Revenew Playbook: E-Learning Platforms

In today’s world, where technology permeates nearly every aspect of our lives, education has undergone a significant transformation. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, online learning has become more centric in people's lives. Capitalising on this growing trend, online learning platforms are making it simple for educators to share knowledge and build thriving businesses. In fact, even before the pandemic, Research and Markets forecasts the online education market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.6% taking the market value from $291.73 Billion in 2023 to an estimated $788.05 Billion by 2032.

As this market evolves and online learning platforms leverage technology to cater to an international audience, they’ve had to implement complex payment strategies to support a wide range of payment methods. While many platforms have traditionally relied on subscription models, there is a growing trend toward diversifying revenue streams through various monetisation strategies which include pay-per-course access, value-added services, and corporate training solutions. Introducing more complex payment flows, however, gives rise to a pressing topic that is often not given much thought initially: How do I manage my payments? In this article, we'll explore how online learning platforms can use Revenew to do just that.

The ‘How’ in How to Manage Margins

Running a successful online learning platform is not easy. It requires a delicate balance between providing value to creators and learners while at the same time ensuring your business remains financially viable. As these platforms scale, many start exploring how to offer more services they can monetise. Today, online learning platforms are diversifying their revenue streams by monetising payment features and generating new lines of business. There’s sound reasoning behind this: a16z reports that, by adding fintech, SaaS businesses can increase revenue per customer by 2-5x.

Payments are often central to solving key business needs. By integrating payments into your platform, you can offer a more convenient product experience while eliminating the costs, delays, and non-payment risks of manual billing. There are a couple of options here, but the premise for platforms remains the same: Regardless of how you choose to monetise payments, you need to make sure to charge enough to make an impact on your bottom line while staying competitive. But what is ‘enough’? Yes, your fees should account for both the added value you're providing to customers and any additional transaction costs you may incur, but how do you ensure that you’re pricing fairly, the payment flows you’ve introduced are actually profitable, and - most importantly - how do you retain your customers?

From our experience, platforms that have a deep understanding of their payments’ financial performance are best placed to maximise the financial upside from their embedded payments while retaining their customers through ensuring margins are fair and competitive. We’re out to prove that payments monetisation does not need to be zero-sum.

The Role of Revenew for Online Learning Platforms

As an online learning platform, do you know your margin on every single payment? With a passion for empowering platform players, we’ve built Revenew and its suite of tools to help online learning platforms gain all of the insights, data, and knowledge they need to understand their business in a new and informed way. By leveraging Revenew’s features, platforms are able to gain valuable insights into their payment data to answer questions like:

How many of my payments are loss-making? Why?
Which customers (ie. course providers) are my most profitable/ least profitable?
Which payment methods should I adjust to help me achieve my overall net margin goal?

This knowledge - combined with the right tools - empowers platforms to easily implement intelligent pricing strategies and create advanced payment flows that cater to their unique needs without the need to do the heavy-lifting of building these capabilities in-house.

Detailed Insights for Informed Decision-Making

Having detailed insight into who your most valuable course providers are and what their impact on your bottom line is enables you to make more data driven decisions around which course providers to incentivise to increase engagement and which to reward and drive loyalty.

Analyse Course Provider Performance

By examining the profitability of your course providers, platforms can quickly understand your customers’ performance and incentivise accordingly.

Monitor Payment Trends

Understanding how different payment methods affect overall margins can help platforms optimise their pricing strategies and reduce processing costs.

Identify Loss-Making Transactions

Revenew’s analytics can flag transactions that fall below profitability thresholds, allowing platforms to take corrective action quickly. Prior to using Revenew, a platform had unknowingly been losing $100k+ p/a due to loss making payments.

Understand The Fee Structure of Every Payment

Especially if you’re on IC++, getting a breakdown of all the fees charged can be a headache. Revenew provides these out of the box.

