Declining Course Sales: What To Do At Your Education Business
Jan 22, 2026
One of the biggest current trends in the online education space?
Declining course sales.
Gone are the days where you could create some kind of “do it yourself” program, whip up a sales page in an hour, and make a killing by the weekend.
Does that still happen? Sure. But the big change in the last few years?
It’s harder than ever to put your earnings on easy mode.
So that’s what this post covers:
Two of the major causes behind declining course sales
Six actions I recommend you take in to build a kind of moat around your business
This email series if for you if your education business is making less money than before-
Your margins are getting smaller and smaller-
And you don’t quite know how to fix it.
Why You See Declining Course Sales Everywhere
If you work in the industry, or own an education business yourself, you've seen the signs everywhere:
Way too many discounts
Too many promotions or sales
A hint of desperation in marketing messaging
Or, worst of all…businesses closing up shop entirely
Weird times indeed.
So, the obvious question:
What’s driving this shift?
The first, and perhaps obvious, cause:
#1: AI is making information cheaper than ever.
Course businesses for a long time were based on a very simple model:
Selling information.
And for a while, it worked.
Somebody wants to learn something
They want all the information they need to know in one convenient place
They find your business, which offers to sell that information to them
They invest in your course
But these days?
Even your grandma (love you gram gram) can ask ChatGPT to teach her how to knit.
Information has never been easier to get, which means the value of it has plummeted.
This isn’t to say that AI is anything to be afraid of. Use it the right way, and it can actually be a game-changer for education businesses.
But companies that have sold purely info (and not a transformation, which we cover below) are having a hard time. All of this leads to the second cause of declining course sale..
#2: People are wising up.
Specifically, they’re realizing what “courses” usually result in:
Big promises, but no lasting changes in their lives.
We’ve all done it:
Want to learn a skill
Buy a course
Start motivated
Lose that motivation over time
Realize, months later, that our life is basically the same.
People are kind of sick of that, and if they are going to invest money, it’s going to be in something that is a bit more structured or guaranteed.
(Keep that in mind.)
But, thankfully-
There are things you can do.
Not just to sell a few more courses, but to make more money from them than you ever have. And it’s all about changing the way you approach your business and the systems behind it.
Six Things You Can Do If Your Business Is Experiencing Declining Course Sales
1) Stop selling information, and start selling a transformation.
Education businesses used to get by just selling info. Pure “how to” programs or courses. But like I said above-
AI means information has never been easier to come by. And the end result of that?
Less value placed on “information only” resources.
What you need to do instead? Sell the same thing-
But market the end result (or “transformation”) that they go through instead.
The difference is subtle, but it is essential.
Here are a few examples:
If you used to sell Spanish courses
Now you sell “confident intermediate Spanish speaker in 90 days.”
If you used to sell weight loss programs
Now you sell “lose 20 pounds of fat by June for your beach body”
If you used to sell “online therapy sessions”
Now you sell “better relationship with your partner with just one session a week”
See the difference? What education businesses should really be selling these days is not education (which they can now get anwywhere in 10 seconds)...
But the transformation (which they will always need help with).
If you take anything away from this series-
Let it be this.
2) Look at (and improve) your upsell structure.
Working with businesses in different industries, it’s crazy to me how many of them don’t have a basic upsell structure in place. I’m talking about:
Order bumps (one click “mindless add ons” on the checkout page)
Upsells (more expensive “next level up” purchases after the checkout page)
Downsells (offering people who say “no” to the upsell something for a cheaper price)
Business is really just a math equation. Give people the opportunity to buy more…
And your audience’s average order value naturally goes up.
And that’s when you have the ability to recoup some of that revenue from declining course sales.
3) Offer a cheaper “clean up” sale.
I was on a marketer’s email list a few years back. He ran a promotion for one of his copywriting programs, and priced it at $1,500 (including live calls). I didn’t buy…
But then a week later, he did something you rarely see: he offered a smaller version of that product, without the coaching calls…
And priced it at $197.
(I snapped it up within two minutes of seeing the email)
Two things work in your benefit here:
The majority of people won’t be able to afford your more expensive offer, so that cheaper “clean up” sale (forget where I heard that phrasing) will naturally appeal to a lot of the initial non-buyers
The cheaper offer looks way cheaper after the more expensive one. Think about that for a second:
If he just said “here’s something for $197”-
That’s not exactly cheap.
But right after her just marketed something for $1,500? All of a sudden, my brain is telling me “damn Eric, this is a great deal!”
And that is the power of pricing psychology! 🙂
4) Start making low ticket products.
I have a love/hate relationship with low ticket products (think anything under 50 bucks)...
And you should too.
Here are the things you should love about them:
More people are willing to spend that small amount of money, so you bring in more customers
You can add a bunch of upsells to drive up the average order value
It’s another product that you can add as an upsell to your “primary” funnel
…but also the things you should hate:
It takes away your attention from your more expensive transformational products
The sort of customers you get from cheap products are usually lower quality (people that buy cheap stuff will refund far more often than the expensive stuff)
You need to sell A LOT of them to make a lot of money (simple math)
Regardless of your thoughts about low ticket products-
You can’t deny their usefulness. It’s worth thinking about creating your own.
5) Segment your audience with a few key data points
The future of good marketing is personalization. It’s no longer enough to send the same email to everybody. Most businesses can’t get away with that.
The solution?
More specific segmentation. When people read your emails, they should feel like you are talking directly to them. And the only way to reliably do that?
Get data about ho you are talking to
Segment your audience accordingly
Send messages based on that information
Segmentation is a massive topic on its own, but I will leave you with this:
Better segmentation = more precise sales message = more sales.
Something to think about.
6) Start using AI to make “immediate feedback” products.
Like I said before, AI can actually be a great tool for bootstrapped education businesses. It’s just all about how you decide to use it.
To give you an example:
I’ve had multiple clients in the language learning space. And instead of just selling courses, some of them are now selling the same course…
But with an AI-tutor embedded into the course area itself.
The result? Not only do their students go through the exercises and course material-
But they also have a tutor that’s ready to help them practice it in real time when they've completed that lesson.
How cool is that? Immediate feedback in a way that used to only be possible with one-on-one coaching with yourself.
The most interactice course experience you can imagine.
Declining Course Sales: One Last Thought
It’s not that people aren’t learning things anymore. People will always be looking to develop their skills, go deeper with their hobbies, or pursue their interests.
And you can be the person that teaches them.
But people are more skeptical about where they spend their money, and the simple "info-only" business model is on its way out.
Take the six actions above seriously, though, and declining course sales cease to be a problem. Because when you do, you set up your business with the systems you need to bring in consistent revenue…
And become the obvious choice for your customers. :)
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