Background Thinkific Customer Service

If you are promoting Or considering selling courses, you do not have to do much hunting to think of a Thinkific review. There are loads of Thinkific reviews out there. The main difference this one provides is It Is written by someone with: Thinkific Customer Service

More than 20 years experience in the e-learning industry, with a Particular focus on companies that sell schooling (as opposed to, for example, corporate training departments, that do not have to convince their students to purchase )
Extensive experience designing, developing, and implementing online class platforms (I had been the founder and CEO of an e-learning platform and course development firm.)
More than a decade of experience tracking and researching online class platforms and helping individuals and organizations pick the right platform for selling classes

I’ve been Tracking Thinkific and other providers that have emerged as a new class of online course platforms. These are programs that LMSes, or are less expensive and a lot more user-friendly than traditional learning management methods. They’re a blessing for solo edupreneurs and tiny companies that want to enter the course enterprise. As time passes, I think they have real potential to interrupt the learning management system market.

Thus, having said All that, let us begin.

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Building and Presence Your Online Course Web Site

Any courses you Sell have to”live” somewhere, and that someplace supplies an appealing, user friendly for the students and potential students. Since the introduction of its Website Builder capabilities this season, Thinkific is definitely up to the project. Thinkific Customer Service

Using Site Builder — that is simply part of the admin board for the platform — you have the ability to prepare an attractive home page to your course site and make as many custom pages as you need (e.g., to give information about you and your other solutions ). Despite the fact that you don’t have total control — you can not, as an instance, install your own style sheets (CSS) — you do get very good capabilities for modifying branding components like colors and font styles and you can upload just about any type of pictures or media you’d like to utilize.

Website Builder Currently comes with three themes to choose from, and there are variants for each of those themes. (The company says more topics are part of the upcoming development plan.) Additionally, there are a selection of pre-fab”sections” you can insert and change on any webpage to provide for matters like social evidence (e.g. customer quotes or”as seen on” logos), calls for action, count down timer, and pricing choices — essentially, all the essential tools you need for running a successful course or membership site. There’s also a blank slate”media & Text” section which can be used to create pretty much anything you desire.

As is the case With more or less any content management system, it took a while to work out how to do some basic things like delete sections (the themes provide a home page pre-populated with segments ) and include custom pages to the website menu. But support has been readily available for them. Thinkific includes a solid support website on which you are able to search for aid, but I tend to only use a Google search together with the phrase”Thinkific” to discover whatever I need (e.g.,”create custom website pages Thinkific”). I have yet to not find good support by doing this, whether on the Thinkific site or from another user.

Some added Features to note:

Custom URL (under Settings > Website ) — By default, you’re assigned a thinkific.com address — e.g., learningrvolution.thinkific.com. Having a paid plan (beginning at $49 a month for Basic) you can find a customized URL
SSL (Under Settings > Website ) — With any strategy you have the option to turn on SSL (secure socket layer), a best practice for any Web site these days. (Google smiles on this.)
White labeling (below Settings > Site)– By leaping up to a Guru Plan ($99 a month) using the Development Add-on ($.10 per busy student/per month) you can quickly remove the”Powered by Thinkific” language on your website and courses.
Text Dimensions (below Settings > Learning Content and various different areas) — It is possible to change a lot of the default language which is used in navigation and other areas. For instance, Thinkific uses”Chapters” because the label for portions of a program. You may like to change this to”Lessons” Thinkific Customer Service

Thus, you may be asking,”Could I use Thinkific for my primary Web website?”

For edupreneurs Who are only starting off and don’t already have a Web presence the answer is an emphatic”yes.” Utilizing Thinkific is a good way to have a big item off of your”to do” list (i.e.,”figure out ways to find a decent Web site setup”) and concentrate on creating and launch your courses. You can be concerned about a more complicated Web site later.

