May 2021 product update: Bundles and order bumps
If it feels like things have been moving a mile a minute for you lately, know you’re not alone. We’ve been busy over here at Teachable this May as we launched new features, refined current ones, and worked to make your life a bit easier this summer. Because we believe in giving you, the most power and control over your business that we can, we’ve worked hard to ensure these product updates are impactful and meaningful, regardless of your business’ size and goals. Keep reading for the latest May 2021 product update from the Teachable team.
What’s new at Teachable?
Circle.so community integration
The month kicked off with some of our biggest news: Teachable x Circle.so. This partnership means you can now create a community experience for your online course students and coaching clients through a seamless single sign-on integration using Circle.so. Circle, a modern community platform for creators, offers a simple and intuitive community experience that allows you to engage and build relationships with students and clients.
With the Circle.so integration, you can:
- Create a free or paid stand alone community
- Create a community that connects to your courses
- Launch a membership that includes monthly access to your courses, coaching, and community
- Use Teachable as an Oauth provider and allow your students to create and login to your Circle.so community account with their Teachable credentials
- Invite students directly, share invite links, and provide links to direct threads to control content visibility
Many creators have adopted the Circle.so integration in the last month. And many have begun building and engaging their communities. You can read more about how one Teachable course creator, Graham Nicholls, incorporated the Circle.so integration into his course sales funnel to lead to more revenue, and thus making his Circle membership pay for itself.
Order bumps: another way to increase average order value
May continued with another new feature—this time one that’s specifically designed to help increase your bottom line. Our new order bump feature gives you the option to tack on an additional product at checkout. Consider this our version of, “Do you want fries with that?”
An order bump is a valuable sales opportunity, as it allows you to increase your average order value and revenue without having to raise the price of your products or bring in more customers. In addition to increasing your bottom line, order bumps create a sense of urgency and send a signal to customers that you’re offering a high value product for a bargain price. Order bumps are also valuable ways to add on complementary courses, test the waters with new products, and encourage customer purchasing action.
On any plan on Teachable, you can now add an order bump on any course checkout page. As a reminder, an order bump can be:
- Any product you’ve created on Teachable—courses, coaching, or bundles
- Any product with a one-time purchase pricing plan
- Added to any course
- Customized with a thumbnail image, headline description, and sale price
Currently, more than 500 schools have adopted order bumps and grossed over $100,000 in GMV from order bumps. You can read more about how to price your order bump and master tried-and-true sales strategies from digital marketing expert and Teachable creator, Julie Stoian.
Bundles: pair courses and coaching together
As if the Circle.so integration and order bumps weren’t enough, we rounded off the month with our new Bundles feature. You may recall with our previous Course Bundle Content feature, you’ve been able to group complementary courses together. But with Bundles, you now have the flexibility to bundle courses and coaching together for the most comprehensive experience yet.
When we launched coaching in 2020, we wanted to diversify what you could sell on Teachable. After nearly a year of feedback, we learned creators craved a way to better connect their course and coaching experiences. With the Bundles feature, you now have the flexibility to run your business, your way and do just that.
As a reminder, bundles are simply groups of multiple courses—and now coaching products—that are sold together as a singular unit at a new price point. Oftentimes, this new bundled price is cheaper than if a student purchases the two courses or coaching services together. For example, if you have two courses on Instagram photography that sell for $20 each, you can offer both courses in a bundle that students can purchase for $30. This, naturally, makes the bundle an impactful incentive for students.
Learn more about how to set up this new feature, here.
Updates and other fixes
- Strikethrough price for order bump: It may be a new feature, but we’re already working on ways to make it better. We released a strikethrough option that shows your original order bump price with a “sale” price to drive a sense of urgency.
- Sales transaction table update: We know you want to see more data and insights on your products so we updated the Sales transactions table to identify which Sales offers are Order Bumps and which are Upsells. We added a new column called Offers to the table, as well.
- Email leads form block: Owners can delete leads from the Users > Leads table, control whether a double opt-in email is sent from their school when a lead joins, and add a consent checkbox to a lead form to create a compliance record for regions where this is required.
- VAT inclusive pricing display: See VAT inclusive pricing on the Order Summary on the student side at Checkout and not on a separate line item. Not only is this important for EU standards, but it also is preferred by many of our creators and is more intuitive to students.
Coming up at Teachable
Our product and engineering team is working on:
- PayPal and mobile pay for subscriptions
- Lead form blocks updates
- Adding more analytics and insights to order bumps
And these are just our May product updates. Look to see more launches headed your way this summer.