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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about marketing automation. According to Chris Badgett, marketing automation is the foundation of a scalable online education company. Its role is to generate leads, cultivate relationships over time, and turn those leads into paying students for coaching, academies, memberships, or courses.

In order to automatically offer value and engage users in follow-up sequences, he suggests first creating an email list using straightforward registration forms or integrated platform code, followed by helpful automations like RSS-driven newsletters and lead-magnet distribution (PDFs, checklists, or free mini-courses). Chris recommends concentrating on three lists instead of dozens of them: prospects, free users, and paying customers. Then, using tags and custom fields, audiences can be segmented and focused nurturing sequences that mostly deliver value and occasionally present offers are sent.

He identifies the main conversion tools (webinars, one-on-one calls/trials, and sales pages) and describes how automations may promote various conversion channels to boost sales while scheduling calls, reminding participants, and rerouting signups to buy sites.

In order for automation to build connections rather than come off as spam, he emphasizes pace (drip/timed campaigns), reasonable segmentation (by course, use case, or behavior), and consistently favoring beneficial material.

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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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m back with another solo episode. I’m Chris Badgett, CEO, and co-founder of Lifter LMS. And in this episode, we’re gonna go over the fundamentals of marketing automation for course creators. So what is marketing automation? The purpose of marketing is to get and keep a customer basically, but primarily to create a lead and then send that lead down a path where that person eventually buys a course, a membership, a coaching program, access to your academy or your school.

So let’s talk about the fundamentals of marketing automation. What are the jobs to be done? With marketing that we can figure out how to automate. That’s what we’re gonna go over in this episode. At the very beginning of a lead or a prospect’s journey it, we want to capture the lead in our marketing automation system, also known as an email list, A CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management.

There are many great CRMs out there. There’s tools like MailChimp, which has a free plan. ConvertKit LifterLMS, by the way, integrates directly with both of those, but there’s literally 50, even a hundred out there, about 60 of the marketing automation platforms you can connect directly to your WordPress site that’s powered by things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce or other tools in the space using an awesome tool called WP Fusion.

So I’m gonna mention a lot of tools in this episode. If you wanna find the best software tools, the recommended list for course creators, just do a Google search for LifterLMS, recommended resources and you’ll find a page on our website, which has all the tools I’m gonna talk about so that you can easily find them.

But this episode mostly isn’t about talking about tools and saying you should get certain tools. But I will mention some tools as we get into it because there’s WordPress, the content management system, and then there’s tools like Lifter, LMS, which adds the learning management system. But then the whole CRM or marketing automation piece is a third leg of that stool to make an online education company.

I also wanna mention there are CRMs and marketing automation tools. That work directly inside WordPress that integrate with tools like LifterLMS, for example. Groundhog and Fluent CRM are really popular for that. But let’s go back to marketing automation. So if I was just getting started, what are some of the first things that I would automate in my marketing on my WordPress website?

One of the first things I would automate is building my email list. So the absolute most simple way to do this is to basically build a newsletter email list. So in order to do that, what I would do is I would put a form on my site to sign up for my newsletter. You can use one of the popular WordPress form tools like Gravity Forms or WSForm, or.

Ninja forms, WP forms, formidable forms, et cetera, and capture an email when someone signs up for your newsletter. And then one of the things you can do from there is it just automates the population of your email list. If you ever want to send out a newsletter your list is growing over time as people sign up by filling out the form that’s on your blog sidebar.

Or maybe you have a dedicated page on your site or a form like in the footer of your site to sign up for your newsletter. And by a form, I just mean like a headline sign up for my newsletter, a place for people to enter their name and email and a sign up button. That’s it. You can also embed the signup form code directly from your email marketing platform.

They, they can give you. Like a form code that you copy and paste on your website to create the form. Or you can use one of the WordPress form solutions that makes it easy to just build the form right there in WordPress. But just to get a little bit fancy, one of the things you can automate for your newsletter, let’s say you write regular blog posts or articles, you can do what’s called an RSS Driven campaign, which just means that, you can set that up directly inside your email list platform, where anytime you publish a new blog post, the content gets put into an email and automatically sent to your subscribers. So that is the easiest way to do an automated newsletter that automatically grows without your involvement.

Automatically sends new content that you put on your blog directly to your subscribers. And that might be the entire article content, or it could be an excerpt, like a little like the title in the first, 200 words or so that people then click on in the email, go to your website and read the full article.

So that’s the most basic form of marketing automation. And a way to help you grow your email list by creating an RSS driven campaign. As we expand from there, there’s a concept called lead magnets. So what a lead magnet is it’s something that you offer for free that somebody puts in their name and email and they get the lead magnet which we’ll talk about the different types in a second.

That gets emailed to them or downloadable or whatever it is at that time, they’re gonna get added to your email list and you can then do follow up campaigns based on that lead magnet. So the earliest been around for a long time version of a lead

magnet is called an ebook. So some people get fancy and call that a white paper.

Basically any kind of PDF resource you can create that helps your ideal learner for free that’s ideally not too big to consume. Like we’re not trying to send somebody a 150 page real book, but just something of value that they would appreciate and be happy to give you their email address for.

