The Tech Toolkit: Essential Tools for a Seamless Course Launch

Launching an online course can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to navigating the tech side of things. In this episode of The New School of Marketing Podcast, I'm taking the guesswork out of the process by sharing a breakdown of the essential tools you need to set up a smooth and successful course launch.

From landing page builders and email marketing platforms to payment gateways and course hosting solutions, I’ll walk through the must-have tech that will streamline your launch and save you a ton of headaches. I’ll also share tips on how to integrate these tools for an automated, hassle-free experience that allows you to focus on delivering value to your students.

Whether you’re a first-time course creator or looking to level up your systems, this episode will give you the toolkit to launch with confidence!

Links mentioned:
MailerLite - email marketing
LeadPages - landing page builder
ThriveCart - payment processing
Sales Page in a Day - write your own sales page copy
20 Minute emails - write your own sales and nurture sequences

Connect with me

Website: www.newschoolofmarketing.com
Facebook: @newschoolofmarketing
Facebook group: @newschoolofmarketing
Instagram: @bianca_mckenzie

Learn from me:

🟣 FREE MASTERCLASS: Sell more of your online course with Meta Ads
https://www.biancamckenzie.com/masterclass

🔵 AIMFUL ADS ACADEMY: Tools, resources & 1:1 support to attract more ideal clients and make more sales with proven, easy to follow Facebook & Instagram ad strategies for any budget. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/aimful-ads/

🟢 FACEBOOK ADS PREP SCHOOL: Find out what you need to know and do before spending money on ads. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/prep-school/

🟡 INVISIBLE AD FUNNEL PLAYBOOK: A practical step-by-step guide to making a big impact with a tiny budget. https://www.biancamckenzie.com/playbook

🟠 FUNNEL FUNDAMENTALS: Building effective sales funnels that drive conversions and grow your business. ...

