Monthly Archives: June 2021

[ad_1] Considering using MemberMouse to create your own WordPress membership website? MemberMouse is a popular option known for its advanced features, but it has some very real pros and cons, so it’s not the right solution for everyone. In our hands-on MemberMouse review, we’ll help you understand MemberMouse’s advantages and limitations so that you can decide if it’s the right plugin for your needs. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dig in! MemberMouse Review: A Quick Look at The Features To kick off our MemberMouse review, I want to quickly run over the various features that MemberMouse gives you access to. I won’t spend too long here because you can find all this on the MemberMouse website (and I’ll go hands-on with these features in the next section). But I think it’s useful to start here so that you know what MemberMouse does. To manage members, you can create unlimited free or paid membership levels or bundles (add-on levels). You’ll be able to easily manage your members and automatically assign members to certain WordPress roles as needed.  Members can also manage their own memberships from the front-end, including support for prorated upgrades/downgrades. To restrict content, you get all the flexible options you’d expect from a membership plugin. You can: Restrict individual pieces of content (or parts of content) or bulk restrict content (like restricting all the posts in a certain category). Drip and schedule content to make it available at different times. To monetize your site, you can: Sell one-off or recurring memberships that give people varying levels of access. Sell products, such as an eBook. Use coupons and other discounting strategies. Offer payment plans for high-ticket items/memberships. Use one-click upsells (or downsells) to create smart funnels. Other useful features include: Custom notification emails (send to admins or users). SmartTags (shortcodes) to display dynamic content. Auto-lock shared accounts to prevent sharing. Finally, you also get a very detailed reporting and analytics area that helps you track engagement, churn rate, lifetime value, your most effective products/channels/payment gateways, and more. That’s just a brief look at the features – keep reading the full hands-on section of our MemberMouse review to see it in action. Hands-On With MemberMouse Now, let’s go hands-on with MemberMouse and I’ll show you what it’s like to use, as well as my thoughts on the features. For reference, I’m using the MemberMouse Advanced plan on my test site. Basic Setup Once you activate the MemberMouse plugin, you’ll get two new menu areas in your WordPress dashboard: MemberMouse – this is where you manage most settings, including your members. Reporting Suite – with the Advanced plan or up, this is where you can view detailed reports on your membership site. MemberMouse will also automatically create all the core pages that it needs. For example, it will create pages where people can purchase memberships, manage their accounts, reset their passwords, etc. There’s no setup wizard beyond that, which I think would be useful for helping people to get up and running. But you do get a bunch of training videos if you go to the main MemberMouse area: Creating Membership Levels To create a membership level, you go to MemberMouse → Product Settings. MemberMouse calls everything a “product”, whether you’re selling one-off or recurring membership access or an actual product (like an eBook). When you create a new product, you’ll get a popup where you can: Enter the price. Add a free or paid trial period. Set up a recurring subscription on a custom schedule. Require shipping (for physical products). You can also set up commission details if you’re offering an affiliate program (more on that later). Once you create your product, you can go to the Membership Levels tab to link it to a membership level. This opens another popup where you can: Assign members of this level a certain user role. Make it free or paid. If paid, you can associate it with the product that you created. Add expiration details. Customize the welcome email. Assign it to bundles. Choose entire WordPress categories to automatically protect for this level. You’ll get a similar interface when creating a bundle. A bundle acts like an “add-on”. Each member can only have one membership level at a time, but they can add unlimited bundles to their account. You can learn more about bundles here and the bundle creating interface looks a lot like adding a membership level, except that you can assign people who purchase a bundle to one of your existing membership levels: Restricting Content You already saw one option for restricting content in the previous section of our MemberMouse review- you can restrict access to entire categories when you create a membership level (or bundle). For more control, you’ll also get a MemberMouse Options area when editing an individual piece of content that lets you grant access to just that content based on a user’s membership level or bundle. This also lets you set up content dripping by only granting access on a certain day: To easily see your content dripping schedule, you can go to Product Settings → Drip Content Schedule: You can also partially restrict content using a shortcode. This is called a SmartTag – more on them later. Setting Up Payments and Checkouts MemberMouse supports the following payment gateways: Stripe Braintree Authorize.net PayPal ClickBank Coinbase You can set these up from MemberMouse → Payment Settings: If you go to the Checkout Settings area, you can also customize the checkout process, including adding your own custom fields to collect additional information from your customers: Setting Up Emails and Notifications One neat feature in MemberMouse is the ability to set up your own custom emails that are triggered by certain actions. You can do this by going to Developer Tools → Push Notifications and you can send these to yourself (for admin) or to your users). You can see the long list of event triggers in the screenshot below: Creating Coupons MemberMouse includes a built-in coupon