How to Automate and Integrate Your WordPress LMS Website With Your CRM

Discover WP Fusion’s no-code solution to easily integrate your LifterLMS website with your CRM software to maintain your contact database, create marketing automation, and enhance the learner experience.

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How to Automate a WordPress LMS With Your CRM

WP Fusion is a no-code connector that syncs LifterLMS with more than 40 CRMs, including ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Ontraport, and Mailchimp. Chris Badgett and WP Fusion creator Jack Arturo walk through how to tag students on enrollment, personalize WordPress content from CRM data, unlock lessons based on tags, automate recertification, and connect a separate sales site to an LMS through a single CRM.

What You’ll Learn

• How WP Fusion connects LifterLMS to over 40 CRMs and 110 WordPress plugins without any code
• How to tag students in your CRM the moment they enroll, complete, or purchase
• How to protect lessons, products, and pages by CRM tag, including hiding them from course navigation
• How to run sales on one site and deliver courses on a separate LMS through the same CRM
• How to build a yearly recertification flow that LifterLMS cannot run on its own

Key Takeaways

• Start with a marketing strategy, then use tags to trigger it. Do not automate first and hope a strategy emerges.
• If you are new to WP Fusion, begin by tagging students by which course they are in. Everything else builds on that.
• Add WP Fusion after the course is built. Layer automations on gradually so you can measure and tweak each one.
• Split transactional email from marketing email. Purchase receipts and renewal reminders belong on the site, campaigns belong in the CRM.
• Any student event in WordPress can drive a CRM automation, and any CRM tag can personalize what a student sees in WordPress.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Every Course Creator Needs a CRM

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to another complimentary training from LifterLMS. I have got my good friend Jack Arturo from WP Fusion, one of my favorite plugins that I recommend just about every single course creator or membership site builder use for their learning management system. It is also really great paired with WooCommerce if you are using that for courses, memberships, or anything else.

Chris Badgett: We use it at our software company, which is sold through a WooCommerce subscription store. We use it in our academy, which is powered by LifterLMS. It basically integrates for us with the CRM we choose, which is ActiveCampaign. So the stuff we need the WordPress site to let ActiveCampaign know, applying tags and triggering automations and all of this, is made possible with no code via Jack Arturo’s WP Fusion solution.

Chris Badgett: And it is not just for ActiveCampaign. It integrates with how many CRMs?

Jack Arturo: 42.

Chris Badgett: All right, so 42 CRMs. Whether you are small, on a smaller CRM like Sendinblue (that just had a lifetime deal recently), or even if you are using something small like Groundhog and running it on your own website, that is cool. And then on the far other end is the behemoth Salesforce.

Jack Arturo: Salesforce and HubSpot plans start at 800 dollars a month. 24-7 concierge support. It is really nice.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Everybody needs a CRM. I am glad you brought up Groundhog. It does not always have to be off the WordPress site.

What LMS, CRM, and CMS Do Together

Chris Badgett: Jack is super smart on CRMs, LMSes, and CMSes. There are all these three-letter acronyms, but these three things (the content management system, the learning management system, and the customer relationship management, which is what CRM stands for) all work together to deliver a learning experience, build a remote school, build an online company, and keep yourself organized. Automate things so you do not end up in chaos.

Chris Badgett: So I am going to hand it over to you, Jack. What do you got for us today?

The Origins of WP Fusion

Jack Arturo: Cool, thanks. I have been working with WordPress for about 12 years now, and I was specializing in a lot of LMS sites for memberships and also universities and stuff like that. It kept coming up again and again that they needed to (they kind of had their marketing teams working in these marketing automation platforms like Infusionsoft back in the day or Ontraport, and then their web team was managing the courses in WordPress) but there was not really any flow of information between where people were taking their courses and where the sales were happening or the marketing emails or Facebook audiences and stuff like that.

I just kept doing kind of the same jobs over and over again where it was like, we need to follow up with the student a month after they enroll, we need to force students to recertify after one year, we need to automatically assign an instructor if someone fails this thing twice. Just repeating those things over and over, it felt like there was a market for a solution like that, and that is where WP Fusion came from. That was six or seven years ago now.

We launched with just Infusionsoft and support for a few plugins. It has grown one integration at a time since then. Now we connect about 110 different WordPress plugins to about 43 email marketing platforms. Some of those are pretty niche, but the majority of our customers are doing either LMS, membership, or e-commerce sites. LifterLMS is very popular, and ActiveCampaign is the most popular email marketing platform.

How WP Fusion Connects WordPress to 40 CRMs

Jack Arturo: Let me share my screen. So this is just our site, and you can see these are all the plugins that we support. It simplifies things because you might be using an email marketing system, and a lot of these plugins have add-ons for those systems, but they do not always get updated all the time. You might be using Restrict Content Pro and they have an ActiveCampaign add-on that was last updated three years ago.

But it is not their primary business. They are focused on building a great membership system, or like with LifterLMS, you guys are focused on building a great LMS. You do not want to get bogged down in managing the nitty-gritty of Salesforce API calls and stuff like that.

