Increase Your Student Engagement and Retention with CRM and Automation

Creating your course is only half the battle. Then you have to get people registered and then get them to complete your course, which is easier said than done. Fortunately, there are LMS email tools like Groundhogg which can help you do just that, automatically.

Funnel Templates:

• Login abandonment funnel
• Course abandonment funnel
• Course lead magnet funnel

Relevant links:

• Course Creator Essentials (Groundhogg academy)
• How to import funnel templates

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How Groundhogg And LifterLMS Work Together To Engage And Retain Students

This webinar covers how course creators can use a CRM and marketing automation, paired with LifterLMS, to convert more leads into paying students and get more of those students to finish what they started. LifterLMS founder Chris Badgett is joined by Adrian Tobey, founder of Groundhogg, who builds three real funnels live: a follow up sequence for new leads, a login abandonment funnel, and a course abandonment funnel, plus contact segmentation, broadcast emails, and funnel analytics.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a CRM belongs alongside your LMS and your CMS, and what problem each one actually solves
• How to build a three-email follow up funnel that moves a free lead toward a paid course
• How to build a login abandonment funnel and a course abandonment funnel that bring lapsed students back
• How to segment your contact list with tags and saved filters so you can send targeted, relevant messages instead of one blanket email
• How to read funnel and broadcast email analytics to find what needs improvement

Key Takeaways

• Build your list first. Most visitors are not ready to buy on the first interaction, so a low barrier lead magnet or a footer opt-in form matters more than a hard sell
• Write your follow up sequence in order: remind them of the problem, reinforce the value they already received, then make the direct offer. Three emails over three days is a reasonable starting point
• Set a start condition and a stop condition on every funnel, so a student who converts early stops receiving the rest of the sequence automatically
• Reduce friction wherever you can. Auto login links and direct course continue links remove steps between an email and a finished lesson
• Tag contacts by course, interest, and campaign from day one. Segmentation is what makes a targeted broadcast possible later

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Every Course Creator Also Needs A CRM

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another complimentary training put together by LifterLMS. We’ve got a special training partner today, his name is Adrian Tobey, he’s from Groundhogg, that’s Groundhogg with two g’s on the end. We’ll put a link to Groundhogg in the chat. One of the great things about Groundhogg is that it allows you to do something in WordPress that every learning platform creator, whether you’re creating an online course, a training based membership site, or an online school, needs. In my opinion everyone also needs a CRM, a customer relationship management system. Think of it as a learning relationship management system if you’re doing free courses.

Essentially, WordPress is a CMS, a content management system. LifterLMS is an LMS, a learning management system. A CRM is a customer relationship management system. When you put all three of those things together, it’s incredible what you can build with that.

Adrian Tobey: Hey, my name is Adrian, I’m really excited to be here. I’m the CEO and founder of Groundhogg, and I’m also a huge LifterLMS fan, so I’m just excited to spend, we have like a whole two hours, right, to just geek out and get into making sure that students are engaged and that you’re converting leads into customers. And if we have time, we can even get into where to find those leads, because I have a few ideas that I’m more than willing to share.

For those of you out there who are still trying to wrap your head around what a CRM is, think about it this way: for course creators, it’s important to have an email list. Sometimes you want to be able to send broadcast emails to many people, and sometimes you want, based on certain events that happen inside the LMS, to trigger certain campaigns or emails that drip out over time, whether it’s before someone becomes a customer or a learner on your site, or after. This is what CRM and marketing automation does.

What This CRM And Automation Training Will Cover

Adrian Tobey: For those of you just joining the call, welcome. My name is Adrian, I am the CEO and founder of Groundhogg, we offer a CRM and marketing automation plugin for WordPress. If you have no idea what that means yet, don’t worry, we’re going to get there. What we’re going to be learning today is all about how to maximize student engagement and increase student retention for your course website, two things that I know a lot of course creators struggle with.

So you’re on the right call if you’ve ever struggled to get new enrollments, you’ve had difficulty engaging with students, you’ve pulled your hair out because students aren’t completing your courses. I know that’s something that really bothers me, when you put so much effort into your content and then someone goes through it and they make it thirty percent of the way there and then they just disappear. How do I mitigate that, how do I get them to the end, how do I make sure that I add value to their lives, because if they don’t finish the course, guess what, if you’re on a subscription or you’re collecting renewals, they’re not going to renew, and that’s a really big bummer.

So specifically during this webinar you’re going to learn how to leverage marketing automation for more enrollments and to fill your courses, whether you’ve got free courses or paid courses or lead magnets you’re giving away that you want to convert to paid. We’re going to cover how to use a CRM to identify your student segments and send them meaningful content, because people on your list are not always in the same bucket, and once you understand them better you can send more relevant messaging instead of a blanket one size fits all to your entire list. And finally we’re going to cover how to encourage students past the finish line and into the next course, how to make sure that thirty percent completion rate doesn’t weigh you down, so that the next month they renew, and they renew, and they renew again, because that’s the most important thing, creating that consistent MRR.

Meet Adrian Tobey And Groundhogg

Adrian Tobey: For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the CEO and founder of Groundhogg, we help small businesses and agencies launch their funnel, grow their list, and scale their business. I actually have a few products, Groundhogg being one of them, MailHawk, FormLift, and we’re a certified Stripe verified partner. We won the Stevie Award for customer service in 2021, gold customer service, and best tech startup in the CRM category in 2020, so we’re very happy with that.

I am a huge LifterLMS fan. I met Chris Badgett way back in 2019 and pretty much my life has never been the same. I owe a lot of Groundhogg’s early success to totally leeching off of his email list and doing a webinar just like this one a few years ago, and I’ve been epically grateful ever since, and trying to repay the favor ever since by investing in the course creator community with products, integrations, strategy, and courses, to move the agenda of educating the world further.

Through creating courses and creating products for course creators, I’ve identified a number of persistent problems that are shared among all course creators when implementing not only tools like LifterLMS but also marketing automation and CRM. So let’s go ahead and solve some of those problems.

