How I got 400+ applications for my course in 10 days

10 days ago I launched our new cohort-based course about instructional design for course creators (https://www.eduflow.com/academy/instructional-design-principles-for-course-creation).

Today we have crossed 400 applicants for the first cohort 🤘.

When trying to market this course, I didn't really have a good idea about which channels would work. Now that we have 400 applications, I can share which channels worked for us - hopefully that can inspire others.

Channel breakdown
We only spent a few hours posting about our course in various places. Here are the places that drove applications for the course:

• 25% - Our own email list
• 25% - Word of mouth
• 16% - Reddit
• 15% - EDUCAUSE
• 10% - LinkedIn and FB
• 9% - Other

I will talk about each of these below.

Our own email list
We have our own email list with a bit more than 6k recipients. We build this list mainly through blog posts - often using gated content (here is an example of a blog post that drives a lot of signups to the list https://www.eduflow.com/blog/the-ultimate-list-of-41-instructional-design-courses).

Announcing our course to the email list gave us 40% opens, 11% click per unique open and led to ~100 course applications.

Word of mouth
25% of our applications mention that they heard about us from someone else. The most common referrals were from colleagues, friends and managers. We also saw a group of people who heard about the course from ID influencers - like https://twitter.com/heidikirbyid and https://twitter.com/drlukehobson.

For word of mouth, I hypothesize that the course being free was a big driver. People love to share free stuff, so if you can make free work, it should give a big boost in attention.

Reddit
Reddit was one of the first places we went to post. I made posts on /training (7 upvotes), /instructionaldesign (27 upvotes) and /elearning (14 upvotes). Overall people were nice and supportive, but you have to be somewhat thick-skinned to post on Reddit 😅. I tried to be quick and honest in answering questions, also from the most critical commenters.

EDUCAUSE
I subscribe to 3 listservs from @educause about instructional design, instructional tech and blended learning (http://listserv.educause.edu/scripts/wa.exe?INDEX). People on those lists gave at least 15% of our applications. I would recommend looking for open lists like this, but again it works best if you share free stuff.

LinkedIn and Facebook
We shared the course on various Facebook and LinkedIn groups for instructional designers, people in e-learning and course creators. This gave around 10% of our applicants. Examples of groups we shared in are https://www.facebook.com/groups/201308379891017 and https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2672881/.

Compared to sharing from our own profiles and groups, sharing in groups managed by others give us better results. But you have to be careful not to overdo this, and it is best if you can team up with the owners of the group.

Main takeaways
We did not expect to hit 400+ applications so quickly and with so little effort. Some of the things that worked well for us here were:

• We used multiple channels that all gave good results, so share your course broadly.
• Niche groups are much more receptive and engaging. Going for groups and channels targeted for instructional designers made our course super relevant for them.
• Having your own email list is great - but not required. We got 25% of our applications this way, but that is still a minority of the applications. And now we have more people for our email list.
• Free stuff is super powerful. It will attract people and entice them to share. If you can find a model where free is possible (lead generation most often), then I would definitely recommend it for building an audience.
• When we do this again, I want to try and promote the course in various Slack teams for instructional designers too. I would also like to test a more classic PR route and team up with a bigger news-site for instructional designers.

Follow me if you want to hear more about building, running and marketing online courses!