LifterLMS 10: We Do A Full Review

Our LifterLMS 10 full review breaks down everything — features, performance & value. See if it’s worth it for your online course.

In this detailed review, we dive deep into LifterLMS 10, exploring its latest features and improvements. From user interface enhancements to new integrations, we cover everything you need to know to maximize your online learning platform. Whether you’re a seasoned educator or just starting out, this video will equip you with the insights you need to leverage LifterLMS effectively.

#1 – Focus Mode

#2 – Introducing Cart Abandonment Recovery

#3 – Email Configuration

#4 – Cart Abandonment Recovery Coupon

#5 – Events Add-on

#6 – Engagement Trigger

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:16.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 173. In this episode, we’re going to do a full review of version 10 of LifterLMS. Came out a few days ago. It’s got some fantastic new features. We’re also, probably if we have time, also discuss how you might be considering migrating from LearnDash to LifterLMS, and we might be giving you some tips and insights about how to do that. I’ve got my co-host Kurt with me. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

[00:00:54.930] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, uh, and we also work directly with the great team over at LifterLMS and WP-Tonic. So I’m wearing the right shirt today.

[00:01:07.400] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Um, should be a great show. Um, before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors of the show. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:01:20.060] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:01:53.360] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back Folks, wanna point out we’ve got some fantastic special offers from the sponsors. We’ve also got a course from Kirk that shows you how to build a membership website from beginning to end, plus a load of other goodies. Where can you go to get these? Go over to wp-tonic.com/deals, wp-tonic.com/deals, and you’ll find all the free goodies there. Plus a fantastic course. So Kirk, where would you say we should start? Um, what’s your initial impressions about LifterLMS version 10?

[00:02:37.540] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think one of the first things I want to hit on, Jonathan, is that when you look at the 10.0 release of LifterLMS, you’re not looking at some kind of um, Band-Aid, you know. You’re not looking at, um, we used to call it bold new graphics in the motorcycle industry, you know, like when a, when a car manufacturer or a motorcycle manufacturer doesn’t change a single thing, right? They just change like the color and the stripe or the, or, you know, different set of wheels, and they go, oh, brand new. Um, I think the Lyft— I refresh— refresh, yes, a refresh. Uh, we would call that bold new graphics, uh, BNG, in, in the, in the marketplace behind the scenes. This is not a bold new graphics release of LifterLMS. When I compare other learning management systems to their evolution, to their growth, to their development, there’s just no comparison to LifterLMS at this stage of the game. Leading up to the 10.0, they had, you know, private site. They did a soft launch of events prior to the official 10.0 release. Uh, they added notes last year. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not like it was stagnant for years and now they’ve added these things that out of necessity, it’s that they just continually improve the product.

[00:03:58.170] – Kurt von Ahnen

And, um, this 10.0 release was a big deal. So I know we’re going to cover things in detail, but when you look at things like, just for example, um, the abandoned cart recovery thing that they have Jonathan, you would normally, you know, we would say to people, oh, we’re going to need WooCommerce and CartFlows, and we’re gonna have to configure this and configure the other thing. And now LifterLMS has come along and said, hey, if you’re using the native payment gateway in Lifter, uh, tick this box and it’ll activate abandoned cart and send coupons and emails out to your people if they don’t buy. Like, that’s a pretty incredible add-on, and it’s— it just comes with, with any of the packages that include any of the e-commerce packages, it’s included.

[00:04:42.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, so fantastic points, Curt. So on our list, I’ve got number 1, focus mode. So maybe you can tell us what is focus mode and just give us the insights.

