Product Structure

How is Summit Evergreen Structured?

One Summit Evergreen Account can have one product or multiple products.

A student can purchase as many products as they like.

A product is a collection of pages organized in a tier, with a syllabus with a drip.

• Pages are where your main content lives. They contain organized content (video, audio, text, images, links, surveys, quizzes, etc).
• Tiers are hierarchical views (Gold, Silver and Bronze) that allow you to use a syllabus to provide a subset or superset of content to users.
  • Tiers are typically associated with different levels and pricing of an offer (e.g., $197, $497 and $997).
  • A product can have one tier or multiple tiers; however, students only ever purchase one tier of a product but can be upgraded or downgraded from one tier to another.
  • Tiers control the customer experience and the level of access, as well as the syllabus and the drip.
  • Typically a product’s tiers will have shared core content (i.e., Tier 1 is A, Tier 2 is A+B, Tier 3 is A+B+C).
  • Each tier has both a syllabus and a drip.

• The syllabus is a hierarchical view of pages that visually drives the users’ learning experience. The syllabus will drive the navigational menu, unless you are using a custom menu.The syllabus controls the layout and the visual sequence of pages.

• The drip is a time-based hierarchical view of pages that visually drives the users’ learning experience. Drip controls the time-release sequence of the pages and emails, driving what the students can access. The drip can be set to have all pages automatically available.

Account

• Account URL – This is the main URL where people can login to view all their products; students can also login here to access and toggle between all of their products, or they can login at individual product URLs.
• Choose your product page – This is where you select a page from products that you own.

• White-labeled – This is a privately branded site
• Custom product URL (this is different than the account URL, and each product will have its own) – This is where you specify specific URLs so that students can login to a URL of your choosing.
• User name – This is set to the student’s email address.
• Password – This is set by the student.
• Reset password – This emails users a link to reset their password.
• Self-service account management – This allows users to update their first or last name, email address and password if logged in.
• Gravatar integration – This automatically pulls the customer’s gravatar if they have one.

• Personalized – You can make what jives with you.
• Branding – You can have multiple products that have different brands, all within the same account.
• Themes – Each product can have its own look and feel.
• Theme customization – Customize your favicon, colors, fonts, and use CSS scripts to give your product a completely unique feel.
• Product logo – Upload your product logo.
• Custom menus (vary by theme) – These give you the ability to create an alternate navigational hierarchy.
• Links to outside websites (vary by theme) – These give you the ability to create links to outside websites on the navigational menus.
• Toggle between products – This allows customers to login at one URL and toggle between all the products they own.

• Pages – These are where your main content lives. They can be tied to or independent of the syllabus, they can also be set to public, draft, or private.
• Welcome page (varies by theme) – Upon login, customer is taken to a homepage of your choice.
• Editor – This is what you use to insert your content, text, mp3 files, videos, pdf downloads, etc.
• HTML – This allows you to switch to an HTML view in the editor for fancy customizations.
• Choose the tiers of your product that are associated with a page (i.e., only the Gold level gets a page). Pages that are shared between multiple tiers only need to be edited once.
• Video – These are easily inserted through using an embed code or a link. Videos need to be hosted (we recommend using Youtube, Wistia or Vimeo, and we have found that Wistia videos work best with our system). Strategically, we have stayed out of the video hosting marketplace because of the proliferation of devices and related support issues.
• File hosting – Small files are hosted on S3 via Summit Evergreen’s account. Large Files are recommended to be hosted on your own S3 account or can be hosted on Summit Evergreen’s S3 account (you will pay for additional streaming costs).
• Expiring URLs – Summit Evergreen files can be set with expiring URLs, so that if the URL is shared it no longer works after a set period of time.
• Non-selection of text – This prevents people from stealing your copy by disabling the ability for the text to be highlighted and copied easily.
• Removable sidebar navigation (varies by theme) – This allows the sidebar navigation to be removed on designated pages to make for a full-width page.
• Public facing redirect – This is the Page that visitors will be redirected to if they don’t have access to this page.
• Comments – You can turn comments on and off on specific pages. Admins can delete comments if necessary.
• Cross-sell or Upsell – This allows you to create pages inside of your product that link to your shopping cart to encourage students to accept additional offers.
• Course content is saved in UTF-8, which enables you to present your content in any language, even character-based languages like, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Some parts of the user interface do not have this capability, but it is available for most content.

