Include Bonus Content – For Increased Sales & Satisfaction

What Is Bonus Content?

Bonus content is extra goods and services that you offer to your course buyers for free. Customers will see that if they buy this course for a certain price, it also includes value of these extra free goodies.

In most cases, bonus materials make the course more valuable but at the same price. Bonuses help students learn and get started and complete their goals faster. It can also help them learn related material that is useful to that target market.

Where Do You List Bonus Content On A Sales Page?

The most important place to list your bonus content is on your course sales page. It’s best to use the bonus material to really over-deliver on the skills that prospective student wants to learn.

Depending on your sales flow, you can mention the bonus material near the top, but then really expand on your bonuses near the end of your sales page right before the final buy button.

Formatting Your Expanded Bonus Content Information

The fully expanded bonus information on your sales page should be a large content block. It should have its own header title.

If you are using horizontal dividers, then it would be divided up to be a section all by itself. If you are using different background colors or pictures for sections then it should have its own popping section background.

The Bonus section should utilize a heading and a sub heading. It should use big bold fonts.

For example,

BONUS MATERIALS

Get $150 In Bonus eBooks, Sample Files, and Coaching

When using one big bonus, then you may want to use a cover image for the section, or show a sample of what they get to the left of the bonus details. Don’t that forget English readers read from top left to bottom right.

If you have more than one bonus, then you may want to utilize columns, with a subheading, picture/icon, and summary for each bonus item. Don’t use the sub-heading “Bonus Item”, but say the name like “Designing Intro eBook”

Listing Your Bonus On Emails

In some cases, you may write a full email about your course or use just a small sales snippet within another email. This is a good place to include a phrase about your bonus material after the sales basic info.

Something like:

If you want to elevate your poetry to a full spoken word performance, consider our Words & Emotion Poetry Masterclass. Order now and get a FREE Inspirational Work Chill Playlist (Valued at $14.99)

Add A Value Statement

When your customer is thinking of whether they should buy your course, a bonus that lists a real price value helps them fully appreciate the bonus.

If your course is $300 and they are getting what you list as $100 worth of additional goods, they will clearly see that they are getting $400 worth of goods for only $300.

If the prices of the bonus content are relative and you don’t actually sell it separately for a specific price, consider adding the words “more than” or “over” when listing your price. For example: Valued over $100.

After you explain your bonus, use an appropriate way to format the value using a big font with a currency symbol. You can also add secondary colors or styles with italics.

For Example:

25 Professional Vocal Exercises

Valued at over $100

How Many Course Bonus Items Should You Include?

Even one good course bonus can help close more sales.

For a large course including 1 to 3 bonuses can really help deliver a full learning experience and set up your students for success.

Having too many course bonuses like 5 or 10 may actually muddy the messaging and could confuse buyers. Also, each of the bonus groups or items uses up space and can waste eye/brainpower when prospects are looking through your sales page.

On a related note, to learn about how many lessons to include in your creative course read: Maximize your lesson count to sell.

Dont Make Critical Course Content A Bonus

Since you are offering a course that promises to teach some creative skills, you don’t want to offer bonus material that is essential to the course.

A good tip is that your basic building blocks or steps required in a course are not bonus items. Lessons that teach the steps to learn the desired outcome should be included as prior lessons within your course.

Bad Examples:

• Don’t teach piano and have the keyboard chart as a bonus
• Don’t teach sculpting and have the tools video as a bonus
• Don’t teach 3D graphics and have a how to install Maya as a bonus

Use Future Needs As Bonus Content

Some bonuses help students learn the basics about future needs. The student will find this valuable because they need to learn the next step eventually, and they were already partially thinking and struggling about how to accomplish their complete goal.

Examples:

• A create costume jewelry course could teach students how to sell jewelry at flea markets and online
• A how to play piano course could include a guide on how to buy your first piano
• A cake design course could offer a pricing financial template bonus

What Are The Different Kinds Of Bonus Content For Creative Teachers

There are many kinds of good bonuses you can offer. Here are some, and I know this will inspire you to come up with your own variations.

Offering A Free eBook As A Class Bonus

An ebook can be somewhat easy to make and is considered a valuable bonus resource. You can also frame the eBook up or down by using title words like How To, Guide, Best, etc.

Using Templates As A Bonus

Templates are so helpful and they can really give your students a head start. You can decide how many or how complicated your templates are.

Examples:

• Website layout in Photoshop
• Dress pattern for sewing
• A wedding video template for Final Cut Pro

Some templates can also be printables to create a booklet or to give you a “coloring book” that you can print out and use like for scrapbooking.

Use Checklists As Bonus Material

Checklists are great way to provide value. Checklists are easy for a teacher to create but are also enormously valuable to art students.

Teachers can use checklists to teach students sequential process steps. In turn, students can use checklists to accomplish their goals and to verify they have done everything possible.

Workbooks As Bonus Course Content

Workbooks help you reach your goals by helping you with page by page steps. Workbooks are like lots of little templates and instructional checklists put together.

Examples:

• A workbook for chefs may help them with questions to eventually design a desert menu
• A workbook for design freelancers may help them identify important text for each page of their website
• A workbook for writers can help them with each major step in their book publishing journey

Content Files As Bonus Material

Providing real content can be very useful to your students. This can give them actual files to tweak, use, and build upon. For art many skills it’s better to learn by combining and tweaking rather than starting with an empty slate.

Examples:

• Sheet music with songs
• 3D object files and textures
• Quilting patterns
• A collection of open source fonts

In some cases, your content files can be a few large hi-quality files and in other cases, it can be dozens of little files like a starter library.

