Using Email to Drive Course Completions

We recently released our latest eBook, "How to Market Customer Training," where we discussed some tips and tricks for keeping your training at the top of learners' minds. This post is going over the first marketing tactic, email marketing.

You might be wondering why email is #1 on our list of marketing tactics to try. After all, it’s no secret that the average business person’s inbox is already full of messages from companies vying for their attention. But trust us, with the right strategy in place, email is still one of the best channels to utilize for your customer training initiative.

At Skilljar, we recommend taking a two-pronged approach, focusing on both acquiring new trainees, then getting them to continue their training. With this in mind, try a combination of the following tactics:

1. Marketing Automation:

Have you integrated your LMS with a marketing automation system, like Marketo or HubSpot? If so, it’s easy to promote students’ progress in the training portal. For instance, you can automatically email any trainees that have made it partway through one course, encouraging them to complete their coursework. In addition, you could craft a second email, which would go out upon completion suggesting they take another relevant course.

2. Drip Campaigns: 

Drip campaigns are a cousin to the marketing automation method described above. Rather than being triggered by an action, they deploy after a specified timeline (i.e. one week after someone registers for a course). 

So when that time comes, your students would receive an email with a friendly reminder from your team. You could then set another email to go out one week after that. This is great for reinforcing key behaviors -- you can encourage a student to partake in a certain action or activity and link to learning resources to help them do that. You can also highlight courses that may be very relevant for the specific point in the customer's journey.

3. A/B Testing:

Don’t underestimate the value of a data-driven marketing strategy. Rather than relying on your gut instincts, implement A/B testing to determine whether one option is really more effective than another. 

Not sure where to start? Try playing around with promoting the same content using different subject lines. Or alternatively, split your email list up and send out two emails with different featured courses. Then see which gets better results.

4. Nurture campaigns:

Traditionally, nurture campaigns are used to engage with leads that are not ready to buy and might otherwise have gone cold. We encourage you to broaden this definition to include both customers and prospects that have not responded to any of your recent outreach efforts. 

In other words, if you notice someone hasn’t taken training in X amount of time, reach out! Send them an email with a link to some of your exciting, new content and draw them back in.

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