New Online Course Sales Page Template Available in Thrive Architect

Author
Bradley Stevens   114

When it's time to sell your online course… you need a high-converting sales page. 

As part of our continuing dedication to help you sell more, we’ve just released a brand new sales page template specifically designed for selling online courses.

It's incredible! You'll find step-by-step copywriting instructions, an editable box-shot, a sticky call-to-action button, beautiful module boxes, an "About the Teacher" section, dynamic pricing tables and more!

And it all follows our research-backed sales page structures and blueprints. Watch the video and read on to see how it works!

More...

Want to see it live? Click here to view the brand new sales page template in a new tab in your browser!

What Does it Take to Make a Great Sales Page?

In the lead up to developing this template, we went deep into research mode, answering the following questions: What do you need to include on your sales page? And in what order? What can you do to increase your sales? 


We published our findings in two epic articles, both which include custom sales page blueprints that helped us prepare this new template:


For more resources on how to improve your online course sales, check out the full free resource list at the bottom of this article.

How To Use This Sales Page Template:

The new sales page template is already available inside of the Thrive Architect template library. You’ll find it when you expand the template set called ‘Bonus’.

This new template is under the Bonus set.

If you aren’t a Thrive Architect user and want to know how you can get access to the sales page, click open the toggle below for a summary of how it all works.

Thrive Architect templates explained

Above-The-Fold

The term ‘above-the-fold’ comes from when newspapers were folded in half on newsstands. Whatever was above the fold was visible to anyone passing by. On websites, it’s everything visible when a visitor opens the page but hasn’t scrolled down yet.

Here’s the above-the-fold for this sales page:

Everything you see above-the-fold is very deliberate.

This is the ideal structure we uncovered from our research:

  • Headline
  • Sales Video
  • Tagline
  • Enroll Now
  • Countdown timer

Remember, you can change all of the images and colors on this template with just a few clicks.

"But I don't have a sales video"

If you aren't using a video to sell your course, don’t worry. Simply delete the video element from the page and your headline + tagline will do.

If you remove the video, we generally recommend also removing the ‘Enroll Now’ button at the top. Generally. Visitors aren’t going to buy based on your headline alone, whereas a sales video could answer enough to sell them on the course.

Keep the call-to-action visible only when there's a video and if there's not, just delete the enroll button. Don’t worry, there are other calls-to-action further down the page.

Copywriting Instructions

Rather than filling the template with 'Lorem Ipsum' placeholder text, we’ve prepared every text box with copywriting instructions for you.

When you first open up the sales page template, you’ll see what you need to write and where. Click inside any text box and do what it says!

For example, look at this text box below the video:

Template text tells you what to write.

All you have to do is think of two things:

  1. What is the great goal that your online course students want to achieve?
  2. What is the major objection or concern that makes them think they won’t achieve it?

With those two points in mind, put them together to write your tagline and type it right over the top of the instructions.

Every single section of the sales page is filled with instructions, from headlines, to testimonial introductions, to module boxes and even the author introduction.

It’s basically like following a recipe.

Countdown Timer

It’s common practice to have launch discounts or limited bonuses for an online course. Some course creators will use an open-close enrollment system meaning the course is not available all year around.

All of this is done to incentivize visitors to take action sooner rather than later. If you’re going to run any kind of special or discount, showing a countdown timer will make that very clear.

The default countdown timer seen on the template page.

If you don’t have any kind of limited promotion, just delete the timer from the page. But if you are going to use it, you can set the date, time, timezone and message on completion.

Countdowm Timer settings in Architect

And Thrive Ultimatum allows you to take your scarcity marketing a step further.

Not only does Thrive Ultimatum vastly increase the library of countdown timer designs you have access to, but it also allows you to create automatic lockdown campaigns, recurring promotions, evergreen funnels and to promote your campaign website wide with ribbons and WordPress shortcodes.

Box-Shot

After addressing your visitor's pain points and the topic you teach early on your sales page, you’ll want to introduce your online course. A picture is worth a thousand words, so this template comes loaded with a fully editable online course box-shot graphic.

Yes, you can change those images with a few clicks.

Previously, you needed a designer to put together a collection of images superimposed on screens with a transparent background before uploading it to your website.

But with this template, you can do away with those extra costs.

Note: The box-shot does not use the image element. Instead, each screen is a content box with an image background. Here’s how to change them:

Select the content box then background style and choose your image.

