Glossary Of Terms Used In Fern CRM

Affiliates are people who refer your brand to others. The difference between a “referral” and an “affiliate” is that affiliates have been empowered with tools and resources to share your brand. Which makes it easier for people to refer you and helps you influence the narrative by sharing specific resources.

Affiliates are given a URL that’s unique to them, that tracks how many purchases were made from their link.

Many businesses choose to reward their affiliates with either a percentage of each sale, gifts, donations to their favorite charity, or other meaningful rewards by tracking the purchases made with their link, tallying the rewards, and then fulfilling the rewards on a regular schedule.

Fulfilling the rewards is called “paying out.” “Payments” in this case can be non-monetary but the term used for fulfilling those rewards. is still “payouts.”

Affiliate Manager is the tool built into Fern CRM that is like a CRM specifically for affiliates. It provides the technology to automatically create those unique URLs for each contact, display the rewards you’ve decided on, track purchases, and more.

You and your team can see all the data about your affiliates so you can see who your top earners are and make regular payouts.

Your affiliate users can see their own data, track the rewards they’re accruing, and see when payouts are made.

Note: Only CRM users on the Tree or Forest plan have access to the affiliate manager tool. This helps us keep the Sprout plan as affordable as possible for smaller businesses.

The term “workflows” and “automations” are often used interchangeably and really there’s no difference other than the words that show up on different pages of your Fern CRM account.

Automations are like having your own personal robot army to do admin tasks 24 hours a day. They make it possible for you to provide experiences that are more personal to each and every contact on your list.

See “Workflows” below for more specifics.

Certificate has 2 uses in this tool:

1. Certificates the course platform are like awards, like a diploma or certificate of completion. You and your team can create the certificate inside Fern CRM (or upload an existing one) and then designate how your users earn them. Certificates can be delivered automatically by a workflow after an action is performed or manually by you and your team.

2. Certificate of signature is found in the Documents & Contracts section and it’s a digitally created certificate of exactly when the document was signed and by who. It’s like a certificate of authentication for the signatures on a contract.

“Client Portal” is one of the most confusing labels in this tool, but if you think of it as the “Members Area” then you’ll be just fine.

In the “Sites” section of the Main side of your Fern CRM account, you’ll see an option in the top menu bar called “Client Portal.” This is where you can edit some of the settings for your overall Members Area that includes courses, communities, and the affiliate manager tool.

Of course, you can use the client portal as an actual client portal for your clients and continue using that label. But, at this time, the phrase “client portal” isn’t visible to any of your contacts. It’s simply the label in your Fern CRM account.

You might here us talking about your customer community, your online following, or your movement as a community of brand champions. But when we’re talking about the tool itself, we’re referring to the feature inside Memberships.

The Communities feature inside Fern CRM is very similar to having your own Facebook, MightyNetworks, or Circle installed on your own website.

You can create a separate “community” for each Facebook-style group you want and give access to all your contacts or specific contacts.

For example, you can create a private community for each client and only give access to their team and yours. You can also have one big community for everyone who has purchased from you so they can interact with each other.

You can add courses to a community for an all-in-one experience or you can keep your courses and communities separate.

Note: Only CRM users on the Tree or Forest plan have access to the community platform. This helps us keep the Sprout plan as affordable as possible for smaller businesses.

Conditional logic is a catch-all term for any kind of decision tree built into a process. Inside Fern CRM, you’ll see the term “conditional logic” used in the Forms and Surveys functions. (See “Forms” and “Surveys” below for more details.) But technically, conditional logic also applies to branches in workflows.

An example: conditional logic can be used in surveys to change what questions a user sees based on how they answered previous questions.

Another example: workflows (automations) have an action called “If/Else” which can be used to send each contact down a different path of the workflow, based on the criteria specified in the If/Else branch.

We use “courses” as a catch-all phrase for anything built inside the “Memberships” section of your Fern CRM account that shows up in the “Courses” tab of the “Client Portal” (Members Area.)

