Evernote uses a point system where points can be exchanged for their premium plan. Likewise, you can offer points that can be exchanged for something intriguing, depending on who you’re targeting, like a free eCourse, or a discount, or gift card.

5. Ask People to Simply Subscribe

Subscription learning offers great retention of knowledge to users. For Example, you might have a tricky sales process, so you may want your employees to do regular training to keep up and retain knowledge.

For Example, an employee can opt to enroll in subscription learning (like asking people to subscribe to receive knowledge base updates and quizzes). They will be emailed updates and you can include a test a few times a month to maintain their knowledge of your sales process. If they opt in, you can offer them a reward. If they don’t opt-in to receive these tests, they get nothing.

Ways to Expand Your Word of Mouth

On top of what we have already mentioned, there are a few ways to supercharge your word of mouth. You’ll have to consider your audience, however. As some options make more sense for a particular group than others.

1. Run a Referral Program

Refer a friend campaigns run on word of mouth. In fact, it’s the whole reason they exist. There are a few types of referral programs that can make sense, and that can hit on different audiences. So whether you are a business trying to increase partner subscribers, customer subscribers, or even employee subscribers, you can run a referral program to increase word of mouth and get your specified subscriber.

2. Engage with Your Community via Social Media

Look, if you have something that you want people to see, your social media platforms are the perfect place to share them. After all, communicating effectively is essential to building long-term relationships, and that leads to subscribers down the road.

If you have an eCourse aimed at customers and partners, sharing it on your social sites is a great way to amp it up. You will be able to engage customers and discuss it, tag people, and even share with specific people. All of which can help you earn a few subscribers.   

3. Be Shareable

The effectiveness of social media at driving word of mouth is impressive. So making yourself shareable is a key component in being shared. You may choose to have a few social sharing icons attached to the course page. This creates a one-step sharing process for users.  These will allow users to automate tweets as well as share your content on other major platforms. This creates a one-step sharing process for users.

They can easily share the course with a friend, which means you are likely to earn subscribers. The easier you make something, the better chance you have at being shared, and thus getting extra subscribers.

Summary

As you may see, creating word of mouth around isn’t difficult. You really need to play into your target audience, however. What motivates an employee to subscribe to an eLearning course might not drive a customer.