Siren Launches Update Featuring LifterLMS Integration, Advanced Incentive Program Builder

Since the beginning, the vision of Siren has always been to be a pay for performance plugin. Our mission at Siren is to help people form better partnerships with each-other. We’ve always wanted to challenge the status quo of what it means to work together online.

We believe in the business-shaping nature of well-designed programs, and think that these new features we’re presenting today will help new businesses do things they’ve never had access to before, and allow existing businesses to adapt, transforming their offering into something that scales in ways they never could before.

When we launched Siren a couple of months ago, we started with the basics. The focus of the plugin was to get the foundations of what people expect an affiliate plugin to do in-place. In-addition to that, we also wanted to make sure we were supporting WooCommerce, since it integrates with so many other tools (including LifterLMS!). All of this was built on a really solid foundation that is extendable, without relying on heavy customizations or digging through yet another settings tab.

Even at launch, Siren has proven to be an effective affiliate management solution, allowing people to create nuanced programs that sell things that other affiliate plugincs can’t do very well.

And now, we’re excited to announce that our LifterLMS integration is available. This release is packed with new features, and new approaches to pay for performance. I think you’re really going to like some of the features we have, even if you’re not using LifterLMS, because nearly all of the features we’re going to talk about in this post also work for WooCommerce and all of our integrations, as well.

Create Royalty Programs With Siren

One of the key goals of Siren’s integration with Lifter has always been to allow WordPress LMS sites to support, and pay multiple course creators on their site. One way to do this is with a royalty program. We want to make it so that you can turn your website into a platform. Want to build a Udemy clone with WordPress? Well, with LifterLMS, and Siren, you’ll be able to.

A royalty program will pay the creator (or creators!) of a product a commission when their product is sold! This exciting change makes it possible to pay creators for the things that they have created, and are selling, on your platform.

With Siren’s multi-program approach, this means you can create a royalty program and an affiliate program at the same time, even potentially awarding the creator credit for both generating the sale, and the royalty for the sold product.

Instructor Uploads Course Using Lifter

The course instructor uploads the course using LifterLMS. They are added with the proper role that allows them to edit their own courses, and perhaps even set their price, discounts, etc.

Student Purchases Course

A student visits the site, and purchases the course. Siren detects that the course is owned by an instructor.

Siren Creates an Obligation for the Royalty

Siren uses the active programs to determine the royalty amount, and adds it as an obligation.

Royalty Programs With Other Integrations

The use-cases for a royalty program goes well beyond the course/educator use-case. This functionality allows you to do all kinds of different businesses in unique and exciting ways.

1. Help artists sell their art. Books, paintings, maybe even create a print shop that sells and pays artists when print orders are made.
2. Outsource the printing of 3D printed parts sold online
3. Create a consignment-based website for antiques
4. Auction houses for estate sales, etc.

These royalty programs can be associated with multiple people, as well, so if you wanted to split a royalty across multiple collaborators, you can.

Limit Which Products Apply To a Program

In order to make royalty programs work, we needed to make it possible for programs to specify that the commission should only be applied to certain products in a transaction. In the case of the royalty program, only products that are owned by a collaborator should apply.

This, and use-cases similar to this kept cropping up, so we decided to create a way to make it possible to not only solve the immediate need for royalty programs, but to also go ahead and set it up to solve the other needs, as well.

For example, we’ve had a few requests for people to be able to make a program only apply commission for certain products, or certain product categories.

This allows you to specify what parts of a transaction are considered for calculation. This includes:

1. Shipping
2. Taxes
3. Specific products (filter by sku, by category)
4. Products owned by one or more collaborators
5. Fees
6. Discounts (In other words, you can set a program to ignore discounts and pay a full commission even when a coupon code is used)

Share Membership Profits With Course Creators

Royalty programs are an awesome addition to Siren’s capabilities, but a lot of learning sites offer access to their content using a membership instead of selling individual courses. This makes it tricky to fairly compensate course creators, since you can’t attribute what courses generated the money for your program.

So, we did some research, and figured out that one way to resolve this is with a membership profit share. This allows you to pay your course creators on a schedule based on how much profit your memberships generated. We call these distributors.

But we believe strongly in pay for performance, so while you absolutely can do an even share across all of your course creators, we also wanted to make sure you could reward your course creators for doing the things that ensure that your customers remain on the platform for as long as possible. This is where Siren’s performance weighted pool comes in.

Distributor Tracks Metrics

Over time, a distributor will track key metrics. These metrics get tallied up and can be used to calculate the distribution values for each collaborator who’s a part of the program.

Distributor Gets Triggered

Something causes the distribution to be triggered, such as a schedule. When this happens, the system ensures that the conditions to run this distribution are met, and then it begins the process.

Collaborator Payouts Are Calculated

Siren calculates the reward pool for collaborators, and then distributes that pool based on each collaborator’s metrics.

This allows you to pay a higher commission to course creators who had the most students complete their lessons, and courses. The ones who had the most students interacting with their content will receive a larger share of the profit share, and those who did less would receive less.

What’s really cool is you can even use a combination of both a weighted, and non-weighted. So you can set a baseline value that all creators get with the non-weighted pool, and then stack a weighted pool on-top as an extra incentive to help further motivate them to perform.

I love this because it motivates course creators to do the exact things that will help reduce churn in your business by keeping the customers engaged, and using your product.

Other Exciting Use-Cases

This is such an exciting set of functionality, because it makes it possible to create many other unique distributions, namely, bonuses.

1. Customer satisfaction program for support teams – Pay support people a bonus based on customer satisfaction and ticket closure counts.
2. Sales volume bonus – Pay a collaborator an extra 10% bonus for their sales last month if they sell more than x dollars.
3. Volume-based sales bonus – Pay your affiliates a bonus based on who created the most sales.
4. Multi-Tier Commissions – With multiple distributions, you can create tiered commissions based on the number of sales generated since the last bonus.
5. Pay podcasters in your network a profit share based on how many listens their exclusive content gets

Hopefully these filters will make it possible not only for our existing customers to tweak their programs further, but it also ensures we can fully create royalty programs.

Imagine The Possibilities

Just imagine the different ways you can build your business. With Siren’s ability to create royalty programs, it’s never been easier to work with creators, and sellers. These programs unlock new opportunities to manage everything between online learning sites, and your local antique store.

With distributions, you can create powerful tiered commissions for your affiliates, or incentivize course creators to maintain, and encourage students to participate, and engage in their courses.

And of course, the LifterLMS integration will fully support all existing features offered with WooCommerce, allowing you to create affiliate programs exactly like you do with Woo.

We can’t wait to see the innovative businesses and successes that will come from the features this update is going to provide.