Thrive Apprentice Review: What’s New In Version 4.0

Thrive Apprentice Review

You’ve decided to create a new course. Congratulations! You’re excited about your new idea and have tested it to find your target audience is equally pumped about learning this topic.

You proceed to work out the content of each module of your course and have everything in place. You know exactly how you want to deliver this via your sales page or membership.

But, as you start to set up the delivery system, you get more frowns than smiles.

Thrive Themes is an incredibly flexible system that allows you to sell anything and customize everything. And, in Thrive Themes’ usual style, even seemingly standard features have unique twists that give you more options than you thought possible.

And, because it was built to be as user-friendly as possible, setting up your product or course won’t result in a migraine.

Here’s the quick overview of the newest features added to Thrive Apprentice 4.0.

Membership and Products

Thrive Apprentice isn’t just for courses anymore. If a customer can download or watch it from a web page, you can sell and protect it on your site, including:

Members-only blog posts or videos
Private podcast episodes that are not available to the public
Video courses
Downloadable courses
Printables
Ebooks
Journals
Planners
Premium blog posts or other content
Membership sites
And so much more

Drip

Dripping content isn’t a new feature in the marketplace. For years, membership plug-ins have been able to do this. But Thrive Apprentice allows you to unlock lessons at the perfect moment with the most customizable drip solution set to dominate the market. There’s never been granular control like this!

De-coupled Drip

Separate drip schedules for the same course? Yes! Do you sell your courses as stand-alones and bundles? Now you can have separate drip schedules for each. And that’s not all. De-coupled drip is an impressive feature that significantly frees up your ability to deliver.

Conditional Display

This is a natural way to lead customers through the fullness of your course base and increase conversions. You’ll be able to personalize each visitor’s experience on your website by showing, hiding, and changing content for entire sections for individual users. If they purchase a course or private content about affiliate marketing, you can show / hide / change notices about other related courses they will benefit from.

Let’s walk through each new feature in detail.

Membership And Products

Thrive Apprentice Review

Thrive Apprentice 4.0 includes a new, flexible digital products feature that allows you to create and sell product combinations from any content on your WordPress website.

The addition of these makes Thrive Apprentice a full membership plug-in for WordPress.

This means you no longer require a dedicated WordPress membership plug-in. You can now restrict and sell access to specific pages, blog posts, content categories, or even custom post types.

With Thrive Apprentice products, you can even go as far as creating a premium members area without making an online course.

What’s more, you can encourage upsells, downsells, and cross-sells within the members area with custom messages. If someone tries to access paid content they don’t own, just show them a notice with a buy button so they can get it.

Inside the members area, show notices about all your courses — even the ones that particular customer hasn’t bought. Then s/he can just click a button and buy them.

You can also redirect new visitors or current customers to specific sales or upsell pages to buy access to your premium membership or single-purchase product content.

Drip Schedules

The second new feature added to Thrive Apprentice 4.0 is drip. Yes, I know, that doesn’t sound too impressive, but Thrive has outdone itself by going far beyond ordinary drip.

Thrive Apprentice 4.0 comes with six easy-to-use drip schedule templates. More advanced users can also create their own drip schedules from scratch.

Once a drip schedule has been created, you’ll then see a visual timeline of how students will access their content. From here, you can add or edit unlock conditions to release course materials at specific intervals. Drip for Thrive Apprentice even lets you hide upcoming lessons until preset conditions are met, meaning you can surprise students with hidden modules!

Thrive Apprentice 4.0 Drip supports:

Scheduled
Evergreen
Repeating
Date-based
Day of week or month
Start from scratch

It’s a great option for just about any learning experience you can think of.

What does this mean in real life?

You aren’t stuck with only weekly or monthly schedules for dripping. You can set your course-level dripping, but also schedule entirely different criteria for specific lessons. So, if yours is a course that requires a certification exam at the end, you can drip the regular lessons based on date, then wait until everyone has finished to send access to the final exam.

Or you can drip everything in the course/paid content, but set special separate dates for holiday-based content.

This granular control, plus the ability to combine advanced unlock criteria, gives you greater flexibility at all levels of your drip schedule.

De-coupled Drip

In addition to the six ways you can add dripped content to your products, Thrive Apprentice also offers De-coupled Dripping. This means you’re not just restricted to a single drip schedule per course. In other words, you can now assign different drip schedules to the same course, but sell them as separate Thrive Apprentice Products.

This unique feature gets rid of the painful process of duplicating the same course when, for example, you want to sell it first as a cohort drip course, and then as an evergreen drip course later. It also centralizes updating both your course and drip schedules — making them much easier to manage. This means the De-coupled Drip feature now allows you to deploy a variety of drip strategies for a single course throughout the year.

Simply put, De-coupled Drip is incredibly flexible. Do you sell bundles? You can give students instant access to all the content in a multi-course bundle all at once, or create separate drip schedules that only trigger after a student takes the first lesson of each course.

You can also create a sense of community between students who are learning together as a group, by unlocking lessons and modules at the same time.

Many traditional solutions can start a drip schedule on a specific date, but what happens if you want a fresh group of students to begin your course in 6 months? How do you offer parallel drip schedules without messing up the first cohort’s content access, and without duplicating the course?

Thrive Apprentice 4.0 has solved the problem.

Create an alternative course drip schedule with a new start date.
Create a new product containing the same course, and link it to your new drip schedule.
You’re done.

There are so many ways to use this, you really have to get into Thrive Apprentice and play with it to see its full potential.

Conditional Display (aka: the conversion booster)

The third major feature revealed for Thrive Apprentice 4.0 applies to every tool in Thrive Suite that uses the Thrive visual editor. Thrive Suite has gained a revolutionary new feature called Conditional Display that I am really excited about. Why? Because it is a solid conversion booster that allows you to dangle teasers about your other products/courses.

Conditional Display gives you the ability to create multiple versions of Content Boxes, Background Sections, and Blocks WITHIN individual posts and pages on your WordPress site using the Thrive visual editor.

However, your visitors will only see the version of content you want them to, based on the display rules you set for them.

What does this mean for your online business?

Well, you can now, for example, build a pricing table that shows one introductory price to non-customers and a different price to existing customers who don’t have the product — on the exact same sales page. That’s a powerful conversion tool.

You can even hide or display different blocks of content among logged-in users who have different WordPress roles on your website (such as subscriber, author, or editor).

Conditional Display can also be used to alter what visitors see in accordance with the products they’ve already purchased from you (that are delivered through Thrive Apprentice). This allows you to create truly unique visitor experiences to help drive more conversions.

For example, you can:

Release sneak peeks of premium content that can be shared on social media, but require purchase to gain full access.
Create single pages that include multiple premium content assets (that must each be purchased separately), such as a premium resources page, a digital downloads page, or a private ebook library.

And these four new features are just what’s been added lately. The same high-performing bedrock of Thrive Apprentice is still in place with all the standard features you love and need.

Cons Of Thrive Apprentice

Of course, no membership site plug-in is perfect.

The most inconvenient aspect of Thrive Apprentice is its inability to integrate with a long list of payment systems.

Currently, it only integrates directly with WooCommerce, SendOwl and ThriveCart. If you already have a membership site plug-in you love but want to use Thrive Apprentice’s snazzy features for content delivery, you’ll have to keep two plug-ins.

Not Just Thrive Apprentice – An Entire Suite Of Tools

Thrive Apprentice comes as part of Thrive Suite, a complete suite of tools that allows you to: