Skilljar & Duda & HubSpot: Making the Most of SaaS Integrations for Recertification [Coffee Chat Recap]

Skilljar’s monthly Coffee Chats, hosted by Skilljar’s Customer Training Manager, Cutler Bleecker, showcase different ways customers are using our platform, including demos with special guests. This month’s Customer Education Coffee Chat featured a conversation with Dan Hansen, Learning Experience Design Lead at Duda.

Duda’s professional website building software is used by agencies, SaaS companies, and web hosting companies. Like many SaaS companies, Duda offers a certification program for users who have developed skills in website design, platform development, and using developer tools.

Because Duda is a growing software company, the product is constantly changing with daily deployment updates and code changes to enhance the offering. Making sure users were recertified, meaning, renewing their certifications annually, soon became an important goal.

They found an elegant solution for automating the recertification process within Skilljar — and a little help from our integration with HubSpot — to help increase user engagement through a series of email campaigns.

The process of certification – and recertification

Here is the recertification process Dan shared in our Coffee Chat.

1. Create an exam using Skilljar’s quiz functionality

In order for users to become certified by Duda, they must complete a one-hour exam at the end of a course and pass it with a score of at least 70%. On the back end, Duda uses Skilljar to administer the questions which make up the exam. After a year, users are required to pass the certification again, ensuring they are up to speed on all of the Duda platform enhancements.

Duda offers various certifications to users to help them up their website building game and drive customer growth.

Duda uses HubSpot to create automated email campaigns to keep users up to date with their certification and engaged with the platform. The campaign kicks off with a congratulations email to all users that successfully complete an exam including an attached downloadable certificate.

2. Remind users their certification is expiring

In order to keep continuity and avoid gaps in certification, Dan programs their users’ enrollment in Skilljar courses to expire after 12 months. At the 11 month mark (335 days), users are encouraged to re-enroll in the exact same course, which is now updated with new questions, in order to recertify.

Through Skilljar’s Course Management tab, Duda sets certifications to expire in 12 months.

Duda enables another email in HubSpot 11 months after certification to let users know they can re-enroll in their course(s) and get recertified on Duda products. Within HubSpot, Dan uses a Behavioral Event to trigger these communications based on Skilljar activity, in this case, successful completion of the certification exam.

In HubSpot, Duda can set behavioral events (e.g., course completions) based on user actions that then trigger an automated email.

Within the Skilljar dashboard, in the Theming tab where customers can customize their learning platform, Dan adds the JavaScript-based course completion code snippet to send Skilljar completion data to HubSpot to trigger the notification workflow.

A simple code snippet generated by HubSpot is entered into Skilljar through the Theming tab to send an automated email when a user completes a course, and then again when their course is expiring and they are due for recertification.

Once users complete their recertification, the whole process starts over again in another 11 months when the notifications begin again to remind them it’s time for recertification.

3. Use quiz banks to keep certification exams fresh and up to date

Skilljar’s Quiz Question Banks house collections of questions that are centrally managed and can be used across quizzes. Organizing questions is easy as you can put questions into a question bank based on topic, subject, or any categorization specific to your needs. They are ideal for any situation where questions need to be reused across courses from knowledge checks, quizzes, and certification exams.

Quiz Question Banks in Skilljar house a variety of quiz questions for use in courses as needed.

Dan adds new questions to their question banks to keep Duda’s certification exams up to date. Each test will have 40 questions, and over time as the product changes, they can add questions to each exam pool but only display 40 questions randomly for each certification exam. So no two courses have the same test and no two users will ever see the same exam.

4. Use emails to keep users engaged

For users who don’t certify within the 30-day period, another email nurture campaign can be sent to help them reengage with Duda. Similarly, Duda is using the process to trigger other types of emails to entice user actions within their platform based on the behavior that is captured in Skilljar, such as if someone registers but doesn’t complete a course.

Users receive emails from Duda University to encourage course registrations, completions, and renewals.

In addition to reminding users when it’s time to recertify, customized emails are also used to engage users after they register, such as a reminder to complete the course.

Skilljar & Duda & HubSpot: A Win for SaaS Integration

To sum up the recertification process that Dan demoed:

In Skilljar: Start with a course, add a quiz, offer a certification when the quiz is completed successfully, and publish the course. In the publishing settings, set a 12-month enrollment expiration for that course.

In HubSpot: Set a Behavioral Event, such as sending a reminder email. Link the code that HubSpot generates to a course completion field in the theming section of the Skilljar dashboard. This will trigger an email reminder 1 month before their certification expires to make sure users recertify so they can fully take advantage of all the new features Duda has to offer.

Now that Dan has all of the pieces in place between Skilljar and HubSpot, it’s very simple and effective for Duda to recertify users on an annual basis. This is just one example of how Skilljar’s functionality enables users to do so much more with our system than what is served out of the box. HubSpot is just one of many valuable integrations that enable endless customizations. View the other platforms we integrate with to find new ways to elevate your learning platform.

Skilljar customers:

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Email customereducation@skilljar.com if you’d like to demo your unique learning platform to our community in an upcoming coffee chat!