Anyone who has done business online knows that one of the most important assets you should develop is an email list. To be more specific, a list should include names and emails of a targeted group of people.

Even if you don’t sell anything online (yet), putting together a healthy email list is still valuable. You can leverage it at a future date should you decide to pursue an online venture.

If you do a Google search, you will find hundreds upon hundreds of suggestions for how to gather emails. Everything from pop-up notifications, blog sign-up forms, and free ‘report’ giveaways.

The idea is simple: offer something of value in exchange for the individual’s email.

Allow me to add one more email capture strategy to the list: offer a free course.

I am by no means claiming this to be a new idea. People have been giving away free courses for quite some time. However, much of the advice doesn’t answer “why” an online course is a good way to generate a list.

The first reason why it’s a good idea is because people who sign-up to take a course are usually a more targeted demographic than those who sign-up for updates via a form on the side of a blog article.

Taking a course requires the person to log into the LMS and to familiarize themselves with the entire offering. While some may believe this to be a hurdle, I think it’s a positive. You immediately know that your list is full of people who take (more) action compared to some of the other methods.

Another benefit to offering a full course for lead generation is that you are immediately establishing you (or your business) as an expert on the course subject matter, especially if your course is well constructed.

Being viewed as the subject matter expert makes it easier to sell future courses to the same audience since you have established a degree of trust in your first free course.

But what if you don’t sell anything online? Well, you may want to still consider creating a course.

If you have a blog, or even just a personal website that acts more as a digital resume, you can still reap the benefits of creating a course.

For example, if you are a graphic designer and have a course on graphic design, then this gives you something to bring up to prospective clients. It’s probably safe to assume that there aren’t too many other designers out there with a course on graphic design – it will help you stand out in a very competitive space.

You don’t need to be overly worried about marketing the course either if you don’t want to. Just include a link to it in places where people interact with you most (social media, email, etc.).

One day you may decide that you want to start earning online income, full time or part-time, and having this list will be extremely useful when it comes time to launch.

As you can see, using elearning for generating an email list is full of benefits. You establish yourself as an expert, you build an important asset in the form of prospective customers, and the course itself becomes a valuable asset.

Naturally, creating an online course takes a considerable amount of effort. You will want your online course to look good, otherwise people won’t be tempted to sign-up in the first place.

That’s where we can help. Contact us today and we’d be happy to discuss your elearning goals and together we can determine if LearnDash can help you achieve them!