Simplero: Everything You Need to Know about the Online Coaching Platform

Looking for a reliable platform to start your online coaching course? Then you’ve probably heard of Simplero.

After over a decade of experience in the field, it has made a name for itself as a comprehensive platform for managing and hosting courses. Of course, this isn’t enough to decide to use the platform.

So, we’ve explored every factor you should consider to judge how well this platform fits your particular set of company requirements, from features to cost to customer support. But even if Simplero doesn’t meet your standards, we’ve even come up with an alternative.

What is Simplero?

You already know that Simplero is an online coaching platform- but what else is there? 

​​With Simplero, you can expect a one-stop shop for managing all things digital, from content distribution to marketing and sales. Anyone can build websites, hold online workshops, sell products, form member groups, and automate nearly every part of their business with this easy-to-use and powerful web application.

Founded in 2009, this platform provides you with all the tools you need to begin your online coaching adventure, regardless of your level of experience or expertise.

What is Simplero Used For?

We’ve already given you a brief idea about what Simplero is capable of, but let’s dig deeper:

Delivering Coaching Content

You can simply create engaging content, host webinars, and maintain your whole online presence, which makes content delivery easier. The platform’s framework offers a comprehensive learning experience by making it easy for users to add PDFs, text, videos, and even quizzes for their online coaching clients.

Simplero also makes sure that users have all they need to effectively launch, manage, and scale their online coaching and courses, with features like automated course dripping and simple-to-build membership sites.

Creating Online Courses

After you’ve done the labor-intensive work of creating videos and content, the course builder's fields make it compatible with the Simplero platform. Before diving in, let’s be honest there are not many course design templates to choose from. But you can add your flair to it such as images or text to make it stand out. 

You can include supplementary materials, like PDFs, videos, and audio files so that students can download or stream them as they progress through your course. Additionally, you can set up a trigger function that automates certain tasks to reduce administrative duties and save time.

Building Membership Sites

Simplero allows you to build membership sites that require a subscription to view content or establish a community. It also provides additional customization options by enabling the display of member profiles on the front end in addition to the ability to add custom fields.

There’s also an optional community feature called Forum on these sites, which you can use to engage with your students. Plus, you can connect payment processing methods, manage content delivery channels for subscribers, and customize access levels.

Of course, apart from the ones highlighted above, Simplero also provides other features related to email marketing, and sales funnel management which could be useful for promoting courses.

Email Marketing & Sales

With Simplero’s full range of marketing tools, you can design and automate a whole sales funnel. Additionally, you can create email lists, campaigns, and tags to send content or teasers for courses to your audience. It’s also possible to build opt-in forms and landing pages on the platform.

Now that you have a clearer idea regarding Simplero’s use cases, let’s go ahead and see if the platform is a good fit for you.

How Easy is it to Use Simplero?

Simplero does seem to have an extensive list of features, however, it’s also important to test the platform’s usability. 

Signing Up with Simplero

There are two options when you’re looking to sign up for the platform. Firstly, you can request a demo, which means you can watch a video of how the platform works. After that, you can choose to either start a free 14-day trial or pay for a subscription.

Regardless of which option you choose, you’ll have to put in your card details which can be inconvenient, especially for a free trial. However, it’s possible to cancel the trial whenever you want within the two weeks (just remember to cancel before you're charged!).

Simplero's Site Functionality

Simplero is more than simply a page builder. You can consider it as an all-in-one solution that can replace WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix.

You can fully host and organize your specialized media library quite easily. There’s already a library of ready-made templates to help you launch your business, and it includes media hosting for your files and videos. 

With features like an RSS feed for your content to be posted on a dedicated blog, or a very useful Redirect generator to organize the various connections on your website. There’s even a built-in link shortener to use like bit.ly and reduce the size of your URL.

