Intro Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
Amazing membership platforms need to be easy enough to work with when membership websites are established, but will need to provide the space for all these websites to grow as they achieve success. In this MemberMouse Review, we’ll go over the pros and cons of using MemberMouse for WordPress membership sites, and how MemberMouse matches the needs of various users. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
Getting Started
The cool thing about this is that you are able to change the registered URL, so if you would like to use MemberMouse on a staging site before migrating to a production website, you can register the staging site URL and fully setup your website and associates for launching, then migrate to the URL into the live site. Once your site URL is registered in your MemberMouse account, you may then download the MemberMouse plugin from your dash and install it on your WordPress website. From there, you’re all set to begin configuring your site.If you don’t want to set up the site yourself, you can purchase Quick Start service out of MemberMouse for $299, which includes a WordPress installation (optional), MemberMouse installation following a consultation call, and an optional migration of registration data out of an existing site. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
MemberMouse Overview
It offers a full-featured alternative for memberships, including content restriction, flexible billing options, content dripping, restricting logins, and supports programmer tweaks and adjustments. Additionally, MemberMouse can offer upsells to members, or automatically provide downsells to customers who wish to cancel so as to improve customer retention and optimize earnings. MemberMouse also allows members to update or downgrade memberships .You can check out a complete feature list from MemberMouse for all the juicy details in one spot, or see our overview of some MemberMouse attributes.
Configuring MemberMouse
MemberMouse generates several webpages when installed (similar to an eCommerce plugin), for example voucher pages, login/out webpages for members, and more. You can customize these pages in order to check the best approach for your store, but I decided to first get set up.You can take a look at your membership dashboard once you log into observe some compressed details about your website, but since I have not put anything up yet, I headed down to the General Settings menu to determine what choices I had.Under general preferences, I navigated to”Other Settings” and was able to change that which members see if logged in, for example, page they’re redirected to and if to display protected menu items (for instance, if you are protecting products from non-members). 1 setting that many of you will find interesting is that the”Access Sharing Security”This little box allows you to restrict how many different IP addresses can log into your website using the same credentials in a 24-hour period. I would enable more than one IP address if members use a computer and a mobile device to view your content. That way they don’t get frustrated by being locked out of your website when using a different device. For some membership sites, the ability to restrict login info is non-negotiable, so MemberMouse becomes an attractive option.MemberMouse also allows you to create Employee users under General Settings so that sales or support employees can log in to your site and member center in order to create or assist members, but don’t have access to site configuration choices. As a last note on setup, MemberMouse comprises a few built-in widgets which you can use to exhibit content throughout your website. For instance, the”Protected Content” widget can display upcoming content to members according to which membership level access they’ve so they know what to anticipate (date could be included as well). Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
“Click here to sign up to MemberMouse.com”
Creating Products with MemberMouse
One word of warning for those of you trying MemberMouse: see the tutorial videos. I make a habit from leaping into using a new plugin without first reading documentation or viewing videos, but I ended up going back and forth between the products and memberships which I created and wasted time. Usually documentation is great for when I get stuck rather than as a beginning point, but I was not certain why products and memberships were separated in the way they were.MemberMouse provides membership access to unique products. If you are new at this, it may seem redundant to separate memberships out of products initially; nonetheless, this permits you more flexibility in pricing your membership solutions. You can create a”Bronze” membership accessibility level and connect it to multiple products, like a standard product (at a single cost ), a discounted product (using a promotional price), and an affiliate product (with a price for users known as an affiliate). After viewing the movies and understanding that this arrangement, I really liked the flexibility provided by separating membership access from goods.Products are created under Product Settings. Both virtual and physical products are managed from precisely the same page, and once your products are set up, after that you can create membership accessibility levels and assign them to your own products. To start, delegate your”Associated Access” for your products to”none” because you’ll be setting up memberships later.With MemberMouse, you can create sign-up fees or trial periods. If you enable”Trials”, then you may optionally set a cost for a trial period (which can be $0), then determine how long trial period will run. If you merely want to use this for a lump-sum payment, then it’s possible to decide on a one-day trial and then initiate the membership. This isn’t ideal, as the monthly charge will not be shown immediately at checkout because just the signup fee is shown, but it works well enough that it should not be a problem. Your product description must explain billing and fees anyway.You can also make products”shippable” to make the most of the limited shipping methodsavailable in MemberMouse for memberships that involve bodily products. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
Creating Membership Access with MemberMouse
Once products are made, you may then create membership accessibility levels to connect to any of your membership products. These membership levels will determine the content restriction rules for members. But, you may also edit the access rules onto a per-post or even per-page basis.When you create a membership level, you can assign that access level to a specific item. This is what I had been talking about in regard to flexibility — you can assign an access level to as many goods as you want, so if you provide promotional pricing for email readers or referrals from the own affiliates, you can tie the identical accessibility to each of these products.You’ll also select which categories will be shielded for that entry level in the same display. Multiple article categories can be selected for access. As a default option, access will be limited for the whole post for each post in the category. Access may also be set on a per-post or per-page basis while editing a post or page. The article / page editor is also where you’ll manage content dripping. Dripping is elastic and super-simple, since you can specify a delay in access for every membership level in terms of days.After content dripping is installed, it is possible to view schedules for every membership level under Product Settings > Content Dripping Schedule to find a general view of if each entry level can see content. This page will also allow you to bulk edit access rights for each membership level, and customize content dripping occasions for each access level. It is really useful for all those of you that currently have a lot of content created, and just want to assign drip times and access rights from 1 display.Not certain how it will look to every member? Examine the top of your screen when previewing your site.
