In this post, we’ll explore four key ways you can boost revenue and conversions by leveraging TCommerce. Did you know TCommerce users see 22% larger transaction sizes than customers not on TCommerce? Let’s dive in to how you can see the same results!
Skip ahead here.
- Reach new audiences
- Maximize revenue with gifting
- Optimizing conversion rates
- Increase average order value
- Final thoughts
One effective way to drive conversions and maximize your revenue is by reaching new audiences. This means capturing more people in your top-of-funnel efforts.
Assuming your funnel is doing its job to drive people from the top to the bottom toward conversion, more people going into the funnel means more people will reach the bottom—ultimately, it’s just a numbers game.
Easier said than done, reaching new audiences can include several different strategies. So to simplify it a bit, we’ve created two categories for you to consider as you work to drive more people into the top of your funnel.
Drive more traffic
Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) marketing efforts aren’t limited to any one platform. A robust strategy will invest in web, social media, paid ads, affiliate marketing, and more. Here’s a breakdown of each:
- Leverage SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing content or websites for search engine discovery. When people search specific terms (keywords) related to your business, product, or service, you want to show up on the search engine results page.
- Embrace affiliate marketing: Creators with a thriving customer base can engage their existing customers by offering incentives for sales that result directly from their endorsements. For example, if you provide a 10% commission to your affiliates, they will earn 10% from every purchase made through their unique referral link or using their promo code.
- Encourage referrals: Affiliate programs are ideal for creators with large audiences because they capitalize on extensive networks. For instance, a student with a popular blog could earn significant income from a 10% commission by directing traffic to your offerings. However, referral programs are more appealing for everyday users with fewer contacts. These programs motivate small-scale sharing by offering tangible rewards like discounts, gift certificates, or exclusive content to loyal customers.
- Strategize with paid traffic: Paid traffic is exactly what it sounds like, traffic that’s the result of paid ads, boosted posts, sponsored content, and more. Paid efforts are most effective when you have a specific or timely offering that will resonate with a targeted audience. A shotgun approach—one where you aimlessly throw money around to boost posts or publish ads—may increase traffic, but not at the rate of an intentional strategy.
- Leverage social platforms: Social media platforms, like Meta, are eager to take your money. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube are an excellent way to get your brand, message, and content in front of new audiences.
Scale your lead nurturing efforts
Many of the methods we discussed above occur at the top of your marketing and sales funnels. However, they’re not exclusive to the top and often occur throughout.
This category focuses on scaling your lead nurturing efforts with digital assets that typically occur in the middle and bottom of your funnel.
Lead nurturing engagement tactics include (but aren’t limited to):
- Ebooks
- How-to guides
- Templates
- Webinars
- Q&A sessions
- Email marketing
Regardless of which tact you use, there is one central behavior that carries over from category one to category two: offering value.
As potential students travel through your sales funnel, your messaging will naturally become more salesy. However, users in the middle of the funnel still aren’t quite ready to make a purchasing decision. Instead, they’re still looking to learn more about you, about your offering, and about their industry or problem. To accommodate these needs at this stage in the buyer’s journey, you need to focus on delivering value above all, while beginning to introduce your offering as the perfect fit to their needs or problems.
The second tip for maximizing conversions and revenue is to introduce gifting as a checkout option.
A simple search in Google Trends reveals that searches for “online gift” have risen steadily since 2004, with all-time highs occurring during the pandemic and remaining high overall relative to the years prior.
People want to give online gifts in 2024, and course creators can allow them to do that with the help of free online tools like TCommerce by Thinkific. This toolkit is automatically enabled for Thinkific payment users on specified plans and allows online shoppers to gift your digital course to a friend, family, or colleague.
We’ve found that customers who offer gifting at checkout generate up to 6.2% larger transactions—and that’s without changing any other variable. By simply offering the option to gift your courses, you can maximize revenue in just a few clicks.
65% of checkout sessions end before a purchase is made. By streamlining your checkout process and making it easier for customers to complete their checkout session, you can maximize conversions.
Forcing customers to locate their wallet, find the right card, and manually enter their payment info is a quick way to increase cart abandonment. Unfortunately, many course creators do exactly that. So, one of the best ways to streamline your process is by simplifying payment methods.
But with TCommerce, you can offer a friction-free checkout experience by offering flexible payment options. These flexible options include:
- Digital Wallets: One reason forcing customers to locate a physical card for payment harms conversion is because, today, everything is digital. Most students will have some form of a digital wallet, which includes Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, and Link by Stripe.
You can reduce friction at checkout by accepting these payment methods and meeting your customers where they’re at—in the digital age. At Thinkific, we’ve seen that simply enabling Link by Stripe (part of TCommerce) can increase conversion rates by more than 7%.
- Buy Now, Pay Later: With the rising cost of goods and record-breaking inflation in recent years, students are strapped for cash. But that doesn’t mean the demand for online education is stagnant. Instead, it just means students are looking for the option to buy now and pay later (BNPL).
In fact, Forbes found that GenZ use of BNPL methods has grown six fold in recent years, with millennial usage more than doubling. In addition, TCommerce customers who offer Buy Now Pay Later see higher transaction sizes and earn 7.5% more revenue on average.
The final tip for maximizing conversions and revenue is implementing an order bump feature.
Order bumps are an automated process that occurs just moments, sometimes seconds, before the final click in a checkout process. The “bump” refers to the act of suggesting complementary, low-stakes, and low-cost offerings.
The thinking behind order bumps is that the student has already committed to a purchase, so they’re more likely to commit to another smaller purchase that helps them achieve their intended goal or resolve a problem.
Here’s an example of what order bumps could look like for your business.
Thinkific creator Kristen Bousquet offers her Brand BFF course for a one-time payment of $649. She also manages an exclusive membership community, which costs members $44 per month. If Kristen wanted to leverage order bumps, she could offer access to her membership community at only $22 per month, a 50% discount, for new students of her Brand BFF course.
When compared to a $600 course, $22 looks small. So, students who haven’t already added it to the cart may be persuaded, effectively adding to Kristen’s average order value.
Additional tactics for increasing average order value include order bundling and upselling. If students are interested in one digital asset, offer a discounted bundle rate if they add another complementary asset to their cart. Or upsell when students are likely to benefit from a more comprehensive but costly offering.
20% of customers using Order Bumps, one of TCommerce’s features, see a 20% increase in average transaction size. Imagine what a 20% increase in revenue could do for your business.
Final thoughts
There you have it! As we wrap up, remember the four ways you can maximize conversions and boost revenue:
- Reach new audiences by driving more traffic and scaling lead nurturing efforts
- Maximize revenue with digital gifting
- Optimize conversion rates with modern payment methods
- Increase sales and revenue by upselling, cross-selling, and bundling
Available now in the US, Canada, UK, and Mexico, TCommerce is your all-in-one solution for advanced sales tools, seamless payment processing, and effortless tax management so you can simplify and grow your business—hitting on the four methods to growing your online education business discussed in this post.
Start optimizing your educational business today to make the most out of every visitor to your site.
