Connecting LearnDash to Ontraport: Common Questions & Use-Cases

Connecting LearnDash to Ontraport is a popular option for teachers and educational content creators who want to automate some of their course sales and marketing.

If you are already using Ontraport then you already know its capabilities. Ontraport is a popular marketing automation platform that helps businesses remove the manual efforts involved in managing their customer database, email campaigns, and campaign reporting.

LearnDash is one of the most popular WordPress Learning Management System (LMS) plugins available today. If you are using Ontraport and decide to launch your own course, then LearnDash is a great choice and there are some nice integrations between the two that can help automate your sales and marketing efforts.

Here are some of the common questions and use-cases people have encountered in connecting LearnDash to Ontraport (and how to solve them).

Do you absolutely need to integrate LearnDash and Ontraport?

The short answer is not right away, but at some point yes.

As a general rule, connecting LearnDash to Ontraport can be beneficial. Before you jump into it, however, you might want to make sure you have nailed down the course and its value to your audience.

Focus on creating a quality course and making sure all your videos are using a high-performance video player and high quality video hosting.  Then your focus should be promoting and distributing it.  And then, as you attract more contacts, start thinking about ways to connect LearnDash to Ontraport.

Next ask yourself why do you use Ontraport? Do you need to tie any of that into your course? If not, then you don’t need to integrate them.

But if you are curious about what you can do, here are some use-cases that you might be interested in doing yourself. 

Use-Cases for Connecting Ontraport to LearnDash

You want one platform to create a salespage to sell your course, as well as a  checkout process, and then pass that purchase to Wordpess.

If you have another separate product (not the course) and are using Ontraport for your sales page, email marketing, and retargeting then you may want to keep those processes similar to sell your course. 

This way you can charge for your course and keep your sales process and everything in Ontraport, and then pass those orders over to LearnDash to register the new student for the course they just purchased.

In order to achieve this you would need to integrate them somehow.

You don’t just want a course. You want to set the course up as a membership site, where certain areas of the website are locked and available only to paying members.

Yes you can set up a course with LearnDash and drip the lessons out already without any additional software. But if you want to set up a full-fledged membership site with other areas locked to members only, like members only videos, articles, etc, then Ontraport can do that.

You want to sell more courses or more products based on what was already purchased.

With the right integration you can tag your customers in Ontraport and sell them more courses based on what they have already purchased. You can even tag someone based on what lessons they finished.

You want to enroll a student in another course once they finish a particular course or lesson.

There may be a time where you want to give a bonus course or bonus material to students but give it only after a certain amount of the course is completed. You could even use this technique to sell more courses.

Once a student finishes course A, enroll them to course B. But then once they wach the first 2 video lessons in course B they are asked to purchase the full course.

You want to send students certain emails once a course, lesson, or quiz is finished.

This is another nice way to sell more courses and products based on certain events. Once someone finishes course A, you can add them to an email drip campaign to send them emails with information on another related course. In the email campaign you can mix in free course videos and other content as well as offers to purchase the next course.

Which Is the Best Way to Connect LearnDash to Ontraport?

You can’t simply connect LearnDash to Ontraport using any direct API integrations. Instead, you’ll need to install a connect LearnDash and Ontraport using a third-party tool. Some of the most popular ones include:

– PilotPress
– WP Fusion
– Zapier

Most users believe that the best way to connect LearnDash to Ontraport is through WP Fusion. This is a tool that “connects WordPress to anything” and is designed to connect WordPress to platforms like Ontraport.  It’s also quite simple to set up.

The main downside to using WP Fusion is that it isn’t free (and they don’t have any kind of free version.) However, for $247/ year you can get their lowest-tier plan which allows use on one website and will do all of the use-cases explained above and more. 

For more information on how WP Fusion and others help you connect LearnDash with Ontraport please check this article.