The actual word “courses” is only visible to you and your contacts inside the “Client Portal” but the “products” inside the “Memberships” section of your Fern CRM account are where you build the courses.

In truth, “courses” don’t have to be actual courses. You can use the course platform to create a library of resources, onboarding tutorials for new clients, membership content, subscription content, “how-to” content for customers who buy your physical products, and anything else you can think of!

So don’t let the term “courses” limit how you think about them. Naturally the developers had to pick a term and stick to it. (We could change it, but that would make it harder for you to follow YouTube videos and such made by other people showing how to do different things inside of HighLevel, the software that Fern CRM is built on.)

Each “course” is broken down into “categories” and each category is broken down into “lessons.”

Note: Only CRM users on the Tree or Forest plan have access to the course platform. This helps us keep the Sprout plan as affordable as possible for smaller businesses.

Custom fields are the end result of the boxes you use on a form, but they can be used with or without a form.

For example, the tool has certain custom fields built-in, like “Full name”, “email”, “phone number”, etc.
Any time you create a form or use a form template, you have the option to use the pre-built custom fields or create your own.

When your users fill out that form and send it to you, their answers are saved inside their contact profile inside your CRM account. Those fields inside their contact profile are custom fields.

But you don’t have to use a form to create those custom fields (unless you want to.) You can also create custom fields from the Custom Fields section of the Settings side of your account and those custom fields will also show up in your contact’s profile. You can then fill them out manually for each contact, or create automations to update them as needed. And of course, you can use them in forms that your users fill out.

You can also use the shortcode for each custom field in lots of different ways. (The short code doesn’t have its own name, so it’s usually referred to as “custom field” too.) You can add custom field code to emails, web pages, notes in the contact profile, and more to display each contact’s individual entry.

For example, you can personalize automated emails by using the custom code for “first name” or you can create an automation that sends you an email when anyone books a call on your calendar and that email can include the contact’s name, email, and anything they typed into the booking form (like, “what do you want to cover during this call?)

Custom values work a lot like custom fields in that they have a shortcode you can add to web pages, emails, workflows, etc. that will display whatever is associated with that custom value.

The main differences between custom fields and custom values is that “fields” are unique to each contact while “values” are unique to the entire account.

For example, you would use custom fields to document each contact’s favorite color or birthday. When you use the shortcode to display that value, each contact will see their answer. In other words, it will look different to each contact. Like using “first name” in emails. Each recipient will see their name.

With custom values, every contact will see the same thing. Even people who aren’t on your contact list will see the same thing.

For example, you can use custom values for each of your brand colors. When you use the shortcode for a brand color on a web page, then the page will display the same color for everyone. If you change the value of the custom value for that brand color, it will change it everywhere the shortcode was used. This is super helpful for things you might want to edit, optimize, or change in the future!

If you used a custom field for a color on a webpage, it would display a different color for each contact who viewed it. And people who aren’t on your contact list would see it as white or grey because the color has no input for that person.

We use custom values a lot for email signatures, URLs (in case you ever need to change the URL for your meeting links or you rebrand and all your social media handles change), and so on.

Forms is the catch-all phrase for things like opt-in forms, checkout forms, intake forms, the forms people have to fill out in order to book a spot on your calendar, questionnaires, and so on.

Forms can be styled in lots of different ways to match your brand. The thing that differentiates forms from surveys is that forms display all the questions on a single page, usually with a button at the end to submit the answers.

Surveys (see below) typically display one question at a time, with a button after each question to proceed to the next question. Surveys can also be styled in lots of different ways to match your brand, using images, videos, and progress bars.

When compared side by side, forms feel very static (even when they’re gorgeous, using images and video) while surveys feel dynamic because the user can’t see the full list of questions.

Both forms and surveys can use conditional logic that changes the outcome based on the user’s inputs. But only surveys can change upcoming questions based on how a user answers.

Inside each contact profile is a section for notes. You and your team can manually leave notes about each contact.