That is kind of where we found our little niche. Our customers know that whatever they are doing in WordPress, we are in charge of making sure that data gets into their email marketing system, and also that changes happening in their email marketing system, like email opens, opt-ins to new lists, timers, and conditions, can affect the experience in WordPress. It keeps us really busy.

Applying a CRM Tag When a Student Enrolls in a Course

Chris Badgett: Let’s look at LifterLMS.

Jack Arturo: Sure. So LifterLMS, I have just installed the demo content here. I have got the official Quickstart Course set up. Logged in as an admin. When you edit a LifterLMS course, there is a new WP Fusion tab, and what we use for a lot of our functionality (called tags in the CRM) is a way to indicate that somebody did something, or somebody is allowed to view something, or somebody signed up for something, or filled out a form. We can tag them, and then you can use those tags to get really specific in the emails that you send, or to trigger automated actions.

Jack Arturo: As an example, I have just set this up to say when a student is enrolled in this course, we are going to apply the tag “Free Course Signup” in ActiveCampaign. And down here I have got another tag being applied when they mark the course complete.

Tracking Contact Activity Inside the CRM

Jack Arturo: Earlier I set up a sample user and had them register using this free LifterLMS access plan. What that did was, WP Fusion automatically synced the new user into the CRM with the basic details they provided at signup. You can see I have got my LifterLMS student here in my contacts list. There is not really much information about them yet, because they have just signed up.

Jack Arturo: On the right-hand panel, WP Fusion has started tracking their site activity. We can see four minutes ago they registered, and now they are taking a look at this free course. If I switch to that user and click Enroll in the course…

Chris Badgett: All right, looks like it is working.

Jack Arturo: So we are here, I am the free user, I have registered. Now I am enrolled. WP Fusion detected that, and we have these logs that are going to show everything being sent to ActiveCampaign.

Reading the WP Fusion Logs

Chris Badgett: Can you for a moment just explain to people what a log is?

Jack Arturo: Yeah. There can actually be quite a lot of data going back and forth between your site and (because ActiveCampaign or whatever platform you are using is a third-party system) we have to be kind of careful that we are not sending data all the time, because it can slow your site down. So for example, if somebody updates their profile in LifterLMS, that is going to update their contact record in ActiveCampaign. If somebody completes a course or earns a certificate or achieves a goal or visits a page, that is going to send that data specifically.

Because things are running at different times in different directions, we have these logs that show exactly what is happening. That is what we tend to look at to get a picture of what is going on and what is being tracked. For example, when I registered the test user, you can see the registration was detected and synced, and the student was automatically tagged as Student because they registered into LifterLMS. And at 11:12 when I clicked Enroll on the course, I got this Free Course Signup tag.

You can see the page views where I went through editing my profile, checking out. Then we can see this Free Course Signup tag was applied.

Building a Facebook Custom Audience Automation

Jack Arturo: I have several automations running here. Let me look at the one triggered by this tag. It is called “LMS Free Course Signup” and it was triggered by that tag being applied. Most of the platforms we support have a concept of automations or workflows. This automation detects when the Free Course Signup tag was applied by the settings on the course, and it updates a Facebook custom audience with the contact details, so we can market them on a paid course, since this is a free course.

It automatically sends an email that says “Welcome to the course.” Then it waits for five days. If the contact has completed the course, then it removes the person from the custom audience and ends the automation. If they have not completed the course, it creates a deal asking one of your teachers to follow up with the student by phone. That is just an example, but you get an idea. You can do these “if this happens, then wait these days, check this condition, send this email, update this audience, assign a task, create a note,” all that kind of stuff to make the experience with the student feel a lot more personalized and make your marketing a lot more effective.

An example of custom audiences: you can have really specific custom audiences that are automatically updated based on the people who are currently in your free course. And once it looks like they are not interested in upgrading to paid, they are removed from the audience and you stop giving your money to Facebook.

That is the idea behind automations. It is just multiplied over a thousand potential triggers. We can see what the student is doing in WordPress or LifterLMS, whether it is course progress, quiz completion, quiz answers, last login dates, how long they have watched a video. We can feed that data into the marketing automation platform and then run business intelligence and marketing intelligence on that data.

Starting With a Strategy Before Automating

Chris Badgett: Before you come out with these tools, it is a good idea to do a strategy. In this case, we are really focusing on having an effective Facebook campaign and checking on completion. These automation tools like ActiveCampaign are really good at building whatever you can imagine, so come with a strategy, and then the tags create the triggers to make it happen.

Jack Arturo: Start with a strategy for sure. Occasionally I will talk to folks and they say, “I bought this, I have set it up, what should I automate?” and it is kind of like, well I do not know, what is the goal? What is going to make your business grow? Are you losing people on abandoned carts? Is your ROI on your ads not working? There is not one playbook that works for every business in terms of automating stuff and making more money. But if you start with, “My students are buying courses, but they take the first three lessons and they do not finish,” that is a great one. We can use WP Fusion to track enrollment, track progress, and then follow up with them if there has not been progress in a certain number of days. If you start with the metric you want to improve, then these tools are really powerful ways to do that.