Provide Swipe Files As Bonuses

Swipe files are already made content that you can use for inspiration to make your content faster. They may have many different kinds of layouts or arrangements, that can be used to help you build something using reference patterns.

Examples:

• Advertisement swipe files
• Color combinations that go well
• Different book covers

Physical Products As Course Bonuses

You may want to send out a T-Shirt or Mug with your branding or cool niche slogan. The good thing about physical products is that there are many companies that can help these days like www.Zazzle.com, www.CafePress.com, www.Printify.com.

Other Bonus Ideas

• You can offer access to one of your other courses (maybe a smaller or older intro course)
• You can offer coaching as a bonus. This can also help you upsell more coaching later
• You can offer end of course project review
• You can offer Discounts/coupons to your other courses, products or someone elses courses
• You can offer a complementary number of months to your evergreen community program

Everyone Loves Free Stuff

Even though prospects are paying for the course, don’t forget to mention the word free in your bonus advertising.

You should also consider bold, big letters, colors, and icon forms. You may even want to highlight a few descriptive words in addition to free.

Example:

• Get a FREE accessibility checklist
• Get a $25 FREE copywriting guide
• Get 5 FREE Sculpting Tools (While supplies last)
• Get 15 Minutes Of Music Coaching FREE

Partnership Opportunities

Remember that you don’t have to create all of your bonus content on your own. You may be able to have a partnership with a non-competitive partner where you offer each other’s bonus material to your students.

This helps you not only deliver more value to your students but also reach more prospects by tapping into each other’s customers. You can also do this across several partners to share more customers across each of your products, services, and courses.

For Example:

• A photoshop expert partners with an Illustrator expert
• A knitting course provider partners with a Sewing blog author
• A dance course provider partners with a dance clothing manufacturer

Raise Your Total Price If Your Bonuses Are That Awesome

If you happen to have a few spectacular bonuses, consider raising your course price as well as your bonus valued at price.

For example, let’s say you included an eBook and 1 hour of artistic mentoring. While initially, you wanted to add value to get more course sales, but now you’ve added too much value, so you can consider raising your total price. You can also tweak your offering by offering only 30 minutes of artistic mentoring.

If you are including high-value bonuses like coaching, a large set of assets, or smaller courses you may want to consider removing and reserving some of these bonuses. You can also consider making these awesome bonuses available for individual purchases, for customers who aren’t yet ready to make the large course + bonuses investment. These customers may still be learning about you, and a smaller purchase can help them build up the value ladder to eventually buy your more expensive courses and services.

Limited Time Course Bonuses

If you are launching your course or you are ramping up for a big annual promotion, you can add a limited-time bonus or an extra bonus beyond your ordinary bonus.

It has been proven that adding an end date to an offer creates urgency and more people order when the clock is ticking.

You will have to manage your course sales content and course bonus content when removing the limited time bonus at the end of the period. But this extra work may be worth it if you see a significant sales bump.

What you don’t want to do is say that a bonus is limited and then keep extending it or adding it back. Eventually, this could lead to negative customer reactions and bad reviews on the internet.

Finally, instead of limiting by time, you may be able to offer a bonus to the first X customers or while supplies last for physical products.

Examples:

• Until Dec, 31, 2022
• For first 100 days after launches
• While supplies last
• First 100 customers

The article How long to allow course access can help you think about how long to give access to your main course content.

Changing Your Course Bonus Content

Course bonuses do not have to be forever, you can add, swap, or remove bonuses when you need to.

You may want to do this for a big holiday sale like back to school or Christmas.

Over time as you add more courses and create new assets, you may want to rearrange which classes get which extra bonus assets. The same thing applies as your partnerships and affiliates evolve over time.

Avoid swapping your offer weekly or monthly since that could create a situation where some of your marketing materials are out of sync, and then someone could click on an old class link (like last month’s email) and see a different offer.

When Should Deliver Your Bonus Materials?

You should provide access to your bonus materials as soon as possible after your students purchase your creative course.

If the bonus materials are not readily available after purchase, some students may lose trust and think that you didn’t deliver on your promise, even if you were going to email them in a few days, or surprise them at the end of the course.

In some cases, your bonus materials may be physical like a T-Shirt or real book, so you should collect any extra information you need after the purchase with an email or content bonus item form with shirt size and then begin the order after the customer submits.

If the bonus material is a service like a review of their work or coaching, then include a course resource to “Schedule A Review” or “Schedule Your Bonus Coaching Session” and explain in the content what it is, what’s included, when should students do it, and how to register/schedule/request.

How To Access The Bonus Materials For A Course?

A good practice is to include a course content section called Bonus Materials that includes text information and links for each of your bonus materials. Just like lessons, if you have more than one bonus, break out each into a separate content item.

Example:

• Introduction
  • (Videos)
• Fashion Design Module(s)
  • (Specific Fashion Design Lessons)
• Wrap Up
  • (Summary, What’s Next, End of class survey)
• Bonus Materials
  • Essential Designer Tools Checklist
  • 10 Shirt Patterns
  • 5 Dress Patterns

Using Bonus Content To Sell More Courses – Summary

In conclusion, offering bonus content can significantly help your course sales and overall customer satisfaction.

But don’t get paralyzed in creating the perfect bonus material, you can launch your course without a bonus and improve over time.

1. Launch your course
2. Add a simple bonus to sell more
3. Improve your bonus to charge more and sell more
4. Utilize a bonus that encourages followon sales and referrals

Creating bonuses are surprisingly fun, iterative, and can make a difference in your course business over time.

For more information on the exact steps how to create a bonus resource for your course – check out How To Create A Guide For Your Online Course.

Best of Luck!