Example: if a contact shares something personal about themselves with one team member, they can leave a note for everyone to see that “she hates December holidays because her mother died on Christmas eve, so be sensitive about that when chatting with her re: December.” Sure, that team member may have also tagged the contact with the “no December promos” tag to make sure she doesn’t get your annual end of year emails. But having notes is great for having important info like that somewhere easy to find.

Notes can also be left by your automations. There is an action inside Workflows for adding notes. We often use this to document the exact time/date of when certain actions occurred, using the “right now” custom value.

Offer is used 2 ways around here.

1. Offer is the technical term for a bundle of courses that are available for purchase or free. Once you create a course, it’s not available to your audience until you add it to an offer. You can have one course per offer or bundle together different courses into a single offer.

You can use workflows to give access to an offer or you can manually add the offer to any contact directly in their contact profile.

2. We also use the term “offer” as a catch-all term for anything you sell. Course creators sell courses, coaches sell coaching packages, freelancers sell services, e-comm businesses sell physical products, d-comm businesses sell digital products, and coffee shops sell a combination of drinks plus ambience. Courses, coaching packages, services, etc. are all “offers.”

Some marketers like to say, “You’re not selling your product, you’re selling your offer” and we agree with that. In a nutshell, no one wants to buy allergy medicine, they want to stop sneezing. Also, most people don’t want to buy a ride in a plane, they want to buy a week of doing nothing in a tropical paradise. Allergy medicine and seats on an airplane are the product. Being able to breathe without sneezing and lazy days on the beach are the “offer.”

The term “opportunities” is sometimes used interchangeably with “pipelines” but they are technically different pieces of the same function. For simplicity’s sake, we will usually use the term “pipelines” when talking about either one.

Opportunities refers to the pipeline stages a contact is currently in.

When you look at a contact’s profile, Opportunities shows up in the left column near the bottom and you can see which stage of which pipelines that contact is currently in.

When you click on the Opportunities tab in the left sidebar of the main side of your Fern CRM account, it will show you a kanban-style board of columns, each column representing one stage of the selected pipeline. (Trello is also a kanban-style tool, if you’re not familiar with the term.)

Within each column, or pipeline stage, is a list of contacts.

See “Pipelines” for more details.

The term “pipelines” is sometimes used interchangeably with “opportunities” but they are technically different pieces of the same function.

Pipelines are the kanban-style boards that show the different stages a contact can move through. Most people think of sales pipelines or the customer journey through a sales funnel when referring to pipelines. But in Fern CRM, you can create pipelines for almost anything you want to track!

You can create a pipeline that shows which contacts have been active, paying members for 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, and more by creating a “stage” for each interval of time.

You can create a pipeline that shows which of your contacts have saved 10 plastic bottles from ocean pollution, 20 bottles, 50 bottles, 80 bottles, 100 and more.

You can have different stages for the process of applying to be a guest on your podcast so you can see who has submitted an application, which applications you’ve approved, which ones have booked a date to record, which ones have sent their bio information to you, and more.

“Cards” are the little rectangular boxes that represent each contact in each column. Each card shows a bare minimum of information on the outside and you can click into the card to see more details and/or add and edit details.

Cards/contacts can be moved from one stage to another by either manually moving the card by dragging it with your mouse or can be automated by setting up triggers and actions that tell the system when and where to move it.

The term “products” is also used in 2 different ways inside Fern CRM. (Hey, we didn’t name any of this stuff and we seriously considered changing the labels! But if we did, it would make it harder for you to find answers on YouTube and such, so, for now, we kept the original labels.)

1. Products are used in sales funnels and the Payments section to refer to a specific offer that you’ve set a specific price for. In order to use a checkout form on your checkout page, you need to create a “product” for the thing you’re selling and then attach that “product” to the order form step in your sales funnel. If you’ve integrated your Stripe account with Fern CRM, then the products you create in the CRM are automatically created in your Stripe account too.

2. Products are also the term used for individual courses in the course dashboard. Each “course” is called a “product” even though it can’t be used by your audience until you add it to an “offer.”

There’s also a few different uses of the word “signature” but luckily these all make sense!

