We’ve prepared this workbook to help you make the move to Thinkific smoothly.
So, you’re moving your online education business to the Thinkific platform? That’s great! Lots of people have made the move and discovered how easy it is to create, market, and sell their online courses with Thinkific. In this workbook, you’ll find an easy step-by-step checklist that will help you transition smoothly to the Thinkific platform. Click the download link or follow this guide to get started!
In this Guide:
Welcome to your Thinkific Migration Guide
Milestone 1: Create your course in Thinkific
Milestone 2: Pricing your online course
Milestone 3: Brand your course website
Milestone 4: The final touches
Milestone 5: Migrate your students and relaunch
Welcome to your Thinkific Migration Guide
This workbook is separated into Milestones and Steps. Each Milestone is a major achievement for you in your migration journey. Follow the steps under the milestone to reach each one. Throughout the workbook, there will be links for you to find additional how-to help and other resources.
Milestone 1: Create your course in Thinkific
Step 1. Import your course content
You’ve already got your curriculum and content, now it’s time to move it on over! This can seem like a daunting task, but don’t worry. Our Bulk Importer is the easiest way to move all of your existing content into Thinkific. After you import your content. We recommend you start by relaunching an existing product or products to test the Thinkific platform with your existing customers. This is also great for gathering initial feedback. To start your relaunch, you first need to bulk upload your existing curriculum!
Looking for step-by-step video tutorials on how to create your course? See our Fast Track Training!
Create a new online course
Create your course with Thinkific using the Thinkific Course Builder. These resources will guide you on how to navigate your Course Builder, how to create and publish your course, and how to choose the lesson template that best suits your content.
Upload media lessons using the Bulk Importer
If you already have video, audio, or PDF lesson content created, you can speed up your course creation by uploading everything at once using our Bulk Importer.
Create other kinds of lessons
Lessons are the structure in which you divide and present your learning material to your audience. Learn more about the variety of content and lesson types you can use within your Thinkific course.
Preview and test your student experience
Preview your course and site as a student at any stage of your course creation process!
Step 2. Optional: Customize your course
We believe the only way to build a sustainable course business is by truly caring about the success of your students and focusing on ways to craft the best learning environment. We help you achieve this in Thinkific by developing features designed to make that easy. Here are some optional features Thinkific includes that you might want to explore as you are migrating your courses.
Student Engagement Options
On-Lesson Discussion
Thinkific's On-Lesson Discussion allows you to enable discussions for each lesson of your course(s) individually. With Thinkific's On-lesson discussions, you can engage your students and foster community in your courses.
Student Communities
Use Thinkific Communities to engage your students in meaningful conversations — both with yourself, the course creator, and with each other. Use Communities to help drive engagement and keep your students around longer.
Course Progress Options
Drip Schedules
Drip Scheduling allows you to schedule the release of your course content over time.
Prerequisites
Prerequisite lessons make sure students complete all prerequisites before moving ahead in your course.
Quiz Completion Percentage Required
If you want to ensure students are acing your quizzes, you can choose to require a quiz passing grade.
Video Completion Percentage Required
Prevent your students from skipping ahead in a course by ensuring that they watch your course video to your desired completion percentage.
Course Completion Options
Completion Page
A custom course completion page gives you the power to customize the messaging and visuals students see when they complete their course. This is a great opportunity to drive students to one of your other courses, link them to in-person seminars you are promoting, or direct them to physical products you're selling on your site.
Certificates
Reward and motivate your students by issuing Thinkific Certificates or Accredible Certificates upon course completion!
If you are looking for more options to customize your course, you can check out the Learning Experience and Engagement & Assessment categories in the Thinkific App Store.
Milestone 2: Pricing your online course
Step 1. Price your online course
You can recreate your course pricing on Thinkific after connecting with a payment processor. Thinkific has flexible pricing options to make migrating your pricing schedule quick and easy.
If you want to brush up on course pricing strategies, now’s a great time! Read our guide on course pricing to get a few new ideas.
