Enabling Marketing Automation for WordPress with WP Fusion feat. Jack Arturo

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite founders and digital marketers alike to discuss software and strategies to help you scale your business. I’m your I’m your host, Chris Davis, the founder of automation bridge. And today, I have Jack Arturo from WP fusion. So Jack is a WordPress developer specializing in CRM systems and marketing automation tools. And for the last seven years, he’s been working on WP fusion. If you have not heard of it, you’re going to be thankful for this podcast, by the time we’re done. And it is a tool for deeply integrating your WordPress site with your marketing automation platform. We’re going to be discussing exactly what that looks like. Why is it beneficial to you? And how how does WP fusion enable marketing automation for your WordPress website? Jack? Welcome to the podcast man. I’m so excited to have you on how are you doing?

Jack Arturo 1:37
Thanks, Chris doing pretty well. Nice.

Chris Davis 1:39
Yes, yes. So, um, quick backdrop, everyone. I’ve, I’ve interviewed Jack prior when I had my time at Active Campaign, and in the moment I was using a different plugin. And years years later comes around. And I revisit WP fusion as a WordPress plugin. And it just unlocks so many capabilities, so many possibilities. That’s what I want to talk to highlight today on on the episode. And I said you know what, I’m having too much fun. This this is adding too much value to my business. I can’t keep it to myself. So now Jack is here, the man himself the creator of the plugin. So Jack, give us a little bit about your your journey into getting to the point of developing WP fusion.

Jack Arturo 2:32
Yeah, so I’ve been working in WordPress for 10 or 12 years now a long time. My entire professional career. And I started out like people do building websites for clients and then guy into you know courses you can charge more if you’re in a specific niche. So I got more into doing online learning platforms and and then started doing a lot of work with Infusionsoft then became an Infusionsoft consultant. And, yeah, for a few years, there’s just were these integration projects that kept coming up over and over again, it was like, you know, we’re running a course, in LearnDash, or wherever. And we need to automatically engage with the students in Infusionsoft, your follow up with abandoned carts or sign teachers or whatever. And these platforms didn’t really link with each other, there were a couple options available at the time, but they weren’t really extensible. You know, you can you can buy an all in one membership system back then that would deliver the courses and send the emails but you couldn’t mix and match components in the ways that we were looking for that my clients felt like they needed. So yeah, out of out of this kind of a just components that I was using over and over again, for clients, I created the first version at fusion, which was just designed to link up whatever you were using for your member directory with your Infusionsoft mailing list, and kind of our unique take on at the time was that you could be using ultimate member or user Pro or member press or any membership plugin, and we would just handled the sync of the members we didn’t get in, we didn’t mess around with the front end of your site or change the look and feel of anything. We were just kind of trying to stay in our lane and create the solution for keeping your membership list in sync with your mailing list. And, and I kind of thought that that would just be a sort of fun little side project and sort of a lead generation strategy for new clients. But you know, there are a lot of plugins and there are a lot of membership solutions out there. And so you know, every couple of weeks we would be well this is this is really good. But we know we need to get some data out of XYZ member or whatever. And so Okay, so we’ll add that in. And yeah, so worked on that for a couple of years. And then a lot of people started coming forward and saying, Well, yeah, this looks great, but it’s just Infusionsoft Can we do the same thing with Active Campaign. and thought why not rebuild the whole thing made it platform agnostic. And so now that’s yeah, that’s what I’m working on full time for almost eight years now we support like 115 Different WordPress plugins and then can sync data bidirectionally with any one of 55 different marketing automation tools. And you know, it’s not like it’s, it’s not the next like, Microsoft or whatever. But we’ve got a solution in our niche. There’s always people who are delivering courses and memberships and WordPress and they need to do marketing to these marketing automation tools. So it’s kept me quite busy now got a small team. Yes, but really exciting journey.

Chris Davis 5:42
It is admirable to see it. I mean, you’re listing off some of these membership platforms. And anybody who’s been in the marketing automation space for seven, eight years knows. Back then Infusionsoft. I think they had, what was it called?

Jack Arturo 5:59
Yeah, they had their customer hub. They had their own community.

Chris Davis 6:03
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Customer hub, then office out Ontraport was Office Autopilot back then. Yeah. And they had a WordPress plugin. And just to be honest,

Jack Arturo 6:14
they still do. It’s still not

Chris Davis 6:17
terrible, bad, just terrible. And they got away with it back then. Because membership sites were so rare. They were just kind of like if you had one you were like a master online marketers like wow, right? Technology evolves. And you know, these these membership plugins, like ultimate member s two member member, press member, mouse,

Jack Arturo 6:40
mouse. We don’t even hear about that one anymore. I

Chris Davis 6:44
remember, building systems using all of these different membership plugins. And there was some point in I know that you were saying around the time where people were like, Hey, can you do this beyond Infusionsoft there was an inflection point in the marketing automation space, where the cloud is really opened up the playing field. Yeah, I think,

Jack Arturo 7:07
yeah, this was Infusionsoft was so bad. And it didn’t get updates for so long. It was so expensive. They I mean, they’d lock you into 48 month contracts. You couldn’t even find out the pricing. He had to get on a sales call with a sales rep was terrible to work with. And yeah, so I think finally, some people decided, hey, we can do a better job in this and I feel like it was active campaign was the first one that like, really stood out to me, but around that time, yeah, like drip. intercom. Yeah, a few of these, like, more lightweight, more friendly, upfront. Less sleazy sales tactics. Yeah, these platforms are showing up. Now. Now Infusionsoft is trying to catch up to what they lost with Keith. But yeah, still not super impressed. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, it’s a fun little corner of the internet to be working in, because it’s always changing. There’s always a top platform, there’s always somebody seeing what could be done better and releasing a new product or like, like BuddyBoss, we were talking about working an existing product and improving it. So yes, there’s always more to do. It’s fine.

Chris Davis 8:09
Yeah. And I’m, I need to warn my listeners here. This is gonna be a bit more of a technical conversation, because I absolutely love the functionality that’s provided via WP fusion, given its sync, net sync, two way sync abilities. But I also want to highlight the membership plugins back then, we’re really one way. Like, if you had if you had to tell them, somebody had access in all of the access and provisions stayed within that membership, it did not send it back out and tell you things that were happening not easily at least. So once getting them to the membership site was the struggle. And then once they’re in the membership site, that’s where everything took place, you know, so now, your plugin was the first that showed a true two way sync, hey, look, they’re in here doing something you want to know what they did, and send it back to your CRM system? Would you like that? You know, and it’s like, wait a minute, this starts to unlock all types of marketing. Because now I can tag somebody when they complete a course that feeds back into my CRM system. And now I can fire off emails of internal notification, it just opens up the entire playing field. And I did not know such things existed, honestly entail Active Campaign. So I think Active Campaign has kind of been that that that inflection point what it sounds like, because it was so flexible. And the API was so much more easier to deal with. That’s at least that’s what I hear from developers.

Jack Arturo 9:54
Yeah, it was really a breath of fresh air. Like it just worked. It was reliable for the most part. Yeah, it’s really amazing.

Chris Davis 9:59
Yeah. Yes. So for you, I’m going to do a quick one minute catch up for anybody who was like, What is this magic they’re talking about? WordPress powers more than half of the websites in the world right now. So it’s open source software, you download WordPress on to your hosting. And now you can build a website. There’s all kinds of themes and stuff that you can do to get your website looking really nice. We focus on the back end, anybody in marketing automation, we’re all about the back end, how do we get the back end to function and support our marketing efforts. So usually what will happen is if you’re dealing with a LMS, like a previous episode, we had Chris Badgett on lifter LMS plugin that goes into your WordPress website, you’ve got a learning environment now. And as if you just want to log into your learning environment and see everything, that’s fine. So those of you may have be using something like teachable Kajabi. Those are platforms that are outside of WordPress. And you go in there, you see what you can see, and you don’t get much out, maybe a tag, maybe a contact added to a list. So what WP fusion does is goes a level deeper, imagine this, you have a online website, that’s maybe a membership site or a learning portal. And there’s an intake form, you want to get more information about your students. So when they enroll in your course, they tell you what they’re interested in the last level of education, they’ve completed, just a regular form that’s filled out. Now usually, to get that information into your CRM, or of some sort, you have to do like a Zapier integration, or maybe your form software has an add on that you can get into your CRM, you know, all of those things. And the beauty of WP fusion is it really takes care have all of this stuff for you automatically, both ways. So even in the event, you do get a plugin for your form, they fill it out, and it sends it over to your CRM. What about when something happens in your CRM, and you collect information on your website? Wouldn’t it be nice to get that information on website a, and populate it in website B of the membership portal? It wouldn’t work, as I’m saying it, what the true functionality I’ve just described is really a more of a progressive profiling. So now they’re in this the the membership site, you’re getting information there on your website, you’re getting information, and everything is in sync.

