Thinkific has recently launched a new app store, where you can discover various third-party apps that easily integrate with Thinkifc to extend its functionality.
The Thinkific App Store has been designed to put more power into the hands of creators to help them supercharge their online course business.
If you are wondering how the app store and the different Thinkific apps can help your course business, this guide has you covered.
By the end of this article, you should have real insights into some of the third-party apps you can benefit most from and how you can use them to level up your online school.
Let’s get started.
What Is the Thinkific App Store?
The Thinkific App Store is a marketplace that lets creators discover third-party apps they can use with Thinkific while allowing software developers and businesses to integrate their apps with the platform.
As you can imagine, the value of any online course platform lies not just in its native functionalities but also in how it works with other tools out there.
So although Thinkific has always offered integrations with third-party tools, the launch of its app store has helped it take the next logical step in this direction.
The general idea behind the Thinkific App Store is to create an ecosystem that makes more integrations available to creators enabling them to build better online courses and more profitable businesses.
Currently, the app store offers integrations with 30+ apps that are available on different Thinkific pricing plans but the number is likely to increase soon.
The existing apps cover business use cases like gamification, marketing automation, customer support, analytics, just to name a few.
Now, before taking a deep dive into the individual apps, let’s take a quick look at why the Thinkific App Store launch is likely to be a game-changer for the online course industry.
Why Is the Thinkific App Store Significant?
Though online course hosting platforms have made it easier to create online courses, one huge challenge with them is that they have traditionally operated in a closed environment.
So if you ever needed additional functionality with a hosted platform, you’d have to wait until the platform added that functionality natively or created a custom integration.
And if you wanted to solve the problem and add the functionality yourself, you would have to go down the WordPress route or hire a developer, both of which aren’t easy or hassle-free solutions by any means.
This is where the Thinkific App Store becomes a game-changer. It gives creators more flexibility and control in extending Thinkific’s functionality without taking away from the ease of use.
As a result, many Thinkific courses use these apps to enhance the platform’s functionality and grow their business.
The Thinkific app ecosystem is going to expand steadily, and this is what we can expect in the near future:
- Many more established software businesses will integrate their apps with Thinkific.
- We will see more dedicated apps, like plaYEAH!, getting built just for Thinkific.
- Plus, we can expect more apps, like eWebinar, making custom features for Thinkific to improve the quality of integrations.
Ultimately, all these developments will lead to better student experiences and more robust online course businesses.
Another thing to note is that you could have linked some of the apps currently part of the app store with Thinkific earlier as well by using Zapier, but that would have meant a lot of additional work along with extra cost.
On the other hand, with the Thinkific App Store, you can integrate most of the apps within a matter of minutes and without any additional cost, which makes them much more usable.
Now, let’s take a look at the 15 most exciting Thinkific apps to level up your online school.
1. Motrain
Gamifying your course experience by awarding learners with virtual currency can be one of the best ways to boost engagement and completion rates.
Motrain takes gamification one step further by letting you create a personalized reward store, where you can link student progress inside a course with rewards that hold real value.
So inside your personalized store, you can offer things like premium content, discounts, live classes, and even merchandise in exchange for virtual coins.
Plus, the Thinkific Motrain connection gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can award virtual coins to learners.
For instance, you can award coins to learners based on their lesson completion percentage, quiz grades, or even reward them manually for assignment performance.
You can also use virtual coins to incentivize learners to refer your course to their friends or promote it on social media. So the integration can be used as a powerful marketing engine for your online program.
2. Lessonspace
Offering live sessions inside your course can be an extremely effective way to enhance the learning experience for your students.
Although Thinkific allows you to offer live sessions with their Zoom app, the Lessonspace app takes things to the next level by letting you create interactive, live online classrooms.
To begin with, Lessonspace offers a reasonably wide variety of live learning tools.
So you can interact with your students through a webcam, screen recording, use its text chat feature, write on its native document editor, draw on a digital whiteboard, etc. Plus, you can even upload PDF or Office documents and annotate them in real-time during your session.
Another thing we like about Lessonspace is that you can use multiple learning tools simultaneously and show them side-by-side in the same view.