[00:04:56.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

Focus mode to me is, it’s simple in its expression, it’s more complicated in its execution. So this, you know, if people want the details, I can give you details. SkyPilot is a full site editing theme, and we were experimenting in SkyPilot with the idea of focus mode. And that idea is, how do you get your learner— it’s like the focus mode when you’re writing with WordPress. You know, you can go to that full screen focus when you’re writing blog posts so that you have a whole page to edit on without all the distractions of like sidebars and widgets and menus and things like that. And so if we were going to emulate, that experience, you know, in full site editing, we were able to just create additional templates, right? Uh, different page templates. We say, we’ll apply this page template to every lesson or to every course page. And so that when a student went into that lesson page, it wasn’t— it didn’t have the header, the footer, the sidebar, or any of those things. Because in a normal website, header, footer, sidebar, those things are like in your marketing pages., but not necessarily in your back-of-paywall, you know, functioning lesson pages.

[00:06:09.070] – Kurt von Ahnen

And so we were doing that in SkyPilot and the question came up, well, if we could do it in SkyPilot, how would we do it in every other theme, right? Because we don’t have a lot of control over how every theme works. And so it took a little time, but the team at LifterLMS was able to create focus mode and it works with most themes.

[00:06:28.430] – Jonathan Denwood

So Got some questions. So does it only work with that specific theme or does it work with any kind of theme page builder that you might be using with—

[00:06:41.550] – Kurt von Ahnen

A marketing person for LifterLMS would say it works with all themes. Uh, I’m more cautious. I say most themes. I’m sure someone’s going to pull out like an Avada website or something like that and go, well, it doesn’t work on my Avada website. Well, yeah, but you’re using some theme that’s 12 years old. So, so I could see where there might be, you know, some conflict somewhere. But if you are on mainstream, you know, Astra, Kadence, GenerateBlocks, you know, all those things. Yeah. Divi is a question mark because that’s a page builder in its own right. So I’m not, I’m not certain about Divi. And I’ve been tracking Divi on their own Facebook page. And I hesitate to commit to anything on Divi based on what I see on that page yet. I think they’ve got some sorting to do with that Divi 5 release.

[00:07:30.670] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. Right. You mentioned it, but the next one is cart abandon recovery. Do you have a seeing sight on that one?

[00:07:41.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

This one I love. I think this is one of the— it’s going to be the easiest to use for anyone that’s using the native payment gateway in LifterLMS. So if you have the Stripe PayPal or their Authorize.net payment gateway activated, and you’re going directly through LifterLMS to make your sales. Um, it acts more like a shopping cart than it did before, meaning someone goes in, they’re thinking, oh, they’re going to buy this membership or they’re going to buy a course. If they put in their email address, if that field gets filled in and then the internet turns off, they get pulled away from their lunch, do they take a phone call from a customer, whatever, they get distracted and they don’t complete the purchase. And we know that that happens, right? If that didn’t happen, there wouldn’t be abandoned cart recovery plugins out there. And so that happens. But as long as they put in the email address, LifterLMS has something to work with. And so if you activate it, so it comes with any of the, any of the payment gateway options that you choose, the abandoned cart is an option that you can tick.

[00:08:44.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

You can turn it on. If you turn that on, as long as your customer not your customer, as long as your prospect puts in their email address, LifterLMS will be able to send them 3 emails and they’re based on like conditional logic, right? So the first one gets sent, hey, you know, your shopping cart’s still full. Did you forget something, right? Did you forget something? We’ve all seen that email. The second one is like, hey, just want to give you another, you know, shot to reserve your seat in this course. And then the last one, if you choose, Uh, it could add a custom coupon code that’s just for like a one-time use coupon code, and you could be whatever you want the coupon code to be, right? It could be specific for that user, and it could be for any amount— 5%, 10%, 20%, whatever. But just say, hey, this is our last email, just want to let you know if you’re still interested in that course, you can get 20% off today by using this coupon code. Boom, done, right? 3 emails, 3 follow-ups. And let’s just be real for a second, Jonathan.