Setting up Paid Products on Simplero

Once you’re signed into your account, it’s as simple as going to the sales page, clicking the products tab, and choosing the “create a new product” option.  After that’s done, you can fill in the fields such as name, price, etc, and you can even add in a requirement to sign an agreement.

Remember, it’s possible to change these options and fields according to your preference. The flexibility makes sure that you don’t have to create a new product every time you need to make an update.

Using Simplero’s Affiliate System

The affiliate system is probably one of the best features and it’s the ideal source to generate more passive revenue. Anyone can simply sign up for Simplero’s affiliate program using the registration link on the site. 

When one of your users brings in new affiliates who close deals, they can even split the commission with them. In addition, if you’re running the affiliate program, you can use the leaderboard tool to reward your top-performing affiliates during major launches or other events.

Simplero’s Top Features

We've looked at what Simplero is used for and how easy it is to navigate. Now, it’s time to highlight some other key features you should keep in mind:

Easy Customization Functionality

For any online offering, be it a paid community, coaching, or course, the value of branding is above all. Why’s that? Well, it can make or break your future sales prospects.

Simplero offers customization options to their templates to make sure your online presence reflects your business identity. So, you can personalize your websites or courses with unique names, themes, and email layouts. It's also easy to construct landing pages that look professional even without any technical experience.

What’s more, you can arrange the content blocks on your website and course modules as you like. It’s even possible to add new features to your course so that you can optimize it for your customers. You even have code access for these, so if you know some CSS, it can come in handy here.

Community Engagement Tools

With Simplero's help, you can further customize your approach to your clients by getting to know them better. You will receive reports on how your consumers interact with your content such as who finished a lesson, which course had better engagement, who visited which page, and other actions as well as their email activity.

Moreover, you can award your customers with badges based on their actions so that they are more encouraged to finish courses. 

Integrated CRM Framework

Like we said, Simplero doesn’t only help with hosting and developing courses but it goes beyond. It is possible to perform marketing or sales activities such as lead scoring which means you can assign points to a particular lead depending on an activity. 

Depending on that, you can determine what kind of qualified prospects they are and you can tailor your marketing or sales campaign according.

The platform also has its own ticketing system to manage inquiries from prospects and students. This allows you to allocate tickets to the appropriate person and respond right on the platform.

Automated Processes

For any online platform especially one with so many features, it might take up too much time to carry out operational tasks.

That is why Simplero allows you to organize your workflows to automate time-consuming processes, such as sending welcome emails or offering a chance at a webinar and more after your customer has made a purchase. You can also segment your audience and send them focused campaigns, set up automated follow-ups, and deliver personalized communication.

The platform takes care of the technical details so you can concentrate on expanding your business.

Payment Methods

Simplero offers integration with multiple payment gateways so it can support a range of pricing plans, including one-time purchases, subscriptions, and payment plans.

Due to its user-friendly checkout procedure, there's less burden from an administrative point of view. Plus, you can even get your refunds, discounts, and invoicing done in one platform so it saves you both time and effort.

Simplero Pricing: How Much Does it Cost?

Now, all of these features are useful for your online business- but they come at a cost.

As mentioned, Simplero has a 14-day free trial that lets you fully explore all of its features before you pick a paid pricing plan. So, here are what options you’ll have available after those 2 weeks:

• The Starter plan for beginners is priced at 70.80$/ month, but it comes down to $59/month (with the discount) which saves $142/year when billed annually. With this plan, you have unlimited email broadcasts, website hosting, and a set of tools to manage up to five items, and courses. However, you are limited to only five products and courses, only 500 contacts, and do not have access to custom admin roles, the help desk feature, or affiliate marketing.
• The Scale plan is dedicated to businesses with revenue starting from $2k-$8k. It costs $178.80/month, and $159/month if you pay annually. Adding to the Starter plan’s offerings, it provides unlimited items and courses, more custom domains, and improved storage options. It still does not include custom admin roles or advanced payment features, and you can only have 1000 contacts.
• The most comprehensive plan, Skyrocket costs $298.80/month or  $249/month with yearly billing. It is aimed at high-achieving firms earning six figures or more and includes features such as custom domains and substantial AI Bot credits.

