How To Automate Your Online Learning Business With Zapier

Learn how to connect and automate your LifterLMS-powered website with over 7,000 other apps using the LifterLMS Zapier App.

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Automate Your Online Learning Business With Zapier and LifterLMS

This webinar shows you how to automate your online learning business by connecting LifterLMS to more than 6,000 other apps through the free LifterLMS Zapier app. Chris Badgett walks through triggers, actions, live zaps for enrollment, Slack, Google Sheets, StreamYard, ActiveCampaign, and QuickBooks, then answers real course creator questions on Shopify, cohorts, Facebook groups, Zoom reminders, and Excel exports.

What You Will Learn

• How the LifterLMS Zapier app works and why it is one of the few WordPress LMS solutions with a native Zapier integration
• Every trigger and action the LifterLMS Zapier app exposes, and how to combine them into multi-step zaps
• Real automations LifterLMS runs in its own business, from student notifications in Slack to accounting in QuickBooks
• How to authorize Zapier with the LifterLMS REST API and where to find course IDs inside WordPress
• When Zapier is the right tool and when a built-in LifterLMS feature like cohorts or engagement emails is a better fit

Key Takeaways

• Start with the automation you want to achieve, then find the trigger and the action. Do not build zaps for their own sake.
• The LifterLMS Zapier app is free on every LifterLMS plan, including the free core plugin, and Zapier itself offers a free 100 task per month plan.
• Multi-step zaps chain one trigger to multiple actions, which is where most of the real leverage lives.
• Do not fight tools you already own. When Zoom already sends webinar reminders or LifterLMS cohorts already handle weekly starts, use those first.
• Zapier is designed for non developers, but if a build gets technical, hire a LifterLMS Expert to set it up rather than abandoning the automation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

What Zapier Is and Why It Matters for Course Creators

Hello and welcome to this complimentary presentation. We are going to be talking about how to automate your business using different apps, using the LifterLMS Zapier app and other applications. There are literally thousands, over six or seven thousand, that you can gain access to through Zapier. LifterLMS just released a new Zapier app on zapier.com. We are going to go over what it is, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. I am going to do some live Zapier app building for you today, and I am also going to show you how we use Zapier in our own business to automate tasks and make things run a lot more efficiently.

If you go to zapier.com and click on Product, you can see all the integrations. There are 6,000 apps that you can connect to. Now, LifterLMS, even though it lives on your WordPress site, is an app. It is a web application that you can interact with. Very few WordPress-based solutions have a Zapier app, and this is one of the things that makes LifterLMS one of the leading learning management systems. It is a reflection of our focus on making LifterLMS extendable, customizable, and affordable.

The LifterLMS Zapier App Is Free for Every User

The LifterLMS Zapier app does not cost you any more money. It is a resource that you can use from LifterLMS whether you are running the free core plugin or one of our bundles or individual add-ons. You can start using LifterLMS Zapier today.

A lot of what Zapier does is available on their free plan. Some of their features are premium and require a paid Zapier plan, but it is very worth it. We have been using Zapier in our business for many years. Let us know in the chat what you would like to automate. If somebody does something in LifterLMS, do you want something to happen in your project management tool? If you are selling with another e-commerce solution like ThriveCart, ClickFunnels, or Square, do you want to automate enrollment on your LifterLMS-powered site or membership? There are literally 7,000 apps you can explore, including AI like ChatGPT, Zoom, and even StreamYard, which is what you are watching right now. We are actually using Zapier during this very webinar, and I will show you how a little later.

How to Think About Zapier: Triggers and Actions

The LifterLMS Zapier documentation is really extensive. We will drop a link wherever you are watching this. It walks through everything I am talking about today in detail.

The mental model for Zapier is triggers and actions. As something happens in Zapier, or in another app like LifterLMS, what do you want to happen in another app? Maybe on your Google Calendar, in Google Sheets, in Gmail, in Mailchimp, in Google Drive, on YouTube. Do you want to schedule a call with Calendly? Do you want to automate enrollment from LifterLMS into Mailchimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, or ActiveCampaign? The list of what you can do with LifterLMS in Zapier is effectively endless.

