How Thinkific Won Hundreds of Clients & Proved ROI with a Single Webinar

Picture this: You're a small but ambitious marketing team, facing the daunting challenge of standing out and winning new customers in the saturated Black Friday market.

Your task? Convince leads to choose your online course platform over all the competitors clamoring for their attention.

This was the reality for Thinkific, an all-in-one software platform that empowers entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.

Luckily, Thinkific had an ace up their sleeve: an interactive, Demio-powered sales webinar that centered on real customer needs and pain points. Read on to learn how Thinkific’s Black Friday webinar helped the team supercharge conversions, surpass sales goals, and prove the value of webinar marketing beyond any doubts.

Thinkific’s Story

Thinkific's mission is to revolutionize the way people learn and earn online by providing them with the tools they need to transform their expertise into a thriving, sustainable business. 

It all started with two brothers, Matt and Greg Smith. Greg, Thinkific’s CEO and co-founder, wanted to scale the LSAT course he taught by taking it online — and with the help of his brother, quickly found himself with a revenue-generating powerhouse. Along with co-founders Miranda Lievers and Matt Payne, they set out to build the best possible platform for course creators and businesses looking to educate their clients and potential clients and drive growth. 

The rest is history: Thinkific has become a go-to digital learning product creation and sales platform for entrepreneurs, coaches, speakers, bloggers, YouTubers, and companies alike. 

With a focus on giving creators complete control over their content, data, and business, Thinkific's intuitive tools make it easy for users to build out and customize courses and learning solutions they can sell on their own website.

The Challenge: Cutting Through the Black Friday Noise

In the fiercely competitive world of online education, the Black Friday season is a make-or-break opportunity. At Thinkific, it’s a major source of Q4 sales and expansion revenue — and after crunching the numbers, they set a target of 350 new customer sign ups for the Black Friday offer.

For the marketing team, the pressure was on. They needed to capture the attention of their target audience and show them why Thinkific was the right choice — with countless other course platforms vying for their business and offering amazing deals. 

Thinkific knew that webinars could be a key one-to-many channel to educate potential customers about their platform's benefits and address any objections holding them back.

As Aaron Morin, Thinkific's Lead Educator, puts it: "Webinars are just an incredible way to compress a lot of the lead time to a sale down to a very short window. You know, it's kind of like having 1000 sales conversations all at once in one hour.”

But like many small-but-mighty product marketers, they faced the challenge of delivering an outstanding event with limited resources. What’s more, to add to the pressure, they faced internal objections about whether webinars were the right approach.

They needed to create a Black Friday event that delivered results — and proved the value of virtual events across the company.

The Solution: A Demio-Powered Black Friday Hit 

To create a webinar that would truly resonate with their audience, Thinkific's marketing team got focused on deeply understanding their customers' pain points and doubts. 

Crucially, they took a data-driven approach. Instead of making assumptions about what potential clients were struggling with, they collaborated closely with their customer-facing colleagues and drew heavily on quantitative and qualitative customer lifecycle analytics to understand the challenges that stop prospects in their tracks — and how to talk about them. 

Armed with this knowledge, Thinkific came up with The Creator Catalyst Masterclass, a free webinar with two goals: 

1. To provide hyper-relevant insights and actionable techniques for potential customers seeking to multiply their impact and revenue with online courses
2. To showcase Thinkific’s solutions, tackle objections head-on, and ultimately drive prospects to convert.

To maximize webinar success, Aaron recommends “understanding where the objections are, then breaking down the limiting beliefs in the webinar, and then offering so much support, so many bonuses, and so much educational materials on top of your product in the actual offer that it doesn't make any sense for them to say no to it.” 

👀 Take a look at Demio’s full webinar playbook for tips on crafting an engaging webinar experience from start to finish.

The Strategy: Promoting & Delivering a High-Impact Event 

But a hyper-relevant topic is just the first step in drawing webinar attendees. 

Thinkific needed to get the message out, build buzz, and drive registrations for the event. 

Partnering with Demio was a key part of Thinkific's webinar strategy from the very start. As well as Demio’s customizable registration pages and automated email reminders, they used Demio’s Hubspot integration to track and segment registrations by channel.

