Your Course Site Is Half-Built Without WP Fusion

Chris Badgett argues in this LMScast episode why LMS and CRM should be handled as a single, integrated system rather than as distinct tools by any professional online learning company. He highlights that whereas CRM technologies handle marketing, automation, and customer connections, platforms like LifterLMS handle the learning process. WP Fusion, which serves as the connection layer that synchronizes student activity with marketing platforms and enables sophisticated automation across WordPress-based educational websites, is the missing component between them.

He explains how WP Fusion unifies important WordPress plugins and features into a single solution. Supported platforms mentioned in this LMScast episode are below.

Course developers may automate tagging, segmentation, and customer journeys based on actual student activities, such as enrollments, lesson progress, quiz completions, and payments, thanks to this broad interoperability. Chris also emphasizes how these linkages produce actual business results. After a student enrolls in a free course, for instance, they may immediately start a nurturing sequence; after they finish the course, they may get certification emails or upsell efforts. He highly advises creating a free course lead magnet as a growth engine and maintaining a straightforward CRM structure that relies on tags and custom fields for segmentation while utilizing a few core lists (prospects, free users, and customers).

He adds that strong eCommerce automations like cart abandonment recovery, refund-based tagging, and lifetime value tracking are made possible by integrating WP Fusion with WooCommerce. In general, the episode presents WordPress as a more adaptable substitute for all-in-one platforms such as Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or Podia because LifterLMS, WooCommerce, form plugins, and WP Fusion combine to create a fully customizable, scalable, and automation-rich ecosystem for expanding online education businesses.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show 

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how every LMS website needs a CRM and a bridge that connects them, and that bridge is WP Fusion. If you’re building an LMS website, every single one I’ve ever built, I would recommend to every single LifterLMS user to also install WP Fusion for seamless connection to over 60 plus CRMs.

Now, let me unpack this a little bit. There’s a lot of terminology here. So LMS stands for Learning Management System. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But a CRM also includes the basics of just having an email list that you can send broadcast emails to, and doing advanced marketing automation And there’s other things you can do in CRMs as well in terms of having sales pipelines and other fancy lead scoring and contact records and all of this.

But at the fundamental level, the most important thing is that a learning management system is where students or learners take action and they do things. The CRM is where the business decides what to say and how to automate parts of their business process. The sad truth is that many learning management system owners don’t even connect the CRM or marketing automation to the LMS.

So what ends up happening is they have two separate systems that aren’t even talking to each other. They may do something where they’re doing some marketing and a lead comes in through a form from the CRM, and then they promote the course, and then somebody goes to the LMS website and buys the course.

But these two systems aren’t linked together. That’s where WP Fusion comes in. And WP Fusion doesn’t just work with learning management systems, it works with WordPress in general, it works with contact form plugins in WordPress, it works in WooCommerce and many other systems in WordPress. So if I could only install five plugins on a website a learning website LifterLMS would of course be in there, but so would WP Fusion to connect To make the connection and the automations, which we’re gonna talk about in a little bit, totally possible. And by the way, I personally am a very heavy user of WP Fusion myself, both for e-commerce and learning management system work, so we’re gonna dive into all of that. But essentially, the most important thing about WP Fusion and connecting your LMS to your CRM is that you can personalize and segment and do behavior-based actions and create automations.

I was looking into some 2024 data, and currently almost 35,000 sites rely on WP Fusion to connect their WordPress sites to their CRM. And WP Fusion also supports 60-plus CRMs. So some of the most popular ones are ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Salesforce Zoho. There’s Kit and MailChimp as an example as well.

So there’s all kinds of… And many more. So there’s literally… If there’s a quality CRM out there WP Fusion integrates with it. So first I wanna talk about LifterLMS and WP Fusion So first of all the, team at WP Fusion is amazing. There’s Jack, the founder, and Steve, and many others, and they just do amazing work.

So first, I just wanna give props to some great people. And me personally, I like to do business with people that I know and trust, and the folks at WP Fusion, 100%, I like them, and also I very much trust them, and they’re also super smart. So just to give you a little story LifterLMS natively in our add-on bundles has a ConvertKit, now called Kit, and a MailChimp integration add-on where, which are plugins that you add that do some of the things that WP Fusion does for just MailChimp and Kit.

And it was back in around 2016 or so where we were getting ready to add another add-on for ActiveCampaign, which is actually the CRM marketing automation platform that I still use today. And I actually did a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 to fund the development of an ActiveCampaign integration, and we raised a bunch of money.

