Did You Know You Can Sell Your Courses and Memberships as Gifts?

Enjoy a demo of the LifterLMS Gifts Add-On for offering course and membership gifting on your LMS website.

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How to Sell Courses and Memberships as Gifts with LifterLMS

LifterLMS Gifts lets anyone buy a course or membership for someone else. In this recorded webinar, Chris Badgett explains why gifting is a revenue channel most course sites block by accident, then demonstrates the full flow on a live site: adding a gift access plan, a buyer choosing a voucher count, a recipient redeeming a code, and where gift orders appear. The Q&A covers corporate gift plans, buy one get one offers, and LifterLMS Groups.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a gift is a sale where the buyer is already convinced, and how a missing gift option quietly loses that sale
• How a gift access plan, a voucher code, and the Gift Vouchers dashboard tab work together for the buyer, the recipient, and you
• The difference between fixed and variable voucher counts, and how the checkout price updates as the buyer changes the quantity
• The two ways a recipient can redeem a voucher, at registration or from the Student Dashboard, and why open registration matters
• When LifterLMS Groups is a better fit than bulk gift vouchers for team and corporate purchases

Key Takeaways

• Install and activate LifterLMS Gifts, then add a Gift Purchases access plan to your best-selling course or membership before the holiday season
• Turn on Open Registration under LifterLMS, Settings, Accounts so new recipients can enter a code in the Have a voucher? field
• Create a second gift plan with a minimum voucher count and a lower per-voucher price when you want a corporate or volume tier
• Pair a gift version with each existing access plan so buyers can gift the exact option they would have chosen for themselves
• Use a coupon and an engagement email, not Gifts, for a buy one get one half off offer

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Gifting Courses and Memberships Matters in November and December

Welcome to this complimentary training on the newly released LifterLMS Gifts add-on. Did you know that you can sell your courses and memberships as gifts? This is a popular time of year for people gifting courses and memberships. I’m going to go over the theory and the method behind how Gifts works, and then I’m going to show you how to do it live on your site.

The big reason why Gifts is so important, especially this time of year, is that we’re almost in November and December, which is a big holiday shopping period all over the world. People don’t just buy physical gifts. They buy digital gifts, they buy experiences, and courses and memberships are experiences.

It’s very cool to be able to allow people on your learning management website to gift a course or membership to somebody else, and to do it the right way, where everything works as expected, instead of trying to come up with a hacky way of doing gifting. LifterLMS Gifts solved that. It is an advanced add-on included in the LifterLMS Infinity Bundle.

The Buyer Who Wanted to Give Your Course Away and Left

The problem it solves is that someone wanted to buy one of your courses or memberships for someone else. They found the course, they were ready to pay, and they looked for a way to buy it for a friend, a parent, a child, an employee, or anybody, and there just wasn’t a way to do that. So they leave, or they abandon that opportunity, which is a lost revenue and lost impact opportunity for you.

Three Hacky Workarounds People Use to Gift a Course

People used to do gifting in sort of a hacky way. One thing people would do with online courses and memberships is buy a course or membership as a gift for somebody else, and then just share their account login with that other person.

Another hack is they would email the learning management system website owner and ask them to transfer the account to somebody else. That doesn’t really work well, especially if there’s payment information there. That user could then use the card on file to buy something else that the gifter did not intend to have happen.

The other thing they can do is just make a recommendation and tell somebody else to buy it, but that introduces a lot of friction as well.

We’ve had requests for how to gift a course or membership to somebody else for years, and we finally architected and designed the perfect solution with LifterLMS Gifts. In our research, a lot of the people wanting to allow gifting on their websites send those inquiries in November and December, which makes a lot of sense because it’s a very heavy gifting season.

A Gift Is a Sale Where the Buyer Is Already Convinced

A gift is basically a sale where the buyer is already convinced. They just need a way for the gift receiver to get it. They chose your product, they’re paying up front, and they want the recipient to have a good experience. The only thing missing was a checkout that understood that this purchase is not for me directly.

You’ve probably seen on Amazon.com where they make it possible to easily gift a product purchase to somebody else. That’s now possible with LifterLMS using the Gifts add-on. It lets anyone buy access for someone else. In the LifterLMS system, a voucher is basically a way for the gift recipient to redeem it, create their account, and get access to what was purchased for them, not by them.

