How to Start an eLearning Business with SaaS (Part 3): Management
In case you missed the part 2 of the series, here’s an overview of what we covered:
How to Start an eLearning Business with SaaS (Part 1): The Basics
How to Start an eLearning Business with SaaS (Part 2): The Education
Recap:
- How eLearning businesses should offer education
- Identifying target audiences and learners’ needs
- How to create a reliable, appealing and valuable curriculum
- The importance of content structurization in eLearning
How to Start eLearning Business with SaaS: The Management
You might be doing well with the content and curriculum creation of your eLearning institute.
However, when it comes to managing an eLearning business, there’s a huge list of troubles that you’ll eventually face.
Unless you go for custom SaaS providers like SubscriptionFlow, you’re looking at subsequently increasing levels of difficulty and complexity.
That’s because you’ll need help managing a userbase that is going to require:
- Recurring payment processing
- Subscription management
- Technical support and assistance
- Stellar customer experience
To help you with this, let’s take a look at the above in detail and understand why you should start your eLearning business with SaaS:
Recurring Billing and Tax Management
The first hassle of managing a subscription business is the process of automating recurring billing.
This is a process that becomes increasingly complex with each different pricing strategy offered by the business.
You’ll soon find it almost impossible to curate and send each invoice on time and process payments.
Without the help of an autonomous software that can help you streamline recurring billing, you’ll eventually be leaking revenue.
Not only will each subscriber be billed at individually different times, but they’ll also have their own custom packages too.
Combined with freemiums, discounts, coupons, rewards and other pricing strategies, you can expect the process to become very complicated.
This is why you need to start your eLearning business with SaaS platforms that are readily available to process recurring billing.
The best part about going for a SaaS LMS is that you get the convenience of integrating payment gateways and accounting tools as per your convenience.
Read More: SaaS or Hosted LMS? Which One Should You Go for and Why?
That means you can also streamline the buying process and make it easier for your accountants to reconcile payments.
For example, you can use PayPal and Stripe integrations to accept payments globally. Whereas, to help your finance department, you can use Avalara, QuickBooks and Xero to reconcile your accounts daily.
Subscription Lifecycle Management
The beauty of SaaS is that cloud-based platforms can be customized to offer anything and everything.
For subscription-based businesses like eLearning institutes, this can spell automation for subscription lifecycle management.
Within a subscription lifecycle, once you convert a customer into a subscriber, you begin the customer success journey.
Now that you’ve got them on board, you need to ensure you’re getting the highest customer lifetime value.
That is to say, you must make the most of your subscriber by upselling and cross-selling various products. Of course, the first priority is to ensure that you retain your customers for the longest time.
To save you the hassle of catering every customer complaint, concern or even action, you can offer them self-service portals.
Read More: Advantages of Offering Self Service Portals for Your Subscribers
Many SaaS platforms like SubscriptionFlow offer eLearning businesses the feature of self-service portals.
As the name shows, this can really help with the management of a subscription business. Your customers will have the access to their dashboards from where they can make their desired changes.
Whether they’re looking to upgrade, downgrade, cancel or resubscribe to your business, they can do so on their own.
Self-service portals are beneficial for a business not only because they reduce the amount of work required for management.
In fact, the main advantage of using these is to be able to track your user’s activity. Every time a subscriber logs on to their dashboard, you’ll get a view of what they’re doing.
Since it’s your own platform, you can advertise anything you want and communicate any updates, changes, etc. seamlessly.
Platforms like SubscriptionFlow can also run their smart analytics and provide you powerful insights to help you grow. (More on this below!)
Your customers will also appreciate the opportunity and with time, you’ll only have suggestions and technical queries to address.
Analytics and Marketing
As discussed above, it’s the need of every subscription business to be able to scale and grow. This means you’ll have to keenly observe your current customer base and work with the data you have to get more.
How you can go about doing this is simple. With smart SaaS LMS platforms, you can get an overview and details of all the important customer retention metrics.
Read More: Important SaaS Customer Retention Metrics for Subscription Businesses
Moreover, you can also integrate tools like HubSpot and MailChimp to streamline all your marketing efforts from one window.
The primary motive many people have for going for an eLearning business with SaaS is because of these integrations.
Think of all these platforms working together with the data your subscription management platform generates.
- Customer activity
- Contact information
- Customer payment periods
- Demographic data, etc.
One doesn’t need to be an expert marketer to know that these statistics alone can help you identify your buyer persona.
Read More: Importance of Using Event Data for Your SaaS Marketing Strategies with SubscriptionFlow
Even though this is just the tip of the iceberg, going for marketing tools integrations can result in a boom (the good kind) in your business.
In fact, these analytics will also reveal whether you’re pricing your products and subscriptions accurately.
Nobody wants to scare customers away but no one wants to create doubts in their subscribers’ minds either.
That is to say, if you price your subscription for a very low price, you’ll risk losing your customer’s trust in your brand.
Ready to Start?
It’s recommended that once you’ve read the part 1, 2 and the above, you should get in touch with a SaaS provider like SubscriptionFlow. Since it’s obvious that you’ll require a customized platform that can process all the above, you’ll need to get in touch with professionals who can cater your peculiar needs.
So, don’t wait up! Contact SubscriptionFlow now!