Every Trigger in the LifterLMS Zapier App

Let us start with the basics. When something happens in LifterLMS, that is a trigger, and an action happens later. Here are the triggers you can use inside the LifterLMS Zapier app: new student, new course, new course enrollment, course access cancelled, course access expired, new membership, new membership enrollment, membership access cancelled, and membership access expired. Within each of these there are a lot of options and details you can hook into.

Every Action in the LifterLMS Zapier App

On the action side, the LifterLMS Zapier app can create a WordPress user, retrieve a WordPress user, search a WordPress user by username, enroll a user in a course, expire course access, cancel course access, enroll a user in a membership, expire membership access, and cancel membership access.

There is already a lot of automation you can do with just these triggers and actions inside LifterLMS. Then consider that every other app you are using has its own triggers and actions. Calendly, for example, might trigger when somebody schedules a meeting with you. That trigger could enroll them in a course or create a student on your website. As Zapier says, the possibilities are literally endless.

Chaining Automations Between Two LifterLMS Courses

You can even create automation between two LifterLMS sites, or within the same site. For example, when somebody enrolls in a specific course, do you want to automatically enroll them in a second course or a membership? Do you want to put a wait timer in and only enroll them a few days later? That is the kind of thinking that unlocks real automation.

Zapier Categories to Explore: AI, Commerce, and Communication

Zapier can become overwhelming just because there is so much potential. I would not create zaps just for the sake of creating them. Start with the category of what you are trying to do. If you want to do something with artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, think about that first, then decide what you want to have happen in LifterLMS, or what you want the AI to do when something happens in LifterLMS.

Commerce is a popular use case. Somebody purchases a product in a Shopify store, which has nothing to do with WordPress, and Zapier then creates a user and enrolls them in a course or membership on your LifterLMS-powered website, completely automated. That is a strong e-commerce use case. Communication is another. If you want your personal Gmail to send an email when somebody completes or enrolls in a course, coming from your personal Gmail, you can do that. Text messaging and video conferencing tools like Zoom and BigMarker are all wired in.

Content, Files, Marketing, and Internet of Things

Content and files is huge. If you add somebody to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and you want them imported into your LifterLMS site and enrolled in a particular course or membership, you can do that. Human Resources is a thing. Internet of Things gets kind of out there, but if you have ever thought about wanting your Alexa device to announce every sale, or a buzzer to go off in your office, that lives in this category. Internet of Things is essentially the bridge from digital events to physical things in your world, like lights turning on.

Marketing is a big one. Integrations with email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation systems like Salesforce, Keap, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and MailerLite are all available. Webinar integration matters too. Right now, this webinar is running on StreamYard, and we have a zap that adds you to our ActiveCampaign account if you are not already there, and tags you as interested in Zapier and automation.

Productivity, Sales, Scheduling, and Support Zaps

Productivity is a huge category for course creators and coaches. If you use a project management tool like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, or Monday, you can have a card created for your assistant, your team, or yourself when a new student enrolls, so they run an onboarding sequence. You can keep things organized in Notion and track things in Google Sheets.

Sales and CRM opens up project management inside a sales pipeline, tracking and integrating with third party sales enablement tools. Scheduling and booking through Calendly or Acuity works cleanly with a free course lead magnet or a low price course, so you can create a lead or invite them to a meeting the moment they enroll. Support tools like Help Scout, which we use at LifterLMS, along with Zendesk and Intercom, are all supported. Bonjoro is a fun one, since it sends personalized welcome videos when people buy, which raises onboarding and activation for your students.

Website Building, Gravity Forms, and Multi-Step Zaps

Website and app building is another rich category. WordPress itself is in Zapier, so you can wire in Gravity Forms and connect automation between LifterLMS and the rest of your WordPress site. The easy example is: when I add a new WordPress user, turn them into a student and enroll them in a specific course. That means new users just have to reach WordPress, which you can also automate with a course importer from a Google sheet.

Zaps do not have to be one trigger and one action. You can have one trigger and then two, three, four, five, even ten actions chained together to create an incredible amount of automation. Tell us in the chat what apps you want to connect. Do you want something to happen in social media when something happens on your LifterLMS site? What do you want to happen with Google Sheets and your LifterLMS site?

Using Zap Templates to Skip the Blank Canvas

We have also done some of the thinking for you. In the brainstorming phase, you can lean on zap templates. These are pre-built examples we have already created, and we are adding roughly 60 more soon. Some are multi-step zaps. One of them updates ActiveCampaign with contact information when specific things happen in LifterLMS.

Take the ActiveCampaign template as an example. When a student enrolls in a course on your LifterLMS-powered website, that is the trigger. Two actions then run: retrieve the WordPress user’s information, then create or update a contact in ActiveCampaign. If you are signed up for Zapier, you click the template button, authorize your LifterLMS site and your ActiveCampaign account, and you can start using it today. The templates are embedded on the LifterLMS Zapier documentation as well, so you can search from that page and see what is possible before jumping into Zapier to build.

A Live Zap: Enroll Students in a Follow-Up Course

Let us look at actually building a zap. This first one is simple. When somebody enrolls in this course, enroll them in that course. It is a live zap we use on the LifterLMS Academy. Courses have an ID, which is how Zapier knows which one to enroll the user in. I will show you how to find those IDs in a minute.

The strategy behind that zap follows the customer journey on the LifterLMS Academy. The first thing a student does is figure out their course topic and build their syllabus in the Course Plan Challenge. Then they need to learn how to use LifterLMS, so they enroll in the LifterLMS Quickstart Course. After they have built their site, we have another free resource course to help them get their first ten paying clients. The zap sits between those courses so we can put the next one straight onto the student’s dashboard. To improve it further, you can put a wait step between actions and space them out by a week, so the student does not get overwhelmed.

Sending New Enrollments to Slack

Now let us look at a zap that goes from something happening in LifterLMS to an external app. If you work in technology, you probably use Slack. When a new student enrolls in the LifterLMS Academy, we send a message to our internal Slack, our own little social network for the company, with detail about which course they enrolled in. That gives us a bird’s eye view of what courses people are interested in on a day-to-day basis, and who is new in our community. If we have just had a pre-sales conversation, we can see when that person is now on the Academy.

Building a Course Importer From a Google Sheet

Here is an external app driving LifterLMS. This one is essentially a course importer from a Google sheet. When a new row lands in the sheet with the right user information, we enroll that user in a specific course or membership on the LifterLMS site. We have built a student importer and enrollment automator with one simple zap, which is particularly useful when you want to add a lot of users at once or you are moving from another system to LifterLMS for more power, customizability, and affordability.

Think about how that becomes a multi-step zap. You might use a sales pipeline tool like Zoho. When a person reaches a certain stage in the pipeline, add them to the Google sheet, which now holds a record, then trigger enrollment in LifterLMS. You can keep going and integrate every tool you use, creating automation that saves you time and money.

Automating Webinar Registrations with StreamYard and ActiveCampaign

Another external-app-to-LifterLMS example is the one you are inside of right now. When you registered for this free training on StreamYard, your information was passed to ActiveCampaign, which is what we use for CRM. If you were not already on an email list of somebody interested in what we are doing, you are now, and we know you are interested in Zapier. All of that happens through automation.

Automating Accounting with QuickBooks Online

Here is one that does not touch LifterLMS but I want to show you anyway, because it was the first zap we ever built for our business. When your business gets to a certain size and you are using QuickBooks, your accountant or bookkeeper needs to see all your order information inside QuickBooks Online. This zap pulls the relevant order data into QuickBooks Online automatically. We set it up nearly ten years ago. We are still using an old Stripe app, they must have a newer one, but the zap still works. You can do the same thing with PayPal.

