So you picked Thinkific to build your membership site but need guidance before getting started.
Worry not; we’ll show you how to build a Thinkific membership site step-by-step.
We’ll cover the platform’s important membership site features and how to use them to create the best experience for your customers and run your membership site efficiently.
But before getting into the tutorial part of the article, let’s discuss why using Thinkific for your membership site is a great idea.
Why Is Thinkific a Great Option for Membership Sites?
Thinkific undoubtedly has a lot to offer for online courses. However, it is also one of the best platforms for membership sites.
It gives you all tools to build an awesome membership site quickly and easily. Here are some of our favorite Thinkific membership site features:
Powerful Online Course Builder
Thinkific is one of the best online course builders on the market.
For starters, you can create various types of lessons, including video, audio, text, PDF, and file-based ones. Thinkific also supports live classes through its direct integration with Zoom.
Additionally, the platform offers important learning and engagement tools, such as quizzes, assignments, certificates, content dripping, prerequisite lessons, etc.
Native Community Tool
One of the biggest perks of using Thinkific for your membership site is that it offers a native community feature.
Through it, you can create a dedicated membership community for your members to engage in conversations with each other. You can organize your community into spaces, create engaging posts, and do live events.
Free and Branded Mobile Apps
Another benefit of using Thinkific for your membership site is that your members will be able to interact with your content on the go with Thinkific’s mobile apps.
The app is easy to use and allows your students to watch courses, participate in community discussions, and stay informed about the latest activities via push notifications.
Moreover, you can get branded membership apps as well.
Members-Only Pages
One useful membership feature offered by Thinkific is for creating members-only pages. With it, you can create custom website pages only accessible to your paid members.
This feature is excellent if you want to offer standalone content to your members without building elaborate courses.
Flexible Subscription Pricing Options
Thinkific also stands out with its flexible pricing options.
Specifically, if you’re selling access to your products using a subscription model, you can offer flexible pricing plans to your clients.
- Offer a monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly subscription.
- Offer a free trial period to try the membership experience before paying.
- Charge a custom fee on top of your subscription.
- Offer multiple pricing options for your membership.
Powerful Thinkific Apps
Another Thinkific feature that stands out is the platform’s dedicated app store, which makes it the only hosted membership platform offering this functionality.
While Thinkific’s native features are impressive, you can extend the platform’s functionality through custom apps.
Thinkific App Store has over 100 apps, and dozens of them can be useful for enhancing your membership website.
For example, there is an app called Community Box that lets you create a directory of your students. Similarly, another app, Flix, can transform the default student dashboard into a Netflix-like experience.
Here we’ve given a summary of why Thinkific is a great option for membership sites. However, if you want to analyze the platform in more detail, check out our in-depth Thinkific Review.
Now, let’s go through the steps to create a Thinkific membership site.
1. Create a Membership Product
An essential feature for creating a membership site is the ability to bundle and sell multiple products together. For this, Thinkific has a feature called Memberships.
If you’re already subscribed to Thinkific, you just need to log in to your account to get started. Otherwise, you’ll first need to sign up for a free trial.
Afterward, go to Memberships under Manage Your Learning Products in your admin dashboard and click the New Membership button.
As soon as you name your membership and click the Create Membership button, Thinkific will take you to the products section, where you can select the courses to include in your membership.
Click Add Product and select the courses and community you want to add to your membership.
We’ve not covered the process of creating a course on Thinkific in this article, as we have a dedicated guide for that. If you want to learn more about the process, please check this Thinkific tutorial.
Apart from courses, you can also create members-only pages. As discussed previously, this feature helps deliver standalone training content rather than full-fledged online courses.
To create one, go to Design Your Site -> Site Pages and click + New Custom Page. Next, enter a page title and click the Create Page button.
Thinkific will now take you to the page builder, where you can design your page and add content.
To add a video, click + Add Section and select the Video section. You’ll then be able to upload a video to your page section.
Once you add content to your page, it’s time to modify the access settings.
For that, click on the gear icon in the top left of your screen and choose the Enrolled Students option. Finally, select the membership you created earlier in this chapter.
That’s it. Now, only your members will be able to access this page.
While you can always add new content to your membership courses, this is a great way to deliver one-off content to your membership site.
Now, let’s move on to the next step and show you how to build your membership community.
2. Create a Thinkific Community
An online community is one of the most important aspects of a membership site. This section will walk you through how to set up a community in Thinkific.