[00:09:44.110] – Kurt von Ahnen

Um, any kind of capitalized investment, any kind of, uh, any kind of expenditure that’s like more than $50, people need to have exposure to it more than once. So like, I do a lot of training in the powersports and marine industry, and it’s common knowledge to us that before someone buys a boat, you know, a $50,000, $60,000, $80,000 boat, they’re gonna need 13 or 15 touchpoints with who they buy that from. It could be their website, it could be visiting the store, it could be an email, a text message, but they’re gonna need multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase decision. So if you’re selling a course, say for $600, chances are your customer’s not gonna come to the website, make a purchase decision in 30 seconds, put in their email and buy the thing, right? They’re gonna require more touchpoints. Maybe social media exposure, an email, a text message, something. And this abandoned cart thing is 3 more touchpoints that helps compress that pipeline to purchase.

[00:10:45.970] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. I think you touched it, but the next one is email configuration. Yeah. So how have they improved that?

[00:10:55.330] – Kurt von Ahnen

Couple of things. LifterLMS, and this is one of those things that gets confusing for clients when I work with clients. But LifterLMS has notifications. It has a separate area where it has emails for engagements. And now it’s got this, you know, series of 3 emails in the abandoned cart situation. It does have the ability to better create emails, better embed codes. So when you create an email, you can make it dynamic. So I could say, hey, ‘Customer first name, you know, period. You know, you were looking at course shortcode blah blah blah. It’s available in this membership shortcode blah blah blah.’ And so when you would receive that email, Jonathan, it would say, it would say like, ‘Hey Jonathan, I saw you were looking at the ABC course. It’s available in the 123 membership, you know, click here to make a purchase.’ And so that Email configuration allows us to dynamically create more engaging emails. And then, like I said, we have emails in the engagements features and we have emails in the notification features and you can adjust and edit those emails through the notification and engagement menus. And you can also review those in the abandoned cart setup.

[00:12:18.780] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think, I think my I want to add a bit of insight to this, hopefully not confuse people. Transactional marketing email is one of the things that confuses people, and then you’ve got inbox email, um, because a lot of hosting providers, especially the better ones, don’t provide email functionality with their hosting packages. At WP-Tonic, we do. With LifterLMS, we provide transactional and marketing email functionality. We also provide one email address for inbox if necessary as well. But people like WP Engine, Kinsta, I think Rocket, um, also, um, all the better quality hosting providers don’t. Funny enough, on the cheaper side, they probably do, but it’s a bit flaky. Um, whoever They’re providing it or you’re getting it from a third party. Um, you’re going to have to set it up. You’re going to have to, um, install a specific plugin. We, we do all that at WP-Tonic. We set everything up and we use SendGrid and it’s part of our— and the reason why we decided to do that, folks, was that we specialize in membership learning management systems, BuddyBoss, Fluent Community websites, and they need marketing and email functionality, and you get it all in one package.

[00:13:54.390] – Jonathan Denwood

But like I say, on the cheaper side, um, on the more expensive side, um, they definitely don’t provide it, and you’re going to have to use something like SendGrid. There’s half a dozen great providers. Omnisend, Omnisend, who used to sponsor the show, is a great provider as well. There’s a number of them. Do you think— do you want to comment on what I’ve just said?

[00:14:21.540] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, I think you’ve handled it. Transactional email to me is a whole lot more straightforward in a website setup. When you get into marketing email and SMTPs and setting up CRMs, and it can get more involved in it. That’s when you probably want to consult somebody if you’re not comfortable.

[00:14:41.620] – Jonathan Denwood

And it doesn’t only affect WordPress folks. There’s a few SaaS providers that don’t— you have to use a third-party provider as well. So it’s a bit confusing, but don’t think it’s just WordPress because that also affects some SaaS providers as well in this area. Onto the next thing. Cart abandoned recovery coupon. What’s this about, Kurt?

