The internet is an ever expanding market that rapidly grows and with it, the opportunities and scope for more grows exponentially. Very similarly, one such idea was of online learning that has immensely affected and widened the scope of education and broke the confinement of the four walls of the classroom. While the earlier model of education was quite laid out and simple, where children would be seated in a classroom and a teacher would lead the process, the launch of e-learning has not just influenced the process but also bought some major developments. E-learning, in theory is education via and electronic medium, which not only means very low costs and immense accessibility but also a shift towards flexible education solutions. Not only is there an increase in effectiveness because of the animation and such, but students seem to enjoy the process and are like to engage more. The same has lead to the creation of make apps and platforms that could help cater the same and in this article, we would be very closely analyzing one such platform.
How Does Thinkific Work?
Thinkific is one of the best software platforms available in the market that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. They aim at revolutionizing the way people learn and earn online by giving them the tools they need to turn their expertise into a sustainable business that impacts both them and their audience. It is an all in one course platform that empowers anyone to quickly create and deliver stunning courses on their own branded site. They seem to be the perfect one step solution to whatever demand one has- be it to educate your customers, to sell courses to earn revenue or to simply grow your brand and engage your audience. Also, it has been smartly designed for both the the teacher and the student. Nevertheless, here, we would closely study the platform to find out whether it is the best course creation platform.
Features Features: The Comprehensive List of Features Available to Thinkific Instructors
Thinkific has a varying set of features to offer to its users. They vouch for it to be the features you want with the freedom that you need and here we have listed a couple of those.
Thinkific Features: Build Your Courses
They allow you to easily create and customize courses to match your brand. It requires absolutely no coding, making it very easy to launch and upload a course for your school and all you have to do is drag and drop your content and upload it. They support most multimedia course content and assure that the student would be engaged by the rich quality of the same. They encourage videos, texts, surveys, quizzes, discussions, Google Docs and more. Also, they allow you to host 100% of your video content for free.
Thinkific Features: Design your Site
They allow you to build and design your website, that is, you could select from their expertly designed themes, and customize every element to match your brand. You could organise your own content, use your own domain name and go beyond with complete access to HTML and CSS.
Thinkific Features: Market and Sell
Business tools-Their suite of business tools can help effectively market and sell your courses. They have flexible pricing options to match every size and style of business. They also offer membership sites and subscription courses to assure that you have options to package your courses in whatever way you deem best and also that you provide to the students more ways to pay and learn. They also host a variety of promotional features and coupons to boost sales and attract more audience for free trials, upsells, payment plans, and custom first month payments.
Quick and safe payments– They assure immediate payments and charge in more than a 100 currencies. Other than that, they accept all credit cards and assure that their payments are 100% secure.
Targeted campaigns- They curate highly targeted campaigns and send emails to the right people at the right time and provide the best possible support for analytics and ad tracking including Google Adwords, Facebook, and retargeting campaigns. They also assure effortless integration with your favourite business tools.
Thinkific Features: Support your Students —–(features will include subtopic)
High Engagement- They assure to engage your students and provide to you the data of over 16 million students and help delight the students with a rich and learning environment.
Progress and communication- They track progress and make communication easy with the automated progress and reminder emails that you can personalize to match your brand.
Monitor and optimize- Also, the allow you to monitor and optimize your business with group and cohort reporting, detailed segmentation, data exports and more.
Thinkific Pricing: List of Plans
They have a variety of plans to offer and all of the plans are inclusive of their core features that includes – Instant access to your funds, Student notifications, Full e-Commerce, Upsell offers, Easy drag and drop Course Builder, Discussion forums, Build out your entire website, Secure cloud hosting, Multiple instructor profiles, Choose your site language, Easy, built-in SSL certificate and Email and phone support and as the plan upgrades, better and more features are added to the plan. Listed below are all the plans that they offer-
They have a free trial in which they offer 3 courses, unlimited students, quizzes and surveys, content hosting and instant access to your funds, in addition to the core features.
An upgrade to that is the Basic plan which costs 49 USD monthly and it is extremely helpful in the start of the course creation and has all the basic features and tools that one would need to launch their initial courses. Their features includes the free features and with that- Unlimited courses & students, Coupons, Email students, Drip (scheduled) content, Affiliate reporting, Custom domain, Email integrations, Zapier triggers and Manual student enrollment & exports.
Better than that, is the Pro Plan, which is also the most popular plan they have and costs 99 USD monthly. It is perfect for the creators who are ready to build a successful online course business and require a complete suite of tools to create an amazing student experience. They features that come with this includes all the features the Basic plan has to offer and in addition to that, they offer- 2 Site admin accounts, 5 Course admins/authors, Private & hidden courses, Advanced course pricing options, Memberships and bundles, Certificates, Advanced Customization and Priority Support.
Other than that, they have Premier plan which is ideal for advanced customers, who are ready to build an education empire, get all the Thinkific features and the Growth package. It is designed to deliver online education at a huge scale and bears no limitations and comes at the fee of 499 USD monthly. In addition to the features deliver in the Pro Plan, they have- 5 Site admin accounts, 50 Course admins/authors, Single sign on (SSO), Onboarding package and the unlimited growth package which offers access to high-powered features to scale your business on an as-you-grow basis.
If you pay the fee annually, you would be saving 20% and you would have to pay 39 USD for the Basic plan monthly, 79 USD per month, for the Pro Plan and 399 USD each month, for the Premier plan.
