5 ways to automate Teachable with Zapier

In the old days, if you wanted to get a point across to a captive audience of students, you needed a chalkboard and a lecture hall. Tools like Teachable are completely changing that. Teachable's platform for selling coaching products, step-by-step lessons, and information products can even scale previously-unscalable coaching businesses. 

But scaling a teaching or coaching business is a lot of work. And if too much of that work requires your manual input, you're not really scaling. Combining Teachable's features with Zapier's automated workflows—called Zaps—you can more easily manage and scale your business.

You can use automation to help onboard new course users to Teachable, add specific tags to new subscribers, and organize your information business with minimal manual input. Here's how.

Table of contents

• Automatically enroll new users in courses

• Update subscriber lists with new enrollments

• Back up your Teachable class data

• Send notifications when a new enrollment comes in

• Use webhooks with Teachable

Automatically enroll new users in courses

Your first step is to shorten the distance between a purchase and the ability to access your course. That's not always as easy as it sounds. You may have users coming in from all sorts of sources, like subscribers on ActiveCampaign or new customers who discovered you via ClickFunnels. 

Your mission: tie each of these pipelines into the same Teachable course. No matter where a customer originates, they should be able to start your course right away.

When someone signs up with a paid order on Shopify, for example, you need a way to tie that purchase to your Teachable course. Or maybe you have a separate WooCommerce site but still need a way to tie new users into your internal economy. Any time there's a purchase through one of these platforms, you can use a Zap to tell Teachable to enroll a new user. 

Update subscriber lists with new enrollments

Let's say you want the process to work in reverse. You have a new student on Teachable and need those students to join a newsletter list. Ideally, you can capture and build a large audience of students by incorporating Teachable into your favorite newsletter software. You just need a Zap to connect them.

When you add a new Teachable student to a newsletter—with their permission, of course—you do more than gain a student. Over the long term, you build an audience. What you decide to do with that audience is up to you. But when you use these Zaps, you use every Teachable purchase to capture an audience that builds your online following.

This way, when you unleash a new course, you'll have a Mailchimp, AWeber, or ActiveCampaign audience to turn to. You'll be past the hard work of promoting your first Teachable product. Instead, you can rely on an audience of customers who've shown their support. This creates a "stickier" web presence—and helps you identify the die-hard customers who are willing to sign up time and time again.

As your audience grows, you can also assign different tags to users who sign up for different courses. The effect: you can build multiple newsletter segments, each of them targeted to a different aspect of your business. You don't have to limit yourself to one audience.

One additional note here: you can use multiple trigger events with Teachable for this strategy. A new enrollment in a course, for example, can create a contact on ActiveCampaign. Or you can use the "new user" trigger with Teachable to create a new newsletter subscriber. It's up to you and how you want to pitch your newsletter to your students.

Back up your Teachable class data

Ever have one of those school-time dreams that you forgot your homework? From the teacher's side, the modern-day equivalent is the fear of forgetting a syllabus. Even worse, you might forget your class list. But that fear is real: if you don't keep track of who's signed up, you might lose invaluable audience-building information you've been working so hard to acquire.

The solution? It's as simple as a spreadsheet. Use Teachable triggers like new enrollments, new sales, and new users to send new rows to Google Sheets or another database app. This way, every time you get a new signup, a centralized Google Sheet can track your data on the cloud. 

When you need to double-check your data, it will be ready and waiting for you. 

Send notifications when a new enrollment comes in

A lot of sales offices used to have a bell. Any time a salesperson made a new sale—hopefully a big one—they'd ring it. The sound of that bell gonging let the entire floor would know it was time to update the "big board." The bell helped the office keep track of sales contests or maybe remind someone else that it was time to prep the paperwork.

These days, we don't need bells. Tools like Slack, Discord, or Gmail can alert anyone you want when someone's signed up for your Teachable class. You can use these messages for internal use—like alerting a team member to follow up with a new class member. Or you can create external messages to welcome new Teachable students to a Slack channel or Discord server. That's especially great for Teachable products featuring a "join our community" upsell as part of the bargain. Or you can reverse it and automatically enroll a new Discord user into your Teachable class.

Use webhooks to fill in the automation gaps

Sometimes, there just aren't enough features or triggers to give you all the Zaps you could want. When this happens, the last thing you want to do is default back to manual work and data entry.

So we fill in those gaps with Webhooks by Zapier, a tool designed to cull the information every app needs and keep your automations running smoothly. Teachable integrates with webhooks, so you can turn just about any website conversion into a new signup. 

The catch hook trigger can even include a user clicking on a custom URL. Once you know how to use other apps to post webhooks, you can turn just about any app into a Teachable trigger.

Do more with Teachable

The beauty of an app like Teachable is that it takes information in your head and makes it both scalable and repeatable as a product. You only have to teach a course one time. That course can go out to thousands of students, continuing to earn you money for years to come.

But with Zapier, there's always more you can do. Automate Teachable to add features for users, build an audience over time, and even back up the critical information that makes your Teachable community tick. And do it all by setting up a Zap or two.