We didn’t quite meet our goal in the way that Kickstarter works is, and the way we did the crowdfunding is if we don’t hit our goal, we don’t get the money. So we almost got there, but we didn’t get the money. But still we’re weighing on this decision, should we focus on building a bunch of add-on plugins for Lifter because every LMS website needs a CRM.

We knew that 12 years ago, and it’s still true. But what that does is that distracts us from developing the core learning management system and focusing on all these CRM connectors. And that’s when we met Jack from WP Fusion, and Jack literally built the ActiveCampaign integration with Lifter, but n- not, through just ActiveCampaign, but adding LifterLMS to his, at the time, new w- newer WP Fusion platform.

And then it w- it could automatically connect to ActiveCampaign, which was what we were trying to do along with many other platforms. So it was in that moment when we decided, hey, we’re not gonna chase all the 60-plus CRMs that people are using. For example, some larger, more enterprise corporate clients will use a fancy CRM called Salesforce.

You may have heard of it. It’s very enterprise. It’s expensive. It’s, but it’s like the standard CRM for big companies. And then there are certain people that use other platforms like Zoho or ActiveCampaign or many, others. There’s Keap. Lately, there’s a platform called GoHighLevel that’s gaining in popularity.

And instead of us having to chase all of those integrations, WPFusion just made it possible, so then we could focus on just developing Lifter. So anyways, that’s it for story time. What you can do with LifterLMS and WPFusion is pretty remarkable. So the most basic way to think about it is when a student enrolls in a course or membership powered by LifterLMS they jump in and then they start, for example, in a course start on lesson one.

But what WPFusion does in the, background is a student enrolls in the course, it takes that student, remember WPFusion is the bridge to the CRM, it goes to the CRM, and in the CRM it creates what’s known as a contact record. So what that means is the person’s name and email address is added as a contact.

Speaker 4: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful and trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or building a membership site, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list, boost conversions, and engage your visitors with highly targeted customizable popups.

You can create smart popups for things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery, upsells, course engagement, activation, targeted offers based on exactly what your students are doing inside LifterLMS. I personally use Popup Maker on all of our websites at LifterLMS for lead magnet opt-ins, cart abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to the right next step.

Popup Maker is essential for growing my email list and making more money through my website. Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast to save 15% off on your order. The discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has a free version, so you can start with that too.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show. 

But not only that, the CRM knows which course or membership on the Lifter site that person came in from. Certain tags can be applied that allow for segmentation in the CRM or the marketing automation. But the most simple way to think about this and the core value is similar to how you really shouldn’t host your own website videos in WordPress we use and recommend platforms like Vimeo Pro for hosting the video.

When it comes to broadcast email and doing really fancy marketing automation that’s often better done by a separate CRM system. So WP Fusion is the bridge. Now, there’s a nuance to that, which I’m gonna talk about, which there has been a lot of innovation in the space, and WordPress-hosted CRMs, like FluentCRM, that live in your WordPress site are really powerful and cool too.

By the way, WP Fusion helps you integrate with that, with FluentCRM as well. And the other really neat thing is some people are more LMS-focused, and some people are more CRM, marketing, automation, business-focused. It’s actually a two-way sync. So what that means is you can do it in WP Fusion, where if somebody in the CRM, let’s say ActiveCampaign, gets a certain tag, that can then…

It can go the other way. It can create the user on the WordPress site and enroll the user in a specific course based on the tag that was applied in the CRM, which is super powerful. And these kind of tagging situations can happen when a course is begun, when it’s completed, when a lesson is completed, a quiz is attempted or passed, a membership is joined or canceled.

A specific access plan in LifterLMS is purchased can fire a specific flow in WP Fusion. It also ties into LifterLMS tracks, vouchers, and groups. So there’s really so much you can do, and you can get really advanced. But what I’m saying, if you’re kinda new to this concept, the first thing you need to do is go get WP Fusion, put it on your site, connect it to your CRM, and then your WordPress and LifterLMS install, and then do the contact syncing and the segmentation by just applying tags based on what the what the user enrolled in, whether that’s a specific course or membership or a specific access plan and if you’re new to setting up a CRM, I’m just gonna give you a couple of tips that I’ve learned over the years.

