Integrated Marketing Features To Sell Online Courses

See how the Lambda Suite brings together the best integrated marketing features to make it easier than ever to sell online courses and grow your eLearning business.

When it comes to selling anything online it’s all about delivering a user-friendly, streamlined experience, whether you’re selling eLearning courses, training programs, shoes, or anything in between.

That’s why Lambda Solutions developed the Lambda Suite: The easiest, most efficient way to sell, market, deliver, and optimize your eLearning business. The Suite is supported by the three pillars of Lambda Learn, Lambda Analytics, and Lambda Store (which we’ll be focusing on in this article).

Below you’ll find all the features included in the Lambda Store, how to best utilize them, and additional resources for when you want to take a deep-dive to learn more on each particular feature.

LMS Marketing To Sell Online Courses

Integrated marketing campaigns are essentially the most effective method for marketing online courses, or anything else for that matter.

Ideally, when utilizing digital marketing tactics, you want to have a fully-integrated platform, something that you can use to sell, market, manage, and deliver your courses - all from the same place.

Until now, most eLearning providers needed to have at least 3 different systems: an LMS, an analytics reporting solution, and an eCommerce platform. While many systems can be forced to work together, very few are actually designed to work together. And that’s what sets the Lambda Suite apart.

Get the deep-dive tactical look into Integrated Marketing Communications: What It Means & How To Do It Right.

With the Suite, not only can you build and manage your courses from your LMS, Marketing, eCommerce, and analytics can also be managed without having to logout and back into a different system, or worrying that some pieces of your tech stack won’t play nice with each other.

Best of all, the same concept applies to your users: they can go from ordering a course in your store to the virtual classroom your LMS provides, without having to worry about multiple accounts, confusing and disconnected UI, so they can get to learning quickly and easily.

Now, let’s get into what the Lambda Store can empower you to sell online courses easier than ever before!

Integrated eCommerce Features

1. Course Catalog

The first thing you need is a place to find, browse, and buy your courses and training programs. Enter the Course Catalog!

Put your courses on display with customizable images, embeddable videos, and detailed product descriptions and attributes.

Next, you can utilize the course catalog to categorize your products, whether they’re self-paced courses, remote training programs, registrations to live events, downloadable content, and even physical products.

For your shoppers, the Lambda Store lets them filter products by category, price, and any other applicable attribute you’d like them to sort by. For your administrators, products are instantly indexed so customers are able to search for products in your course catalog as quickly as possible!

But we’re not done yet. The course catalog comes complete with a bundle of the most useful (and effective!) eCommerce features that you can leverage to increase sales even more.

Course ratings, user reviews, and integrated social media sharing will help get the word out and build trust around your brand. On-page product comparisons provide more options for your audience with zero effort on their part (or yours). And persistent wishlists let your audience save courses they’re interested in for purchase at a later date, promoting return purchases and long term customer retention.

We’ve also made it incredibly easy to bundle and group related products together, with automatic promotions of related items so you can create more upsell and cross-selling opportunities (more details on that below!)

2. eCommerce Shopping Cart & Checkout

We briefly touched on the Wishlist feature, but let’s focus on what you can do with the two final and most important stages of the eCommerce journey, the shopping cart and checkout page.

The Lambda Store has support for multiple currencies, localized tax rates, and shipping estimates right in the shopping cart, with the ability to collect payments via credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, invoice, or purchase order. You can also utilize any or all of the following payment gateways: Stripe, Moneris, Authorize.net, Paypal, and Braintree.

The Lambda Store also allows your customers to purchase and assign eLearning for others with automatic enrollment, perfect for selling bulk enrollments to organizations with one purchaser and multiple attendees.

While shipping may not be a major concern if you are primarily selling digital content, we have you covered there too. The Lambda Store can generate shipping fees based on location and selected service, or you can offer free or flat-rate shipping with shipping service support from USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL.

