How Are People Joining My Teachable School Without Buying Anything?

Are you getting email notifications saying that someone has signed up for your school... but there's no revenue showing up in your dashboard?

Confused? So are many of our clients.

Here's what's happening.

Someone visits your school. Then they land on a sales page. Then they click through to the checkout. They enter their payment details, get access to the content, and they're now a member of your school.

There are a few ways someone can join your Teachable school...

1. Joining through the checkout

This way is the most intuitive to understand.

Someone visits your school. Then they land on a sales page. Then they click through to the checkout. They enter their payment details, get access to the content, and they're now a member of your school.

Simple.

You'll get an email notification that someone joined (unless you've turned notifications off). And when you visit your dashboard, you'll see their transaction.

2. Joining through an email leads form

Teachable recently rolled out a new page block called 'Email Leads Forms'. These blocks let you collect email addresses from your visitors.

If this is how someone joined your school, you should see them in your Leads section (Admin > Users > Leads). Click on their name and you'll see the name of the form they entered through.

3. Joining through the 'general sign-up' link

If you're getting mystery sign-ups and don't have any email leads forms installed on your school, this is usually the culprit.

In fact, we've yet to meet a client where it makes sense to keep this feature turned on, because it tends to confuse visitors.

If you accidentally keep your general sign-up link visible in your navigation bar, visitors to your sales page might click it thinking it will take them to the checkout. They'll enter their details, you'll get a notification, and they'll be confused as to why they haven't got access to anything.

How to tell if you have general sign-ups turned on

First, open up your school in a window where you're not logged in as an admin. That way, you'll see what visitors are seeing.

There are two main places to check:

• Look in the navigation bar. If you see a link that says 'Sign Up', that's a general sign-up link.
• Click the link in the banner on your homepage. If it takes you to a page that says 'Sign up', that's a general sign-up link.

Teachable puts the sign-up link in those places by default on some schools, so you'll need to edit those links if you want to turn general sign-ups off.

How to turn the navigation sign-up link off

1. Open your Admin area.
2. Click Site in the icon menu.
3. Click Navigation in the side menu.
4. Scroll to the Navigation Bar section.
5. Toggle the 'Sign Up' option to not visible.

If it says it's already hidden, toggle it on then off again. (Sometimes it says it's off, but it's still visible when you preview your school. Turning it on then off again fixes that.)

How to turn the banner sign-up link off

1. Open your Admin area.
2. Click Site in the icon menu.
3. Click Pages in the side menu.
4. Click the Edit button next to your sales page.
5. Click on the banner block.
6. In the sidebar settings, scroll down and either uncheck the box to hide the button, or replace the button URL with a link to a different page (for example, a sales page or your course directory).

That's it!

Hopefully that helps explain your mystery sign-ups and improve the student experience as they navigate your school. 🙂