In addition, Lessonspace comes with a helpful troubleshooting feature to help you quickly diagnose and solve any technical glitches during your session.
Finally, with the Thinkific Lessonspace integration, your students won’t have to create or log into a Lessonspace account, resulting in a smooth user experience.
So if you offer live 1:1 or group sessions, the Lessonspace integration is a no-brainer. It is available on the Basic plan and above and is one of our favorite Thinkific integrations.
3. eWebinar
Hosting interactive webinars is one of the most popular ways to promote online courses. And there are many automated webinar tools out there that make it easy for you to set your sales webinars on autopilot.
eWebinar is one such tool that seamlessly links with Thinkific and lets you create engaging webinar experiences. With eWebinar, you can convert any pre-recorded video into an automated webinar.
To make the webinar interactive, you can add elements like questions, polls, and downloads at specific points inside the webinar. Plus, you can engage with your attendees on live chat to deliver even more value.
With its Thinkific app, eWebinar will show a Thinkific interaction card to attendees at specified times, which takes them to the checkout page on your Thinkific website.
Moreover, you can promote the webinar on your Thinkific landing page with the eWebinar countdown widget.
Finally, eWebinar gives you all the popular features you would expect from an automated webinar tool. So you can set up engaging registration pages, create scheduling options, send timely reminders and follow-ups, and check essential webinar metrics using its analytics tool.
We like the eWebinar Thinkific integration a lot, and you can easily see the effort they have put in for creating a smooth integration with Thinkific by building custom features.
4. plaYEAH!
plaYEAH! is a dedicated app for Thinkific, designed to help you improve student engagement, course completion rates, and more.
To begin with, the most important capability offered by plaYEAH! is that it lets you create and show personalized popups inside your course.
The popups can include animations, GIFs, and images, and they can be triggered when a student completes a specific lesson or reaches a milestone. And you can use them for a variety of use cases, like:
- Reward your students with hidden courses, surprise downloads, and coaching calls to gamify the course experience.
- Encourage them with fun, animated messages and celebrate their success as they make progress.
- Remind them of the downloadable resources, assignments, upcoming events, and group calls.
- Share calls to action to upsell them to your other courses or products.
Moreover, plaYEAH! gives you a lot of flexibility and control regarding the kind of popups you want to create, how long and where they appear on the screen, etc.
Besides the popups, the plaYEAH! Thinkific integration allows you to change the default Thinkific course player design, including colors and fonts, so that you can align it with your brand guidelines.
Besides, it lets you create a course player tour, which can help your students learn how to navigate your course.
5. DropInBlog
DropInBlog is another useful app that allows you to set up an SEO-friendly, feature-rich blog on your Thinkific website.
Once you install the blog with DropInBlog, it lives on your Thinkific site and not on a separate subdomain.
The blog will automatically use your site’s design and layout to maintain visual consistency. Moreover, the integration is quite simple, so in our view, this is as good as having native blogging functionality on Thinkific.
And as long as you are not looking for advanced features and customizations, you are also not likely to miss WordPress.
In terms of features, DropInBlog allows you to do a bunch of things, like:
- Change the style to create a customized look.
- Add multiple categories and authors to the blog.
- Embed Youtube and other videos to your posts.
- Manage images and schedule future posts.
- Allow comments via Disqus or Facebook.
- Gives you an SEO score for every post.
Another thing we like about the DropInBlog app is that you don’t have to worry about security as the blog is hosted on Thinkific. And you don’t need to install any additional plugins, so the blog will be effortless to maintain.
6. Hello Audio
Podcasts make it easy for users to consume content on the go, which has made them an extremely popular content format. So if you have a vast library of content, offering it in a podcast format can be a huge value-add for your students.
Hello Audio allows you to convert your digital content — course videos, coaching calls, masterclasses, into a private podcast feed for your course students.
The app is quite user-friendly, so you can generate a podcast feed from your existing digital content and share it with your students, all in a matter of seconds.
And your students can access the podcast feed through any of the popular podcast apps that allow for subscribing via an RSS feed, like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, etc.
Plus, Hello Audio allows you to track podcast downloads and remove access for students in case of cancellation or membership expiry.
7. CartStack
Another Thinkific app we like a lot is CartStack, which helps you improve your online course sales conversions in several different ways.
