How often do you buy a product or a service without checking its ratings and reviews?
Well, personally, I rarely do it, given the exploding number of choices for each product. It’s the same when it comes to e-learning. Owing to the increasing popularity of online courses, the chances of others offering courses similar to yours are quite high. Now, to distinguish your courses from others and to gain that edge over competitors, it is essential to have a ratings and reviews mechanism on your LearnDash LMS.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the impact of Ratings and Reviews on your LearnDash courses and how you can implement them effectively.
4 Advantages of a Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback System
Too often, we obsess only with the idea of making our courses better. And, at the same time, undermine ways that’ll lead potential students to make decisions regarding these courses. E.g., let’s say you offer a course on the Basics of Arithmetic on your LearnDash LMS. But, there are lots of other online training sites that provide courses on the same topic. In such a scenario, How will you make your course stand out?
Sure, you work on great course content, but how will potential students know of it? The answer is quite simple – through genuine student reviews.
Banking merely on the content of your courses is not enough to compel someone to hit the purchase button. As human beings, we tend to make decisions based on past experiences and observations of our peers. It is this psychological emotion that becomes a larger part of our decision-making process. This implies that ratings and reviews add heavily to this cause.
1. Increase in LearnDash course enrollments
Implementing ratings and reviews on your LearnDash LMS will give your existing students an opportunity to express their opinions freely regarding the courses they’ve taken or completed. And as discussed, several genuine reviews on your courses will help potential students make an informed decision regarding the course they want to enroll in. The more positive reviews and ratings, the more increase in your LearnDash course enrollments.
2. Boost your LearnDash course credibility
Encouraging and garnering multiple genuine reviews from students on your LearnDash courses can help you in marketing and highlighting the relevance of your courses, thereby boosting its credibility and making it easier for potential students to trust you.
Through these reviews and ratings, your instructors can also build a reputation for themselves, which in turn will motivate them to work harder.
3. Build goodwill through Word of mouth marketing
People always look for quality when it comes to choosing a particular online course.
Your potential customers, after reading multiple genuine reviews on your LearnDash courses will definitely form an opinion, and there are high chances they will talk about it with their peers and others unintentionally triggering Word of Mouth Marketing, which will help in building goodwill for your e-learning business.
4. Stay ahead of your competition
Ratings, reviews, and feedback system on your LearnDash LMS will instill a sense of confidence and trust in your courses amongst your visitors. The feedback system will enable your students to submit feedback regarding your courses and suggest improvements, which in turn will help you to identify the gaps in your courses and also involve students in the improvement process.
Taking regular feedback will allow you to keep your content updated and will help in staying ahead of your competitors. With that being said, incorporating Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback mechanisms on your LearnDash LMS will definitely play an integral part in your students’ decision-making process. And let’s see how that can be done next!
Choosing a LearnDash specific plugin to enhance your e-learning business.
Even though there are plenty of generic review plugins out there that might do the job for you, however, the recommended choice is WISDM Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback (RRF). This plugin is specifically made for LearnDash courses, which means all its functionalities are designed to work seamlessly with LearnDash. WISDM Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback plugin allows reviews on course pages and also displays aggregated ratings for a course on the course grid, presenting a glimpse of people’s reactions to that particular course.
To provide you a better understanding of the plugin, let’s take a look at the features that make this plugin stand apart from the most generic ones:
Features of RRF:
● Admin approval/rejection of reviews
As an admin, you have full control over the reviews. You can reject reviews if you feel they are fake and avoid spamming on your LearnDash LMS. It also enables you to reply to these reviews quickly.
● Automatic email notification sent to course author/instructor on submission of reviews
RRF has the ability to notify your LearnDash course instructor/author automatically through email whenever a review regarding their course(s) has been submitted so that the instructor can also take a look and work on improvements or changes in their courses accordingly.
● Display reviews on any desired page using shortcodes
With RRF, you have the freedom to display the course reviews and ratings on any desired page on your LearnDash website using shortcodes that will be auto-created.
● Present ratings and reviews in style
You can present Ratings in the form of Stars (5,4,3,2,1), bars and also embed a clickable ‘Thumbs up’ sign, which can be used to engage and encourage students to drop a review.
● Control Course review submissions
You can set pre-requisite conditions allowing students to submit a review either after course completion or after course enrollment in order to avoid ingenuine reviews.
● Sorting and Filtering to view relevant reviews
Your students can find relevant ratings and reviews for the courses they wish to enroll in by sorting the top comments or most recent and filtering the star ratings, thus making the job much convenient for them.
With RRF, you can allow your students to send feedback regarding the courses they’ve taken once they’ve completed it. This feedback will help you in making improvements in the courses and better them.
These are some of the features that make WISDM Rating, Reviews, and Feedback plugin special, and having this LearnDash specific plugin ensures a smooth integration and functioning with your LearnDash LMS. Moreover, it also adds more value to your e-learning business in terms of course enrollments, course improvements, and goodwill. With that being said, there’s one more thing that adds to the specialty of this plugin, i,e.
RRF’s Integration abilities with Design Upgrade for LearnDash
RRF now integrates with the plugin Design Upgrade for LearnDash, which lets you design the star ratings and review elements as per your liking. This integration will enable you to add some new designs and styling updates to the reviews and feedback plugin. If you’re using a free version of the Design Upgrade plugin for LearnDash, then you can brush up your RRF with some nice design elements.
With the Design Upgrade PRO version, you get to access a handful of customization options like changing the color of the star rating, hide sort/filter options, etc. to enhance the Reviews and Rating system on your LearnDash LMS. Above all, RRF smoothly integrates with the Design Upgrade for LearnDash to ensure your LMS doesn’t fall short on the design aspect.
Conclusion
With the ever-increasing popularity of online courses in today’s times, relying on genuine student reviews is the new norm that will push your potential customers to hit that enroll button. Thus, incorporating a LearnDash specific plugin like WISDM Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback on your LMS is bound to make a huge difference giving you the much-needed edge over your competitors.
On that note, you can also check out its demo to understand the functionalities and its working. Feel free to drop a comment in case of any queries.