If you already Have an Internet site, however — especially on a fuller-featured content management system such as WordPress — I would not suggest relying on Thinkific (or some other course platform) for your primary Web site. Website Builder is great for what it does — and can create a great course website to match your main site — but finally it is relatively limited. A few of the key current limitations include:

All motifs are single column. Therefore, as an instance, you can’t put e-mail sign-up types, promotions for course, or other things down the left or right side of your website.
As noted, you can’t apply your own CSS (cascading style sheets), largely a limit in the event that you truly want to reflect the branding of an present Web website.
There’s no control over search engine optimization settings on Internet pages — e.g., you can’t specify the name tags or meta tag descriptions. You , however, do this on course landing pages, which is arguably more significant for the average edupreneur.
Thinkific lacks the abundance of plug-ins and the extensive network of experienced contractors who are available to support platforms such as WordPress.

In spite of those Limitations, Website Builder is likely to perform the work well for many edupreneurs and is quite a little better than what most online course platforms supply.

Creating Online Courses with Thinkific

While you Definitely need to have an attractive, user-friendly website to house your courses, the courses themselves are the main attraction. As you may expect, this is an area where Thinkific really shines.

To Begin with, the Platform provides a variety of pre-configured templates which can be quite beneficial to track builders searching for assistance with how to arrange their content. The templates cover the assortment of standard scenarios you’d be likely to consider for offering an educational product. These are:

Blank — Start new and construct your course to meet your particular program requirements.
Mini-course — Use a free or low-cost mini-course to generate leads for a full flagship course or service.
Flagship Course — Build a full online class employing a strong curriculum outline made with best practices in mind.
Pre-sell — Create a pre-sell landing page and start building a waitlist to gauge interest in your program.
Digital Download — Host downloadable files in an internet course to generate earnings or collect email addresses.
Membership Resource Library — Host downloadable tools to be included in a membership bundle for this template.
Webinar Replay — Host your webinar replay video to allow registrants to assess your presentation and provide.

All of these can Be modified broadly — you can alter the content from the sections that are provided, delete segments, or insert new sections to arrive at the approach that is ideal for your content. All throughout the process, Thinkific provides”smart mentor course building tips” to assist you. (I found them useful, but they may be easily switched off, should you prefer.) Thinkific Customer Service

If you have zero Experience working with Web content, there’ll inevitably be a bit of a learning curve, but my view is that Thinkific has done a fantastic job making that curve as manageable as possible. Invest in earning your way up it, and you will reap the rewards.

And You’re Already comfortable with other Web content systems — like, by way of instance, WordPress or a different course platform — I think you will find working in Thinkific to be a breeze.

Overall, the logic A class in Thinkific makes complete sense from my standpoint. After choosing”New Course,” picking your course type, naming it (which you may change at any stage ), and rescue it, you add”Chapters” (or change ones in the template) to create the structure of this program. As noted above, if you don’t like the term”Chapters,” you can change it to whatever you would like.

You fill the Chapters with articles in a way very similar to the way I described using Site Builder above. There are 11 choices:

Video lessons — Upload a video file. (This gets saved in a video library for re-use in other classes. Videos stored in this library are protected from access by anyone who is not a registered user of your site.)
Classes — Create a quiz for the students. (More information on quizzes under )
Multimedia lessons — This is a way to link out to content not hosted on Thinkific and also make it an integrated part of your program. A Few of the possibilities include:
Webinar tools (supply the link to some live Zoom session, by Way of Example )
Surveys (e.g. Typeform)
Appointment booking tools (e.g. Calendly)
Presentations (e.g. Prezi)
Google Docs
Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate files (Requires Professional or Enterprise license. More on this below)
Text lessons — Combine text, images, videos, etc. into a single lesson. This is essentially the equivalent to”Text and Media” Website Builder alternative discussed above.
Research lessons — Collect information/feedback from your pupils by building a survey in Thinkific.
PDF lessons.
Disqus classes Disqus discussion boards to your program. (Note: there’s also a discussion option built into Thinkific that you may turn on or off under Support Your Students > Discussions.)
Audio classes — Upload an audio file.
Downloads resources.
Presentation lessons — Upload a demonstration as record sound and a PDF document for each slide.
Exam lessons — Contain a Brillium exam on your program. (A Brillium license is separate from Thinkific and starts at $49 a month. More on this below.)

The above options Will find the work done for all but the most sophisticated edupreneurs. The main places they fall short is in

Supplying for branching scenarios — i.e., allowing learners to go down different paths depending on their performances from the course or data you collect about them and
Adding components.

