14 March 2025
Marketing e-learning courses using your LMS
Explore ways of using your LMS as a tool for marketing e-learning courses to your learners.
While the ‘M’ in LMS stands for management, it could just as easily stand for marketing. A learning management system is a valuable marketing tool when it comes to driving engagement with your learning content.
You can think of it as being a bit like a stroll around your local supermarket. The supermarket is essentially a delivery method: somewhere you can go to get the things you need. Yet you’re constantly being directed, marketed to and upsold every step of the way. End-of-aisle deals, discount signs, promotional stands and checkout impulse buys are just a few examples.
Your LMS is very similar. While it is a delivery method for your e-learning courses, you don’t need to wait for learners to browse around to find what they are looking for. You could be directing, marketing and upselling learning like a supermarket does with its products.
Let’s see some of the ways you can start marketing e-learning courses using your LMS.
Website-style slides
Most websites you visit are likely to have a homepage slider that promotes new or important products. Why should your LMS be any different? If your LMS homepage is bland and static — as many LMS homepages have been over the years — adding slides to direct learners to key courses is a huge improvement.
Marketing banners
Using banners, such as the Marketing Cards available with our Spark LMS theme, turns any block region anywhere in your LMS into an advert. This means you can easily promote key courses, content and events in context.
For example, if an upcoming seminar is likely to be of interest to learners who are currently enrolled on a specific course, you can use a marketing banner and call-to-action to direct them to the sign-up page for the seminar.
The Marketing Cards in Spark can be configured to create a grid that promotes various courses or content in an attractive layout.
Branded, targeted email marketing
Your learners won’t always be logged in to your LMS, but you can still use your LMS to reach them with key marketing messages. It’s useful to be able to email all of your learners but, for marketing purposes, it’s even more beneficial to be able to define a specific audience and reach them with a tailored message.
This could be promoting a more advanced course to everyone who completed a foundation course on the same subject or emailing anyone who hasn’t completed a particular piece of mandatory learning.
Spark includes a Branded Emails add-on so you can send professional, cohesive and on-brand emails from your LMS. You can choose platform-wide branding or use different branding for each tenant.
Personalised experiences
There’s a good reason why many of the marketing emails you get contain your first name in the subject line. It grabs attention and instantly indicates that this is meant for you. It’s easy to achieve the same effect on your LMS, using user profile fields to incorporate each learner’s name, role or department in ways that make sense.
Great to see you today, [Jane]. We’re recommending all [team leaders] join this management skills seminar next month.
This sort of personalised snippet will help you market your courses far more effectively than generic messages.
Be more website
As we mentioned when discussing slides, an LMS can often benefit from being more like a well-designed, engaging website. This includes creating pages or sections of pages that include images, shorter snippets or key text and dynamic call-to-action buttons.
You can create attractive landing pages that are on-brand and drive engagement because they offer a good user experience and are closer to what people are used to when they use a site.
Create a blog
Adding a blog to your LMS is a great way to share news and longer pieces of content with your learners. This could be announcements of upcoming events and new courses, or resources to guide learners on specific topics or job roles.
Once you’ve started creating blog posts, you can use all the tactics we’ve mentioned so far to drive learners to your articles and increase engagement.
Use testimonials
We all see testimonials being used in advertising and marketing materials every day, so why not use them to push your e-learning courses? Identify people who have landed a promotion or have expressed that they got a particular benefit from a course, then use their words to inspire others to complete the same course.
Start marketing e-learning courses using your LMS
The marketing features mentioned in the article — and many other features — are available with Spark, our better-than-bespoke LMS theme for Totara and Moodle.
