9 Great New Features in Thrive Themes

Welcome to another roundup of our latest releases, features and improvements at Thrive Themes!

We're excited to share with you how Thrive Suite has been growing stronger and stronger with every release, helping online business owners and course creators build a better business on the back of our software.

Today, I'm rounding up 9 new features and improvements, including a few that slipped by without getting the attention they deserved back in March.

Read on to see what's new!

1. Thrive Ovation: New Capture Form & Testimonial Display

This feature is huuuuge, and we need to take a moment to really highlight what it means. If you haven't seen Tony's short overview yet, check out the video below to see the new Thrive Ovation in action.

Social proof is one of the strongest influences on your conversion rate. No matter how great your copywriting or marketing skills, potential customers want to hear from other people like them, to validate that your products can help them get what they need.

Thrive Ovation is an incredible plugin that lets you capture, categorize, tag and display targeted testimonials at the right places on your website, to give your potential customers the confidence they need to make a purchase.

There are two halves to this update that make Thrive Ovation even better: the capture form, and the display element.

New Testimonial Capture Form

The new testimonial capture form has all of our visual editing capability, and more. We've got a bunch of pre-made templates you can choose from, and you can style and edit every border, corner, font, color and available field until it looks just how you want it to.

The Testimonial Capture form should feel just like our Lead Generation element, meaning you can add and edit your fields from the left hand sidebar.

But take note— this update means you can add other connections too. Want to add the user to your mailing list, or update a tag when they add a testimonial? Now you can, by simply adding other connections. You can even map custom fields!

Testimonial Capture forms have a new 'Avatar Picker' element in them too. This allows your visitors to add their avatar from Gravatar, Facebook, Google or a custom URL (you'll need to add API connections for the social accounts).

Enter edit mode and select the Avatar Picker to customize the options you want to offer to your customers, and on the front end, they'll be able to choose which avatar they prefer, just like this:

New Testimonial Display

When it comes time to show your testimonials on your site, they're going to look fabulous. Why? Because the new Testimonial Display element leverages our post list loop builder technology, including the side-scrolling carousel. 

That means you can easily display a rotating list of your testimonials, that will dynamically update when new testimonials are added. And— like everything else in Thrive— you can visually customize it to your heart's content.

Here's a screenshot of a Testimonial Carousel added on a page with just a few clicks and no additional edits.

We're super proud of the latest changes to Thrive Ovation, and we hope you use it to its fullest to capture your testimonials, display them at the right places and ultimately boost your conversions.

2. Thrive Quiz Builder: Select Multiple Answers + New Quiz Navigation

These are two of the most requested features we've ever had for Thrive Quiz Builder. Once again, I'll let Tony demo it quickly:

By allowing quiz takers to select multiple answers, you have new ways to test their knowledge. But your quiz takers might want to revise their answers, especially for quizzes used in Thrive Apprentice.

Now they can easily jump back to previous questions and change their answers, meaning that by the time they submit their quiz, they are locking in their final answers for grading.

Haven't seen how Thrive Quiz Builder integrates with Thrive Apprentice for course creators? Learn about it here.

3. Certificates Improvements in Thrive Apprentice

In November last year, we released our Certificates feature for Thrive Apprentice, that lets you visually edit and create stunning, print-worthy PDF certificates for your students.

Now, we've made a few improvements to make it even easier to manage your certificates.

Whenever you select a student in the Thrive Apprentice members list, you'll see a new column with their certificate status. 

It's an easy way to see which courses have a certificate assigned, and for those that do, whether or not your students have earned them.

But there's more. Hover over the 'Achieved' status and you'll see 3 options.

With a single click, you can view the certificate design with that student's name and information on it, giving you a quick preview of what your student is getting.

Or you can go one step further and just download the PDF certificate straight away.

But there's a 3rd option: Send to student.

You can now send an email from your website whenever you manually issue a certificate to a student.

Visit Settings > Email Template > 'Certificate Manually Issued', and you can customize the content of that email.

This email won't send automatically when a student achieves a certificate. That's because, if you've enabled the 'Course Completion Page' option in Thrive Apprentice, students will be able to download their certificate right there.

But with this new feature, you can send it to your students on request with one click.

There's more, though. We've added some Thrive Automator triggers and actions around certificate management too.