How a Gift Access Plan and a Voucher Work Together

On a typical course pricing table, you might have a course a la carte price and a course with membership price. What LifterLMS Gifts allows you to do is set up a specific access plan so that somebody can purchase access to a course or membership for somebody else.

The way this works is the purchaser purchases the gift access. They check out like your checkout normally works, and then they get a voucher code that they can gift to the recipient. What you have to do as a site owner is absolutely nothing, which basically turns your users and buyers into part of your marketing program. They’re actually buying for somebody else and spreading the word.

It’s an access plan type that you can add to some or all of your courses and memberships. You can decide if you want every course or membership to have a gift option, or maybe it’s only certain ones that you want to allow gifting of.

Fixed or Variable Voucher Counts for Buying Multiple Gifts

You can set a fixed number of gift vouchers per plan, or let the buyer choose within your range. Let’s say somebody wants to not just gift one, but gift multiple copies. Think of how sometimes people have a favorite book and buy many copies to give out as gifts to multiple people. That’s how gifting works here too. And I should also mention it can even work with the LifterLMS Groups add-on, which we’ll look at later.

The Gift Vouchers Dashboard Tab and the Receipt Email

Inside the student dashboard there’s a new area called Gift Vouchers. In the example on the slide, this person bought three gifts and has a voucher code for each one that they can give out to their friends, family, coworkers, whoever they’re giving the gift to.

The receipt carries the code. The purchase receipt basically does the heavy lifting of delivering the voucher code to the buyer, just like any other email. So you can send the voucher code by forwarding this email, or you could write a custom message and give your gift, or print it out and put it in a box, wrap it up, and give it to somebody.

How the Recipient Redeems a Gift Voucher on Their Own Schedule

The recipient redeems the gift voucher code when they’re ready. They can do that at registration, which we’ll look at. They can do it in the student dashboard. And they can do it on their own schedule, so there’s no forced timing. They can activate it when they are ready.

For you, there are two steps: activate the add-on and add a gift option to a paid plan. Basically you add this gift option, say yes, use for gifting, and set the quantity you want buyers to be able to give out as a gift. We’ll look at that in detail in the live demo.

Creative Ways to Use Gifting on a Course or Membership Site

Gifting can actually work in lots of different ways you may not have thought of, so my goal here is to brainstorm with you different ways to think about gifts.

One is course creators heading into the holidays, trying to get more sales through a gifting channel. Membership sites that want to be recommended to other people. Corporate and team training, where you could gift some kind of interesting course to your business employees. Coaches selling premium programs, where if one of your customers is loving your coaching program, they can gift it to somebody else who they think would benefit from it as well.

You can also get creative with that as an option. You could potentially make a discounted gift option that’s designed for existing customers to refer a friend, let’s say at fifty percent off the retail price. You can get super creative with it.

And then parents, grandparents, and partners buying for family. People don’t just want things, they want experiences, and gifting courses and memberships can be a great, kind of non-traditional gift.

Why LifterLMS Built Gifts Around Customer Requests

It was our customer Nick Usborne who said he’s used a number of course creation and delivery platforms over the years. They were all fine, right up until the day they weren’t. Now he hosts all his courses on LifterLMS. Totally different experience, because he’s free to do things his way.

This gifting solution is part of a theme at LifterLMS where we listen to what our customers need and make it as flexible as possible. This gifting request came up enough times that we created a really great solution for it.

Every course or membership is a gift that someone could share. You built something worth sharing. Right now, the people who love it most have no way to gift access to somebody else, but now they can with LifterLMS Gifts.

Viewing Your Course as a Visitor Before Adding a Gift Plan

Let’s jump into the live demo. I’m on a LifterLMS site here, and you can see we have multiple courses. I’m just going to pick one. We’ll do this health insurance course. I’m enrolled in this course, so I can’t see the access plans. A pro tip for you: use the View As menu in the WordPress admin bar and choose View as Visitor. That converts your website temporarily to what a non-enrolled visitor would see. Now you can see the two access plans are here.

