The Big Benefits of Adding a CRM (Like HighLevel) to Your Online Course Tech Stack

My team and I build a lot of online courses. We specialize using Wordpress and a good number of our projects make use of LearnDash as their learning management system.

I wrote the article, Should I Use the LD E-Commerce or WooCommerce? earlier where I recommend WooCommerce over LearnDash's e-commerce. It addresses the LearnDash shortcomings. I followed that up with, LearnDash Advice: Adding a CRM Puts You in the Big Leagues. In that one, I begin to cover the benefits of  adding a CRM to formula. That article focuses on how to use it for emailing and automation sequences.

Here I discuss the more significant advantages  you get when combining Wordpress and a CRM making use of connector plugins like Memberium (to integrate with the Keap and ActiveCampaign CRMs) and Better Wizard (for integrating with the HighLevel CRM).

How Did I Get Here: The Journey From Simple to the More Complex

When growing a simple Wordpress / LearnDash site, you typically consider using plugins to:

• provide improved access control to your content,
• customize what a member sees based on what they have requested or purchased, and
• adjust, enhance and customize the members experience overall.

What we see a lot when business owner hires us to enhance their site is a good number of Wordpress plugins used to needed features to the site. They help with displaying the right menus. They give the ability to protect content and give or remove access to different parts of the website for many different reasons.

The problem is that it's a cobbling together of plugins. In the shortterm, its a way to meet an immediate requirement. One time isn't a problem. Twice may not be an issue. Do this consistently for several years and you've slowly introduced potential plugin conflicts, performance implications and other problems that you now have to address. It's not a bad approach, but at some point an online course builder needs to step back and consider how to get past these secondary issues that creep up over time.

 Selecting a Platform That Uses the Right Tool for a Problem

Wordpress is a solid and very flexible platform for building online courses. LearnDash is a solid platform for building your online courses. It has a strong after market of products to expand it beyond what LearnDash itself offers. WooCommerce is the right platform to address e-commerce. The article I referenced earlier goes into that discussion.

What these tools do NOT do well is provide a platform for managing more a complicated customer journey well. What do I mean by that? As an online course gets more complicated, there are more requirements describing how members get access to their content. Here are some examples:

1. Is this person just a member with access to a course or does this person need access to view information, like course progress, about other members?
2. Do you want to sell multiple licenses or seats for your course to an organization, as opposed to an individual, and give them the ability to  manage who they want to use those licenses?
3. Will you need to allow members to add their own course materials without giving them access to full back administrative function which can compromise your environment?

These are just a few examples. There are many other requirements, but you can see these are more than just something simple.

When you try to do  this inside the Wordpress platform, you can easily stretch it beyond what its designed to do. Wordpress does have a database, but is it the right platform to support many different users in the system at the same time without bringing the system to its knees and delivering unacceptabily slow performance?

What Adding a CRM Gets You?

What adding a CRM does is it delegates these more complex functions to an outside system. This is something that is better suited for addressing these requirements. A CRM gets you is a tagging system. Every member can be tagged with attributes that tell you everything you want about that user. You tag them to handle things like:

• If aperson has never logged in, they need to be redirected to a page where they can reset their password.
• If a member is a group leader, allow Wordpress to show them LearnDash or Tin Canny reporting pages so they can access progress information for people in their team. (This would also include NOT allowing them to see progress for anyone outside their organization.)
• If a member is an editor and is allowed to add content or modify course content, you can tag them as having that priviledge.

The CRM holds the attributes in the form of a tag. The Wordpress component, whatever that may be, checks on that tag and takes action accordingly.

When I explain this to my customers, I like to use the analogy of a large church hall with many rooms. There many lights throughout the building. You often see a bigbank of light switches that turn lights on and offer throughout. To get the lights turned off in a given room, you need that "guy" with the big set of keys that knows which switches work the lights for which room.

The light switches on the wall are the tags. Each one corresponds to some attribute for a given member. When a member needs something turned on, you give them that switch and they get what that tag entitles them to get.

The CRM is that "guy" that knows what each tag does. And because the CRM knows what each tag does, it can orchestrate giving members access to what they need.

Obviously, I have oversimplified this, but the CRM with it's campaigns, e-commerce access, automations, etc. orchestrates what each member needs telling Wordpress and all it's pieces and parts what to do.

I'm happy to go over how this might be a great next step for you given your online course. Feel free to schedule a free call with me to go over this with you.