MemberMouse Smart Tags
Before you start setting up your website in order to market membership products, you will want to check out a few of the built-in shortcodes for MemberMouse, known as Smart Tags. It is possible to use smart tags to insert purchase links for your merchandise, selectively restrict (or remove restrictions from) specific pieces of content to make excerpts, and display member data. Smart tags also let you insert links that allow members to manage their own subscriptions, update memberships, or even purchase new products. As you’re able to customize the member’s”My Account Page”, you can upsell bundles for all members, or dynamically display upsells for every membership level.
Selling Bundles
MemberMouse has another sales option of which you can take advantage. Members can’t purchase more than 1 membership degree using MemberMouse. However, you can use another content limitation tool, known as a package, to supply a topic-based membership. This is also how you’re able to offer upsells to present members. You can assign multiple products to a bundle in precisely the exact same way which you can assign many goods to a membership accessibility level. Packages permit you to expand the material accessibility a product provides when used this way.Because Bundles are tied to products in the exact same manner as membership accessibility, bundles can also take advantage of material dripping. The benefit to using packages is that members can buy more than one bundle at a time.
“Click here to sign up to MemberMouse.com”
Selling and Handling MemberMouse Memberships
When you are done learning about smart tags, establishing products, access levels, and articles dripping, you will want to sell the memberships you’ve created. While MemberMouse automatically produces a whole lot of pages, it does not produce a catalog or sales page. For me personally this is a good thing, since I think selling memberships to potential users requires long-form content anyhow — members probably are not going to come to your site and navigate for memberships straight away.To market memberships, you ought to create pages or posts with buy links. You can copy purchase links from the product settings for each product, or generate a purchase link employing a smart label if the link is being posted in your WordPress site (which is what we’ve done in the screenshot). You might even use MemberMouse’s built-in button styles rather than the ones from the theme (mine are somewhat lackluster since we’re using the default theme).
Prices
MemberMouse costs are dependent on the number of consumers for your membership site, yet MemberMouse is not a genuine SaaS solution, since the MemberMouse plugin runs on your own servers. You put in the plugin on your website, but will also possess a MemberMouse account; your site then checks in with the MemberMouse licensing server to deliver data on site usage. As a result, site performance is completely determined by your hosting and environment.MemberMouse pricing ranges from $20 a month for 1,000 users as much as premium and specialist plans at $300-600 a month for sites with over 100,000 users (support is included for the majority of plans). It is possible to try MemberMouse free for a 14 day trial before committing to using it. Each pricing tier provides distinct advantages (like premium support beginning with advanced programs ), but here’s a rough breakdown of cost based on number of users.
Managing Staff
One of the great things about MemberMouse is that members can manage themeselves, which can help free up time you would otherwise spend on site administration. You can also customize the manhood”My Account” page to mechanically upsell your merchandise for you, or to attempt to save sales if members wish to cancel.When members make adjustments to their accounts, these changes are automatically reflected on your e mail lists or other integrations built-in to MemberMouse so that you don’t need to manually handle fluctuations in membership (i.e., moving out of the”golden” listing to the”platinum” email list). The members centre is geared towards automating and simplifying your website management, which may save massive amounts of time for sites with tens of thousands of members.If you’d like to downsell members who’d prefer to cancel, you also are able to make the most of the MemberMouse Conserve the selling webpage , which lets you create a downsell which will be shown to members who want to cancel a membership. If members do cancel, you may choose to difficult cancel the membership, which blocks access to the members area and logging in, or you may pause the membership. When a member pauses their account (or you opt to set cancellations to membership pauses), their registration is really frozen so that they have access to any material that’s been released up to that point, but are removed from the drip program and cannot access any content that is new. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
Billing and Payments
Billing is extremely flexible with MemberMouse, and bicycles are totally customized. In addition, you can bill a one-time fee for memberships (though I’d recommend avoiding this unless you’re just starting out, since you’ll always have to pursue new associates, which kind of defeats the purpose of some recurring billing version ).You might even use coupons with MemberMouse, and determine whether to apply them to the first billing cycle or the lifetime of the membership. Coupons can provide a percent off or a dollar-amount reduction. Coupons are also created to provide an totally free membership, or you might make a membership for a customer yourself and comp that membership instead. Coupon use can be limited to certain products or a number of uses.The best part about charging is that you can control recurring billing actions, such as refunds, straight from MemberMouse instead of logging in to your account with your payment processor. It’s possible to use one onsite payment system, for example Stripe or Authorize.net, and in the same time use PayPal and/or ClickBank to supply up to 3 payment options.As cards are tokenized and saved to get associates, MemberMouse may also help automate late payment managing to save your customer control staff time and keep your revenue stream flowing. When MemberMouse finds that a card has been diminished , it marks the member’s account as late, then sends the member and email requesting him to login and update the card info in the account. The penis is then immediately charged the sum as a result of member account is reactivated.
