How to Automate a Skool Community with Zapier and AI

What can you automate in a Skool community?

Skool is a community platform, similar to a Facebook group or a course platform. This guide covers two automations for a Skool group that a client or business runs as a free group, often as a funnel into a higher offer.

The first automation sends a personalised welcome message when someone joins, based on their answers to the membership questions. The second sends an action plan or lead magnet based on pain points collected in a form. A lead magnet is simply a way to turn leads into engaged leads by giving them something useful up front. Both automations are built in Zapier, because Make.com did not have a Skool integration at the time of this build.

How do you set up the membership questions?

In the group's settings, open plugins and then membership questions, turn them on and add your questions. You can only add three. Choose them to collect the contact detail you plan to use and to bring out the member's pain points:

• Question one: their email address. Use a phone number instead if you plan to send SMS.
• Question two: why they are joining the community, as a text box, to surface a pain point.
• Question three: a second pain point question, or a qualifying question, such as about their business.
• Change the wording to match your own group and the way you help people.

How do you connect Skool to Zapier?

In Zapier, set the trigger to Skool and choose the event for answered membership questions. Create a new connection. To get the API key, go to the Skool group's settings, open plugins and the Zapier integration, turn it on and copy the API key. Paste the key into Zapier along with the name of your group.

To test, request to join your own group and answer the questions. The trigger test should then show your answers. Real triggers can take around two minutes to arrive.

Automation 1: send a personalised welcome email

Once the trigger is working, add these steps:

1. Add ChatGPT with the conversation action. Write a prompt asking for a short, customised welcome message and insert the member's first name and answers from the membership questions. A conversation with an assistant gives better results, but a simple conversation works to start.
2. Ask for the output in HTML. This keeps the formatting clean when it goes into an email.
3. Add Gmail and choose send email. Use the email from the membership answers as the recipient, set your sender name, write a subject line with the member's first name, set the body type to HTML and insert the ChatGPT output. Add a signature.
4. Add Klaviyo (or your email platform) and find the profile by email first. Switch on the option to create a profile if it does not exist. This avoids duplicates.
5. Add a second Klaviyo step to create or update the profile and add it to the list that starts your email sequence.

What should the welcome message and sequence include?

Include a link to the form you want members to complete, links to your other resources such as a YouTube channel or newsletter, and a link to the community. The aim of the email sequence is to get new members to complete the form. In our example the sequence ran over several days.

The first output had stray HTML markers in it. Fix this by refining the prompt, which is a matter of testing and tightening the instructions. Most email platforms can start a sequence when a profile joins a list, so if you already have one, use it rather than building a sequence in Zapier.

Automation 2: turn a form into an automated lead magnet

The second automation starts when a member completes a form. Use the form to collect more pain points than three membership questions can. Our example asked for company name, main bottleneck, revenue range, industry, employees, primary marketing channel, top priorities and email address. The form can be built in Typeform or Google Forms, because the process is similar.

In Zapier, use these steps:

1. Trigger: Typeform, new entry, for your form.
2. ChatGPT conversation: write a prompt that uses the form answers, one question and answer at a time, to generate the content for your lead magnet. Our example generated ad copy, a marketing structure and a plan to scale.
3. Google Docs: create a document from the text, named after the company.
4. Google Drive: add file sharing preferences, using the file ID from the previous step, so anyone with the link can view it.
5. Gmail: send an email to the address from the form, with the shareable link and a short message.
6. Skool: optionally unlock a course for the member by email, as an extra reason to complete the form.
7. Klaviyo: find the profile by email, then remove it from the list, so the member stops getting emails asking them to complete the form.

How do you alert your closers to qualified leads?

Add a filter step after the email steps. Use a question in the form, such as a revenue range, to decide whether someone is qualified. For example, use a filter that only continues when the answer does not contain the lowest option, so unqualified leads stop there.

After the filter, add a Slack step that sends a channel message. Include the company name, a few useful answers such as the number of employees, and the email address so a closer can follow up. If you collected a phone number, include that too. You can format the message with a bot name and icon.

A lead magnet can also be a presentation or a larger document, and the form data tells you what your community is made of. This works best for a free group that feeds a higher offer, but it also suits any group that wants to give more value up front.