5

REASONS
CLIENTS DON’T COMPLETE
YOUR ONLINE COURSES
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
STEP #1: AVOID LEARNER FRICTION ™
STEP #2: BEWARE OF THE FIREHOSE EFFECT ™
STEP #3: DITCH ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL CONTENT
STEP #4: PRIZIFICATION™
STEP #5: OPTIMIZE FOR RETENTION

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 INTRODUCTION
WHY READ THIS EBOOK?

The market for online courses is massive, and it’s growing each day. For
example, in 2016 the eLearning industry raked in over $50 billion dollars.

That’s billion with a B!

You already know that for the up and coming tech-savvy generation, everything
is online. For many of them, it’s all they’ve ever known, and it’s the best way to
deliver value for them.

In short, if you’re not online you’re going to miss the boat.

All this content online doesn’t mean that anything goes, however. Your clients
are as skeptical as they are savvy, and they can spot a shoddy job a mile away.
And unfortunately, that “shoddy job” is exactly what most courses look like
when they’re launched. And the numbers point to this sad fact.

Across all industries, the average course completion

rate is between 3% and 12%.
Which means 88% to 97% are not getting positive student outcomes.

They’re not engaging with your material.

They’re not learning what you’re teaching.
And they’re not buying more of what you offer.

Most of the time, making more money with an online course is about avoiding
the mistakes instead of throwing money at Facebook advertising. In the next
few pages you’ll learn how to avoid the biggest roadblocks to making more
money with your online courses. So keep reading!

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIKE WEISS
Mike Weiss is the Founder of Client
Engagement Academy (CEA) where
he helps entrepreneurs build passive,
scalable 7 figure businesses using
courses.

In the past 36 months, Client

Engagement Academy clients have
generated over $10,000,000 in
additional revenues as a result of
Mike’s strategies and custom course
platform.

Mike’s client roster is a who’s who of

industry leaders such as Digital
Marketer - Ryan Deiss, Brian Tracy,
NeoruGym - John Assaraf, Jon
Benson, Alex Mandossian, GKIC,
Keith Kranc, Bill Baren, Jason
Hornung, and many, many more.
The success strategies
His exclusive system, the PEP™ used with Mike’s clients
Strategy, is the same 7-step system are some of the same
which helped Digital Marketer rapidly you’ll learn in this eBook.
expand their new certification
program past $2,000,000 in the first
16 months.

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 REASON ONE

AVOID
LEARNER
FRICTION™

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THE PROBLEM
YOUR CONTENT IS GREAT, BUT
PEOPLE ARE LEAVING
Clients come into your course and finish a lesson or two and then “forget”
to move forward. Or, they hop in and then ask for a refund. Your content is
excellent, so what’s the problem?

The problem is Learner Friction. When Learner Friction is present in your

course, your clients spend all their time trying to navigate the system and
not enough time in actual learning.

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THE SOLUTION
THE PEP SYSTEM PLATFORM
When you eliminate Learner Friction™, you’ll see more client engagement,
higher student completion rates, and better student outcomes.

Which means more profit for you at the end of the day.

The solution, therefore, is to use a complete, learner-friendly system

which eliminates Learner Friction™ so your students can focus on the
material.

You may know that your platform is an issue, which is likely why so many
of you ask, “I’m thinking about creating a course. Which platform do you
recommend?”

Maybe you’ve asked this question yourself. When I plugged this question
into Google, the search engine returned over 206,000,000 results.

You should look for a solution that allows you to:

• Incorporate membership levels and courses hosted on your site

• Enable single sign on, one key to combating Learner Friction™
• Enable complex quizzes with teacher logins
• Allow for note-taking abilities inside the course
• Deliver digital badges, the key to the Viral Social Loop™ (See reason #4
for further details)
• Gather complete course engagement data, allowing you to
incrementally improve (Intelligent Upsells™)
• Eliminate all the components of Learner Friction™

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If your courses don’t have some (or all) of these factors, engagement and
completion rates will suffer.

For example, they might show up in your course as…

• Outdated technology • Slow site speed

• Lack of following directions
• Multiple logins
• Confusing UI
• Poor mobile experience
• Too-long training lessons
• Site isn't engaging
• No memorialization of success
• No accountability
• Terrible customer service
• No defined e-learning strategy
• Multiple sign-ons/logins

The Client Engagement Academy platform does all of this

and more. It’s a combination of the best software in the
industry combined with our data-driven hosting to give
you the best of all worlds without the hassles.

