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
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
Now you can get started filling out the details of your promotion!
- Choose your discount and select your products - you can offer a discount in terms of a specific amount, or a percentage of the pricing. Then choose which specific courses and bundles the discount can be applied to (for a site-wide promo select 'All Products').
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 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.
- Coupon code - this what the customer will need to use to redeem your offer; e.g. summersale50.
You can add more than 1 code for the same coupon:
- Specify a quantity (optional) - use this field to limit the number of times a specific code can be used. For unlimited uses, leave this field blank.
- Change the coupon name (optional) - the coupon name is what will be used to refer to the promotion on the checkout page, receipts, etc. It’s worth changing this to something that will be informative for both you and your customers.
- 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.
- Save your coupon - When you’re done, hit Save at the top right and you’ll be taken back to the main Coupons page to see your new promotion listed there.
Now you're ready to share the deal with your audience!
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.
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.
- Coupons are not case sensitive
- Coupons cannot have symbols in the coupon code. For example, 25%off will not work. Make sure to use letters and numbers only, like 25off.
- 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!