To begin with, it helps you recover lost customers and abandoned cart sales through multi-channel campaigns.
For example, you can use the app to send personalized cart abandonment reminder emails, including your shoppers’ cart items. Plus, you can also use it to send SMS campaigns and browser push notifications in the same way.
Moreover, with CartStack, you can create retargeting campaigns even for users who dropped before adding any product to their shopping cart.
Another thing we like about the tool is that it makes it very easy to create and manage recovery campaigns with ready-made templates and automation.
Besides, CartStack also offers on-site retention tools like exit-intent popups to generate more leads and sales.
With its exit-intent popups, you can address user concerns and offer discounts to reduce the cart abandonment rate. Plus, you can capture emails from website visitors to convert more leads for recovery campaigns.
In addition, you can show timed popups to nudge customers towards conversion with targeted messaging and discount coupons.
8. Typeform
Typeform is a popular tool that allows businesses to engage with customers through interactive forms, surveys, and quizzes.
However, when it comes to the Thinkific Typeform app, there are two primary use cases that you need to keep in mind.
Firstly, the app makes it easy for you to collect student reviews and show them on your Thinkific website to create social proof.
With the Typeform app, you won’t have to ask for student names and emails while collecting reviews, which speeds up the process and makes them more likely to leave a review.
Moreover, the submitted reviews will get automatically synced in the Reviews section of your Thinkific website. So Typeform is an obvious choice to collect student reviews if you want to automate and scale that process.
Besides reviews, the app also makes it easy for you to collect student feedback to improve your course offering.
Though Thinkific offers a native survey feature for collecting feedback, Typeform gives you more flexibility and better features, so it is certainly worth considering.
9. Intercom
One of the keys to providing best-in-class customer support is giving your support team access to relevant customer data so they can answer all kinds of customer queries.
And even if you are the one chatting with a customer through a support tool, you will need all their information in one place. Thinkific’s integration with Intercom allows you to do exactly that.
And this is one app that I’d recommend to every course creator who has a sizable number of students enrolled in their course.
With this integration, you or anyone in your team can access a customer’s details, including their name, email, course progress, and more, on the fly from within their Intercom dashboard.
Plus, you can go to the Thinkific interface from the Intercom dashboard with a single click if you want to check more information about a customer.
Another useful aspect of the integration is that it allows you to have some administrative control within the Intercom interface. So you can enroll a new student in a course, offer them a free trial, or expire their membership from there itself.
10. Shopify
Most online course platforms, including Thinkific, offer a simple checkout system where users can buy one course at a time.
Though you can create course bundles, if you offer a large number of courses, you can’t possibly have bundles that cover every possible combination.
In other words, if you want to build an online course portal with a full-fledged storefront like Udemy, where users can add multiple courses to their shopping cart, you can’t do that with the native capability of these platforms.
Thinkific tackles this problem by offering a simple Shopify integration, which lets you sell your courses through Shopify and deliver them with Thinkific.
Another scenario where Thinkific Shopify integration can be handy is when you plan to sell online courses alongside physical products, eBooks, and other digital products.
While something like this is great for diversifying your business, offering products like physical merchandise with online courses can also help you grow your brand and improve customer loyalty.
And if you already have an audience and a full-fledged Shopify store, adding an online course via Thinkific can be a great additional revenue stream.
11. Stunning
If you use Stripe for payment collection on your Thinkific website, Stunning can help you recover failed payments and minimize revenue loss through a bunch of payment recovery features.
For example, if a payment fails, Stunning can switch the customer’s credit card to a backup payment method and even make timely payment retries.
Plus, it can send emails and SMSes to customers to encourage them to update their billing information if their credit card doesn’t work.
Stunning would notify customers if their subscription is marked unpaid or gets canceled due to repeated payment failures. Plus, it would remind them if they abandoned the payments page.
Moreover, when a customer reactivates their billing information, it will charge them for their past dues and renew their subscription.
Besides payments recovery, Stunning offers several other useful features.
For instance, it gives creators visibility into their overall payment data, including recovery stats, cancellations due to failed payments, customers with expiring cards, etc.
