LearnDash Developer on the Top 3 Ways to Reduce Churn and Attrition

After our LearnDash developer team builds an online course site with all sorts of content, the site owners next focus needs to be on keeping members in their program. You worked so hard to sell your online courses. The last thing you want is to have people leaving before their time.

If you have a subscription membership with payments made monthly (or annually), keeping them around means money in the bank. Just as important, keeping them around finishing your program means they got maximum value. That makes them more likely to refer you to people they know. They are also ones to get testimonials you can use as social proof.

Here are the top 3 recommendations we have for reducing churn and attrition on your online course site.

LearnDash Developer Recommendation #1: Give Them "People" Access to Keep Them Moving

Think about how you best learned when going to school. Everyone appreciated a good teacher with great presentation skills. You appreciated that they made themselves available to answer questions. Since you had a way to interact with your your instructor, you could ask question and get answers. Often time, a good instructor would answer by reteaching the materials from the perspective of your questions addressing the parts you didn't understand.

This is all missing from an online course. Your students are logged in by themselves at their computer or phone. They receive no feedback from a living person. Even the greatest of materials in this format can be challenging to cover.

What a lot of successful, do-it-yourself online course owners do is include a way for students to submit questions and get answers. In it's simplest form, it could be to allows students to submit questions via email. It does require that the instructor make themselves available. This solution isn't going to scale very well if you have a lot of students.

Another option is to start a private Facebook Group. You give all students access and encourage them to submit questions in the feed. The benefit here is that you can answer the question once and all students see the answer.

Facebook has the disadvantage that as the feed gets longer, answers to older questions aren't easy to find. You cannot provide a search feature and you cannot add an easy to use frequently asked questions (FAQ) section. If you use a community site tool like BuddyBoss, you can provide a way to answer questions using the BuddyBoss Activity Feed. This functions like a Facebook discussion thread. You own the site site so you can collect questions and the answers making them available to your students using Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) format.

Finally, you can consider holding office hours. This is similar to what college instructors do making themselves available at set times. Using Zoom, this is really easy to implement. You don't really need to prepare. You can answer questions from those attending and you can consider allowing students to submit questions ahead of time. Then you publish the videos as an archives made available to all the students.

Either way, you've added a resource that helps students know from the very start that they have a way to get help when/if they need it.

LearnDash Developer Recommendation #2: Create a Sense of Community

As I mentioned in #1, yours students in a typical online course are learning in solo mode. They have no interaction with the instructor and other students taking the course. Using a private Facebook Group or something like BuddyBoss, you can give students access to you and others taking the course. You can answer questions and so can other students farther along. Some course builders find that they can effectively outsource the answer of question to their students

Since students can interact with others, they start establishing relationships. Your platform is what they use to keep in touch. You may find that people stay with your program even after they have completed your course materials. The platform gives them access and leaving your site means leaving their friends. This gets you more stickiness than you would have otherwise.

LearnDash Developer Recommendation #3: Gamify Your Site to Entice Your Members

Gamification can include so many things. If you are teaching a topic that draws competitive type people, you might consider adding a leaderboard. There members can see how they rank relative to others taking the course. You can name the all time top scorer in your program so members can use the leaderboard as a trophy for themselves. You might consider a leaderboard the resets every month so everyone one gets a chance to be the top dog.

You can add a point system where member gain points every time they accomplish something. It could be based on the time it takes them to complete a section, a quiz or some other task in the course. You can award points for students completing a set of lessons in a given amount of time. To motivate students, give points real value. You could offer a free month to your highest scoring student every month.

The implementation of this sort of arrangement is straightforward. The key is to define rules to the game that motivate students to do what you want them to do. This means they are motivated tokeep moving through your course materials at a good pace and complete it.

Hope this helps.