1. User Signature is a custom value that will display whatever is written in that team member’s email signature in their user profile settings. You and each of your team members have your own user settings where there’s a section to create your own personal email signature. We highly recommend including an unsubscribe link and legal details in each team member’s email signature, along with whatever branding and other info you want to include. From there, it can be easily inserted into every email (including automated emails in workflows which is where you need it most) using the custom value for “user signature”.

2. Signature is also used on Documents and Contracts to collect digital signatures. When this field is used on a document/contract and the person signs it (digitally), a certificate is created with a timestamp and other data about the signature.

In the settings side of your Fern CRM account, you’ll see a link for “My Staff” in the left sidebar. Staff here refers to anyone who will have partial or full access to your account, even if they aren’t technically staff members.

For example, if you hire a social media marketer, you can give them their own individual login and restrict their access to just the social media planner.

We also recommend creating a second account for yourself, in case you ever get locked out of your usual one. This is also helpful for LLCs who want to create one for the business itself (maybe with the legal or support email address) and another for themselves as the worker or CEO in the business (with your “personal” business email.)

“Triggers” refers to any activity that kicks off a workflow (automation.) At the very top of a workflow, you add what will trigger the rest of the workflow. You can add multiple triggers if you want that workflow to start when any of those triggers happen. If no trigger is added to the top of a workflow, then the following actions won’t start until a contact is either manually added to the workflow – or – another workflow is told to add contacts to this workflow.

Workflows have a long list of triggers to choose from, including trigger links (see below.)

Some of the triggers available are: when a form is submitted, when a tag is added, when a contact is created, when a DM is received, when a comment is added to a Facebook or Instagram post, when a specific product is purchased or when any payment is received, when a contact is moved from one stage of a pipeline to another, and so many more possibilities.

Trigger links are an amazing feature that helps you personalize at scale and I hope you use them to the fullest!

Trigger links are shortcodes like custom values that are used exclusively in emails. When your contact opens the email and clicks on the link, it “triggers” an action to be performed by your automations. The action could be to add a certain tag to that contact, add them to a certain email list, give them access to a specific offer, and so many other possibilities.

First, you create the trigger link by deciding which URL you want them to see after clicking the link. Then, you create the workflow (automation) to perform the action every time the link is clicked. And finally, you add the shortcode to an email.

You can use trigger links for segmenting your list (like letting people opt-out of Mother’s Day promos because it’s a painful reminder for some.) You can also use them to track who visited your sales page from a specific email and add them to a different email sequence. Or add 2 different trigger links to an email and ask your readers to vote by clicking on one or the other. Any action that can be used in a workflow can be triggered by a trigger link!

At this time, trigger links only work inside of emails.

The term “workflows” and “automations” are often used interchangeably and really there’s no difference other than the words that show up on different pages of your Fern CRM account. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll usually use the word “automations” when creating help docs or talking about what workflows can do.

Workflows are where you create and manage your automations. A “workflow” is basically the visual map of an automation sequence. Workflows can be triggered by a specific action (clicking a trigger link, filling out a form, making a purchase, completing a course, etc.) or contacts can be added to a workflow from another workflow.

Workflows make it possible to send a welcome email when someone purchases or signs up for something, tally trees planted or donations to make based on purchases, add tags to contacts, add notes to contact profiles, send appointment reminders, alert you and your team when certain things happen, move leads through your pipelines and more.

Workflows are practically synonymous with automations around here. Inside the Main part of your Fern CRM account, you’ll see “Automations” in the left sidebar. Inside Automations, you’ll find Workflows and your Content AI data.

In conversation, (including articles and tutorials) we may refer to automations as a general, catch-all term for anything that isn’t done manually. And occasionally that will refer to something that’s done without a workflow. (For example, new contacts are automatically added to your contact list without you having to create a workflow to perform that action.) But 90% of the time, automations will refer to workflows.

So, for now, we’ll use the term “Automations” to categorize all articles about workflows unless the devs change the label in the left sidebar or add more sections to the Automations menu.