Increase Your Revenue with Advanced Coupon Technology

Enjoy a demo of the LifterLMS Advanced Coupons add-on so you can generate more sales with strategic discounts and advanced coupon technology.

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How To Use Advanced Coupons To Grow Course And Membership Sales

This webinar walks through the LifterLMS Advanced Coupons add-on, a premium extension of the core LifterLMS coupon system for course creators, coaches, and membership site owners. Chris Badgett demonstrates access plan targeting, minimum checkout amounts, maximum uses per user, geographic restrictions by country, coupon URLs that apply the discount on link click, and detailed usage reporting. He also introduces the Big Mac Index as a lens for pricing courses in global markets.

What You’ll Learn

• How the Advanced Coupons add-on extends the built-in LifterLMS coupon system
• How to build coupons that target specific access plans on a course or membership
• How to require a minimum checkout amount before a discount unlocks
• How geographic restrictions serve buyers in different countries fairly
• How coupon URLs remove friction from promotions, emails, and social posts
• What the Big Mac Index reveals about pricing digital products globally

Key Takeaways

• Coupon URLs let you place one-click discount links in emails, landing pages, social posts, and ads
• Set a minimum checkout amount to reward larger orders and drive upsells into higher-tier access plans
• Use geographic restrictions to open your courses to buyers in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and select African markets
• Combine country-targeted coupons with country-targeted ads on Facebook and Google, and with segmented email campaigns
• Track coupon performance and associated orders directly from the Usage tab inside every coupon

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Coupons Drive Course And Membership Sales

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary training. It’s Chris and Kurt from LifterLMS, and today we’re doing a presentation about the LifterLMS Advanced Coupons add-on, which released recently. If you have questions as we go, drop them in a comment wherever you’re watching this. This is going to be an interactive session. I may take some questions as we go, or we’ll have a dedicated Q&A section at the end.

Advanced Coupons is a recently released add-on for LifterLMS. It adds additional functionality to help you create more sales through strategic discounts and some advanced coupon options. Why are we even talking about coupons? Coupons are a big part of making money on the internet with digital products like courses, memberships, and coaching programs. Everybody loves a good deal, they like a discount, they like a special sale and promotion. We want you to have the most powerful tools for your learning management system e-commerce with LifterLMS Advanced Coupons.

Where To Find LifterLMS Advanced Coupons

You can purchase Advanced Coupons on our website. It is listed under Software Add-Ons, and you can find Advanced Coupons in the mix there. If you just want to get LifterLMS Advanced Coupons on its own, that works, and you can also get it as part of the LifterLMS Infinity bundle. When you click Compare Plans, you can see exactly which add-ons are in which bundle. Advanced Coupons is included in the Infinity bundle.

We do have documentation for the Advanced Coupons add-on, including a well-polished overview video. I’m going to be doing a raw presentation for you today, going into detail and setting things up. We have also done some Feature Fridays on Advanced Coupons where we go into all the details.

What The Core LifterLMS Coupon System Includes

Let’s take a look at a site with Advanced Coupons installed. This is a LifterLMS demo site using one of our templates, and you can get the exact website we’re looking at for a dollar with the Try LifterLMS for a Dollar offer if you want to test Advanced Coupons before you buy.

Before we look at the add-on, let me turn Advanced Coupons off in the WordPress Plugins screen. The LifterLMS coupon system is included in the core version of LifterLMS. The coupon system already exists and you can use it. What Advanced Coupons does is provide additional functionality on top of the base coupon system.

With the core system, you can add a coupon by giving it a name and a code that people enter at checkout. You can set a percentage discount or a dollar discount. You can target specific access plans. You can set an expiration date and a number of times the coupon can be used. Over on the restrictions side, you can limit the coupon to specific courses or memberships on the site. That’s the base coupon system, and there is a lot more you can do with LifterLMS Advanced Coupons.

What Advanced Coupons Layers On Top

Let me reactivate the Advanced Coupons plugin and jump into a new coupon. I’m going to call it Black Friday sale, 50% off. You can see more options in the sidebar. There is a description field where you can add more information about the coupon for your own records. There is a powerful new feature called Coupon URL, where you can apply a coupon by a custom link. Coupon URLs are one of the most powerful features in Advanced Coupons, and I’m going to demo that in a bit.

We also added coupon reporting. If I go over to a coupon that has usage data, you can see the reporting details. People have requested more detailed reporting about coupons, and that is now part of Advanced Coupons.

How Access Plan Targeting Works

Let’s step through the features. On the Restrictions panel, you can target specific access plans with the Access Plans setting. To make the example more real, let me go to the front end of the website and use a specific course for the demo. We’ll use the commercial real estate investing course.

