Setting up your school on Thinkific is the first step to creating an online course business. To make sure your courses are successful, you need a comprehensive email marketing strategy.
That’s where ConvertKit comes in. It’s a powerful email-marketing tool designed to help you nurture your leads, send targeted emails, and promote your courses. But how do you connect ConvertKit and Thinkific?
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to connect ConvertKit and Thinkific integrations. We’ll also discuss how to set up automation workflows and create email campaigns.
Introducing Thinkific and ConvertKit
Thinkific is a robust online course platform that lets you build, sell, and deliver online courses. It takes care of basic email notifications (e.g. course welcome email) and even lets you send one-time emails to your students.
ConvertKit, meanwhile, is an email marketing platform that lets you build and grow your email list and create personalized email campaigns with ConvertKit’s segmentation and automation features.
Thanks to the direct integration between the two platforms, you can send your students’ information to ConvertKit, and then create and send automated emails. This integration is used by 4,900+ Thinkific websites, making it one of the most popular Thinkific integrations.
Here are some examples of what Convertkit-Thinkific integration can do:
- Pass enrollment data to ConvertKit and segment buyers and non-buyers
- Send personalized welcome emails to new students
- Send sales emails to users who signed up for a free preview of a course
- Send a congratulatory email when a user finishes a course
- Send broadcasts to announce new courses and special promotions
Apart from these, there are many other ways you can use ConvertKit to engage with your students and promote your courses.
Steps to Integrating ConvertKit With Thinkific
In this section, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to integrating Thinkific and ConvertKit. To get started, you’ll need an account on ConvertKit. The platform has a 14-day free trial, so you can explore the platform before committing to a pricing plan.
When you land on the website, you’ll see an option to start a free trial. Go ahead and sign up and create your account.
The next step is to find and copy your API key. To do that, go to your profile in the top right corner of the screen, and from the drop-down menu, select Settings.
On the Settings page, select Advanced, and in the API section, you’ll see your API key.
Now that you have your API key, go to Thinkific’s app store. Inside your Thinkific dashboard, click on Apps, and below the apps you’ve already installed, you’ll see the Most Popular Apps section. Click on View All to go to Thinkific’s App Store.
Once you’re in the store, search ConvertKit in the search bar, go to the ConvertKit App’s page and click Install.
After the app is installed, you’ll be taken to the app settings. Here you can add the API key you’ve previously created.
You have now connected your Thinkific and ConvertKit accounts, and you can move on to the next step: creating ConvertKit tags.
Tags are labels that you can add to your ConvertKit contacts. So when you add your Thinkific students to ConvertKit, you can add tags to segment them and send more targeted campaigns.
To create a tag, head over to your ConvertKit account and select Grow → Subscribers in the header menu. On the right side, you’ll see the option to create a tag. Clicking this option will open a pop-up window where you should add a name to your tag.
Since tag labels identify your contacts, name them in a way that’s logical to you. For example, when a user creates an account on your Thinkific school, you can add the tag Signed Up on Thinkific, and when they enrolled in a course, you can add the tag [Course Name] Student.
Now that you’ve created your tags, you can go back to Thinkific and set up the rules to tag students based on trigger events. To do that, go to the Apps section and click Settings next to the ConvertKit app.
When you scroll down this page, you’ll see the available trigger events:
- Sign-ups: When a user creates an account on your Thinkific school
- Full enrollments: When a student enrolls in a specific course
- Free preview enrollments: When a student signs up for a free preview
- Completed enrollments: When a student completes a course
- Order: When a new purchase is made
Except for the sign-up event, you’ll have the option to add separate tags for individual courses.
Now, these open a world of possibilities for you. You can use these tags to send users personalized email campaigns through ConvertKit and automate their entire journey.
For example, when a student enrolls in a free preview for a course, you can send them an email sequence with a special offer to promote the course. And as soon as they buy the course, you can remove them from the sales email sequence and automatically add them to the onboarding email sequence.
Besides these events, you can also send transaction data to ConvertKit. To do that, just turn on the option for Student Payment Tracking in the ConvertKit Apps settings area. Enabling this option will automatically send transaction data, including purchase amount and discount, to ConvertKit.
This feature is called Products in ConvertKit and lets you segment your students based on the course they’ve purchased, the total amount spent, and other criteria.
You can also use the Purchases feature to create visual automations.
Steps to Creating a ConvertKit Automation
Now, let’s create a visual automation in ConvertKit for your students.
We’ll use the example mentioned above, a student enrolling in a course with a free preview and adding them to the sales sequence.
To get started, go to your ConvertKit account, and select Automate → Visual Automations from the header area. On the next screen, click New Automation → Start from scratch. You can also select a template and customize it according to your preferences.
You’ll now enter the automation builder.
Your first step is to create an event, which in this case will be Is Added to a Tag, and from the drop-down menu below, select the appropriate tag.
Save this event, and click the Plus icon below the trigger. Select Action → Email sequence. If you have already created an email sequence, select that here. Otherwise, you can create a new sequence from within the automation builder.
Sequences in ConvertKit are nothing but a series of emails that you can send one after the other. You just need to specify the time interval between each email.
ConvertKit’s email editor is similar to other editors, like Gmail. You can easily add images, HTML elements, text, and links with just a few clicks of the mouse. Once you’re finished with your emails, click Save.
Now, you can add a step in your automation to remove users from the sequence when they buy your course. To do that, click the plus icon after the action step. Click Event → Tag is Added, and then select the tag you added for course buyers.
This will pull users out of the sales sequence when they make a purchase and the buyer tag is added to them.
Now, all that’s left to do is to toggle the Live button at the top right of the page, and each time a student signs up for a free preview, they’ll receive this sales sequence to motivate them to buy the full course.
You can use this same method to create other automations that suit your needs:
- Invite school sign-ups to try a free preview of your course.
- Add students to an onboarding sequence when they enroll in a course.
- Send a congratulations email (or special offer email) to students when they complete a course.
How Else Can You Use ConvertKit With Thinkific?
Apart from email marketing, ConvertKit also allows you to create opt-in forms to collect leads. If you want to add an opt-in form to the homepage or any other page on your Thinkific website, you can use ConvertKit forms for the same.
To get started, go to your ConvertKit dashboard, and select Landing Pages and Forms from the Grow menu at the top of the page.
Click on Create a Form, and then you can select the form’s display format — inline, modal, slide-in, or sticky bar.
You’ll now see a bunch of templates for the selected form type. Choose the one you like.
Once you select a template, you’ll enter the form editor, where you can customize nearly every element, from text and colors to when you want the form to appear on a page.
Once done, click Publish. This will open a pop-up window where you can grab the HTML embed code. Copy this code and add it to a text block on your Thinkific website.
That’s it, and your form will now show on your Thinkific site.
Conclusion
The Thinkific-ConvertKit integration is an excellent way to segment your students and send targeted content to them, leading to higher engagement and more sales.
You can also create opt-in forms for your Thinkific website that will help you grow your email list.
If you’re not using ConvertKit yet, now is the perfect time to start! Click the button below to get a free trial and start automating today.
If you don’t have an account on Thinkific, create a free account here.
We hope you enjoyed this article, and we’d like to hear how you plan to use Thinkific and ConvertKit together. Let us know in the comments below!