Adding WP Fusion to an Existing LMS Site

Chris Badgett: We have got a quick question from the audience. John is asking, what if you are already running with your LMS site and you add WP Fusion later? What should somebody do in that scenario?

Jack Arturo: Yeah, that is totally fine. In fact, I think probably most people I talk to add WP Fusion at the very end, because they built their content first. If you have a course set up now, you are probably at least sending a welcome email when people sign up. A simple thing WP Fusion would allow is sending a welcome sequence: that first email, then three days later another one, then a week later another one, just to say “hey, how is everything going.” That is really easy to bolt on top of an existing course. You can look at the effectiveness of it, and then realize, “Okay, we want to send either email A or email B depending on their progress.”

It can grow organically from there. From what I have seen, it is most effective to build out these automations over time and see how effective each one is and tweak it, rather than going in with a whole big setup from day one and automating every single step. Your emails are not going to be perfect on the first draft, or your timing is not going to be right on the first draft. If you launch with 20 different automations and 100 different emails, it is a lot of work to tweak later. Some people are really good at planning that and launch that way and it works fine, but it is totally normal and quite typical to add this stuff in after the course is already launched.

Tagging Students by Course They Are In

Chris Badgett: Just a tip out there, I think step one is just tagging people based on which course they are in. So that when you send even a broadcast email, not an automation, and you only want to talk to people in one course or in two courses, you have got the tags in place. That way you are talking to the right people and not everybody.

Jack Arturo: Exactly.

Retroactively Applying Enrollment Tags

Jack Arturo: Also, if you have a course that has been active for a while, all of this can be done retroactively. You would set up WP Fusion, go to your courses, set up your tags on the courses, and then go into the WP Fusion settings and run this Enrollment Statuses operation. That is going to update all the tags for every student historically.

Chris Badgett: 10,000 students on your site.

Jack Arturo: Exactly. It will get them all sorted in the CRM. Even if you have never done any email marketing up until now and you decide, “Okay, I am going to sign up for even something basic like Mailchimp, I want to get this data in there,” it is quite easy. You just export all the users to the CRM and then tag them based on the enrollment statuses. Now you have got all this historical data that you can work with.

Personalizing WordPress From CRM Data

Chris Badgett: You also had on the right side, there is a WP Fusion box on every WordPress page as well. Tell us about that box on the right.

Jack Arturo: Right. Up until now we have been talking about tracking student information in the CRM. With this box we can use data in the CRM to personalize the experience on the website. Let me show an example. This was a customer who had a requirement that a certain subset of her students (she had a list of email addresses) needed a bonus lesson unlocked on a specific date.

What this automation does: it runs whenever anybody is added to the course, but narrows it down to that list of specific students in the course, and then waits until it is the 10th of September, and then it adds a tag that says “Unlock Lesson 5.”

Chris Badgett: Wow, that is super specific. That is cool.

Jack Arturo: It is a niche case, but there are always cases like it. So that tag “Unlock Lesson 5,” we can set on the lesson itself: users must be logged in to view this lesson, and require the tag “Unlock Lesson 5.” Now that is required to view this lesson.

Filter Steps to Hide Restricted Lessons

Jack Arturo: We even have a handy feature specific to LifterLMS where I can go into the course settings and turn on Filter Steps. What that does is, if the person does not have the Unlock Lesson 5 tag in ActiveCampaign, the lesson is not going to appear at all in the course navigation. That means people who are not in this list of email addresses will not even see that the lesson exists, and it will not be required to complete the course. But this group of email addresses on the 10th of September will have that extra lesson appear. We can send them an email letting them know, and then they will have to finish that lesson to complete the course.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I did not even know that feature was there. What is it called?

Jack Arturo: Filter Steps. It is newish.

Using Access Control Tags on Courses and Products

Jack Arturo: We can do access control via tags on courses. If access is denied, we can redirect them to a sales page or an external URL. We can do that on pages, posts, and even in WooCommerce. I can create a product that is a members-only product. Let’s say we will have a discounted hoodie, and I can say users must be logged in and be tagged Gold Member, or even Completed Silver Course, to purchase this product at the sale price of 75 dollars.

We have 100 plugin integrations feeding data into the CRM. It is triggering these automations, running these conditions, and then applying these tags, which then personalize the experience back in WordPress.

WooCommerce Subscription Tagging With WP Fusion

Chris Badgett: Can we look at the general WooCommerce WP Fusion panel on the product level?

Jack Arturo: WooCommerce is very popular. It is one of our most flexible integrations. Here I have a subscription product that is 20 dollars a month. There is just a tab for WP Fusion where we can set this up right inside WooCommerce. When the product is purchased, I will get tagged “Subscription Purchased.” Based on the status change of the subscription, I can apply additional tags.

Automating Failed Payment Follow-Up

Jack Arturo: For example, if someone has a payment failure, apply that tag. Then I can easily have an automation over here that kicks in when the tag “Payment Failure” is added, and then sends email one, waits three days, sends email two to follow up with failed payments.

Subscription Lifecycle Automations

Jack Arturo: Cancellations, put on hold, pending cancel, expire, when a free trial ends. We can use all of those as triggers in the marketing automation system.