Jack Arturo 12:34
Yep, exactly. And you use the example of a signup form, we could send that data over to the CRM and run some calculations on and then use that to assign a one on one coach automatically. And then that coach assignment can be used back in WordPress to unlock a member center that is owned and controlled by that coach, or to trigger a pop up saying the coach has been assigned. And her name is this and this is how to contact her, that kind of thing. So yeah, it is the you can sort of move that business intelligence out to the third party tool, and then it calculates the results and that personalized experience in WordPress later. Yeah,

Chris Davis 13:12
absolutely. So So you all have to be able to now see that whatever takes place online, and sends information into your CRM, you can now customize that in your membership portal or your your, your learning management, that’s really the main The biggest benefit is when they’re logged in. Because you can I mean, the experiences like none other that you can really customize, and I want to talk about some of the features. So that was the ketchup, everyone. And now we’re just gonna go a level deeper. If you need if you’re like, wait a minute, show me the way slow down, pause this, you can rewind it, you can do all of those things. But we’re going for the digital marketer in this episode. That’s got a bit more acumen. So what I want to talk about some of the features, okay, we talked about the custom fields, two way sync, which is great, by the way, amazing I in my learning management system. I’ve got all of these user medic keys, just custom fields that I’ve created. But I say user meta, because I’m taking gravity form submissions, and I’m actually storing them in the database of WordPress, so I can recall them. My students fill out worksheets. So I don’t want you if you’ve already filled that answer in in module three. I don’t want you to have to fill it in again, in module six, I want to refer to it and maybe updated because you learned something right? So that’s the reason I have to store it into the into the WordPress database. To my surprise, when I install WP fusion, you identify all of that all of that user data, and just with one click of a button said hey, do you want to send this to your CRM? Do you want to sync this with the custom field in your CRM, and that alone I jack? as advanced as I get at times I know ever even thought of that as a possibility. I was just like, okay, all of this information is stored in the learning management system. Wait a minute, I can get easily I can easily get it out because otherwise I had to do like Zapier and Gravity Forms add ons, and it just got a lot to manage. But this one, you pull in all customers that no matter how they come in, you can have four different form plugins, you’ll see all of it and just say, hey, where do you want me to send it? And that alone? I guess what I’m talking about is the, you’re doing advanced functionality. But it’s so easy. Yeah, configure it.

Jack Arturo 15:38
It’s funny, because that seems like the simplest thing to me. But of course, I’ve been in it for eight years. So I can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. But yeah,

Chris Davis 15:46
right. Yep. And now I can say, if somebody answers a question a certain way that can trigger marketing, I can now do upselling, I can put special offers in front of them all automated, it just unlocked a whole different realm. And I was like, Wow, just making that easier. I didn’t realize that, right. So I’m also gonna mention something else that was simple to you, that’s gonna be simple to you. That was refreshing. And it is when I go when you have users in WordPress, you go to Users, and it lists all of them based on user roles and everything like that technical stuff. But when you go to their profile, what I really appreciate appreciate about WP fusion is that you’ve linked I’m speaking Active Campaign, you linked to the Active Campaign contact record. So yeah, why

Jack Arturo 16:37
didn’t occur to us until a few months ago. But yeah, it’s really handy. Right? I use it all the time. Now. Yeah,

Chris Davis 16:41
I did. It’s like you go without, like, you go without something for so long. You know, you don’t even realize what you’re missing it because you’ve no, I guess not even go with that. You just never had it. It’s like, Hey, have you ever had steak this way. And you’re like, you can cook steak that way. And I’m just going through because you do a lot of troubleshooting. Hey, I don’t have access to this course. Hey, what happened? You go to the profile in WordPress. And right there is the number their contact ID and I was like, I wonder what happens if I click this link, and it took me to active, I can literally pull it up the active campaign account. Furthermore, Jack, you also allow the user to modify the tags on their contact record within WordPress, so I don’t eat because usually what I’m doing is I’m either adding or taking a tag away. That’s really the main functionality. I can do it all there, right within WordPress without even having to leave.

Jack Arturo 17:43
Yep. Or a big reason for that is we often have people who are assistants on the site who like work for the company, but don’t necessarily have access to the CRM. So if they need a quick adjustment to the membership level or something, you can do all that within WordPress. Yeah, yes.

Chris Davis 17:59
And that’s the exact case. Because I had operations manager, I was like, No, I’m trying to simplify my SOPs. So you know, simplify the places to go and just eliminate error. So that was great. That was just amazing. And these are everybody, what we’re talking about is the functionality of make a tightly integrating your CRM, with your WordPress Based Learning System learning management, environment, or membership, most of the time, they’re there, they’re both. So that these are just little little things. And the reason why tags are important everybody’s because if you didn’t know, you can now with the aid of WP fusion, if you sold a course, it doesn’t even have to be on your website, like WooCommerce or anything like that. You can sell it anyway in your CRM. But by selling that course, the contact gets a tag, that tag can now automatically enroll somebody into a course. And this is big, because a lot of people are trying to try to figure out when they first do a learning management system. How do I get them their user credentials? How do they log in? How do I create a form they log into. So just with the tag, you’ll get access to the to the course that they’ve enrolled in. And it gets really robust because you can have multiple tags for courses. I won’t get too technical, but you can link them but then you could also add another layer that says Hey, and if they have any of these tags, give them access to this as well. And that’s really across the across the board for the for the membership.

Jack Arturo 19:40
Yeah, we’ve got I’ve mentioned we’ve got I think 115 plugin integrations and probably almost 300 different points where you can require some tags or apply some tags or Yeah, auto enroll into courses or protect Pages menu items, widgets, any basically any aspect of WordPress can be personalized using tags.

Chris Davis 20:00
Yeah, yeah, and I want to keep going down this exploration because many of you have a WordPress learning management environment or membership environment. And you’re doing it the hard way, I’m just going to tell you. So if you I use Elementor is one of the top page builders, but it, yeah, it also works with just regular Gutenburg WP fusion. And what you can do everybody just just dream with me for a little bit, you can set the elements on your page, let’s say you dropped a video element on your page, a call to action element on your page. WP fusion integrates with this. So if you go to the advanced settings, you can now select whether or not to show that element if they have a particular tag or not. So it gets really, it takes some customer journey mapping because don’t just go you

Jack Arturo 20:58
gotta be careful. Definitely, yeah.

Chris Davis 21:00
Oh, man, you can get some blank pages, like where’s my content? Or you can get some pages that have everything and you’re like, why is it showing everything. So it definitely takes some mapping. But when we talk about personalizing, think about the Amazon effect, right? You go to Amazon, and based on what you’ve purchased, they’re now showing you other things that you may like theirs, they’ve got your name, Hey, welcome back, Chris, you know, you can pull that type of, of experience off now and say, Okay, since you completed this course, start this one. And it only shows because you apply the tag when they completed the course. And the tag now reveals another element on the page or on their dashboard that they didn’t have it. I’m talking about it in the sense of functionality, Jack. But I the motive is customer experience, that just enhances the experience that your customers have, as they’re learning are logging in

Jack Arturo 21:59
to your students and members on your site engaged for longer coming back more often. Of course thing being able to track all this stuff, we can say if somebody doesn’t log in for a week, or if somebody only completes the first lesson, and then doesn’t come back and try the second one. And we can also engage them via email or via text message. So in the end student doesn’t notice any of this stuff. It just magically keeps them engaged with your content.

Chris Davis 22:22
Yes, yes. Um, I will say, as a owner of the the website and the learning experience, it has just I can it feels lighter. I don’t know how to explain it. But sometimes you can be using tech that just feels heavy. Sometimes you dread going in because it’s like, Oh, what was I doing? Again, you got to recall all of this stuff. It just feels lighter. And it feels like my students. It’s an easier experience for them as well, like, I migrated. And I was like this like, Oh, I hope I didn’t break anything. everybody on my team is ready for all of the support tickets that come in. Yeah, I had maybe two or three tickets.

Jack Arturo 23:05
That’s great. Good luck. Not everyone has that easy, but we try. I mean, that’s the goal we try.

Chris Davis 23:10
Yes. And so, but to your benefit. WP fusion is a paid plugin. But you guys have a free lite version. Yeah. And that lite version took care of all of my needs in terms of getting it configured. Yeah. So by the time I got everybody over, I was like, Wait a minute. This was great. It was a no brainer. Yeah. You know, and I went straight for the lifetime Jack. I didn’t even play it. Nope, I give you the lifetime access. I’m going to be using this for for for the foreseeable future. So I when you look at from your perspective, I’m not I’m I’m probably a little too excited because it’s working so well for me, but I do want to give you the floor. When you when you look at you’ve got eight years plus of development in this plugin. What are some of the most common trends that you’ve seen that people are just like, oh, my gosh, WP fusion is so great. What are those? What are those things that you see come up time and time again?