Why Ninety Percent Of Stalled Enrollments Are Not A Content Problem

Adrian Tobey: Let’s talk about how we convert more enrollments into paying students. As I was just saying, we go through that content production phase, we lock ourselves in a basement, in my office, I lock myself in here, I close the door, I turn my recording light on, and I say all right, I’m going to sit here until this twenty four part War and Peace course is done. We record it, we get through it, we put it up for the world to see, and we kind of cross our fingers and pray. And then we wait. And then we wait, and then we wait, and then we wait, and usually what ends up happening is we’re watching the hours go by. We built this awesome piece of content that’s really going to change people’s lives, and we’re not really getting any traction, we’re not getting people to enroll, if it’s free we’re not getting people past the first few lessons.

There’s a whole bunch of reasons why this might happen, but ninety percent of the time for first time content creators, our intrinsic belief is that there’s something wrong with the content. In truth, it could be, but ninety percent of the time there’s nothing wrong with the content. It’s all about the process of how people actually get to the content and how they consume it.

What Actually Affects Whether Someone Enrolls

Adrian Tobey: Things that affect conversion rate, people on your site actually enrolling in your course: it could be the price, it’s too expensive or it’s too inexpensive. I’ve had a lot of experience with undercharging, and it’s something I still think we’re doing, but for the benefit of you guys, price might be too expensive or too cheap, so your target audience may not be able to match you at that price point. The amount of content might be too long, people might not want to invest twenty four hours in the course, they might only want to spend five minutes, so you have to match people’s expectation of time investment. Reviews and testimonials are also a big factor, it’s hard to convert people without those. Billing period, if it’s a one time payment or people don’t want to commit, trust factor, prerequisites, whether it’s a required credit or not, all these things impact an enrollment and purchasing decision.

But we’ve got to build the list first. Build a list, build the list. This is sort of a blanket statement across all types of digital content creation: all of that I just mentioned is overcome if you build the list, build a list, build the list, and it’s all about building up your contact list, not necessarily of customers, but of leads, of prospects, of people that match your ideal customer profile.

If the only thing you’re doing is putting up content with a paywall and no other method of entry, that’s all you’re going to be doing, because ninety percent of people don’t make a purchasing decision on the first interaction. Usually it takes three, four, five interactions with a business before they’re comfortable making that purchasing decision. The average on our Groundhogg pricing pages is five visits before someone is able to make a purchase decision. There are exceptions to that rule, but for the vast majority of us it takes a few interactions and a few touch points for someone to be comfortable spending their money with you.

Build The List Before You Try To Sell Anything

Adrian Tobey: All of these ideas are dependent on you actually having traffic, which is kind of the first step. For those of you who have traffic but aren’t yet seeing the enrollments follow, here are some ideas for immediately building your list. You can have a free trial, that’s super popular for courses, first fourteen days free and then the billing starts. You can offer a lead magnet with maybe a course template or some sort of instructional template related to your niche, or maybe a free lesson, LifterLMS makes it super easy to offer the free lesson.

On all of our website properties we actually have a form, if you look at the top right it says subscribe and discount, and that form is located in the footer of all of our website properties, and it converts ten percent of website traffic into a lead, just for basically doing nothing, and the only thing we have to give them is ten or fifty percent off the first year, and that is just extraordinarily effective.

There’s people who are analytics, they go to a website and want to consume every single word, that’s not me, I skim, I look, I click the big red flashy button. But some people analyze every single thing on a web page, and they get to that footer and they’re analyzing every single link, and they’re going to find this form, and they think, all right, if I end up deciding to make a purchasing decision, I’ll trade an email address for fifteen percent off, why not. It’s super effective for basically minimal effort, you don’t have to set up a landing page, it just goes on every single web page because it’s in your website footer.

Free courses are also just a really simple one, that’s our course creator essentials course, a full day intensive on how to do everything we’re doing in this webinar, which you can all check out after this.

Chris Badgett: I’m also interested to learn more about that subscribe and discount, how you did that, and maybe for a quick thing while we’re here, do people need a separate form plugin to create these kinds of lead magnet opt-in forms, or how does one think about creating the form?

Adrian Tobey: So all of this, with the exception of the Black Friday one, is just done with Groundhogg. We have a form builder built in, it’s not the most advanced one, but it’s more than good enough to get name and email address, which is more than what you need most of the time. If you’re collecting way too much information upon initial signup, people think, I don’t know if I want to divulge all of this personal information yet. So usually the first interaction is just an email address, or just name and email address, and then you can start to build up the customer profile later after they’ve had a few interactions with you.

Keep Every Page To One Clear Call To Action

Chris Badgett: Ashley has a question about what’s too many CTAs, like if you’re on a page, at what point do you cross the tipping point of overdoing it?

Adrian Tobey: I think the answer is one glaring CTA. You can have multiple CTAs on a page, like the subscribe and discount form is on every single page, right, but it’s in the footer, it’s like an afterthought, so it’s not going to interrupt somebody in whatever they’re currently doing. On the pricing page, the only CTA is buy now. On the home page, the only CTA is go to the pricing page. Your home page and the layout has to have a logical flow, as minimal steps as it takes to get someone directly to the checkout page. If someone goes to Groundhogg.io for the first time, it’s home page, pricing page, checkout, three steps. If they end up on a landing page, it’s landing page, pricing page, checkout. It has to have that logical flow.

If you have these afterthought CTAs in the footer, as many as you want, but I think too many is when one call to action interrupts another one. You want someone on the checkout page with minimum steps to the checkout page, because we’re here to make money, we’re here to create value, and we can’t do that if we don’t make money.

Why The Fortune Is In The Follow Up

Adrian Tobey: So we built the list, we send them to the checkout page, do they buy? Most of the time, no, because that’s still the first interaction of a few that has to happen. The next step after building the list is follow up, follow up, follow up, it’s all about the follow up now. Ninety percent of your sales are going to happen on the back end. I used to be in the live course business, we used to do three day seminars with my dad, we’d rent a board room at a hotel and set up a booth and the lights and the microphones, and we’d put thirty to sixty people in a room, and ten to thirty percent would sign up right then, and the other thirty percent of the sales came from the follow up after that, like hey listen, we know you had a great time during the course, I think your business would really benefit from taking this next one. A lot of our sales just happened from that follow up on the back end.

