Having your marketing website installed in the same environment as your LMS has certain benefits. For example

  • A more cohesive user experience
  • Easier integration of free and paid content to promote upsells.
  • Affordability, it’s more cost-effective to build both marketing and LMS sites at once.

User Experience

Suppose a customer decides to purchase an eLearning course from your company, and they land on the marketing website. Your landing page copy is convincing, and they decide that they’re a great fit for your course. They register for a subscription or add a course to their cart, but somewhere in that journey, something changes.

A sudden change in environment can be jarring to users. For example, a visitor may be asked to log into a separate site where the interface is different from the one on your marketing website. This inconsistency in design between the two sites can cause confusion and increase the likelihood of visitors bouncing off your LMS website. Additional logins, having to constantly go from one web page to another, will slow down the learning process and increase churn.

Although you could achieve a design consistency between both sites and carry user sessions between platforms to create the illusion of a single platform. Building a single solution is undoubtedly the easier and most affordable of the two options. 

Promoting upsells

Having the two platforms integrated can help your SEO through the creation of bespoke course landing pages that offer free or partially free lessons. Students would find your content on the marketing site and seamlessly signup. That is where you could use the reduction in churn to your advantage and introduce learners to higher-tier courses that require investment.

Affordability

When you have two separate installations, it can be difficult to mirror a single user experience. One way to accomplish this is with single-sign-on technology. Or you might consider using purchase data syncing between the marketing website and the LMS to ensure that users’ courses are ready and waiting when they log into their learning dashboards.

However, this split approach is not cheap to develop, and once it’s done, it adds an additional level of maintenance and upkeep.
Read more about this topic in this guide.