Chris Badgett: That is super cool. When you use these two tools together, LifterLMS or WooCommerce with WP Fusion and your CRM, literally almost anything you can think of is possible when it comes to “I want somebody to be in this situation to have this thing happen, or be able to buy this thing.” It really opens up infinite possibilities. If you are brand new, just start with getting people enrolled into courses and segmented by tag in the CRM, like “okay, they are in the gardening course, they are in the cooking course.” But then there is so much you can do beyond that.

A Note on Tags in WordPress vs Tags in a CRM

Chris Badgett: Just a point of clarification: I have seen people get confused in our world with tags used in different ways. On a WordPress site, the word “tag” for blog posts or course tags is more for organization or groupings of things. But a tag in a CRM is a totally different kind of tag. So just want to clarify that.

Jack Arturo: It works well with a membership system. Obviously membership levels are good to have. They put people into a clear spot where they are, and you can have Gold, Silver, Bronze, upgrade through them. Then having tags in addition to that gives you a little bit more. Like today’s your birthday, you get a pop-up. It is sort of like the way you have your course categories, which are the big concepts, and then your course tags, which are little things.

Mapping User Fields Between WordPress and the CRM

Jack Arturo: Let me take you on a tour of the general settings. This area here has to do with how your users and customers are synced with the CRM. Out of the box, when somebody purchases or makes an order, they will be sent to your CRM as a contact record. You can put them on some default lists and default tags.

This second tab is the next big concept. Tags let us segment people obviously, and here we have a way to map all of your data in WordPress with data in the CRM. On the left, these are all the fields that are available in WordPress, and for each one on the right I can choose a field in ActiveCampaign. It starts with the standard fields of user ID, role, register date. We can track stuff like the effectiveness of Google Analytics campaigns. If somebody follows a tracking link to your site, we can pass that through to ActiveCampaign if they eventually sign up, so you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. All the billing and shipping information for WooCommerce, of course.

We have some things that are not related to a specific user, they are pseudo fields. We can track the user’s most recent subscription status or their renewal date, and by syncing that to the Next Payment Date field in ActiveCampaign, we can run automations relative to that date. Three days before, we say “your renewal is coming up.” For LifterLMS, we have a couple of those pseudo fields. We can track the last lesson completed, last course completed, and create logic around that. If the last course completed was X, then send email Y. We can track the start date of a user’s LifterLMS membership. If you want to send a “you have been with us for one year” email reminder, that is quite easy to do.

We are adding new fields all the time. It depends on what plugins you have active, but the general idea is that the valuable stuff in WordPress, we let you pick a field in your CRM, enable it, and when it is updated it will be synced across.

Syncing LifterLMS Custom Fields

Chris Badgett: To clarify on this point: the WordPress site has users on it with their information. Address Line 1 is a field, the country they are from is a field. When you use a CRM with the website, it is important for them to be mirror images of each other. If you are looking at Johnny on the WordPress site and then you go look at Johnny in the CRM, you want all his field data to be in sync.

I want to take my hat off to you that after we released our Custom Fields add-on (we will link that up in the chat), you within 24 hours had documentation on how to sync those fields to your CRM. That is really cool. It means if a field you need does not exist about your users (like company name or license number) and you want to sync that to your CRM, you can literally do that with WP Fusion.

Personalizing Emails by Learning Style

Jack Arturo: As an example, we could say “what is your learning style?” on an account form or registration form. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic. We could require that as part of a free registration, have a few fields to get to know the student better. Then WP Fusion is going to detect that, and you can see Learning Style here. We could map that to a custom field, and when somebody registers, we could run a campaign around, say, visual learners only.

Chris Badgett: While Jack is building this, I just have to say, I am pretty good at this stuff. Whenever I talk to this guy my mind expands. I am like, holy cow, there is even more you can do here. The name of the game going forward is personalization. This is what your learners want. They want every touch point to feel like it is really for them.

Jack Arturo: So the course signup is added, and if the student is a visual learner (text custom field one is Visual), then we send an email with a video in it. If they are an auditory learner, we can send an audio clip.

WP Fusion Documentation and Training Resources

Chris Badgett: We have got some questions rolling in. A general one from Jack West. He is asking, do you have detailed tutorials? What do you have to help support people who are first getting started with WP Fusion?

Jack Arturo: Some people say they are not great. We have some videos. The problem is, we have a small selection of recipes and ideas on our website. For example, if you are selling with WooCommerce and doing memberships with BuddyBoss, these are some ideas of things you might want to do. Collect an email address via free lead form, create a contact record, apply a tag, and send an email.

Jack Arturo: But with 100 plugins and 45 systems, we cannot really create a tutorial that shows you how to get up and running, because no two customers have exactly the same setup. We do have video tutorials that go over the general concepts, and some cool demos of interesting things like personalizing content. But there is not one true master “get up, get running, get profitable” guide with WP Fusion, just due to the nature of all the different options.

Chris Badgett: By the way, somebody should create a course about that. Some of the best software training courses are never made by the software company itself. If somebody watching this is like a WP Fusion fanboy or gal and wants to rockstar it out, there could be a whole product there.