Transcript

Hey, welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast. I am so grateful to you for tuning in. Before I dive into this episode, I would love to pay my respect and acknowledgement to the Palawa people of lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates. And I pay my respect to their elders, past and present. Yay. Welcome to another episode. I am super excited to dive into a topic, and today's topic is actually a really crucial one for anyone launching an online course. I'm going to talk about your tech toolkit. This is often what stops a lot of people from putting their course out there in the world. So whether you're a tech savvy creator or tech scares you a little, having the right tools in place can actually make or break your launch. So let's go over the essential tools that you need to have a smooth, stress free. I'm laughing because, you know, there's never so such a thing as stress free. But let's aim for that stress free course launch. And once you've got these in your back pocket, I do have to say launching will feel so much easier. Like, it's still, it's still gonna be a little bit stressful, but it will be so much easier. So let's make sure that we don't let the tech stop us from putting our work out there into the world, right? So before we get into the tools themselves, let's talk about why tech is so important. In your course launch. You can literally have the best course, the best content, the best marketing. But if your tech setup isn't up to scratch, you're just going to have lots of headaches. It's just not going to work. The right tools actually make sure that everything runs smoothly behind the scenes so that you can focus on delivering value to your students. You don't want to be worrying about the tech, and tech is made like it makes our life easier. It's about efficiency, it's about automation. It's about avoiding those launch day and like, you just general launch nightmares. And like I said, a lot of people let tech stop them. There could be a lot of tech issues, like from webinar platforms, not working from links, not working from people, not getting into certain, you know, parts, whether it's a webinar into a course or all of those things. But once it works, it makes everything so much smoother, so much easier. It makes it a better experience for your audience, for your learners. So first up, let's talk about course platforms. So basically, your course platform is your virtual classroom. It's where students access your course materials. It's where they track their progress. It's where they interact with you. And you want to use one that is user friendly for both you as the creator and your students. And there are so many different options out there. Things like thinkific, teachable, kajabi, just to name a few. You want to look at features like easy uploads, customizable designs, and of course, a great user experience for you and your students. Now, I am not here to recommend one platform or another. That is up to you to look at what you will use. You need to think about long term. You need to think about what is easy for you to use, what is easy for your students to use. If you've done any online courses and you've liked the platform, find out what it is and if you can use it. I also want you to know that it does not need to be complicated. So I would suggest do a few trials, sign up for a few accounts, don't fully build out your course, and also know that it's not going to necessarily lock you in. You can change. It's a pain. It is a pain to change. I've done it multiple times. It is a pain, but you can change. And at some point you probably will change. Just to let you know. So I have used multiple things over the years. I have used memberpress as a membership plugin on my own website. I have used something called Gumroad. I don't know if it's still around. I have used thinkific. I am now using go high level, which is a beast of a platform. You don't have to be locked in. You can change. Like I said, I've changed multiple times. It is not a pretty process, but at the same time, it also gives you that time and that opportunity to review your courses. You know, what do you want to keep? What do you want to change? All of those kind of things. I would say sign up for a few platforms, do the trials, see what works for you. Also look at it from the other end as a, as a user, as a customer. And yeah, look at things like customization. How easy is it to use what integrations does it have? Like, can you integrate it with your email marketing platform, with payment methods? All of those things. While you're doing all of this, keep in mind the student experience. Also know who your audience is and what their capability and their level is of using certain platforms. You might actually need to create a lesson on how to access your content. So just be mindful of that and keep the user experience, the student experience, like as a priority, it should be your priority. Now let's talk money. So yeah, you've put in all this work. You definitely want to make sure that you get paid smoothly. And trust me, you might sit there going, yeah, duh. Of course, the amount of times where it's actually not clear how to pay for something and making that process safe, secure and smooth, a lot of people actually don't, don't do it. It's almost like they're afraid to receive money. So you want to make sure that you get paid smoothly. Payment processes like stripe, PayPal, or even built in payment gateways on your course platform, they're just essential. You need to make it so easy for people to give you money. If you're making this course, you need to be making it so easy. Yeah, people need to be able to give you money. So make the payment process as seamless as possible for your student. You don't want them to go fill in this form, then email it back to me, then I will send you an invoice, then you will pay the Inv. You don't want to do all of that. You want it to make super, super simple for people to give you money and get instant access to the course or whenever it starts. If it is complicated, people will be out of there. They will note, proceed. You will not sell your course if you make it complicated, make it easy and they'll enroll in no time. So if you've ever had a bad experience, you probably know if it's not easy for people to give you their money and to get into something, they will be out. Make sure that you follow best practices for secure and easy payments. So your website needs to be secure. And if you go through a course platform, most of the times that is part of that. So you know, if you can't do it on your own website, go through a certain payment processor. I personally use thrive cart for all of my payment processing, including my one on one work. I don't really invoice anything through my so I use Xero. I don't really invoice anything through that. Everything I do goes through thrive cart and I'll pop my affiliate link in to the show notes. But yeah, I can set up really beautiful looking payment pages, but I can also embed payment forms inside of my websites. I literally use thrive cart for everything. It's a one off payment, so and it has well and truly made my money back on that payment. So I'll pop that link in the show notes. But yeah, find out what an easy payment processor for you would look like. And for me that is strife cart. I really do love it, but just make sure that they are secure and that it's easy. Like obviously it needs to be legal and it needs to follow all of the best practices of getting payments. The next step I want to talk about is email marketing platforms and they are crucial for your launch because email is one of the most powerful tools for connecting with your audience and also for in a way nurturing and continuing that relationship with your students. So it's important before they purchase and it's important after they purchase. It is