Jack Arturo 24:16
Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, people use it for a lot of different things. Like I mentioned, personalizing dashboards. And that kind of thing is very common. Another thing we’re doing a lot of lately is personalizing actual course content. So what you could do is give somebody an assessment survey when they first sign up, and if you determine that they need some extra help with your content, you could tag them as beginner. And data fusion would let you go into your lifter LMS or LearnDash courses and say that these lessons are only required for people with that beginner tag. So we call that adaptive learning, is what somebody told me it So just the tech side of it. But anyways, the idea being, you can create sort of like personalized learning paths for people based on these tags, which, as you mentioned, are quite flexible. And you can even calculate, you know, based on quizzes or surveys and that kind of thing. So that’s a really common one. I mean, another just like standard, but very common use cases abandoned car tracking. So we yeah, we have a very like simplified version of abandoned car tracking, we don’t have an email templates included or anything fancy like that. But we let you apply and remove tags in your CRM based on whether or not someone currently has an abandoned cart. And then that lets you do whatever you want terms of following up with them. That’s really common. I’m trying to think, yeah, we kind of kind of 5050 I would say, half of customers sort of fall into the bracket that you described, which is membership, and LMS. Together, usually with some kind of social layer, like, buddy boss. And then the other 50% are just using data fusion for E commerce. Like we have a lot of just standard like online retailers. They’re using Salesforce or Zoho or HubSpot is really popular. And they just need to get like the WooCommerce order data into the CRM, send those post order follow up emails, like hey, would you leave us reviews and abandoned cart reminders, that kind of thing. And so that’s a big part of our business as well as just facilitating that e commerce Store. You know, automation.

Chris Davis 26:33
Yeah. And that’s a huge one. Because a lot of times, if you are using a platform like a HubSpot or something like that, they don’t have any e commerce functionality in there, right. And then they don’t need it. They’re not purchased for that. But to get the data out from an E commerce platform, Intuit is you you all make it so easy. One of the things that I find extremely valuable, and I’m gonna go through your documentation. So I’m weird Jack, I like to read companies documentation. It’s

Jack Arturo 27:08
unlike a lot reading, I can’t I can’t sit through a five minute video, but I’ll

Chris Davis 27:12
read but I’ll read the document. Okay, so I don’t feel weird. I like you, I can spend time with it. I like okay, go get a drink, lay down on the couch.

Jack Arturo 27:23
50 tabs,

Chris Davis 27:26
and reasons have documentation. And great documentation is hard to find you guys do a really good job. But you just recently released a feature. And I want all my listeners to know about it. It’s the events tracking add on. And this is really twofold. And what it allows you to do is say somebody’s completed a course, you can now put the name of the last course they completed in a custom field, you can put the score of the last quiz they completed in the custom field. And I won’t go too deep because there’s a lot of events, tactics terrible. One of the things along with the event tracking is if I’m using LearnDash. And what happens is, I can sync their progress of any course the percentage their complete to a custom field. And why am I why am I saying this? Everybody? Why do you hear a bit of excitement in my voice. Because prior to this, what I had to do is tag every lesson complete. So I can see you completed Lesson One, two, and three. But listen, after you have maybe six or seven courses, you forget how many lessons are in each course, what does completed three means is that three out of four is a three out of seven. So now I can see in my CRM, Jack 100% 25% 50% Not just that I can also start automation, when someone’s halfway through this course, get feedback, right? When they’re 75%, through, send another email because we all know that last 20% sometimes could just be like getting through quicksand for a lot of people. So maybe I want to incentivize them, hey, here’s a 20 $20 gift card if you finish this week, there’s all kinds of gamification and marketing that’s unlocked, just by passing the progress percentage of their learning into the CRM.

Jack Arturo 29:23
And then another thing we’re doing with that, too, is, you know, Active Campaign, you have the activities feed on the right side that shows the pageviews. So I’ve found we’re using the event tracking on our site, I find that really useful just to get a sense of like the temperature of a customer, because I can see now with the events chronologically submitted a pre sales question. viewed the checkout page added a product to the cart, abandon it did or didn’t open this email. I can see if they did upgrade it, it would take a day to take a week. All that stuff is shown chronologically along the side of the rest of their data. has been super helpful just to see like, okay, like this lead is really warm or this person’s may be on the fence with us. Yeah.

Chris Davis 30:06
Yes, this is so what you what you are seeing is turning your membership learning portal, whatever you want to call it and to an on going lead generating by lead generating I mean, a customer for product A can be a lead for product B, right so one customers not always the customers like okay, you bought a now you’re a lead for the for the next product. And you have this environment now, that’s always warming up keeping them warm, keeping them ready keeping you informed with what they’re doing. So you understand your your avatar, you understand what people are doing and what they what they’re looking for from you.

Jack Arturo 30:47
And I mean, of course, this all sounds complicated to set up. But when you’ve had automated setup running like this for a while, you don’t need to that doesn’t require much input from you, as a site owner, you know, it was set up, if somebody fails to get a login or password and reminder to go to the admin to check on it. Or somebody close to buying that abandons, you get a notification. So you set up all these processes at the beginning, which is a bit of work. But then your site runs itself and is generating sales for years. So yeah,

Chris Davis 31:14
yeah. And I have to say, you listeners of the podcast, no, I tell you, the dream of automation is take your hands off of it, it just does what you want it to do. That’s not the case for a lot of you. A lot of you there’s a little more work involved a little more maintenance, a little more monitoring, I will say one of my greatest achievements has been automating my learning management environment. Because Jack, you’re right, once you have it mapped out, and I use air table and all of these other tools to map things out and make sure it’s appropriate. But once you have it in there you are 100% True. Like it runs itself. And the experience does is not sacrificed at all. It’s It’s like one of the best systems that I’ve built in I’m extremely proud of. I just I Okay, I have to say this this one thing, and it may border. It may border to advance. But I want to put it out there because I trust my listeners, Jack, I do I trust my listeners, I want to talk about this feature that I as a marketer, I just like, is Jack doing this on purpose? Or is he just just just the luck of being a great developer, you’ve got an auto login feature. Now, everybody just listened to how this works. Auto log in is not new. It’s when you’re logged when you click a link, and you’re logged into a website without having to put in your username or password. Okay, many companies do this. And you just don’t realize that it’s taking place. But for you, for most people, you have to go to the login page, put in your username and password to get access. So you do you have it to where WP fusion, again integrates with probably every WordPress base form builder that I’ve seen, or I’ve used even even some strange ones. I’m like, wow, Jack, how did you find that? Where did that come from? So as long as WP fusion is integrated with it, what happens is, I can now send people to this page. Let me put it like if I fill out a form, let’s say a lead form. Let me pull all the way back. You’ve got lead magnets on your website and you have a members area. When someone downloads a specific lead magnet, you can have that form automatically log them into the members area where if that’s where you want to deliver it. So somebody may say this, Chris, why would I want them logged into my members area to access this free content, instead of just giving it to them on a thank you page or delivering it via email? And I had that same question everybody I did. But once I experienced how Jack’s coded the auto login feature, I was like, oh my god, the implications are endless. So watch this. What happens is, Jack will log WP fusion. I’m saying it like you’re doing it Jack. All right, WP fusion will log you in automatically. They fill out the form. The next page they see is the page where they can download their their freebie, but they’re actually logged in. And what what WP fusion has done is it’s logged them in as a guest. So they’re not actually a user yet in the your WordPress installation. But guess what? Every page, they go to every link that they click everything that they do, it’s tracked back to the CRM. So why would I want to? Why would I want to send them to my members area? Because now you can see You can offer other things that they may have access to, you can let them window shop but not go in, you’ll be able to see everything that they’re interested in as a lead, they don’t even have a true access in to the membership site. But since they downloaded that lead magnet, you auto logged them in as a guest. And you can protect pages with tags and certain things. But you can also let them see stuff so you can tell what they’re interested in.

Jack Arturo 35:30
Yep. Yeah, that’s a funny is you’re probably familiar with them barium and I think I am. Imember360. They have a similar system, but it really logs members into their real member accounts. Yeah. And we always had people asking for that. And the security person in me did not want to ever create a system that would let someone just log in as an administrator. So this idea of logging somebody into like a guest account that just has their tags, and the tracking came up as a compromise. If it’s really important, like editing saved credit cards, and they can use a username and password, but if it’s just yeah, browsing a lead magnet or sample the membership area, why not just allow that via link. So then that’s turned out actually really well turned out to have a lot more flexibility than requiring everybody to have a real user account, because now you can send out a blast to 10,000 people on your email list. And they can all have a personalized experience inside your website. But you don’t have to create user accounts for them. They don’t have passwords. Everything’s cleaned up after 24 hours. So yeah, that’s that’s one of those things that just sort of people were asking for it. We came up with a compromise and functionality, and it worked out pretty well.

Chris Davis 36:38
Yeah. And I feel like the compromise should be the standard. And here’s why Jack when I when I was doing it, because I use other platforms. I was of the mindset that every time someone logged in a profile was created, right? So now I naturally go and think how do I manage these profiles? I don’t want 1000s of users in my WordPress installation. And I went to go look and said, Okay, maybe there’s a plugin that I can manage users see when the last time they logged in? Well, there’s not a lot, there’s not a lot of plugins that allow you to see the activity of your users, I found a couple paid ones. But I was like, wow, this is this is concerning. But then I was like, well, where’s the test profile, that I use it? Initially, I was about to create a support ticket. I was like, Jack, it’s not working, you’re not creating a user. And I said, Wait a minute, I don’t think

Jack Arturo 37:30
documentation on this one.