That is the basic ebook lead magnet. The concept of a white paper is basically just something that’s a little bit more formalized, in depth, scientific researched, but it’s still just an ebook or information. Essentially. It’s a PDF. There’s other things like cheat sheets or checklists. These are like templates or resources you can provide.

In PDF format that your audience would like. So for example, if I was doing a course or coaching program around health and fitness, I might do a lead magnet about a shopping list of what you need to get ready for the program. Could be a certain type of running shoes or certain type of workout gear.

So on. So that would be, my lead magnet, PDF, if you will, in a pro tip about PDFs. You can also put those inside of your WordPress media library on your website. So when somebody signs up, you create the marketing automation. I use a naming convention when I construct things like. Tags or automations.

In my CRMI call this stage lead magnet delivery. So if I was doing the shopping list for my workout program. I would make a tag or automation called lead magnet delivery shopping list. When somebody signed up through that form to get that lead magnet, it would. Send an email. Hey, thanks for signing up.

Here’s a link to download your free shopping list. Please let me know if you have any questions about that. And then the link, I would actually just link them to the media file in my WordPress media library so they could download it directly from that email. So that’s how I would actually deliver the PDF.

So that’s like a one step. Or two step marketing automation where somebody enters their name and email clicks, submit. That’s step one. Step two, they get an email with a link to download the resource. So that’s the, that’s like the basics of email marketing and how that works. There’s other type of lead magnets you can get fancy, like you can do free courses on your website if you’re using a learning management system like Lifter, LMS.

That is also a lead, lead magnet. A free course or a free mini course, in my opinion, is one of the best lead magnets, particularly if someone is already somewhat interested and they’re willing to invest a little more time. Then a one to five page PDF and wants to get some free information from you to make sure you’re a good fit for their goals.

So you can set all that up in LifterLMS also has. An email system built in so that when somebody enrolls in a certain course, lifter can send a certain email instantly, then again on day two, day four, day five, and so on. So you can create what’s known as a follow-up sequence. So the cool thing about marketing and marketing automation is that it allows you to time travel.

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And what I mean by that is. It’s important to think about your customer journey through time, so it’s not like everything is instant and everything happens all at once. It doesn’t. So one day they might sign up for your email newsletter and then a month later they might decide to get one of your lead magnets, and then a month later they may want to jump on a sales call with you about signing up for the membership.

So when you think about these things through time, when you set up these marketing automations, they can, trigger sequential sequentially at the right time, not all at once. Some people call that drip campaigns or, time delay campaigns. So it’s all about thinking about your customer journey from, when they first hit your website.

To where they might be in six months. There’s all kinds of opportunities to create automation to help communicate some of the communications that you would have to do manually if you don’t set up any marketing automation. And then, once somebody is on your email list, usually when people first get started with marketing.

They will over complicate it and build all these different lists. But in my opinion, in my experience, I would recommend only having three email lists. So everything else you can do with what’s known as tags in custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But the three email lists that I find most education companies need.

Is a prospect email list. So this is somebody who’s never signed up for any of your free things or been a customer. They’re literally prospective possible future users or customers. Then I like to do a, what I call the users list or free user. So most education companies have some free training available so that free training is valuable.

It’s they’re still a free user. They haven’t given you any money, and that’s okay. And maybe that’s all they’ll ever be. They won’t graduate to being a paying customer, and that’s okay, but they’re a little bit more invested than a prospect who maybe just signed up for your newsletter on a whim or downloaded a PDF report from you.

So the free user is like the second email list that I like to have. And then the third email list are your customers. These are your paying customers. Maybe they spent a little bit of money, maybe they spent a lot of money but these are your. Your customers. And in each of these email lists, you can set up what’s known as a nurture sequence.

So again, we’re gonna start thinking through time and the way I like to do it is when somebody joins, say the prospect email list if you get fancy, you can have I don’t know, like 30 emails that go out, spread out over an entire year. Or you could do less. You could only do let’s say three follow ups and if they don’t move from prospect to free user, you’re just done and you stop emailing them in an automatic automated fashion through your marketing automation, that is completely fine as well.

I like to nurture the email list. So what that means is I like to add value and not just pitch products or pitch becoming a free user or pitch my most expensive thing. I like to just add value Hey, I see you signed up for my newsletter. You might also like this specific free article I published five years ago.

That’s the most popular. Blog post on my website about X, Y, and Z. That could be an email. And then the next email I could just, go for a personal connection and say something like, Hey I helped this type of person achieve this type of result. Do me a favor and hit reply to this email with your biggest challenge, and I’ll see if I can just help you or point you to the right place on my website where we have some free content that will help with your particular challenge.

And then I might send ’em another email. Hey, by the way, did you know we have a YouTube channel or a podcast or this other thing that you might also like? I’m not trying to sell them at all. And then on the next email, I might actually try to pitch something. It could be a recommendation for the free course on our website, or one of our sales presentations or one of our paid products.

But when you’re nurturing somebody through email, it’s important not to just constantly hit them up with pitches to quote, buy my stuff. That’s the, that’s what you wanna avoid so that you’re actively developing a relationship where you’re giving way more value than what you’re asking from them, which is something you can do with marketing automation.

And I do recommend spacing those out when somebody first joins your email list. In my experience, it’s Ty typically okay to send them with a little more frequency, like day one, day two, day four, day six. But if somebody’s, if you have a long nurture sequence I recommend spreading things out so that you can as their excitement about first joining, maybe they’re turning into more of a long-term sales cycle, as we call it.

You’re not just like hitting ’em every single day with something new. So space, those out. And, free users, it’s the same thing. Nurture free users, add value. And then on, the fourth email, recommend one of your paid products. Then go back to adding value. Adding value, and so on.

And then when it comes to customer nurture sequences. I like to do the same thing Hey, you’re a customer. I’m not just gonna instantly start pitching you my next expensive thing, or to buy more quantity of X, Y, and Z. I’m gonna add value and be like, Hey, did you know you could get help in this way?

Reach out to us here if you’re stuck. Hey, did you know we have these five resources for customers only? I wanna make sure you saw that and so on. And then as you get through the. Add value. You get to the point where you can send a, an email about, Hey, you might wanna upgrade.

We have this other thing over here. Or you might, I also like this other product or program course or membership that we have. So those are nurture sequences. And important thing about nurture sequences is you set these up to create an automated follow up. Create touch points where you’re primarily adding value and building a strong, healthy relationship with the people that have entrusted you with their email address.

That’s what nurture sequences are. But around all that, you still have an email list and can do dedicated one-off broadcast email campaigns. So as an example, you may have nurture sequences running. You get to, let’s say the New Year’s holiday of the year and you’re doing a January 1st. It’s a brand new year sale.

You can still email your list, either just the prospects, just the free people, just the customers or all of them together about your January 1st New Year sale. So just because you do marketing automation, you can also do. Broadcast emails on top of that. And the key to email is that email gets a bad rap.

Oh, people are just gonna spam me and all this stuff. But if you’re genuinely care about your people and you’re genuinely adding value through your nurture sequences and your lead magnets, and when you do make an offer for something paid or to move a customer further along in the journey. It’s a good fit for them.

It could really help them in their life. That’s a really good thing. So just keep that in mind. And then the other great place for marketing automation is what I call conversion tools. So this is where you move from like you’ve generated the lead, you’re nurturing the lead, and now there’s this step before somebody becomes a customer where they can, go through a sales process basically. And I learned a framework here I’d like to share with you, which is there’s really only three conversion tools. So the first one is a sales call, also known as a demo, a trial, or a proof of concept as it’s also known. And a webinar, which is a group sales presentation.

Now, depending upon your price point, a different one of those conversion tools makes more sense for your offer. And I’ll just add that there is one more conversion tool, which is primary above all of this, which is the sales page for a course and membership. So even if you’re, you don’t have a conversion tool like the other three I mentioned previously.

You probably have a course description or a membership or a coaching program description or a page. That sales page is a type of conversion tool. So that’s this. This is one area where you can create marketing automation. You can create marketing automation around scheduling sales calls where people you know say, yes, I’d like to have a 30 minute strategy call.

You can go through a calendar booking link, and automatically. Set all that up there. There’ll be follow up emails out of the calendar system to capture those signups, and then send reminders about the future sales call. You can automate webinars as well, particularly if you do a prerecorded webinar.

So if somebody signs up and then they get redirected to a page that has a presentation, from there, there can be a call to action. To purchase your program. And the other important piece of marketing automation is to do what’s called segmentation. So segmentation is where when people are signing up, you’re creating, you’re adding tags or what’s known as custom fields to segment your audience so that later.

You can do marketing automation or broadcast emails based on the unique characteristics of this segment. So there’s different types of segments, like with Lifter, whether you’re using our MailChimp or ConvertKit integration, or you’re using WP Fusion to get to other tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot and Salesforce, you can segment based on which course they’re in.

So if you ever just need to do marketing automation or nurture sequence based on course. Membership specifically, you can do that. The other thing you can do is use cases. So maybe you have a couple different types of customers. Maybe you work with individuals and you also work with companies. That would be another way that you can segment and have different kind of micro campaigns for your different use cases.

And just a pro tip for you here, one of my favorite ways when you’re trying to increase sales, if you have multiple conversion tools, if somebody comes in through one of them, let’s say they sign up for a free course or they sign up for a sales call, or they watch your webinar and you have all these things available, if they sign up for one and they signed up for this one, but they haven’t seen these other two and they haven’t become a customer yet.

You can, send future resources to send them to your other conversion tools, which will help increase your sales and give them more time to consider your product, learn about it, and buy. And of course, with our existing customers, we can create expansion revenue by creating marketing automation that lets people know about other opportunities, future opportunities that you release.

How to upgrade and upsell through various offers. So that is a high level overview about how to do marketing automation for course creators. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, just let me know. I’m happy to hear what you’re doing for marketing automation. And if there’s any questions you have or you want me to go deeper on a specific topic, just let me know.

Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. 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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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