Pricing your courses appropriately is crucial to the success of your online education business. You must consider all the factors that will affect your revenue. Most guides for pricing will tell you to be sure to understand your customer, account for the time and effort that goes into developing training, and know how your competitors are pricing similar products when trying to decide how much your training should cost. While these aspects will certainly impact your earnings, don’t forget to account for the LMS factors that affect how you price courses! Not including the costs associated with your chosen LMS when pricing your training will set you up for small earnings and a big headache.
Four Critical LMS Factors That Affect Course Pricing
There are several LMS factors that affect how you price courses, including the costs of the LMS, LMS-related administrative requirements, LMS pricing setup and structure, and course access options. On paper, there’s a clear dollar amount that you pay to use your LMS. However, there are other costs, monetary and otherwise, that you pay when it comes to your LMS. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
1. How much does it cost to use your LMS?
One of the LMS factors that affect how you price courses is the clear dollar amount that you pay for LMS use. Consider how often you pay for usage and how much that payment is each time that you are billed. These details should factor into the way that you price your courses. Also, there are sometimes extra costs associated with your LMS, like one-time fees that you might pay at the start of use and then forget about, like setup and licensing fees. That said, such costs are straightforward to quantify once you review them. There are often additional LMS costs that aren’t as obvious, including the following:
- Time: Time can be factored into pricing in many different ways, but a few things to consider are how long it takes you to set up your courses on the LMS and how much time is required to learn how to use and manage the LMS.
- Training: Depending on the complexity of your content and the LMS, you may need to train employees on how to use it, and you may need to pay for that training to be delivered by an LMS expert or invest your own time in doing so.
- Customization: Customizing the look of your LMS and the different benefits that you want to offer your future customers often add to the base price of the LMS use.
- Hosting and Security: Storing data through your LMS and doing it securely, as well as ensuring that your information and content are safe, also come with a price tag.
- Support: Depending on your level of technical know-how, you may pay more fees to have access to different types of IT support.
2. Do you need an administrator?
Depending on the size of your business, the number of users that you anticipate, the amount of content that you are generating and offering, and the complexity of using and managing the LMS, you may need an LMS administrator. Whether you are the administrator or you have to hire someone to manage your LMS, this is another LMS factor that affects how you price courses. If you are comfortable and able to be the LMS administrator, your time is your main cost. Map out how much time your administrative duties will take up, and factor them into your pricing. If you have to hire an LMS administrator, their proper compensation must be considered.
3. How does the LMS directly impact pricing setup and structure?
Something that you might not initially consider when pricing your courses until after you’ve loaded them into your LMS is the way that the LMS shapes the pricing setup and structure for your training. Some LMS are designed for you to sell your training to customers, while others require add-ons to do so. For example, Firmwater LMS comes with e-commerce through Shopify built into all plans.
Also, some LMS are designed only to sell courses in bundles, requiring customers to purchase multiple courses at once, while others let users buy individual courses. The way that an LMS enables you to sell your training online will impact the way that you price your courses. It is also important to consider whether the LMS company takes a cut of your profit and if so, how much.
4. Does your LMS dictate course access?
It is not uncommon for an LMS to charge you more the more users or customers you have taking your courses. Different LMS offer access to users following different models. Some LMS give users access to multiple courses for one cost, while others only come with a basic plan, offering a single course to a single user for a single price. With Firmwater LMS, you can have unlimited users at every level of membership, while decreasing your course costs as your sales volume increases.
Conclusion
Be sure to consider the costs of your LMS when pricing your online training, but don’t let them overwhelm you either. While there are many different details when it comes to figuring out the different costs, both obvious and hidden, of your LMS of choice, they can be identified easily now that you know what to look for! Just remember the critical LMS factors that affect how you price courses, and you’ll be well on your way to selling your training at a fair and appropriate rate.
Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.
Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today!