If those are Choices you genuinely need, you would be better off using a full-blown course authoring tool such as iSpring or even Articulate Storyline (see more about these types of tools here). Thinkific Customer Service

Use of Articulate and Captivate in Thinkific

Many course Creators will be perfectly content with using the resources in Thinkific to make courses, but some may prefer the option of producing their classes with third party e-learning class creation software such as Articulate Storyline or even Adobe Captivate.

Why?

Basically, using a Third party tool is an option to seriously think about if you (a) currently have a substantial number of classes built out in one of these tools (in which you probably don’t want to need to re-create them utilizing Thinkific course production tools), or (b) you anticipate developing a substantial catalog of lessons with a relatively long”shelf life” — in which case you might not wish your courses locked to a particular delivery platform.

These can be used by you Kinds of tools with Thinkific — Articulate Storyline and Captivate are supported — but there are some limitations you should be aware of if you go this path.

First, Thinkific (like the rest of the platforms in its own class) hasn’t implemented SCORM, which stands for the Shareable Content Object Reference Model. There’s a lot to SCORM, but the principal thing for edupreneurs to know is that it provides standards for how an internet course can communicate with a learning platform to deliver it information like how much time a learner has spent in a program, or whether specific areas of the class have been finished successfully. Thinkific monitors this kind of data. (More about SCORM here.)

You Can’t Import an Articulate or Captivate course into Thinkific all on your own. These courses are made up of over a single file (such as, for instance, a video file), so to get them into the platform, you have to zip up the files and send them into Thinkific customer service.

The Features and How They Benefit You

An excellent Course building platform typically offers you the features you need from begin to finish. This includes also the teacher/student management, the promotion, the promotion, and also the training course building.

Systems such as Thinkific do not host classes on your own website. Your articles is actually hosted with Thinkific (so that you don’t have to go out and find your personal hosting,) but it still gives you complete control on what your site looks like.

In comparison to Systems like Udemy, Thinkific certainly provides management and more freedom. Let us explore some of the other standout attributes.

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Outstanding Student Management and Communication Modules

During my Thinkific review, I noticed the smoothness of the pupil communication tools. It’s a visual pupil management area, with images of your pupils, titles, contact information, and details for how far they’re in your course.

You’ve got the Choice create a conversation or to send emails that are customized to each of those students. Thinkific Customer Service

Incentives are Also part of this learning environment because Thinkific offers report cards, completion certificates, and of course, the emails for sending out just about whatever you want throughout courses.

Along with Replays of speech controllers, course material, pupils, and optimisation working with the Thinkific platform should feel.

A Mostly Drag and Drop Editor for Quick Course Design

Section of this Motive Thinkific seems great in contrast to this rivalry is that of its course designer. In case you don’t need to, you don’t need to mess with any code.

In Reality, all of Your content is coordinated with a simple drag and drop editor, in which you pile the course content and move it about vertically.

Speaking of Content, Thinkific supports uploads of media forms. From PDFs to sound files, and surveys to quizzes, the stage is fantastic for offering up a wide assortment of learning tools for the students.

As we mentioned Before, every one of these files are hosted on the Thinkific servers. Therefore, you should not need to worry running in your servers that are shared or being too large.

When you customize Your course site it features some editing tools for the beginners out there. You can correct items such as banners, color schemes, and logos without touching any code.

The more, however Advanced developers have complete control over the HTML and CSS. Consequently, if you want to make your site unique, the alternative is there for you.

Promotions on Autopilot

Some online course Platforms fail from the promotions arena. This is unfortunate as there’s no way unless people know your path exists to start making money.

Thinkific does It the right way, with promotional and marketing instruments built into the program. Much of this is automatic also. Consequently, if you’d like to trickle articles to your students–in which courses would be released over time–Thinkific has this operation. Thinkific Customer Service

Furthermore, you Have the ability to target the right people and send emails that are automated based on a schedule. Pricing is done through Thinkific, in addition to the option to get paid immediately when someone signs up for your course.