Jack Arturo: WP Launchify has some training material on WP Fusion. Also Kay at Slick Business is great. She is an ActiveCampaign certified consultant and she has a course specific to WP Fusion with ActiveCampaign. She has a free Accelerated ActiveCampaign course which I highly recommend. We are trying to encourage more of that.

Chris Badgett: If you can just pull up the LifterLMS documentation on the WP Fusion website. Jack is being humble here. His documentation is quite good. What you are trying to do with LifterLMS, it goes over how it all works, what you need to do, and the concepts you need to understand.

Jack Arturo: We update that all the time. You can see this was last updated just two weeks ago. Everything you would need to know is inside these individual integration pages. It tells you what the options are, what to expect, any gotchas or things to be aware of.

Where the Data Lives and Where Emails Come From

Chris Badgett: Maria is asking, she wants to clarify that WP Fusion’s function is to pass all information to the CRM like ActiveCampaign and vice versa, but it does not keep the data itself.

Jack Arturo: Right, we do not store any of your data. It goes directly to your platform. It is more like a connector. It is not a separate software you sign up for.

Chris Badgett: She also just wants to clarify that the emails are sent by ActiveCampaign, not WP Fusion.

Jack Arturo: Exactly. We send the data to ActiveCampaign, and then your emails are sent from there.

When to Use the LifterLMS WooCommerce Add-On vs WP Fusion

Chris Badgett: Jeremy is asking, would you still need the LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on if you use LifterLMS, WooCommerce, and WP Fusion?

Chris Badgett: I will take a stab at that. What the LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on does is it connects a WooCommerce product to an enrollment in LifterLMS. You can do that with WP Fusion just with WooCommerce directly as well. So I think you can go either way on that. Any thoughts, Jack?

Jack Arturo: It is sometimes simpler to use the LifterLMS plugin because it is direct. But yes, you can. Say I had my subscription product here, I can make it apply the tag “Purchased Course” when it is purchased, and also remove that tag if somebody cancels. Then I would go into LifterLMS and I would say I want the course to be linked with the tag Purchased Course. That means when this tag is applied by the WooCommerce integration, the person is going to be enrolled into the course, and if somebody cancels, the tag will be removed and they will be unenrolled.

Jack Arturo: Where I would use WP Fusion definitely is if you need to automate the enrollment. So what I could do, now that I have this set up, let’s say it is a free enrollment. I can create an automation that says wait for three months, and then remove the Purchase Course tag unless a specific condition has been met. Once this tag has been removed by this automation, the person will be unenrolled from the course and can even be blocked from signing up for the course again. If you need to automate people’s enrollment into courses or memberships, WP Fusion is great for that.

Creating Tiered Course Access With WP Fusion

Chris Badgett: We have a question from the YouTube audience. Matchlessweb is asking, they are launching a course next month where they plan to have two access tiers. The basic tier will have access to limited course lessons, where the all-access tier has everything. How could WP Fusion help with that? I think that goes into the Filter Steps thing you were just talking about, right?

Jack Arturo: There are a couple different ways to do it. Also, in LifterLMS you can apply a tag per access plan. That feature comes from having WP Fusion installed. So if you are just using LifterLMS ecommerce, that is another place you can apply a tag from.

Jack Arturo: I would have my course, and let’s say we are going to make the first section free so you can go through, and then to get to the other lessons in the subsequent sections, you can say required tag: email opt-in. Maybe it is still free but we require an opt-in or registration. We can protect that content, and if they do not have it we can redirect them to the free registration page. That is a way to build your course like normal in LifterLMS and lay everything out as if it were one big course. Now inside that course, you can have the first five lessons available to everybody, the next five require an email opt-in, and then the next five require a paid signup.

When You Need to Resync Tags

Chris Badgett: A question I had: when does it happen where you sometimes have to resync your tags? What causes that?

Jack Arturo: A common operation would be removing duplicates in the CRM. For example, I have a lot of contacts in here, and I might over the years accumulate people who signed up multiple times with different email addresses. I would run a deduplicating operation on them and merge them. That is also going to change their tags and their contact ID.

Jack Arturo: Whenever you do any kind of edits like that in the CRM that might change the ID of the customers, you can go to the settings and run this operation. It is going to look up everybody in WordPress, look them up in the CRM based on their email address, and make sure their contact ID is accurate and their tags are up to date.

Selling on One Site and Delivering on Another

Chris Badgett: A question we get frequently, which I always refer to WP Fusion for, is basically what Kay did for Melissa Love (we will put a link to her case study in the chat). Melissa built her coaching business with LifterLMS but they have a separate WooCommerce site that does sales, and then a separate LMS. Completely different WordPress sites. And they enroll a user based on tag, but it is not on the same site. Can you talk us through at a high level how one would create a sale on one site and use WP Fusion to make the enrollment happen on a completely different website?

Jack Arturo: That is actually really common. We can connect as many sites as we want to the same CRM instance. When we set it up, we just put in the URL and the API key, and they are all connecting to ActiveCampaign.com, or whichever platform you are using.

