Teachable Review – Pros & Cons [2023]

Top Features of Teachable

Teachable houses some powerful features to help you easily grow an online course business. Let’s take a closer look at those features.

Create Multiple Types of Courses

With the growing popularity of online courses, you need to bring as much variation as possible. You can offer multiple types of courses on Teachable to maximize your reach.

• Self-Paced Courses – These courses are suitable for learners that aren’t capable of joining live or cohort-based courses. Create fruitful self-paced courses and let students learn whenever they feel convenient.
• Cohort-Based Courses – Self-paced courses often have a low completion rate. This is because students tend to leave their courses midway or lose the excitement. But cohort-based courses keep students engaged throughout the course and increase the completion rate.
• Live Coaching – This can be an excellent opportunity to engage with students and address their problems in person. You can create live courses on Teachable to help students learn better and generate more revenue throughout the process.

Drag and Drop Course Builder

Once your course is ready, you don’t need to worry much about the sales process on Teachable. The platform offers you a customizable course builder to quickly launch your courses.

• Sales Pages – The courses you offer should appear on an attractive sales page that can lure potential students. Designing such sales pages isn’t that difficult on Teachable. You get a drag-and-drop sales page builder to create sales pages that convert. Without any prior knowledge in using page builders, it might be a bit confusing at first. But you will overcome the hurdles as you move forward.
• Checkout – An accessible checkout page might help you convert more potential students. You can use the checkout page builder to organize items on the page. For example, designing CTA buttons or showing the price breakdown can be helpful for customers.
• Built-In Payments – Collecting payments is one of the most critical steps when you want to run an online coaching business. In most cases, you need to integrate with third-party payment gateways. But Teachable lets you collect payments from all over the world, thanks to its 130+ currency support.  Students can pay directly on the checkout page using Apply Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and so on. Besides receiving one-time payments, you can also set up installments to ease up the process for customers. And you can offer free trials on the checkout page.

Student Engagement Features

Running a plain course might not be interesting enough for students. You need to let students participate in a multitude of activities to keep them engaged in the course. This can range from making comments related to the course or their problems to weekly or bi-weekly quizzes. You also need to provide them with certificates of completion after they successfully finish the courses. Teachable allows you to do all these easily. But we think the platform requires a lot of improvement regarding comments and quizzes. And more certificate templates should be available.

Third-Party Integrations

In this world full of tools for different purposes, you need a good load of integrations to automate processes. Teachable has integrations with a lot of popular tools that can make your business hassle-free.

For example, the MailChimp integration will let you automate the email marketing process to acquire new students and keep current students engaged. Zapier, ConvertKit, or Google Analytics are some of the integrations you get here, and they will help you manage your online coaching business better.

And even if you don’t get a direct integration, you have the API to use in your favor. But things aren’t highly polished here, so you might need to spend a bit of time and effort to make your own integrations.

Affiliate Marketing Tools

Teachable doesn’t only allow you to upsell items but also to use affiliate marketing tools to grow your business better. For example, you can recruit affiliate partners who will do the marketing for you and receive a commission for every successful sale.

Plus, you can use the student referral feature, where current or previous students can refer their friends to the course and receive an incentive. This can be a great tool to bring a surge in your sales.

With these affiliate marketing tools, you could reach more potential customers and have a higher chance of converting them to generate higher revenue. Spreading word of mouth is essential in this case. Though the platform needs to upgrade its affiliate marketing tools, we think they perform decently right now.

Business Management Tools

Besides bringing more customers in, you should also have complete control over how the business runs and make informed decisions for your business growth. Teachable offers multiple features to make business management a breeze.

• Manage Taxes – Handling tax is one of the biggest headaches when you run a business. But Teachable offers you peace of mind by handling taxes on your behalf. You don’t need to worry about remittance or tax forms so you can solely focus on the courses you make on the platform.
• Insights and Analytics – When you are at the helm of a business, you need to adjust the course plan before it’s too late. Only a set of advanced reports can provide you with all the necessary information you need to make a decision to steer the business. Teachable does quite well in terms of analytics and helps you with intuitive reports on sales and engagement.
• Data Privacy, Fraud Protection, and Encryption – Preventing fraud or protecting your data on the platform is of great importance. Teachable has some advanced fraud protection and data encryption so that you can sell courses without any worries. Plus, you can always back up your data so that you don’t lose them due to unwanted issues.

Pros & Cons of Teachable

Besides being highly suitable for selling online courses, Teachable has some downsides too. Let’s check them out.

Teachable Plans & Pricing

Teachable offers four different pricing plans, including a free option, with varying features.

• Free – starting at $0/mo
  • 10% transaction fee on sales
  • 1 admin user
  • 1 course
  • Email support
• Basic – starting at $29/mo
  • 5% transaction fee on sales
  • 2 admin users
  • 5 courses
  • Email support
• Pro – starting at $99/mo
  • 0% transaction fee on sales
  • 5 admin users
  • Unlimited courses
  • Live chat support

Teachable’s Advance plan has custom pricing, based on your unique requirements. It has 0% transaction fees on sales, and puts your course on a custom domain and all of Teachable’s features. Plus, you’ll get priority support and a dedicated customer success manager.  

Our Take on Teachable

As we mentioned throughout our review, Teachable is a great platform for creating online courses. It lets you create a variety of courses without any fuss, and you can launch them in minutes. The drag-and-drop sales page builder helps you create attractive landing pages. And you can also customize the checkout page to bag more conversions. Its built-in payment system lets you collect payments in more than 130 currencies. Student engagement features are handy to keep them focused. And you get a whole lot of integrations on this platform to automate your marketing process. The customer support isn’t that great, though (you need to be on an expensive plan for live chat support). And there is no sales funnel builder either, which can be a deal breaker for serious marketers. Teachable’s pricing is quite affordable, though. They offer a free plan to test the features, and their Basic plan starts at $29 per month.

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