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.

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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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Episode Transcript

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