To create a community, go to Manage Learning Products in your admin dashboard, select Communities, and then click + New Community.
Thinkific will ask you to name the community and create a brief description.
You’ll then see the settings for customizing access to the community, including the possibility of making it accessible to:
- Students who purchase the community via checkout
- All logged-in students
- Students in courses and bundles
- Students in selected groups
However, you should choose the third option for a membership community.
Here, you can do a couple of more settings.
For example, you can customize the appearance of your community by choosing the primary color and the font. Then, you can upload a community home banner image.
Now that the initial community setup is done, you can review your final product and make some more changes.
To preview your community, click the Go To Community button in the top right of your screen.
The community has a simple layout with user posts and discussions on the right and navigation on the left.
Thinkific allows you to create spaces to keep your community organized. Right off the bat, you’ll get four different spaces in your community:
- General
- Announcements
- Introductions
- Questions
You can add, remove, and edit spaces as you please.
To create a new post, click the What’s On Your Mind box. You can then select a space, enter the post title and write the post content. Your posts can include an image, a video, or another file.
That’s all you need to set up a Thinkific community; as you can see, the process is pretty straightforward.
3. Set Up Membership Plans
After building your core product and community, it’s time to create your membership plans.
Thinkific offers many options for pricing your membership product, but we’re mainly concerned with subscriptions.
To create a pricing plan, go to Memberships and click on the product you created earlier.
Then, select the Subscription/Membership option under Pricing and write down the pricing.
Thinkific lets you create a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription. You can include a free trial and also charge a custom upfront payment.
Now, you can have multiple pricing options for your membership. As you scroll down this page, you’ll see the option for setting up Additional Pricing for your membership.
Again, select Subscription/Membership and enter your pricing.
Additional Pricing is helpful if you want to offer subscriptions of different duration. For example, you can offer a monthly and a yearly subscription plan for the same membership product.
Thinkific offers another useful pricing feature where you can offer 1-click upsells on thank you pages.
To create an upsell, go to the After Purchase section and click on Add Flow. Then you can choose the product you want to upsell to your members after purchase.
Now, creating multiple membership tiers with different benefits in Thinkific is more work.
For each tier, you’ll have to create a new membership, select the products you want to include, and set the pricing.
4. Build Your Membership Sales Page
After you’ve set up the pricing plans, it’s time to take care of the membership sales page.
By default, Thinkific creates a landing page for every product. You can then use Thinkific’s page builder to achieve the desired look for your sales page.
To access the page builder, click on Build Landing Page from inside your membership.
Inside the page builder, you’ll see the builder options appear on the screen’s left side, while the page’s real-time preview will appear on the right.
The default membership page comes with two sections: Banner and Bundles. You can customize these sections as you wish.
In the Banner section, you can customize the heading and background, add an image or video, and adjust the page alignment.
If you want to add a new section, click the Add Section button. Thinkific has over 20 section templates for you to choose from.
You can use these to highlight membership benefits, show customer reviews and testimonials, display pricing options, answer frequently asked questions, show a countdown timer, etc.
Select the section type you want to add to your page, and it will get added to your page. You can then edit the section by clicking on it in the left panel.
This will show you various options for that particular section.
After you’ve made the necessary edits, click on Save at the top right corner of the screen, and your membership page is ready.
Now that your membership site is complete, you can start sharing it with your audience.
However, before you do that, you need to make some final settings and publish your membership.
For this, go to your membership and click on Settings. Make sure your membership URL is correct, and you can also make your bundle Private or Hidden:
- A Private membership will be visible on your website, but students must request access to enroll.
- A Hidden membership won’t be visible on your website, but anyone with a direct link can access the sales page and enroll.
To make the membership live, go to the Publish Menu and click on the Publish button.
After you publish your membership, it’s important to check out the entire flow to ensure that your users will have a smooth experience signing up for it.
You can replicate the user experience by creating a 100% off coupon code for yourself and then purchasing the membership using a different email address in a private window.
This way, you can see whether your sales page, checkout process, and membership library are in order and ready for your customers.
Summary
Thinkific is, without a doubt, an excellent platform for creating a membership site. It allows you to offer courses and community as part of your membership and provides handy selling tools.
In this guide, we covered all aspects of building a Thinkific membership site, right from creating your membership product to setting pricing options and building a sales page.
We hope this article helped you learn how to launch your membership with Thinkific.
If you aren’t using the platform yet, sign up for a free trial to start using it.
Have any doubts or questions about Thinkific membership sites? Leave them down below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
