Imagine your marketing tech stack all in one place.
Everything you need to:
- Publish content
- Collect leads
- Create sales funnels
- Process payments
- Manage email campaigns
- And even host online courses
Well, in this post I’m going to share how you can do all of this with WordPress and a few affordable plugins.
You’ll be able to sell any type of product or service from your website and manage everything from within the admin.
And the best bit:
It’s easy to set up yourself because you don’t need to know any code, which could save you a lot of money hiring others to do it for you.
Here’s a powerful WordPress marketing tech stack you’ll enjoy using.
Table of Contents
Website Platform: WordPress
Obviously, to build the perfect marketing tech stack with WordPress, you’ll need to be using WordPress.org.
Of course, any content management system will do the trick, but at what cost?
Most entrepreneurs who recommend other platforms aren’t using just one platform.
They need to use 4, 5, or 6 different services and pay absurd amounts just to connect them together.
With WordPress, there is literally a plugin for everything a digital marketer could ever need.
Also, if you want to drive traffic to your products and services through your blog, you might as well use the most widely used Content Management System on the planet.
Web Hosting: Cloudways
Avoid the hastle of needing to change hosting provider when you’re ready to scale your business.
With Cloudways, you can launch your own private server and take full full control for a low as $10 per month.
Then, when you need more resources, upgrading your server takes one click, without the need to speak to support staff.
There are so many extra benefits to using Cloudways than other platforms.
- Using your own SMTP or a built-in Cloudways email service with Elastic Email
- Automatic server and application backups
- Staging site management
- And tons of integrations like bot protection and Cloudflare
- Free SSL certificates
But the most exciting and recent addition to the service is Astro Pro for unlimited sites for just $4 extra per month.
Why choose cheap, shared web hosting when you might need to upgrade or switch to something better in the future?
Choosing Cloudways will grow with your business and set you up for success in the beginning.
WordPress Theme: GeneratePress
GeneratePress has been a leading WordPress theme for several years now. I’ve been a paid customer since 2017.
I use it for all of my sites. Why?
Because its so easy to design your website or blog exactly how you want it to look.
It also works perfectly with all popular page builders, so there’s no need to learn any coding to make your website look great.
And it’s modular, which means the features available can be switched on or off depending on whether you use them.
Another significant benefit of GeneratePress is the low cost for the Premium addon, which gives you an unlimited website licence.
There’s also a lifetime, one-time payment option if you want to save on the annual update fees.
Page Builder for Sales and Landing Pages: Elementor
Any digital marketing strategy is useless without an offer. And selling a digital product or service will require several pages to present your offers from.
These pages include a landing page (or sales page), a checkout page, and a thank you page.
Some of these pages are easy enough to make with the Gutenberg editor, whereas landing pages need a little more attention to convert more leads and sales.
This is where Elementor comes in. It’s an excellent page builder, perfect for creating landing pages for your sales funnels.
You can also use it for other pages such as the home page and about page to make them look more professional.
There’s also a ton of other uses you can get out of it, like collecting emails, which is another important aspect of growing your email list as a marketer.
Update: I personally use GenerateBlocks now, instead of Elementor. I find that GenerateBlocks is faster and I prefer the user interface. It’s also created by the same guy who built GeneratePress. Learn more here.
Sales Funnels: Upsell Plugin
Your WordPress technology stack isn’t complete without some form of funnel system in place.
This WordPress sales funnel plugin is an excellent choice for anyone selling digital products or offering a service.
You create the product or service inside the plugin and then add the checkout pages to guide your visitors through a sales funnel.
Upsell Plugin give you full control of the type of funnel you build, from a simple checkout form to complex sales funnels that guide your prospects through a seamless checkout process, with upsells, downsells, and order bumps.
You can sell single products like digital downloads, PDF’s, online courses with LearnDash, membership sites with MemberPress, or even a service with subscription payments using Stripe.
All done from your WordPress website.
The plugin connects to several popular plugins to automate the entire process. A new added feature connects into FluentCRM so you can follow up with your customers through automated email sequences.