Chris Davis 37:33
And I went to the documentation, and it talked about they’re signed in as a guest. So all of the protections of pages are still intact. However, everything that they do is tracked in the CRM, right. And I said, Oh, my gosh, that’s genius, because now I don’t have to manage that, who’s who’s active in my WordPress, because WordPress just makes that part hard. I can do that in my CRM, and everybody can get temporary access to this to this logged in area. And for those of you who are just like, Oh, but I don’t want to give somebody ongoing access, you can also use a tag in a upon applying this tag, it doesn’t matter if they fill out an auto logon form or not. If they have this particular tag, they won’t be able to log in, they just won’t. So you’re in full control. Full control, you can give somebody a seven day preview, you can,

Jack Arturo 38:30
for example, set it up so that the will set a coupon and WooCommerce so that the coupon is automatically applied as long as they have the tag. And then we’ll apply a tag and Active Campaign send them an auto login links. As soon as they click the link, they get an automatic discount, but then we just remove that tag after seven days and the coupon actually no longer works. Don’t have to worry about different codes or anything. It’s just a one click link to get automatic discount. And it expires based on whatever logic you choose.

Chris Davis 38:56
Yes. So listen, everybody listen to what he just said. Dynamic, expiring coupons. You can right now in the marketplace is not hard to find a coupon set a date, where it’s active instead of date where it expires. That’s not what Jack is talking about. Jack is talking about relative to the customer specific contacts journey. Now they can have a coupon. Hey, as for joining our list for the next seven days, enjoy 25% off. Better use it though and seven days it’s gone. And guess what, you have to do nothing because the automation is going to wait seven days and then remove the tag, the same link that they use takes them in but no longer is the coupon apply. So I hope I hope I’m doing this a decent job of showing you all the capabilities that you may have been going without.

Jack Arturo 39:52
And then just add on that with the coupon example. We could also set up a split test in Active Campaign and use a goal if they use the group On the right time, and we can see what’s most effective for urgency three days, seven days, 10 days and then check the goal completions to figure out which of the split test is winning and use that to further optimize the marketing?

Chris Davis 40:12
Yes, it literally puts you in full control. So some of you may I dare I say, your static learning or membership environment is what’s holding you back from retaining more students from selling more products to current students, and just overall, more fluid functionality in flow. And and the reason why Jack, I’m so glad you were able to come on and kind of nerd out with me, is because this type of functionality needs to be common in in terms of implementing in the marketplace. And I feel like your plugin does a really good job. It’s like, it feels like Jack. I mean, of course, I wouldn’t know how much how many lines of code or whatever.

Jack Arturo 41:03
But it’s, that’s been a priority. Yeah. Okay.

Chris Davis 41:07
It feels super light. It’s, it’s really quick. And it’s really easy to access. Like, I just go to settings, WP fusion and everything is right. There were other plugins, they’ve got, like these embedded, embedded menus, and you got to go to five different places to enable stuff. So it’s easy to configure. And I believe if you have a WordPress base, which is my preference, everyone, WordPress, braze learning, learning environment or a membership environment, I just don’t see how you get the maximum out of it without something like WP fusion and not just sync the information, but it’s also unlocking so much marketing automation capabilities. It’s unparalleled anywhere else. I mean, there’s so many CRMs what would you say I can go on for days and I know we need to quit it a little bit. What would you say is at this moment? Anecdotally if you don’t know like, for sure for sure. But just kind of based on your feel of of people signing up? What would you say the top CRM is? So far,

Jack Arturo 42:11
active campaigns are number one right now. Followed by Infusionsoft this is kind of a shrinking share of the pie. And then Ontraport drip HubSpot are on the top five. But yeah, campaigns number one by pretty fair margin.

Chris Davis 42:25
Yeah, it’s it’s really tough to beat a WP fusion and Active Campaign combo. I mean, it is, is so powerful, man. So alright, Jack, you’ve had WP fusion for eight years going on nine into infinity hope. Hopefully it never goes away. What do you have on the horizon? What are you eyeballing for the for the rest of the year? Is there any big big updates? Or is it just making sure the customer support is tight, the plugin stays lean and functional.

Jack Arturo 42:59
Nothing crazy. At the moment, we’re working on a setup wizard to just sort of reduce the number of overwhelming choices and give you some next steps after setting up there. I feel like nowadays, people are switching platforms so often. So you’re going to put some time into creating a sort of migration utility that if you want it to move from Active Campaign to try self hosting on fluency or ham or something, we have a little assistant that moves all your tags and access rules over. So you can try out a membership site connected to another platform right now. It’s a pretty manual process to switch everything. As you can imagine. There’s just it’s just stuff like that is like how can we make things easier to understand for new users and reduce time spent doing repetitive tasks? Actually make it less confusing? Yeah,

Chris Davis 43:48
and I love it Jack, you know what I never bought about it. But just the if this if we stuck with tags and custom fields, right? If I say hey, I’m no longer using Active Campaign, I want to jump over into fluent CRM, WordPress base has been growing. And though I love automation, I just kind of need some simple email marketing. And this fits my needs, right? I’m being able to say, okay, WP fusion, I’m now influence CRM. And it takes all of the tags that it’s read in active campaign with a click of a button generates them influence CRM, and the custom fields. And let’s take it to the step that you have it. I don’t have to sync all of my custom fields in WP fusion, you give me a checkbox, and I could say sync this one, don’t sync that one. If I did the checkbox, I want to sync all of these. That step alone, just getting all my tags over all of my custom fields over. That’s a huge leap for people who are migrating because it’s that much more fun, especially if you didn’t have

Jack Arturo 44:49
to redo all your tracking and everything like you have all of your videos and lessons and everything set up to track with tags. We’d like to if possible, make it easy to automatically switch

Chris Davis 45:00
Yep, yep. And, okay, everybody, I promise you, I’m stopping. But Jack mentioned this, okay, it’s his fault. And he said it, he said, It’s so common to just like, if you’re tracking video videos with tags, there’s also the feature that you can tag users based on the amount of a video that they watched. Okay, so you can tag them when they started tagging them when they end it and anywhere in between. So let me in my final example, everybody, this is just giving you some insight. This is daily for me in my automation service provider program, and all of that this is stuff we nerd out about every day. But just imagine if now you wanted to deliver maybe a video series as your lead magnet, and they do the auto login function. So they opt in on your website, they’re auto logged in. Now, WP fusion integrates, I’m using Presto player right now, and I’m really liking it. So it’s working really well. And it’s on a page, and they’re watching the video. And based on how much of that video tags are just being added to their account. So I can see they finish they’ve started. Now I can my marketing for just this, say a three part video series is going to be so dynamic and so unique. And the completion rate is going to be out of the out of this world in comparison to somebody who’s just sending the email. Hey, here’s video one. Hey, here’s video two. So that’s another superpower. These are all what we will call more basic. So when Jack’s like nothing, nothing major. But it’s all relative. Right? These small features, they just unlock so much not because of the feature itself is just because of how you implement it, Jack, I feel like, you know, you’re so ingrained with both WordPress and your platform because you haven’t been removed. You’re not one of those developing CEOs that are sitting on in a boardroom somewhere saying, Hey, guys, more users come on, right? More users, you understand what the users are doing what they need, and you understand the WordPress ecosystem. So it all makes sense to me why the plugin functions at such a high efficacy that it that it does.

Jack Arturo 47:19
And we use it for ourselves. So everything that we can make work better makes our site generate more sales, too. So yeah,

Chris Davis 47:25
yes. Alright, everyone, so just know, it is taking all the strength in my body and my brain and my heart to stop. But I don’t want to overwhelm you all. Jack, if people want to find out more about WP fusion is there. Where should they go as their community to join? What should they do? Yeah.

Jack Arturo 47:46
So we’re at WP fusion.com, all one word. And also on Facebook, we’ve got a pretty active community with about 2500 members. And the name of that is marketing automation for WordPress with WP fusion.

Chris Davis 48:00
Yeah, love it. Love it. So we’ll have all of those links. Again, WP fusion is a paid plugin which please consider buying the plug in to support Jack and all of his all of his efforts. However, they have a lite version to get you started at no cost. So there’s nothing preventing you right now to say, okay, Chris, while you’re listening, just type in WP fusion in the back end of your WordPress, click add new plug in search WP fusion, you’ll see it, install it and just test it out for yourself. Again, the support is top notch, there’s a good chance Jack himself. May I answer your support ticket. So you want to make sure that when you have that level of support and documentation that you pay attention to those type of tools, everybody, so that was the purpose, I hope you all got massive value out of today. And just the insight on an average day of Chris, you see when I get tools like this, I’m tinkering around, thinking of ways that I can enhance other people’s marketing, you know, so that they can get more out of it. So Jack, thank you for WP fusion because it has been instrumental, instrumental and pivotal. So greatly appreciate it. Awesome. Well, thanks

Jack Arturo 49:13
for having me on the show.

