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5 Tips for Marketing eLearning Courses to your Employees
Training your employees is a smart move. Not only does it help them achieve success in their roles, but it also benefits your organization and gives you a competitive edge.
Delivering employee training, such as corporate or compliance programs, presents countless benefits to your organization. However internal eLearning strategies often receive unenthusiastic responses from the employees themselves.
Even if it’s an eLearning course that hones skills and encourages professional development, employees often place training close to the bottom of their list of priorities.
There can be many reasons for employees’ lukewarm feelings towards internal eLearning courses. Perhaps they are more accustomed to traditional training methods, or not fully aware of the benefits of eLearning. Or maybe you’re not marketing your courses effectively enough!
Marketing your eLearning courses generates awareness among your employees and encourages engagement. Investing time, money, and effort into thoroughly perfecting course content is futile if the courses are not promoted well.
In this post, we’ll take you through some helpful tips that will help your internal learners get excited about eLearning.
1. Let your learners know what’s in it for them
Employee training offers your organization many benefits, such as improved performance, faster onboarding, and increased ROI. But what’s in it for your employees?
As we’ve already established, for many employees, completing online training is often an undesirable task. The first essential step in marketing your eLearning courses to employees is highlighting the many reasons to take the training, and how it will directly benefit them.
Corporate learners can be motivated by discovering exactly how training enhances their day-to-day activities. Will it save them time, or help them organize their time more effectively? Will it further their professional development? Will it improve their productivity?
Whatever the advantages, make sure they’re made clear to your employees from the outset.
It’s also useful to let your employees know how they will benefit from the convenience and ease eLearning offers. For example:
- They will be able to access training at their own convenience
- If they need to refresh their knowledge, this can be easily done
- Learning can happen anywhere, anytime; on the bus, on their mobile phone, or from the comfort of their home
- Learners can go at their own pace, and can easily keep track of their progress
2. Involve management
Another important step in marketing your courses to learners is to market them to managers too. It’s essential that management is onboard with eLearning, and that they understand the importance of training. Include them in the process from the beginning; invite their input and feedback while educating them on the advantages.
With this step, you’re promoting an eLearning culture within your organization, and encouraging managers to communicate to their teams the benefits offered by online training.
Furthermore, if your managers make it clear to team members that training is a priority, learners are more likely to see it as a priority also. This not only increases general course engagement, but will improve course completion rates too.
3. Get other relevant employees onboard
By utilizing the skills and experiences of other employees in your organization, marketing your courses to employees can be even more successful.
The first, and perhaps most obvious place to start, is the marketing team. After all, these colleagues are experts in marketing! Get them involved in the course creation process, or ask for advice on improving course content already in your LMS.
You should also take advantage of existing company collateral to give courses a familiar feel. This, in turn, will give your learners a more personal learning experience.
Testimonials are another great way to market your courses to internal learners. Have managers, or other influential employees share their training success stories. Get precise details on how the training helped them, why they recommend the training, and the skills they gained. Utilize this information through quotes, or even a short video, in the introduction section of courses on your LMS or in your course enrolment emails.
Everybody loves a good success story, and your employees are likely to respond positively to endorsements given by trusted colleagues.
4. Give learners recognition
When it comes to marketing your eLearning courses to internal learners, motivation is key. After all, you can inundate them with marketing messages, but it’s all pointless if it doesn’t actually make your employees want to engage with your courses.
Everyone is motivated by different things. But one common motivational factor shared by many employees, and people in general, is recognition. When someone has done a good job (e.g., completed required course work), it’s rewarding when that work is recognized.
There are numerous ways you can use recognition to motivate them to engage. One way is to make learning achievements public. Such achievements could be shared through your LMS, company blog, or newsletter.
When employees see strong-performing colleagues getting recognition for participating in your courses, it’s natural for them to be encouraged to put greater effort into their learning endeavors in order to receive similar recognition.
A more streamlined and trackable way to give learners recognition is gamification. Gamification provides a fun way to reward learners via your LMS, and instills a sense of competition and fun.
For example, when your learners complete a certain course task or activity, they may be given recognition through:
- Badges
- Points
- Levels
- Leaderboards
5. Utilize your LMS
And finally, we save the best for last! The most powerful tool you can use to market your eLearning courses to your employees is your LMS. By promoting and encouraging the use of the organization’s LMS, your employees will experience first-hand how it’s designed to make the eLearning process straightforward for them.
Rather than informing your employees of your LMS and simply waiting for them to use it, make them aware of the great learning opportunities the LMS provides them and how easy it is to use. For example, features like notifications and reminders enable you to communicate the benefits of training while keeping them employees to date on the courses they’re enrolled in.
Of course, this whole process is made much easier by ensuring you’ve got a great LMS. Book your free trial and demo with LearnUpon today.
