In my last post, I mentioned that the Blog Marketing Academy was built on top of MemberMouse. I also said, almost in passing, that you should forget about Wishlist Member.
So, what’s the deal?
Especially from a guy who used to recommend Wishlist Member. Why am I hatin’ on it now?
Well to be clear, I don’t think Wishlist Member is a bad plug-in. It is used by a lot of people and is pretty solid, for the most part. It is a good plug-in. Thing is… MemberMouse is just better.
There are a lot of membership site plugins out there to choose from. In addition to Wishlist Member, we also have Digital Access Pass, OptimizeMember (which comes with OptimizePress), Paid Memberships Pro, Magic Members and more. I haven’t used all of them, but I’ve used many.
There are also the hosted options. We have Kajabi, Fedora and even the new Rainmaker platform.
Lots of options. But, I chose MemberMouse.
I’m not going to do a big feature-by-feature comparison here. All platforms have their pros and cons. What I’m going to do is simply show you why I chose MemberMouse and a little of how it works here at the Academy.
Let’s roll….
Life Before MemberMouse
My first membership plugin was Wishlist Member, like it is for many people. It got the job done, but it had some issues.
For one, sometimes members were confused by the registration process and they just wouldn’t complete it. They’d pay for it, but not finish registration.
Drip feeds with Wishlist are also rather odd. Instead of drip feeding actual content, instead you are dripping people between member levels. This would be a big confusion on a larger site with a lot of content.
Also, Wishlist led to more customer support. Aside from the usual little hiccups, the issue was that members could not control their own accounts nearly as cleanly. To control their account info, they would literally enter the WordPress admin panel to do it. I always saw this as very unprofessional. Members shouldn’t even realize the site is built on WordPress. Also, members didn’t know how to cancel their memberships.
When I decided to combine all my courses into one site, I switched to the PilotPress plug-in which works on conjunction with Ontraport. Now, controlling everything inside of Ontraport is pretty attractive. That said, it was a buggy experience.
Member logins, access control – everything – was controlled via Ontraport. Which means that pretty much every single action on my site had to contact Ontraport by way of their API. This would routinely cause major delays in page load because Ontraport’s servers were going up and down. Also, the customer account center that came with Ontraport was ugly as hell with no ability to modify it. Lastly, member sessions would expire all the time. Members would be browsing the site and then mysteriously just get kicked out.
I knew I had to make a change. So, I went shopping.
And I found MemberMouse.
The Features That Sold Me On MemberMouse
MemberMouse is a WordPress plug-in that has enterprise-level features. In fact, some VERY large membership sites run on top of MemberMouse.
So, let’s just go point-by-point on the things that surely matter to me.
Completely Customizable Checkout Process
Truth is, most mature businesses don’t send people off to Clickbank or Paypal to make a sale. They do it right on-site. So, one of the things I liked about MemberMouse is that it has a fully developed checkout process that I can customize and make my own way.
Checkout pages are built using shortcodes which actually gives a lot of customization options. My checkout page is actually built with OptimizePress and the MemberMouse tags are just baked into it.
My checkout page here at the Academy, using MemberMouse SmartTags inside of an OptimizePress page.
Beyond Shortcodes – SmartTags
MemberMouse SmartTags are shortcodes on steroids. Rather than just blindly doing things like output a member’s name, SmartTags have actual logical capability. Want to show content to people who have one of a few different member levels OR a particular stand-along product? No problem.
SmartTags are also used to empower things like upsells, downsells and more. The bottom line is that you have a LOT of flexibility in the sales process AND in how you present content across your entire site that you just won’t find with other plug-ins or the CRM-based systems.
Members Can Manage Their Own Account
Ever had members get confused on how to cancel? Or change the email address on their profile? Maybe you billed them via Paypal and now they don’t know how to cancel themselves?
MemberMouse unites everything into a customer account page where they can take control of everything. They can change their own account, cancel their account, downgrade their plan. And Membermouse keeps all the payment systems and email systems in sync.
Oh, and you can control the look and feel of it to match your site. No more sending your members into the WordPress admin panel to edit their profile.
Solid Member Management
Every member account can be managed right from within MemberMouse. We can see their order history, their access log to see when they login and what they’re doing. We can pause them, cancel them, refund them. We can “comp” people a membership if we want.
We can easily re-send their login details or welcome email.
We can easily change their password.
The site history allows us to know if somebody is pulling one over on us. If a member requests a refund and says he could never get into the site, we have the access log which will clearly tell us when they’ve logged in.
I also like how the members list isn’t all merged into the WordPress user list. Makes managing members a lot simpler.
1-Click Upsells
A feature often reserved just for the fancier shopping carts. Now you can do it right on your own site. You can assign different upsells to different products to create your own upsell path. And, sure enough, a single click allows them to take the upsell.
MemberMouse gives you a SmartTag for each product. Wherever you use that, 1-click purchase is automatically enabled (as long as your payment system supports it).
Depending on your payment system, this also works after the transaction. Similar to Amazon’s one-click purchase, you can give logged-in members the ability to purchase any other product you want with a single click. Even a month or more after they initially purchased from you.
This was a huge one for me.
“Save The Sale” and Downsells
When a member goes to cancel, you can attempt to “save the sale”. You can customize your own page which either tries to talk them out of canceling or offers them a downsale of some kind. So, maybe your member is a “gold” member and decides to cancel. Instead, you can offer to downgrade them to a “silver” membership.