What this eliminates is days and days of busy work manually adding information into QuickBooks. A very common question is how to get LifterLMS order history and banking activity into your accounting software. This is how you do it.

Q&A: Shopify Users, Shared Accounts, and Single Sign-On

Question from an attendee: is it possible to have the same user in Shopify and WordPress with just one login, essentially buying in Shopify and transferring to WordPress?

Because Shopify and LifterLMS are two separate applications, by default this zap will create two accounts. The customer will have a login and profile in Shopify, and a different login on your WordPress site. It is the internet, so anything custom can be developed, and there is a concept called Single Sign On, or SSO, which gives users a master login across systems. That is custom development territory. For most stores, my recommendation is to be comfortable with the customer holding two accounts, one on your store and one on your school. That is how it works out of the box, and most people are fully capable of managing accounts on multiple things.

Q&A: Weekly Course Starts and LifterLMS Cohorts

Question: I have a course that always starts on Thursdays. Can I automate a rolling weekly start so new users always land in week one?

LifterLMS actually has a feature called course cohorts. With a couple of clicks, even though it is manual, you can spin up a new cohort that launches every Thursday. For this problem I would keep it inside LifterLMS rather than Zapier. Use cohorts, or use the same course over and over and update the enrollment time period so there is a window to enroll the week before and then a new batch comes in. Not every automation should be a zap. If the tool you already own solves the problem, use the tool.

Q&A: Adding Students to a Private Facebook Group

Question: could you add someone to a private Facebook group when they enroll in LifterLMS?

Facebook groups are not exposed to Zapier, which is a decision Meta has made and likely comes back to privacy. Facebook does not want to hand a piece of software the ability to look up all their users and move them around programmatically. There is no direct zap for this. The workable path is to use LifterLMS directly to send an engagement email when the student enrolls, invite them to the Facebook group with a link, and let them make their own decision to join. If joining the group is required for the program, say so, and most students will follow the instructor’s instructions.

Q&A: Reminder Emails for a Zoom Webinar

Question: I have courses with webinars via Zoom, and I need to send reminders by email the day before. I already have an engagement email set up in LifterLMS at registration. What is the right way to handle the reminder?

I am a power Zoom user, so I know Zoom has webinar reminder emails built in that you can modify and schedule. They are not all on by default, but the feature is there. That said, you should never build a zap when the tool you already have does what you want. If you are not happy with Zoom’s built-in reminder system, then yes, you can build your own. The Zoom Zapier app has triggers for new meeting, new meeting registrant, new recording completed, and new webinar registrant. On the action side, connect Gmail, drop in the event date, registrant first name, registrant last name, and registrant email, add a delay for the amount of time or until the exact date and time you choose, and you have a custom reminder. Before any of that will render properly you need to connect your Zoom account and your Gmail account inside Zapier.

Q&A: Sending LifterLMS Orders to Excel

Question: how do I automate LifterLMS transactions into Excel?

The difference between Excel and Google Sheets is that Excel is an application on your computer while Google Sheets is a cloud application. Google Sheets has a one-click export to Excel format, so one path is to send data to a Google sheet and download it as Excel. Excel in the cloud is also supported. When you are going out of an app into Google Sheets or Excel, you are usually adding a row. Connect the account, pick LifterLMS as the trigger, choose new student or another trigger, and use the fields you get back, things like student name, email, and course, to fill columns in your spreadsheet. If we do not yet expose a piece of data you need, let us know and we will consider it for future development in our REST API and Zapier app.

Building a Zap from Scratch with the AI Zap Builder

Using Zapier sounds easy, but there is genuine detail work: finding course IDs, setting up API keys, authorizing every connection. A newer feature I love is the AI zap builder. You can type a general idea, like Shopify order to LifterLMS course enrollment, and let the AI try to build the zap for you. It is not perfect. If the AI does not pick it up cleanly, you can build from scratch. Choose Shopify as the app, choose the New Order trigger, then reach for the LifterLMS app.