Shipping
MemberMouse is not really designed to be an eCommerce system, but it does permit you to promote some physical goods through your website and to sell physical goods with subscriptions, such as magazines (though I believe it does a much better job with virtual products compared to physical products). When you create your goods, you indicate it as”shippable”, subsequently set up basic shipping rates (like standard and expedited shipping).As for me, I’d only include shipping as part of the membership prices a month (and advertise this actuality!) To simplify my store management, however, the shipping methods can be useful for promoting’swag’ items and other bodily products for your site.
Integrations
MemberMouse has a couple of integrations built in to help you with your site administration. First, email is critical for communication and engagement. Instead of set up an internal email program, MemberMouse integrates directly with email marketing companies like MailChimp and AWeber. You can take advantage of this integration to handle your connection with members having an email platform you’re already familiar with, and transferring members between automatic lists to save you time.MemberMouse also integrates with iDevAffiliate to manage affiliates for your membership site. When customers have been sent from an affiliate, this can automatically be noted in the member account, and you’ll be able to opt to dynamically display content or provides to associates according to what affiliate referred them to your website.
Talking of Developers
If you are a sophisticated user, or possess a developer on staff, it’s possible to further automate a lot of MemberMouse functions. In addition to clever tags (shortcodes from WordPress lingo), there are plenty of filters and actions available, in addition to a well-documented set of global functions for use in templates as well as other customized code.Additionally, you can make push notifications for site administrators and members for occasions like new member signups or payment receipts. However, these push notifications can also be used to trigger actions in third-party integrations (i.e., sending information to an accounting system). MemberMouse additionally has an API that developers can use to incorporate MemberMouse with outside systems, which is not true with all plugins. This permits you to make, get, and upgrade information about members.
Support
Full documentation can be obtained, and was fairly helpful for me personally. Some documentation comprises movie walkthroughs, and all settings and functions are documented. I only used the service desk one time for an problem with the smart tag libraryand received an answer for the question I filed in the morning later the exact same afternoon, and also got a followup email to let me know the problem would be solved in the next release.Furthermore, there is developer documentation accessible for website customizations. If you are conducting a membership site with tens of thousands of associates, odds are you own a programmer on retainer or one on staff, so getting docs handy for tweaks and customizations is a plus. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
MemberMouse Review
MemberMouse offers enormous functionality and will make it possible for you to see to your membership website like a business rather than a hobby. Since it is intended for sites with tens of thousands of members, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Establishing a site and fundamental material restriction is simple (especially with the assistance of the”Getting Started” videos), but far more customization is possible in case you are eager to generate a time investment in site optimization and setup. There’s definitely a learning curve involved in using MemberMouse, however it is in proportion to the sum of performance you get out of the plugin, as it has virtually everything you could desire in a membership stage.
Conclusion
MemberMouse makes it effortless to improve the Lifetime Value of your members by giving the ability for same-sex earnings. By eliminating obstacles to purchase for existing members, you are able to drastically increase conversions. When members have been logged in, buy links simply start a pop-up confirming that the order will be billed to the card on the account to make the purchase basically a one-click sale (account info is already prepopulated with all the payment data tokenized in the customer accounts ). Since you’ve already gone through the time and expense to acquire these members, up-selling them is made as easy as possible to generate extra revenue and to help them find other goods.Another interesting feature is the capacity to email purchase links to associates, so that when the link is clicked, then members are logged in and delivered to a pre-populated shopping cart to again remove as many barriers as possible to buy.The degree of support MemberMouse provides was interesting for me personally, as many membership alternatives offer you the plugin / integration and support, and that’s it. The Fast Start agency is a white-gloved install and installation, which is supplied by some different services, but MemberMouse additionally provides a list of recommended contractors, and encourages present users to become affiliates to advertise the services. Developer tools are also a great addition, and help you to customize, tweak, or expand your use of MemberMouse past WordPress. Best Free WordPress Membership Plugin 2017
“Click here to sign up to MemberMouse.com”