In eLearning it’s vital for teachers to be able to engage with their students in order to know if they’re learning and understanding the material. In today’s LMScast with Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett, we discuss how to use technology to scale the human touch between teachers and their students in online courses.
We’ve been building engagement systems for websites in the Infusionsoft community for years. Using Infusionsoft, you can apply tags that trigger engagements with customers based on their actions. For example, if a customer makes a purchase, you can set up a sequence in Infusionsoft to send them emails based on which product they bought.
We’ve built our lifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin with that same type of engagement in mind so you can use automation to scale your interactions with your students. You could set up engagements in lifterLMS to email your students when they finish lesson one or when they pass a quiz. You can set up the engagement system to meet your unique needs and to help you identify which places in your course materials may be causing your students to get stuck. And then the system can automatically let you know which students you should reach out to in person with extra help. The system is not to replace you, but to give you more productive time.
Some of our lifterLMS users are also Infusionsoft users, and for them we’ve created an add-on to lifterLMS that integrates with Infusionsoft. This integration will allow use of the ecommerce system in Infusionsoft, and campaigns inside Infusionsoft can be set up to trigger engagements based on students’ activity. The integration between lifterLMS and Infusionsoft allows for advanced options that are based on the flexibility that tagging brings for organization and engagement sequences.
Part of our background is that we have deep WordPress, Infusionsoft, and LMS online course knowledge, and we’ve merged those together into lifterLMS and the Infusionsoft add-on. We’ve created the foundation of a learning management system with a deep Infusionsoft integration for WordPress sites.
If you have any specific feature requests for lifterLMS, we’d love to hear from you. You can leave us a comment on this LMScast episode at LMScast.com/Infusionsoft. You can also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
Episode Transcript
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome to LMScast. This episode is a little bit different, because Chris and I are actually in the same location today in Santa Cruz, California. But yes, I’m Joshua Millage. This is Christopher Badgett. Today we are talking about Infusionsoft and WordPress. Chris, where do we start with all this craziness.
Chris: Let’s take it down to the learning management system level and talk about … Those of you who have been following lifterLMS, our WordPress learning management system plugin, we do bring up integration with Infusionsoft, and it’s one of the things that we’re getting ready to release tomorrow as a matter of fact. This is in the middle of February when we’re recording this.
That Infusionsoft integration with our plugin, what it does is it allows for two very different things to happen for Infusionsoft users. One is to use the Infusionsoft eCommerce system. It’s kind of like the more obvious thing, in the same way that WooCommerce allows you to add the Infusionsoft payment gateway option with the premium plugin add-on or extension.
What’s more interesting, and one of the things that’s really interesting about lifterLMS and our whole mission and purpose in the eLearning, LMS, online courses community is engagement. In our Infusionsoft add-on, it allows you to inside of a course engage your students in a certain way with a automated email, badge, or certificate based on a triggering event.
Now let’s say someone finishes lesson one or passes a quiz. If you’re an Infusionsoft user, you’re very used to the language of applying a tag. We can also do something where if a user hasn’t logged in for a certain number of days we want to apply this tag. Now we’re in Infusionsoft world.
Joshua: The Infusionsoft world is really interesting. We’ve been building engagement systems in Infusionsoft for years now. What’s cool is you can trigger engagements in Infusionsoft based on when tags are applied and certain systems, like there’s a system called PlusThis, which allows you to wrap up videos and apply tags based on how much of a video is watched. It allows you to do some really interesting things. In that use case, you could apply a tag based on whether or not someone got 50% of the way through your video. You’d trigger an email if they hadn’t watched more than 50%, say, “Hey listen, you missed X, Y, and Z at the end of the video. Click this link to go back and watch it.” And you could actually up your engagement.
I think the one thing I want to demystify first is that lifterLMS scales the human touch with automation. Let’s start there because-
Chris: That confuses some people.
Joshua: That confuses too many people. I think it’s interesting because I can see why people are getting a little bit confused on that. It’s polarizing. If an email is supposed to be Chris, that’s not really scaling the human touch; it’s robotics. I think what lifterLMS is going to do and what it is doing currently is it’s allowing you to see when you need to follow up with your students. Our hope and our goal here is to provide a foundation of technology that helps scale the human touch by taking the thinking out of when do I contact my students. The system will say, “Okay, people are getting stuck here,” and maybe engage them, send kind of a shot across the bow with an email, but it will also tell you, “Hey, people are getting stuck here. Why don’t you give them a call?” Or maybe an email is generated when someone hasn’t logged into your course, so it’s showing they haven’t engaged with your material. It also tells you that you need to go in and give them a call in addition to that email. This is just example.
We want to create a bunch of different ways for your to engage your students, a bunch of tools that do it automatically. Our hope isn’t that that replaces you. It helps you scale and gives you more productive time so that you can get in, look at your dashboard, and know these are the people that need help, these are the people that I need to reach out to.
Because what happens with the internet is that we don’t have a classroom. We don’t have that in-person non-verbal communication where intuitively … This is kind of my origin story, is a professor saw me every day struggling in class, reached out, asked to get coffee, helped me out, and I succeeded in that class. How does that story translate online? What does that look like? That question has driven us to go, “Okay, we’re going to start with just some basics here with email automation and Infusionsoft, and merging that with course analytics and student analytics. The sky is the limit. We have a lot of other ideas.
At the same time, if you’re someone who has no interest in ever engaging your students, we don’t really want you to buy lifterLMS. I digress a little bit here, but I want to get back to the Infusionsoft thing, because Infusionsoft is an engine that can connect to lifterLMS and really allow you to turbocharge these interactions.
Chris: If I could jump in there, I also want to point out just with lifterLMS that if you’re not an Infusionsoft user, the stuff that we have built natively inside lifterLMS to allow these trigger points and email engagements that can be personalized to the user to go out is kind of like Infusionsoft-like capability that we’ve brought right into your WordPress and into your learning management system. Don’t feel like you have to use Infusionsoft, but the people that do use Infusionsoft know it’s a really amazing community, pretty advanced in terms of marketing and strategy around types of campaigns people want to build. We just wanted to reach out and since we have all that history with Infusionsoft make that intersection between WordPress learning management system and Infusionsoft, which is optional. You don’t have to use Infusionsoft to supercharge that.
Joshua: Transitioning over to scaling the human touch in the Infusionsoft world, I would say the upper echelon, the top 5% of Infusionsoft users, do this, and they do it really well. They do some incredible things with Infusionsoft. I think there needs to be a tool that sits in between Infusionsoft and WordPress that allows the rest of us to do some pretty cool, engaging things with our students and our customers.
LifterLMS is that perfect tool. With our Infusionsoft premium add-on that can connect with lifterLMS, you can do a lot of advanced things. All of them are based on tagging options, which if you’re getting into Infusionsoft I recommend using tags for pretty much everything because of their flexibility in organization and starting and stopping actions.
With that said, I think where we’re headed here with Infusionsoft and WordPress is creating a learning management system that can also act as a foundation for the Infusionsoft user who wants a deeper integration into their WordPress site.
Chris: Absolutely. Also, those of you who aren’t using Infusionsoft, that’s okay. The WordPress users kind of are your CRM. But the Infusionsoft people like their Infusionsoft CRM, so when someone purchases a course now they have a contact record and so on.
Joshua: Some of the things that we’re going to be able to do is pass that user data back to Infusionsoft, store things in custom fields, apply tags based on actions. We’re going to be able to pass eCommerce data back through so you’re not going to need a third party plugin to manage that, which there’s a lot of them. Then as time rolls on and we update the plugin, we’ll be able to track a lot of behavioral actions. I think we’ve talked at a high level about even integrating with video players and things like that.
We are looking at really creating the foundation of a learning management system and a deep Infusionsoft integration for WordPress. Not that it’s the goal, but I’m excited to see how people use it as a framework to integrate the two. It’s kind of on the horizon I think.
Chris: That’s kind of what we do. We’ve built the lifterLMS plugin, but we also do a lot of custom WordPress sites that have membership sites. We do a lot in the Infusionsoft community. We’re kind of at the intersection of WordPress and Infusionsoft, and if that project happens to have online courses or learning management system needs, we can extend and go deep with Infusionsoft advanced integrations or custom learning management system stuff.
For the plugin and the Infusionsoft integration, you’re off to the races with just that alone. Then there’s this whole other layer of custom development that in the hands of a skilled developer or someone with skilled Infusionsoft knowledge can really take it to another level of deeper customization and that sort of thing.
Joshua: Yep, absolutely. This has been a good one, Chris, to give some insight into where we’re headed with Infusionsoft and lifterLMS. If you have any specific feature requests or needs or what you’d like to see us do, we’d love to hear for you. Please leave us a comment at LMScast.com/Infusionsoft. We’d love to hear from you and get to know what you want to see in our premium add-on for lifterLMS.
Chris: Absolutely. Just to wrap it up, part of our story is we came with deep WordPress knowledge. We came with deep Infusionsoft knowledge. We came with learning management system online courses knowledge. We’ve just combined that all together, so we’re really excited to see what other people who are at this intersection are going to do with the tools we’re building and the community around that.
Joshua: Yep, absolutely. Until next time, we’ll talk to you soon.