Chris Davis 49:14
Yes, yes. Anytime Jack and listeners, WP fusion.com. Right. By the way, it’s a very nicely designed website as well. All right. All right, Jack, I promise. But thanks for coming on to the podcast man. I appreciate it. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show Joseph love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly, and you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening and until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite founders and digital marketers alike to discuss software and strategies to help you scale your business. I’m your I’m your host, Chris Davis, the founder of automation bridge. And today, I have Jack Arturo from WP fusion. So Jack is a WordPress developer specializing in CRM systems and marketing automation tools. And for the last seven years, he’s been working on WP fusion. If you have not heard of it, you’re going to be thankful for this podcast, by the time we’re done. And it is a tool for deeply integrating your WordPress site with your marketing automation platform. We’re going to be discussing exactly what that looks like. Why is it beneficial to you? And how how does WP fusion enable marketing automation for your WordPress website? Jack? Welcome to the podcast man. I’m so excited to have you on how are you doing?

Jack Arturo 1:37
Thanks, Chris doing pretty well. Nice.

Chris Davis 1:39
Yes, yes. So, um, quick backdrop, everyone. I’ve, I’ve interviewed Jack prior when I had my time at Active Campaign, and in the moment I was using a different plugin. And years years later comes around. And I revisit WP fusion as a WordPress plugin. And it just unlocks so many capabilities, so many possibilities. That’s what I want to talk to highlight today on on the episode. And I said you know what, I’m having too much fun. This this is adding too much value to my business. I can’t keep it to myself. So now Jack is here, the man himself the creator of the plugin. So Jack, give us a little bit about your your journey into getting to the point of developing WP fusion.

Jack Arturo 2:32
Yeah, so I’ve been working in WordPress for 10 or 12 years now a long time. My entire professional career. And I started out like people do building websites for clients and then guy into you know courses you can charge more if you’re in a specific niche. So I got more into doing online learning platforms and and then started doing a lot of work with Infusionsoft then became an Infusionsoft consultant. And, yeah, for a few years, there’s just were these integration projects that kept coming up over and over again, it was like, you know, we’re running a course, in LearnDash, or wherever. And we need to automatically engage with the students in Infusionsoft, your follow up with abandoned carts or sign teachers or whatever. And these platforms didn’t really link with each other, there were a couple options available at the time, but they weren’t really extensible. You know, you can you can buy an all in one membership system back then that would deliver the courses and send the emails but you couldn’t mix and match components in the ways that we were looking for that my clients felt like they needed. So yeah, out of out of this kind of a just components that I was using over and over again, for clients, I created the first version at fusion, which was just designed to link up whatever you were using for your member directory with your Infusionsoft mailing list, and kind of our unique take on at the time was that you could be using ultimate member or user Pro or member press or any membership plugin, and we would just handled the sync of the members we didn’t get in, we didn’t mess around with the front end of your site or change the look and feel of anything. We were just kind of trying to stay in our lane and create the solution for keeping your membership list in sync with your mailing list. And, and I kind of thought that that would just be a sort of fun little side project and sort of a lead generation strategy for new clients. But you know, there are a lot of plugins and there are a lot of membership solutions out there. And so you know, every couple of weeks we would be well this is this is really good. But we know we need to get some data out of XYZ member or whatever. And so Okay, so we’ll add that in. And yeah, so worked on that for a couple of years. And then a lot of people started coming forward and saying, Well, yeah, this looks great, but it’s just Infusionsoft Can we do the same thing with Active Campaign. and thought why not rebuild the whole thing made it platform agnostic. And so now that’s yeah, that’s what I’m working on full time for almost eight years now we support like 115 Different WordPress plugins and then can sync data bidirectionally with any one of 55 different marketing automation tools. And you know, it’s not like it’s, it’s not the next like, Microsoft or whatever. But we’ve got a solution in our niche. There’s always people who are delivering courses and memberships and WordPress and they need to do marketing to these marketing automation tools. So it’s kept me quite busy now got a small team. Yes, but really exciting journey.

Chris Davis 5:42
It is admirable to see it. I mean, you’re listing off some of these membership platforms. And anybody who’s been in the marketing automation space for seven, eight years knows. Back then Infusionsoft. I think they had, what was it called?

Jack Arturo 5:59
Yeah, they had their customer hub. They had their own community.

Chris Davis 6:03
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Customer hub, then office out Ontraport was Office Autopilot back then. Yeah. And they had a WordPress plugin. And just to be honest,

Jack Arturo 6:14
they still do. It’s still not

Chris Davis 6:17
terrible, bad, just terrible. And they got away with it back then. Because membership sites were so rare. They were just kind of like if you had one you were like a master online marketers like wow, right? Technology evolves. And you know, these these membership plugins, like ultimate member s two member member, press member, mouse,

Jack Arturo 6:40
mouse. We don’t even hear about that one anymore. I

Chris Davis 6:44
remember, building systems using all of these different membership plugins. And there was some point in I know that you were saying around the time where people were like, Hey, can you do this beyond Infusionsoft there was an inflection point in the marketing automation space, where the cloud is really opened up the playing field. Yeah, I think,

Jack Arturo 7:07
yeah, this was Infusionsoft was so bad. And it didn’t get updates for so long. It was so expensive. They I mean, they’d lock you into 48 month contracts. You couldn’t even find out the pricing. He had to get on a sales call with a sales rep was terrible to work with. And yeah, so I think finally, some people decided, hey, we can do a better job in this and I feel like it was active campaign was the first one that like, really stood out to me, but around that time, yeah, like drip. intercom. Yeah, a few of these, like, more lightweight, more friendly, upfront. Less sleazy sales tactics. Yeah, these platforms are showing up. Now. Now Infusionsoft is trying to catch up to what they lost with Keith. But yeah, still not super impressed. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, it’s a fun little corner of the internet to be working in, because it’s always changing. There’s always a top platform, there’s always somebody seeing what could be done better and releasing a new product or like, like BuddyBoss, we were talking about working an existing product and improving it. So yes, there’s always more to do. It’s fine.

Chris Davis 8:09
Yeah. And I’m, I need to warn my listeners here. This is gonna be a bit more of a technical conversation, because I absolutely love the functionality that’s provided via WP fusion, given its sync, net sync, two way sync abilities. But I also want to highlight the membership plugins back then, we’re really one way. Like, if you had if you had to tell them, somebody had access in all of the access and provisions stayed within that membership, it did not send it back out and tell you things that were happening not easily at least. So once getting them to the membership site was the struggle. And then once they’re in the membership site, that’s where everything took place, you know, so now, your plugin was the first that showed a true two way sync, hey, look, they’re in here doing something you want to know what they did, and send it back to your CRM system? Would you like that? You know, and it’s like, wait a minute, this starts to unlock all types of marketing. Because now I can tag somebody when they complete a course that feeds back into my CRM system. And now I can fire off emails of internal notification, it just opens up the entire playing field. And I did not know such things existed, honestly entail Active Campaign. So I think Active Campaign has kind of been that that that inflection point what it sounds like, because it was so flexible. And the API was so much more easier to deal with. That’s at least that’s what I hear from developers.

Jack Arturo 9:54
Yeah, it was really a breath of fresh air. Like it just worked. It was reliable for the most part. Yeah, it’s really amazing.

Chris Davis 9:59
Yeah. Yes. So for you, I’m going to do a quick one minute catch up for anybody who was like, What is this magic they’re talking about? WordPress powers more than half of the websites in the world right now. So it’s open source software, you download WordPress on to your hosting. And now you can build a website. There’s all kinds of themes and stuff that you can do to get your website looking really nice. We focus on the back end, anybody in marketing automation, we’re all about the back end, how do we get the back end to function and support our marketing efforts. So usually what will happen is if you’re dealing with a LMS, like a previous episode, we had Chris Badgett on lifter LMS plugin that goes into your WordPress website, you’ve got a learning environment now. And as if you just want to log into your learning environment and see everything, that’s fine. So those of you may have be using something like teachable Kajabi. Those are platforms that are outside of WordPress. And you go in there, you see what you can see, and you don’t get much out, maybe a tag, maybe a contact added to a list. So what WP fusion does is goes a level deeper, imagine this, you have a online website, that’s maybe a membership site or a learning portal. And there’s an intake form, you want to get more information about your students. So when they enroll in your course, they tell you what they’re interested in the last level of education, they’ve completed, just a regular form that’s filled out. Now usually, to get that information into your CRM, or of some sort, you have to do like a Zapier integration, or maybe your form software has an add on that you can get into your CRM, you know, all of those things. And the beauty of WP fusion is it really takes care have all of this stuff for you automatically, both ways. So even in the event, you do get a plugin for your form, they fill it out, and it sends it over to your CRM. What about when something happens in your CRM, and you collect information on your website? Wouldn’t it be nice to get that information on website a, and populate it in website B of the membership portal? It wouldn’t work, as I’m saying it, what the true functionality I’ve just described is really a more of a progressive profiling. So now they’re in this the the membership site, you’re getting information there on your website, you’re getting information, and everything is in sync.