This is by far probably the thing that most course creators and other creators leave out, this follow up process. Now let’s see what that follow up process looks like, this is when we’re going to jump into the WordPress admin and take a look at the product and do some implementation. I’m going to be doing all of the work today from scratch, just so you can see how the product works and how you build these, but you don’t have to do that, because at the end of this, everybody on this call is going to get the templates that I export from this, so you can just go ahead and install those if you choose to use our product, you don’t have to do all the setup work, all you’re going to have to do is rewrite a few emails and change a couple links.

Chris Badgett: A quick question about follow up, I know some people get a little cautious around the idea, like I don’t want to annoy people. What would you say to that person?

Adrian Tobey: If they’re annoyed, they’re not your customer. People who are your customer are going to immediately identify with the need, and a lot of the time what follow up does is give them permission to spend money. Most people need permission to actually invest their money, and following up is basically just asking for the sale, hey listen, it’s okay if you have this problem, this is going to solve that for you, buy now, and it’s like, oh, thanks for giving me permission, I’m going to go buy now. If they say this is too many emails, I can only tell you that person is going to be problematic later down the road. There is a point where it becomes too much, maybe if you’re sending five emails a day, but most people aren’t doing that, maybe a couple, maybe one a day, maybe four every five days. Be relevant and then just don’t be annoying, that’s pretty much it. If it’s relevant they’re going to want to hear from you. Spam is whatever the recipient thinks it is, so as long as you’re sending relevant content that identifies where they’re at, the problem they have, and a solution, I think you’re going to be okay.

Setting Up A Free Course Enrolled Funnel In Groundhogg

Adrian Tobey: Let’s go ahead and build some follow up here. There’s a saying that the fortune is in the follow up, and another key concept there is segmenting, it’s not about having one giant email list that everybody gets the same message all the time, it’s all about targeted marketing and content, but first, follow up.

We’ve got a few courses here, literally just imported five minutes before the call from the LifterLMS import tool, so we have a free course lead magnet template, and we’re going to assume that this is the course people signed up for as the free lead magnet, and we want to move them into some paid course. Then we have our LifterLMS Quick Start course, we’re going to assume that’s our paid course just for the sake of example. So we have our free course and our paid course, and from here we can actually start building out our first follow up funnel.

We’ll head to Groundhogg and open up Funnels, add a new one. When you have Groundhogg with the LifterLMS integration installed and LifterLMS installed, we’re going to see benchmarks that are specific to LifterLMS, these are our triggers, our goals. We have our LifterLMS action, and we can choose a few things: course completed, course enrolled, or lesson completed. Whenever someone on our website does one of those things, we can start some automation.

So I’m going to do course enrolled, and we have our lead magnet course, which we’re offering here, so essentially when anyone enrolls in this free lead magnet course, with low barrier entry of just first name and last name, they’re going to end up with this funnel, and the entire purpose of both this course and this funnel is to get someone to purchase that other course, to invest in themselves and invest in you.

The second thing we’re going to do is add another one, rename it enrolled in paid, and select our Quick Start course, our paid course. Now what’s happening here is when someone does this thing, they enter this funnel, and when they actually buy that course, they exit this funnel. So what I have set is my start and stop conditions, everything in between is the messaging we’re going to send this person in between those two events occurring, and the messaging will stop as soon as they actually make that purchasing decision. Then we can move them over to another funnel if we wanted to, to continue the follow up process into the next course.

Writing A Welcome Email That Builds Trust With New Leads

Adrian Tobey: Let’s send some emails here. I’m going to send three emails, spaced out with a delay timer of one day, I know the fear is over stimulating or over engaging someone to the point of annoyance, so we’re going to spread the content over a few days.

We can apply a tag to this person, if segmentation is a new concept, tags are basically a way to put your leads and prospects and users and students into different buckets of things that might be relevant. Somebody teaching multiple subjects, like math or science, might apply a tag when someone enrolls in one of those courses, an interest tag. I’m just going to name mine lead magnet enrolled, we’re going to apply that tag whenever they enroll in this course, and then we’re going to send them an email.

I’m going to use our basic text editor, it gets better email deliverability than our drag and drop editor, which we also have but won’t demo today. I’m going to call this first email thanks for enrolling, and you get to share a little bit about your organization, this might be the first time this person has ever interacted with your organization, the first content they might ever consume from you, so you want to make a good impression and give them some next steps. Thanks for enrolling, we really appreciate you taking the time and investing in your personal growth, your next steps are to complete the lead magnet course, insert your actual course name there, any homework or prerequisites, read a blog post, listen to an interview. We want to build up more areas for them to go and build that trust factor, more touch points, and also a direct line to the checkout page, everything should have as least steps as possible to get to them separating with their credit card information.

Thinking Through A Follow Up Sequence Like A Time Traveler

Chris Badgett: It’s a learned skill to kind of think like a time traveler. If you look at your customer journey, you may be creating a bunch of emails and feel like you’re doing too much, but when you spread it out and you have those delay timers, you literally can travel through time of their future experience.

Adrian Tobey: It’s a different way to think, writing this kind of content is not like writing a broadcast email, you have to really think through time. You have to understand, by the point they get that second email, what lesson are they on, right, are they on the third lesson, the fourth lesson, what’s their state of mind at this point, has the problem gotten worse, is the lead magnet we gave them going to solve that problem. Those are all the questions we have to ask and plan the messaging around.

For the sake of this example we’re going to assume they’re traveling through the lead magnet course, which hopefully you’ve constructed, or if you haven’t, just assume this is some sort of white paper. From personal experience developing our own lead magnet courses, keep it high level, don’t go too nitty gritty, give them a few golden nuggets but keep the best for the paid stuff, because if you give away the whole farm they’re not going to buy anything. You don’t want to solve their problem in that first interaction, because in order for you to add value to the universe and continue to create value, you have to collect reciprocal value in return.

Adding SMS Alongside Email Follow Up

Adrian Tobey: We got a question about sending text messages instead of or in addition to email in one of these campaigns. Yes, absolutely, we do have an SMS add-on and integration with Twilio, which you can set up in order to send up to a hundred forty characters, or is it two hundred eighty now, they increased it a little bit. That is totally something you can do in addition, so if you do collect a phone number, which I know LifterLMS does, that just puts them into the contact record, and then you can use Groundhogg to send text messages.