Moreover, you can use it to send automatic emails to customers for things like trial expiration, upcoming charges, payment cancellations, and refunds.
Finally, you can also use Stunning to let customers switch between plans, cancel their subscriptions, and generate receipts for previous charges.
12. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an advanced analytics tool for web and mobile that allows you to gather user behavior insights at a highly granular level.
Though Thinkific offers an integration with Google Analytics, you’d need to rely on Mixpanel if you want to do a more in-depth analysis of user actions and not just page views.
For example, with the Mixpanel, you can track how many users are dropping at different points in your website conversion funnel, which can help you improve conversions.
Plus, you can analyze website visitor data based on parameters like their location, device type, referring domain, search keywords to get handy marketing insights.
And when it comes to tracking student behavior inside the course area, you can analyze how they engage with different lesson types over time.
So you can pass data for things like video views, quiz completions, and course completions from Thinkific to Mixpanel and generate useful reports.
Plus, if you want to track the activity of individual students, you can do that as well.
13. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing and automation platform, and you can easily link it with Thinkific on the Pro + Growth Plan.
With Thinkific’s native email capability, you can send a few standard email notifications like welcome emails, weekly reminder emails, or some custom broadcast emails.
But you can’t create email sequences or run marketing campaigns. And this is where Thinkific’s integration with a tool like ActiveCampaign comes in handy.
With the ActiveCampaign integration, a user can get added to a list in your ActiveCampaign account based on their actions on your Thinkific site, including things like sign up, course purchase, enrollment, course completion, etc.
Once you add a user to an ActiveCampaign list, you can use the platform to send targeted broadcasts and email sequences.
For example, you can run an email sequence campaign for customers who have already purchased your course and upsell them to your premium product.
Or you can regularly engage them on email with your blog posts and encourage them to check out updates to your course.
Essentially, once you have an ActiveCampaign list for your Thinkific customers, you can track and manage them on the ActiveCampaign CRM and run any kind of marketing automation campaign.
14. Community Box
Community Box allows you to create and embed a members directory with well-designed member profiles in your Thinkific website, which can help you in several ways.
Firstly, it can help you create social proof for your course and help improve your sales conversion. Plus, students will be more likely to promote the listing if they have a public profile on your website.
Besides, having a directory on your website will also help members find and network with each other, which adds to the course experience.
What we like most about Community Box is that it maintains an outstanding balance between flexibility and ease of use.
For instance, students can get added automatically to the directory, and you can choose to add every student or only those who have completed the course.
You can allow students to edit their profiles, making it much easier to manage and scale the process. Students can also add additional information like text, image galleries, videos, or even resumes to their profiles.
Plus, you can control the design of the directory to make it visually appealing and consistent with your brand aesthetics.
15. Salesforce
Salesforce is the most popular CRM software globally, which brings customer data from different sources in one place to give businesses control over their data.
The Thinkific integration with Salesforce is specially designed to benefit creators running multiple Thinkific sites. A great example would be training organizations that run education portals or manage employee training programs.
Moreover, it can also be quite useful for SaaS companies or B2B agencies offering educational courses to their clients. It would help them link their online course data with sales and marketing data.
That being said, it can still benefit any creator looking to get a better grip on their customer data.
With the integration, you can view data around course enrollments, student progress, and course completion inside Salesforce. And you can generate powerful reports to understand business progress across your different Thinkific sites and courses.
Plus, you can gather insights on learner progress to identify gaps in your courses and make better decisions to improve them.
In this guide, we have looked at some of the most useful apps you can use with Thinkific to improve your online course experience and business processes.
However, there are several other apps available in the app store that you can check out.
We can expect to see exciting progress in this space in the near future, with many more Thinkific apps likely to get added.
If you’re an existing Thinkific user, you just need to log in to your school and start using the apps you need.
If you don’t have a Thinkific account already, we suggest you sign up for a free trial and try the app store for yourself.
If you’re not yet sure about using Thinkific for your online course business, you should read our in-depth Thinkific review. If you are ready to build your online school on the platform, you should check out this step-by-step Thinkific tutorial.
We hope you found this guide useful. If you have any questions about these Thinkific apps or the app store in general, feel free to ask them in the comments below.
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