A question we commonly get goes like this:
Q: Can we give away the first three modules for FREE and make people pay to get the rest of the course?
Short answer: you can do it, but not like this...
Longer answer: we don't do it exactly like this because we tried it like this in an older platform and we found that it has a terrible upgrade rate. (Less than 1%)
Today's learners have so many free and high-quality options available to them that just seeing a bunch of locked content usually isn't enough to get them to upgrade.
You really have to pull out your marketing "big guns" and customize the end of your free course experience to make it hard for them to say no.
A marketing mentor of mine once told me: "Never understimate how hard it is to get people to buy from you", and that's never been more true these days when it comes to selling courses, information and coaching.
With this in mind, here's how we do this with Xperiencify, and it has a much higher conversion rate than just showing your freebie students some "locked" content"...
- Make a copy of your original course, and rename it to be a "Preview" version of the course
- Now, remove most of the course content except for the part you want them to preview for free. For example, remove any welcome or introduction material if you have any. Just jump right to really practical part of the course which busts a big myth for your prospective student or gives them a big "ahah!" moment.
- Next, add a different version of your course welcome video that speaks directly to new people who are previewing the content for free. "Welcome to our preview version of XYZ course. I wanted to make it easy for folks who don't know us yet to experience what we do for themselves, etc. etc."
- Finally, add an additional, final training to your preview course that doesn't exist in the main course that will be your upgrade "call to action". Call that training something like "Next Steps". In that training, you would remind them what they just did, what it may mean to them, and what they'll get out of going through the entire course. You could even include intervews or testimonials from previous students who got a great outcome or result from your course. You could also have a special, time-sensitive offer under the video as an action, along with other upgrade specific copy and content (testimonials etc.) -- things you absolutely cannot do if you have it all in one single course.
Doing it this way will outperform a course that offers "free content" by a factor of 10, I guarantee it.