Complex Payment Flows to Drive Growth

Imagine knowing exactly where every penny goes in your payment processing ecosystem. Revenew Clarity gives platforms a crystal-clear picture of their financial landscape, enabling them to gain granular insights into per-payment fees charged by payment service providers, eliminate tedious manual reporting and reclaim valuable time for the team, and identify and address loss-making payments before they impact your bottom line. The flexibility of Revenew’s payment flow capabilities has enabled platforms to create more complex and flexible payment experiences that drive increased revenue and customer satisfaction through:

Supporting multiple course purchases from multiple providers simultaneously
Flexible payment options such as instalment plans or buy-now-pay-later, making courses more accessible to a wider audience
Hold payments in reserve before paying out to the course provider (eg. until the course has been completed)

By expanding payment flow capabilities in an informed way, online learning platforms leveraging the Revenew product suite can differentiate themselves from competitors, attract new customers, and generate additional revenue streams that drive long-term, sustainable growth and profitability. Best of all; Revenew delivers detailed reporting on all payments, regardless of payment flow complexity.

Comprehensive Payments Reporting for Streamlined Operations

Managing payment data and processing fees can be a complex undertaking for online learning platforms. Platforms require real-time access to consolidated reports on collections, margins, fees, payouts, chargebacks, and other key metrics which are not readily available today without a lot of leg-work. From what we’ve seen, manually compiling this data from disparate systems, that takes anywhere from 10 minutes per payment (multiplied by thousands) as evidenced in our recent case-study with a leading B2B Fintech Infrastructure SaaS business, Monite, can significantly slow down operations - not to mention the cost implications. Revenew’s automated reporting tools help platforms simplify this process, allowing them to focus on delivering high-quality educational content rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks. The benefits associated with automated reporting are widespread, but a few of these include:

Error Reduction: By automating the reconciliation of interchange++ (IC++) fees, platforms can minimise the risk of human error in financial reporting.
Time Savings: Streamlined processes mean less time spent on manual reporting, allowing staff to focus on improving course offerings and customer engagement.
Comprehensive Reporting: Revenew provides detailed reports that give platforms a clear overview of their payment activities and associated fees, helping you to define and execute a successful payments strategy.

Complexity Doesn’t Need to Be Complicated

Revenew’s no-code integration capabilities make it simple for online learning platforms to incorporate its tools into their existing technology stack. This ensures that platforms can quickly and efficiently implement Revenew’s features without disrupting ongoing operations:

Connecting Revenew with existing payment processors, like Stripe or Adyen, to enable real-time data synchronisation and automated fee reconciliation. Our no-code integration makes it incredibly simple for platforms to sign up in less than 30 seconds - allowing you to gain detailed insights into the profitability of your payments near-instantly. A video demonstration of the sign-up flow can be found below.
Leveraging Revenew's low-code metadata API to build custom integrations with other business-critical applications to ensure a centralised and streamlined approach to managing payments

By integrating Revenew into their existing technology infrastructure, online learning platforms can unlock the full value of Revenew's tools without the need for extensive development resources or system overhauls. We’ve built Revenew to make signing up as seamless as possible with the process taking less than 60 seconds. Too good to be true? Take a look for yourself in our onboarding video.

It’s Just the Beginning

Embedded payments have unlocked a new era for online learning platforms, where we’re seeing the bulk of revenue being generated from financial services. As platforms add financial services, they not only increase revenue per customer (often by 2-5x according to a16z), but they open opportunities in markets previously deemed too small, or not cost efficient to acquire customers, to be viable. As online learning platforms continue to evolve and expand, having an intimate understanding of your payments’ financial performance becomes a crucial component of your businesses’s viability and retaining customers.

By utilising Revenew’s detailed payment insights and intelligent pricing controls, platforms can significantly improve their financial performance while maintaining focus on delivering exceptional educational experiences. In a landscape where competition is fierce and consumer preferences are rapidly changing, online learning platforms that embrace innovative payment strategies and diversify their revenue streams will be well-positioned for sustainable growth. If you’re an online learning platform and you would like to discuss how we can help level up your payments intelligence, boost your margins and improve your operational efficiency with best-in-class tools, reach out to us by visiting https://revenew.co/contact or send us an email at info@revenew.co.