Why Groundhogg Still Needs A Transactional Email Service

Adrian Tobey: We also got a question about whether Groundhogg actually sends an email or whether people need a mailing service like Mailgun or SendGrid, and I’m sure we’ll talk about MailHawk as well. As a quick prerequisite, Groundhogg is the content management system for your marketing automation and contacts, but not the delivery service itself. You do need a transactional email service like MailHawk, which is actually our own proprietary service, AWS, Mailgun, SendGrid is a great option, and you can also hook up any other SMTP integration.

The main benefit of using one of those services versus a SaaS CRM and marketing automation tool is the price. The multiples on email sends for SaaS based CRM and marketing automation are many multiples of what the transactional email equivalent would be, the price markup is exorbitant. We’re going to talk about pricing and all that stuff a lot later, so stick around to the end of the call to learn about your actual expected investment in a system like this versus using a SaaS.

Quick Answers On Email Length, Images, And Deliverability

Adrian Tobey: We got a lightning round of questions from Ashley, short punchy answers. Recommended length of the first email to recent enrollments, shorter, I find long form emails, people drop off. I like to personally, and it comes down to who your audience is, if your audience is more analytical they’re going to read everything, like they would on your homepage, and they’re going to find that opt-in footer at the bottom. But if your audience is more rise and grind entrepreneurial types, they’re kind of skimming, and it’s better to just keep it short and sweet with a very clear CTA, because they’re all over the place chasing that solution or looking for that silver bullet. So it really depends on your audience, and understanding your audience is half the battle.

Include or exclude hyperlinks in email? Well, you’ve got to have a CTA, and the only way to have a CTA is to have a link, so absolutely you should have a link in an email in order to take someone to go do something. If you don’t give them any sort of call to action, you’re basically just taking up space in their inbox, and we don’t want to do that, we want to compete for their engagement.

Have you seen engagement impact from inclusion or exclusion of images in emails? The more you have, the more it impacts deliverability and engagement, the more badly, the more images and formatting your email has, the more likely you are to end up in the promotions tab and compete with the riff raff. Most of our emails that we send are image free, very bare bones and short and sweet, and the majority of those end up in the updates tab, which is a good tab to be in, it’s very difficult to get into the main inbox anymore. As soon as you have even a hint of HTML formatting it’s almost impossible unless someone personally delivered that email to you. The updates tab is a high interest tab, I spend half my time in there looking for billing notifications and calendar notifications, so if your email is in there, they’re going to open it. The more images and hyperlinks you have, the more likely you are to end up in the promotions tab, and it’s basically impossible to get out of there once your reputation is set.

Can I show Groundhogg analytics, open rate, click through rate, read time? Read time, no, and I don’t know anybody who can do that. If someone is collecting read time for email and marketing that as a feature, I’d be dubious about the reliability of that metric, considering what I know about how inboxes work. But open rate and click through rate, absolutely, those are metrics I can show you a little bit later.

Writing A Reminder Email That Re-Engages A Cold Lead

Adrian Tobey: Back to our follow up, follow up, follow up. Our first email gave them next steps and things to consume so we can build trust, and once we’ve done that we can schedule the next follow up, because this probably isn’t enough, it’s all about the consistency with which we engage with this person over time, and we don’t want to do that manually.

We’re waiting a day, and we’re at day two now, this is the second day after they haven’t yet purchased, and they’re in the process of learning more about your organization, your values, your service offerings. We want to remind them at this point of the problem they originally needed to solve, because they may have ended up on the landing page or identified with the problem, but people have short attention spans, and Netflix is competing for our attention, they might not even be aware a day later that they spent fifteen minutes going through your free course or reading your lead magnet. So at this point we have to remind them of the interactions they took the day before, remind them of the problem they have, and remind them that we have the solution.

Our subject line has to be in the vein of reminding someone that these events took place, a really great idea to frame it as a question, are you still looking for a solution for X. If their problem is that they can’t get leads, are you still looking for a way to get more leads, it’s like, oh yeah I was looking for that yesterday, thanks for reminding me, let me hop in there and see what you actually have to offer. You can blatantly spell out, yesterday you took the time to sign up for our lead magnet course, I hope you found it valuable and that you learned X, Y, Z. And what this does is that if they haven’t actually done the course at this point, they’re now experiencing fear of missing out, like, oh, those things were in the lead magnet, I might actually go back and redo it to grasp that knowledge.

We’re just going to say, we hope you learned X, Y, Z, if you’re still having trouble doing X, we actually have a program that will help you do that, and then your three value points, whatever you’re offering, just like at the start of this webinar, the reason you’re probably still here is because you’re going to learn how to increase engagement, reduce churn, increase retention. Those are the value props of this webinar, you’ve got to plug that into these emails. People are very results oriented, if you’re process oriented that’s not as engaging.

You can learn more about the program here is not a sexy CTA, what’s a better one? We have limited capacity for this year for this program, find out if you qualify, because everybody wants to feel special. If you find out you won’t qualify, go here, and then you link that to your special paid program.

The key points to take away from this email: we have to remind them of the problem they were looking for a solution for, because they’re not guaranteed to remember, we have to reinforce the value of the thing they originally signed up for, and then we have to start hinting about the thing we want to inevitably sell them. It’s not a hard sell yet, we don’t need to go for the jugular yet, we just want to seed that now. I say follow up three times for a reason, follow up one, follow up two, follow up three, third time’s a charm, we’re going to go for the hard pitch and go for that sale. For now we’re just going to soft sell it, some people at this point will say take my money, I’m all in, more people are going to tip their toe in the water and see how they feel, they have to go ask the boss, they’ve got to check the bank account.

Writing The Hard Pitch Email That Asks For The Sale

Adrian Tobey: This is the hard pitch, this is when we let them know they should in fact enroll in our course, we want them to invest, we want them to spend money, and we have to reinforce all the value they got from the previous experiences and how they can use that to magnify the value in your next course. You learned X, Y, and Z from the things we gave you for free, you can now use X, Y, and Z to magnify A, B, C in our program. Everything you’re learning in this webinar is going to be magnified when you actually buy Groundhogg, because it’s going to be easier to implement. You’ve got to reinforce the value they got for free and tell them how they can use that value and actually implement it effectively with your paid thing.