In Terms of becoming People beyond your site try it out, Thinkific includes an affiliate marketing program to reward bloggers and men and women who recommend your course. Coupons can also be provided through Thinkific, giving you a chance to create ads and convince novices your class is worth investing in.

Everything from Coupons to affiliates is tracked directly in the dashboard, and you can link your Adwords, Facebook, and other accounts to determine where students are coming from.

Handling, Engaging, and Supporting Students

Aside from Allowing you to produce your classes, one of the key reasons for utilizing a specialized online course platform is that it creates monitoring and managing your users and their data a lot simpler.

Communicating with Learners

In addition to Helping you organize your students, Thinkific also enables several ways also for them to provide feedback on the course and for you to communicate with your learners. Thinkific Customer Service

As noted, For instance, you can empower discussion for your classes and manage your pupils gifts under Service Your Students > Discussions, where it is possible to sort discussions by course, react to pupils, and — if desired –“Disapprove” gifts that you don’t want to appear in the course. (Note: Enabling talks is now a nothing option in Thinkific — i.e., either all classes have it or no classes have it. The workaround for this would be to utilize the Disqus option on a course-by-course foundation )

You can also Allow your student to submit reviews for your classes. You then have the ability to approve these reviews (they aren’t printed automatically) and use them as social proof on your sales page for your program. Unlike discussions, this feature can be enabled on a course-by-course basis.

Finally, there are Numerous notifications that can be enabled or disabled at the Thinkific platform, some of which can be personalized. You can, for example, send a message when they register for your site to students, enroll in a course, or finish a course. It is also possible to send out weekly reminder messages. (Note: Reminders are site-wide, maybe not course-specific.)

Managing and Organizing Learners

To Begin with, When a user signs up at your site, Thinkific captures all their key contact data (e.g., first name, last name, email ) and utilizing custom sign-up fields (under Settings > Programs & accounts) you can easily add fields to catch whatever special information you want from your own users. (Notice that, unlike programs such as Udemy, you get complete access to the user information you collect.)

You can also Organize users. This feature may have a large effect on your business model by making it possible for you to sell classes in bulk among the greatest ways for course vendors to drive significant revenue growth, in my experience.

You, using groups May also organize your learners by business, or cohort, time, enrollment, job-type, or other variables, which makes it feasible to track the effectiveness of your offerings and also to enhance your marketing. (Note: Use of the Groups feature requires a Guru plan license with the Growth Add-on.) Discover More about the Thinkific Groups performance Thinkific Customer Service

Tracking and Reporting

A motive to Have a technical online course platform — to just posting content behind a password on a Web site instead, by way of instance — is that it is going to track things like completion and course progress as well as quiz and survey information.

Thinkific’s Progress tracking (under Support Your Students > Progress) enables you to select a particular student and monitor a number of factors for every course in which the pupil is registered. For every course you will see:

Percentage of Course of Viewed
Percentage of Course Completed
Student Name
Student Email
Course Completed in (date)
Course Started at (date)
Course Activated at (date)
Last sign in (date)
Company

I enjoy this you If you are adding new classes to an already completed course May opt to reset the completion percentage of a student at any time, for example.

Overall, the Course reporting is fairly simple, but I guess it will serve the needs of the vast majority of course entrepreneurs.

Contrary to the Program Reporting, the quiz and survey reporting is exported to a .CSV document (instead of displayed on display ) and e-mailed to you. The .csv file contains the answers from all students who’ve obtained a survey a quiz e-mail address, together with their name, and if it was taken by them. For quizzes, in addition, it supplies percentage and the amount .

Overall, reporting For both quizzes/surveys and courses is among the main regions where the Thinkific system might be more powerful. In fairness, this has a tendency to be true for much of most of the platforms in this class of platforms. Ideally, over time, it might be possible to get quiz/survey data and course completion via a Web interface. Better still, it might be good to be able to view a student transcript that shows hours related to a course, any credit earned (not currently captured at all in Thinkific), along with a link to download the certificate related to the course. Thinkific Customer Service

What Thinkific is currently Missing

Anyone who has Been operating in the e-learning industry for the last few years (as I have) will understand that Thinkific offers a remarkable range of features at a really reasonable price. It wasn’t long ago that a system with those capacities may have cost thousands of dollars a year.

With that in mind, It’s hard to argue that Thinkific is”missing” much. There are openings which can rule it out and these all tend to be. The main ones I see are:

No support for SCORM or xAPI/TinCan

As noted above, While Thinkific can host and deliver classes created in common authoring tools like Articulate and Captivate, it does not really take advantage of the SCORM (or even xAPI/TInCan) packaging capacities of these programs. If you have a reason for using one of the major standards, Thinkific would not be the thing to do.

Like I Are areas that, for the most part, aren’t served by additional programs that are in Thinkific’s course. To get a platform which supports all three means a starting price point a few times higher than Thinkific — and it can go a lot from that point. So, be sure that these are gaps for you before ruling out Thinkific.

No continuing education credit capabilities

While you can Indicate the variety of hours for completing a class in Thinkific, you can’t specify the amount of continuing education. While There Might Be work-arounds, for many course providers that focus on providing continuing education credit, this will be a significant barrier to utilizing Thinkific, Thinkific Customer Service

No multi-tenancy alternative

Multi-tenancy Means that you manage and can make a number of instances of a stage. This can be useful if you’re a training company that has corporate clients and those clients want their own branded example of this platform for handling and serving their own users. While the Group functionality in Thinkific makes you a part of the way there, it isn’t the same thing as multi-tenancy.

Cost

Although I To find an internet course platform which has hidden charges, Thinkific advertises it too has no hidden charges or contracts. That is good to know, however, nothing special.

However, Thinkific Does provide a totally free plan for people who wish to test the platform out but not get bogged down by constraints. In theory, it helps you start your store and start building a pupil base. If you give one of the plans a whirl there is also a free trial.

The pricing is Divided into four simple strategies:

Starter — $0 for many core Thinkific features. This strategy has a high transaction fee, all you need to create, market, and market your classes, infinite courses, course upsells, content hosting, basic integrations service, and access to all funds.

Essentials — For $49 per month you get all center and starter features, together with a 5 percent transaction fee, coupons and promotions, monthly subscriptions, course bundles, intermediate integrations, fundamental Zapier, trickle articles, affiliate reporting, a majority student emailer, customized domain, along with extra course prices. Thinkific Customer Service

Business — For $99 per month you get the attributes from all prior plans, no transaction fees, completion certificates, private and hidden courses, website white tagging, a host narrative, intermediate Zapier, webhooks, three-course admin accounts, innovative HTML/CSS editing, priority service, instructor payout coverage, an onboarding call, payment strategies, and a direct Infusionsoft integration.

Advanced — For $279 per month you receive all attributes from prior programs, no transaction fees, one sign-on (SSO), three site admin accounts, 10-course admin accounts, an onboarding professional, onboarding package, public API, innovative integrations, and innovative Zapier.

Thinkific has some Fantastic advantages to its pricing layout. Not only can you begin your course at no cost (something that’s not offered with competitors like Teachable,) but the extra three plans are broken down in a logical manner.

After all Most likely do not need API accessibility until you start becoming advanced with your path selling.

I wouldn’t mind Seeing the completion certificates and the HTML editing however $99 per month is not that bad.

As you can see, The transaction fees are 10% for the program that is free. That’s high, but it creates an atmosphere for individuals who don’t have the capital to launch a professional online store or anyone who have low volume right now. Once you get started earning money that transaction fee can be cut down by you.

You can By paying on an annual basis, Save money. If you pay it all upfront, the snowball strategy goes down to $39 per month. The Business program is $79 a month and the Advanced program is 219. That makes the pricing plans quite much like Teachable.

Wrap-up

I’ll finish this Thinkific review where I started: this is. Hopefully it’s clear by now that it offers a complete range of the most essential features to encourage your edupreneur in selling classes that are online.

I think it is also Important to replicate as I wrap up that Thinkific is a business with a lot of momentum. This is not a point: the market for online course platforms like Thinkific is noisy and crowded. You can be certain that a lot is going to be gone tomorrow. I feel confident that Thinkific will be about, and the organization is clearly growing and always investing to boost its platform. Thinkific Customer Service