The box shot is responsive too, with the largest screen being hidden by default when viewed on mobile. This was a design choice to prevent it from being too busy and cluttered. You can always bring the larger screen back in by changing the Responsive Setting to enable the graphic on mobile and then adjusting the negative margins until it looks right.

Mobile view of the box-shot

Click the mobile view icon to add the 3rd screen back in.

Sticky Enroll Now Button:

After the online course has been introduced, there is a primary call to action that looks like this:

This bold call-to-action stretches full screen width.

This is a background section that has its scroll behavior set by default to ‘sticky’.

What does that mean? It means as the visitor continues to scroll down the page, that call to action will remain fixed at the top of their browser viewport. Watch it stick to the top in the following animation:

The sticky call-to-action stays stuck at the top on scroll.

Enroll Now Button - Anchor Link

The enroll now button at the top of the sales page and the sticky call-to-action are both anchor links, also known as jump links. This means that when the visitor clicks the button, it will jump the browser viewport further down the page to the pricing table.

You can change this to link straight to your checkout if you’d prefer, but so you know how it works, this is the default set up:

By default, the enroll now buttons link to ‘#Pricing’, as you’ll see here:

#Pricing is entered in as the target link URL

The pricing table that they are taken to has been given that same ID tag under the HTML properties. To see it, select the first pricing table on the page (make sure you’ve got the whole table selected in the breadcrumbs), and look under the HTML properties.

ID matches what's in the anchor link.

Pricing Table:

By default, the sales page comes with a pricing table that has 2 pricing tiers (regular and advanced), and 2 payment options (one time payment or 3 monthly installments).

That's an attractive pricing table!

The payment options use what we call an ‘instance switch’ just above the table, that allows the visitor to toggle between payment options. Clicking this will change the tables displayed.

The Enroll Now button in each payment option should be linked to the checkout page of your choosing, whether that’s to a checkout inside your WordPress website or one hosted elsewhere.

If you don’t want to offer this many options, you can easily edit the table settings in the sidebar to suit your preferred options.

Easily add or remove payment options.

And There’s More…

We’ve included the important features of the sales page in this post, but there’s even more to it than that. It also includes a pricing guarantee section, an about-the-author, beautiful module boxes and more.

The best way to see all of it… is to have a look! Check out the live preview of the new online course sales page template right here.

So what do you think of the new sales page template? We think you're going to love it, but we'd prefer to hear it from you.

Leave us a comment below to let us know, and give this page a share on social media!

by Bradley Stevens  June 11, 2019

114

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Leave a Comment

  • Great template, thank you. I’ll be using this to rework my courses sales pages. I appreciate you making this available. I know it is going to save me lots of time.

  • Thank you…this is fantastic. You all do such a great job of overdelivering and making my life easier 🙂

  • Awesome…you’ve inspired me to redo my current course sales page which I’ve been using for years but doesn’t convert well..thank you

  • Excellent video Brad – and great template. ThriveThemes has been my goto WordPress site builder since 2014. My clients love it (as do I).

  • Thanks, Brad, this is of very great help, especially, while I’m in the midst of making my very first sales page for my very first online course ever!

    Question: I’ve already completed 50% of my sales page. How can I best integrate my current sales page with this beautiful template?

    Scenario 1: save elements of your template and incorporate them into mine?
    Scenario 2: start from scratch with your template and copy/paste the elements of my current sales page into your template?

    Many thanks!!

    • This is an interesting situation, Harry. If it’s your first sales page and you’re 50% through, I’d say you should keep going with your own page and maybe take inspiration from this template. That way, you’ll get more experience using Thrive Architect and making it do what you want, and those skills will help you no matter what you do. Once you’re up and running, you could create a second sales page from our template is run an A/B test between the two, to see which converts better.

      If you want to take any elements from your page to the template or vice versa, just open them both on separate wordpress pages and save the background section of elements you want to copy (click the save icon on the right right of the section when selected). Load it with the symbols/templates feature on the other page and tweak it until it fits in seamlessly.

      Good luck

      • As always Thrive delivers again and again. This is just in time as I am working on a course right now. Thanks Brad job well done, you guys think a head of all of us and that is what we love about y’all.

  • Great addition to the templates already offered. Just in time for a new leadership course I am creating.

  • Wow, you guys did a great job. I’m excited to finish my course and use this, will save a lot of time. Thank you!