[00:15:10.270] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, and it kind of gives me a chance to fill in some of the missing elements when I talked about email configuration and abandoned cart in the first place. I mentioned earlier that you have the ability to add that, that custom coupon that gets sent out. I think what I failed to mention before, and correct me if I’m wrong, Jonathan, because I was excited when I was speaking, but you can set those 3 emails that I talked about. You can select when they go out. So do you want it to go out in 1 day, 2 days, 5 days, 15 days, whatever, right? So you know your market, your needs the best, you know, you know, the cost of what you’re selling. So what’s going to fit the best? So you can select that custom coupon code or a prefix for whatever you want it to be. Like maybe for Jonathan, he’s WP-Tonic, right? So maybe he’s going to be WP- and then whatever the coupon is, right? So it’ll fill it in with a randomized coupon code, uh, and then you can say include that in email number 3, right? And then, uh, it picks up percentage point or anything like that.

[00:16:15.220] – Kurt von Ahnen

But one of the things I, I want to talk about with the coupons is, A, you can create them as unique coupons, which is totally cool, right? So you don’t have somebody willy-nilly sharing your coupon code all over the internet. And then, um, coupon expiry. So you can say, hey, this coupon’s only good for 3 days, and that helps you create like a sense of urgency to the purchase. I was talking about shrinking the sales pipeline earlier. That’s one of those things. You create a sense of urgency and you say, this coupon’s good for 3 days, this coupon’s good for a week, like whatever you want, you pick the time. But because it has an expiration date and because it’s unique, it can only be used once and you’ve got the expiration, which to me is that— that’s, that’s like a real system. That’s like a credible, real trackable system. And then the next thing, because I mentioned trackable system, is those coupons, that whole cart abandonment thing and the coupons and all of that is all tracked within its own weekly report in LifterLMS. And so you can look at your cart abandonment recovery statistics and you can, you know, say, hey, enable this weekly report and then, you know, send the report to whoever you want to send it to.

[00:17:27.520] – Kurt von Ahnen

So you can send it to yourself and blind copy your partners or whatever. But you get this report and it will tell you how many coupons were given, how many conversions it created, and how much revenue it created through the use of it. So I think it’s a really great tool.

[00:17:45.000] – Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for that. I think this is a good place for us to go with our middle break. When we come back, we’re going to be talking about you event add-ons, engagement triggers, and also about migrating from LearnDash to LifterLMS. I think a lot of people are looking at doing that. I’m going to give you some insights about that. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:18:08.950] – Kurt von Ahnen

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. 2.0. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:18:46.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Coming back, folks, want to point out we’ve got a fantastic weekly newsletter. Normally give some of the links, go into more details about one of these shows, and I give you a curated list of the best tech WordPress and tech stories. To get this newsletter, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. WP-Tonic. Wp-tonic.com/newsletter. So let’s go straight in. Um, one of the bigger ones, I suppose, um, uh, is the Event Add-On. Um, obviously you’ve got the free product, and then you’ve got Earth, then you’ve got Universal, and then you’ve got Infinity. I want to point out, if you host with WP-Tonic, you get the Infinity bundle, which is normally around $1,700. You get that as part of our hosting package, which gives you all these add-ons. But what— give us the insight about the event add-on, Kurt.

[00:19:46.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you know how everybody has a favorite thing, right? Like, no matter where you work, no matter what you do, everybody’s got a, uh, a favorite thing. The favorite thing for me is because the events add-on is a thing that I personally had requested. It’s something that I’ve wanted for a long time. Um, a couple of years ago, I did the blog post for LifterLMS that talks about integrating your LifterLMS website with the Zoom integration, uh, that was available in the repository. And it was an involved process. It was, you know, 90 to 120 minutes of, you know, making a pretty involved application in Zoom and then integrating that with your WordPress website, and then further trying to integrate and strategize the use of those meetings within the LifterLMS, you know, frameset, right? The course and lesson structure. So I’ve been asking for a while, hey, can we have an events feature that we could add so that people could just have— they could just create fe— they could just create events and make them part of their courses or part of their memberships and, you know, invite their enrolled members to come to these.