So here’s how you solve X with Y, reinforce the problem and the solution, given what you’ve already learned so far, you’ve learned A, B, C, which is really going to help with your problem and get you amazing results, now that you have that information we have to implement it, your options for that are. This is a great selling tactic in general, not necessarily Groundhogg specific: at the end of this webinar I’m going to show you the prices for our competitors in the SaaS industry, which are exorbitant in comparison to us and a lot more difficult and complicated to set up, and you’re going to think, wow, that’s so complicated and so expensive, and then I’m going to introduce you to Groundhogg, which is so inexpensive by comparison and way easier to set up.

You’ve got to quantify the value you offer, not necessarily at a rock bottom price, but as something more affordable and easier to consume than the alternative. Your options are, you know, spend thousands on this, pull your hair out, get frustrated, we’re agitating the pain that they’re currently experiencing, or instead you can take our program, which is getting amazing results for our students, testimonial, we have limited spots for the rest of the year, qualify now and solve your problem, and then our call to action, and then we’re going to agitate that pain one more time: if you choose not to move forward this year, the wait time is X until you’re actually able to solve that problem. In their mind they’re thinking, if I have to wait till then I still have to put up with all this pain I’m currently experiencing, there’s no way I want to continue doing that, and I’m going to go ahead and follow through on that initial call to action.

To summarize this email, this is our third follow up, and you can do more than this, but I think this is probably a good starting point, if you do more than this you’re probably wasting your time, because especially when you’re first implementing stuff like this you don’t really know what works. This is our best guess, this is what we see work commonly among multiple business niches, but people’s audiences vary wildly so your mileage may differ. Going down the rabbit hole and tweaking these emails before you ever turn the on button on and see how it works is probably a waste of time. Do the bare minimum, get it implemented, have clear positioning, and then see if it works, and from there you can see, all right, my conversion rate on this is around ten percent, I want to get that up to fifteen, maybe that means you need another email, maybe you need to tweak your audience, your messaging, or your call to action.

Three emails over three days, one initially, one the day after, one the day after that, each moving the prospect forward in terms of their awareness level and their buyer readiness, by identifying their problem, agitating it, introducing solutions that are only half complete, and then completing the solution with your paid offer. That is our follow up strategy in a nutshell.

Chris Badgett: What happens if somebody does the call to action pretty quick, before email two goes out, do they get pulled out?

Adrian Tobey: Exactly, that’s what happens, if they complete that call to action, which is register for our paid thing, then once they enroll in the paid thing they’re just going to get sucked right to the bottom and the automation’s over, they’re not going to receive any of those other follow up emails. We don’t want to bombard them with stuff they don’t need. This is our end condition, this is our start condition, you can even have conditions in the middle if you want a multi step process, but this is pretty much all you need, just the two, and you’re pretty much off to the races.

Why Students Abandon Courses They Already Paid For

Adrian Tobey: So how do we get our students to finish courses? A lot of you might think getting someone to finish a course is like pulling teeth. How hard is it to go from one lesson to the next, it’s only going to take twenty four hours of your life away. But like I said earlier, we’re all competing for attention, and with courses, especially video courses, there’s a lot of video out there, there’s Netflix, YouTube, Instagram reels, TikTok, we’re getting notifications on our phones, ooh, someone you follow just released a new video, I know I’m only halfway through this thing I paid a thousand dollars for, but it’s only going to take two minutes, and then it’s midnight and you look up and it’s dark and you think, what just happened, where did all the time go. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wake up at two in the morning once thinking, how did I get here, it was like time flies. I deleted TikTok after that, I was like, no more, that’s too much.

Abandonment happens, and it’s hard to fight, because these companies have perfected the art of interruption, of being able to take you away from whatever you were focused on, and that’s how they make money. Rather than trying to combat that, because it’s impossible, what you’re going to become an expert on is the art of interruption yourself. You’ve got to pull someone back, fight for them, get in their inbox or through SMS or whatever, and interrupt whatever they’re currently doing to get them back focused on the thing they paid money for and invested in with you. You’re not going to be able to stop YouTube or TikTok or Instagram from sending them notifications, that’s just not going to happen, so you have to send notifications too.

The abandonment cycle at checkout is no different, it’s estimated that ninety percent of carts are abandoned just because someone gets to the checkout page and then their mom calls, or their credit card doesn’t work, and they get distracted, and then all of a sudden it’s midnight and you’re on TikTok still. We have to perfect the art of interruption in order to get someone’s attention back on track.

There are also other reasons this happens, it might be some sort of mandatory compliance course, boring stuff people have to do for work, in which case they’re intrinsically motivated to get to the end. Other problems are your skill level might be too high for the audience you’re targeting, if you’re targeting juniors but the level of content you’re giving is expert level, they’re just going to think, this isn’t for me, this is too tough, I’m going to give up. That’s something you tweak on your content level. The content is exactly what they expected, they left you for Netflix, life happened, distracted by shiny object syndrome, so many reasons.

And like follow up, we’ve got to push, we’ve got to nudge this person through the art of interruption back into the fold, into the course, and get them to complete that content, because if they don’t finish the course, all of a sudden three months go by, they haven’t done a single lesson, they’re looking at their credit card statement, and they’re seeing that they didn’t get value from that, no fault of your own because the ownership is on them for not completing it, but you’re going to get a charge back or a cancellation or refund request, and we don’t want to deal with that stuff. We’d rather make sure the person gets the value they originally paid for, and it usually falls on us to make sure that happens, because relying on the customer to get the value themselves is a non-starter in a lot of cases.

Building A Login Abandonment Funnel To Bring Students Back

Adrian Tobey: Let’s head back over to our website. I’m going to create a new funnel, and we actually have a template for this one called login abandonment. There are two kinds of funnels you can do here, there’s the general login abandonment, which I’m going to start off with, so basically you’ve got to log in to use LifterLMS, and the way this funnel works is if someone doesn’t log in within a certain time period, let’s say they log in one day and don’t log in the next day and don’t log in the day after, we can send them an email, hey, we haven’t seen you in a while, you have these courses ongoing and we’d love you to continue. You have to reinforce the value you’re offering, reinforce the problem they’re suffering from, agitate that a little bit so they realize, oh my god, I can’t believe I let this lapse, and you almost make them feel guilty for not investing in themselves. We’re going to guilt trip them a little bit, don’t feel bad about it, it’s all to help them.

