How to Automate Online Courses (3 Reasons to Leverage Email Automation)

If you’re not using automation, you’re behind the times.

Automation has come a long way over the last ten years. Today, all types of software tools integrate automation and offer a wide range of features that can elevate the customer experience from the first moment a prospect finds your brand to the fifth, sixth, or tenth year they've stuck beside you.

If you're a course creator, you're in a prime position to lean into automation and use it to save time and drive ongoing sales. In this article, we'll discuss how to automate online courses, the importance of email automation, and how to leverage both to engage your students and keep them around for the long run.

Marketing automation ties to course creation by streamlining the process of promoting, managing, and engaging with students. It helps course creators by automatically sending out promotional emails, scheduling social media posts, and nurturing leads with tailored content (among many other things).

Once students enroll, automation can handle welcome messages, course reminders, progress updates, and feedback collection.

This automated workflow ensures that every student gets timely and consistent communication, enhancing their learning experience while allowing you, as the course creator, to focus on developing great content instead of managing repetitive tasks.

Let's take a look at how to use automation to market your online course and effectively engage the students taking your class.

There are plenty of different tools and techniques you can leverage to automate your online course. Here are a few ways to begin folding automation into your course creation and promotion process:

• Choose the right platform: Use an online learning platform like Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi. These platforms handle a lot of the heavy lifting for you, from hosting your course materials to processing payments. You can set up your course once, and the platform takes care of enrolling students, delivering content, and tracking progress.
• Distribute drip content: Set up drip content to release your course materials gradually. You can schedule lessons to be released at intervals, like once per week, instead of giving students access to everything at once. Setting up a dedicated cadence for content keeps students engaged and helps them absorb the material better.
• Automated your emails: Create automated email sequences that guide students through the course. This could include welcome emails, reminders to complete modules, encouragement when they hit milestones, and follow-up emails to gather feedback once they’ve completed the course. More on this later.
• Send quizzes and assessments: Use automated quizzes and assessments to test students' knowledge as they progress. Many course platforms have built-in tools for this, so you can create quizzes that grade themselves and provide instant feedback to students.

For example, Booking.com sent an email with a quiz to help its subscribers decide where to go on their next trip.

The subscribers were served a list of suggested locations based on their responses. This can make all the difference in effectively engaging your customers.

• Build a strong community: Set up a private Facebook group or Slack channel for your course where students can interact and support each other. You can use automation to send invites and reminders to join the group. Some platforms even allow automated notifications when new content is posted or when there are group discussions.
• Don't forget certificate generation: Automate the generation and distribution of course completion certificates. When students finish all the modules and pass any required assessments, they automatically receive a certificate recognizing their achievement.
• Collect feedback: Use tools like Google Forms or Typeform to automate the collection of feedback from your students. Send out automated emails with links to feedback forms at different stages of the course, such as after each module or upon completion.
• Automate analytics and reporting: Set up automated reports to track student progress, engagement, and completion rates. Most course platforms offer analytics features that can give you insights into how your students are doing and where they might struggle.

By using these techniques and tools to automate your online course, you can create a smooth, engaging experience for your students while saving yourself a ton of time and effort. This allows you to focus more on creating amazing content and supporting your community.

Over 80 % of small businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition and retention channel. It's not a joke when we say that email is the most effective marketing channel you can take advantage of. Most importantly, email is a completely owned channel. You don't have to worry about websites crashing or certain social channels losing popularity forcing you to pivot and focus your efforts elsewhere.

So why should course creators care about using email to automate their online courses? Firstly, email is a great medium to promote your course and continuously nurture the relationships you’ve built with your students.

With automated emails, you can welcome new students, send reminders, share tips, and even congratulate them on completing modules—all without manually sending each message. This saves you a ton of time and ensures that every student gets a consistent and personalized experience, helping them stay engaged and motivated throughout the course.

Let's break this down a bit more and look at the three main reasons why online course creators should consider using email automation and how it benefits both parties.

Communicating with your students

According to a recent study, welcome emails enjoy a high open rate, with more than 8 out of 10 people opening them. This results in 4x as many opens and 10x more clicks than other email types. This should be reason enough to make sure you're including welcome emails in your automated workflow as more students sign up for your course.

A good welcome email series will:

• Send valuable content to prepare your students for the course ahead
• Be personalized for each student
• Show powerful social proof of what they can expect to learn and gain from your course
• Set expectations for future emails they can expect to receive
• Potentially include a coupon code the student can send to a friend to boost your course sign-ups

Unsure how to begin creating an email sequence and how to go about automating it? With ActiveCampaign's Welcome Series Automation Recipe, you can set your workflow up quickly (and correctly).

Nurturing your students with valuable content

As a course creator, email automation is a game-changer for nurturing your students with valuable content. You can set up automated follow-up emails to keep students consistently engaged.

For instance, after a student completes a module, you can automatically send a follow-up email recapping key points and offering additional resources like articles or videos to deepen their understanding. These emails can also include quick tips, success stories from other students, or even mini-quizzes to reinforce learning. By automating these follow-ups, you ensure that students feel supported and encouraged to continue progressing through your course.

Additionally, email automation is perfect for sending timely reminders and various types of content that add value to the learning experience. You can schedule emails to remind students about upcoming live sessions, and assignment deadlines, or even just to log back in if they haven’t accessed the course in a while. This keeps your course top of mind and helps maintain momentum for each student.

Don't forget to use automation to send emails that share different types of content, such as downloadable worksheets, exclusive webinars, or curated articles related to the course material. Doing this enriches the student's learning journey and shows that you’re committed to providing ongoing value, making them more likely to stay engaged and complete the course.

And don't forget the importance of a well-built, valuable newsletter as a lead-generating channel.

Notifying them about new classes or special offers

If you've created an online course, odds are you will create another one to keep your students engaged and learning. Email automation is a fantastic way to keep them in the loop about new or upcoming classes and special offers they can look forward to.

You can set up automated emails to notify students whenever you launch a new course or have a special discount available. This ensures that your students are always aware of the latest opportunities to continue their learning journey with you, and you don't have to manually send out these announcements every time.

Segmenting your audience is key to making these notifications even more effective. By dividing your students into groups based on the courses they're currently taking or have completed, you can send targeted emails that promote similar courses they might be interested in. For example, if a student is enrolled in a beginner's photography course, you can automatically send them information about an advanced photography class or a related course on photo editing.

This personalized approach not only makes your emails more relevant and appealing but also increases the chances that students will sign up for additional courses, enhancing their overall customer experience and boosting your enrollment rates.

Automation is a game-changer

No matter if you're just getting started with course creation or a seasoned expert, it's never a bad idea to automate more of your process and build a powerful email marketing strategy. From social media scheduling to collecting feedback to sending the right email at the right time, automation can be incorporated into almost every facet of your course promotion strategy.

Ready to leverage email and drive more course sign-ups?

Sign up for a free trial of ActiveCampaign and begin nurturing your students so they have a reason to keep coming back for more.