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 REASON TWO

BEWARE
OF THE FIREHOSE
EFFECT ™

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THE PROBLEM
SO MUCH CONTENT CREATES
AN OPPOSITE EFFECT

Clients come into your membership site or course, but don’t know where to
start. When they quit after 2-3 months, or ask for a refund, they say it’s
due to “so much great content.” You keep adding more, thinking they’ll
stay, but it seems to have the opposite effect.

I call it the “Firehose Effect™” and it’s the very reason your members are
leaving you around month three.

It’s the reason they cancel while singing your praises.

The Firehose Effect™ goes something like this:

The client signs up for your membership site all gung ho.

They visit a few times in the first week, a few times over the next
month, and then forget about it altogether. By month three, they’re
already feeling guilty for not signing in. And when the invoice comes
for their membership fee, they decide (perhaps rightly) that it’s not
worth the money and cancel.

They’ll send things like, “I love the site and the material, I’m just
not using it right now.”

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Or, “There’s so much here, I don’t know where to start.”

Whoops.

You see, this “Firehose Effect™” drowns your clients in so much information
and so many choices that they can’t see a straight path through to the
ideal client outcomes you promised them.

It’s like walking through a Walmart Super Center and not knowing which
aisle to go down.

Adding in more content doesn’t

necessarily add in more value.

“ Overwhelm adds an obstacle that

they now must overcome which
wasn’t there before.

- Mike Weiss

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THE SOLUTION
SINGLE STEP TRANSFORMATIONS
What you want, instead, is for them to head along a defined, clear path.

PINWHEEL PRODUCT OFFERING

™

PAGE 10
You want to give them step-by-step chunks of information.

Then you’ll sprinkle it with a little gamification and voila! They stay for
longer than 2-3 months.

With Single Step Transformations, you do just

that through:
• Defined courses based on smaller chunks of material
• Defined lessons to make the material manageable
• Badges to reward them as they complete each step
• Quizzes to test and reinforce their knowledge
• Progress bars to track their progress through the material
• When you teach your students in a way more similar to how they learn,
they’ll stick around.

Better organization and reduced

Learner Friction™ is what will keep

“ members, not more content.

- Mike Weiss

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 REASON THREE

DITCH
ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL
CONTENT

PAGE 12
THE PROBLEM
SPEAK TO EVERYONE’S NEEDS, GOALS
AND PROBLEMS

When you try to sell your course, you have trouble speaking to everyone’s
needs, goals, and problems. It feels like everyone wants something
different, and this makes it hard to scale into a larger audience.

We are all different.

This is a universal truth that stares us in the face every day, yet most
course developers overlook this simple reality when they put their course
and learning management system together.

How many personality quizzes have you taken?

How many “personality type” books do you have on your shelf at home?

We all seek to understand which type of personality we are, but we

conveniently overlook this when we’re trying to sell our services to different
people across the world.

Instead of catering to how your various buyers like to consume material

and how they like to make purchases, we build our e-course based on “our
way” of consuming material.

Which leaves you with one boulder of a problem: the 75% of students
don’t learn like you will fail to complete the course!

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THE SOLUTION
THE “B.A.N.K” APPROACH TO LEARNING
Knowing this, it’s critical that you create a course that can adapt to each
learning style and personality type. There are multiple ways to classify
personality types. However, I’ve found one that I feel works very well for who
we’re working with in the e-course industry.

It comes from a sales training company I worked with and it’s easy to
remember: B.A.N.K.

• “B” stands for Blueprint. Blueprint people live in boxes and like to follow
the rules. They like to follow a prescribed path and check off their list as they
go.
• “A” stands for Action. These are people that want information NOW! They
want you to cut to the chase and want consolidated information as fast as
they can get it. They don’t like constraints or checkboxes.
• “N” stands for Nurture. These are people that want to know there is a
bigger purpose tied into what they are doing. They love to talk about their
success with others and like to be acknowledged.
• “K” stands for Knowledge. These are the analytical types who like to use
data to make decisions. Everything they do is calculated and methodical.

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 INSERT IMAGE

Remember, every customer doesn’t fit nicely into each

of these boxes. In fact, most are a combination of
each.