In WordPress, you need a user to exist before you can enroll them, so the first action is Create WordPress User If None Is Found. This makes it a multi-step zap. Add a second action to Enroll In A Course. Before any of it runs you have to connect each account, which is the next thing I will walk through.

Authorizing Zapier with the LifterLMS REST API

To authorize the connection, you need to give Zapier a REST API key from your LifterLMS site. Inside wp-admin, go to LifterLMS, Settings, REST API. You can have multiple API keys for different integrations, which I recommend. Add a new key, give it a name like Zapier To Excel, and grant Read and Write permissions. Click Save.

Pay attention to the alert at the top of the screen. This is about security. You will only see the consumer key and secret key one time. Do not share them around. Once you leave that screen you will never see the secret key again. You can also download them right there, so you have a local copy to keep in a safe place.

Back in Zapier, when you set up a LifterLMS trigger or action for the first time, it will prompt you to Connect A New Account. In the pop-up, paste the consumer key, paste the secret key, leave the next field alone, and enter your base URL, which is the root URL of your LifterLMS site with no trailing slash at the end. Authorize the connection and Zapier can now talk to your LifterLMS site.

Where to Find Your LifterLMS Course IDs

You will need a course ID whenever a zap says enroll in a specific course. There are a couple of places to find it. If you open a course in the LifterLMS Course Builder, the course ID shows up on newer versions right in the Builder header, along with a lesson ID column if you need a lesson ID.

The ID also lives in the browser URL. Every post in WordPress, whether it is a course, a lesson, or anything else, has a numeric ID, and WordPress reads that ID from the URL to know which post to load. If you hover over a link on a WordPress admin screen, that same ID appears in the small preview at the bottom left of the browser window. Improvements to the Course Builder are on the way to make IDs even easier to find.

Working With a LifterLMS Expert on Complex Zaps

If you get really into automation, you do not have to figure it out on your own. You can work with a LifterLMS Expert to build your automation for you once you have decided what you want to integrate. Zapier is designed for non developers and our getting-started documentation walks you through it. If it starts to feel too technical, outsourcing the build to somebody who uses Zapier every day is a legitimate move.

Pricing and How to Get Started for Free

There is nothing to buy from us for the LifterLMS Zapier app. It is a benefit for every LifterLMS user, including people running the free core plugin. Zapier has a free plan too, with 100 tasks per month. So you can pair free LifterLMS with a free Zapier plan, run 100 tasks a month through your automation, and pay nothing to either company to get started.

Before you build, think hard about the automation you want to create. How will it save you time, make you more money, or unlock an experience you have not been able to deliver before? Come up with your strategy first, then open Zapier and see what you can put together.

Q&A: Do Zapier Emails Work With LifterLMS Cohorts?

Follow-up question: how about Zapier emails, one per week, with cohorts?

A cohort is essentially a new version of the course that has all the same content. Through the setup wizard, you can change the course time period and the course enrollment period, and you can automatically hide the previous version from your course catalog so only the current Thursday cohort is available. Every automation and engagement email built into LifterLMS can be configured to work with the new cohort. There is not a way in Zapier yet to automate cohort creation itself, but in LifterLMS spinning up a fresh cohort is only a couple of clicks and two minutes a week. Sometimes you have to weigh the benefits of complex automation against just working in the tool you already have, and this is one of those cases.

Where to Go Next

Go check out the LifterLMS Zapier app on zapier.com, read our launch post, and read the documentation. If you have questions about moving off Shopify, ClickFunnels, or ThriveCart into LifterLMS, or you want help thinking through an automation, reach out to our pre-sales team at team@lifterlms.com. In our own experience Zapier is a phenomenal organization to work with, both as an integration partner and for support. It is great to be with you on the journey.