The main difference is that with Scale and Skyrocket, you can market and sell an unlimited number of items, courses, and membership sites, whereas with Starter, you can only do so with up to five. 

It's important to note that the more contracts you sign with clients, the higher your membership price will be. This is a huge downside to using Simplero. You can also customize your pricing depending on your number of contacts - if you have 20,000 contacts (individuals who are part of your customer or subscriber base) you will be paying $488.80 monthly. However, if it’s more than 500,000 contacts, you’ll have to speak to the support team. 

Contacting Simperlo Customer Support

With any online platform it is important to be able to easily contact the customer service team. There are a couple of ways to resolve any issue you have with Simplero. Let’s start with the most basic one, knowledge-based articles & FAQs that you can use to understand and solve any common problems you may have.

If that doesn’t work for you, there are recorded training sessions at Simplero University (their community forum) that you can use to walk through some common issues. But if you don’t have an urgent issue, they do hold live- implementation sessions twice a week, which you can join easily as well. Of course, you can just write them an email too.

Apart from these, their support team has specific hours they are available: Monday to Friday 3am to 12am, and Saturday to Sunday 9am to 4pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). However, bear in mind, their typical response time is said to be around 5 hours, which is not ideal if you have a pressing issue.

If you want more personalized advice, you can actually set up a one-on-one with their Concierge who’ll walk you and your team through each step. But only the discovery call with your Concierge is free, you can then pay and book the hours you need starting from $100/hour. You can also get discounts here depending on the hour bundle you buy, but these hours are only valid for the first 6 months.

Now that you’ve gone through what you need to know regarding Simplero, we’re going to give you an overview.

Is Simplero Worth It? 

Now it’s time that you make a decision: should you really consider using Simplero? You can’t simply pick an online coaching platform without considering all the facets.

Well, we’ve broken down each of the pros and cons for your benefit:

We’ve seen that Simplero provides feature flexibility and customization for membership sites, marketing and sales, and course building and hosting. In addition, in addition to offering a greater variety of extra features like affiliate programs, podcasts, and webinars.

However, it can be difficult to navigate the platform, features are paywalled behind pricing tiers, and the costs for larger companies aren’t as easy on the pocket. So, what can be an alternative to Simplero? Well, we have just the platform for you.

Whop: The Number One Simplero Alternative

Let’s start with the basics: what is Whop and why Whop?

Similar to Simplero, Whop is an online platform that allows creators to sell online courses, ebooks, access to paid communities, services like coaching calls, downloadables, and any other digital products you can think of.

Whop acts as a quick and simple means for young entrepreneurs to launch digital businesses - including coaching and teaching businesses - without having to construct the necessary infrastructure. Whop uses a streamlined hub system, where you add Whop apps (native features) that you need to construct your ideal business.

For example, as an online coach, you could add the chat app for community conversation, videos app for one-on-one calls, courses app to sell courses, files app for PDFs, forums app for Q&As, and whatever else you would like to use. Include as little or much as you like in your whop - it's your business space, designed by you, for your business.

Whop purposefully keeps costs low and charges a fee of only 3% on your sales so there’s less risk involved. There is no membership fee to use Whop, so you don't pay anything unless you are making money.

Lastly, Whop's customer support is available 24/7 so you don’t need to wait for hours (or days!) to get your issues resolved.

Now you see why we’ve chosen Whop as the alternative for Simplero.

Selling Online Coaching Services with Whop

According to the International Coaching Federation's Global Coaching Studies, in 2023, the coaching business was forecast to be worth $5.34 billion, and by the end of 2024, that number is projected to rise to $6.25 billion.

Now, more than ever, it’s become more important to find the right platform to sell your online coaching. The best option to sell your coaching services is Whop. Sign up today and maximize your income as an online coach.