We have this benchmark called logged in, we’re going to stick that at the top and say anytime, so every single time someone logs into the website this funnel starts, and we have a seven day timer here, so if someone doesn’t log in within seven days we’re going to send them that interruption. You can set this to three days or five days depending on your audience or your content structure, I’m going to leave it at seven days for now, and then we’re going to send them an email, is everything okay, we haven’t seen you in a week.

Hey, it’s been a while since you last logged in, is everything okay, we’d be happy to answer any questions you have if you’re having trouble finding anything. We’re going to ask, is there something preventing you from moving forward, you can let us know, and that way we get feedback on how to fix it if it is indeed something on our side, and if not, then we give them the opportunity to log in, just let us know, log in now.

Using Auto Login Links And Course Continue Links To Remove Friction

Adrian Tobey: Groundhogg has this cool thing called an auto login link, which I can stick into any email, and what this does is log someone in and take them to the dashboard, which is kind of cool, and you can set it to redirect to your LifterLMS dashboard as well. This is going to take you to the WP admin dashboard, or if you have that protection set up to redirect to the literal LifterLMS dashboard, you don’t necessarily have to do this, you could say slash dashboard or something like that. What’s going to happen is when they click that link, they skip the login screen entirely and get immediately logged in, taken to their courses dashboard where they can continue from where they left off.

Another thing you can do is nest these, which is kind of cool. I’m going to have my auto login link here, and then add another one, added by LifterLMS, which is our course continue link. I can put in a course ID, so if I know what course they’re in, this is actually going to log them in and take them directly to the lesson they last completed, so they can immediately start from where they left off, which is also kind of cool, isn’t it, talk about removing friction. That’s what a lot of it is, least possible steps to where they get value, it’s all about removing friction, removing steps.

This is in a nutshell our login abandonment, you can go even further and agitate that pain, if you’re still suffering, it’s time to end it, continue the course and be done, you can dangle the carrot a little bit and give them an expectation of when they’d actually be able to see results.

This is something that will run infinitely, for pretty much the lifetime of this user, so every time they fall off the bandwagon they’re going to get this nudge, we’re mastering the art of interruption. We can configure it to only run for the third time or the fourth time if we want, but I prefer to just leave it on every single time, and then even once they log back in it resets. We’re going to reinforce that pain, if it’s still suffering, time to end it, continue the course and see results as soon as you complete it. You can send an email in that vein as many times as you want, but after three times it’s kind of diminishing returns, until you understand and have this running for a while and can see the results and the abandonment rate. I wouldn’t invest too much time in this, three emails, keep it short and sweet, identify the pain, identify the value, run with that, and then you’ll be able to look at those analytics later and optimize based on those results.

Chris Badgett: We got a question about unsubscribing from emails and Groundhogg, like how does it work, does that type of email have the ability for them to unsubscribe?

Adrian Tobey: Absolutely, people can unsubscribe from emails, they can unsubscribe from funnels, they can generally just blanket unsubscribe. We have a very user friendly preferences area, this is all GDPR compliant as well, or CAN-SPAM compliant, so if you’re worried about compliance and you’re worried about people being able to tailor the messaging they want to receive, absolutely that’s all possible. It’s a little bit more of an advanced topic, I don’t want to get too far down that rabbit hole, but the answer is yes, we have lots of courses and documentation on that if you want to investigate further after the webinar.

Building A Course Abandonment Funnel For Paid Students

Adrian Tobey: This is the first type of retention funnel we can set up, login abandonment, but we’re also going to set one up specifically for a course, because that’s a little bit more tailored. Let’s close this, get a new one, start from scratch, and call it course abandoned. We’re going to start off with our enrollment action, on our paid course, we want them to finish our paid course, that’s the goal, so we’ll set up enrolled in a course, and we’re also going to set one for when they complete it, that’s our starting and end condition, and set up some timers in the middle and some emails.

Depending on the length of your course, the time in between messaging might differ. If your course is heavy handed and longer, you might want to wait a few days before sending these, if it’s something that should be completed within a day, you might want to wait a few hours or just a day. I’m going to set mine at a single day for the sake of this demonstration. So my first thing is enrolled, completed, and I’m going to wait one day in between.

The purpose of this funnel is, someone enrolls in a course they paid for, we want to make sure they get past the finish line, because if they don’t, they’re at risk of cancellation or a refund, especially if you have a generous thirty day refund guarantee, and if that course doesn’t take thirty days to complete and they don’t complete it, you’re going to get an email you’re not going to enjoy.

Let’s go ahead and write. I’m going to be super uninspired for my email titles, but a little more inspired for the subject line: don’t wait to solve X, don’t wait to solve your problem, that’s what we’ll go for the first one. It’s been a day, they haven’t completed the course yet, they should have by now, so we send a message like, hey listen, don’t wait to solve this, the longer you wait. We’ll leave that a little ambiguous, that’s going to create curiosity that incentivizes the email open, so we can hit them with the call to action and the sales copy. They’ve enrolled in the course, your job selling this person isn’t over, you’ve got to keep selling them, sell them that they want to help themselves and get them to the end, because depending on your refund policy, you’ve got to sell them for that full thirty days until they get to the point where they made the right purchasing decision.

Hi, you have yet to finish the course, the longer you wait the more your pain will get worse, we don’t want that, and then we can have that same course continue link, continue now to solve the problem, insert our link here with our course ID. Then we reinforce again what their expectation of results should be, because if we leave the results ambiguous, a person who’s a little more apathetic can convince themselves that no matter what, the course might not solve their problem, so we have to set expectations of what their results are actually going to be, and you probably want to err on the side of selling. Hey listen, if you complete this you can expect to see A, B, and C change in your life, positive outcomes, but you’ve got to invest the time, you’ve got to make it happen. Then we reinforce the call to action again.

Why The Sale Is Not Over Until The Student Finishes The Course

Chris Badgett: I’ve also heard this concept called re-enrolling, even though somebody’s bought from you and become a customer, you still have to re-enroll them into what they bought, the sale isn’t over.