You can trigger automations when a certificate is downloaded or verified, and there's a new action for 'Issue course certificate' too, as shown below.

That means with one simple automation, you can fire off that email as soon as students earn a certificate. The automation to do this might look like this:

But— you can go one better!

Perhaps as a course creator, you want to grant certificates to students only after they...

By pairing any triggers with the 'Issue course certificate' action, you have all the control to choose when and how your students can access to their certificates.

4. Click to Call + Click to Email

Once again, over to you Tony:

For many years, we've had Global text and Global Links options in Thrive Dashboard, under 'Smart Site'. 

It's an easy way for you to centrally add your business name, email address and phone numbers (or any other custom information) and apply it anywhere on your website. All you have to do is add them as Global fields.

The best part? If you need to change your business number, you just change it once, and all of those instances that show your phone number will automatically update— making sure your customers are always calling the right person.

But now we have an easy way to include click-to-call or click-to-email with your global links.

Whenever you apply a dynamic link to text or a button, you can pick the 'Click to ...' option, like this:

Not only can you show your business number or email address wherever you want with a few clicks, but you can apply an action to the link too.

If it's a click-to-call, then one tap on the phone number and your browser or mobile device will start a phone call.

If it's a click-to-email, one tap will open their email client with a new email addressed to your business.

How easy is that? 😁

5. Thrive Ultimatum: Cookie-based countdown and redirect on expiry

Wait... Thrive Ultimatum is getting an update?

You bet! It's one of our most requested features too. Thrive Ultimatum is our scarcity plugin for WordPress, and it allows you to show countdown timers that restrict access to content on your site once they expire. With this plugin, you can create and manage scarcity campaign timelines just like this:

Your scarcity campaign makes pages and promotions on your website only be accessible within the campaign window. When that expires, that visitor has truly missed their chance.

And to make it clear how much time they have left, Thrive Ultimatum lets you easily add beautiful and functional countdown timers to your site, just like this:

But what makes Thrive Ultimatum super special is our Lockdown campaign type.

We're very proud of the Evergreen 'Lockdown' campaign type in Thrive Ultimatum because it is authentic, unbeatable scarcity that is unique per-user. It's handled server-side, and ties to a user's email address, meaning that no matter what a user does, they cannot get around the scarcity campaign.

Once it ends, it truly ends. And each user can trigger a different countdown sequence that is unique to them and their email address.

But that's the one catch: it does require you to know a user's email address first before you can trigger this campaign type. 

For this reason, we've had requests for evergreen campaigns that redirect on expiry and that don't require an email address. These campaigns are cookie-based, meaning that although they aren't unbeatable (someone can re-start the campaign by clearing cookies and revisting the page), they are perfect for driving anonymous traffic from a platform like Facebook into a scarcity funnel.

Here's how it works.

Select an 'Evergreen Campaign' type in Thrive Ultimatum, set your duration but— in this case— do not activate 'Lockdown'.

Remember, Lockdown is what ties it to a user identifier, an email address.

Set the page that should trigger your campaign, and then you'll see a new toggle: Redirect when expired.

This new toggle is where you'll access the new feature we've just released. Enable the Redirect toggle, and choose your target page.

That's it!

When any visitors arrive on your campaign page, the countdown campaign you've configured will begin, and when it reaches zero, they'll be redirected away. Just remember, this is based on cookies and not on identified users, so if you have a nosey visitor who knows how to clear their cookies, they could find a way to re-trigger the countdown campaign. 

Of course, to show your visitor how much time left, you'll want to add one of our beautiful countdown timer templates built by our design team, and customize it to your liking.

How would you use this?

Think about it.

You can now build a PPC scarcity advertising funnel by driving traffic from Facebook or Google ads straight to your promotion page, where visitors will instantly see a countdown timer that truly redirects them when it hits zero. Try it out, we're convinced you'll see a boost in your conversion rates.

6. Facebook Events with Thrive Automator

Speaking of Facebook...

We've released an integration with Facebook/ Meta's Marketing API. And when you understand how exactly you can use this, it'll blow your mind.

If you haven't tried advertising on Facebook yet, you might find that your opinion on Zuckerberg will change. It's easy to get started with such a small advertising budget to test your funnels, and evaluate your ROAS (Return On Ad spend).

Given that Facebook has a huge amount of data on it's users, that data means you can target a very specific set of users— people who will be interested in your topic or product.

