Building a happy customer base should be the main goal of every organization, even more when you offer membership websites. Memberium highlights its support and achievements in the main page along with the first steps to create your membership website and how to be successful.
Website Planet‘s Miguel Amado talked with Ben Denny (CMO of the company) to know more about that strategy and what this plugin can do for your business.
Please present Memberium to our audience
Memberium is a membership site WordPress plugin. We offer software to help people build membership sites. A membership site could be anything, but it most commonly is people selling online courses and training online to a portal.
We’ve been in business since 2014, and fully remotely since then. I wasn’t part of the company at that time, but that’s when it started. It is really a niche product because you have to be using a specific CRM. You have to be using either Keap or ActiveCampaign in order to use Memberium.
Even though that’s a little bit of a limitation, it’s also a benefit in a way because both of those platforms are very powerful CRM and marketing automation platforms. So, a lot of our customers are already using them, or they sign up for those. It’s a combination of everything together. So, Memberium plus that CRM allows you to build a fully automated membership website.
Our mission right now is to get 1000 customer success stories. That could be just a positive review or it could be a case study. We bring to our site people who’ve started a membership site with Memberium and let them showcase their site to our audience.
I saw Memberium’s reviews, and they are really positive. When it comes to your customer base, are they from a specific niche or is it more diverse?
Number one is people selling online courses. If I had to sum it up, it would be the main one. But we do have people in all different industries and obviously you can sell a course about anything. We have people selling courses about business, people selling courses about personal finance and relationship development, tons of things.
We also have businesses who need a membership platform for whatever reason, such as law offices, doctor’s offices who need a member portal, so that their clients can come in there with their patients and download documents, upload information. That’s a smaller portion of what we do, but we do service those people.
Can you talk more about the plans that you offer?
Memberium is two different products very similar in functionality: Memberium for Keap and Memberium for ActiveCampaign. It’s pretty much the same. It starts out just at a low monthly fee, $37 for the ActiveCampaign and $57 for Keap.
We don’t charge you based on the number of users or anything. It’s completely unlimited. We charge you based on the number of websites, which is how many membership sites you are planning to run.
We also have a couple of Pro features on our higher plans. I won’t dive into all of that, but what I will say is that a lot of the other competitors of ours charge you for the number of members or students you have, or for the number of courses you offer, so that, as you’re growing, the fees are increasing. So, you’re almost being punished for growing because they’re having to pay more. But with Memberium, it’s a flat, stable fee.
Also, we don’t take a percentage of all your sales as other platforms do. If you’re going to take credit cards, you have to pay a fee to your credit card processor, but Memberium doesn’t take any.
Do you help the clients to find sweet spots to differentiate themselves from other customers?
First and foremost, anyone selling a membership site has to differentiate themselves. We don’t really help with that too much, but I will say a couple of things just on how, from a technical perspective, maybe Memberium can help someone be different from other people.
If you think about a lot of the competing platforms and especially since the pandemic happened, there’s been a lot of new companies starting up who are providing online course services and selling different platforms. They’re all very cookie cutter. That’s the best way for me to say it. So, your membership site will look pretty much the same as everyone else’s.
There’s not a lot of room for customizability. Memberium, on the other hand, it’s built on WordPress, which is an open-source platform that provides unlimited flexibility. It’s not the easiest platform to work on. Although a lot of the other solutions, which may even be more expensive, are easier to use, they get you boxed in as you grow. Whereas with Memberium, as you grow, it allows you to hire developers to add more features and code functionality. On the other platforms you’re locked in. With maximum flexibility, your membership site will look unique.
If you can give one advice or one point that your client should pay attention to, what would that be?
It’s hard to limit that to just one single thing. We sell a training course at membershipcoach.com. There’s a lot of little tips I could give, but one of the big ones is make sure that you validate your idea before you spend a lot of time and money building an actual website.
One of the ways you can do that is by actually not even making the course yet. So don’t record videos. Don’t come up with a lot of content yet, instead make a basic outline and then go try to sell a live course.
And that’s where you will meet either weekly or every two weeks with a group of people who signed up and you’ll teach the content live over Zoom or something. This will give you the ability to learn from them and their feedback. And then when you have finally done that maybe once or twice, then you have feedback from actual people who purchased from you, and then you can record your course with that.
This way, you’re not spending much time recording and then nobody ends up buying. Let’s say that you do this and you try to sell the live course and you can’t get any buyers. You may be out a little bit of time and money trying to sell that, but it’s a lot less than if you had recorded the entire course and made the whole website.
What are Memberium’s plans for the next 3 or 5 years?
People always ask us when we’re going to integrate with more platforms and I can’t speak to that, but what I can say is a couple of things. Number one: we’re going to continue to do what we’re doing right now, which is providing awesome support. If you go to the Keap marketplace, there are somewhere around 300 reviews, all five stars and they pretty much all talk about our support. Memberium grew so quickly because we made a big investment in providing awesome support.
We often ask ourselves inside the company what’s going to happen with WordPress. Is it going to go away? WordPress is fundamental for around 40% of known websites. So, you know, we’re not really worried about that. We chose the right platform to build software on and the market is only going to continue to grow and grow.
During the pandemic, a lot of people tried to move quickly to online: physical trainers, yoga instructors, schools, colleges and universities, and more. A lot of that was done through Zoom and other communication software, but some people chose to set up membership websites, so we helped people in those companies.
The way that the whole market’s going is e-learning is just going to continue to explode and grow, and we’re going to benefit from that. It’s hard to say where we’re going to be exactly in 3 to 5 years, but we’ll still be here. We have big clients behind us and we’re helping them obviously. We also have tons of smaller clients too, who are just starting their side businesses, side hustles, and it’s awesome to be helping them.