To learn more about this tool, read my Upsell Plugin review.
Email Marketing: FluentCRM
If you want to turn your WordPress site into a complete marketing automation platform, then look no further than FluentCRM.
FluentCRM is a WordPress plugin that acts like an Email Marketing Solution, directly on your site.
You can do all the usual stuff an EMS does, including:
- Create optin forms to collect leads
- Send email campaigns from inside your WordPress dashboard
- Create automated email sequences
This new way of connecting and communicating to your audience is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to FluentCRM.
It turns what was once an unavoidable expense into an affordable, yet powerful way to grow your online business.
If you also want to sell online courses, you can utilise FluentCRM to send emails based on student interaction or lack thereof.
For example, if someone hasn’t watched a video inside your Learning Management System (such as LearnDash) for several days, you can get FluentCRM to send automated emails to help them get motivated.
Learning Management: LearnDash
If at any point you want to sell online courses, you’ll need a plugin that manages the content and provides an enjoyable experience for the student.
LearnDash is my learning management system of choice as it has plenty of features for most course creators for one yearly payment.
I prefer to use something within WordPress because once you purchase the licence, there are no monthly fees except the standard Stripe fee, host unlimited courses, and unlimited students.
How to Setup Your WordPress Marketing Stack?
The simplest way to setup your website with the above tools is to install them all on the same site
But a better way that I like to adopt is to separate things up a bit.
We can think of this as having our main website as an inbound marketing base where all the traffic comes in.
This could be traffic from search, social media, or paid ads.
This side of our website stack needs to run as smoothly as possible, on a server that has the capacity to manage lots of concurrent connections at one.
The the other side of the stack is for taking payments, hosting courses, and customer support, etc.
These can be split in different ways, for instance, having the sales side on a sub-domain.
The reason behind it is so you can maximize the performance of your site that visitors interact with, such as site speed, SEO, and so on.
Many of the plugins that take payments and deal with customer requests are heavy plugins that constantly require a connection to a server and database.
When you put these plugins on a separate WordPress install, it not only makes your main content site more lean, it simplifies tracking subscribers vs tracking sales.
Other Potential Tools to Include
In theory, the idea of managing our marketing directly on our WordPress site sounds attractive, but it’s not practical in many aspects.
That being said, here are a few other areas missing from the above stack that could be of potential benefit.
Customer Support
An important aspect of keep your customer happy and a seamless way for them to request support when they need it is in your support system.
There are plenty of WordPress plugins capable for the job. Here are just a few to take a look at.
Community Engagement
If you sell courses or run a WordPress membership site, an excellent way to keep students engaged and provide support at the same time is to include community features.
This can be done in many ways.
The simplest is likely with a forum such as bbpress, but if you want something more elaborate, plugins like BuddyPress or PeepSo will do the trick.
Social Media Management
Managing social media can be a daunting task.
Even if there were a WordPress plugin to manage our social media posts from to keep things organized, this might save us time and minor headaches.
A potential candidate here could be Social Web Suite. It’s allows you to schedule and manage social media posts based on the blog content you publish.
I haven’t used this (yet), but I can see the potential benefits in using such a plugin.
Content Management
Similar to scheduling our social media posts, we need a system or editorial calendar in place to manage our blog content.
To develop an efficient inbound marketing strategy within our WordPress stack, we can use a content calendar plugin such as CoSchedule.
With CoSchedule, you can plan and publish your blog posts in an organized editorial calendar directly inside WordPress.
They also have some features to post to social media which would save us needing an extra plugin for that alone.
Analytics Platform
It’s unlikely that the team at WordPress will ever add traffic data and analytics to the WordPress dashboard.
A plugin I quite like is Lara’s Google Analytics.
There are plenty of other plugins that display Google Analytics stats in WordPress.
I personally keep them both separate and simply login to Google Analytics to view my stats.
Conclusion
That concludes my list of tools to build the perfect tech stack for WordPress.
What do you think of this list?
Let me know in the comments which one’s you use.