How to Add a Gift Access Plan to a Course

Let’s add a gifting option to this course. I’m editing the course, and then I go to the Access Plans. I’m just going to remove the course-with-membership plan to make a simpler example. So right here we have our a la carte regular access plan, a one-time payment of five hundred dollars for lifetime access. That’s just a normal lifetime access plan for a regular buyer.

One note before we go further. When I first clicked Add New Plan I didn’t see any gift options, because I didn’t actually have the Gifts add-on installed on this site yet. So I grabbed a copy from my account on lifterlms.com, uploaded it under Plugins, and activated it. Once it’s active, the gift options show up in the dialog.

Now I click Add New Plan. Using this table, you can set it up from scratch with the advanced option, but the shortcut is to click Gift Purchases, which sets up an already-configured gift access plan. We’ll name it Gift Access for a Friend, and we’ll do the same price as the retail price: five hundred dollars, one-time payment, lifetime access. And right here you can see the Use for Gifts setting is set to Yes, use for gifting.

Setting a Variable Voucher Count From One to One Thousand

In the Voucher Selection setting, what we want to do is allow the number of vouchers to be selected at checkout. That’s the Variable option. I don’t think anybody is going to buy a hundred gifts at once, but let’s even make the maximum a thousand. This means somebody could buy anywhere from one to a thousand gifts of this course. You’ll see what that looks like in a second. Then I click Save All Plans, and click Update on the course just to make sure.

Why Enrolled Students Can Still Buy a Gift of the Same Course

Now let’s visit our course again. You can see the gifting access plan is here. Keep in mind I’m enrolled in this course, and that’s why I only see one access plan. I can be enrolled in a course, already have an account, and still gift the same course to somebody else.

Remember, since I’m viewing my site as a WordPress administrator, I can kind of see everything. When I switch to View as Visitor, you can see we have the two options: the a la carte course for five hundred, or Gift Access for a Friend.

Watching the Price Update at Checkout as the Voucher Count Changes

Let’s say there are three people I really want to gift this to. You can see how that changed the price automatically. I click Purchase Now. I’m already logged in and I already have a credit card on file with Stripe, and you can see my total here for checkout as a gift buyer.

Let’s say I change my mind and actually want to give it to four people. The price updates automatically, and the summary tells me four gift vouchers will be created after checkout is complete. My card is already in here, so I’ll complete the purchase.

It took me right to my student dashboard, and you can see I have purchased four gifts that I can give out. Those are all right here under Gift Vouchers. For my four friends, I would email each of them a code.

I was going to show you the email that got sent, but I don’t have a mail logging plugin on this site. As we saw in the slides, the purchaser receives a Purchase Receipt (Voucher) email that also has their voucher codes listed.

Turning On Open Registration So Recipients Can Redeem a Voucher

Now I’m going to show you how a gift receiver activates their account. I’m going to open an incognito window that’s logged out and go to the website. On the login page, you need to allow people to redeem a voucher, which means you need to have open registration on. Remember, the gifts are vouchers.

Back in my logged-in view, I go to LifterLMS, then Settings, then the Accounts tab, check the Open Registration box, and click Save Changes. Now when I refresh the logged-out view, there’s a registration option, and you can see the Have a voucher? field. That’s where I will enter my code as the gift receiver.

How a Gift Recipient Registers and Redeems Their Voucher Code

Back on my logged-in site, I go to my dashboard where I purchased my gifts, and Gift Vouchers is right there. I’m going to copy the health insurance course voucher code.

Now here’s the gift receiver. I’m going to register and create an account, so bear with me while I fill this in, just to show you the full experience. And remember, if you want your registration form to collect less, like you don’t want to collect the address, you can set that up as well.

Here’s where I paste in that voucher code and click the register button. I’ve just redeemed my gift. You can see the health insurance course is there and ready for me to start. As the gift receiver, I’m getting going on enjoying my gift and taking the course. That’s how you set it up, and that’s how somebody redeems it.

And even here, as the person who received the gift, even though I’m enrolled, I can still see the gift access plan. I can be like, you know what, I really want to give this to somebody else, make the purchase again, and move forward.

