There’s never been a better time to be in the professional training market—it’s bursting with opportunity.
According to a LinkedIn report, companies are increasingly hoping to offer their employees opportunities to keep their skills up to date via company-sanctioned training and professional development programs. Companies are starting to realize the benefits of training in the workplace. For starters, it reduces turnover and increases job satisfaction.
Is your company poised to take advantage of the e-learning boom? Delivering content digitally is crucial for staying in and growing your training business.
Your content may be king, but delivering that content efficiently and in a way that customers desire is crucial for staying in business.
The dilemma between content quality and creating efficient e-learning delivery methods poses quite a predicament for training companies. As trainers, your goal is to package content into a stellar learning experience (LX) to garner repeat customers. As business managers, you need to create generic, streamlined content that’s easily modified and branded for myriad customers—sometimes, concurrent ones.
We recommend several strategies to help you choose the proper e-learning delivery methods for training based on your target customer.
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) E-Learning Delivery Considerations
If you are selling training directly to customers, there are several key delivery attributes to enhance LX and hopefully, build brand loyalty for future training. It’s up to five times more efficient to retain an existing customer than find a new one. If DTC is your primary business model, you need to deliver in a way that appeals to your customers.
Your training delivery needs to be seamless and multichannel, i.e., mobile-friendly and easy to purchase. You should build brand familiarity and a streamlined user experience using consistent course design and create easy-to-navigate storefront pages.
Your LMS should also integrate with a user-friendly e-commerce platform, like Shopify. Using an LMS integrated with a digital storefront allows automated training access with an online point-of-purchase.
Anyone visiting your store can purchase a single course, multiple courses, or multiple seats to a single course. You can even offer bundle pricing to entice larger purchases or sell your training courses with other, tangible products.
Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Learning Delivery Considerations
If your training company sells primarily to other businesses, you will have different e-learning delivery priorities. Overlap exists with DTC strategies—particularly having responsive and mobile-friendly course design—but the main concerns for B2B delivery change.
On-the-Fly Customization
Creating content that is easily updatable, adjustable, and easily delivered in several different ways is critical to growing your business. Chunk your training content into theme-based modules when developing training curriculums. The advantage of doing so is that you can create new, customized training courses by combining existing modules from different courses into new offerings. This way, you can deliver exactly the content that your clients want, with minimal work.
You will need to choose an LMS designed to import, export, and rearrange existing content modules. Find one that is also SCORM compliant so you can export to client LMS with ease.
Branding
It’s essential to settle on a delivery solution that enables you to rebrand the LMS to your client’s specifications. You need to find a simple, nearly plug-and-play branding solution that can quickly refashion your training platform in the client’s brand.
Common branding solutions include a custom login screen with your client’s logo and brand colors, completion certificates, and emails.
Your LMS solution should enable you to export your training into a third-party LMS—i.e., your customer’s. Potential clients frequently seek to have training embedded in their own LMS or networks with their branding.
E-commerce for Business Clients
While an e-commerce platform like Shopify provides a smooth experience for individuals shopping for online training, you can also advertise your online store to business clients.
For example, a manager or department head who wants to upskill their team can purchase multiple seats to a course, receive automatic access to that content, and invite their team members via email. The manager will have oversight on course access, due dates, and reporting. The LMS will remember the purchaser’s email, so repeat purchases are automatically added to their current account.
Lastly, Shopify’s checkout process lets you keep tabs on the different companies that are purchasing your courses.
Multiclient Training
The goal of business is to expand your offerings. Don’t let capacity issues ever stand in your way.
Ensure that your LMS solution enables you to have management and absolute control over which clients get access to specific training sections or courses. Your delivery solution needs to enable you to run many instances of the same training program concurrently for different clients, potentially with different branding.
The goal is to sell the same training to as many clients as possible to maximize efficiency. Your delivery solution should make this easy by enabling you to package the same training content into different, siloed client sites.
Single Sign-On (SSO) Capabilities
SSO integration is ideal for large clients who are using an identity management service such as Okta or Azure AD. It allows employees to log into their corporate network and seamlessly access the LMS with no further authentication required.
Not only can LMS user accounts be created automatically, but access to course content is also much easier for learners because they won’t have to remember yet another set of login credentials. This simplifies administration and reduces support costs.
The Right E-Learning Delivery Methods Always Depends on a Robust LMS
Online training will continue to grow substantially over the next five years. Now is the time to position your company to deliver training how your customers want it and in a manner that exceeds their expectations.
Choosing the right LMS is the keystone to building a successful e-learning training business. It will allow you to market, sell, and scale your training to various customers—DTC and B2B—efficiently and with minimal cost duplication.
Your training may be the best there is, but few will ever learn from it if it’s not convenient to buy or be delivered how customers want it. Make sure you consider branding, e-commerce integration, SCORM compliance, and platform flexibility when choosing your e-learning delivery methods to future-proof your training business and see increased return on investment.
Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.
Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today!