Matt has over 20 years of experience in the software industry. As the founder or co-founder of four software companies, he comprehensively understands technology, design, operations, finance, sales, marketing, and customer service. Matt co-founded CourseStorm to connect learners to classes where they can gain education a la carte to enrich their lives through art classes, prepare for a new job, or level up their existing skills.
After months of working behind the scenes, we are beyond excited to announce the single feature that has been requested by customers more than any other: the ability to register for multiple classes at once. We call it CourseStorm Cart. Read on to find out how to enable early access to the feature on your site!
Once your site is equipped with Cart, students can pick as many classes as they want from your catalog and register for them all in a single transaction. And because CourseStorm has easy tools to register your family and friends as well, you can register as many people for as many classes as you want with just a few clicks!
A couple of weeks ago we talked about the importance of loyal students. Now we want to delve deeper into how you can attain that student loyalty by using a thought experiment first developed by Airbnb called Seven Star Design.
These days giving something a rating of five stars no longer holds the same importance it once did. Where once, a five star rating meant that the company went above and beyond, these days five stars tends to mean that there’s nothing wrong with the experience. That’s a pretty low bar. So Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, set their goal to go beyond five stars. As he put it, “We wanted to build a product where you loved it so much you would tell everyone about it.”
Customer loyalty is a buzzword in many businesses. As an educator, you may not think in business terms all the time, but in some instances, it can be valuable to take a page out of the business playbook. Focusing efforts on increasing student loyalty is one of those instances. When you work in education, however, it can be hard to know what a loyal student looks like or why they’re important. If you’re teaching professional development courses, for example, you may not expect repeat students in your classes as they may achieve their educational goals quickly. This can make it feel like there’s no point in working to keep individual students happy once they’ve enrolled and paid for your classes because they’ll be gone so soon.
Despite the challenge of students who may only ever take one or two classes through your program, student loyalty remains an important factor in keeping enrollment rates high. Even if a student never comes back to your program, they will remain a part of your community.
Imagine you want to take an art class but don’t know where to go. The first thing many people do in this circumstance is to ask friends, family, and coworkers if they know any programs nearby that offer good art classes. The experience your students had in your program will directly impact who they think of when they are asked these sorts of questions and what they say in response. If you have done the work of ensuring student loyalty, it’s your name they’ll think of when recommending programs. This is how you grow your reputation in your community and increase enrollment.
So how do you develop loyal customers? Here are some quick and easy tips!
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: It’s a motto many of us live our lives by. Unfortunately, sometimes we get so used to doing things the same way we’ve always done them that we don’t notice the cracks and tears in the system. Think of that old swelling front door that you have to kick to close or the upstairs toilet that you have to remember to wiggle the lever on to keep the water from running. While this solution works for a while, over time the problem gets worse. At first, you tell yourself that you’ll hire a repairman or look up how to fix it yourself, but you get busy, and then you grow so accustomed to the inconvenience that it can be easy to overlook the fact that it’s costing you time and money.
The same may be said your current strategy for managing enrollment. It’s working okay–it’s been working for years–but is it still the most efficient, cost-effective solution for your needs? It’s easy to add registrants to a Google spreadsheet at first, but as your program grows, that spreadsheet grows as well. You start to lose track of who has paid and who hasn’t, and what started out as a simple solution has become complicated.Read more
For most programs, a new class catalog launch is always right around the corner. We want your catalog launch to be easy and successful every time. To make that possible, follow these four easy steps.
As some of you may know, we recently won our episode of Greenlight Maine, putting us one step closer to winning the $100,000 grand prize! We went head-to-head against the creator of College Helpers in front of a panel of three judges: Tom O’Donnell, the principle of Macpage; Mike Duguay, the executive director of the Harold Alfond Institute for Business; and Becky Conrad, the president of the LA Metro Chamber of Commerce. Each of us were given time to pitch our business, and we were judged not only on the quality of our pitch but also the long-term growth potential of our company.
We’re really excited to announce the launch of a pair of new features made especially for programs that run multiple sessions of the same class. They’re two of the most-requested features from users of CourseStorm: the ability to duplicate a class and to have multiple sessions for the same class. Both of these features are available starting today.Read more
Our goal at CourseStorm is to create an impossibly simple way for everyone to register for classes online. From birthing classes to retirement planning, from Washington to Texas to Maine, from summer camps to corporate training, we’re thrilled to give such a diverse range of people access to education at their fingertips.
Over the past few months we’ve been putting a special emphasis on making online registration easier to use for individuals with disabilities. We’ve heard from a growing number of programs that accessibility is an important focus for them, and we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’ve been working hard to make some changes to increase usability for those with accessibility needs.
We recently had the fortune of presenting nearby at the MAEA Conference in beautiful, Portland, ME. It was a great event and a wonderful time to connect with some of our customers here in Maine. It was also a chance to preview a brand new feature we’ll be launching soon that will help effortlessly increase enrollments.
To get started, I’d like to share an interesting stat with you. If you had to guess how many online transactions across the entire web are abandoned part of the way through, what would you think? 20%? 30%? More?
It turns out that the number is around 70%. That’s right. Out of all online transactions, almost 7 out of 10 are abandoned midway through. When we came across this number, we were stunned. And it got us thinking: how often does this happen in CourseStorm?
So we did some digging and found that, interestingly enough, registrations through CourseStorm complete 2x more often than average! That’s definitely encouraging, but in our mind, there’s always a way to be more helpful. And, thankfully, there’s a simple solution to this problem that’s also rather helpful: just remind those students that they were interested in registering.
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with computers. Like most kids that age, my friends and I loved playing video games, but we also loved creating things. The first computer program I wrote with a friend was a short game of Madlibs. The game started by asking you for words: adjectives, nouns, places, things you wear, etc. We’d then take those words and insert them into a pre-built story invariably designed to make whatever you had typed into a crude joke. It was a blast!
But one thing was clear when it came to school — there wasn’t a lot of instruction for computers. Sure, we could take a keyboarding class or learn the ins and outs of Microsoft Word, but there wasn’t a class we could take to just “build cool stuff” on the computer. Yet, that’s all we wanted to do! We wanted to build computers from scratch, program new games to play, design animated shorts, create cool video effects, and stay up late into the night making music on the computer. We wanted to learn how to create new things, but there were no classes we could take that would teach us. So, we taught ourselves.