I like to have minimal numbers of email lists. I actually recommend three at most, and then everything else you can do with tags and something called custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, which WP Fusion also helps you with. But the way to th- think about lists and tags differently is that you may have…

I like to build three email lists. The first email list is the prospects list. The second one is the free user list, and the third list is the customer list. So you really only need three email lists. You don’t need a separate email list for every course. For example, if you had 500 courses on your website, you don’t need 500 email lists.

What you need is three email lists and one tag per course so that you, if you wanted to just send an email to people in a certain course, you just send it to all the customers that have that course’s tag. It’s a little nuanced if you’re new to it, but the difference between tags and custom fields is a, user can have multiple tags, or a contact record in a CRM can have multiple tags.

But a user, when there’s fields, can only have one option in the field. So an example of that would be like a level. Like you could have a bronze, silver, gold version of the membership, and you can only be at one at a time, and those are custom fields and not tags, as an example. That’s a whole rabbit hole to go down to learn the difference between tags and custom fields, but I’m just going over that with you to discuss the nuance of tags, lists, and custom fields.

And remember, WP Fusion allows you to create all this automation. LifterLMS, as an example, has… Over the past decade, we’ve had around 120,000 people join our email list. WP Fusion has been involved with every one of those interactions, as an example. The other thing to think about with using LifterLMS with WP Fusion, if you go to the LifterLMS Academy site and you enroll in the LifterLMS quick start course- That is a free course.

So when somebody enrolls in that course, they basically end up on our free user list if they’re not already on a customer list, and then they get tagged as having come in through that course. And then what we can do is we can build marketing automations, which is a series of nurture emails that don’t go out all at once, but are spaced out to nurture that student enrolling in the free course.

So if you’re looking for something to do, a project to do with WP Fusion and LifterLMS, this is my number one tip for you, which is to create what I call a free course lead magnet. So for us, the LifterLMS Quick Start course is that. It’s had about 50,000 people enroll in it over the past 10 years.

We’ve rebuilt the course several times to keep it current, and all of those people enrolling are getting passed to our CRM for nurture through email automation via WP Fusion. So that’s how to think about LifterLMS connecting to a CRM through WP Fusion. The other big elephant in the room is e-commerce.

So in WordPress, the largest e-commerce platform is WooCommerce. Now, LifterLMS integrates with WooCommerce. So if you’ve been listening to this and you’re thinking, “Hey, that all sounds great, but I don’t use LifterLMS’s payment system, I use WooCommerce integrated with Lifter,” which we have a Lifter add-on for that hey, it still works.

You can get the best of both worlds. You can use WPFusion to work with LifterLMS components like course enrollments or course completed, but you can also integrate it with WooCommerce as well for the e-commerce stuff. Tags can be applied and removed, and people can be unsubscribed and subscribed based on refund status or new orders and so on.

There’s so much that you can do. So LifterLMS itself when we first started, we actually used Infusionsoft for our marketing automation CRM. And about 10 years ago, we switched to a company called ActiveCampaign, which is where we still are today. That’s our CRM. And the LifterLMS software is actually s- sold through a WooCommerce store.

So we use WPFusion with WooCommerce. Anytime anybody buys anything from LifterLMS it’s creating, it’s adding context to our ActiveCampaign through WPFusion. It’s triggering automation nurture sequences based on what somebody is buying. It’s checking to make sure somebody doesn’t already exist, so we don’t send too many emails and all of that stuff.

So we’re- we deeply use WPFusion with WooCommerce as well. And once you get super big, like you get a lot of traffic, you have lots of orders every day and everything, a lot of the management of all that is fully automated using WooCommerce, WordPress, and WPFusion. Another cool thing you can do with WPFusion and WooCommerce is cart abandonment.

Now, LifterLMS has a cart abandonment recovery system that does what it does But you can also do another cart abandonment campaign using WP Fusion as well. And then the cool thing is WP Fusion also has even more advanced e-commerce integrations where, for example, with ActiveCampaign, it can push ActiveCampaign data or WooCommerce- advanced WooCommerce data to ActiveCampaign and vice versa.

Things like lifetime value, deal stage and whatnot to the CRM. So it’s the same thing like with LifterLMS, with WooCommerce. You can– WordPress, things can happen in– with WooCommerce checkout, and tags get applied over in the CRM, but it can also talk back the other way and create things to happen in the WooCommerce store based on what’s happening in the CRM.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plugins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show. 

Speaker: So it’s super powerful The next one is probably even easier to understand and more basic than LifterLMS or the WooCommerce integration with WP Fusion, and that’s using WP Fusion with form plugins. So these are form plugins like Gravity Forms, WPForms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, Fluent Forms, and so on. So the simple way to think about that is when you get somebody to sign up for your email list on your WordPress website, they need to come in through a form.

