Offering discounted pricing is one of the most effective methods for promoting your online courses and increasing sales. Who doesn't love a bargain?!
Thinkific makes it super simple to run special promotions using the Coupons feature, available as part of any upgraded plan. In this article, we’ll show you how to create coupon codes for your courses and bundles, and how they can be redeemed by your customers.
In this article:
Automatically Applying Coupons
Understanding Your Coupons Table
Creating Coupons
To get started, head to the Market & Sell section of your admin dashboard and select Coupons. Click on New Coupon. This will take you to the coupon creation screen.
Coupon Details.
The information here applies to the entire coupon that you're creating.
Coupon name - this is the description of the coupon that the customer will see on checkout after they apply the coupon.
Set an expiry date (optional) - adding an expiry date for your coupons is an excellent way to give a sense of urgency to your campaign and can lead to greater conversions because people are more likely to act instantly upon receiving your offer if there’s a deadline.
Discount Configuration
Each coupon you create has its own discount configuration which determines the type and duration of the discount that the coupon applies, as well as which products and specific prices the discount applies to.
If you have a product that has multiple prices, such as a one time payment and also a payment plan, the discount configuration section is where you can decide which pricing option you'd like to apply the discount to.
Discount Type
You can set a fixed discount by choosing the currency symbol option, or set a percentage discount by choosing this from the dropdown:
Select Your Products
Choose which specific courses and bundles the discount can be applied to - for a site-wide promo select 'All Products' which is the default choice for new coupons.
You will see your products sorted by courses, then bundles, then your additional prices in the dropdown.
If you have multiple pricing options on your course or bundle, selecting that product will apply the discount to the default price only. If you want the discount to apply to the additional pricing options, you will need to select them from the Additional Prices list.
Duration
If any of the products included in the campaign have subscription-based or payment plan pricing, an extra field will appear where you can specify how many months the discount should be applied for. This allows you to offer introductory deals, e.g. “Your first month free”, which is a great way to give people a free trial and capture the customer’s billing information at the same time.
The coupon period for subscription-based or payment plan products will always be in months. Take this into consideration when creating your coupon if your payment schedule is on a quarterly or annual basis.
For example, if you have a payment schedule on a yearly basis and you want a student to receive the first two years for free, you would need to create a coupon for 13 months. This way your student will have the first billing period free (the 1st month) and the second billing for the second year free (the 13th month).
You can leave this field blank to give free-forever access to a subscription or payment plan.
For a more detailed explanation of how the Coupon discount is applied to subscription or payment plans, including examples, take a look at How Do Coupon Discounts Apply to Multiple-Payment Plans?
For subscriptions with a custom first payment, coupons can only apply to the custom first payment (1 month) or applied to the whole subscription including the custom first payment.
Codes
You can create multiple codes that are associated with the same coupon allowing you to easily adjust the discount for coupon details for all the codes at once. There is a search bar available at the top of the codes table so that you can easily search for a code to check the quantity and remaining value or edit/remove that code.
Code
Pick the unique code that your students will apply on checkout to receive their discount. At least one code is required for each coupon that you create.
You can create multiple codes for the same coupon by using the Add New Code button.
Quantity (Optional)
Use this field to limit the number of times a specific code can be used. For unlimited uses, leave this field blank.
At the bottom of the Codes table, you'll see a summary of your code information:
- # codes: how many unique codes in total you have for a single coupon.
- Total quantity: the total amount of codes that were created (does not account for codes that have unlimited uses). For example, if you have 3 codes with a quantity of 5 each, that's a total quantity of 15.
- Remaining: the total amount of codes that can be redeemed.
Updating Your Code Quantity
If you have set a quantity for your coupon codes and find that you have 0 remaining codes left, you'll need to increase the quantity of your codes and save your changes.
For example, if you have a quantity = 1, and remaining = 0 for a specific code, you would need to increase the code's quantity = 2. Upon saving, you'll see that your remaining value for that specific code, will now be updated to 1.
Redeeming Coupons
Students can easily apply the coupon on the checkout page to redeem their discount.
- On the checkout payment page, click on the Have a coupon? link.
- Input the coupon code in the text box that appears
- Press Apply
- The checkout will update the order detail with the discount applied if the coupon is successfully added.
- The student can complete the checkout as normal!
Automatically Applying Coupons
You can make it even simpler for customers to redeem their offer by sending them to your course landing page or checkout via a URL where the discount is already applied. This means your students will not need to type in a coupon code at checkout!
Learn how to set that up here.
Understanding Your Coupons Table
Your coupons table includes an overview of all created coupons, quantities, expiry dates and more!
Learn more about your coupon table here.
Important Considerations
- Coupons will no longer work as of 00:00 UTC on the expiry date set. For example, if you set the expiry date as August 15th, the code will be valid until the 11:59PM UTC of August 14th.
- Coupons that have multiple users (quantity is larger than 1), can be used by the same student multiple times.
- With Stripe or Paypal, there is a minimum payment of $0.50, so if your coupon discounts the price of your course to between $0.01 to $0.49, your student will not be able to complete the transaction.
- You cannot set coupons to have a zero dollar ($0) value on subscriptions or payment plans. This is not commonly used, however, we have seen some customers use $0 coupons internal tracking purposes. If you are setting up $0 coupons for tracking, they can only be applied to one-time pricing options.
- If you previously created a coupon and then downgraded to a plan that doesn't have access to the coupon feature (the Free plan), your coupons will not be available for use for future orders.
- Coupons are not case sensitive
- For subscriptions with a custom first payment, coupons can only apply to the custom first payment (1 month) or applied to the whole subscription including the custom first payment.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with us!