  • WOW! Just in time and I already love it! We want more of these Online Course Sales Pages. :-))))

  • This is such a wonderful video and great timing as well because I’m about to create a new online course.

    Thank you so much for all your wonderful work and help.

    Stay awesome! 😀

  • Hello,

    This is impressive and really exciting.

    I have a question though.

    I am actually using a LMS wordpress theme.

    Is there a way to implement your template page and integrate it with such a theme ?

    As the LMS theme “opens” a customer account (via a WooCommerce payment) that allows the customer to access to the course content online.
    How all that can be integrate once the customer clicks on the enrol button ?

    The following steps are not covered by your video or I missed it.

    Thanks for this awesome work and your further information.

    Take care,


    Cyril

    • I kept the video reasonably broad, since each payment system has its own quirks. But yes, this should work.

      What you need is a checkout URL link that automatically places the Online Course product into the cart and takes the visitor to the checkout. I can’t remember exactly how to do this in Woocommerce, but it can be done by adjusting a few settings.

      That specific product->checkout link is what you then link to from the ‘Buy Now’ buttons on the sales page. So once someone has read about your product and they click ‘buy’, they should go straight to the woocommerce checkout with that product pre-selected and ready for purchase.

      It’s been a long time since I’ve used Woocommerce, but I hope that helps

  • Looks great! I notice there’s a payment plan… Is that functionality coming soon to TA/SO??

      • My understanding though is that Thrive Apprentice doesn’t recognise such “subscription” purchases / payment plans. Thrive support has told me and other purchasers of CC that the integration only works (currently) with single-time purchases.

      • Daniel, I owe you an apology. Checked with the team and you are right. So, to go back to your original question, no this isn’t on the cards (yet). We are looking to expand Apprentice, though, so as we review upcoming integrations, we’ll keep this in mind as a request.

      • I love Apprentice and CC. But this omission is so glaring! I hate to be the “one more feature” guy, yet the fact that you didn’t even believe it wasn’t possible in TA/SO reveals just how fundamental a payment plan is to any course creation business.

      • Daniel, I disagree. Last week I published an article on lower priced online course sales pages ($250 or less). Not a single course in question used payment plans and they are successful businesses. So I wouldn’t say it’s fundamental to any course creation business. At higher prices ($500+), it’s more common which is why we’re looking to expand functionality of apprentice. It’s not that we won’t do this, just that we haven’t yet.

  • This is fantastic. I’m about to redo the sales page for my coaching program and I see how this template could also be used for that with a few small tweaks.

  • Great explainer video Brad! Can you please let me know how to make the ‘enrol now’ ribbon sticky? I really like that feature of the page.

  • That’s it!. Now, you’ve done it! Now, you have eliminated all my excuses for not writing my sales page. This should make it pretty straight forward. And, even if I decide not to charge the full $250 for the course, some subset of this template should work just fine.

  • Looks great, I am going to use it. I now have a half-started sales page so great to use this one now. I hope for more pages like this one.

  • Great timing! The email about this template arrived the day before I plan to get started on my sales page.
    Very clearly explined Brad.
    Many thanks.

  • Great content and video Brad. Stunning layout!

    Just in time to put all the Course Craft efforts in a greate Course Page.

    Thanks!

  • Love this page, thank you for designing it. It’s just in time for a new course I’m launching 😀

  • Awesome. Thank you for doing all the hard lifting. It saves a huge amount of time, that I can spend on creating the course. I love being a member of Thrive.

    • And that’s exactly the point. Creating the course itself can be a lot of work so we want this template to help you spend more time where you need to. Thanks for your comment, Rosemarie

  • I sell the high-price art crafts!
    I love all of your team’s blog! It’s really useful~~
    But I still want not only “online course” but also “products” template!!!!

  • The template is great – but rather usless because it is not usable on mobiles – to adapt it ourselfes is rather much work.
    50-80 % of our users are on moble!
    I am speechless ..

    • Andrea, the template works fully on mobile. I re-tested to confirm.

      Everything including countdown timers collapse down to a mobile friendly view and we’ve taken great care to make sure of it.

      If you are seeing different behavior, then that’s concerning. I’d suggest updating Thrive Architect. If it still doesn’t work, open a support ticket. It’s likely that there’s another plugin or code issue on your site that is causing problems and our support team can help find out why.