Jack Arturo: On my local site here, I have got an opt-in form. When I submit this, it is going to create a contact record in ActiveCampaign and apply tags. That same contact record and those same tags are accessible on the LifterLMS site. So that can be a free opt-in via Gravity Forms that adds them to the CRM and gets some access. Or it can be, some people prefer to keep their sales and membership content separate, so you have a sales site with WooCommerce running the subscriptions and your marketing pages, and then you use WP Fusion to collect the customer data and put it into the CRM. Then ActiveCampaign can send what is called a webhook, which tells your course site that someone has purchased the product in WooCommerce. Using that linked tag, it will detect the Purchased Course tag and import the user, give them a password, enroll them in the course, and the person can come to your course site and log in and take it.

Managing Multiple LMS Sites From One CRM

Chris Badgett: This dovetails into Marco’s question. Marco is asking, suppose I have multiple LMS platforms or websites but I would like to manage them all via a single CRM. Could that be feasible?

Chris Badgett: I think what you just showed us is yes. Just be careful with tags. Some CRMs have payments, right? In that case, if all you are using the LMS site for is enrollment and you are just trying to manage everything from a single CRM, you can do it.

Running Sales From a CRM Checkout Instead of WooCommerce

Jack Arturo: Let me pull up Ontraport. Ontraport is an email marketing system, but it also has built-in checkout forms and a landing page builder. So a lot of people find that instead of running a WooCommerce site (which some people find stressful), you can build your landing pages in Ontraport, have your checkout and billing in Ontraport, but it all works the same way. The tag is applied to the contact record, and then LifterLMS via WP Fusion detects that tag and enrolls the student in the course. You can even have one Ontraport account with your sales pages, but five different websites all running different groups of courses, and manage enrollments into all of them independently.

Chris Badgett: I have seen this before with Infusionsoft. They are kind of an all-in-one solution. They even have a hosted content thing called Customer Hub. But I have seen a lot of people want more full LMS features, so they do everything in Infusionsoft (or Keap, whatever it is called now), and then through the webhook do the actual membership site on LifterLMS.

Jack Arturo: Some people do not want to worry about setting up the cron job so that subscriptions renew on time, setting up their SMTP settings so that renewal reminders go out, and all this stuff. The sales part, you do not need so much flexibility there. You just need a checkout form, the ability to send emails, and take credit cards. That lets you focus your creativity into building your course and let something like Keap or Ontraport handle the ecommerce side of it.

The Most Popular CRMs Among Course Creators

Chris Badgett: Can you pull up that page that has all the CRMs you integrate with, just so people can see?

Jack Arturo: Actually before we do that, I have a chart showing the most popular ones. As of the end of last year, these are what people are using. Our customer base is about 30 percent ActiveCampaign, and then Infusionsoft, Groundhog, Ontraport, Drip, HubSpot, Mautic, Mailchimp, Zoho, and then we have the other 40 percent share, this little quarter of a pie.

Jack Arturo: All of these top 10 are really really reliable. There are some with a smaller slice that I would not necessarily recommend, like Kartra for example, or Nation Builder is great but it is designed for non-profits and political campaigns. On our site we have this compatibility table in our documentation that lists all the platforms with my personal feeling about how much I recommend it, and in terms of WP Fusion what features are available. Is the sync bi-directional? Can we track ecommerce orders? Does it have pipelines and deal stages?

Splitting Transactional and Marketing Emails

Chris Badgett: We are getting a question from Maria. She is asking, can you set up WP Fusion to pass info to a CRM but then have emails sent through a different app that is not the CRM?

Chris Badgett: I do want to say the WordPress site (with LifterLMS as an example) has some email automation built in, a notification engine that you can customize. So you could do that. We do a lot of stuff out of ActiveCampaign because of WP Fusion. We are emailing the right people at the right time. But our LMS site also sends some emails on its own without going to the CRM. So you can do both a little bit.

Jack Arturo: Same for us. Our purchase receipts are sent direct from our store, and subscription renewal reminders, because I would not want you to unsubscribe from marketing and then not get the notice that we are going to charge your yearly renewal. We actually use SendWP. It is a cheap service that optimizes delivery of your WordPress transactional email, I think it is like 10 dollars a month or 5 dollars a month. We use that for all of our transactional stuff. Password resets, login notifications, account was updated, that kind of thing. And then ActiveCampaign we just use to drive marketing. For example, we will send the email saying your license is expiring today direct from our site, because that is kind of transactional. But then a week after somebody has expired, we will send a “hey, can we get you to come back” marketing campaign from ActiveCampaign. It is going to be a little bit different for everybody, but it is normal to split up the sources of email depending on the content.

Chris Badgett: Just to throw one more layer of complexity: all the major CRMs have a Zapier integration. So if you are trying to do something in another app based on a tag that came through WP Fusion, you can take that data even further away.

Inside the WP Fusion Add-Ons

Chris Badgett: Can you tell us about your add-ons? You have some add-ons like one around card abandonment. What are those all about?

Jack Arturo: We have three license levels. Everything I have talked about thus far, all the tags, the syncing, the enrollments, the tracking, is all included in the main plugin, which is our Personal license. The Plus license includes six add-on plugins that are specific to certain functionalities or certain CRMs.