[00:20:56.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Events. I know that that sounds simple when I say it like that, but, but it took some development, right? And so they came out with that as part of this 10.0 release, and I’m really happy with it, Jonathan. The integration with Zoom, um, I went from, you know, 90 to 100 minutes of trying to integrate on that other platform. I mean, literally, the first time took me probably 15 minutes, but the second time was less than 10 minutes. I mean, I literally knew exactly what I was doing. Went to Zoom, create an app, choose this, you know, bank of 155 actions within Zoom I want to do. And it was like an instantaneous thing. I got my API keys, I put them in the back of my website, and Zoom was connected. Um, that is awesome. Now, when I create an event, I can name the event, I can attach it to a Zoom meeting that LifterLMS creates for me through that app. Uh, so it creates that meeting. And puts everything right there. I can create a separate events page in my website, or the events will show up on the membership or the course that I create the events for.

[00:22:02.770] – Kurt von Ahnen

And you do this all right through the membership and course pages. So, so it’s all right there. Everything’s right there at your fingertips to set up. One of the features that I like, and I think it might be a stumbling block to others, so it’s, it’s— I want to make sure I present it in a way that’s honest and transparent. If you are using the events feature and you put it on a public-facing page, their visitors aren’t going to see the location of the events. They’re not going to see the Zoom link. They’re going to know that there’s an event. It’ll say there’s an event at this time, but it’s not going to show the Zoom link. It only shows the location because the location could be physical or it could be the Zoom link. It only shows the location to people that are enrolled in the course or the membership that you created the event for. So that to me is one stumbling block that some people might, you know, from a marketing perspective might see as a stumbling block, but it’s actually exactly the way that I wanted the platform to be built.

[00:23:02.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

I wanted to make sure that I had a way to invite registered enrolled users to, and use the event feature for list building purposes. So you and I talk a lot about marketing, right? But, but if anyone could click on the event, click on the Zoom link and show up, well, then where was the inspiration to enroll, sign up, do whatever? You could make it a free membership, sign up for this free membership and come to our free Zoom meeting. But then you’ve captured the user and the email address, right? So now you’ve got them and they’re added to your list. So whether you’re using your WordPress users list for marketing, my goodness, whether you’re using your WordPress users list for marketing, or if you’re integrated with a CRM tool, the main thing is that you’ve grown the list. You’ve brought that person’s user information in. And so that’s exactly the way I wanted the event system to work. And I’m really pleased with how it functions.

[00:23:59.680] – Jonathan Denwood

Now, um, got a couple of quick questions. So I’ve forgotten if you’re, I know Zoom provides a free version., but let’s talk about the paid version, the normal paid version, which I think is still around $150. Um, they might put it up to $170. I’m not sure. I don’t, I think I’m still paying $150 a year. How many, I’ve forgotten. They’ve got the add-on, which the, the Webinar add-on, haven’t they? But how many can on the, do you know, on the normal paid version, how many people can attend a meeting?

[00:24:39.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

The number that stuck in my head from memory is 300.

[00:24:44.260] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?

[00:24:46.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:24:46.220] – Jonathan Denwood

If you’re on that, that should cover most scenarios, you know.

[00:24:51.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Let’s be real. I mean, unless you’re Tony Robbins, you know, and I might be— I might be being a little facetious here, but unless you’re Tony Robbins or Russell Brunson, if you’ve got 50 people on a single meeting, you’re kicking butt, right?

[00:25:06.910] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, unless you’re spending a lot of money on marketing.

[00:25:09.070] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think most, most people that we deal with in our circles, Jonathan, would probably never have, you know, more than 50 to 70 people on a single call.