“Our registration goals were pretty much just to get as many people registered for this webinar as possible, because the types of people who register for these webinars are typically very high-intent”, says Aaron.

By targeting their existing database of warm leads — inactive free users or email subscribers — they were able to tap into a highly receptive audience.

They also launched a high-energy multi-channel promotional campaign through social and YouTube content and email nurture, as well as paid ads.

👀Take a look at Demio’s masterclass for FREE webinar promotional assets tips and templates!

Thinkific partnered with Demio to host the event, so they knew they had a powerful, reliable, and easy-to-use platform in their corner: Demio’s interactive features like chat, Q&A, downloads and free goodies, and featured actions kept attendees engaged and excited.

And afterwards, the team used Demio’s powerful webinar analytics and audience segmentation data, automated follow-up emails, and replay pages and email. Demio’s tools let them easily take the live event and “make it an evergreen webinar where people can register anytime on demand, so it generates leads on a regular basis and our ads team can use that in their strategies.”

The Results: Amazing Sales, Attendance, & ROI 

Thinkific's Demio-powered Black Friday webinar exceeded all expectations, delivering impressive results across the board. 

Result # 1: Surpassing Sales Goals and Driving Immediate Conversions

The ultimate measure of success for Thinkific's Black Friday webinar was its impact on sales — and the results were nothing short of remarkable. 

Not only did they sign up 384 new clients, exceeding their goal of 350, but they actually saw 50 customers claim the Black Friday promotion immediately during the live session.

As Aaron explained, "Right in the middle of our live session, during the pitch, we had 50 different customers claim an offer immediately. So that was really exciting for the host and for everybody on the internal team, watching the numbers roll up."

Result #2: High Registrations & Attendance 

Thinkific’s promotional efforts paid off in a big way, with an impressive 3,821 registrations.

Their Demio-backed webinar also boasted an impressive attendance rate way beyond the standard. “We typically have about a 16% show up rate for these kinds of webinars, and we ended up getting about 866 people, about 23% of all those who registered”, Aaron revealed. 

Result #3: Proved the ROI of Webinar Marketing

As Aaron shared, “I think at the start of the year, the marketing team wondered if we should move away from event-based marketing or webinar based marketing… and we showed that it's still incredibly valuable to do virtual events.”

By using Demio's analytics to track key metrics like registrations, attendance, conversions, and engagement, Thinkific was able to quantify the impact of their webinar.

Result #4: Granular Marketing Attributions

Thanks to Demio's integration with Hubspot CRM, Thinkific was able to gain valuable insights into where their webinar traffic was coming from, allowing them to identify top-performing channels, measure ROI, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their webinar and follow-up strategy. 

Result #5: Easy, Evergreen, On-Demand Lead Nurture 

The success of The Creator Catalyst Masterclass didn't end with the live session. 

By sending out the webinar replay and creating an evergreen lead nurturing sequence, Thinkific was able to continue engaging leads and driving conversions long after the event had ended. 

Transforming webinars into on-demand content might appear daunting for a small team with limited resources. However, Demio's customizable replay page and automated replay emails eliminated the need for multiple tools or time-consuming processes, making it low lift — but high reward.

As Aaron explained, "We put some more legs behind the event so that it keeps converting over time. We will continue to email our list of registrants and we'll continue to promote the replay. And then on top of that, we put that replay into what we call a 'demo sequence.' So after people register for a demo of our products on our marketing site, they'll be sent a series of emails, and one of the emails will include this Black Friday promotion replay."

All in all, Thinkific's Black Friday webinar campaign is a shining example of the power of webinars to drive sales, engage audiences, andå prove marketing ROI. By partnering with Demio, Thinkific was able to deliver a high-impact virtual event that not only exceeded their sales goals but also provided invaluable insights into their audience and marketing efforts.

Demio's webinar hosting, engagement, and analytics tools helped Thinkific to cut through the noise, engage their audience, and drive meaningful business outcomes – all while showcasing the true potential of webinar marketing.