Yet the power for you comes in knowing how to

incorporate each of these learning styles into your e-
course. By implementing aspects that cater to each
style you will see a significant increase in graduation
rates because students will be able to learn “their”
way.

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 REASON FOUR

PRIZIFICATION™

PAGE 16
 THE PROBLEM
STUDENTS HAVE NO BUILT-IN INCENTIVE
TO FINISH COURSES

Students have no built-in incentive to finish courses. Shouldn’t the reward

of new knowledge be enough?

Sometimes, course creators and membership site owners balk at my

suggestions for digital badges and certifications.

They say, “Isn’t the reward of learning enough?”

Unfortunately, it is not enough to keep your members engaged. And if you

have members asking for them, then that’s the surest sign you’ll ever get
that your site would benefit from Prizification™.

Our society has trained students to take education which gives them a
certificate – a Return on Education™ - seriously. Without that, and they
won’t pay as much attention. They know it won’t advance their career any.
They can’t use it to get a job or land a client. But give them something to
show for their work and suddenly you’ve incentivized their completion.

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THE SOLUTION
RETURN ON EDUCATION™
VIA DIGITAL BADGES

Digital Badges are the difference between “watching some informational

videos online” vs. “attending and completing a legitimate e-learning
program.”

Do you see the difference?

This simple paradigm shift significantly changes the way students approach
your e-course. Digital badges do three fundamental things:

1. They mark progress and skill mastery that would otherwise go

unacknowledged.
2. They connect students to your brand and course and encourage them
to continue progressing in order to “reach the next level” or “obtain the
next certification”
3. They display evidence of achievement and competency to employers
or anyone else that will be reviewing the student’s skillset.

However, I haven’t yet told you the best part.

Digital badges don’t just increase your graduation rate and help your
students show they now have a legitimate skill, they also significantly
increase your profits.

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 I call it the Viral Social Loop™.

When your students add their badge to their LinkedIn profile or post it on
FB, this means free impressions and leads for your course.

You get free leads, which saves you money.

You get free leads, which makes you money.
You get free leads, which increases your course alumni – giving your brand
more credibility.

All of this creates win-win outcomes for both you and your students.
The truth is this: digital badges are the future of e-learning. Students will
eventually expect these for all courses, and if your course doesn’t provide
this feature, it won’t be long before you’re out of business.

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 REASON FIVE

OPTIMIZE
FOR CLIENT
RETENTION

PAGE 20
 THE PROBLEM
YOU’RE SPENDING MORE TIME TRYING TO
GET MORE CLIENTS

You’re spending considerable amounts of time trying to get more and more
clients for your business. You feel like if you stop pushing people into your
funnel, your whole business will fall apart.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “A penny saved is worth more than a
penny earned”?

Think about it for a few seconds and ask yourself, “why is that?”

It’s simple really. To earn a penny, you have to advertise, work and deliver
a product or service. (And don’t forget you have to pay taxes on your new
penny as well!)

To save a penny, you simply have not to spend it.

When your students add their badge to their LinkedIn profile or post it on
FB, this means free impressions and leads for your course.

You get free leads, which saves you money.

You get free leads, which makes you money.
You get free leads, which increases your course alumni – giving your brand
more credibility.

All of this creates win-win outcomes for both you and your students.

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The truth is this: digital badges are the future of e-learning. Students will
eventually expect these for all courses, and if your course doesn’t provide
this feature, it won’t be long before you’re out of business.

It’s a simple analogy, but it can be easily applied to what we do as e-course

developers.

Why would you go out and spend money and time bringing in new
customers and students, when you already have paying customers in your
course RIGHT NOW?

All you have to do is keep them engaged and buying more of what you
offer, and the profit potential and ROI is much greater compared to
replacing them.

What a huge mistake!

Too often e-course developers

spend all their time and energy

“ getting people into their

course. Then once they’re there,
they just forget about them.

- Mike Weiss

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THE SOLUTION
THE PEP SYSTEM ™
What you must do, as a course creator, is focus on retaining the clients you
have so that you can earn more no-cost profit… rather than spend all your
time on the lead generation hamster wheel.

Your long-term success requires that you think of creating long-term

clients, rather than one-off buyers.

And clients who complete your course are clients who stick around.

