It can be difficult to know how much to charge for an online course. If you’re a training provider, often you’ll have a good idea of the market value for your face-to-face training, but less so for an online offering.

We work closely with training companies delivering their expertise to corporates around the world, and we have identified four key factors that will have a major influence on the price you set for your product.

1. The impact of your training

The size of the transformation your training will have on your learners will affect the price you can charge.

For example, your online training may be part of an annual update on a key subject area to keep the learner up to date with the most recent changes. In this case, it will help someone’s understanding of a subject but is unlikely to significantly change their role.

On the other extreme, your intervention could have a dramatic change in someone’s career or life. In this case, there is a greater propensity for a higher fee – as the perception of value should be much higher for the learner (and the client, if they are paying for this).

2: The quality and involvement of your offering

There are many different formats of online training. Some are completely self-study (with no marginal cost), whereas some involve a lot of ‘teacher’ time. Naturally, this is a consideration for your pricing, as you’ll need to factor into the costs.

You may want to consider offering a sliding scale of price – a ‘gold’, ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ package for example. At the centre of this scale would be the amount of involvement. For example, this could include dedicated tutor support, access to a community, one-to-one coaching. As such, it’s not unreasonable that a highly tailored and involved learning experience will command a higher price than a self-study online course.

3: Willingness to pay

An often overlooked factor is a client’s willingness to pay. If they are buying it on behalf of their team, do you know what their budget is? What roles in their workforce would benefit from the training? How quickly do they need to resolve the workplace issue?

Asking good questions is critical to get a sense of appetite for your online training, which in turn will affect your proposed pricing.

4: Competition

You may find it useful to consider the competition when deciding your pricing. But be wary of competing solely on price – you should think about the many other considerations a client will take into account when weighing up their options. Brand, history, quality of provisions, benefits to the learner – there are often many other (and better) ways of attracting that sale.

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What other factors should you consider when deciding your pricing? Leave your comments below!