Simplifying Success: LMS Strategies to Grow Your Training Business

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There is probably no other industry that understands the value of focusing on core competencies more than online training providers. Each is an expert in their chosen field of study, creating and customizing eLearning courseware, knowledge checks, and certifications for product, job, or compliance training. Training providers know how to build curricula, but that’s very different from selling curricula.

White Label LMS

Learning Management System (LMS) providers are the missing links between online training providers and their customers. They provide the expertise and system to host, deliver, and sell eLearning courses. A LMS eases the customization and administration of the business side of eLearning, allowing training providers to focus on what they do best: develop great content. Together, a training provider and its LMS is the perfect example of a symbiotic business relationship, allowing each to grow by investing and trusting in the proven skills of the other.

This eBook offers an overview of how training providers can leverage LMS features to…
• Sell more courses and reach new customers
• Save time and reduce errors through automation
• Gain a competitive edge
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Generate repeat sales

… all to grow their business and increase revenue.

But not all companies and goals are revenue-based. Some training providers are non-profits or organizations with internal training needs. Others focus on product or customer training. Whether your objectives are to provide eLearning for monetary or other reasons, it’s important to find an LMS platform that offers the tools, flexibility, and support to deliver your courseware to target audiences worldwide. Read on to discover the tips and best practices used by successful training providers.

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Chapter 1: Increasing Sales Through Your LMS

Your Goal: Sell and Deliver More Courses

Training providers that do not use a LMS designed for selling courses face several hurdles that cause them to miss out on sales opportunities and add to their administrative burden, including:

Manual processing of courseware price changes/discounting, order fulfillment, and student registration slows the delivery process.
Course customization and bundling can be time-consuming or not possible at all.
Reporting requires manual collection of data.
Payment options may be limited to methods or currencies not popular with your target audience, losing potential sales.

Training providers that use a LMS with tight eCommerce integration benefit from streamlined purchasing, automatic fulfillment, instant course access for learners, and better reporting based on accurate sales analytics. The ideal LMS eCommerce integration allows training providers to sell their content directly to consumers online without manual intervention using whatever payment means is best for them, saving time and increasing customer satisfaction.

True eCommerce with Automated Fulfillment

LMS with eCommerce integration provides a digital storefront for a better user experience. Users can browse and purchase courseware titles over the internet for a completely self-serve shopping experience. Once payment is accepted, automatic order fulfillment and student registration completes the purchase process. That means learners start the course right away – no waiting for manual order processing.

Flexible Course Bundling, Pricing, and Splitting

Customize course offerings to match different learner needs, groups, or price points. For example, offer a series of courses at a discount versus individual course pricing, or allow customers to purchase individual modules from a larger course at a reduced price. You can also target different levels of learners by dividing courseware into beginner, intermediate, and expert classes. This encourages repeat business by moving students through an entire curriculum towards a certification. Alternatively, consider selling course subscriptions to attract different customer types and unlock recurring revenue.

Reach New and Larger Businesses

The ability for larger customers to purchase multiple seats to a course on behalf of their employees in a single transaction is critical for the corporate purchaser and an easy way to boost revenue. Consider volume-based discounts to encourage multi-seat purchases. A LMS with eCommerce allows seat licenses to be purchased in bulk, managed, and transferred on behalf of employees by the client as needed, giving them control over their users and access to reports on learner progress.

External LMS Integration

Many large organizations already have their own LMS. To gain them as customers you must be able to offer your content through their training portal. However, if you give your original course files to your clients to load into their LMS, you lose control over your IP and reporting data. This is where the ability for a LMS to integrate with an external LMS becomes beneficial to training providers. With an external LMS integration, courses are hosted on your LMS but are launched by your client’s LMS. To learners, the training is provided natively, but the content is actually controlled by you, the training provider, ensuring you always maintain ownership over your intellectual property.

Multi-tenancy

Many training providers start out selling courses to individual end users with a single tenant LMS in which all courses are offered to all customers in only one brand. Now it’s time to scale up from simple eCommerce sales to offering your customers their own client site. Two business-building strategies necessary to marketing courses to larger organizations are multi-tenancy and content customization.

A scalable, multi-tenant LMS like Firmwater provides a dedicated, brandable LMS portal for each client, or tenant. It operates on the principle of creating a master course library and then granting access to specific courses on a client-by-client basis. When a new client portal is created, white labeling allows each tenant to customize the look and feel of their LMS portal with a custom subdomain, logos, colors, and design themes to make the LMS appear as a native extension of their brand. A multi-tenant LMS also compartmentalizes training data to keep critical information for each tenant separate for reporting and security purposes.