Where Gift Orders and Vouchers Show Up in the LifterLMS Orders Screen

I just want to show you something else related to this. When I’m managing the site, if I go to Orders, you can see where I purchased that course right here. The gift access information is in the order in the LifterLMS order system, with the voucher count and the vouchers themselves. So that is how you do gift access.

Two Steps to Set Up Gifting and Where to Get the Add-On

It’s two steps. You set up the gift access plan, and then the recipient redeems their gift code.

The LifterLMS Gifts add-on is in the Infinity Bundle. You can get it a la carte as well if you just want the Gifts add-on. If you already have the Infinity Bundle, you already have this, and you may just not be using it. So heading into November and December, I would encourage you to explore setting up a gift access plan for some of your courses and memberships. You can find all that information at lifterlms.com/pricing.

Setting Up a Corporate Gift Plan With a Minimum of Ten Vouchers

An attendee asked whether you can set up multiple access plans for gifting. Let’s look at that. I’m back on my site as a WordPress administrator, on the health insurance course. You saw how we set up that gift access plan.

There are different ways to look at this question. One is that every single course and membership can have different gift options. Let’s say we want a gift access plan for companies with ten or more employees, a kind of corporate gifting option where they get a volume discount. For this one we’ll do a variable selection, they have to buy at least ten gift vouchers, we’ll put a thousand as the max, and because they’re getting ten, we’ll reduce the price from five hundred dollars to two hundred. Save the plan and view the course.

Now we have two gift options, the regular one and the corporate one. You can see the minimum is already set to ten. If I try to say I only want five, it won’t let me, because we have a minimum of ten. At retail you get four for two thousand dollars, but at ten times two hundred dollars for the corporate option, you can do different pricing, as long as they’re buying at least ten. If this buyer wanted a hundred, it’s going to be twenty thousand dollars.

Just for fun, how much money can flow through a Stripe checkout? I believe last time I checked it’s nine hundred ninety-nine thousand dollars, basically one dollar under a million. Most credit cards don’t have a limit that lets you buy up to a million dollars in one purchase, but large amounts of money can flow through Stripe if the card limits allow it. If somebody has a corporate card with a really high limit, they can do very big purchases on your website.

Why You Might Want More Than One Gift Access Plan on a Course

Yes, you can have a lot of access plans on a course. You could have an a la carte price, a course plus membership price, a course plus membership plus coaching price, and then multiple gift options if you want. It’s really up to you. I recommend not putting too many access plans on there, because it can get confusing to the buyer with too many options, but the LifterLMS access plan system is very flexible.

The attendee’s point was that the purchaser should be able to choose which access plan to gift, not just a single gifting plan. I get that, and it’s one reason to have multiple gift access plans. If you already have, let’s say, two different access plans for your course, you could have two different gift options that deliver the same benefits as the two regular access plans.

Creating a Buy One Get One Half Off Offer With an Access Plan and a Coupon

Another attendee asked how to best set up a two-for-one purchase, or buy one get one fifty percent off, to allow gifting. That’s a cool way to do it, and there are a lot of ways to do it. Let me give you probably the most straightforward way.

Let’s go to our courses and build the front end first. I’ll pick a different course, the money preservation course, and simplify it down to one access plan. One way to do this is just with a regular access plan. We’ll call it Buy One, Get One Fifty Percent Off. Let’s say it’s a five hundred dollar course, and you get a coupon code for fifty percent off when somebody makes that purchase. That’s just a regular lifetime access plan. I’m actually not using the Gifts add-on for this. I’m using the LifterLMS coupon system.

Save the access plan, view the course as a visitor, and you can see the Buy One, Get One Fifty Percent Off plan for five hundred bucks. Next I create a coupon code under Orders, then Coupons. I could also do it with vouchers, so there are multiple ways to do what you’re trying to do, but I’m showing you the simplest. I create a new coupon called Buy One Get One Half Off. This isn’t really a gift per se, it’s more of a discount. It’s a percentage discount, fifty percent off, and I publish it.

Sending the Coupon Automatically With a LifterLMS Engagement Email

Then I take my coupon code and go to Engagements, then Emails, and add a new email for the buy one get one offer on the money preservation course. I’d use the merge codes here, something like: Congratulations, first name. Here is your coupon code for fifty percent off. Then the code, and a link to the course page. Set the subject line to something like Your fifty percent off coupon code. I could CC or BCC myself if I wanted to keep track of what’s going on, then publish the email.