When we look at that course, it is set up with three access plans. You can buy it for $500 and just get the course, buy it for $2,000 and get the course plus group coaching, or buy it for $10,000 for private coaching. This is the access plan system built into LifterLMS synced with the e-commerce engine. These are the price points we’ve chosen for this course, and we’re going to use them to demonstrate the features of Advanced Coupons.

Testing Access Plan Targeting At Checkout

Going back to our Black Friday coupon, let’s say we want to do 50% off only on the group coaching plan. In Restrictions, I limit this coupon to the commercial real estate group coaching access plan and hit update.

Now I open the course in an incognito window as a regular visitor and try to buy the base course version with the coupon. The site tells me the coupon cannot be used to purchase that access plan. So I back out and choose the group coaching plan for $2,000, which is what this coupon was intended for. I paste the code, and the discount applies. Now imagine you did a promotion where you’re trying to get more people into your group coaching program. That is access plan targeting in action.

How To Require A Minimum Checkout Amount

Let’s look at another powerful thing you can do, which is the Minimum Checkout Amount setting on the Restrictions panel. I’ll reuse the same coupon code. I remove the access plan restriction so the code applies broadly again. Now, in Minimum Checkout Amount, let’s say we want to give people 50% off but only if they spend at least $5,000.

Back on the course front end, if I try to buy the group coaching plan at $2,000 and apply the code, the site tells me the minimum purchase price amount for this coupon is $5,000. What we’re doing here is encouraging people to spend at least $5,000 on the website to take advantage of the special coupon. If I go back and pay attention to the marketing message that said I had to spend at least $5,000 to use the code, then the discount fires because the cart meets the required minimum. That is what the Minimum Checkout Amount option is for.

Using Maximum Uses Per User To Protect A Coupon

The next feature is Maximum Uses Per User. This one is fairly self-explanatory. Say you have an introductory offer where you only give 50% off to anybody on their very first purchase. That way you’re encouraging people to at least get in the door, because the first thing they buy from you is half off. It is a specific kind of promotion, and it also protects you from someone abusing a high-dollar-value coupon that is meant to be one use per person.

How Geographic Restrictions Work

Let me delete that out and start with a fresh coupon. I’m going to add a coupon that I want to be usable only in the Philippines, and it is 60% off. In the Restrictions panel I turn on Enable Geographic Restrictions, and under Geographic Restrictions I select the countries the coupon should function in. The site figures out where the visitor is based on their location. I select the Philippines and hit update.

Now, back in an incognito window as a regular visitor, I try to use the 60% off code. I am in the United States, not the Philippines, so the site tells me this coupon is restricted for use only in certain countries. The website can tell I am not visiting from the Philippines, so it does not let me use it. There is a good reason to build promotions this way, and it is worth a stop to explain the strategy behind it.

Why Price Localization Matters For Global Course Sales

This is a very underused strategy that course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs can use, and really anybody selling any kind of digital product. There is a concept called price localization. People in different parts of the world have different purchasing ability. Their currency is stronger or weaker compared to your currency, or to the United States dollar. What ends up happening with digital products, when you are trying to sell them to a global audience, is that you may have priced it right for the United States, Europe, and Australia, but it is cost-prohibitive to people in Southeast Asia or certain Latin American countries.

If you want to expand your reach and get more customers, and start marketing in other countries that have less purchasing power, you can. That strategy is called price localization.

What The Big Mac Index Reveals About Global Pricing

I first learned about this concept when I discovered the Big Mac Index. If you’ve been to McDonald’s, you might not realize this unless you’re a world traveler, but the McDonald’s Big Mac sandwich costs different amounts of money in different countries. Using the Big Mac Index you can see the price disparity across the world.

Here in the United States, the sandwich costs about $5.71 in US dollars. All of these figures are in US dollars. If we look at the Philippines as an example, the Big Mac costs about $2.86, which means to make my price feel as affordable to somebody in the Philippines as it does in the United States, I would need to do a discount of around 50% off just to normalize the price. If I actually want to run a promotion or a sale in the Philippines that makes sense from a Filipino buyer’s mindset, I might do 60% or 70% off to give them a discount, while being sensitive to their purchasing power.

The funny thing is that in some countries a Big Mac is even more expensive than in the United States, particularly the Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden, and Switzerland is the most expensive in the world. We’re talking about discounts today, so we’re looking more below the US purchasing power, but it is worth being aware of.

How Spotify Uses Price Localization

Here is another quick example that tons of countries do this with. Spotify uses price localization. Spotify has different pricing in different parts of the world. In the United States, Spotify Premium costs about $9.99. In Denmark, remember the Nordic countries, it is almost double that in US dollars because purchasing power there is greater. In Great Britain the same Spotify account is around $16.90 in US dollars, which means it is even more in pounds for the same service.