[00:25:23.290] – Jonathan Denwood

So this is really built for internal masterminds, upsells to higher where you might be having a week weekly mastermind meeting, that type of scenario. Is that correct? Do you—

[00:25:34.580] – Kurt von Ahnen

well, I picture it like, um, let’s say I’m running a cohort of 50 students, you know, um, max. Because if you’re running a cohort, you’re, you know, you’re using people as a group, right? So if I had a cohort of 50 students and I put up an event, that’s— I’m gonna get those 50 students, period. That’s it. And it might be, hey, I’m gonna do the 2-hour lecture live, and you have to come to that, and then you’re gonna, uh, you know, view the resources and lessons 2, 3, and 4. There’s a quiz after lesson 4, and then we’re gonna have an assignment for you to do, and then a final test. Like, let’s just say that that’s the way that that goes. You know, that cohort’s gonna come into that first live event, and that’s it. But having the ability to embed that event directly into your course page and make it part of the structure is a big bonus. It just lends to, um, LifterLMS has, uh, has 7 things that, that they refer to as, as like their way of doing things, right? And one of their core values is, um, student experience first, right?

[00:26:40.470] – Kurt von Ahnen

Learner, learner experience first. And I think that this events add-on really speaks to that. It just, it’s implemented and it’s, it’s used in a way that really adds value to the student.

[00:26:54.250] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. So, but it is with this, it’s just become a lot easier to utilize LifterLMS with Zoom. Yeah. Right. That’s fantastic. And I presume, is this available, do you know, on the Universal Infinity bundles only, or is it, or is it available on the Earth bundle?

[00:27:16.530] – Kurt von Ahnen

I don’t— it’s an Infinity product, so it comes with the Infinity bundle. Events does, um, but you can get it separately as a separate app.

[00:27:25.740] – Jonathan Denwood

You can still buy it separately.

[00:27:27.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:27:28.170] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes. Do you know how much roughly it is to buy separately?

[00:27:31.840] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s probably in the $299 range, would be my guess. So all the pricing is on LifterLMS. And fair warning, um, LifterLMS did about a month ago have a price increase, so like right now the Infinity bundle is used to be $1,500 a year. Now it’s almost $1,600 a year. Everything went up basically $100.

[00:27:52.570] – Jonathan Denwood

Right on to the last one on the list. Engagement triggers. What’s that about?

[00:27:59.610] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you know how I said everyone has a favorite and then sometimes you have things that aren’t your favorites. This is, this is one of the features they rolled out that I’m sure somebody loves. I didn’t really see a need for it, but I, but I can explain it really quickly. Like I said before, there’s notifications and there’s engagements. An engagement in LifterLMS is something that is caused by a user’s trigger. They signed up for a course, they completed a course, they successfully completed a quiz. You know, there’s some kind of a trigger that makes something happen. Now that engagement could be multiple things. It could be, um, send them a certificate, uh, could be send them an achievement, like did they win a badge or something, right? They completed 3 lessons and got a badge. Maybe it’s that. Um, could you send an email? That’s, that’s, that’s a big one, sending an email. So this, any engagement trigger is like, normally what would happen when you would make an engagement in LifterLMS is you would say, I want to send an email to every student that completes a course. And then you would say, so engagement, you know, new engagement, student completes a course, and then it would come up and say courses, and it would say select the courses that you want this engagement to, you know, to work on.

[00:29:21.260] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, now instead of having to pick each of the courses, you just leave it blank and it’ll be for any course. So if the student completes any course, they’re going to get whatever the engagement is, which is like maybe it’s an email, right? I’m going to send an email to every, every student that completes a course. Um, my concern with this, Jonathan, and you know me, right? I’m always like, hate to say devil’s advocate, right? But I like to do the seesaw thing, you know, pros and cons. You want to use the any engagement trigger, you know, sparingly or with full knowledge that it’s going to go to everybody, right? And so I don’t necessarily want to send the same email to everybody that finishes any course. I don’t necessarily want to send the same engagement to everybody that successfully, you know, passes a quiz. Like, so you want to kind of weigh it, like, go, do I really want this to go to everybody or do I want it to just go to people that take, you know, Course ABC, right? Because Course DEF is maybe a different demographic, maybe a different message. And so I want to encourage people like Everybody wants automation.