This goes hand-in-hand with customizable content, the ability to tailor courses to various industries, locations, or business sizes. For example, you sell training on hazardous material handling in the workplace. The foundation of the content is common to all clients but there are some laws, compliance regulations, and penalties that vary by province or state. A multi-tenant LMS offers the flexibility to deal with the intricacies of each client individually. Read this article for more tips on how to structure your content properly to make customization and updates easier down the line.

Chapter 2: Saving Time & Prioritizing Efficiency

Perhaps the most important benefit of a LMS is automation, using technology to replace manual processes to execute routine tasks faster and with more accuracy. In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to leverage LMS automation to save time and point you to a few training provider success stories.

Automated Course & Communications Delivery

A LMS simplifies course delivery, freeing time for training providers to focus on other areas like sales or content development. But LMS automation should go beyond course fulfillment and student registration as described in Chapter 1 to reach the learner multiple times.

When a customer purchases or is assigned a course, an LMS should trigger a series of automated messages such as a welcome email, tips on how to best use the system, progress updates to managers or a completion certificate download. Watch this video case study about how Tallann Resources, a training provider specializing in staffing and recruitment, uses Firmwater Subscriptions integration and email communications to save time and reduce errors through automation, ensuring no student gets left behind.

Compliance Automation through Learning Paths

Many industries with strict regulatory requirements demand employees complete continuing education courses or mandatory recertification after a fixed period, annually from date of hire, for example. That means large organizations can have a constant stream of employees due for myriad compliance training assignments.

LMS Learning Paths allow clients to assign multiple courses to students and define when those courses get assigned. There may be several modules or knowledge checks in each step, and multiple steps in the path. After a learner completes a portion of the training, they receive an email reminder to begin the next module or course within the necessary timeframe. If the training is recurring, for example annual safety training, the LMS can automatically assign the proper compliance course to users every year – saving administrative time by automating routine tasks. In this case study video hear how Corridor Interactive, a provider of corporate policy and compliance training, uses the Firmwater LMS to automate recurring training assignments to reduce admin workloads and prevent employees from falling out of compliance, which in turn helped them grow their business!

Leverage Automated Reporting

Reporting is critically important to LMS clients. They want to know real-time standing of student performance, course start and completion statistics, compliance status, usage trends, etc. to ensure training meets company objectives. Training providers can use the same data to promote their business. Regularly sending reports to customers improves communication and student data can be used to highlight the quality of training or identify areas for improvement.

Consider enabling auto-email reports to be sent to specific managers at regular intervals to reduce their administrative burden. At-a-glance reporting of “all course completions over the past 30 days,” for example, sent proactively to each branch manager keeps them informed of staff training status with just a few clicks.

One Firmwater compliance training client uses reporting data in its marketing efforts to advertise its 100% course completion rates – a key selling point for organizations in highly regulated industries where periodic recertification is mandatory.

On-Demand Live Assistance

Sometimes issues arise that require immediate assistance or explanation from the LMS provider. Make sure the provider you choose offers reliable support to minimize potential downtime and enhance the user experience.

Watch this case study video to learn how Corporate Training Materials leans on Firmwater not just for responsive tech support, but for advice on how to structure soft skill eLearning modules, improve white-labeling, and generally optimize the platform on behalf of their clients.

Chapter 3: Gaining a Competitive Edge

A LMS is a great way to differentiate your eLearning business using innovative customization technologies and access to new delivery methods and channels.

Sell Course Subscriptions

Tap into subscription-based models to diversify revenue streams and attract new learners. Subscriptions provide consistent, predictable recurring income. When a customer subscribes to your course(s) on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis they’re making a commitment. This leads to increased customer retention and more repeat business. Plus, all the course delivery and billing tasks are handled automatically.

Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that supports subscriptions. When integrated with an eCommerce-enabled LMS training providers can offer multi-course subscriptions as standalone products or alongside one-time course purchases to reach a wider audience. The advanced functionality baked into the Shopify integration allows training providers to customize the eLearning shopping experience in ways other platforms simply cannot.

Client-Centered Development

Choose a LMS provider that will adapt the portal to your needs with customization or integrations. Be wary of providers that only offer one storefront solution or use proprietary courseware authoring tools, as that will limit your ability to differentiate the look and feel of your store and its content from competitors. They may not be SCORM-compliant, willing to add features, or limit you to payment gateways they choose.

At Firmwater we work with our clients to ensure all their needs are met. If there is a missing LMS feature or integration, we’ll explore ways to find a work-around or develop a new solution. Read the Blue House Energy case study for an example of how the Firmwater team helped educate Blue House on modern eLearning technologies and why our willingness to go the extra mile influenced their decision to partner – and stay – with Firmwater.