Then I go to Engagements and set up the trigger. I’m saying when a student purchases a specific course, and I could even get as specific as the specific access plan, but in this case we’ll target the course, the money preservation course, send this email. We leave the delay blank because we want this email to fire automatically, and hit publish.

That’s a long way around, but I’m showing you that if you want to set up a scenario where somebody buys one and gets one at fifty percent off to allow gifting, you don’t actually need the Gifts add-on. Access plans are very flexible, and between the coupon system, the engagement system, and the gift system, there are lots of different ways to set up that scenario.

When LifterLMS Groups Is a Better Fit Than Bulk Gift Vouchers

Following up, an attendee said they have folks who may buy for forty-five people, and at times four. Would Groups still be the best option for that scenario? Let’s look at it.

LifterLMS Groups is on the front of this website, so we can see our groups. For forty-five people, I would do that with Groups. Back on the health insurance course, you can see how we’re doing gift access for multiple people, up to a hundred, but this isn’t creating a group. This is more like somebody buying bulk access to that course.

Setting Up a Group Access Plan That Is Also Giftable

If we edit the course, go to the Access Plans, and add a group access plan, you can see the gift options are available there as well. Let’s set up a group gift access plan. Say it’s fifty dollars per seat, it’s eligible for gifting with a minimum of four, we set Use for Group Enrolment to yes, and we use variable seats with a minimum of four. Save that access plan and view the course. I actually have not tested this exact scenario before, so this is fun to look at live.

In the example, forty-five seats comes to two thousand two hundred fifty dollars, and you can see the checkout summary saying gift vouchers will be created for this course. My card is already in the system, so I click Buy Now, and you can see I’ve created my group.

In this case we’re using Groups and Gifts together. To keep people focused on the group aspect and not just getting individual access to the course, I would invite the group members through the Groups invite system. That takes care of all the redemptions in the background: account creation, free access since you already paid, and people joining the course associated with the group, so all their data will be in the reports. If you look at a group that’s already established, you can see the reporting data is in there, which is part of what people want when they do group-related training.

If you don’t want them attached to the group, you could just give them the voucher codes, but then you’re not using all the features of Groups. There are lots of ways to slice and dice it, and LifterLMS is extremely flexible this way.

Pairing a Gift Version With Each of Your Existing Access Plans

An attendee explained that they let students choose how long they need to complete the course and how many exams, like four weeks, six weeks, or exam only. That’s three access plans. You could basically do three more access plans that are the gift versions of those. Yes, that can be done.

As a quick reminder, let me go to another course and show how. On the emergency budgeting course, I’ll remove the membership option so we have a la carte, five hundred dollars, lifetime access. I’m going to add a new plan, a gift option, that’s basically the same thing: a la carte gift access, five hundred dollars one-time payment, used for gifting. In this case we’ll demonstrate locking it with the Fixed voucher option, so they can only gift one at a time. Click Save All Plans, save the course, and view it as a visitor. You can see the regular plan, and then the gift version of the plan.

So if you have three different access plans, you would want to do the paired gift version of each one. You’ll end up with six total.

What the Gift Vouchers Screen Shows and Where It Needs Customization

The follow-up question was whether the version, a voucher for four weeks, six weeks, or exam only, could be noted somewhere on the voucher screen. If I go to my dashboard and the Gift Vouchers tab, you can see the product, but not necessarily which access plan version the voucher is for. That one might require some customization to show which one they got.

There is another option, which you probably don’t want to do, which is to create three different versions of the course. Then it would be easy, because the name of the course could include exam only, four weeks, or six weeks, so it would be really clear in the voucher screen. That would be the way to do it without customizing the screen. Reach out to LifterLMS support if you have more questions on that.

Go Use LifterLMS Gifts

Thank you for coming to this. I’m super excited about Gifts, and I want to encourage you to use it. Thank you for letting me do my best work and spending your time with me. My life’s mission is our company mission, which is to lift up others through education. Go use LifterLMS Gifts. I think you’re really going to love it, and allow your people to gift courses and memberships to others. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.