Jack Arturo 12:34
Yep, exactly. And you use the example of a signup form, we could send that data over to the CRM and run some calculations on and then use that to assign a one on one coach automatically. And then that coach assignment can be used back in WordPress to unlock a member center that is owned and controlled by that coach, or to trigger a pop up saying the coach has been assigned. And her name is this and this is how to contact her, that kind of thing. So yeah, it is the you can sort of move that business intelligence out to the third party tool, and then it calculates the results and that personalized experience in WordPress later. Yeah,

Chris Davis 13:12
absolutely. So So you all have to be able to now see that whatever takes place online, and sends information into your CRM, you can now customize that in your membership portal or your your, your learning management, that’s really the main The biggest benefit is when they’re logged in. Because you can I mean, the experiences like none other that you can really customize, and I want to talk about some of the features. So that was the ketchup, everyone. And now we’re just gonna go a level deeper. If you need if you’re like, wait a minute, show me the way slow down, pause this, you can rewind it, you can do all of those things. But we’re going for the digital marketer in this episode. That’s got a bit more acumen. So what I want to talk about some of the features, okay, we talked about the custom fields, two way sync, which is great, by the way, amazing I in my learning management system. I’ve got all of these user medic keys, just custom fields that I’ve created. But I say user meta, because I’m taking gravity form submissions, and I’m actually storing them in the database of WordPress, so I can recall them. My students fill out worksheets. So I don’t want you if you’ve already filled that answer in in module three. I don’t want you to have to fill it in again, in module six, I want to refer to it and maybe updated because you learned something right? So that’s the reason I have to store it into the into the WordPress database. To my surprise, when I install WP fusion, you identify all of that all of that user data, and just with one click of a button said hey, do you want to send this to your CRM? Do you want to sync this with the custom field in your CRM, and that alone I jack? as advanced as I get at times I know ever even thought of that as a possibility. I was just like, okay, all of this information is stored in the learning management system. Wait a minute, I can get easily I can easily get it out because otherwise I had to do like Zapier and Gravity Forms add ons, and it just got a lot to manage. But this one, you pull in all customers that no matter how they come in, you can have four different form plugins, you’ll see all of it and just say, hey, where do you want me to send it? And that alone? I guess what I’m talking about is the, you’re doing advanced functionality. But it’s so easy. Yeah, configure it.

Jack Arturo 15:38
It’s funny, because that seems like the simplest thing to me. But of course, I’ve been in it for eight years. So I can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. But yeah,

Chris Davis 15:46
right. Yep. And now I can say, if somebody answers a question a certain way that can trigger marketing, I can now do upselling, I can put special offers in front of them all automated, it just unlocked a whole different realm. And I was like, Wow, just making that easier. I didn’t realize that, right. So I’m also gonna mention something else that was simple to you, that’s gonna be simple to you. That was refreshing. And it is when I go when you have users in WordPress, you go to Users, and it lists all of them based on user roles and everything like that technical stuff. But when you go to their profile, what I really appreciate appreciate about WP fusion is that you’ve linked I’m speaking Active Campaign, you linked to the Active Campaign contact record. So yeah, why

Jack Arturo 16:37
didn’t occur to us until a few months ago. But yeah, it’s really handy. Right? I use it all the time. Now. Yeah,

Chris Davis 16:41
I did. It’s like you go without, like, you go without something for so long. You know, you don’t even realize what you’re missing it because you’ve no, I guess not even go with that. You just never had it. It’s like, Hey, have you ever had steak this way. And you’re like, you can cook steak that way. And I’m just going through because you do a lot of troubleshooting. Hey, I don’t have access to this course. Hey, what happened? You go to the profile in WordPress. And right there is the number their contact ID and I was like, I wonder what happens if I click this link, and it took me to active, I can literally pull it up the active campaign account. Furthermore, Jack, you also allow the user to modify the tags on their contact record within WordPress, so I don’t eat because usually what I’m doing is I’m either adding or taking a tag away. That’s really the main functionality. I can do it all there, right within WordPress without even having to leave.

Jack Arturo 17:43
Yep. Or a big reason for that is we often have people who are assistants on the site who like work for the company, but don’t necessarily have access to the CRM. So if they need a quick adjustment to the membership level or something, you can do all that within WordPress. Yeah, yes.

Chris Davis 17:59
And that’s the exact case. Because I had operations manager, I was like, No, I’m trying to simplify my SOPs. So you know, simplify the places to go and just eliminate error. So that was great. That was just amazing. And these are everybody, what we’re talking about is the functionality of make a tightly integrating your CRM, with your WordPress Based Learning System learning management, environment, or membership, most of the time, they’re there, they’re both. So that these are just little little things. And the reason why tags are important everybody’s because if you didn’t know, you can now with the aid of WP fusion, if you sold a course, it doesn’t even have to be on your website, like WooCommerce or anything like that. You can sell it anyway in your CRM. But by selling that course, the contact gets a tag, that tag can now automatically enroll somebody into a course. And this is big, because a lot of people are trying to try to figure out when they first do a learning management system. How do I get them their user credentials? How do they log in? How do I create a form they log into. So just with the tag, you’ll get access to the to the course that they’ve enrolled in. And it gets really robust because you can have multiple tags for courses. I won’t get too technical, but you can link them but then you could also add another layer that says Hey, and if they have any of these tags, give them access to this as well. And that’s really across the across the board for the for the membership.

Jack Arturo 19:40
Yeah, we’ve got I’ve mentioned we’ve got I think 115 plugin integrations and probably almost 300 different points where you can require some tags or apply some tags or Yeah, auto enroll into courses or protect Pages menu items, widgets, any basically any aspect of WordPress can be personalized using tags.

Chris Davis 20:00
Yeah, yeah, and I want to keep going down this exploration because many of you have a WordPress learning management environment or membership environment. And you’re doing it the hard way, I’m just going to tell you. So if you I use Elementor is one of the top page builders, but it, yeah, it also works with just regular Gutenburg WP fusion. And what you can do everybody just just dream with me for a little bit, you can set the elements on your page, let’s say you dropped a video element on your page, a call to action element on your page. WP fusion integrates with this. So if you go to the advanced settings, you can now select whether or not to show that element if they have a particular tag or not. So it gets really, it takes some customer journey mapping because don’t just go you

Jack Arturo 20:58
gotta be careful. Definitely, yeah.

Chris Davis 21:00
Oh, man, you can get some blank pages, like where’s my content? Or you can get some pages that have everything and you’re like, why is it showing everything. So it definitely takes some mapping. But when we talk about personalizing, think about the Amazon effect, right? You go to Amazon, and based on what you’ve purchased, they’re now showing you other things that you may like theirs, they’ve got your name, Hey, welcome back, Chris, you know, you can pull that type of, of experience off now and say, Okay, since you completed this course, start this one. And it only shows because you apply the tag when they completed the course. And the tag now reveals another element on the page or on their dashboard that they didn’t have it. I’m talking about it in the sense of functionality, Jack. But I the motive is customer experience, that just enhances the experience that your customers have, as they’re learning are logging in

Jack Arturo 21:59
to your students and members on your site engaged for longer coming back more often. Of course thing being able to track all this stuff, we can say if somebody doesn’t log in for a week, or if somebody only completes the first lesson, and then doesn’t come back and try the second one. And we can also engage them via email or via text message. So in the end student doesn’t notice any of this stuff. It just magically keeps them engaged with your content.

Chris Davis 22:22
Yes, yes. Um, I will say, as a owner of the the website and the learning experience, it has just I can it feels lighter. I don’t know how to explain it. But sometimes you can be using tech that just feels heavy. Sometimes you dread going in because it’s like, Oh, what was I doing? Again, you got to recall all of this stuff. It just feels lighter. And it feels like my students. It’s an easier experience for them as well, like, I migrated. And I was like this like, Oh, I hope I didn’t break anything. everybody on my team is ready for all of the support tickets that come in. Yeah, I had maybe two or three tickets.

Jack Arturo 23:05
That’s great. Good luck. Not everyone has that easy, but we try. I mean, that’s the goal we try.

Chris Davis 23:10
Yes. And so, but to your benefit. WP fusion is a paid plugin. But you guys have a free lite version. Yeah. And that lite version took care of all of my needs in terms of getting it configured. Yeah. So by the time I got everybody over, I was like, Wait a minute. This was great. It was a no brainer. Yeah. You know, and I went straight for the lifetime Jack. I didn’t even play it. Nope, I give you the lifetime access. I’m going to be using this for for for the foreseeable future. So I when you look at from your perspective, I’m not I’m I’m probably a little too excited because it’s working so well for me, but I do want to give you the floor. When you when you look at you’ve got eight years plus of development in this plugin. What are some of the most common trends that you’ve seen that people are just like, oh, my gosh, WP fusion is so great. What are those? What are those things that you see come up time and time again?