If we look at the discount zone, in the Philippines Spotify costs about $2.93 in US dollars for the very same service that Americans pay $9.99 for. When you look down in places like Southeast Asia and Latin America, you can find markets where you may want to consider bigger discounts, just to make the price feel normal for your courses and memberships. If you actually want a country-level sale, you might go bigger than that to make the offer land.

Combining Geographic Coupons With Targeted Advertising

That is price localization as a strategy. What we’re doing on the coupon side is selecting the countries that we want the deal to apply to. The website automatically detects where the user is and makes the coupon work for them if they are in the appropriate country.

The cool thing is that advertising platforms like Facebook and Google Ads let you target specific countries. A lot of email service providers and CRMs collect the country a contact is in, either through your list or through your registration form on your website. You can send targeted emails to specific countries promoting the discount, instead of a broadcast message to everybody on your list. You can segment and target that specific country in an email. That is Geographic Targeting.

What Coupon URLs Are And Why They Reduce Friction

As I mentioned, Coupon URLs are a really powerful feature. Selling digital products is all about removing friction. You want to make it easy for people to buy from you, learn from you, and discover and consume your content.

Normally you have to send somebody an email and say, hey, use this coupon code at checkout. If you actually want somebody to click on a link in an email, or click a button on your site, or send it to an affiliate partner and say, use this link and we’ll track your sales, you can do that with coupon URLs.

How To Create A Coupon URL

Let me start with a fresh coupon. We’ll do a simple 20% off coupon code. You can get fancy with the settings, but I’m showing you the basics. I’m setting a 20 percentage discount and publishing it. In the sidebar, I enable Coupon URL for this code. I add a small message that becomes part of the URL, then I select which access plan the URL should send buyers to. Let me pick the group coaching access plan again, and hit update. Now I copy the generated coupon URL from the field. That link is now on my clipboard.

Using A Coupon URL In A Purchase Flow

Back in my incognito window, I paste the coupon URL into a fresh browser tab. When I hit enter, the site goes directly to the checkout with the 20% off coupon code already applied to the order. It is an instant checkout. No code to remember, no form to fill in, no friction between the click and the discount.

Putting Coupon URLs On Landing Pages

Here is another way to use a coupon URL. Back in the admin, I create a new page and start building out a simple sales page. I am using an add-on that helps me build landing pages quickly, and I drop in a couple of headlines and testimonials.

No matter where this page lives on the internet, I can point my call-to-action button at a coupon URL instead of a plain course page. I paste the coupon URL into both buttons on the landing page and hit update. When I preview the page as a visitor and click either button, the site takes me straight to the checkout with the coupon already applied. That is a landing page wired to a coupon URL.

Where To Share Coupon URLs

Anywhere you can post a link on the internet, you can use a coupon URL. This is what makes them so powerful. You can post the link in an email. You can place the link on a button on your website. You can post the link in a social media post on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, wherever your audience is, and say, hey, buy my course and coaching and join the community for 20% off, click here to join. We have removed a ton of friction by letting you use coupon URLs to send people directly to checkout with the sale already applied.

Where To Find Coupon Usage And Reporting

On any coupon there is a Usage tab that shows the usage data. You can also see the orders associated with each coupon. Say you are using coupon codes instead of a full affiliate system just to track partner referrals. You can do that with coupons, and it is all organized in your LifterLMS site dashboard.

Recap And Where To Get Advanced Coupons

I want to encourage you to check out LifterLMS Advanced Coupons. It is available as a standalone add-on, and if you already have the Infinity bundle, it is sitting in your account ready for you to use to start making more money with strategic discounts.

Check out our documentation and the videos there. Everything I showed you today is quick and easy to set up once you learn how to drive the coupon system in LifterLMS. Get Advanced Coupons and explore selling your course, coaching, or membership more broadly around the world with geographic targeting and advanced discounting. Leverage it in your promotions and your sales, because coupons do work. I would like to know, drop a comment if you have ever bought something that was on sale, and the fact that it was on sale motivated your decision to make that purchase that day. I say that in jest because I guarantee everybody has used a coupon before as a regular customer. It is a big part of sales and marketing, and these things do work, but you can get more advanced with your coupons.

Q&A: What The Advanced Coupons Add-On Costs

Kurt Von Ahnen: One of the things I want to shout out. Sonia made a note of your Big Mac Index, and I have to say, every time I have heard you talk about the Big Mac Index I go, oh yeah, I forgot about that. It is one of those cool things where, when you think about the idea, Advanced Coupons is not a sexy-sounding feature. You hear coupons and go, yeah, coupons, big deal. But when you look at what you can do, geofencing a coupon is a whole different level. You could take a course creator who is generally thinking in terms of basic SEO to plot along and find some usership, and once you start talking about geolocation for couponing, they realize, oh, this is a global audience, this is a global application. They can reach more people. It really opens things up.