super, super powerful and there are so many different platforms that you can use. I myself use Mailerlite, but I have used Convertkit in the past and a very, very long time ago, like 15 years ago, I used to use Mailchimp. There are so many options. There's active campaign, there's flow desk, go high level has a function for email marketing as well. I am not using that at the moment, I'm using mailalyte, but there are so many options. I will also pop in an affiliate link for Mailalite in the show notes because I love it. I changed over from Convertkit, which I also liked, but it was kind of good for me to start with a clean slate. And yeah, I love mailerlite. It has really nice landing pages that you can build as well, which I don't use at the moment. I use their pop up boxes and their embedded forms. But yeah, I'll pop a link in the show notes as well because I do love it. So yeah, you can use one of those platforms to build your email list to send out launch sequences. You can automate all of it. You can have campaign specific ones like if there's timed, but you can also make them automated. It's amazing and it really just helps you nurture relationships with your potential students. And then once they become students, like it's like onboarding and sending them the course materials and all of that. And with the automation function you can set up everything ahead of time so that your emails go out at the perfect moment and you just don't have to worry about a thing. You can build out this whole course, like this whole launch thing in advance. It's not like you have to be there and you can recycle what you're using like for the next time, or you can build an evergreen funnel wherever. Yeah. Someone goes into that, you know, into that sequence and the automation does its thing. Now, email marketing is super, super important during a course launch. And I will let you do more research about this. And I also kind of want you to figure it out yourself a little bit because I can say you need to send this many emails and all of that and you'll be like, that's too many. So I want you to learn this for yourself a little bit. But it is not uncommon to send out an email every single day during a launch. And like four or five or six on the cart close day, if there is a cart close, it might seem excessive, but it is proven it works. People need reminders, people need an, everyone has different stats on this, but the latest I've heard is twelve touch points before someone actually purchases. And it could have increased again, but they need to get all of those touch points from you before they decide that they purchase. And those touch points could be social media, email, website, a landing page, a freebie. Like they just, they don't go first interaction and they purchase a, some people do, but most people don't. So having something that can help you nurture your audience and that is email marketing, that will be invaluable. It will allow you to sort of highlight your expertise and then tell them, okay, well, this program, you know, doors are closing or something like that. And like I said, there's so many social media marketing, so not social media, email marketing platforms. It's up to you what's going to work for you. It's up to you what's going to work for your budget. Mailalite has a free option to start with if you wanted to. I use the paid version just because it gives me more option, but it's actually really affordable. So have a look at the different email marketing platforms and again, think about the future, what you want to do, where you want to go, because you want to get something that is going to serve you right now, but also well into the future. So have a look at that. And I suggest looking at something that actually has automation functions and mailalite has automation like really, really good automation functions because it's just going to help you so much. It's like it's going to just like you can set it up and the emails will go out when you tell it to go out. And it will be so easy not to have to physically be there. You could like, you know, go on holiday and you could still be launching. It's amazing. And another thing I want to talk about in your tech stack is landing pages and sales pages. So your landing page and your sales page is literally where your course offer shines. It's where you convince potential students that your course is exactly what they need. And whether you're using like your course platforms, built in page builder or something like leadpages or unbounce, you need to make sure that your landing pages and your sales pages, that it's compelling, that it's clear that it's optimized for conversions. You want the design to be like clear, beautiful, and you want your message to be really laser focused, like on the value of your course offer. And not just like, I'm not saying value as in there's five worksheets and this many videos. No. Tell people what problem it's going to solve for them. And look, we can talk about this as well. I will pop some links into the show notes of other episodes that I've spoken about this because messaging and copy and all of that is so, so important. Your sales page, in a way. And some people say landing pages, sales pages. I talk about both of them. I normally see a landing page as something where you offer a freebie or a webinar or like something where people register for it, and that's how they get onto your email list. And then there's the sales pages, both of them. The copy is super, super important because that's in a way, during the selling, especially your sales page where you get people to go where they can buy the offer that it's like your salesperson without having a salesperson. So you need to have everything on that page that is important to your ideal customer, where it tells them how it's going to solve the problem for the, for them, whatever the problem is, or like how it's going to satisfy their desire, what it does, what is included, like all of the pieces that they need to know. But the most important part of that is painting that picture of where they're at right now and where they could be. It's really like, what problem is it going to solve or what desire is it going to satisfy? And that's so, so super important. And look, you can build it on your own website. You can use one of the course platform builders, you can use something like leadpages. I use leadpages myself. I love, love, love leadpages. I'll pop in an affiliate link for that as well because honestly, I've been using it for probably like 15 years now and I love it. It's just so easy. Just make sure that it is compelling, that it is clear and optimized for conversions. And by that I mean your copy needs to be in the right spot. Your design and layout needs to be clear and functional and like look good. And then you need to have your buttons and your payment methods all easily accessible so people know what to do, where to go and then how to pay. So super important to have your landing pages, to have your sales pages because your sales page is your sales person, really, you need to have and again, I'm going to say this again, really clear messaging to build a high converting landing page and you have clear messaging, really good copywriting and this is going to be a work in progress. Honestly, trust me, the amount of times I have changed my sales page copy because I'm like learning how to write sales pages and things like that. Again, I will pop some links in the show notes is super, super important. And do not forget your call to action. You need to tell people what they need to do next, as in buy now or join now, get instant access. All of those things. You need to have a button, very, very prominent, I would say buttons. Have a look at some of my sales pages. You'll see that there's buttons everywhere because I want people to know that that's what they need to click and that's how they get