  • This is just simply fantastic and another reason why I renew my Thrive University sub each year. This video is concise & easy to follow & the template spot on & particularly timely for me

  • Superb video, Bradley! I’m thrilled with this! Thrive always seems to come out with the perfect tool or template at the exact moment I need it.

  • I love the box shot function, but have a problem using it: what dimensions / height – width ratios should the various photos be to fit in each section?

    • Good question. With a little bit of trial and error, here’s what I found: 568 x 320 (desktop), 377 x 236 (laptop), 212 x 159 (tablet), 130 x 72 (mobile). So long as your images preserve that ratio, they will display edge-to-edge. Of course, if you want it to look sharp on high pixel density screens, you can make them bigger but just keep the same ratio.

  • This is epic. Thank god for Thrive Themes taking control over my design work. I’ll just stick to what I’m good at :). And design isn’t one of them.

  • Great content AND great template. Thanks to you all.

    I love the jump links too, but the user experience isn’t that great, so I’m having a coder alter things a bit. I want the page to scroll instead of jump.

    I’m finding that the jump is so prompt that the user thinks it’s a new page and will hit the “backspace” button to get back to where they thought they were.

    This, of course, sends them away from my website altogether.

    Maybe you could mention this to the team… 😀

    • Glad you like the page, Michael. Sure, I’ll mention this to the team. We’ve seen this requested a couple of times, so we’ll look into it. It would be a nice feature

    • Funny you mention this Michael. We have an update on July 10th that will do a couple of things:- i) Make it far easier to add jumplinks in Architect and ii) include the option to “jump” or “smooth scroll” when a link is clicked.

      • That’s great to hear Paul, since I wanted this feature also for a long time! I look forward to it. 🙂

  • Really great work! This template jumps way beyond the level I could ever achieve on my own. And.. the beautiful thing is the complete ability to easily customize.
    Just wondering, would you consider a follow-on template for in person events like a boot camp or intensive? Stakes are high for live events so having this level of design would be super valuable! –Thanks, Roy

    • Hey Roy, glad you like it. Most of what you’ve described would probably still fit the template, to be honest. For example: the Module Boxes could be replaced with seminars or sessions.

      But we’ll keep this in mind. This page has been a hit, so we would like to look for ways to add more pages like this.

  • Hey Brad, Thanks so much..

    I have been a thrive theme fan boy since 2015…

    I needed something like this when creating my course’s sales page last year. I don’t mind starting all over because I just had to draft my template from scratch…good stuff…

    Quick question, using the sticky enroll now button, if i delete the 3 month installment button on the pricing table and fix my link to a check out page, will #pricing element still work once the person clicks it?

    • Hey Kenneth, yes it should do. The #pricing is on the whole pricing table element on the page, so you can make all the changes you want within that element and the ID will remain the same. But if you delete the pricing table and then add a new one, that new one won’t have the #pricing link attached to it.

      Glad to hear you’re going to use the page! Best of luck with your online marketing

  • You don’t know how much time you just saved me! This is perfect. I love Thrive Themes and you always come through for me. Thank you!

  • Hi, it looks very great!. Just a quick question. Could you share real examples template o “look a like” examples? . This could very helpful the customize the template.

  • Great one brad! The reasoning behind the template really convinced me to go with this. But there’s one thing that I’m always battling about:

    Question:
    Though all conversion-focused elements are in the right place – what is your or Thrive Themes thoughts when comparing it to Shane’s “Copy 2.0 Hybrid Smart Sales Page (Video Version)” template?
    In particular – Thoughts on the “corporate/professional” design vs. “blog post” design. The 2.0 one has bigger font size for readability, more attention grabbing headings & content boxes, while this new one makes you trust it more because of the corporate design.

    It’s a trade-off, I know – but what has worked best if you have any thoughts or data on that 🙂 ?

  • Hey Bradley, nice support video. Is there some secret to providing the answers to the FAQs on this template? It’s obvious how to edit the questions, but it’s not intuitive how to insert the answers. Help!!

  • Years later … 2022. 🙂
    I just went through Shane’s Sales Page course, followed some links and came here. As always, you give (still) valuable advice and insightful hints. Thank you!
    The only thing – some explanations for the structure of the videos of those pages would be helpful, especially since I don’t want to just repeat what the written texts of the sales pages say.
    Any hints (or ThriveThemes blog posts, which I didn’t find) on that?
    Thanks again!

    • Hi Stefan,
      While you don’t want to repeat the exact words on the written page, you can follow the same structure in your sales video!

  • {"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}