Once you have created your community, you have quite a few options for packaging and selling it, whether that be standalone, alongside a course, as a membership and more! This article will cover some popular strategies you can use to sell your offering and how to set them up in Thinkific.
In this article:
Options for Packaging and Selling Your Community in Thinkific
Important Considerations for Community Access Settings
Cross Selling and Upselling Strategies
About Communities
Thinkific Communities are online learning environments, created by you, where your audience can come together to build meaningful relationships—while you build your business. Communities have many benefits that can help you scale including earning recurring revenue, a way to promote other learning products and can help you gather valuable insights from direct interaction with your audience!
Check out Drive Revenue with New Thinkific Communities to learn more about how communities can help your business.
Options for Packaging and Selling Your Community in Thinkific
In Thinkific, you have a lot of flexibility in how to sell communities, whether that be in a bundle with a curated selection of learning products, as a membership, or standalone. Here are a few popular options to consider.
And remember, this list is not exhaustive! The more learning products you create, the more creative you can get with packaging and selling your offering.
Sell a Community as a Complement to Your Course
We know that many of you have already created a course, and a learning community can be an excellent learning enhancement tool that complements your course content. Communities can help students reinforce their learnings from the course by asking questions, sharing insights, and learning from one another. As the creator, you can also learn from your community members through feedback, Q&A, and more, to inform the content for your next course.
Thinkific Set Up
If you plan to sell a community as a complement to your course, we have a few recommendations for setting this up in Thinkific. For both options, you'll want to make sure to set your community access for students to purchase this community.
- Create a bundle that includes your course and community
This will provide students with access to both your course and your community with a single checkout experience. We recommend setting a subscription price to reflect the ongoing value your students will receive from access to your community. - Sell your course standalone and offer your community as an order bump
If you offer your course as a standalone learning product, and want to promote access to your community during the checkout experience, we recommend taking advantage of order bumps! Order bumps are available if you are signed up with Thinkific Payments and are a great way to offer additional, relevant products directly within the checkout process.
While your course is likely priced as a one-time payment in this scenario, we recommend setting a subscription price for ongoing access to your community in the order bump.
Sell a Community as a Standalone Learning Product
Selling a community as a standalone learning product is also an option to consider. Maybe you haven't started your course yet, but want to focus on building and nurturing your audience first. Or perhaps your core offering is a learning community with monthly live Q & A sessions!
Growing a thriving community takes time, commitment, strategy and ongoing maintenance, but the advantage of this approach with Thinkific is that you can create and launch a community very quickly.
Thinkific Set Up
To sell your community as a standalone product, you'll simply need to set your community access for students to purchase this community and price it accordingly! As you are providing ongoing value and community access, we recommend a subscription pricing model.
Sell a Community Membership with a Course Add-On
Although we often think of communities as a great complement to courses, the opposite is also true! If you have a thriving community and you want to sell a course to your loyal, engaged members, this is a great approach to take.
Thinkific Set Up
If you plan to sell a course as a complement to your community, we have a few recommendations for setting this up in Thinkific. For both options, make sure to set your community access for students to purchase this community.
- Create a bundle that includes your community and your course
This will provide students with access to both your community and your course with a single checkout experience. We recommend setting a subscription price to reflect the ongoing value your students will receive from access to your community. - Sell your community standalone and offer your course as an order bump
If you offer your community as a standalone product, but want to promote access to the course during the checkout experience, you can use our order bumps feature. As mentioned above, order bumps are available if you are signed up with Thinkific Payments and are a great way to offer additional, relevant products directly within the checkout process. We recommend setting a subscription price for ongoing access to your community.
Benefits of Creating Bundles
If you decide to create a bundle, we also want to highlight that you also have the flexibility of selling products within the bundle individually. So if you have multiple learning products, don't be afraid to sell your community in a bundle, as well as standalone to give your audience different options.
Also note that bundles can have more than one product included, which means you can create bundles with more than one course and one community. You can include various combinations of your learning products in several unique bundles. For example, maybe you'd like to create a tiered pricing model and offer 3 bundles at 3 different price points.
Important Considerations for Community Access Settings
Since you plan on monetizing your community, we don't recommend setting your community access to students in selected courses or bundles as this provides less flexibility in packaging your community down the road.
That said, if you have already started selling this way, not to worry! It is possible to change access types, there are just a few extra steps you'll need to be aware of which we cover in detail here: Converting and Selling Your Existing Thinkific Communities
Cross Selling and Upselling Strategies
So far, we've covered some recommendations for selling your community using a single checkout experience. We also have features to help cross-promote or upsell your community with your existing learning products. Check out:
After Purchase Flow
Our After Purchase Flow feature allows you to upsell a product in the thank you page after checkout.
Cross-Promote Your Community on Product Landing Pages
We recommend taking advantage of our Upsells Site Builder Section, Additional Products Site Builder Section, and Call to Action Site Builder Sections to promote your community on different pages of your site.
Coupons
Coupons are a great way to incentivize a purchase for students considering your community. Coupons can be customized for products with subscription pricing so that you can offer an introductory deal like “Your first month free!”