to, you know, pay and then get into the course. So super important now. Also going to mention a launch event so you can do a webinar or a virtual event to get people into your course. And I do this all the time. In fact, if you are keen to learn how to use my for ad stack method to sell more of your online courses, then sign up for my free webinar, my free launch events. You can do that. Bianca mckenzie.com masterclass. You'll see when the next one is coming up. But yes, you can host webinars or virtual events and you'll need the right platform for that as well. And look, I'm saying the right platform, it is entirely up to you to figure out what the right platform is. I use Zoom, but there's also demio webinar jam. I have used all of those in the past. I do really, really love demio, but I figured I could actually do the same with Zoom. So I swapped to zoom and stopped paying demio for it. I do love demio because there was way more functionalities for tracking and things like that. So if you do really big launches, I would say use demio or webinar jam. They make it really easy to host live or recorded webinars as part of your launch. And webinars are really great because they let you connect directly with potential students and answer their questions. Give them a taste of what your course is all about. Like you can teach them something. I would say make sure that your webinar platform has chat features, that it can do screen sharing, and that it has good recording options. Those would be my three must have. You can do a lot of it with Zoom as well. You can just literally also have a launch event where it's like an informal get together. People can ask you questions. You obviously need to have an audience before you sell your course. So like, all of this is applicable, but you need to have an audience. I, like I said, I do really love demio, but I use Zoom because it does the thing. Now, the next one I want to talk about, and people often tune out with this, I'm going to talk about analytics, like measuring, gathering data, all of that. If you're not tracking your results, you will not know what's working and what's not working. So you need to figure out your easy way to track results, whether that is Google Analytics. If you're doing ads, make sure that you have Facebook pixels installed. Maybe you have built in reporting on your course platforms that can help you measure your traffic, your conversions, your engagement. All of the data that you will get together will help you optimize your future launches. It's all about learning what works and then doubling down on it. And a lot of us, and I'm saying us because honestly, I'm not immune to this. A lot of us are scared of the data, but at the same time, we also don't look at the data and objectively see what is not working. We kind of go, oh, nobody wants this. And when you dig down, you're like, oh, actually, people might want it or do want it. I just didn't get enough traffic. I didn't get enough leads. I didn't get enough webinar signups. I did. And all of those are so important. It's not about, you know, a one time putting your offer out there. That's not going to work. It's not. If that's your approach to creating a course and trying to sell it by one post on social media. It's not going to work. I hate to say it, but launching is. It's a process. It's a long process. It is all about getting enough traffic, getting enough leads, nurturing those leads, converting those leads, having your sales page optimized so that you actually can convert those leads. So the main thing is traffic and an audience. You need enough people to see what you do and to go through what I would call a funnel or a journey that you created. You need enough people through that before someone will actually purchase. And it is a process, and it takes time. And it honestly, if you have created a course and it's gathering digital dust because nobody bought it, most likely it will be because you didn't have enough traffic. Or potentially your sales page wasn't optimized. Like if you had tons and tons of traffic, tons and tons of leads, but nobody converted, there's something else wrong. Either you have the wrong audience or your messaging isn't right. So this whole launch process, you need to start gathering data and literally looking at the data going, okay, what, what's this telling me? What's that step telling me? What is that number telling me? What can I improve? If that, if that happens, then you know, what will happen to the rest of the funnel. And look at this data. I just listened to an episode from the Chill and Prosper podcast with Denise Duffel Thomas, and she was saying that their refund rates went up and they had gone through a rebrand and added more stuff into the course. And they asked the question to people that asked for a refund, you know, why are you asking for a refund? And they said, there's just too much content and I don't know how I'm going to get through it. So they literally went back and went, okay, well, what is essential in this course? And they stripped it all back and it was just so much clearer and their refund rates halved. And that's all by looking at their data. And then what could be wrong? Finding out what's wrong, making the change and then making the improvements. So you need to be tracking how much traffic, how many conversions, what's the engagement, where are people dropping off, potentially, what can I improve? It is literally test measure, test measure all the time. So make sure you keep tracking your analytics. Alrighty, I'm just taking a deep breath. There you have it. The essential tech toolkit for your course launch. And I know that this is literally the tippity iceberg. There's so much underneath. But having these tools is really going to help you streamline the process and hopefully help you avoid those tech headaches that you might have. But you need to focus on what really matters. You need to focus on delivering an amazing experience to your students. And remember, it's all about working smarter, not harder. Use the automations. Use like the tech to help you use the tech to make it a more seamless experience for yourself and for your students. With the right tech, your launch can be literally as smooth as butter and you need to figure out what the right tech is. I can say, well, I'm using this, I'm using that, and I will put all of that in the show notes so that you can look at that and so that you can kind of go, is this for me? Is this not for me? But it is ultimately up to you to figure out what works for you and what works for your students. Awesome. With that said, thank you so, so much for joining me on yet another episode of the new School of Marketing podcast. I hope it was helpful and I'm always excited to share more marketing tips and strategies with you next week. If you're ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure that you head to the newschoolofmarketing.com for practical, free resources. And if you want to grow your business but you don't want to spend all of your time on slow and unpredictable organic social media strategies, then the Aimful ads academy is for you. It's literally the place to learn how to be seen by your audience, attract the right people as leads and turn them into paying customers with my proven for ad stack method. Plus, as part of the program, you'll have one on one access to me. And I'm a marketing strategist with over ten years of experience so that you don't have to navigate ads alone. I'm here to help you be seen. I'm here to help you attract leads and get more paying customers. And remember, make sure you subscribe to the podcast where I share so many insights, tips and all the bits and pieces that you need for a sustainable business. So subscribe so that you never miss an episode. I can't wait to keep this journey going with you. Until next time, take care and market your business every day.