Today I’m talking with Chris Badgett, my business partner at codeBOX, about the problem with membership sites and how you can solve it.

Last week we launched our new WordPress learning management system plugin LifterLMS and its Infusionsoft extension, so I wanted Chris to talk about membership sites versus learning management systems.

The technology for eLearning is evolving, and membership sites are no longer the best way to sell your online course materials and engage with your audience. A learning management system allows you to engage with your students and make sure that they’re actually learning and connecting with your course content.

When you combine our LifterLMS WordPress plugin with the Infusionsoft extension we created for it, the possibilities for how you can engage with your students is endless. You can apply tags that allow you to monitor your students’ progress through your materials and reengage with them when they haven’t logged in for a certain period of time. The power is there for you to use technology to scale up the human touch in your courses, and therefore interact with a large number of students in a high-touch way and increase your revenues.

I really appreciate you being with us on this journey we’ve been on to create LifterLMS and its Infusionsoft extension! I want to hook up my Infusioncast audience, so listen to this episode for details and then head over to LifterLMS.com.

Joshua: Hey everyone. Today I brought on Chris Badgett, my business partner over at codeBOX to talk about our new WordPress plugin, LifterLMS and its Infusionsoft add-on. Let’s get into it.

Announcer: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast, the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host, Joshua Millage, as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.

Joshua: Hello everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast, the only podcast where we teach you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Today, I have my business partner, Chris Badgett, on with me. As most of you know, last week we launched our WordPress learning management system plugin, called LifterLMS. I wanted to bring Chris onto the show to talk a little bit about learning management systems, as well as dive into the Infusionsoft add-on that we created for all of you. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris: Thanks for having me, Josh. It’s good to be here.

Joshua: Right on, man. Let’s start out with talking about membership sites versus learning management systems. I think it’s an interesting conversation. There’s a lot of membership systems out there that I think people are familiar with. There’s WishList and Memberium and iMember360. The list goes on and on and on and on and on, CustomerHub, which Infusionsoft owns. What in your mind is the main difference between these types of systems and the system that we’ve created with LifterLMS?

Chris: That’s a great question. I’ve worked with a lot of people who thought they wanted a membership site. It ended up you actually need something a little more evolved, like a learning management system. Just to frame it in, membership sites where the software and the plugins that support membership sites, they became popular around 2008 when information marketers started using them and putting content behind a pay wall. There’s a lot of great membership programs out there, but what’s happened is the technology has really evolved beyond membership sites to a place where the word doesn’t even apply anymore.

When I hear somebody asking for a membership site, the first thing I think about is does this person actually mean a learning management system? The market is catching up to what the tools are on the shelf that you can use, but to be a little bit more specific about what all that means is a membership site is a place where you can put content behind a pay wall. A lot of people sell access to a membership for a high ticket or high dollar amount or a recurring monthly thing. They’ll often bundle in other things like a coaching call or a webinar once a month or something like that.

There are great tools out there. OptimizePress is one that was really popular about four years ago where you can create modules inside your membership site, which is just like a way of organizing the content in a little more course-like fashion. It’s not really a real online course or learning management system. If we think about the traditional membership site that has modules, where somebody pays the money. They get inside. They have a user name and password. Then they can go through the content. Some membership systems have drip content where you can’t access things until a certain amount of time has passed.

It’s one way they try to keep you on the recurring monthly or keep you from refunding or something like that. They’ll use drip content. The new modules are only published once a week or once a month and that sort of thing. A learning management system takes that whole scenario and just takes it deeper and further and focuses less on locking down content and putting a pay wall up and more in terms of helping the learner progress through the material. I can go into more detail on that. Now we’re starting to get into the learning management systems side of it all.

Joshua: I think the key difference to me is that, and I’ve worked with a lot of membership plugins, I think the big thing is that when you get into a learning management system, your mindset is probably more driven towards whether or not the student is actually going to use that information as opposed to just delivering the information. I think it’s a key switch between how do I just get this information over to them? Do I really care whether or not they’re going to put it into action? Think about a teacher. A good teacher who is teaching a class genuinely considers the success of each and every individual student in that class.

At least in my life, those are the teachers who have had a profound impact on me. They were intentional about watching my progress and helping me when I got stuck and encouraging me along the way. I think when we set out to build LifterLMS that was inside of me, inside of you, and inside of Tom and Mark and everyone else on the team. How do we enable that type interaction to happen as opposed to here’s you’re course, thanks for your cash?

Chris: Absolutely. I think part of it too, it’s like the evolution of the entrepreneur behind the membership site or the learning management system. At first, when you’re learning marketing or getting into information products, if you’re coming at it from more of the entrepreneur first and not the teacher first approach, the membership thing makes a lot of sense. You’ve got recurring revenue. You’ve got drip content. You can put all your great material behind this pay wall. As time goes on and as you evolve as an entrepreneur, you realize that the real way to create value of which revenue is a side effect or increased revenue as a side effect is to really focus on the learner and not the membership itself. That’s the difference in the evolution of the entrepreneur when they make the leap from a membership site to a true learning management system.

Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is where Infusionsoft becomes really wonderful, as we’ve always talked about on the show with all the guests that I have on, how do we scale the human touch? How do we use automation to do that? Infusion Soft is a wonderful system to scale the human touch. Then these tools, like LifterLMS can really bring it full circle and allow you to execute differently.

Chris, let’s dive into the Infusionsoft add-on. We’ve created this out of the gate, which a lot of people I think are angry with us because of our mad obsession and love with Infusionsoft users and Infusionsoft.

They’re like, I want stripe integration. I want this. I want that. We’re like, no we’re building a new Infusionsoft integration first. For the Infusioncast audience, you have to understand, you’ve had significant pull on the development of this thing. Thank you for being with us through this journey. Let’s dive into the functionality. I think people are going to be very interested in how this applies to their lives. Why would they buy LifterLMS and the Infusionsoft extension? What can it do for me?

Chris: The most exciting part is that engagement piece and really focusing on creating the value for the learner and helping them execute, be entertained, and get educated. One part of the LifterLMS Infusionsoft extension is E-Commerce related. We built an all-in-one solution where it all works, E-Commerce membership, learning management, eLearning engagement, all without additional plug-ins. One of the things that happens with a lot of Infusionsoft users is you end up leaving the website and going to an Infusionsoft cart. What we’ve done is we’ve actually integrated with Infusionsoft so that you can have a checkout process on your web-site.

The user never leaves to go to an Infusionsoft cart. You can have one time or you can have recurring payments. You can have an either/or scenario where this is the one-time price or this is the recurring payment plan price. You choose. That’s the E-Commerce part. Once we get into the engagement part, which is where Infusionsoft really shines, it’s a marketing automation skill, the human touch thing. Marketing is about getting the sale, but then you can continue to deliver value with that campaign builder. The sales have already happened. They’re in your system. Now let’s nurture that person inside the system.

One of the things we’ve done is we’ve built a framework of triggering events at which point you can apply a tag. There’s a lot of thought and user experience that comes down to the scenarios we’ve created. The tool is actually pretty simple and easy to use, but it’s really powerful with what you can do with it. In terms of applying a tag, the triggering events are purchase or enrollment date. As soon as someone buys their membership or you can also do free courses. If someone just enrolls in your free course because you’re doing some content marketing or whatever, you can apply a tag.

Now you should watch the rest of the episodes on Infusioncast to see all the amazing things you can do with Infusionsoft and build some kind of campaign around somebody just joining. The other thing we’ve done is set up, it’s like drip content in the sense that you can apply a tag, but also put on a delay. I want to apply this tag in Infusionsoft two days after they purchase or enrolled in my course. There’s also that delay element that you can set up to trigger with the plugin. The other ones are lesson completed, section completed. A section is just simply a collection of lessons.

The other one is course completed. The other one is days since last logged in. We have an episode on our other podcast, LMScast, about the dirty little secret of membership sites. One of those dirty little secrets is that users buy the course. They get real excited. You did a great job marketing. They’re inside your membership site, but now they don’t complete the material. They get through the first part or the first lesson and they just disappear. If we really focus in on caring about the learner, we would want to set up campaigns that whatever makes sense for your particular education material, if the user hasn’t logged in in a week, that’s probably the canary in the coal mine that you should trigger some kind of campaign to basically re-engage that learner. Those are the basics of what you can do with LifterLMS and Infusionsoft.

Joshua: The possibilities are endless because we’re using tags. The combination with all the other platforms out there makes it incredibly powerful. I’m just excited too, because I think that the best is yet to come too. I have so many ideas on how to improve the extension and would love for the audience to tell us what you think would be valuable adding. I look at a lot of these big membership platforms in the Infusionsoft space. They’re good, but they have just these long, long lists of all these different things that they can do. I’ve questioned the average user. What do you actually need? I think simplicity is beautiful. I think making it simplistic to activate these powerful Infusionsoft functions is really important to me.

I don’t care if your system has a list of a thousand shortcodes because I’m probably only going to be using a handful of those. I want to focus on the essentials here when we build up the extension. Just on what we’ve created alone, I think the most powerful types of campaigns would be exactly what you talked about, Chris. Applying a tag based on the amount of days that someone hasn’t logged in to re-engage them to come back is a huge one. You could create a looping system to do that that it could always ping them. Then you could even get really fancy and start adding in a system like Call Loop or PlusThis.

You could be doing text messaging and that sort of thing. It could be really fancy to get them to come back. I think awarding badges on completion. I think it would be really cool if instructors actually thought about picking up the phone when people completed certain courses and maybe actually calling them or sending them a voice mail broadcast or something like that. The sky is the limit. I think it’s really impressive what you can do just with tagging people and triggering a bunch of different actions. Yeah man, I’m really fired up about this add-on and what we’re doing in the learning management space.