[00:30:30.580] – Kurt von Ahnen

Everybody wants the easy button. And that’s really common in the work that we do. But I think there’s a lot of value in the extra work, like the custom message for each course that’s passed. Well, or something like that.

[00:30:45.140] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I think you’re right about this because what we’ve found, we provide FluentCRM and we got a couple other, um, marketing automation. We’ve got two of the leading marketing automation, um, solutions in WordPress, and you have access— if you host with us, you have access to both. We lean a lot on Fluent CRM, and if you— so you get that as part of your package. Um, um, I need to make that clear on, on the Microsoft package. I think that you do get that. Um, you don’t, if you’re getting something like FluentCRM, you want to switch this off. You want to choose which one’s going to be doing the email marketing. A lot of people, I’ve seen this when I was actively building, um, if the LMS or learning management websites for people, they, they would have a mixture of different emails. Um, like they were with a cheapo and some of the transactional email would be sent by LifterLearndash or, um, something would be sent by another plugin or they would have multiple plugins that could send email. Um, it becomes extremely a mess. You just want, you just want one key, one key to truth when it comes to email marketing.

[00:32:19.590] – Kurt von Ahnen

WooCommerce is a perfect example because WordPress natively sends a, you’ve got a new account, click here to update your password. Right. And then LifterLMS would send a notification that would say, thank you for signing up for your new course. And then they’d get a receipt and a follow-up email from WooCommerce. And so you would end up with all of these things polluting your customer’s inbox. All styled differently and not carrying consistent branding. And that’s a problem.

[00:32:48.350] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes. Thanks for pointing that out. Cause that’s happened a lot. Doesn’t happen if we’re building the site out, but I’ve seen a lot of people doing it themselves and they’re using WooCommerce and WooCommerce subscription. And that, that, once you know what you’re doing, you avoid that. Now let’s go on. There’s been a bit of controversialism in the learning, the WordPress learning management area, because the parent company that owns LearnDash have done some things that have caused some concern in some ways. I think it’s a little bit overblown. But I think it’s kind of highlighted that, and we might be totally wrong here, is that LearnDash, I don’t think is gonna, we’re gonna see a lot of new functionality or new elements to LearnDash for quite a while. I think it’s, it’s a established product, but I personally, I might be totally wrong here, but I don’t see it being updated very often. And they’ve, I think they combined their membership plugin with, you can, you buy, you buy it now, you get both now. Um, because of these, what’s happened, a lot of people are looking at migrating their membership from LearnDash to another provider.

[00:34:35.140] – Jonathan Denwood

And LifterLMS is one of the best alternatives in my opinion. But that normally both would allow you to export stuff as JSON files, but it, you know, it’s a little bit more complicated, but I think AI has come to the rescue to some extent. Would you like to take over? And do you think with AI— and I know Chris from LifterLMS, the founder, has provided some videos and resources about moving using AI— how, but depending on the size of your community and that, it’s not something— I think it’s become a lot easier, but it’s really Unless you’re very technical, you’re going to have to employ an agency or experienced freelancer to do this for you, aren’t you?

[00:35:33.510] – Kurt von Ahnen

The same answer with everything in WordPress, Jonathan, is, you know, it depends. Um, really depends on your use case and your situation. If you just want the course material, if you say you got a course in LearnDash and you want to put that course in your LifterLMS website, um, Perfect. You mentioned it already. Chris already made a YouTube video about it and put the exact prompt in the description of the video. So if you go to YouTube and you search up migrate from, uh, LearnDash from, you know, with LifterLMS, it— he’ll show you right there. Like, this is exactly how you do it. Um, so you can, you can do that. And using Claude, uh, Claude very effectively will create your JSON import, take that course from LearnDash and put it in your LifterLMS website. Um, you gotta be comfortable doing it. And if it doesn’t work, you gotta be comfortable troubleshooting why it didn’t work. Right. Um, there’s another element though, Jonathan, and this is where what you and I run into a lot is you’ve got a preexisting client on another platform, LearnDash or otherwise, and they don’t just want the course. They want the users, the quiz results, the test scores, the grades, the certificates, like they want everything to migrate over to the new website.