LMS White Labeling & Branding

Giving each tenant the ability to customize their LMS portal to reflect their company brand is another way training providers can differentiate themselves from the competition. LMS white labelling lets training providers boost brand recognition and customer loyalty for themselves and their clients by applying company logos, colors, and imagery to a generic portal to make it appear as their own brand.

Training providers can create custom subdomains, user groups, unique course assignment rules, emails, and branded course completion certificates to personalize the LMS experience by client. Firmwater’s turnkey white labeling capabilities are ideal for training providers serving multiple clients that each need a distinct online presence for foundational or shared content. It gives clients control over their portal, removing the LMS provider’s administrative burden of rebranding and maintaining portals for each tenant, while the provider retains control over their intellectual property, granting and revoking access to courses as needed.

Upsell Opportunities

Once you have your eLearning products loaded onto a multi-tenant eCommerce-enabled LMS, there are many opportunities to capitalize on current or prospective customers to generate repeat business:

eCommerce Strategies.
- Offer one-time purchase courses alongside subscriptions to attract a wide variety of customers with different budgets. For example, selling subscription access to a course library for $50/month might be more appealing to some customers compared to a one-time payment of hundreds of dollars up front.
- Offer limited time free trials or free course samples to increase leads.
- Offer volume discounts like “buy 9 seats get the 10th free,” or multiple courses on the same topic for a reduced price.
- Promote similar courses during the check-out process. Ie. Before payment, a customer could see a “You might also like…” section featuring courses that are relevant to that specific customer.
- Use email marketing integration to automatically follow up with customers, enticing them to purchase additional courses.
Graduation promotion. Offer some type of continuing education accreditation upon completion of a series of courses to entice users to move through a multi-course curriculum.
Recertification training. Offer the mandatory refresher or license renewal training to keep workforces in compliance.
Scale to offer client sites. When you offer LMS services to new clients, they may start out by buying a few seats of your training for their team. Over time, you can offer them the ability to have their own branded LMS site with custom content, admin privileges and integrations like Single Sign-on (SSO). With a multi-tenant LMS platform training providers get the scalability they need to take their business to the next level and never have to worry about outgrowing or changing LMS providers.

Chapter 4: Content Flexibility & Security

Growth for training providers usually means one thing: multiple clients. Repackaging, customizing, and delivering the same piece of intellectual property to diverse clients and audiences is how to best monetize eLearning products. Your LMS should help you do that.

Beyond integrations and white labelling, a multi-tenant LMS can also simplify the activities surrounding the loading, customizing, and securing of content for each client. This gives training providers the agility to meet the needs of multiple clients to achieve growth.

Centralized Content Management

This is the key to success for eLearning businesses. With a multi-tenant LMS, training providers can sell their standard library of courses off-the-shelf with no modifications, offer to brand the learning experience to match the customer identity, create client-specific content, or even give tenants the ability to load their own materials into their portals while you retain ownership and control of your content. Here are four key content management functions of a multi-tenant LMS:

Master-level content loading. The basic premise of a multi-tenant LMS platform is to be able to build and load courses into the master course library just once, and then share or grant access to the entire library or just a portion of it to tenants on an individual basis. Land a new client? Simply grant them access to your courses with a few clicks. Lose one? Revoke access to protect your property just as quickly.
Automated content updates. Changes made to a master course module instantly and automatically cascade down to all tenants who share that resource in one action, saving time while ensuring the accuracy and consistency of information across all clients.
Client-specific content management. Customize training content for each client. Easily remove, add, edit, or reorder modules, videos, documents, and folders containing client-specific content in each client site. Change testing requirements, compliance standards, rules for length of course access, or supplement training with proprietary or sensitive data without affecting other clients.
Content Security. Each client site remains connected, yet separate. Load content created for a specific client without the risk of it accidentally being shared to another client site.

Check out this article for more tips on effective multi-tenant LMS content management.

Firmwater: Your Partner for eLearning Success

The online training market is experiencing tremendous growth with annual sales counted in the billions of dollars worldwide. Propelled by advances in technology and the acceptance of remote learning by consumers as the result of work-from-home experiences, eLearning is now mainstream.

For many training providers, the only thing standing between them and success is the right LMS.

Firmwater offers unbeatable value through its scalable and brandable multi-tenant architecture, SCORM-compliant course building and customization capabilities, tight Shopify eCommerce integration and automation, and most importantly, the personalized support and willingness to go the extra step most LMS providers cannot match. Firmwater is the right LMS for you.