February has been full of flowers, heart-eye-emojis, and some great new Thinkific features and training! We want your students to fall head-over-heels in LOVE with your courses and their learning experience.
Creating student success is more than just great looking and sounding content. Designing a smooth curriculum and building out your course in Thinkific was our focus this month for development. That meant prepping your course website for some serious upgrades in the coming months.
On top of that, we aim to save you time and give you everything you need to know to prepare for the rest of the year with an updated integration, and more free training for course creators.
New Free Training and Resources
This year’s trends in marketing online courses
Did you miss our live training last month on the top trends for course creators this year? That’s okay! We’ve turned it into a brand new blog post designed to catch you up.
Change can be a course creators best friend or worst enemy depending on how far ahead of it you are. Tyler Basu rounds up the best ways for you to market an online course as we shift away from the Information Age and into the Transformation Age. Learn more about community building, pricing strategies, and fine-tuning a customer experience in his latest.
Later switched from webinars to online courses
Later.com, a fellow Vancouver tech company with a platform dedicated to Instagram marketing, changed how they onboard their customers with Thinkific forever. After four months using an online course instead of a webinar to help customers get the most out of their product, they increased retention rates by 320%!
Great user onboarding is a powerful way to make sure customers are finding value with your products or services. Online courses can help you keep more of the customers you fought to land in the first place.
We’re opening up our doors to course creators!
A little while ago, Halley Gray, of Evolve and Succeed, showed up at the old Thinkific HQ in the Railtown neighborhood of Vancouver. We set her up with a desk and co-worked with her throughout the day. That turned into a four hour Facebook Live session where Halley showed you how to build a course from scratch in our studio!
That got us thinking, and now we have a way for anyone who’s in our new neighborhood to stop by to meet the team, work on your business, and catch a few social media minutes. You can now book a co-working day here at Thinkific HQ!
Follow each Thinkific Instagram takeover
So far we’ve had Jessica Moorhouse, Xayli Barclay, Elizabeth Rider, Michael O’Neal, Halley Gray, and Brian Fanzo take over our Instagram account to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what being a professional online educator means.
We’re following up with more takeovers by Dr. Carrie Rose & Lechon Kirb (starting today!), Fiona Humberstone and Sunny Lenarduzzi. Be prepared to get schooled by the kings and queens of online education, personal branding, and video marketing!
What’s new to Thinkific?
Add Logos and Change Fonts in Your Course Player
In the spirit of giving you complete control over your Thinkific course site, we’ve unlocked a couple of customization options for your student experience.
You’ll now notice a gear icon in your My Courses section of the Admin Dashboard that will let you add a logo image and change the font in your Course Player (where students access your course content)!
Learn more about customizing here »
Redesigned Bundle & Course Builder
In anticipation of some exciting new updates to come, we’re redesigning parts of Thinkific to help you manage the workflow of creating products like courses and bundles.
These makeovers help you understand where to go to create and make edits in the course builder and the bundle builder. Explore the changes by logging into your Thinkific course site and editing a course or bundle!
Learn more about creating courses here »
Build Great Courses with Smart Coach
Creating a great course means understanding how students in online courses actually learn. Learning instructional design can be a four-year university degree, and we know you don’t have that time on hand, so we’re adding a few new features to help take the guesswork out of curriculum design.
Thinkific Smart Coaches appear (based on your course content) to help you take advantage of best practices and ensure maximum student success, like this tip from Yinyi.
Keep an eye out for the team in the Course Builder — remember, we’re always here to help.
Other amazing releases this February
We’re also hard at work building out tiny wins for you and your students in Thinkific. This month we released some updates to enable you to automate more of your workflow:
New Zaps Available
Course creators love using Zapier to automate their workflows to free up time. So, we’ve added new zaps to help you automate more:
- You can now search your user base as a part of your Zap. This is helpful when you only want to perform actions on specific users.
- You can also now unenroll students from courses automatically. Pair this action with triggers like failed subscription payments, for example.
Webhooks API (Beta)
If you’re looking for advanced integrations, for the first time, you can now use Thinkific’s Webhook API on the Business plan or higher. (Heads up: it gets pretty techy from here on out!)
What’s Happening at Thinkific HQ?
What does 10-stars feel like?
Our Director of Customer Experience, Veronica Howes, ran a brainstorm session (based on this method) with our customer support team to dream up ways we could improve the experience of being a Thinkific course creator.
Carnival in… Vancouver?
We celebrated the Brazilian holiday of Carnival this month by sharing brigadeiros, quindim, and a little cachaça with the team and their families! Did you know, 1 in 5 Thinkific engineers are Brazilian? Saúde!
That’s it for February!
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next month for another round-up of the best Thinkific has to offer.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we develop features, resources, or what we’ve been up to, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