[00:36:52.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

And that brings with it a workload that is, you know, a 10x experience, just being honest. Um, there’s a tool from, uh, Honors WP. It’s called Transfer. That, that plugin, that tool, uh, does a very good job of LearnDash to Lifter for migration. It’ll bring over the users, it’ll bring over the user’s history, it’ll bring over their their grades. It does a really good job of bringing everything over to LifterLMS. But again, I’m going to be honest with you, you have to look at the output when it’s done. You have— you still have to quality assure check it. So I would definitely say that’s something you want to do on a staging site first and then duplicate the issue in production. Um, most of the time that I’ve used the Honors WP-Tonic tool, and it’s a great tool, I gotta stress this all the time. It’s a great tool. It’s a wonderful tool. It’s not even that expensive. Um, but I’ve had to use it more than once in each of the migrations that I’ve done. Something’s been missed, right? There’s been a piece of data that didn’t come over or, uh, user error on our part.

[00:38:03.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

We missed something and the client’s like, no, I need that too. Um, clients always come up with something after, right? And so. As an agency, you want to make sure that you can answer that need. But if this is a do-it-yourself situation, I’m just saying you want to be in staging and you want to quality control the results because you might have to redo the effort.

[00:38:26.870] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think the main thing is it’s doable, folks, but expecting everything and expecting everything when you pull the trigger, and you go live existing membership website that’s making good money. Unless you’re very technical and you got the time, because a lot of people, I found the most successful people as some of our most successful clients. This is the second, this is the second income scenario. They’re, they’re got a full-time job or, and they’re running They’re running a membership business as a side hustle and they’ve been doing it for a number of years and they’re doing quite well. But this, this is not something if you’ve got existing members and you’ve got existing business, this is something that’s totally doable, but it’s gonna take a little bit more work. That’s even with AI. Um, so I don’t want to put people off because it’s totally doable. Um, but it’s not going to be done in a day. It’s going to take planning. It’s going to need— it’s going to take an assessment of the existing website. We learned that. And a lot of people take the opportunity to update their website at the same time.

[00:39:53.610] – Jonathan Denwood

Um, they, they take the opportunity to have a new look. And, and, you know, just change things in general, um, which is a good opportunity. You know, it’s good timing to do it, isn’t it, Kurt?

[00:40:09.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Um, I’m a big fan of refreshing things, as you’ve seen on the Mañana No Más project. I think we’ve done 7 complete rebuilds in, in the last decade. And, and I’m a firm believer that, you know, if you’re in business and you’re public-facing and you’re online, you want to be modern, you want to be timely. And yeah, that’s an excellent time to change your branding or refresh and get your new, your new content up just the way you want it.

[00:40:38.730] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. I think we wrap it up now. What’s the best place for people to find more about what you’re up to and maybe have a chat with you?

[00:40:46.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, to connect with me personally, probably LinkedIn. I’m the only Curt Van Onnen on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to find. If you’d like to schedule, you know, a 30-minute break, the ice session, just click the book a call on manianonomas.com, and we’ll get together and have a conversation.

[00:41:02.370] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And if you’re looking to use LifterLMS and you’re looking for the Infinity Bundle to get that as part of your hosting package, have a look at WP-Tonic. We provide a ton of value. Kirk’s part of the team. Just go over to WP-Tonic, and you can book a consultation there, a free one, and that will either be me or Kirk that will do that consultation with you. We will be back, hopefully next week, with some more insightful topics to help you build the membership community website you’re looking to do in 2026. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:41:43.970] – Kurt von Ahnen

Bye. Thanks for listening to the Membership Machine. The Dean Show. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.

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