But if you can pass information back to Facebook about a group of users on your website, and build what Facebook calls a 'Custom audience', then you can also target a 'Lookalike audience'— people who are similar to those who converted on your website, but who haven't yet. In other words: the people who want what you're selling.

Following me so far? 

Let me show you an example. It starts by creating a Facebook/ Meta marketing account and adding your Pixel ID and Access Token in Thrive Dashboard.

Once you've done this, you can open up Thrive Automator and build an automation.

Let's imagine that you want to create a custom audience on Facebook that consists not of your customers, but specifically of those who are engaging with and completing your online courses.

Set a trigger of 'User completes course', and then pair it with an action: Fire Facebook Custom Event, one of the new actions available once you've connected the Meta API.

You can define the name of your Custom Audience too. In my example, I've named it 'Course Completion'.

Now, when a student of mine completes a course, it'll register an event with my Facebook/ Meta Pixel. You can see in the screenshot below that the data has been received in my Facebook Events view.

Great! Now what?

Under Facebook Audiences (a different area for managing your advertising and targeting) I can create an audience of all Facebook User Accounts that have completed my online courses, and every time a new student completes one, that audience will automatically update to include the new student.

Then, I can create a 'Lookalike audience', just like this:

Next time I run a Facebook Ad, I can target that lookalike audience, knowing Facebook will only show my advert in the Facebook Feed for users that have similar traits to those who have completed my online courses.

And with such accurate targeting, I won't waste my budget on showing ads to the wrong people.

Starting to see the power of this feature now?

You can do the same with WooCommerce product purchases, lead generation form submit, quiz completions, and more, building out any custom audience for the Facebook advertising that makes sense in your business.

7. Improvements to Video Cover User Experience

Were you aware of our Video Cover feature in Thrive Architect?

It allows you to create a clickable thumbnail over the top of your video in Thrive Architect, meaning you can drag and drop text, icons, images, and more. The whole video cover is treated like a context box that, when clicked, plays your video.

And because it's a Thrive Architect element, it can be dynamic— meaning you can place it in your theme templates with Thrive Theme Builder and automatically feed featured images into each unique video cover, or display blog post titles in the text on the videos.

You don't even have to build it from scratch— we've already got designer-made templates to get you started with your video covers.

However, we heard some of you had issues with the video cover, mainly that when a user clicks to play a video, they sometimes have to click a second time for it to play.

We investigated, and found that different browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc) on different devices (iOS, android, etc) have some rules around autoplaying, intended to prevent videos from suddenly blaring loud audio when a user doesn't want it to.

These rules have meant that in some situations, a video with a cover requires 2 clicks to start.

In our latest release, we dug really deep into this, and managed to improve the user experience with some coding sorcery. That is our commitment to making your website vistors' experience as easy as one click and not two. 

8. Thrive Apprentice Data Optimization

Have you ever wondered "Can Thrive Apprentice host a huuuuge online course library?"

The answer is yes, provided you have good website hosting. In our latest release, we've performed even more optimizations, testing with a database consisting of over 100,000+ students, making your experience as a course creator snappy and fast on the backend, no matter the size of your business.

Our goal is to make Thrive Apprentice the leading online course platform for marketers, so if you find anything is slowing you down, we want to know about it. 

9. Support for MailerLite Version 2

Recently MailerLite, a popular email marketing service, updated their API. To make sure we're keeping on top of it, we've release our support for Version 2.

If you've been using MailerLite for some time, you'll likely be using Version 1 and your integration with Thrive Themes should continue to work just fine.

But if you want to access some new features of MailerLite, you may want to generate a Version 2 token. 

To do that, visit your MailerLite account -> Integrations -> API -> and click 'Generate new token'. Return to the Thrive Themes API dashboard, select Version 2 for MailerLite, and paste your new token. You can now enjoy all the benefits of the new integration with Thrive lead generation forms.

Are you using Thrive Suite yet?

We’re constantly adding new features, plugins and professionally designed templates to Thrive Suite to make it easy, fast, and fun for you to build a successful online business in 2024.

And if you are using Thrive Suite, we'd love to hear your feedback on this latest round of updates. Drop a comment below!

For now, that's all, but keep an ear out for next months updates in late May.

Bradley Stevens
General Manager, Thrive Themes.