Now these CRM platforms like ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, HubSpot, and so on, they do have form builders where you can kinda create a form on the CRM and you take this embed code and you stick it on your site. But often they don’t look very good. They look like a different design ’cause they came from somewhere else.

They’re not aware of the site you’re putting them on. You can do that, but what most people do is they will use a WordPress form plugin and then basically get the, sign-up, the name and email address through the form plugin, like Gravity Forms, and then via WP Fusion, pass that, that data and create that contact and deliver the lead magnet, or deliver the newsletter, or sign them up for whatever list in whatever CRM they’re using, passed over by WP Fusion.

So we do this all the time at LifterLMS. So on our site, we have a lot of Gravity Forms, and whenever somebody completes a certain form, it could be something like a automated webinar, that Gravity Form will capture the name and email, and then it’ll pass that data to the in our case, ActiveCampaign to deliver whatever needs to happen behind the scenes by email or just segment the contact with certain tags or custom fields and so on.

So this is the power of automation. If you’re new to using form plugins, this is the first thing I would do with WP Fusion, is to create a newsletter sign-up form, make it easy to f- to find on your site. And once you learn the basics of that, you’ll be ready for more advanced marketing automation that you can do.

But the, form, like a newsletter sign-up or a lead magnet form, like to get a e-book or a PDF or a worksheet or something like that, is a great place to learn the basics of using WordPress, WP Fusion, a form plugin, and whatever of the 60 CRMs you are using. And just a pro tip for you out there if you’re beginning- there’s some great CRMs that come with a free plan.

So for example, MailChimp has a free plan and many others have a entry-level thing. WPFusion also has a lite version that you can get for free, which you’ll need the pro version to do stuff with LifterLMS. But if you wanna just kick the tires and learn the basics of syncing users on a WordPress site to your CRM you could check out WPFusion Lite.

So- In terms of the CRM landscape, C-CRM is one of the most cluttered, crowded markets there is. There’s so many CRMs out there, it can be mind-blowing. So if you’re trying to choose, I’m gonna tell you what’s the most popular today from what I’m seeing. So the, biggest ones right now are FluentCRM, which is a different one.

That one is hosted inside WordPress itself. And there’s still a lot of great reasons why to use WP Fusion to keep them connected, even though they can exist on the same site, or maybe you have the FluentCRM on a different site, and there’s all kinds of reasons to still use WP Fusion. ActiveCampaign is still popular.

It is in decline. I’m an ActiveCampaign user, have been a long time. Their pricing is getting a little out of control, but it is still popular and it does what it does well. HighLevel is growing fast. It’s more kinda popular among the marketing crowd, the scrappy entrepreneur crowd.

HubSpot is kinda mid-market very popular as well. Infusionsoft, later rebranded as Keap with a slightly different offering, has been in com- decline for a while, but there’s, many more. There’s, Drip, there’s Zoho CRM, there’s Brevo, Mailchimp, Kit, Klaviyo, Ontraport, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Customer.io.

There’s Groundhogg, another WordPress native CRM, Mautic, AWeber, Bento, and many more. The most important thing you need to think about when choosing your CRM is to pick one that you can live with for five-plus years. Like I said, I’ve been with ActiveCampaign for almost 10 years, I think, and it would be very hard for me to move because I have so many automations and so many things built in there.

So it’s choose wisely ’cause you’re probably gonna be there for a while, and it’s kinda painful to move later. However, WP Fusion actually makes it easy if you do wanna switch CRMs and stuff. It’s not as challenging or as hard as you might think. And particularly today, with the help of artificial intelligence and the AI tools, these kind of migrations have gotten much, much easier the next thing I wanna talk about is what are the real automation unlocks that you can get when you add WP Fusion to connect your learning management system website to your CRM or email marketing, automation platform?

The first thing is you can do personalized learning paths. So based on all the things that happen in an LMS that can trigger a tag or sends, send a behavioral note to your CRM you can customize. So if somebody fails a quiz as an example, and you want a coach to be notified via your CRM to engage with the student and recover them before they get lost, that’s an example of a personalized learning path.

The other big automation thing is really just for sales. So- There’s this saying that your– somebody has to touch your marketing like seven times before they buy from you. So they visit your website, and then maybe they come back later and they join your newsletter, and now WP Fusion captures that lead and sends it over to your CRM, and then they forget about you.

