How to customise LearnDash with Zapier
Zapier is a great tool for those looking to customise actions within LearnDash, making it unnecessary to install various plugins and weigh down your WordPress site whenever you need an automation and, of course, much more practical by avoiding hours of development.
In this article, I will quickly teach you how to customise LearnDash for Zapier using Mailchimp (an email marketing tool) connected to LearnDash by Zapier as an example.
What can I automate with Zapier in my LearnDash course?
Many things, really, the possibilities are many and incredible. For example, every time a student starts a course, you can use Zapier to send them to a CRM, an email list, an AI that will perform a specific action, an Excel spreadsheet, etc.
It is also possible to make the student receive a customised completion certificate by email, instead of having to download it from their dashboard, and the possibilities are endless.
Some other cool possibilities:
- Certificates via Google Drive: Generate a personalised PDF and save it in a folder.
- Slack/Discord Notification: Notify the support team every time a student completes a critical course.
- SMS/WhatsApp: Send a welcome message via Twilio or similar.
One of the most used customisations is using Zapier with an email marketing platform, such as Mailchimp.
In other words, when the student starts course ABC, they automatically go to your preconfigured email list in Mailchimp or to an automated email delivery list.
Let’s customise an integration between Zapier and LearnDash in practice
The best integration approach through Zapier is via Webhooks, which are handled by the LearnDash Zapier plugin.
This way, every time an event happens in LearnDash (example: student enrols in a course), the site triggers a webhook to Zapier which executes a certain action.
For educational purposes, let’s customise the integration between LearnDash and Mailchimp.
- In your Zapier account, click the orange button with a “+” sign or “Create”, then “Zaps”. This type of integration is very common; it is based on trigger and action.
- Click on “Trigger” and search for “LearnDash”; the option will appear. When opening the LearnDash box, in Trigger Event select: “Enrolled Into a Course”. What we are going to do is that every time a student enrols in a course, they will go to a specific list in your Mailchimp.
- In Account, click “Sign In” and a new box will open asking you to fill in your site URL and the API Key. You can get an API by going inside the WP admin dashboard under the menu LearnDash LMS > Zapier > Settings > API Key.
- You can download the Zapier plugin directly from the LearnDash website within your account.
- After confirmation, your site will be integrated with Zapier. Click “Continue” and select the course for which you want the integration to be made. Then click “Continue”, you can test the trigger and now select the action.
- In the action, select “Mailchimp”. If you don’t have a Mailchimp account, create one.
- In Action Event, select “Add/Update Subscriber”. Then connect to your Mailchimp account and click “Continue”.
- In the configuration tab, in “Audience”, select your existing audience in Mailchimp, i.e., your contact list.
- In “Subscriber email”, click the plus “+” button and select “Student Email Address”. In “Status”, leave it as “Subscribed”. In “Double opt-in”, check “False”; this will mean the student does not need to confirm the email. In “Update existing”, check “Yes”.
Note: Make sure your terms of use clearly state that the student will be subscribed to the list when purchasing the course, to maintain compliance with data protection laws (such as LGPD or UK GDPR).
In Tags, put the name of the course so that you can organise and segment the emails later; without tags, everything gets mixed up. The other options are configurable and are at your discretion; if you have questions, you can click the question mark icon next to the name of each label.
Click “Continue” and then you can test and publish. If everything is correct, your new student will appear in your audience list.
From there, the sky is the limit; you can create various customisations integrating Zapier and LearnDash. Generally, the process is the same, only the applications you want to use change.
If you need support to customize your LearnDash with Zapier, please contact me!