I also can’t help but think of direct purchase links, and how handy they are to put into social streams or scheduled posts. That is spreading the net so much further than what your website is doing by itself. So with the caveat of, yes, Advanced Coupons does not sound sexy, when you look at what it is doing, all of a sudden it gets to be pretty sexy.

Let’s get into the questions. How much does the Advanced Coupons add-on cost?

Chris Badgett: Advanced Coupons is available as an individual add-on, and it is also included in the LifterLMS Infinity bundle. LifterLMS offers a first-year introductory discount on new licenses. For the exact current pricing, check the Advanced Coupons page and the Compare Plans page on lifterlms.com, since prices can change.

Q&A: Which Regions To Target First With Geographic Coupons

Kurt Von Ahnen: Another question is related to your Big Mac example. What regions would you recommend creating a coupon for? As someone who runs the LMS, what do you recommend people geofence for?

Chris Badgett: This is one of the things I really learned in building international software. LifterLMS is not just for people in the United States. Because I live in the United States, and a lot of software companies are really focused on the US and Europe, WordPress in particular has such great global adoption. I learned the power of just making a product that the whole world would want and afford. That is one of the reasons why our free core plugin is completely free, so that it is accessible and usable and can create impact across the entire world no matter what a person’s purchasing power is.

In terms of regions to focus on, I like to focus on two characteristics. Look at areas that are inside your total addressable market, and areas that are the most disadvantaged in terms of purchasing power. Sometimes you also want to look at your language. If your course or coaching program is in English, a country like the Philippines is a strong fit because a lot of Filipino people speak Tagalog locally but they also speak English.

Q&A: Why Emerging Markets Are Strong Fits

Chris Badgett: If you know you have people in Asia, I like to target Southeast Asia particularly, because that is where people have some of the most disadvantage in terms of purchasing power. I am also a big fan of Eastern Europe. The UK has an even more expensive Big Mac than the United States, and Europe is a big place. There are a lot of places in Eastern Europe that do not have the same purchasing power as Western Europe like Spain, France, Germany, or the Nordic countries which have the highest purchasing power. A lot of people think the United States has the highest purchasing power, but it is not true. It is literally Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland.

I also like to do what I can to help out in Latin America. When you study populations, you will discover things like Brazil has a ton of people in it, and a lot of Brazilians speak Portuguese, Spanish, and English, so there is huge opportunity there. If you look at Africa, Nigeria has a thriving emerging technology scene. For example, in WordPress there are a lot of people using WordPress in Nigeria, and Nigerians speak English as well.

When I create a course, I want anybody anywhere in the world to benefit from it. If you want to get really advanced, you could figure out the Big Mac Index and set your discount by region and cover everybody. If you just want to get started, find a country that does not have great purchasing power, that has a lot of people who could be a good fit for your program. If you sell to entrepreneurs, there are entrepreneurs all over the world, but particularly in tech entrepreneurship there are a lot in India, a lot in Nigeria, a lot in Eastern Europe. It just depends on your niche and where the people are. When I first did this kind of strategy, I focused on one region or one country with a high population and started there. You do not have to figure out the whole world at once. Spotify and McDonald’s already did that work for you.

Q&A: What Is Included In The Infinity Bundle

Kurt Von Ahnen: One more question, and this one is kind of a softball for you, Chris. It is simple and difficult at the same time. What else is included with the Infinity bundle? Because it is a big bundle.

Chris Badgett: The Infinity bundle has literally everything we make in it. Go to Software Add-Ons on lifterlms.com and everything you see on that screen is included. Payments, integrations with form plugins and CRMs, our theme, access to our live office hour support call, and our Mastermind community. The orange add-ons on the Software Add-Ons page are the advanced feature add-ons. Advanced Coupons is an advanced coupon add-on. Advanced Videos extends video functionality and protections in your LMS. Groups lets you offer training into groups like companies, schools, governments, and families. Everything we make is included in the Infinity bundle.

LifterLMS is the most powerful learning management system in WordPress. It is the most all-in-one, and outside of WordPress, if you look at other tools, this level of customizability, all-in-one nature, and extendability makes LifterLMS the most powerful platform to build your LMS on. You own the asset, you customize it, you have full control, and you own your data.

Closing Thoughts

Chris Badgett: Kurt, thank you for helping me put this on. To everyone out there watching, thanks for checking this out. Go leverage the power of Advanced Coupons if you sell your training. There is so much you can do. If you have any questions about how it works or what you could do with it, feel free to reach out. Check out lifterlms.com, go get Advanced Coupons, and get the Infinity bundle. Thanks everyone for coming, and have a great rest of your day.