Introducing Content Bundles in Heights Platform

Heights Platform’s robust selling features already made it easy for creators to monetize their knowledge in the form of online courses, membership sites, digital product downloads, and coaching. Creators could sell individual courses and products, or sell membership access to a program of courses, message boards, and projects, complete with optional add-on and upsell products and courses.

While those options provide a good amount of flexibility, we wanted to ensure that creators could monetize their knowledge in even more ways. Our new Bundles feature offers creators almost limitless flexibility in how they can sell their content with Heights Platform!

Here are a few examples of what is now possible thanks to our bundle payment plans feature:

1. Powered Up Online Courses: Sell an online course package including a course, project, and private messageboard, plus potentially a bonus digital product download or coaching service (either included or as an add-on). We believe the most successful online courses offer more than the course content itself. Creating a bundled package of interactive learning content like this provides more value to your students.
2. Discounted Packages: If your messageboards and projects are public and your courses are typically sold separately, you could create a bundle of courses to offer discounted access to customers that purchase all of your courses at once.
3. Tiered Pricing Plans: Courses can be added to any number of bundles allowing you to create multiple pricing plans for each of your courses. For instance you might sell the course on its own as the base tier, then have a bundle that includes the course, an extra private messageboard, and digital product download as a bonus. Finally, you might offer a bundle as a third tier that includes everything in the previous bundle, plus an additional digital product that is a one-on-one coaching service.
4. Multiple Subscription Plans: While you can create a subscription membership program using the paid enrollment option, bundles allow you to create multiple subscription membership plans inside one Heights Platform account.

So that’s an overview of what course creators can accomplish with our Bundles feature, but our recent feature release includes many more new features! Here’s an overview of what’s new:

New Features:

• BUNDLES! Probably our most desired and requested feature of the year is here! Bundles allow you to take any combination of your content (courses, message boards, projects, digital products), and offer access to it in a bundle package that you can sell at a one-time, installment plan, or subscription plan fee. You can sell bundles independently of paid enrollment plans and individually sold courses and digital products. This offers creators almost limitless flexibility in how they can sell their content with Heights Platform! Check out the guide to Bundles.

  

• Customizable Bundle Welcome Emails: Each bundle has an optional custom welcome email that you can have sent out to customers after they purchase your bundle.
• Hidden Courses and Products: In the past many creators used our Roles feature as a way to hide courses. If you want to sell a certain course from its landing page only, and have it hidden from the rest of your students unless they own it, simply set it as a hidden course! No need to use roles or manually grant a role to a student after they purchase.
• Launch Date Feature: Presell your course or bundle and have the contents release to everyone who has purchased it on a set date. Preselling works for courses, and bundles. When you presell a bundle, all content (courses, products, digital projects and messageboards will be locked until the launch date).
• Landing Pages for Digital Products: Like courses and bundles, digital products now have their own optional public landing pages.
• Digital Products Purchasable from Landing Pages: This allows creators to sell a digital product as an entry point to their program, instead of it being an add-on/upsell.
• Digital Product Types: While many creators already use our digital products feature to sell coaching and events in addition to downloadable products, it is now possible to specifically label a product type as: Download, Coaching, Service, or Scheduled Event. This type label will appear on a product card when the product is shown inside a bundle, or during landing page checkout.
• HTML in Digital Product Reveal Content: Creators can now add custom HTML inside the “purchase reveal content” field allowing greater flexibility in providing links or embedded HTML content to a student after product purchase. For example, you can now easily embed a Calendly widget for your customers to schedule a time for a coaching call after purchase, or a link to a Zoom meeting.

  

• Product List View: With the vast amount of selling capabilities now available in this release, it is important to be able to see an overview of all your courses, bundles, and digital products in order to see what is published, what is hidden, what prices everything is set to, and if the product has a landing page enabled. This view also allows you to easily click to copy the URL of a product’s landing page to share quickly.

  

• Payment Guide Page: With the introduction of bundles, there are now three primary ways to sell access to your content - Bundle Payment Plans, Individual Course/Product Sales, or Paid Membership. These methods can also be used together. We want to ensure that creators can quickly understand what options are settings are best for their knowledge business, so we’ve introduced a Payment Guide page accessible as a tab on your Payment Settings view. You can find links to the payment guide articles in our knowledge base below.

  

• Personalization for Custom Script Integrations: You can now get a user’s email, ID, and full name to personalize third-party tools like chat bots and live chat tools that you use with Heights.
• Mentor Email Notification For Deleted Student Subscriptions: Get notified via email by Heights when Stripe is unable to charge your student for a subscription or installment payment.
• Student’s Can Now View Current Subscriptions: The addition of bundles means it is possible for your student to have multiple active subscriptions at once. When a student goes to their “edit profile” page they can view all active subscriptions. If a student chooses to delete their account, it will cancel all active subscriptions. If a student wants to cancel a single subscription, but not all, they are instructed to contact you for help.

Minor Enhancements and Fixes:

• iOS Home Screen Icon: When you or a student saves your Heights Platform site to your home screen, a home screen icon is automatically set and generated from the favicon image uploaded in your account settings.
• Added help text for creators when a course is marked as “unavailable” on its purchase page, so that it is more clear why the course is in an “unavailable” state.
• Localization fixes
• Performance optimizations for student analytics that will help us provide more detailed analytics in the future.
• The “Join Program” link at the bottom of login page is now hidden when program enrollment is disabled. (Previously this link was always visible on the login form and would link to a page that said enrollment was closed)
• Fixed issue where viewing orders for an individual student would only show their paid orders. Incomplete and failed orders will now display for a particular student’s orders as well.
• Improved handling of failed payments in order to be more clear to your students of the reasons why a payment failure occurred.
• Added a grey outline to iframe content embedded in the lesson editor to make it more obvious where the embedded content is located in your text (In cases where the iframe content doesn’t fully load while in the editor view).
• Other minor fixes and optimizations

Learn How the New Features Work in These New Knowledge Base Articles:

Payment Guide: Bundles

Payment Guide: Individual Courses/Products

Payment Guide: Paid Memberships

Managing Student Bundle Subscriptions

Individual Course/Product/Bundle Landing Pages

Custom Code

Failed Subscription Payments

Hidden Courses

Hidden Products

Using Launch Date to Presell Courses and Bundles

In the coming weeks we will be making it possible to grant and revoke bundles via our API and Zapier. We’ll also be adding a couple missing localizations for bundles to make sure they are fully translated in the 19 languages available in Heights Platform.