Keap Consultant Opinion: What Are the Benefits for Your Membership Site?

As a long time Keap consultant with over eleven years developing Keap expert systems, I thought it was time to answer the question, "What does Keap get me that I don't get using BuddyBoss, LearnDash and Wordpress alone for my membership or online course project?" Many business owners build successful BuddyBoss community sites without it. Many course builders use LearnDash either on its own or with BuddyBoss to build learning sites with community features so learner can interact with each other to enhance the learning experience. That do  just fine without any Keap integration.

What is it they are missing?

Keap Consultant Opinion #1 - How Does It Integrate?

Keap consultant teams typically integrate Keap to Wordpress using one of two tools. Those are Memberium and AccessAlly. Both are implemented as Wordpress plugins that enable Wordpress and Keap to communicate. I recently wrote an article comparing the two systems with information to help business owners select the tool that's best for your situation.

Keap Consultant Opinion #2 - E-Commerce and Giving Access

This then enables you to use Keap's e-commerce features, for example, to sell a course or membership to a customer,  triggers actions to assign them access to the content they purchased and send them their login credentials to gain access. This is something you could have done with WooCommerce integration with LearnDash which then integrates with BuddyBoss and you get something similar.

So this by itself is not the reason to go Keap, but this might be.  Suppose you want to do one of the following:

• You are selling several courses individually and also packaged together.
• You are taking a try and buy approach giving either temporary access or access to a first few lessons before making the bigger sale.
• As part of a trial sale like I just described, you want to offer one of several choices based on the members behavior using the course.

Some of these can be done without Keap, but it's going to get complicated and may involve bringing in different other Wordpress plugins to make it happen.

Keap Consultant Opinion #3 - Marketing Intelligence

In #2 above, I started explaining more complex sales scenarios. What I have found happens is you start a membership site or online course site and they you start selling. Then you need to start gathering intelligence. It's tough without a tool like Keap. You want to get answers to questions like:

• Did the member already login? Did they login more than once?
• Is the user progressing through the course at the right pace? Are they falling behind? Are they making really good progress?
• Is the member taking a look at other things going on in the site? Are they showing buying behavior (i.e., visiting sales pages for course they haven't yet purchased.)

Because the site is integrated with Keap, you can tag members based on what they do on the site. Everything can be marked on the contact's Keap record using tags. As tags get applied to the contact, campaign sequences can be triggered accordingly.

• You could send an "attaboy" to someone going through your course quickly or scoring a high mark on a quiz.
• You could send an "Is everything OK?" message to someone who hasn't logged in or going through a course very slowly.
• You could message someone when they are close to the end of the course recommending another course that follows it in your curriculum.

These are just a few of things possible when you membership site is Keap powered.

Keap Consultant Opinion #4 - Trace Your Member Footsteps

Often times, you make assumptions about how people use your site and you are mistaken. You are going on gut instincts instead of gathering the facts. A Keap integrated site enables you trace everything your members do on your site. In #3 above, I talk about how this can help you market more effectively. You can, however, use similar tactics to see where you may have flaws in how people use your content.

Suppose you have a course that allow member to take course lessons in any order they like.  It could be it's more like a smorgasbord site instead of a linear or sequential course. If that's the case, you can use trace information to identify lessons no one cares to see. That could be an opportunity to rearrange your course, better focus a lesson you think is being underappreciated or remove lesson that aren't serving their purpose.

Keap Consultant Opinion #5 - Communicate with Outside Systems

Because of our online course building know-how combined with Keap expert skills, we often get pulled into building certification programs. In several cases, our business owner customer wants to automatically notify an outside party that someone got the certification. This eliminates the need to do this manually.

Keap has features for integrating with external systems when someone in your program achieves some goal. Many certification bodies provide documentation for interacting with it and Keap typically has a way to work with them.

That's yet another way Keap enables you to do things you couldn't do easily without it.

Hope this helps!