How long have you been thinking of starting a membership site where your users can be charged for what they use, and everything happens automatically? Whether it’s been years or just days, the part to think is now over and the moment to decide is here. Introducing you to the WP eMember Plugin – A complete solution for creating a membership site using the popular WordPress platform.
Though the plugin performs greatly when used all by itself, the word ‘great’ can be transformed to ‘best’ if it is used along with its other two companions – WP eStore and WP Affiliate Platform which are by the same developers. This trio can open up an eStore for any sort of products that you would like to sell within minutes. Some examples are – Digital Products, Digital Media, Videos, Tutorials, eBook, Premium Content, Physical Products (to be shipped by the seller) etc.
Mentioned below are some of the outstanding features that comes with the eMember plugin.
Membership Levels And Management
The eMember plugin can handle the user database table all by itself. It can also handle the registered members by creating corresponding WordPress user entries too. The admin can define the user role for each membership level.
A membership level is a level that is created in WP eMember to differentiate between different users and their permissions. For example – If you are offering two different plans and the second one has 5 extra features than the first one, you would obviously be charging more for the second one. Hence, you’ll be having two different “membership levels” which will handle the registered users separately.
All the members are visible inside a nice table in the WP dashboard of the site. The members can be easily edited (changing the level, delete the user, update certain info of the user) etc. from within the dashboard itself.
Content Protection
Most membership sites offer premium content, which is only made available to the members. WP eMember is, of course, made for that as well. With the professional in-built features, any content on a WordPress site can now be protected with the help of this plugin. This is not limited to the normal content on your WordPress site such as the posts, pages, media, galleries etc. eMember also comes with a download folder protection feature which can come in really handy to protect your digital files (if you are offering them to your members only).
Even if the visitors land on a page where you have your premium content, they would be asked to either login to their account, or sign up to be a premium member. This also works in complicated cases. For example – If you have 3 premium membership levels names (a), (b) and (c) which are priced $1, $2 and $3 respectively, you might want to make a certain page visible only to level (b) and (c). WP eMember will handle everything for you.
Secure and Automatic Payments
You would, of course, be charging your premium members right? You can do that easily buy creating PayPal subscription buttons and then linking them to a particular membership level.
You can also use the WP eStore plugin to create the purchase button for your memberships. eStore is another really good plugin from the same developer that makes selling from WordPress a breeze. Read my WP eStore Review if you haven’t done so already.
Within 3 steps, your premium membership is all set-up and ready for the people to buy it just because WP eMember makes it all easy for you!
If a person cancels the Paypal subscription, the membership account is also cancelled automatically. That means, the customers have no way to cheat and use your premium quality content for free.
AutoResponder Integration
Nowadays, there is hardly any seller who doesn’t make the use of email marketing. That said, email marketing has been proven to keep the customers/users updated about any change, update etc on the site. There are services that offer fabulous tools that bring down the stress level to zero. Some names are – Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse etc.
WP eMember comes with the facility to integrate any of the above-mentioned services right into your blog! That means that if a user registers on your blog, he/she is directly added to your email list. However, the user(s) have to confirm the subscription like the normal users do.
You can, hence, keep your customers/subscribers informed about anything regarding the purchased products, updates, new products and much more.
User-Friendly Registration
There are a couple ways the users can register on a specific site. If the option “Allow Free Registration” is checked in the Settings, users can register and access the free content you’ve made available.
If there is no option for free registration, the visitors first have to pay on Paypal (or other systems if defined in the Settings), then register through a special unique link which is mailed to them, and then login using their login credentials. This whole process is really fast, and the mails reach out as soon as the payment is made.
After logging in, the users can access the content that was made for that membership level that they belong to.
Auto-Affiliates Registration
Affiliates Drive More Sales – Agree on that. If this plugin is used with the Affiliate Platform plugin (by the same developers), then the registered users can be automatically registered as affiliates as well (who can then promote your membership site). The affiliates can drive immense targeted traffic to your site and therefore more sales for you.
Support And Documentation
The developers at Tips-and-Tricks-HQ have been great at providing the detailed documentation that answers almost any query that one could probably have. Apart from the informative documentation, the support staff has been responsible on the forums as well. Each question, regardless of the difficulty, is answered and solved effective as soon as possible. The expertise can be seen when many questions are answered with a link to a post in the documentation. This shows how quality the user guides are, and that the user who asked the question didn’t have time to find it, or search for it in the documentation.
Conclusion
WP eMember is one very effective solution for creating a completely organized membership site that runs on auto pilot.