Adrian Tobey: The sale is not over until they get to the end. We have to sell them, it’s our job as the purveyors of important information to ensure that people can successfully consume it. This concept of following up and getting someone back into the fold is magnified when the content also follows correct instructional design and is engaging as well as informative, the concept of edutainment. If you have a course with poor structure and it’s too long, this is only going to get you so far, it’s absolutely going to help, but it gets magnified when the level of the content lives up to the expectations of the consumer and the student.

That’s our first email, and to all intents and purposes the rest of these emails are exactly the same, you might tweak the copy, tweak the page, but every single email you send, and maybe send four, five, six, seven, eight, however many it needs, whatever it takes, you’ve got to get them back. Again, diminishing returns the more emails you send out, so I’d focus on maybe the first three or four getting those really dialed in, keeping track of those analytics and that conversion rate, and then you can go in and start adding more and tweaking it.

Our own abandonment sequence on academy.groundhogg.io converts at like thirty percent, and the emails actually get a lot of engagement, we use a Mission Impossible style where it’s like, your mission should you choose to accept it, and that gets like an eighty percent open rate. People enjoy that and get a laugh, and even if they don’t complete the course, they get value and they’re entertained just from that email as well, your email in their inbox is also a place where you can educate and entertain, not all of that has to happen in your videos, it can happen in your email as well. Even if you’re not able to get that person to the finish line, you may have converted them into a follower regardless, through exercising your creativity on email instead of on video.

Sending Follow Up Emails In Each Student’s Own Time Zone

Chris Badgett: We had a quick one around, can you control the time of day somebody receives an email?

Adrian Tobey: Absolutely, we have at time of day, and then you can select what time.

Chris Badgett: Whoa, that’s awesome, I did not realize you had that, that’s a sweet feature. And is that like the, does it change per user, like if it’s eight a.m. on the west coast or the east coast, or is it the time of the sender?

Adrian Tobey: It’ll run at the contact’s local time, we can get the local time based on the person’s IP address or based on the browser, there’s a lot of ways to actually get the local time of the user, and that’s saved at the contact record. Then we can use that, based on the system time of your WordPress site, to calculate the difference and make sure events run. If you’re delivering the same course to someone in Australia as you are in the United States, they’re on the other side of the world, so you want the content to go out when they’re awake, engaging them at a point when they’re going to be open to consuming it, and not at midnight where their inbox is closed and by the time they wake up your email is buried.

Finding And Segmenting Contacts With Groundhogg’s Search Filters

Adrian Tobey: We need to identify and engage students to monetize them, and we talked about segmenting and understanding our audience, learning how to identify certain people and target them with specific marketing, the money’s in the list, but unless you have tools to decode the data in the list, it’s kind of like flying blind. The problem with a tool like Mailchimp is that everybody just gets added to this big list, and you don’t know anything about them, you don’t know where they live, you don’t know what their interests are, everybody’s on the list and they all get the same email, that doesn’t work. If you need to make money by the end of the week, say Black Friday’s coming up, you want to target everyone on your list who’s not even a customer yet, or you want to target people who’ve completed a specific course that leads to the next course, and offer those specific people a specific deal. You need to be able to target those people specifically, and you just can’t do that with other tools.

Let’s go back here, I’m going to open up our contacts, I have some example contacts and I took a few minutes to put a few people in different funnels. This is our contact filtering system, it allows you to find people in your list based on specific criteria, let’s say you want to run a promotion in a specific country, we’ve got a filter for that, so we can find everyone on our list who’s also a student from Canada. If we want to find everyone who’s completed or enrolled in a specific course, we can do that. We want to find people who are enrolled in a membership, someone was asking about that earlier, we want to find people who have a specific tag, right, so we were using tags to segment, we want to find people who have specific interests, math and science, because we have a new course about math and science, and we want to let those people know they get first access to this new course before anybody else. That’s the kind of thing you’re now able to do because you have a tool like this, to identify people’s specific interests, specific behavioral elements, specific demographic elements, and then tailor your marketing to suit those people.

One of the ones I recently love, that we’ve been playing a lot with, is that once people sign up on your site, they get a tracking cookie, and Groundhogg can use that cookie to identify that person’s customer journey on your site. So if you want to find everyone who’s visited your pricing page in the last thirty days at least three times, those people are probably at a higher buyer readiness level than somebody else, and you might want to offer those people a deal, like, hey listen, if you sign up now we only have three spots remaining, this is probably something you want to get on board with.

Combining Filter Conditions With And Or Or Logic

Chris Badgett: I got a question in the chat, can you select multiple tags for one email blast, and maybe you could explain the difference between the plus and the or area of the segment?

Adrian Tobey: This is basically building something we call a search query. So all of this, could you add a second tag, yeah, we can select like a tag or a country, so we can have a tag condition which is tags include started course, and we want to say their email address ends with dot com or something, right, these are two conditions which are considered, so it’s either both of these, the contact matches both these conditions, or they match this sequence of conditions, or they match this sequence of conditions, so you can get very specific in your segments.

Then what you can do, after you’ve created this segment of contacts that match specific criteria, is go ahead and save that, because you don’t want to go through that setup process every single time. When you save that, it’s saving that exact configuration of search filters, so the list is dynamic, it’ll update with the most recent people who match the specific criteria, it’s always changing depending on what people do on your website.

Sending A Targeted Broadcast Email To A Saved Segment

Adrian Tobey: Then you can go ahead and do things, you can add these people to a funnel, you can send them to a broadcast, export them, edit them, delete them if you want, I wouldn’t recommend that. At this point we can send a broadcast to these people, I can select the email I want to send them, maybe it’s a one time special offer, schedule when I want to send it, maybe at the end of the month or on a Friday, at ten a.m., and it’ll send to those people I selected, I can confirm and schedule it, and then that email gets sent to all of those people.

