Setting up automated course engagement emails

Increase engagement and revenue with course progression reminders and upsells

If you’re running a business that hosts online courses, like Thinkific or Teachable, you’re probably excited for registrants to finish your course, not only to get positive reviewers for your brand, but also to recommend more of your great content to them.

Sometimes an enrollee gets busy, and might forget about your course. And if they complete the course, they could be in a great position to receive an upsell to your next course.

But it’s not always easy to send those communications automatically from within course platforms. So in this post I’m going to run through options for sending targeted emails based on couse progression, both manually from within each platform, and automatically using Zapier. With this framework, you can:

• Send reminders to complete courses

• Upsell upon course completion

Manually sending emails from Thinkific or Teachable

To be fair, Thinkific and Teachable have powerful filters that you can use to target messaging to enrollees based on course progress. However, there are two big problems:

• They need to be done manually

• They come from Thinkific or Teachable’s domain, not yours (Teachable can fix this but only on their most expensive plan)

To send a targeted email in Thinkific (see image below - and see Teachable’s article on filtering here):

1. Go to “Users”

2. Add a combination of filters e.g. to email those who haven’t finished a course, use “Enrolled in”…”Course”, AND, “Progress” is “Less than or equal to” 99%, AND, to prevent annoying those who have recently been engaging with the course, “Last sign in”…”before” 2 or 3 weeks ago

3. Click the select all checkbox

4. Click the message icon and craft an email to your enrollees

Setting up filters in Thinkific

Automatically sending emails, your way, from your brand (e.g. Mailchimp)

The great thing about Thinkific and Teachable is that they both integrate with Zapier, and, unlike another popular course platform - Kajabi, they let you update other platforms with course progress data.

Combined with the automation of an email marketing platform, this offers up all sorts of possiblities.

Here’s a basic workflow automation mapped out in Mailchimp (the feature in Mailchimp is called “Customer Journeys”), showing off paths for an upsell email, as well as a reminder email. Note that many other email marketing platforms offer similar capabilities!

Here’s the nuts and bolts of it:

• When someone enrols in a course, Thinkific/Teachable tags the user using Zapier (by the way, you can also use Zapier to subscribe enrollees to your Mailchimp list, or use the built-in integration for Thinkific or Teachable)

• The workflow waits for a certain amount of time e.g. 3 weeks (giving the enrollee time to finish the course)

• Then, it checks if the user is now tagged with the course completion tag (which is also put into Mailchimp with Zapier)

• If they do have the tag, send them an upsell email with a link to the next recommended course

• If they don’t have the tag, send them a reminder email to access their course (if you really want to push engagement, this reminder email could include helpful pointers on completing the course material)

With this basic setup, you can not only increase course completion rates, but increase upsells and LTR. And building on this framework, you could set up a reminder series, an upsell series, or get into more of the nitty gritty when it comes to specific course completion percentages (e.g. targeting students that are stuck at a particular bottleneck).

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