But because you’ve p- used WP Fusion and passed that lead to your CRM, let’s say a five-part nurture sequence that fires every three days or so sends an email just adding value about the niche that your LMS website problem solves. And in the last one, there’s a message to come back and try a free course.

Now they come back, they sign up for the free course. WP Fusion passes that detail over, which now adds them to the free course nurture sequence and so on. And then it just– it keeps rolling until they become a customer. And it’s not about… The beauty of this kind of work is it’s not one size fits all marketing, sales, or learner experience design.

We’re actually creating a lot of personalization. So if they’re– It’s meeting them exactly where they are. It’s sending emails when it makes sense to send them because they just got this tag, because they just completed X action, and so on. And when they become a customer, it’s smart. It knows it’s not gonna send them marketing-related emails anymore.

It’s gonna switch to sending customer success-related emails. And now it’s possible for the site owner to send segmented emails to just the students in that one course via a broadcast email. We know that WordPress can, and LifterLMS as an example, can send these one-off emails for different things.

But when you’re doing these big broadcast emails whether it’s twenty people or two hundred thousand, this is where the CRM and the email broadcasting tool, that’s what it does really well you can also do win-back sequences. So for example, if a customer hasn’t completed something or, cancels and you wanna do a re-engagement campaign to see if there’s anything you can do to help them or save them or point out resources that they missed, the marketing automation and tagging that you can do with WPFusion to your CRM allows you to build those win-back sequences.

So basically, your students will feel seen, and as a business owner or web professional your business is running much more efficiently, so both the business and the student win bigger. And this whole thing with WPFusion and LifterLMS or WooCommerce and the four plugins, it really illustrates what makes WordPress and LifterLMS far superior to a platform like Kajabi or Podia or Thinkific that does– has one way of doing things, and maybe you can send us some emails, but they’re just not customizable in the way that you can customize with WordPress a CR- your own CRM in a tool like WPFusion that is a two-way sync that keeps them talking.

And these are things that just aren’t possible at all to customize and innovate on with platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or School. They may have some email capabilities, but it’s gonna be very limited compared to the kind of marketing automation, segmentation, and just communication that you can do with WordPress, a CR- a good CRM, and LifterLMS.

In terms of our stack at LifterLMS, we do– we use WooCommerce, we do LifterLMS, we do Gravity Forms, and we do ActiveCampaign, and WPFusion is the bridge between those. But you can swap any of those out. So for example, WPFusion also works with LearnDash. It also works with other WordPress e-commerce solutions besides WooCommerce, like Easy Digital Downloads.

It works with many other Gravity f- form plugins besides Gravity Forms. And like I said, there are 60 CRMs. I’m on ActiveCampaign a- actively looking for something else, but I– Just check out the WPFusion website. I bet the CRM you’re using or thinking about using is already on there the other cool thing with WP Fusion from a pricing perspective is it doesn’t scale with your size of your email list.

So you could have a 200 people in your LMS, or you could have two million. WP Fusion is not gonna cost you any more. And the same is true for LifterLMS as well. Now, the CRM platforms will charge you, which is one of the reasons why FluentCRM is becoming so popular is ’cause now you have a WordPress solution that’s not charging you based on the size of your email list or, and all of that, the number of active contacts that you have.

So go check it out. That’s at wpfusion.com/pricing. I believe they do have a lifetime option available as well. Yeah, WP Fusion is one of the top five plugins I would install on any site. The first thing I usually do is okay, I’m putting LifterLMS in there. I’m putting the LifterLMS Stripe payment gateway in there.

I’m putting WP Fusion in there. I’m putting the Switch User plugin in there, and I’m putting the Sky Pilot theme on there. And just with those five things, you’re basically unstoppable, and you have a system that is so powerful and actually quite affordable as well. So go get your license of WP Fusion and connect it to your LifterLMS.

If you’re using WooCommerce, connect it. Connect it to your form plugins. Also keep in mind, WP Fusion has some of the best written documentation I’ve ever seen, so if you’re ever trying to figure out how to do something and sync your contacts or, connect something in a certain way, their documentation is just phenomenal.

So go check out WP Fusion. I highly recommend it. And if you just wanna kick the tires, you could try the, lite version and start playing around with it. But if you’re- have a serious LMS business or a serious WooCommerce or e-commerce store business, I would encourage you to jump right in with the Pro version.

So that’s it for this episode of LMScast. Thank you for checking it out, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.