There was a question about avoiding certain holidays, I don’t think you can do that with Groundhogg, correct me if I’m wrong, in terms of having an email campaign that won’t deliver or blast automation on a certain holiday. I think it’s also important to keep in mind, what if I interrupt somebody while they’re on vacation or asleep at the end of the day, people have the ability to turn off their phone if they want, so you’re never going to get it completely perfect, and if they’re busy on their holiday they’re probably not looking at their email anyway. You can’t manage every single edge case, it’s an edge case, you’re going to spend more time and effort to solve that problem than the money you’re going to lose from it, diminishing returns.

Reading Groundhogg’s Funnel And Email Analytics

Adrian Tobey: Before I move on, the last thing I want to show is the reporting, someone did ask about the reporting and the analytics you’re able to get, so I’m going to show what that looks like on our actual academy site without showing anybody’s personal information. This is an example of what the reporting might look like, you have your date range, Groundhogg has incredibly sophisticated event tracking and activity tracking, giving you line graphs for pretty much everything in specified date ranges. We can see however many people, what our open rate is overall, the number of emails we sent, which funnels are converting the best, which countries have the most contacts within that time range, the lead sources of where people are coming from.

We can break that down into specific funnels, if we look at our Quick Start course reminders funnel, we can see it’s not doing so hot right now, so maybe I need to go tweak it, and that’s the kind of information you use, if this is your thing, if you live and breathe courses, you can look at this and say, okay, maybe I need to consider tweaking some of the content here. We actually break the emails down into different categories, like ones that need improvement, I can see this one has only a seven percent click through rate from a fifty percent open rate, not great, so we need to improve the call to action here in order to see an increase.

It’ll give you a breakdown of how many people completed each trigger, you have an enrollment action at the beginning and a completed action at the bottom, and this is how many people completed each within the time range. That’s the kind of analytics we offer to help you optimize your funnels and your systems.

A Simple Way To Start Naming Your Tags

Chris Badgett: Do you have any high level tips on the main types of tags, if people are going to come up with a naming convention, what are some things course creators might want to tag?

Adrian Tobey: Probably just the courses people are enrolled in, that’s a good place to start, so when someone enrolls, what product did they buy. As far as naming convention, I’m terrible with that, I kind of just tag willy nilly, like if someone signs up during a promotion it’ll be like that promotion name, or if someone signs up from a specific lead magnet or campaign I’m running, I’ll tag them with that campaign, so if I ever want to see everyone who signed up as a result of that marketing effort, I can just search them via that tag. We actually have a very detailed YouTube video about a high level naming convention for tags if that’s something you’re into, but courses, products, interests, profile type, gender, location, although we have custom fields for that, that’s probably where I’d start.

You can go down the rabbit hole on this, but it’s more important that you get some of those marketing efforts set up first, it’s all moot unless you have traffic to the website and you’re building your list. If you’re not doing those things, all the other setup is pointless until that point, it’s better to start building your list and then start worrying about those things than the other way around.

Recommended Hosting For A CRM Powered LifterLMS Site

Chris Badgett: We got a question around hosting, what do we recommend? I’ll throw some names out there that we recommend and see people being successful with: LifterLMS, WP Engine, Cloudways is very popular, Nexcess, GridPane, Kinsta, these are some of the more popular ones. When you do a CRM and an LMS, you’re using more server resources, it’s not just a simple brochure site for a Main Street business, so you want solid hosting, but it doesn’t have to be super expensive to start.

Adrian Tobey: I use a service called Kloudless, I’m pretty happy with it, it’s on Google Cloud servers which have pretty good uptime. The only time I had an issue was when Google went down, I also went down, but I digress.

How Groundhogg’s Pricing Compares To A Typical CRM Stack

Adrian Tobey: So to recap, by using Groundhogg with LifterLMS you’re consolidating your tools in one place, eliminating the multiple screens you have to have, because Groundhogg is installed in WordPress and LifterLMS is installed in WordPress, and that makes integration really simple and management really simple, because you only have to log into one place. You can convert more leads into students because you have those funnels set up and your strategy in place, you can better segment and identify your customers using our search filters, tailor your marketing to better serve your base, increase your retention and completion rates, and mostly you can save big.

If you currently have a CRM, this is what you’re paying, and it’s expensive, you’re spending hundreds of dollars a month, plus you have to use a tool like WP Fusion or Uncanny Automator, which is an additional yearly expense, so your overall investment could be in the thousands of dollars a year, and if you’re pre-revenue or in the beginning stages, that can hurt. Our regular pricing is a little more affordable and accessible for beginning course creators, a flat yearly fee no matter how large you grow, no matter how many students you have, how many people on your list, how many emails you send, you pay that same rate, so we make it incredibly equitable. It’s a WordPress plugin, self installed, self hosted, you’re in complete control, if your license lapses Groundhogg doesn’t go down, it still works, you still have access to all your data and the benefits that go around with that.

We have two plans accessible for the vast majority of people, the Pro plan and the Agency plan. For the Pro plan it’s five websites, and for the Agency plan it’s twenty five.

Closing Thoughts From Adrian Tobey

Adrian Tobey: Thanks for having me, I had a great time, I hope you learned something. My goal is to make sure you walk away, whether you buy something or not, with something that you can implement, something that’s actionable, I hope that you got that. There’s so much more you can do with Groundhogg that I haven’t been able to touch on because we’re just out of time, and I know there’s probably a few questions we weren’t able to go deep into, I’m sorry about that, you can hang out and come to our Facebook group and I can answer all the questions you have there. I am in there every single day, I’m a product owner who keeps his ear to the ground and I’m constantly engaging with our base, we have around fifteen hundred people in our Facebook group and all of them are incredibly helpful.

If anyone wants to dive deep and geek out on some of these subjects and topics that we really only just scraped the surface of, you can go so much deeper, I’ve posted the link to the Groundhogg Facebook group.

Chris Badgett: That was awesome, thank you for the generous offer and generosity for the LifterLMS community, that’s incredible. I want to thank you for coming, that was really good, I learned something, and I’ve been around the block a few times with marketing automation and CRM and all this stuff, and I’m really impressed with what you’ve built and grateful for what you’ve built for the LifterLMS community, especially for people who are looking for an all-in-one solution, to just have an online learning company on one website without overdoing it on all these tools where people get a little overwhelmed and their credit card gets a little beat up. You’ve done an amazing job there.

Thank you everyone for coming, Adrian, thanks for putting this on, and I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.