Take a Look at Thinkific Pros and Cons
Every coin has two sides, so does Thinkific. They have their set of benefits that makes it stand out and also their set of down-slides that pulls it down. Here, we have put together a comprehensive list of both.
Thinkific Pros:
- The journey that the students seem to have from the landing page to the course completion page, is quite appealing to the users.
- It is very easily customizable and that is a highly appreciated feature, because at the end of the day, each user has to have their own brand. Also, the final look is very professional and engaging at the same time.
- It is very easy to use it, and one does not necessarily have to be a tech savy to create and put up a course. They explain even the most minor details in the video, assuring that the learning curve can be surmounted in a day, at the most. Students too seem to love how using Thinkific is a cakewalk. The interface is very user friendly.
- It provides detailed and easy to comprehend analytics and reports on both your work and the students’. They show exactly how the student progresses and what content they get stuck on.
- They do not hold up your money and you get paid right away, even if it is a free account, so the management of cash flow is not interrupted.
- Their support team is incredibly helpful and responds to everything really quick. They always willingly help to find solutions to the issues and their reply is always clear and coherent.
- They provide an option to create a course for free and also they give you all the tools, that provides one a platform to start with the business with very minimum investment and see if they get far. It is a great medium to test if one wishes to pursue the business further.
- They allow you to host almost anything imaginable including content made on authoring tools.
- They offer unlimited video hosting, even on the free plans and the video player is of the best possible quality.
Thinkific Cons
- The formatting of their system is not necessarily the best and students tend to miss out the training parts at times because of the same.
- They seem to have limited options when it comes to themes and it has a very standard view. The look and feel looks seem humdrum and there are platforms with better aesthetics.
- The marketing platform could appear a little robust and not cater what you expect.
Thinkific Success Stories
Thinkific has been instrumental in helping a huge set of people and their instructors have some very inspiring stories. For instance, Johnathan, who teaches speed reading and memory skills has accelerated learning courses to over 140,000 students in 193 countries and the same continues.
Sunny Lenarduzzi, who has helped 1500 people alter their lives with her online video marketing, says that, “Thinkific really is the best in the business. Since building my course with them, I went from working with 10 clients at a time to being known and found by millions of people.”
One of Thinkific’s users’ is AWeber, an industry-leading marketing and automation platform dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners create automated email campaigns. They aimed at finding a new way to engage current customers, and bring in new ones and settled on Thinkific that helped launch an online course to educate their customer base, which resulted in an increase in the LTV of more than 500 customers and the creation of a new revenue stream.
Another user of Thinkific is the award winning, Entrepreneurs on Fire who teach entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses. They already had an engaged audience and they packaged their training content into an online course which generated thousands of new leads and 50,000 USD in revenue, in less than two months.
Thinkific Payments
They have full e-commerce payment processing and they accept all major credit cards with a simple and secure checkout, and allows you to receive instant access to your funds in your account. Also, they provide an certificate to help ensure that all your data and customer information is secure. Though it is noteworthy that transaction fees may apply if third party payment processors are used.
How to Create Your First Course with Thinkific
Creating a course with Thinkific is quite a breeze and you would be done with it in lesser time than you think. Here, is a guide with each step in brief and if you had rather prefer a video explaining how to create a course on Thinkific, you could head to their website.
For starters, you need to head to Courses on your admin dashboard and select the New Course button on the top right corner and you would see a variety of different kind of courses.
If you already have a course prepared in some format, be it a video, audio, PDF or so, you could go to the Bulk Importer tab of the course builder to upload all of your content at once.
You could include lessons to your course, from the Curriculum tab of the course builder, get started by adding your first chapter, give it a heading and Save.
On hitting Add Content, you would see all the different options for lesson types.
On the Settings tab, you could add information to your course landing page and configure a number of settings for your course.
You need to update the landing page of the course by clicking on the Build Landing Page link in the top right corner.
Then you need to take the final steps before publication like add branding, set your pricing, get ready to get paid, take a run through your course as a student, set a drip schedule and add some upsells.
On completion of that, you could hit the Publish button.
Thinkific Review: G2crowd – 4.7/10
Thinkific is an easy course creation platform that any beginner can use to create courses for their online school. It is very easy to use and flexible while building a course with the e possibility to add different media and create quizzes. The fact that people can have a professional training site for free is highly appreciated. Also, their customer service is excellent and responsive.
Thinkific Review: Capterra- 4.5/5
“Thinkific is everything you need to publish online courses.”
Thinkific is highly appreciated because they are highly customizable and offers lots of webinars and help with all aspects of publishing online courses. Not just that, they offer a couple ways to collect money and the end look is quite professional. There are ample ways to connect with the user through various integrations. Their free plan provides the best of tools at the lowest possible investment.
Thinkific Review: Getapp- 4.6/5
Thinkific allows a person to publish an online course and customize everything, including the price you sell it for. It is very easy to use and they spell out exactly what you need to do and host a lot of Webinars. It results in a very attractive front with very little effort you can customize the branding and even your own site theme. Also, it is mobile friendly for the students.
Thinkific Review: Overall Instruction Review
Final Verdict: We Recommend Thinkific to
Thinkific Alternatives: The Comprehensive List of 10+ Alternatives
References:
https://www.zencourses.co/articles/Thinkific
https://www.quora.com/Was-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-teaching-on-Thinkific
https://foundertips.com/thinkific-vs-Thinkific/
I and my team research various e-learning platforms and can help you choose the right toolkit to get you started. I am just a mail away, so reach out to me if you want to tap into the power of online learning business. mail: [email protected]