And it all takes place right on your own site – with single click. And MemberMouse automatically takes care of any pro-rated billing adjustments if they make the change.
API And Push Notifications
Internally, we use other systems of course. So, I needed MemberMouse to be flexible in working with other systems. We use the push notifications quite a bit. For a number of different events, you can either send an email or ping a URL.
I use the Push Notifications to integrate with Fuzed as well as to integrate with my own internal customer intranet system that I have down tracking all customers and company key performance indicators.
Reporting System
This was a selling point for me, although I admit that I’m not using it much anymore. MemberMouse has a fairly good reporting system within to track your sales, member churn, retention rates, etc. All very important metrics if you’re running a site.
I’m not really using it much anymore since, instead, I’m using the push notifications to push all activity into a custom, internal system I’ve developed. From within that system, I’m able to track everything much nicer and bring it into a KPI dashboard inside of Cyfe.
Anything I Don’t Like About MemberMouse?
Not much. These are pretty specific pet peeves that are rather unique to my situation…
No built-in Ontraport integration. I knew this going in. I use Fuzed for this. MemberMouse has built-in integrations to the usual consumer options for email list hosting, but strangely, no integrations for the CRMs like Ontraport, Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign.
It’d be cool if I could select payment options on specific products. I don’t currently accept Paypal because it is huge pain in the butt when it comes to recurring billing. But, for a few of my one-time offers, I wouldn’t mind taking Paypal. Problem is, it is all or nothing. Not a huge issue at all, but it is something I wish I could do.
We have a strange issue with the members list where the AJAX pagination between screens will hang up sometimes and we can’t go deep into the member archives.
A Few Things To Know Going In
If you’re considering going with (or switching to) MemberMouse, you’re making a good move. But, go in with your eyes open. Here’s a few things to know about getting started…
MemberMouse is its own membership. In other words, you’re paying monthly for MemberMouse. It starts at $19/month and goes up depending on the number of members, although for most people it will be at $19 for awhile. Trust me, though, whatever you pay monthly for MemberMouse can be quickly made up for. Once you’re making a few grand a month, $19 doesn’t matter.
No shipping options. For most of my readers, this won’t matter. But, if you’re trying to sell stuff which includes physical shipping, you’d need to deal with that outside of MemberMouse.
No file protection. If you make files available to members in your media library, MemberMouse doesn’t protect those. I honestly don’t think its an issue, but just know that.
Learning Curve. MemberMouse isn’t one of those plug-ins that you’ll activate and be up and running in an hour. It’ll take a bit to get used to how to use products, member levels and bundles and translate that to your business. Also, building the pages you want using SmartTags will take a lot of trial and error before you’ll be happy with how it looks and feels. You’ll have the guts of your site operational very quickly, but really tweaking things so it looks professional and has all the fancy upsells and downsells in place is going to take some time.
Not GPL. This won’t matter to most people, but unlike many WordPress plug-ins which have the GPL software license, MemberMouse does not. This means that you will not be able to get in and customize or hack the source code if you’re a developer. Personally, I don’t care. But, you may.
One License Per URL. MemberMouse is a plug-in which you will download, but it “phones home” to their licensing server. For this reason, you cannot buy MemberMouse once and use on multiple sites. Honestly, though, MemberMouse really shines when you do everything under one roof.
One other interesting tidbit that explains the monthly billing and the one-site license…
MemberMouse actually assists in your timely recurring billing. Most WordPress plug-ins rely heavily on WordPress itself to run scheduled tasks (like renewals), and WordPress tasks are triggered by actual site traffic. It isn’t all that reliable. The alternative is to set up a CRON job with your server, but this is something many blog owners don’t know how to do. MemberMouse actually helps ensure timely billing by monitoring it from MemberMouse servers and ensuring billings are triggered on time. It is completely secure, since no customer information is shared with MemberMouse. All they get is an internal database ID, an amount and a billing interval. So, this is an extra bit of security to make sure that your business isn’t leaving timely billing up to WordPress.
The Final Word
MemberMouse allows you to turn your WordPress site into a full business platform. It is designed to scale with your business and, quite frankly, it blows the snot off most of the other options out there.
The Blog Marketing Academy runs on MemberMouse and I’m quite happy with it.
Much larger sites than mine also run on top of MemberMouse.
Simply put, this plug-in isn’t no mouse. You’d think they’d call it something which didn’t sound so diminutive, but trust me, this thing is powerful.
To check it out for yourself, click here.
NOTE: MemberMouse used to offer a “Quick Start” setup service for $499 to help over the initial “hump” on getting started with the product. They no longer offer it, apparently. Inside the Blog Monetization Lab, I have now done a few member phone calls specifically on short-cutting the setup with MemberMouse. These member calls are $99 (which is a lot cheaper than $499). This option to book a call with me is reserved only for Lab members, but if you are not a member and you enroll with MemberMouse through my affiliate links on this blog post, contact me. If you’d like to book a “getting started” session with me to speed things up, you don’t have to be a Lab member to do it.
If you’d like to set up your site similarly to how the Blog Marketing Academy works, click here.
The post MemberMouse Review: Why I Built This Site On Top Of Membermouse appeared first on Blog Marketing Academy.