Ways to Justify Your High-Priced Online Course | ProductiveandFree

A high-priced online course can be a tricky purchase to justify in the minds of potential buyers.

Some will doubt your course effectiveness while others will be skeptical about the value of your course when weighing it against the premium price that it’ll cost them.

In the end, your job as the course creator includes answering the questions:

Why should someone pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn your course topic?
Why should someone pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn from you and not someone else?
Why can’t they just search your course topic online for free?
Why do they need to join your course now and what will they miss out on if they don’t?
What’s really in it for them / what will they get out of joining your course?

To help answer these questions and address the objections of potential buyers, here are 7 ways to justify your high-priced online course.

1. Provide Premium Content and Communicate It Effectively

Arguably the best way to justify your high-priced online course is to provide extremely valuable content for your students… and communicate it effectively.

Value, of course, can be relative but I suggest including specific ways to help them reach a goal or solve a problem.

Try to highlight those goals and/or problems very well and position your course as the method, system, or solution to move forward.

On top of providing valuable content, always consider your students’ experience with your course — how they’ll be learning your lessons and implementing your strategies.

Think: premium content + premium experience = premium price

Make sure everything in your online course is top quality, professional, well-designed, and organized.

Consider each and every touch point for your students from your content, videos, and audios all the way to your workbooks, presentation slides, welcome email sequence, and online course experience.

The last thing you want to happen is for students to pay a premium price for your course and then come out of it feeling completely unsatisfied or thinking your course is cheap.

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2. Focus on the Transformation

Another way to justify your high-priced course is to focus on the transformation and benefits for your course students.

What’s their current situation?
What’s their ideal future situation?
What goal/s do they want to achieve?
What do they want to change/improve in their lives?
How might they transform after completing your course?

It helps to also identify the obstacles and problems your course can help them solve, manage, or avoid.

What is causing them to feel uneasy, stressed, or overwhelmed right now?
What are they currently having problems or issues with?
What have they had enough of?
How might your course help them overcome those obstacles?
How might your course help them get things done faster or more effectively?

3. Position Your Course as the System and Solution

Next, I recommend highlighting your course as the system and solution they need to reach a goal or solve a problem faster and more effectively.

It may be enough to teach a single strategy or simple method in a mini course but if you want to sell a premium-priced course, it helps to package your lessons as an all-in-one system or solution.

The idea is for students to avoid purchasing multiple mini-courses on a topic and have them piece everything together themselves.

By joining your complete, comprehensive, and step-by-step course, they can save time, energy, and in the end, even money.

4. Remind Them It’s Your Course

Never forget that whenever you sell something, you are one of the reasons someone will buy.

Especially in the online course marketplace, it’s getting more and more difficult to stand out and position your course as the course someone should buy.

But if a potential student knows you, likes you, and trusts you enough, you can be sure that the chances they’ll buy from you (and not someone else) will greatly improve.

Be sure to share your unique story, values, experience, credentials, and brand mission with potential course students.

It helps to also connect with them — show them you know exactly what they're going through right now and that you understand how stressful, inconvenient, or painful it was for you.

Then share how you overcame those obstacles yourself or how you’ve helped customers and clients before, all with the help of the lessons you’ll be teaching them in your course.

5. Share Proof and Social Proof

Another way to justify your high-priced course is to prove that it actually works.

Again, it’s more difficult to trust digital products nowadays so be sure to ease people’s doubts and anxiety about online purchases by providing actual proof.

On top of recounting your own experience, share your students’ testimonials, reviews, and case studies.

Use statistics, before and afters, and powerful storytelling to make your case that what you’re teaching in your course has been proven to be effective for people like them or in their situation.

6. Use U.S.E.

Next, it can also help to use urgency, scarcity, and exclusivity (or a combination) when selling your online course.

If a course is offered within a small timeframe and only for a few times a year, the opportunity to join the course is rare. This then creates a sense of urgency and scarcity for potential buyers since they’ll have to wait for the next round to join. Likewise, if a course is offered with limited spots available, this creates a sense of exclusivity.

Of course, be sure to use these strategies only when applicable and not as a sleazy sales tactic. Genuinely helpful course creators who use these strategies are honestly concerned about their students’ welfare since they can provide more support for a limited number of students as opposed to making the course available all the time.

7. List Everything

Lastly, be sure to list down all the items, features, or bonuses your course students will receive or gain access to.

It helps to see everything enumerated and grouped together in one place because they’ll see exactly what’s in it for them — how many valuable things they’ll get when they join your course.

If you’ve ever come across sales pages for courses before, this is also why high-priced courses are often offered in tiers or packages.

The lowest-priced package includes far less items compared to the higher-priced package. Sometimes they even use anchoring to show the small difference in price between two or more packages but with much more bonuses or features under the higher-priced course.

Conclusion

A high-priced online course can be a tricky purchase to justify in the minds of potential buyers. As a course creator, you can help ease their doubts and anxiety by communicating how valuable your course is, identifying the possible transformation, positioning your course as a system and solution, sharing your own story and experience, providing proof that your course actually works, using genuinely helpful marketing tactics, and listing down everything of value your course includes.