The Abandoned Cart Add-On

Jack Arturo: Abandoned Cart Tracking, for example, works with WooCommerce but also works with just LifterLMS without Woo. It is going to watch when somebody begins checking out, and as soon as they type in their email address, it is going to sync their data to the CRM. If they do not finish checkout, you can follow up with them, send them a cart recovery email, and even offer automatic discounts. If they ignore the first two emails, send them a 10 percent coupon, that kind of thing.

The Enhanced Ecommerce Add-On

Jack Arturo: Our other popular one is called Enhanced Ecommerce. For some CRMs (ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Ontraport), they have an ecommerce portal where you can see customer lifetime value, churn rate, average order value. With those platforms, this plugin lets you sync additional data. In ActiveCampaign it looks like this: we can see the actual order numbers, the products purchased, the total revenue, any recovered abandoned carts. We can see that in detail inside the CRM.

The Media Tools Add-On for Video Progress

Jack Arturo: The other three add-ons are more niche. Media Tools is useful if you are doing video-heavy content, especially requiring people to watch an opt-in or a video before opting into your free content. This add-on can track somebody’s progress in a Vimeo or YouTube video and apply tags. Say you want somebody to watch the full 15 minutes of your sales video before they can access your free course. This would track their progress in the video and then apply a tag, and then the tag can unlock the content or trigger an enrollment. Some people use it inside a course to force people to finish the video before moving on to the next. LifterLMS already has that built in, so I do not recommend it for that scenario.

Divi and Elementor Video Support

Chris Badgett: Jeremy is asking, does the Media Tools add-on track video progress if the video is embedded with a Divi video module? I could probably ask the same about an Elementor video module.

Jack Arturo: We do not support Divi. Divi is a little bit too old and it was not quite built with that kind of extensibility in mind. We do support the core WordPress embed video, YouTube, or videos uploaded to your site. We also support videos added via Elementor the page builder. When you add the video, you can click on it and you can even specify different tags to be applied to different time codes. Recently we added support for Adam’s Presto Player video player, which is pretty new. When you are adding your video to the page, you can add shortcode parameters to apply tags based on the playback time.

Building a Yearly Recertification Automation

Jack Arturo: I had another customer come to us. They had a course set up but they needed their students to complete a recertification (I think it was a professional training) every year. That is kind of hard to do with just LifterLMS, because LifterLMS cannot send emails relative to the date that somebody joined. But when we add this extra automation layer on top of it, we can easily track the date the person joined the course. We can wait until one year has passed. Seven days before one year is passed, we can send this “your certificate is expiring” email. We can wait a week to see if they have completed their certificate. If they have renewed their certification, we can give them a badge or something. If they have not renewed, we can let them know their certification has expired.

Chris Badgett: One of the ways I like to describe that is, if there is a feature that LifterLMS does not have, sometimes you can just build it without code, without hiring a developer, by using WP Fusion and your CRM to add that functionality. This recertification flow is a complete no-code solution. You just had to add on WP Fusion and the CRM to make it happen.

Retroactively Awarding a Certificate

Chris Badgett: Maria is asking, can we use WP Fusion to retroactively award a certificate of training in LifterLMS? Somebody wants to force somebody to complete a course that triggers a certificate. Any thoughts?

Jack Arturo: You can actually. Let me check the docs. If I create an engagement, I can choose a triggering event, and then I can choose “a tag is applied to a student via WP Fusion.” Select a tag, let’s say “Completed the Profile,” and then I can award a certificate. So you could go find all those people in ActiveCampaign, give them this tag, and then this is another example where you would want to run a Resync Tags operation. If you have gone into ActiveCampaign and tagged everybody you want to get the certificate, you set up your engagement here with the trigger and the engagement type, and then you would go into the WP Fusion settings and run this Resync Tags operation to load those tag changes into WordPress. As they are loaded over the API, it is going to award the certificate to everybody who has that tag.

Chris Badgett: That is amazing. So go grab your copy of WP Fusion, Maria. That would be a big win there.

CPD Listings and Degree Programs

Chris Badgett: John is asking, could this be used to set up a CPD listing (Continuing Professional Development) for each student?

Chris Badgett: LifterLMS worked with WP Fusion to add a new way to tag people for what we call Course Tracks, which are courses that can be completed in no certain order and can trigger an engagement to fire, basically like a degree. So whether it is a single course certificate or an entire degree program, using them together is great. For CPD, you might care about that thing where “it is only good for a year, you are going to have to redo it in a year,” and that is what Jack was just demonstrating with the recertification automation. Anything else to add?

Jack Arturo: In terms of displaying the students, if you are looking for something like that, WP Fusion could not help with that, because it does not actually add anything visual. If LifterLMS has a way of displaying everybody who has completed the course, then you could do it that way, but WP Fusion would not help there.

Picking a CRM on a Small Budget

Chris Badgett: We get this question a lot from people starting out who want to keep costs down. I know ActiveCampaign is the most popular. The beginner plan for ActiveCampaign is not that crazy, I think it was like 15 dollars a month. But if somebody is really cost sensitive, do you have a CRM you recommend?