3. Order Management

While the shopping cart and checkout pages are designed to deliver the best possible experience for your customers, Lambda Store’s order management is designed to keep your administrators and sales team happy.

Invoicing is streamlined with the ability to view, edit, create, and fulfill orders/invoices from a single integrated platform. If you have a sales team chasing down leads, they can easily create orders and accounts for customers directly to further streamline the buying process.

It’s also easy to create multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split payments when necessary and apply coupon codes and promotional prices directly to customers’ carts.

For more on why these eCommerce features should be considered absolutely essential for selling online courses and training programs, check out our article on the 14 Must-Have eCommerce Marketing Features To Sell Online Courses.

4. Digital Marketing

There is a lot to cover when it comes to marketing tactics and eCommerce, but here are some highlights of the most effective digital marketing features that come complete with the Lambda Suite.

Promotions! Easily configure pricing rules for promotional campaigns by store, category, customer, or products. Alternatively, you can configure coupons by store, category, customers, time period, and product to apply dollar or percentage-based discounts.

Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) so that people can find you and you know what people are looking for! The Lambda Suite allows you to track and evaluate both on-page and off-site search data.

On-page, you can see what people are typing into your search bar so you can

Adjust the names and search terms to match what your customers are looking for
Discover content people want, but you aren’t providing (yet!)

Best of all you can sort these results by Product Name, Price, and Relevance, and see any and all related search terms for a particular inquiry.

For off-site SEO, well there is a ton to cover for that… but rest assured that the Lambda Suite has everything you need to build up your page ranking and visibility. To learn way more about how to get the most from your SEO and digital marketing initiatives, we highly recommend these resources:

Webinar: 3 Brilliant Ways Proven To Get Your Online Courses To The Top Of Google
Webinar: Marketing Your eLearning: Keys to Success
Webinar: Enhancing Your eCommerce For Your eLearning Business

5. Email Marketing

Yes, email marketing is certainly under the umbrella of digital marketing, but we’re giving it it’s own section because there is a ton to cover!

Email marketing is an incredibly effective (and cost-effective) way to build your brand, grow your list of sales leads, and engage with your existing customers to keep them coming back for more.

Newsletters, drip campaigns, and special promotions are just a few of the types of email marketing tactics you can employ with the Lambda Suite on its own.

But, to make things as easy as possible we’ve partnered with MailChimp as the official email marketing integration for the Lambda Suite. In fact, we put together an entire article covering Everything You Need To Know About MailChimp Email Marketing To Sell Online Courses. Check it out for a comprehensive list of features and tactics that will let you get some incredible value from your mailing list.

6. Complete Data Access

Analytics reporting may just be where the Lambda Suite shines brightest, thanks to Lambda Analytics.

The Lambda Suite allows for the integration of all your business and learning data. For the sales process, you can integrate all your customer data from the Suite directly to Salesforce.

For eCommerce, you can integrate all the data on customers, products, orders, carts, coupon codes, etc. directly to MailChimp.

Better yet, all of that data can be combined and used to create your own reports and dashboards so you can present a complete picture of your entire eLearning business.

But what does this mean in practice? Well, for example:

You have a brand new program in your course catalog but nobody is buying it. Now you can find out why!
See if your title and description match what people are looking for, or if there is really any interest in the course topic itself.
A new course is bringing in a lot of negative reviews.
Take a deep dive into how learners are consuming the course to determine the problem: Is the course too long? Are the materials being used? Are there problematic test questions or course modules?
What is the real ROI of your marketing and eCommerce initiatives? Draw from all your data to find the answers in terms of dollars, courses sold, courses completed, or by whatever other metrics that define success for your organization.

All of that is what makes the Lambda Suite a truly integrated eLearning revenue solution designed to work with Learning Management Systems and award-winning Analytics Reporting, to provide the best way to grow your eLearning business.

For more advice, best-practices, and how-to guides for creating, boosting, and improving your digital marketing and eCommerce, check out these additional resources:

Essential Integrated Marketing Features To Quickly And Easily Sell Online Courses