8 Steps to Launching a Successful Online Learning Academy

A majority of people say the customer experience influences their purchasing decisions.

Therefore, companies today are exploring new methods to keep their customers happy.

Customers can learn from customer education programs, blog posts, webinars, knowledge centers, and certification courses that companies offer through their online learning academies. It helps its customers realize the value of the product by letting them learn about its features, troubleshooting problems, and ultimately identifying its limitations.

An online learning academy of this magnitude may seem overwhelming, or even impossible, to those who are looking in from the outside. Nonetheless, it isn’t impossible to launch one. Our team is going to show you how to develop an online learning app development that your customers will enjoy. Let’s walk through the process together.

The 8 Steps to Launching a Learning App Development

1. Plan your goals in detail

It’s easy to get lost in the possibilities of online learning when you’re just getting started.

Your Customer Success team may want to streamline onboarding, for instance.

As well as reducing the number of support tickets, you want to improve the efficiency of your Customer Service department. It is also important that your Product team adopts your product more quickly.

Your leadership team’s lifetime value (LTV) needs to be boosted.

Choosing an education app development company will lead to all of these outcomes, but at this point, you must pick one.

Identify the learner persona you imagine and their greatest challenge to help you make a decision. Think about this:

• Is a new feature proving difficult to implement?
• What happens after onboarding in terms of engagement?
• Support tickets and requests overwhelm your Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

Start by determining what is most pressing at the moment.

Then you can progress to addressing other challenges within the organization and with customers after resolving that challenge, proving the solution’s value to your internal stakeholders and leadership team.

2. Organize your team

Organizing your team should probably come before setting your goals, or at least concurrently. However, for this article, I want you to see them as 1a and 1b – setting a goal and building a team.

When you’re starting, don’t set too many goals or hire too many people, just as you shouldn’t overburden your resources.

It is better to have one person who possesses a passion for online learning as well as alignment with your objectives to lead the charge.

Organize your team

• Expert (SME): An expert understands your customer’s challenges, what they will need from the content, and what value they will get from it.

• Instructional Designer (ID): Developing learning content to achieve specific outcomes requires the expertise of an ID with design expertise.

• Technical Expert: In addition to ensuring the LMS or other learning technology operates properly, technical experts also integrate data. A learning technology switchover can also be led by them.

• Executive Sponsor: Maintaining alignment with the boardroom is the responsibility of an executive sponsor. Even the newest teams need an executive sponsor.
• If you could build a cross-functional team with people who fill all of these roles, that would be ideal.

The likelihood of this happening is low at this time.

Consequently, getting started doesn’t require a formal team. To get customers excited about learning, you only need someone passionate about learning.

3. Make use of an LMS

LMSs are the backbone of most established online learning academies since they facilitate the creation, management, delivery, tracking, and optimization of content.

A scenario might look like this: You train 150 customers using blog posts, videos, quizzes, and certifications without a learning management system (LMS).

Keeping customers happy and delivering value is the responsibility of CSMs, Support, and Service. Upon signing the dotted line, a new customer may need onboarding documentation.

It might be possible for newer companies to satisfy this demand while retaining the high level of customer service customers expect without sacrificing their brand image.  

It will become increasingly difficult for your teams to maintain a consistent content production and customer service level as your product evolves and the customer base grows.

It ensures your service and support teams do not drown in tedious and time-consuming tasks when using an LMS.

You can also provide your customers with any time, anywhere learning when you provide an always-on learning academy. Additionally, customers can use this to solve their problems without having to submit a ticket or email a customer service representative, which reduces the strain on your teams.

4. Publish content on the web

You’ll fall into one of two groups when you’re just getting started with an Education app development agency:

• Group 1: What kind of content do you have?
• Group 2: The content you have does not exist

The launch date just got closer for those in the first group. After this, ensure that your content is in line with your persona and also achieves the desired result (such as enrolling customers in your program or making advanced features available).

Although there is still work to be done in the second group, they deserve props. There isn’t as much complexity or labor involved in content creation as you might think.

To get your MVP off the ground, you need to be strategic and ask yourself what is essential.

You should also outline the content, including the description, the goals, the titles, and the types. Your team should then produce content (or a course) based on your schedule.

Whenever you create content, keep scaling in mind. Consider these factors:

• What is your plan for creating content that speaks to various cultures and languages as the company grows?
• How does content creation change once you have a larger team?
• Which updates should you make and when?
• Which learning styles will you address when creating content?

I would appreciate it if you could respond as soon as possible to these questions. Currently, your learning app development academy might seem too large to address them, but scaling will be possible in the future.

Now is the time to think about scale. To increase customer satisfaction and sales without disrupting the learning experience, you will need to think about it now.

5. Make sure everything is inspected.

Your online learning app development should be looked at from all angles before it launches, including its processes, its team, and its learning management system (if it uses one).  

• The content: What are the learning outcomes of your content?
• The team: Do you have a team that is ready to go? What are everyone’s responsibilities and roles? Does your team understand how to ensure your customers’ success and the academy’s goal?
• LMS: Can you prove ROI by combining data from different systems? Is there an integration with your CRM, for example? What is the status of automated emails? Also, you should have the LMS backend checked by your technical expertise. You want your learners to have a seamless learning experience, so ensure everything is working.

It may be possible to take things one step further by asking a small group of customers to take part. Afterward, make adjustments based on their feedback.  

As a final step, communicate what you are doing with the rest of your company, especially the leaders. You’ll be able to succeed in online learning if your customer’s buy-in, but company-wide support is also important.

6. Let’s launch it

Getting started is the next step.

Consider this your first version or MVP – this is the beginning of your journey. You should focus your efforts now on engaging your customers rather than educating the app development company.

Afterward, you can iterate (step #7) after tracking performance and obtaining feedback.

Pro Tip: Your Education app development agency’s current version may not include all the features you had envisioned. That’s great news. Once you have the resources and the ability to add features to this list, keep it in your back pocket and cross them off as you grow.

7. Popularize it

Before, during, and/or after your launch, communicate with your audience through Slack, email, the breakroom, Zoom, or any other method you use to connect with them.

Take two approaches to this:

• Internal: Promote the academy to everyone and any team you can. You can demonstrate its benefits to the Support team by, for instance, reducing support tickets. Explain how it can speed up the closing process for your Sales team. You want people to feel excited about learning at the Education app development agency and see how it can help them become rock stars. Maintaining budgets and buy-in will be easier if you have buy-in from your company.
• External: Inform your customers about upcoming events. Explain why you created your academy so they can benefit from it. Provide them with instructions on how to access content, navigate the site, and contact you if they need additional assistance. To create a sticky environment that they will rely upon for years to come, you must get them inside and engaged.

To keep your company and customers engaged, celebrate wins, share resources, and more as you go. 

8. Increase its quality

There’s no point in launching an online learning academy that’s not ready for prime time.

Get a clear idea of how things are going by sourcing feedback as everyone gets used to online learning.

• Do you have a smooth-running team?
• What is the effectiveness of your content?
• How long should videos be?
• Is the short-form nature of your quizzes decreasing customer engagement?
• Is there a better format for certain types of content than others?
• What is the status of the LMS?

Improve the learning app development experience as you gather these insights and ensure your customers remain delighted and engaged.

Conclusion:

It takes only 8 steps to launch an online learning academy that your customers will love – don’t let a lack of bandwidth, resources, or experience stop you. We hope this blog helped you uncover the steps for creating the best learning app development for your academy. Is there anything else you would like to know? Comment below if you have any thoughts.