Whether you’re looking to teach someone how to wrestle a crocodile (which we do not recommend!) or you have a PhD in Quantitative Mathematics, we all could use some help with improving how we deliver the content we’re passionate about.
I work as a Customer Success Manager supporting our Thinkific Plus clients, and one way that I’ve seen course creators transform their businesses is with the Thinkific App Store.
I’ve seen firsthand how the 80+ apps available today can enable creators to set up advanced marketing funnels, effective lead magnets, interactive learning scenarios, gamification, and so much more. Apps add value to your business by saving you time on administrative tasks, and they can help improve content by confirming where your students are engaging the most.
So, which are the apps that you absolutely need to level up your online academy?
When I go to a restaurant I ask the waitress or waiter: “What is the most popular meal?” instead of “What do you recommend?”
The reason why might be subtle, but it’s because the way I phrase my question significantly impacts the type of response I get. I want to crowdsource my information on the best meal and not rely on one person’s taste buds to make my selection. In this metaphor the waiter or waitress at the restaurant.
To get you the best possible answer, I polled our team of Launch Specialists and Customer Success Managers and asked them: “What apps do you think are some of our customers’ favorite and most effective apps?”Then, I took a look at the apps suggested in the app store, and searched for the ones with the most installs across all of our Thinkific sites. I curated the information I gathered from my poll with my team and in my search through the Thinkific App Store, and distilled it down into this list.
6 steps to level up your online academy with the Thinkific App Store
Where does your student’s learning experience begin?
It starts with attraction, love, or (perhaps in this case) interest at first sight.
Attracting Students
Your content is great. You have put in time and effort to create quality content and have the charisma of a slightly over caffeinated chihuahua. Now what? How do you do to get eyeballs on your expertise?
Prove Source Social Proof: ProveSource allows you to add real time notifications to your Thinkific Site. Whether you want to showcase reviews from Google, Facebook, Trustpilot or show recent purchases or signups, this app is a great way to provide social proof and show your prospective students and customers that you can be trusted and that your content is valuable to others!
Enroll More
Your customers and students are intrigued by your content, your charisma and have been exploring your courses. How do you move them into Thinkific and make it feel like they are landing on the soft cloud of the mind melding experience you have promised them?
Poptin: Sometimes your students may need a little extra incentive or perhaps a bolder call to action to bring them over the finish line. Poptin helps with that! With this app, you can create fully customizable and engaging pop-ups, forms and autoresponders that engage your prospective students and convert them into your students. The best part? They also have a free plan to get you started!
Sell more — all at once
As you scale, those that you sell can go from students to businesses and you’ll need to be able to support their needs – in bulk. A simplified, seamless checkout experience is a must as it means less friction for your volume buyers—removing barriers to making the sale.
The Group Orders feature from TCommerce does just that by making selling and managing multiple course seats a breeze. With the feature, you can sell multiple seats for your courses to a single buyer, offer tiered pricing and volume discounts to encourage more sales.
Engage
Your students have now enrolled in your course and are ready to go. But the paraphrased adage “the path to failure is laid with good intentions” is very fitting at this point in your student’s journey.
As a business or course creator, it’s important to ask yourself how you can keep your students engaged as they are working through the learning materials in your course. Intentions are fleeting, and having consistent touch-points to keep your students engaged and motivated throughout your course can be transformational for their learning experience. And plaYEAH! helps you move students through your courses with consistent touchpoints and keeps them engaged.
plaYEAH!: Who doesn’t like animated confetti when they finish a course? plaYEAH! is the type of app that will give your students all the dopamine hits they can handle.
plaYEAh! allows you to create and customize:
- Rewards and to gamify your course content
- Progress Based Triggers
- Timely Pop-ups
- Animations and GIFS
There is so much that you can do with plaYEAH!. By creating personalized pop-ups and customizing your course player, you will be able to increase course completion and student engagement. Having consistent touch points in your content will also allow you to start tracking and obtaining more information on your student’s behaviors and preferences. You can’t be there for every student to remind them how awesome you and your course are – but plaYEAH! can.
The best part of this app, though? It’s a one-time payment!
Thinking of making the switch to Thinkific Plus? Make the transition seamless with our Migration Checklist:
Analyze
Now that you’ve gamified your content, tracked student engagement and learned more about their behaviors, it is time to refine your content, landing pages and course curriculum.
The best way to determine what changes need to be made to your content, landing pages and curriculum is to use reliable and quantitative data points to understand student behavior. To make small changes that have a big impact, you need to be precise with your decisions and make small changes.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is by having good analytics around student behaviors.
The Google Analytics app integrates with your Thinkific site and can help you create detailed reports to help you understand student behaviors. It’s great and it’s free!
However, one of the most popular apps amongst all the apps (not just analytical apps) I recommend to clients is:
Mixpanel: Mixpanel allows you to run several types of reports to learn more about your students and customers such as:
- Insight: Segment and filter events and user counts
- Funnels: Understand user conversion and drop-off by measuring user progress
- Flows: Analyze how users move through your site
- Retention: Identify how many users come back over time
Celebrate
Finishing a task, project or perhaps a course is a big accomplishment. Your students and customers are investing time and money to make themselves better. Whether that be to become a contributor to society, or a better parent, sibling, child, role model, or employee.
That’s pretty fantastic! Let’s celebrate it. And who doesn’t enjoy the random excuse to party like it’s 1999?
Accredible: Accomplishments should be celebrated, and Accredible allows your students to:
- Share their verified certificates on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
- Add their certificates to their digital wallets for easy access, for when they need to show their certificates while out and about.
A big plus? These certificates provided by Accredible can be verified using bank-level encryption and blockchain technology.
Giving your students certificates that are unique to them and that they are able to share to land a job, get a promotion or prove they have the skill set to get the job done is a really great way to add value to your students’ and customers’ lives.
There are many other great apps in the Thinkific App Store that will help you improve your online academy and grow your business depending on your goals and use case.
Take your time, do your research, and you will find an app that meets your business needs and more importantly improves your students’ learning experience.
Whether apps improve your business process or student/customer learning experience there is one thing that they can do that is universal: They change the way people feel and interact every day in an online learning community and help change the way people feel about themselves and what they are accomplishing.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ― Maya Angelou
Are you ready to level up your online academy and take your business to its next phase of growth?
With Thinkific Plus, you can build, design, market, and host dynamic and engaging online courses that are easily accessible to your customers. Thinkific Plus is a scalable platform that is simple to maintain, seamlessly integrates with your existing software, and is customizable for your brand needs. Schedule a call to try it for free.