Jack Arturo: 9 dollars a month Lite. We just use the Lite plan. There is a post on our blog about how we do abandoned cart automation on the Lite plan, which saves us because the Plus plan is obviously quite a bit more, and that plan includes abandoned cart stuff.

Jack Arturo: Mailchimp, everyone used to dump on, but actually it has gotten a lot better and it has added an automation builder that is just as good as ActiveCampaign. I think it is comparable in terms of price. Multi-step journeys, yeah, 10 dollars a month for 500 contacts.

Jack Arturo: On the cheaper end, the platform I really like is Sendinblue. It bills you based on the emails you send, not the size of your list. So if you are somebody with a large list but you send irregular emails or primarily transactional emails, you can save a lot of money. They have a free plan of 300 emails a day, which is great. With Bronze at 30 euros a month, you get 60,000 emails a month, which is quite a few. It has very similar features to ActiveCampaign. All the platforms we work with use the same model of having a workflow builder, an automation builder where you can choose an entry point and then have steps and conditions and waits.

GamiPress and Points-Based Certifications

Chris Badgett: One more question from John. He has a ton of training and Certified Professional Development stuff in Australia. He is asking about the points thing. Do you have a GamiPress integration?

Jack Arturo: Yep. We are putting most effort into GamiPress these days because it is getting more actively developed. For GamiPress: apply tags when achievements are earned. Same as we auto-enroll people into a course, you can auto-enroll people into an achievement. Apply tags when ranks are earned. You can sync points to the CRM.

Chris Badgett: He is saying, for instance, if they have to do so many hours (courses with hours allocated to get the certification), let’s say every course was worth three points or three hours, and after 30 points you get your certificate. Can you talk us through that in WP Fusion?

Jack Arturo: No problem. You would either use the default points or create a new points type for your certification to track it. In the GamiPress settings you can set it up, they have a logic builder. When the course is completed, or when a course in this category or track is completed, award 10 points. Then over in the automation builder here, we can run an automation when the points field is updated, and we can add a condition to say if this field is greater than 30 points or 100 points or whatever, apply a tag, award badge, enroll in a course, unlock something, give a certificate. You can do other conditions here like the contact create date is before a certain date or whatever. You can get quite specific with that.

Handling WooCommerce Subscription Upgrades

Chris Badgett: One more question from Jeremy. Talk through how WP Fusion might work in a WooCommerce subscription upgrade. WooCommerce Subscriptions has upgrade functionality where you can switch subscriptions and proration happens in the background. Could you think of anything related to WP Fusion?

Jack Arturo: That is handled by WooCommerce. I have an example here. I can have a variable subscription where the Bronze is paid 10 dollars every month and the Silver is paid 100 dollars every year. You can have an upgrade path between them, no problem, because they are variations of the same product. If you were using WP Fusion to apply this Membership Purchase tag and that granted access to a LifterLMS membership, upgrading between the monthly option and the yearly option would not change that tag and would not affect their membership status. You would not have to cancel their LMS membership or re-enroll them. It would just be simply a change in billing frequency.

Chris Badgett: If he was not using WooCommerce and he was just using LifterLMS, let’s say a LifterLMS membership that has two access plans, one monthly and one annual. I think what he is saying he has to do now is if somebody wants to switch, they have to cancel them out and then re-enroll through the other access plan. Kind of a manual process. Do you know if WP Fusion can help with that?

Jack Arturo: I have not used your access plans a lot. We do not have the prorated upgrade feature that WooCommerce Subscriptions has. I would guess that because you do not have switching between the plans with proration, they probably would be canceling the monthly plan (which would remove the person from the membership) and then signing up again with the annual plan. In that case, I would recommend using WooCommerce Subscriptions because they can upgrade partway through and just pay a partial upgrade, and it is all seamless and built into the account area.

Chris Badgett: He is saying he thinks the LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on blocks the upgrade because they are already enrolled in the membership. This might be a case where if you do not use the LifterLMS WooCommerce plugin and you just manage it through WP Fusion, you might test that experience.

Jack Arturo: It is possible that the LifterLMS Woo plugin interferes with that somehow. I know at least with WP Fusion it would not be a problem. Even if they are switching between two different subscription products (which is another option in WooCommerce), it would not affect their enrollment in the LifterLMS membership, as long as the tag stayed on their record.

Closing Thoughts

Chris Badgett: As we are wrapping this up, WP Fusion is super powerful. Similar to WordPress and LifterLMS, these are flexible tools that can be used in a lot of different ways. When you combine an LMS and WP Fusion and a CRM all together, there is just a lot you can do. We are just trying to give you an overview of some simple things and some more advanced things you can do. If you do not have WP Fusion yet, go grab it.

Chris Badgett: Jack, I want to thank you for coming on. There is always a lot of activity in both our Facebook groups, and Jack has got a great blog and documentation. Any final words for the people?

Jack Arturo: No, that is it. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming, Jack. Thanks everybody in the audience, and those of you watching on YouTube. Hope everybody has a great rest of your day.