Integrate with a payment processor
You must set up your payment processor before you can set a course price. Thinkific supports several different payment processors. All our processors have one-time payment options but if you want to set up subscriptions or payment plans, they are only available through Thinkific Payments or Stripe.
Add your primary price for your course
Choosing the pricing for your course can be tricky. You need to strike a delicate balance in finding a price that people are willing to pay, without devaluing the work you’ve put in and the perceived worth of your content.
Set enrollment expiry
When an enrollment duration is set, any student who enrolls in your course through the Thinkific checkout will automatically lose access to your course after the number of days specified in your enrollment duration settings. Enrollment duration is optional and set at a per-price level.
Publish your course
Courses will not be visible on your site until they are published. When you are ready to start accepting enrollments, you can publish your course.
Step 2. Optional: Add more pricing options
If you’re looking for something beyond setting a course’s price to be free or a one-time fee, you can explore these optional pricing features to offer more:
Set your course pricing to be a recurring subscription
The subscription payment option allows you to take recurring payments for your course via Thinkific Payments or Stripe. Subscriptions are based on monthly or yearly billing periods and the student’s billing date will be based on the day of the month that they sign up.
Set your course pricing to be a payment plan
Using our payment plan feature, the pricing for your product can be split into automatically collected, monthly payments. This is a time-tested way to provide your course at a more affordable rate per month and increase your sales.
Add additional pricing options for your course
You can use additional pricing to create more than one pricing option for your course or bundle. If the price point is high for your course, you might want to offer a payment plan that breaks up the cost of the course over a few months!
Set lessons to be a part of your free preview
Free Previews provide your students a sneak peek into your course lesson before prompting your student to purchase your course.
Create a coupon to discount your course’s price
Utilizing coupons to offer discounted pricing is one of the most effective methods to promote your online courses and increase sales.
Sell multiple courses as a package with Bundles
Course Bundles allow you to sell multiple courses in a single package by bundling related courses together at a discounted price.
Milestone 3: Brand your course website
When you sign up for Thinkific, you get a customizable website to sell your online courses. If you have your own sales pages and don’t wish to use your Thinkific website, you can skip Step 1 below.
Step 1. Choose a theme and recreate your pages
Themes are collections of styles that control how all parts of your Thinkific website look to site visitors and student users. You can select a Theme for your site and make it live by selecting the Publish button. Next, you can edit your homepage and course landing pages. Thinkific’s landing pages offer lots of section choices for course information including instructor bios, curriculum overview, bonuses, upsells, and more.
Use Unsplash or Pexels to find free stock photography. Use Canva to create images and other designs for free.
Preview and select a theme from the Theme Library
Choosing a theme with Site Builder is simple. Each theme is fully mobile responsive and has been crafted and refined to look great with many different types of content. If you want to see more detailed examples of each theme and style in action, check out our Sample Theme Sites!
Edit your theme settings: styles, colors, and fonts
Theme Settings allow you to have full control over the look and feel of your site pages. This is the perfect place to apply branding and accent colors, styles, and typography across every element of your site, making it truly your own.
Edit your home page
A striking home page is a great way to draw potential students to your site. Customizing your page is easier than ever with Site Builder.
Edit your course landing page
Your course landing page is a webpage on your site where you can showcase your course and prompt leads to sign up.
Step 2. Optional: Integrate Thinkific with your existing website
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to link your external website with your Thinkific landing pages, checkout, and more. You can also use custom domains and white labeling to ensure your Thinkific site looks and feels exactly like your brand.
Linking between your site and Thinkific
Link your existing website in your site header
Integrate your existing website (e.g. hosted on WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, etc.) with your Thinkific website to create a seamless and branded experience between your two sites.
Remove Thinkific branding
Remove Thinkific branding to further personalize your website and Course Player!
If selling your courses from your own sales pages
Redirect your Thinkific site to your external sales page
Do you want to use your external sales page instead of your Thinkific course landing page? Not a problem!
Change your site URL
Change your site URL and site name
When you first create a Thinkific site, it will be given a thinkific.com URL, formatted as follows: yoursite.thinkific.com. Everything that appears before .thinkific.com can be customized as desired! You can also change the site name that appears in your site header.
