Insights: Sales and marketing tips from Teachable creators’ Black Friday success

This growth is a reflection of you—our hugely impactful creator community. And if one thing is clear: The consumer demand for creator products is only on the rise. Education creators continue to represent a massive opportunity within the broader creator ecosystem, with 95% of consumers saying they’ve learned something new from a creator, according to a recent Teachable report.

The same report reveals that approximately 40% of consumers prioritize price and a genuine desire to support their favorite creators as top decision factors when buying from a creator. And, if you ask us, this season’s Black Friday results align perfectly with this trend. As creators deepen connections with their audiences, Black Friday becomes a key opportunity to make their products more affordable for a limited time, setting them up for success throughout the year. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday might have passed, but there’s still time to get your products in front of your audience and market yourself to get those last-min sales.

See our top five tips for boosting holiday sales.

1. Diversify your product offerings

With the addition of our new product offerings, it’s easier than ever to push and expand what you can offer your audience. Look to digital downloads like guides, ebooks, and PDFs more accessible. Plus, you can even pull content you already have from an online course, social media, or a blog post and package it up in a digestible digital download.

Looking to provide even more? Our new membership offering allows creators to have more flexible and customizable ways to deliver content and value to their audiences. Memberships are a proven way to earn more for creators too. Oftentimes, you can simply use the products you already have. Plus students on memberships have a 43% higher lifetime value than one-time students. That’s because memberships let you deliver consistent content and foster connections, making your students more engaged and your brand stronger than ever.

2. Take advantage of gifting

We just dropped our highly requested gifting feature. We just released the ability for buyers to purchase access to an individual product for a recipient at the point of checkout. One of the most common and lucrative sales tactics in e-commerce. Boost both your audience and your sales with our new gifting feature. 

3. Put on the pressure with limited-time offerings, enrollment caps, and coupons

OK, perhaps putting the pressure on your customers is a bit dramatic. But for Black Friday especially, we’ve all seen the tactic of urgency put into practice. And when it comes to marketing, it works. We have a number of product features that can help your marketing game.

Limited-time access duration gives creators the ability to set time limits on product access for Free, One-Time, and Payment Plan pricing plans. You can customize your products so that all students/clients are unenrolled on the same specified date. Or, if you prefer, products can be set to access for a specified duration over a rolling period (for example, 30 days). Once the time limit expires, students can repurchase the product if it is still available. 

Enrollment caps lets you cap the number of students you let into a course or product. For schools on the basic plan and up, you control the limit on the amount of students who can enroll in a course, coaching, or bundle product either by limiting the number of available seats, or by a specific number of days. This helps you put a sense of urgency on enrolling in a product knowing there’s a limited number of seats.

Lastly, sales are always a little sweeter with a discount. Offer your beloved audience a little coupon that can be used for promotional events or large scale discounts (i.e. the holidays!). Plus, with Coupon Urgency Drivers, you can increase student excitement as you now have the ability to make existing coupon expirations or deadlines visible to students on sales pages and checkout in order to drive up urgency and excitement to purchase. Consider this a powerful marketing tool for creators to drive urgency around purchases with time-based and headcount-based coupon caps placed front and center.

4. Leverage on-the-fencers with abandon cart

Never leave a sale behind with Cart Abandonment. As part of the latest addition to our industry-leading sales and commerce tools for creators, this tool allows you to access customer data and use it to re-engage customers who failed to complete checkout and purchase a product but dropped off before completing checkout. 

With enhanced customization, data access, and built-in tooling, you have complete flexibility at your fingertips to enable this feature in the way that works best for you—and your customers. Creators using the feature have boosted earnings by 14% on average—with some increasing their bottom line by more than 100%.

5. Use BNPL as a marketing tool

You asked, we listened. As one of the biggest launches of the year, our Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) feature on checkout for BackOffice subscribers is finally here. Use BNPL to increase sales and make larger course purchases more accessible to more students. In fact, BNPL can increase creators’ total sales by an average of 25% on Stripe. You’ll get paid upfront while your students have the flexibility to make installment payments through Affirm, Afterpay, or Klarna.

No matter what your holiday and end-of-year goals are, we’ve got you covered. From tools and features to help you run your business smoother to content and free courses (yes, really!), we’re here to help you hit those goals and kick off 2024 the right way.