My name is Denise Davis and I am one of the dedicated Customer Success Managers here at Thinkific. My role is to support our Plus clients and help them see success on our platform. My portfolio is made up of a wide variety of sectors, consisting of creators in various industries. I support clients with their Thinkific sites and courses in the B2B, B2C and internal employee training spaces, but my passion is supporting revenue-generating opportunities, and helping entrepreneurs and companies see a return on their investment in Thinkific.
I wanted to share some best practices that I feel help course creators reach new audiences and grow their course sales. Below, you will find 5 different strategies that I encourage my clients to try when it comes to creating buzz around their Thinkific offerings and acquiring new customers.
1 . Create urgency and maximize conversions with a “Flash Sale”
You’re probably wondering, what is a flash sale? A flash sale is a discount or promotion offered for a limited duration of time! For you as a course creator, offering a “flash sale” could look like offering 20% off an all-access membership using a coupon code at checkout.
These short-term sales can be excellent opportunities to increase conversions and sell more of your courses to both new and existing customers. A great way to implement this on your course site is to lean on Thinkific’s Coupons feature. Flash sales have been quite successful for some of my Thinkific Plus clients who use the platform to generate revenue and are looking to drive conversion for various holidays or celebrate business milestones such as when they hit one year of selling courses online or launch a new product.
Learn more about working with the Customer Success team by watching this on-demand session.
2. Invest in Ads
Promoting your courses is necessary to gain a return on your investment, expand your audience, and increase conversions. Businesses I have worked with before through Thinkific Plus have leveraged Facebook, Google and Youtube ads to reach more customers depending on their target audiences.
I encourage online course creators looking to grow their business to ask themselves the following questions before starting an ad campaign:
- Where does my audience spend the most time? Which platforms can I find my most engaged audiences on?
Asking yourself this question is often a good place to start when considering where to invest and spend your advertisement budget. This looks different for each client, depending on how they use Thinkific, and where their target audience hangs out so while there isn’t a specific example to share- I would suggest checking out these interesting articles that dive more into various Ad strategies for more information.
Learn more: Scale your online course business using Facebook and YouTube Ads to generate qualified leads.
3. Increase trust with Social Proof
Social proof sections are a great way to demonstrate to visitors that your courses provide real benefits and that other students have already taken your courses and found them to be valuable on your site. They help build trust in your brand and create enthusiasm for your products.
Testimonials are a form of social proof and are an awesome way to showcase your past user’s experiences and increase trust with those shopping around your business for new courses and learning products. It’s an effective conversion tactic that builds trust with your audience and costs you little to no resources.
Social proof is often one of the first details I look for when working with new clients and when conducting audits of my client’s Thinkific sites. As a business and course creator, it’s a quick win for you that takes little to no work to set up and has an extremely positive impact on a buyer’s decision-making.
Learn more: How to maximize conversions on your course site by incorporating Social Proof
4. Leverage Social Media to drive traffic to your site
Course creators and businesses that I work with often wonder about the expected Return Of Investment of a social media strategy. Implementing a social media strategy is something I often touch on with my Thinkific Plus clients if their main goal for their online academy is to generate revenue for their business.
As a course creator and business owner, it can be easy to wonder if your Facebook page is effectively driving sales or if your Instagram presence is worth investing in.
I like to position social media strategy to my clients as an opportunity to drive traffic and sales to their site by tapping into influencer networks to expand their reach, connecting with potential customers and building brand awareness through their content, as well as providing customer support.
Your social media strategy will vary depending on the nature of your business and course content, but from a holistic perspective, I suggest exploring this avenue when looking at additional streams of marketing for your business.
5. Send the right message, at the right time to your customers with email marketing
Email marketing and automation are critical to reaching your customers on a sequenced and ongoing basis. Luckily, the Thinkific App Store has direct integrations with tools such as ActiveCampagin, Mailchimp and ConvertKit to help you deliver the right message to your customer at the right time to drive sales and increase your conversion rates.
Email marketing automation is a tool and process that allows you to automate manual tasks related to how and when you communicate with your customers/ students. Once you’ve set up an automation on your e-mail marketing platform and turned it on, the automation will run on its own whenever it’s triggered by a customer.
For example, when a customer subscribes to your mailing list, you can create an automation in your e-mail marketing platform for them to immediately receive a welcome email offering them a discount on various courses and products on your site.
Take your online learning business to the next level
If you’re spending much of your time trying to reach new audiences and expand your course sales, you want to make sure that one of your main focuses is driving traffic to your site, and these 5 tactics I shared are effective methods to do so!
Selling more courses takes time, effort, and applying different tactics to see a return on your investment. I often lean into the methods mentioned above, and beyond with my Plus clients to help them strategize for business growth and expansion.
Working with a Customer Success team member allows you to receive dedicated 1-1 support, industry expertise, advice on best practices, and ongoing accountability as you continue your journey of growing your business with online learning.
Meet your new members today and find out more about how Thinkific Plus can help your business scale!