Milestone 4: The final touches
Step 1. Set up email notifications
Thinkific makes it easy to set up and automate personalized emails to your students to help you boost engagement and completion rates in your courses. Use these automated emails to welcome and congratulate students, share important news and information, and check in on students on a weekly basis.
Customize and enable site welcome email
Personalize and send a site welcome email to welcome your students when they first create an account on your site.
Customize and enable course welcome email
Engage your students when they first enroll in your course by sending them a course welcome email.
Customize and enable course completion email
Turn on a course completion email to congratulate your student when they reach 100% completion in your course! This is a great opportunity to encourage them to review the course and give them recommendations on where to go next.
Customize and enable weekly reminder emails
Turn on a weekly reminder email for your students to let them know which courses they have yet to complete on your site. This increases student engagement and ultimately, course completion.
Step 2. Optional: Connect your tools with Thinkific
Thinkific makes integrating your favorite business tools quick and easy. We recommend integrating with a payment processor, email marketing tool, ad tracking, and reporting tools. If we don’t have a direct integration with your tool of choice, chances are, you can use our Zapier integration or site footer code to make it happen!
Integrate with a payment processor
You must set up your payment processor before you can set a course price and sell your course. Thinkific supports several different payment processors. All our processors have one-time payment options, but if you want to set up subscriptions or payment plans they are only available through Thinkific Payments or Stripe.
Integrate with an email marketing tool
Email automation apps for marketing are a great way to build rapport with your current and potential students by sending them info about courses you're currently offering, free content, or providing them with coupons for use during future purchases.
Integrate with an advertising or analytics tool
Drive customer adoption of your learning products with Selling & Conversion apps from our Thinkific App Store.
Looking for more tools? Connect to them directly in the Thinkific App Store!
Step 3. Optional: Set up your team roles
As you scale your course business, Thinkific’s tools make it easy for you to bring people aboard. Add multiple instructors and site administrators so you can easily delegate work. Thinkific is also great with partner programs so you can reward partners and affiliates with sales commissions.
Create and assign course admins to products
It's always nice to have a little help, and we know that the course creation process is often a joint effort! Our Course Admins feature makes it easy to collaborate on projects.
Invite your teammates to join you as site admins
Site Admins have access that is similar to a Site Owner and works great if you need someone to help manage your students and courses.
Share revenue with affiliate partners
By promoting your products to their network, affiliate partners can hugely help with expanding your marketing reach. In return, they can earn a commission for each new sale that they send your way.
Share revenue with content partners
Was your course creation process a joint effort? Are you selling a product on behalf of another instructor? Our Revenue Partner feature makes it simple for you to share a percentage of sales made on your courses and bundles by tracking the commission owed to your co-instructors and course contributors.
Milestone 5: Migrate your students and relaunch
Import and Enroll Your Students
After you’ve migrated your content and created your Thinkific courses, you’re ready to launch your new course website to your existing customers! There are a few different ways you can do this. Students can always enroll themselves in your Thinkific courses, but here are some other options to make this process smoother.
Bulk import student accounts
Our Import Students from File feature is a quick and easy way to add students to your Thinkific account from another platform or database using an XLSX or CSV file.
Bulk enroll users into their existing courses
You can use bulk enroll and unenroll for a quick and easy way to add or remove students from a course or bundle at once.
Have our team import your students for you
Bulk student import and enrollments are offered if you're looking to migrate to Thinkific from another platform. Feel free to get in touch with our Solutions team to learn more.
Give existing students a 100% off Coupon
Coupons offering discounted pricing are one of the most effective methods for promoting your online courses and increasing sales.
Create and enroll students in courses manually
You can create a new student and manually enroll them into a course or bundle or enroll an existing student into a course.
Congratulations
You’ve migrated all your content, and are now ready to launch your new Thinkific course website! Use your Thinkific website’s URL to drive traffic to your course from blogs, emails, ads, etc. As you go forward, if you have any questions at all, please let us know. We want you to find the success you set out to achieve with online courses. If you need any help, contact Thinkific Support.