On-line education as a whole is just so fascinating to me. I think right now, we’ve seen that the Argacy and Phoenix universities and these big shops are devaluing the degree. I think less and less people are even going there to get educated. They’re actually going to the instructor. They’re going to the person directly. Our system supports that type of relationship with direct education happening between the instructor and the student. You snap in Infusionsoft and the Infusionsoft extension. Now that instructor has the power to connect with thousands upon thousands of students in a very high-touch way.

One of the things too, Chris, and this is important because it supports our idea that a proper on-line education system should eliminate the bottle necks that happen in a course is our course analytics feature. I think our course analytics feature is incredibly powerful. What’s the idea behind that? What does that even mean for the listeners who are listening who are like what do you mean, course analytics? This is something that just does not exist at all in membership sites.

Chris: Absolutely. That’s a great example of how the LMS is moving above and beyond what a membership site does. Course analytics are really interesting. We’re all familiar with Google Analytics or an Infusionsoft doing our ROI reports to see what lead generation strategies are the most effective. The course analytics is essentially a visualization of data that is happening inside your learning environment. As you drill into that data and look at your charts and your grafts, as you get down to the student level, now you’re getting into student management where you can do something like give a student an option to re-take a quiz that you had a limit on.

You can override the system if you will. That’s just one example of student management. If you zoom back out as the entrepreneur, we’ve got E-Commerce data if you have multiple courses or you’re selling membership to your whole site, which is what a lot of people do. There may be one or there may be 20 courses in there. You can see your E-Commerce stuff so that you can make intelligent decisions as an entrepreneur. On the engagement level, you can look at where people are completing lessons. It might not be, if a student is falling off and you’re trying to re-engage them, it’s not just their fault.

It’s really your issue as a leader to get in and see if by looking at your course analytics, you can see in this course, after lesson three, I lose 50% of my users that don’t come back. That’s when you can tell you have a problem there. That’s an opportunity from your analytics to take the cue and work really hard to improve that lesson in your material or add a webinar, some kind of high touch thing to keep people engaged at that point. You can actually look at your material and see where your successes and failures are.

Joshua: I love that. It’s important to constantly be improving your material too, to make sure that people get through. Every course has its sticking points. It’s important to see those and then figure out ways to help people through them. Sometimes it might even require that you go back and re-record a course to make it a little bit better. We allow you to see that when you’re using LifterLMS. We allow you to see those things through our course analytics features, which is really exciting. Chris, I think I’ve pulled your leg a little bit about hooking up the audience who is listening to us this far and I want to do that.
Chris has allowed me and the team has allowed me to create a little coupon code for those of you who are listening. It is infusioncastvip. Basically, if you come over to LifterLMS.com and you purchase a copy of LifterLMS, we’ll give you the Infusionsoft add-on for half off, which is a significant discount because the Infusionsoft add-on is a flat fee of $300, and that means you get it for $150. It’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of money off just for being a listener. I really appreciate all the encouragement and feedback and just kind words from you guys. You guys have been amazing over this launch and just helping me refine my thoughts when it came to plotting out the extension at the beginning.

I want to hook you up. That will be available for seven days. This is originally going out on Thursday, the 26th. It’s seven days from now. You’ll be able to access that coupon code. I hope you join us over there at LifterLMS and help us continually improve things. We want to build it with your needs and desires in mind instead of guessing, so we’re very active listeners and would love for you to join us on the journey. Chris, I really appreciate you coming on the show, man. Is there anything that you’d like to share as we close out this episode?

Chris: Sure. There’s a great quote by Peter Drucker who wrote a book called The Effective Executive. He’s a brilliant business mind and leader in learning leadership and management and how to run a business kind of stuff that’s really evergreen. He created his material a little while ago. He has a quote that says that business is really just two things, marketing and innovation, which is a really simple quote, but it’s so true. If you’re not doing both sides of that, you’re not really in business. The Infusionsoft community is really, in my experience and in observation focused on marketing and innovating within marketing.

If you’re thinking about a membership site, I would encourage you to spend just as much time on the innovation side of your actual membership or your learning management system. LifterLMS is a tool that can help you innovate more after the marketing and getting the sale to get your users and customers to get whatever it is your trying to teach them or help them learn or problem you want to overcome. Just to really encourage people and challenge people to focus on splitting their time between marketing and innovation and leveraging the power of these amazing tools like Infusionsoft and LifterLMS.

Joshua: Awesome. Chris, that’s a beautiful thought to close this episode out. I couldn’t have thought of anything better to say there. That’s really inspiring. Thank you for bringing in that quote, man. All right guys, check out LifterLMS.com. Just start the checkout process. Enter the coupon code infusioncastvip. We hope to see you over there. Thank you so much for being an Infusioncast listener. Until next week, we’ll talk to you then.

Announcer: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress web-site? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin, FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress web-site with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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