Every one of my clients who’s reached $30,000, $50,000 and $100,000+

per month have embraced this reality for their business. They do it by
designing courses which put the student outcome first. And when student
outcomes are first, everything else falls in line.

Here’s a story to illustrate just how important keeping clients engaged is to

your bottom line.

Hypothetical Example Comparing Completion Rates And The Effect On Sales

Industry Average Digital Marketer Certification IMPACT IMPACT (% Gain)
Total Customers 10,000 10,000
Completion Rate 5.20% 32.60% 27.40 627%
Customers Completed 520 3,260 2,740 627%
Customer Upsell Rate (%) 33% 33%
Customer To Upsell 172 1076
Price of 2nd Product $2,000 $2,000
Upsell Sales $343,200 $2,151,600 $1,808,400 627%

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Two online course creators launch their course and receive 10,000 new
customers.

Because they each had to invest their money in the technology, funnel, and
marketing costs, they know that they will barely break even on the first
course.

They know the upsell is where the profit happens.

Here's what happened next...

Course Builder A uses "industry average" practices. Due to Learner

Friction™, he only sees a 5% completion rate. Which means that only 520
students complete the course. Due to great marketing and copy, he has a
33% upsell rate, which translates to 172 who buy his more profitable
course at $2000. As a result, he sees $343,200 in back-end profit.

Course Builder B uses the PEP System™ model taught by Client

Engagement Academy. Since he doesn't have Learner Friction™ in the way,
he sees a 32.60% completion rate. Which means that 3,260 students
complete the course. Due to great marketing and copy, he has a 33%
upsell rate, which translates to 1076 who buy his more profitable course at
$2000. As a result he sees $2,151,600 in back-end profit.

Which means...

You could have the best Facebook or other advertising...

The best copywriting and marketing....
The best upsell....

And still barely turn a profit if you have Learner Friction inhibiting
engagement.

The difference, here, is $1.84 million left on the table with almost zero
cost to acquire this extra money. All by changing a few small things in the
course structure as taught by Client Engagement Academy.

PAGE 24
 If you’re not seeing the graduation rates you would like from your course,
there are a number of strategies and tactics you can use to improve
engagement.

We’ve gone through five here, but there are so many more.

To achieve maximum
student engagement, it’s
not simply throwing
everything at the wall
and seeing what sticks.

- Mike Weiss

“
PAGE 25
11 SUCCESS ACTIVATORS

DIGITAL BADGES
BRAND AWARENESS & FREE
LEADS

REVERSE CONTENT
DESIGN™
SURGING STUDENT OUTCOMES

MOBILE APPS & WEB

OPTIMIZED
PLAYS ON ANY DEVICE, EVERY TIME

CLIENT ACCOUNTABILITY
AUTOMATED EMAIL, TEXT &
VOICEMAIL

PAGE 26
11 SUCCESS ACTIVATORS

GAMIFICATION
LEADERBOARDS, POINT
SCORING & PRIZIFICATION™

DUAL CLIENT PATHWAY™

REDUCE CHURN & DROP OUT
RATES

DETAILED CLIENT
REPORTING
ANALYZE, TEST & IMPROVE

QUIZZES & FINAL EXAMS

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT &
COMPREHENSION

PAGE 27
11 SUCCESS ACTIVATORS

PRODUCT ASCENCION
MODEL ™
INCREASE LVC & PROFITS

MEMBERSHIP PROFIT
FORMULA
REDUCE CHURN RATE & EXTEND
PAYMENT

LMS COURSE
STRUCTURE
ONE LOGIN & INSTANT LESSON RETURN

PAGE 28
 DISCOVER HOW DIGITAL
MARKETER’S CERTIFICATION
PROGRAM GREW FROM
$0 -$2,000,000 IN LESS THAN TWO
YEARS
At Client Engagement Academy, we’ve spent years and hundreds of thousands of
dollars perfecting what it takes to maximize course completion and therefore
maximize your bottom line profits. If you’re serious about implementing some of
the strategies we’ve discussed here in this eBook, then I invite you to watch our
free Digital Marketer Case Study.

In it, you’ll learn almost all of the course-building strategies we used to help
Digital Marketer go from $0 to $2,000,000 in profits in under 2 years.

WATCH CASE STUDY NOW

FOLLOW US

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