With the tremendous shift the education sector has seen, virtual classrooms helping education reach the remotest of places, the all-in-one technology platform for online learning, Edmingle, is thriving.
One of the largest challenges facing online education institutions is the lack of infrastructure to get courses going—this usually results in relying on a third-party service provider with additional costs for maintenance and support. Edmingle, founded in 2016, solves this problem by empowering educational institutions and individual trainers quickly set up their courses online and promote via their website, growing their online student community.
Since Edmingle caters to two different set of customers, educational institutions shifting to an online model and and individual trainers promoting their brand, they have a specific set of needs. And because they offer their services on a recurring basis, Gaurav Doshi, founder and CEO, decided subscription-based pricing was the best fit for their business model.
At the time, Doshi's team was using a cloud-based invoicing tool for their billing but they only had one flat pricing plan. As they scaled up and started offering multiple plans, Doshi started looking for a dedicated subscription management application to automate their billing and save time.
Since Doshi was already using Zoho People and Zoho Payroll for their HRMS operations, he was aware of Zoho's solution for subscription management and started using Zoho Billing.
First off, Doshi created multiple plans, add-ons, and a few test subscriptions to ensure the app fulfilled their core requirements.
I was really impressed by Zoho Billing' clean and no-nonsense interface. Whenever I had questions, the Zoho Billing team was ready to answer. We looked no further.
- Gaurav Doshi, Founder & CEO, Edmingle
Once Edmingle started using Zoho Billing, it only took about a week to get started. Doshi and his team imported their existing customer subscriptions and customized their templates and all other customer touchpoints to provide a unique checkout experience. "The Zoho Billing team was super friendly and ensured that our onboarding experience was seamless," Doshi said.
In terms of their pricing model, Edmingle offers a freemium option and four paid tiers. For all paid plans, customers can choose from three different billing frequencies: Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly.
Customers sign up for the free plan to evaluate Edmingle. Once they decide to purchase, a subscription is created with Zoho Billing and an invoice is sent. The customers can then pay online instantly with the Zoho Billing - Razorpay integration.
A few months back, Doshi's team faced an interesting challenge: They learned that some of their customers did not have enough budget for higher pricing plans but wanted access to one or two premium features. They had to find a way for their customers access to those features without detaching them from the higher plans completely.
Doshi found a solution to address this quickly: He converted those sought-after features as recurring add-ons in Zoho Billing, and associated them with lower plans so their customers can choose a plan that best fits their needs and select other features as add-ons without too much more spend.
Furthermore, when Edmingle was fully ready to scale up their operations, Doshi decided their customers should be able to visit their website, look at the pricing tiers, pick a plan, and upgrade themselves by completing their payment online. To ensure they had everything in place to switch to this self-service model, their team started testing Zoho Billing' APIs and webhooks thoroughly, and they were impressed with the clarity of Zoho Billing' API documentation.
"Very soon, we are going to list our pricing plans on our website where customers can subscribe and onboard themselves through secure hosted payment pages. I firmly believe that Zoho Billing is going to provide us a huge value as we scale our operations and venture into new markets," Doshi said.
Doshi and his team love Zoho Billing as it allows them to grow their customer base rather than wasting hours on trivial tasks. In addition, Doshi pays very close attention to the metrics that Zoho Billing offers to monitor their business growth and market trends, and therefore make more informed decisions.
Edmingle has grown 10x in the past three years, and Zoho Billing' played a crucial role in it. Personally, it saves me at least 90 hours a month that would have been spent on manual billing processes and follow-ups, which is the biggest ROI I get from Zoho.