• These can be attached to a page or set as stand-alone.
• They cannot be shared publicly; they need to be associated with a users account.
• They provide the admin the ability to see all responses.
• They allow customers to go back and see how they answered.
• They give you the ability to prevent future access until a quiz is taken and the user achieves a certain score (this setting is course-specific, not quiz-specific).
• They provide automatic grading.
• They provide custom thank-you messages after a quiz is completed.
• Survey questions provide user feedback, so that the course can be improved, future courses can be developed, and you can create a high-quality user experience.
• They provide journaling, multiple choice questions, short answers, multiple choice, text answers, and instructional text and headings.

• You can send a welcome email to users based on registration. You also have the option to disable this email if you choose to send the welcome email another way.
• Email integration is sent through mailgun.
• They provide the ability to send out emails on a drip (schedule) based upon the time maps of when a user starts a course.
• They provide the ability to add in custom merge fields (e.g., user name, email, etc.).
• They do not provide broadcast message ability. We intentionally “out-of-scoped” this because we wanted to focus on Evergreen course delivery.
• Email integration is built in with Aweber, MailChimp and Infusionsoft to add users to list or tags to users upon purchase.
• You can set up the “from” address to an address of your choosing, as well as the “from” name.

Drip – Product Schedule

• Evergreen – The drip is what allows you to create an Evergreen experience, meaning you can launch your course once and continue to generate income with minimal maintenance.
• Drip – A time based hierarchical view of pages that visually drives the users’ learning experience. The drip will drive what the user can access, based upon when they purchased.
• The drip enables the user experience to be curated so that all users go through the same week 1, week 2, week 3 experience regardless of when they purchased the product.
• Pages can be dripped or set as “always available”.
• Access is based upon the customer’s time zone, which is automatically set when they sign up. This can be changed manually for customers.

• These provide built-in reports and analytics to help you build your business and understand your customers.
• They allow for Google analytics to be easily integrated.
• Who logged in – They ensure that people who join your program actually get logged in, so they do not refund.
• Dashboard – They provide a dashboard of product and course statistics.
• Recent purchases – They show any recent purchases.
• Newest users – They find the newest users.
• Non-registered users – They find any users who did not fully complete the registration process.
• Inactive users – They find any users who have not logged in recently.
• Customer activity – They allow you to see what pages a customer has been accessing, so you know if they are following the program.
• Customer account rabbit hole – This allows you to login as if you were the customer to see if a support ticket is based on the program, the device, or an education issue.
• Survey responses – They allow you to see all responses from all customers for a particular survey, or see one customer’s responses to all of the surveys.

• These help you focus on creating an amazing customer experience, as well as integrate with your shopping cart and email provider.
• You can manually add students and assign them products, if you’re not integrating with any other services.
• We currently provide integration with:
  • Infusionsoft
  • 1ShoppingCart
  • Stripe
  • MailChimp
  • Aweber
  • PayPal
  • Gumroad
  • Google Analytics
  • Ontraport
  • Groupon, Amazon and access codes
  • Our Custom API – for the tech savvy user
  • And many others…

When using Summit Evergreen, it will sometimes run more efficiently and effectively when using a browser other than Internet Explorer (e.g., Mozilla Firefox).

• Let us know how we can best help you reach your goals.
• We offer Concierge Services, Training and Done-For-You Services.
• We are always open to new feature requests.
• Email us at support@summitevergreen.com.

Rachel Kersten & Keith Perhac

Co-founders of Summit Evergreen

rachel@summitevergreen.com & keith@summitevergreen.com