Jack Arturo 24:16
Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, people use it for a lot of different things. Like I mentioned, personalizing dashboards. And that kind of thing is very common. Another thing we’re doing a lot of lately is personalizing actual course content. So what you could do is give somebody an assessment survey when they first sign up, and if you determine that they need some extra help with your content, you could tag them as beginner. And data fusion would let you go into your lifter LMS or LearnDash courses and say that these lessons are only required for people with that beginner tag. So we call that adaptive learning, is what somebody told me it So just the tech side of it. But anyways, the idea being, you can create sort of like personalized learning paths for people based on these tags, which, as you mentioned, are quite flexible. And you can even calculate, you know, based on quizzes or surveys and that kind of thing. So that’s a really common one. I mean, another just like standard, but very common use cases abandoned car tracking. So we yeah, we have a very like simplified version of abandoned car tracking, we don’t have an email templates included or anything fancy like that. But we let you apply and remove tags in your CRM based on whether or not someone currently has an abandoned cart. And then that lets you do whatever you want terms of following up with them. That’s really common. I’m trying to think, yeah, we kind of kind of 5050 I would say, half of customers sort of fall into the bracket that you described, which is membership, and LMS. Together, usually with some kind of social layer, like, buddy boss. And then the other 50% are just using data fusion for E commerce. Like we have a lot of just standard like online retailers. They’re using Salesforce or Zoho or HubSpot is really popular. And they just need to get like the WooCommerce order data into the CRM, send those post order follow up emails, like hey, would you leave us reviews and abandoned cart reminders, that kind of thing. And so that’s a big part of our business as well as just facilitating that e commerce Store. You know, automation.

Chris Davis 26:33
Yeah. And that’s a huge one. Because a lot of times, if you are using a platform like a HubSpot or something like that, they don’t have any e commerce functionality in there, right. And then they don’t need it. They’re not purchased for that. But to get the data out from an E commerce platform, Intuit is you you all make it so easy. One of the things that I find extremely valuable, and I’m gonna go through your documentation. So I’m weird Jack, I like to read companies documentation. It’s

Jack Arturo 27:08
unlike a lot reading, I can’t I can’t sit through a five minute video, but I’ll

Chris Davis 27:12
read but I’ll read the document. Okay, so I don’t feel weird. I like you, I can spend time with it. I like okay, go get a drink, lay down on the couch.

Jack Arturo 27:23
50 tabs,

Chris Davis 27:26
and reasons have documentation. And great documentation is hard to find you guys do a really good job. But you just recently released a feature. And I want all my listeners to know about it. It’s the events tracking add on. And this is really twofold. And what it allows you to do is say somebody’s completed a course, you can now put the name of the last course they completed in a custom field, you can put the score of the last quiz they completed in the custom field. And I won’t go too deep because there’s a lot of events, tactics terrible. One of the things along with the event tracking is if I’m using LearnDash. And what happens is, I can sync their progress of any course the percentage their complete to a custom field. And why am I why am I saying this? Everybody? Why do you hear a bit of excitement in my voice. Because prior to this, what I had to do is tag every lesson complete. So I can see you completed Lesson One, two, and three. But listen, after you have maybe six or seven courses, you forget how many lessons are in each course, what does completed three means is that three out of four is a three out of seven. So now I can see in my CRM, Jack 100% 25% 50% Not just that I can also start automation, when someone’s halfway through this course, get feedback, right? When they’re 75%, through, send another email because we all know that last 20% sometimes could just be like getting through quicksand for a lot of people. So maybe I want to incentivize them, hey, here’s a 20 $20 gift card if you finish this week, there’s all kinds of gamification and marketing that’s unlocked, just by passing the progress percentage of their learning into the CRM.

Jack Arturo 29:23
And then another thing we’re doing with that, too, is, you know, Active Campaign, you have the activities feed on the right side that shows the pageviews. So I’ve found we’re using the event tracking on our site, I find that really useful just to get a sense of like the temperature of a customer, because I can see now with the events chronologically submitted a pre sales question. viewed the checkout page added a product to the cart, abandon it did or didn’t open this email. I can see if they did upgrade it, it would take a day to take a week. All that stuff is shown chronologically along the side of the rest of their data. has been super helpful just to see like, okay, like this lead is really warm or this person’s may be on the fence with us. Yeah.

Chris Davis 30:06
Yes, this is so what you what you are seeing is turning your membership learning portal, whatever you want to call it and to an on going lead generating by lead generating I mean, a customer for product A can be a lead for product B, right so one customers not always the customers like okay, you bought a now you’re a lead for the for the next product. And you have this environment now, that’s always warming up keeping them warm, keeping them ready keeping you informed with what they’re doing. So you understand your your avatar, you understand what people are doing and what they what they’re looking for from you.

Jack Arturo 30:47
And I mean, of course, this all sounds complicated to set up. But when you’ve had automated setup running like this for a while, you don’t need to that doesn’t require much input from you, as a site owner, you know, it was set up, if somebody fails to get a login or password and reminder to go to the admin to check on it. Or somebody close to buying that abandons, you get a notification. So you set up all these processes at the beginning, which is a bit of work. But then your site runs itself and is generating sales for years. So yeah,

Chris Davis 31:14
yeah. And I have to say, you listeners of the podcast, no, I tell you, the dream of automation is take your hands off of it, it just does what you want it to do. That’s not the case for a lot of you. A lot of you there’s a little more work involved a little more maintenance, a little more monitoring, I will say one of my greatest achievements has been automating my learning management environment. Because Jack, you’re right, once you have it mapped out, and I use air table and all of these other tools to map things out and make sure it’s appropriate. But once you have it in there you are 100% True. Like it runs itself. And the experience does is not sacrificed at all. It’s It’s like one of the best systems that I’ve built in I’m extremely proud of. I just I Okay, I have to say this this one thing, and it may border. It may border to advance. But I want to put it out there because I trust my listeners, Jack, I do I trust my listeners, I want to talk about this feature that I as a marketer, I just like, is Jack doing this on purpose? Or is he just just just the luck of being a great developer, you’ve got an auto login feature. Now, everybody just listened to how this works. Auto log in is not new. It’s when you’re logged when you click a link, and you’re logged into a website without having to put in your username or password. Okay, many companies do this. And you just don’t realize that it’s taking place. But for you, for most people, you have to go to the login page, put in your username and password to get access. So you do you have it to where WP fusion, again integrates with probably every WordPress base form builder that I’ve seen, or I’ve used even even some strange ones. I’m like, wow, Jack, how did you find that? Where did that come from? So as long as WP fusion is integrated with it, what happens is, I can now send people to this page. Let me put it like if I fill out a form, let’s say a lead form. Let me pull all the way back. You’ve got lead magnets on your website and you have a members area. When someone downloads a specific lead magnet, you can have that form automatically log them into the members area where if that’s where you want to deliver it. So somebody may say this, Chris, why would I want them logged into my members area to access this free content, instead of just giving it to them on a thank you page or delivering it via email? And I had that same question everybody I did. But once I experienced how Jack’s coded the auto login feature, I was like, oh my god, the implications are endless. So watch this. What happens is, Jack will log WP fusion. I’m saying it like you’re doing it Jack. All right, WP fusion will log you in automatically. They fill out the form. The next page they see is the page where they can download their their freebie, but they’re actually logged in. And what what WP fusion has done is it’s logged them in as a guest. So they’re not actually a user yet in the your WordPress installation. But guess what? Every page, they go to every link that they click everything that they do, it’s tracked back to the CRM. So why would I want to? Why would I want to send them to my members area? Because now you can see You can offer other things that they may have access to, you can let them window shop but not go in, you’ll be able to see everything that they’re interested in as a lead, they don’t even have a true access in to the membership site. But since they downloaded that lead magnet, you auto logged them in as a guest. And you can protect pages with tags and certain things. But you can also let them see stuff so you can tell what they’re interested in.

Jack Arturo 35:30
Yep. Yeah, that’s a funny is you’re probably familiar with them barium and I think I am. Imember360. They have a similar system, but it really logs members into their real member accounts. Yeah. And we always had people asking for that. And the security person in me did not want to ever create a system that would let someone just log in as an administrator. So this idea of logging somebody into like a guest account that just has their tags, and the tracking came up as a compromise. If it’s really important, like editing saved credit cards, and they can use a username and password, but if it’s just yeah, browsing a lead magnet or sample the membership area, why not just allow that via link. So then that’s turned out actually really well turned out to have a lot more flexibility than requiring everybody to have a real user account, because now you can send out a blast to 10,000 people on your email list. And they can all have a personalized experience inside your website. But you don’t have to create user accounts for them. They don’t have passwords. Everything’s cleaned up after 24 hours. So yeah, that’s that’s one of those things that just sort of people were asking for it. We came up with a compromise and functionality, and it worked out pretty well.

Chris Davis 36:38
Yeah. And I feel like the compromise should be the standard. And here’s why Jack when I when I was doing it, because I use other platforms. I was of the mindset that every time someone logged in a profile was created, right? So now I naturally go and think how do I manage these profiles? I don’t want 1000s of users in my WordPress installation. And I went to go look and said, Okay, maybe there’s a plugin that I can manage users see when the last time they logged in? Well, there’s not a lot, there’s not a lot of plugins that allow you to see the activity of your users, I found a couple paid ones. But I was like, wow, this is this is concerning. But then I was like, well, where’s the test profile, that I use it? Initially, I was about to create a support ticket. I was like, Jack, it’s not working, you’re not creating a user. And I said, Wait a minute, I don’t think

Jack Arturo 37:30
documentation on this one.

