A simple Google search on how to develop a certification program will turn up thousands of results enumerating the many benefits of starting a program around your product. Building your own certification program can promote brand awareness, create an additional revenue stream, and cultivate a community of followers around your product.
While most of these articles outline how to build a certification program, they predominantly focus on keeping your program credible and thorough. Certainly, these are foundational components. However, it is so easy to overlook the small, but key changes you could be making to dramatically improve your program, making program execution a breeze for your staff and program completion engaging for your clients.
Having an online certification program does so much for your organization. Are you doing enough to ensure you’re putting forward the best possible experience?
In this article, we’re going to outline three simple ways you can enhance your professional certification program at every step of the process to make sure you’re reaping all of the benefits.
1. Simplify the Sign-up Process
You’ve put out a successful marketing campaign, and people are interested in signing up for your program! But your system for online registration is long and deters people from completing the process. So, how do you get people who express interest in your program to complete the sign-up and get their certification? Make it easier!
Once someone expresses interest in your certification program, make sure they have immediate access to your sign-up location. Embed a form on your site where people can let you know that they are interested in your program. Include a field for potential registrants to share their email address so you can send them additional information about your program and alert them of upcoming deadlines.
When someone has officially registered, you’ll need to send them a completed version of their registration form and details about their course. Use Formstack Documents to automate how registrants receive this information and ensure that both you and your customers have the necessary information on file.
Keeping the registration process simple and efficient by automatically sharing the information your clients are looking for is an easy (and effective!) way to keep registrants engaged. Now, you can sit back and watch the number of completed registrations go up!
2. Send Out Reminders
Now that customers are registering, it’s important to make sure they see your program through to the end. Having an online certification program is a great marketing strategy to improve your organization’s brand recognition, but the real benefit strikes when you’re able to cultivate a community of subject matter experts (SME). SMEs spread the word of your product’s benefits and promote education across employees, colleagues, and peers. But building a community of SMEs starts with optimizing the number of successfully completed programs. Adding automated email reminders to your system is a great way to get started.
Certification completion may take place over several weeks or in one long examination. If registrants are taking time in between when they start and finish their certification program, there is a possibility of letting it fall by the wayside under a mounting to-do list. When registrants complete a section of their certification, automatically generate an online certificate in the form of a PDF that they can save to monitor progress through the program. Send automated email reminders to registrants who have not completed their certification or stopped making progress. Your email reminders could include additional information on the benefits of being certified in your product or service, such as serving their organization as a SME or supplementing a resume.
3. Automate Your Certificate Creation Process
You’ve developed a solid certification program for your product or service, and you’re seeing results. People are completing your program and getting certified!
It’s time to start sending out certificates. For online product/service certifications, waiting to receive a document in the mail is no longer acceptable. People completing your program want their proof of certification right away. Formstack Documents can function as an online certificate generator for your organization so certified clients can promote their knowledge of your product by hanging their certificate in their office or storing it in their personnel file.
Get Started
These are just a few of the ways you can automate, simplify, and enhance your online certification program. Formstack Documents can support your program as an online certificate generator, email automator, registration collector, and much more. It’s never been easier to streamline your certification program.
Check out the video below to learn more about leveling up your document generation process with Formstack Documents.
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