Why So Few People Finish Courses And How to Make Yours Pop

Today, we're going to talk about why so few people finish courses and how to make yours pop. Before we begin though, Neil, I want to apologize because we're both under construction right now. So we apologize for the background noise. So I'll start first to give some, get some context around this. So I believe the number is when it comes to online courses, if it's just self-serve, 98% of people do not finish. So we're talking 2% of people finish. Now, when you flip it around to something like a cohort-based course, which I'll talk about in a second, I believe the completion rate's a lot higher. We're talking 90+% or even 70%, 80%+ is very high. And what a cohort-based course is, I invested in a company called Maven and I'm actually doing a cohort-based course for them right now. Basically it's called Leveling Up: How to Build Your First Business, Build Your Dream Business. The difference is for a self-service course. So let's say you see a lot of internet marketers selling courses for maybe $200, $500, $1,000 online. And it's just a lot of videos that you watch, right? And a lot of times it's information that you can get online for completely free. The experience that I'm going through with Maven right now is it's— they're actually doing a course for the course creators. And it's been a pretty amazing experience and it's pretty grueling. So every Tuesday, every Thursday, we meet for 2 hours and there's a different section each time. And there's different instructors and we all get in there. We go Brady Bunch mode into Zoom. And then there's homework that we have to finish. And they go into breakout rooms and they keep it all engaged. I'm happy to go a little deeper later, but I'm just saying that I've never gone through a program or a course where it's actually kept my attention. And I felt the need to be engaged because I felt like I was part of a community that was a lot bigger than myself.

I've—

Neil and I, we've done a lot of courses in the past. I'll say this experience at least is a little different and we'll dive into the details.

The other thing that I've learned, I've done quite a bit of courses. And Eric's right, majority of the people never finish the course and the cohort stuff does do a little bit better. What I've also found is if you can do the cohort-based stuff, we did that, was pretty interesting and it helped improve the efficiency rates of people completing, which means they got value, referred more people, didn't ask for as many refunds, is we would actually do a weekly call based on where you were in the lesson. So we would have It's not really like a cohort, but it's rolling. So we would, every week we would have calls for people who finished the week 1 lessons. Every week we would also have calls for people who finished the week 2 lessons, et cetera. And if you had 8 weeks of lessons, every week we had 8 weeks worth of calls. And by having those calls and trying to hold people accountable and telling them all the goodies that they would get for being on those calls and some of the extra stuff that we would do, a lot more people showed up and they would complete that week's lesson. And the reason being is they didn't want to be that person who didn't know what they were talking about or looked foolish. So they were just more likely to complete it. And we found that to work extremely well.

Yep. And so the key thing here is we're talking about engagement at the end of the day, how engaged are people? If you're doing a weekly call, there's a reason for people to continue to stay engaged because they also feel like they're getting more support and they feel like they're part of a community. If you put them into Facebook group, you have someone supporting there. So I do think, The community manager aspect is very important. The coaching aspect is very important, and it doesn't have to be you coaching. And if you're gonna do, if you're gonna add in more of a level support here, you're gonna have to hire more people, which means you probably need to charge more for your course, right? It's hard to get by charging $100, $200, $300 for a course. You're probably gonna have to charge upwards, maybe $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 for this type of stuff. And you just have to keep in mind that you're delivering an outcome at the end of the day. And if you're building You're helping people build relationships with each other. That's super powerful on its own and you shouldn't shortchange yourself. So I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with courses. I think there's a delivery problem and there's a quality problem. And I think if you want to surpass everyone else and make yours pop, then I think this is your ticket to doing so. Neil?

Yeah, I think we pretty much covered everything. If you want to learn how to grow your course business more, check out marketingschool.io/live.