Chris Davis 37:33
And I went to the documentation, and it talked about they’re signed in as a guest. So all of the protections of pages are still intact. However, everything that they do is tracked in the CRM, right. And I said, Oh, my gosh, that’s genius, because now I don’t have to manage that, who’s who’s active in my WordPress, because WordPress just makes that part hard. I can do that in my CRM, and everybody can get temporary access to this to this logged in area. And for those of you who are just like, Oh, but I don’t want to give somebody ongoing access, you can also use a tag in a upon applying this tag, it doesn’t matter if they fill out an auto logon form or not. If they have this particular tag, they won’t be able to log in, they just won’t. So you’re in full control. Full control, you can give somebody a seven day preview, you can,

Jack Arturo 38:30
for example, set it up so that the will set a coupon and WooCommerce so that the coupon is automatically applied as long as they have the tag. And then we’ll apply a tag and Active Campaign send them an auto login links. As soon as they click the link, they get an automatic discount, but then we just remove that tag after seven days and the coupon actually no longer works. Don’t have to worry about different codes or anything. It’s just a one click link to get automatic discount. And it expires based on whatever logic you choose.

Chris Davis 38:56
Yes. So listen, everybody listen to what he just said. Dynamic, expiring coupons. You can right now in the marketplace is not hard to find a coupon set a date, where it’s active instead of date where it expires. That’s not what Jack is talking about. Jack is talking about relative to the customer specific contacts journey. Now they can have a coupon. Hey, as for joining our list for the next seven days, enjoy 25% off. Better use it though and seven days it’s gone. And guess what, you have to do nothing because the automation is going to wait seven days and then remove the tag, the same link that they use takes them in but no longer is the coupon apply. So I hope I hope I’m doing this a decent job of showing you all the capabilities that you may have been going without.

Jack Arturo 39:52
And then just add on that with the coupon example. We could also set up a split test in Active Campaign and use a goal if they use the group On the right time, and we can see what’s most effective for urgency three days, seven days, 10 days and then check the goal completions to figure out which of the split test is winning and use that to further optimize the marketing?

Chris Davis 40:12
Yes, it literally puts you in full control. So some of you may I dare I say, your static learning or membership environment is what’s holding you back from retaining more students from selling more products to current students, and just overall, more fluid functionality in flow. And and the reason why Jack, I’m so glad you were able to come on and kind of nerd out with me, is because this type of functionality needs to be common in in terms of implementing in the marketplace. And I feel like your plugin does a really good job. It’s like, it feels like Jack. I mean, of course, I wouldn’t know how much how many lines of code or whatever.

Jack Arturo 41:03
But it’s, that’s been a priority. Yeah. Okay.

Chris Davis 41:07
It feels super light. It’s, it’s really quick. And it’s really easy to access. Like, I just go to settings, WP fusion and everything is right. There were other plugins, they’ve got, like these embedded, embedded menus, and you got to go to five different places to enable stuff. So it’s easy to configure. And I believe if you have a WordPress base, which is my preference, everyone, WordPress, braze learning, learning environment or a membership environment, I just don’t see how you get the maximum out of it without something like WP fusion and not just sync the information, but it’s also unlocking so much marketing automation capabilities. It’s unparalleled anywhere else. I mean, there’s so many CRMs what would you say I can go on for days and I know we need to quit it a little bit. What would you say is at this moment? Anecdotally if you don’t know like, for sure for sure. But just kind of based on your feel of of people signing up? What would you say the top CRM is? So far,

Jack Arturo 42:11
active campaigns are number one right now. Followed by Infusionsoft this is kind of a shrinking share of the pie. And then Ontraport drip HubSpot are on the top five. But yeah, campaigns number one by pretty fair margin.

Chris Davis 42:25
Yeah, it’s it’s really tough to beat a WP fusion and Active Campaign combo. I mean, it is, is so powerful, man. So alright, Jack, you’ve had WP fusion for eight years going on nine into infinity hope. Hopefully it never goes away. What do you have on the horizon? What are you eyeballing for the for the rest of the year? Is there any big big updates? Or is it just making sure the customer support is tight, the plugin stays lean and functional.

Jack Arturo 42:59
Nothing crazy. At the moment, we’re working on a setup wizard to just sort of reduce the number of overwhelming choices and give you some next steps after setting up there. I feel like nowadays, people are switching platforms so often. So you’re going to put some time into creating a sort of migration utility that if you want it to move from Active Campaign to try self hosting on fluency or ham or something, we have a little assistant that moves all your tags and access rules over. So you can try out a membership site connected to another platform right now. It’s a pretty manual process to switch everything. As you can imagine. There’s just it’s just stuff like that is like how can we make things easier to understand for new users and reduce time spent doing repetitive tasks? Actually make it less confusing? Yeah,

Chris Davis 43:48
and I love it Jack, you know what I never bought about it. But just the if this if we stuck with tags and custom fields, right? If I say hey, I’m no longer using Active Campaign, I want to jump over into fluent CRM, WordPress base has been growing. And though I love automation, I just kind of need some simple email marketing. And this fits my needs, right? I’m being able to say, okay, WP fusion, I’m now influence CRM. And it takes all of the tags that it’s read in active campaign with a click of a button generates them influence CRM, and the custom fields. And let’s take it to the step that you have it. I don’t have to sync all of my custom fields in WP fusion, you give me a checkbox, and I could say sync this one, don’t sync that one. If I did the checkbox, I want to sync all of these. That step alone, just getting all my tags over all of my custom fields over. That’s a huge leap for people who are migrating because it’s that much more fun, especially if you didn’t have

Jack Arturo 44:49
to redo all your tracking and everything like you have all of your videos and lessons and everything set up to track with tags. We’d like to if possible, make it easy to automatically switch

Chris Davis 45:00
Yep, yep. And, okay, everybody, I promise you, I’m stopping. But Jack mentioned this, okay, it’s his fault. And he said it, he said, It’s so common to just like, if you’re tracking video videos with tags, there’s also the feature that you can tag users based on the amount of a video that they watched. Okay, so you can tag them when they started tagging them when they end it and anywhere in between. So let me in my final example, everybody, this is just giving you some insight. This is daily for me in my automation service provider program, and all of that this is stuff we nerd out about every day. But just imagine if now you wanted to deliver maybe a video series as your lead magnet, and they do the auto login function. So they opt in on your website, they’re auto logged in. Now, WP fusion integrates, I’m using Presto player right now, and I’m really liking it. So it’s working really well. And it’s on a page, and they’re watching the video. And based on how much of that video tags are just being added to their account. So I can see they finish they’ve started. Now I can my marketing for just this, say a three part video series is going to be so dynamic and so unique. And the completion rate is going to be out of the out of this world in comparison to somebody who’s just sending the email. Hey, here’s video one. Hey, here’s video two. So that’s another superpower. These are all what we will call more basic. So when Jack’s like nothing, nothing major. But it’s all relative. Right? These small features, they just unlock so much not because of the feature itself is just because of how you implement it, Jack, I feel like, you know, you’re so ingrained with both WordPress and your platform because you haven’t been removed. You’re not one of those developing CEOs that are sitting on in a boardroom somewhere saying, Hey, guys, more users come on, right? More users, you understand what the users are doing what they need, and you understand the WordPress ecosystem. So it all makes sense to me why the plugin functions at such a high efficacy that it that it does.

Jack Arturo 47:19
And we use it for ourselves. So everything that we can make work better makes our site generate more sales, too. So yeah,

Chris Davis 47:25
yes. Alright, everyone, so just know, it is taking all the strength in my body and my brain and my heart to stop. But I don’t want to overwhelm you all. Jack, if people want to find out more about WP fusion is there. Where should they go as their community to join? What should they do? Yeah.

Jack Arturo 47:46
So we’re at WP fusion.com, all one word. And also on Facebook, we’ve got a pretty active community with about 2500 members. And the name of that is marketing automation for WordPress with WP fusion.

Chris Davis 48:00
Yeah, love it. Love it. So we’ll have all of those links. Again, WP fusion is a paid plugin which please consider buying the plug in to support Jack and all of his all of his efforts. However, they have a lite version to get you started at no cost. So there’s nothing preventing you right now to say, okay, Chris, while you’re listening, just type in WP fusion in the back end of your WordPress, click add new plug in search WP fusion, you’ll see it, install it and just test it out for yourself. Again, the support is top notch, there’s a good chance Jack himself. May I answer your support ticket. So you want to make sure that when you have that level of support and documentation that you pay attention to those type of tools, everybody, so that was the purpose, I hope you all got massive value out of today. And just the insight on an average day of Chris, you see when I get tools like this, I’m tinkering around, thinking of ways that I can enhance other people’s marketing, you know, so that they can get more out of it. So Jack, thank you for WP fusion because it has been instrumental, instrumental and pivotal. So greatly appreciate it. Awesome. Well, thanks

Jack Arturo 49:13
for having me on the show.

Chris Davis 49:14
Yes, yes. Anytime Jack and listeners, WP fusion.com. Right. By the way, it’s a very nicely designed website as well. All right. All right, Jack, I promise. But thanks for coming on to the podcast man. I appreciate it. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show Joseph love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly, and you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening and until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends