Today, I’m going to review one of the biggest platforms for online course creations and membership sites – Thinkific.com. This is one of the most popular platforms that is being used by a lot of marketers. They provide a lot of options.
It’s a one-stop-shop If you want to sell online courses or create membership sites. They host your products. They do provide a lot of options for you. And we’re going to do a deep review. We’re going to talk about the pros and cons and as usual, I will go ahead and discuss also who I think This platform is more suited for, so let’s go.
Pros
Customer support: they do have a customer service number that you can call them.
I always value the option to communicate with the service that I’m using for my business. And if you are able to speak with humans it is even better. But just to be honest here, I did attempt to call the number but at the time I’m doing this video, there is a lot going on in the world so, they are being impacted also.
They are directing everyone to just sending them an email. But they do have that phone number option if you have a presale question.
They offer all the tools that you need to create and market online courses: landing pages, checkout pages, everything is basically there for you.
It’s a one stop shop.
Your students have the option to track their progress.
In each lesson you have the option to add a discussion form for your student to communicate with you or between themselves.
A search bar : so that students can search for lessons.
students also have the option to leave reviews on each course: And you can take those reviews and add them to your sales page, social media platforms as a social proof.
You have the option to create quizzes at the end of each lesson: you can have a bunch of questions and add them in a question bank, from which the quiz will extract different questions for each student so that each assessment is unique.
You have the option to drip your content.
They offer you a lot of flexibility as far as how to set up your pricing plan for your students: You have the option to include a free trial period or put an upfront fee, then the customer gets charges, regular rates. You can add a payment plan. Those options are only available with the pro package.
You have the option to create membership bundles and coupons.
You have the option to email directly your students within their own platform.
You have the option to add contributors teachers in your course, and you will be able to share the revenue directly from thinkific.
You can create courses in all the formats that you can think of. Video, PDF, text downloads they host all the files for you and you don’t have to pay for hosting.
They provide you the options to use affiliates to be able to sell your product and they give you all the tools that you need to manage them.
They integrate with a lot of tools: Shopify ,zap, Google analytics etc.
One of the biggest features that they have that a lot of platforms lack, is the fact that you can create a certificate of completion for your students. When a student completes your course, you can provide him with a personalized certificate with his name on it.
Their setup is really easy to use, self-explanatory: you don’t need to struggle a lot to find out All the tools that they have. It’s really clean. I really like the workflow. When you try to create your courses, everything is simple. It’s not complicated. Everything is linked to the way it’s supposed to.
Cons
With the $49 package, you still have the thinkific branding on your pages. For me, if I’m paying for a service, I understand if they show the branding on the free package, but if you start to charge me money, I don’t think you should put some type of branding on my pages that isn’t my own branding. on that, on that package.
Also for the growth package, you pay $99 a month, there is no fee for the first hundred students. But after that you get charged 10 cents per student after the first hundred. So if you have more than a hundred students, you basically get charged an extra 10 cents. And that’s like a transaction fee. I don’t know why because it does mention ,on the pricing page, that it is unlimited students.
But then it also says that they charge you 10 cents per extra student after you cross a hundred students. To me it’s kind of a contradictory statement here because if it’s unlimited courses and students, then I should not get charged after I pass a certain threshold.
And I can understand if you say, well, if you have more than a thousand students or 2000 students, then you have to pay extra. That’s fine. But just a hundred? I just think that that’s a limited number for a $99 per month price.
They don’t have fully premade landing pages for your funnel: they offer you different themes to download but you will have to tweak the design yourself.
So you have to add the different sections yourself and build your pages and website yourself. Which is fine If you are someone who has been doing marketing, been building websites .Or if your business is at the level where you can pay someone to build pages for you. I really wish that they had pre-made templates.
Now I’m going to discuss who this platform is for and who I personally think. This is not going to be a good platform for.
So this platform is for you. If you are an online course creator or if you are someone that is trying to create a membership site it does not really matter whether it’s a beginner or an an expert marketer, if you don’t have a following or you have a huge following. It gives you all the options that you need for online course creation or also creating a membership site.
And it’s also great for you if you want to collaborate with different course creators to be able to create one course together. They give you all the options that you need to be able to create the course with the different instructors, and also make it easy to split the revenue.
Now people who will struggle with Now who I think was struggling with thinkific are new online marketers who don’t have the knowledge of the talent to build convertible landing/sales pages. They don’t offer pre-made templates, so you have to build your pages with the themes that they offer you. You will also not like this platform if you are a marketer who loves A/B testing marketing funnel because it doesn’t have those functionalities.