WordPress plugins prove to be some of the best membership management services out there, but with so many choices, it’s hard to figure out which one will work best for your specific vision.
With MemberMouse, you get access to an ever-evolving platform that gives you more bang for your buck.
Every plugin has its ups and downs, which is what we intend to divulge here.
In this MemberMouse review, we’ll cover the different things you can expect from MemberMouse including pricing, installation time, ease of use, and whether or not it’s worth the monthly amounts that scale up as you gain more students. Let’s take a look.
What is MemberMouse?
MemberMouse is a WordPress plugin that’s been around for quite some time.
It allows you to make multiple features for different tiers of memberships, accept payment through those memberships, and activate content dripping, login restriction, and give flexible billing options for your students.
With MemberMouse, you can monetize content on your website. Popular blog posts can now require money to view, or you can sell online courses, access to photos and videos, and exclusive interviews. If it’s website-ready content, you can use MemberMouse to turn it into a business.
MemberMouse Ease of Use
Thanks to the way that MemberMouse plays nice with other plugins, it’s exceptionally easy to use.
For pre-existing WordPress sites that already have a ton of content on them (that you presumably now want to monetize), MemberMouse drops right in and helps immediately.
There’s a learning curve with any LMS or similar plugin, and with MemberMouse, it’s just understanding the different options. It will apply itself to your WordPress theme rather easily, but there are definitely a sea of options for your memberships that you have to navigate. Many of them you won’t even need.
Give it two days of messing around, and on the beginning of day three, you’ll feel like you’ve been using MemberMouse for years.
Installation
Installation is a simple solution that just drops into your site. You think it would be that easy, but if you have more than one site, installation can be a bit aggravating. You have to install it individually on each site, because you need separate subscriptions for each site.
MemberMouse only works for one WordPress site at a time. Installing it into each site is still a very short and easy process, but if you’re trying to monetize half-a-dozen sites at a time, you now have to juggle those subscription costs. Furthermore, if there’s an issue with MemberMouse, you have to troubleshoot the same problem for each of those sites.
Setup
Setting up memberships through MemberMouse is pretty simple. Once subscribers begin the signup process, they’ll be directed to the in-site checkout feature.
This works similarly to just about every checkout function you’ve used throughout the years for online shopping, so users will feel right at home.
MemberMouse Pricing
MemberMouse has different pricing features, although we’re going to get into why the highest package probably isn’t what most people want.
It’s important to know that this includes what you’re able to charge customers for their memberships as well.
Plugin Pricing
You have three different packages to choose from. The first one is Builder: a $29 per month plan that gives you the basics, and very little else. This includes a staging license, email support, membership pages, and one-click purchases and upsells.
Go up a notch to the Advanced plan, and you’ll pay $79 per month with additional access to an employee access control system, affiliate settings, and all the benefits from the Builder plan. That, and you get access to social media signups and logins to help expedite the signup process.
Last but not least, we have the Premium plan. It includes everything previously mentioned before, but includes integration with Sticky.io—a full-service ecommerce platform—as well as active phone support. The price difference is stagger, though, at an increased cost of $199 per month. The phone support is nice, but may not be worth an additional $120 per month.
Your Membership Pricing and Tiers
You can create membership levels and price them however you want to. You have to go through some settings, such as free versus paid (great for trials of your site), and descriptions for different tiers.
You can also describe which products you include in the memberships as well as how much they cost. You set the price, you control how much money you make.
Payment Methods
This is one area that MemberMouse really shines. There’s a built-in, on-site integration to allow people to pay directly right then and there.
Then again, some people are (rightfully) picky about where they input their information online. You can sign up with Authorize.net and include PayPal connectivity. Basically, any major payment is acceptable.
How to Use MemberMouse
MemberMouse actually has an entire video training course that you can take to show you the ins and outs (and they update it regularly to comply with any plugin updates).
There’s a moderate learning curve here. You have to learn how to create products, bundles, membership levels, and integrate email to complete everything.
You can view their full list of videos here to explain everything in detail.
Setting Up Memberships
When you set up a new membership, you have to go through the process of setting up their names, adding an email address, phone number, and so on. Once you fill out the fields, you have to design a password for the member.
That’s where it’s a bit tricky. You’re basically setting up an account for someone once they make the payment to become a member, but the good thing is that once you set the password for them, MemberMouse says that you can make it easy for members to change their own password at any time in their “My Account” page.
Just be sure to write down the temp password and send it to them appropriately, or allow it to send the password to them in a welcome email.
Membership Managements
Under your plugin, there will be a tab that says “Manage Members”. Go here, and you’ll see that you can alter membership levels to increase the level of that person.
This is great if a student or viewer asks what the bigger packages are like, because you can give them a two-day trial of it, and then scale back their membership later. It’s basically upselling with more effort, but more personalization. All the management options will be under this tab for their actual membership.
Features
Apart from the obvious membership options, you can add tiers to make different levels of memberships, customize payment confirmation pages so that customers know exactly what they’re getting, and make a fully functional “My Account” page to let your visitors access their profile whenever they want.
While it’s not something that people think of (because we’re so used to seeing it), a lot of membership plugins don’t have password reset options.
MemberMouse offers a forgotten password reset (see also ‘The Best Alternatives To LastPass‘) that you don’t have to touch, that way you don’t have to be the one to verify people when they lose their password. Including dynamic checkout and fast activation, there’s a rap sheet of features a mile long for Membermouse.
Third Party Integration
There’s a decent enough level of integration here, but if you want to add a popular plugin like WooCommerce (common among online learning platforms), you actually need another plugin to make it work with MemberMouse.
Now, the good thing here is that it’s developed by MemberMouse, so you know it works and gets updated, but it’s an extra hoop to jump through.
MemberMouse is an older membership app and they know how important it is to have multiple plugins running on your WordPress site at the same time, which is exactly why they work hard to make sure your MemberMouse memberships will compliment your site and pre-existing plugins, not make it harder on you.
MemberMouse Analytics
MemberMouse surprisingly has one of the best analytical tools of any WordPress LMS-style plugin out there.
You get access to target keywords that your customers are using to find you, sales per product, customer valuation (lifetime purchases and frequency), as well as detailed sales reports to help you market your courses better. It helps you find out what works and assists you in capitalizing on it.
MemberShip Security
According to MemberMouse, they use protocols for passwords (see also ‘The Best Alternatives To LastPass‘), licensing, transactions, and more. If you’re worried about being held liable in the event of a data breach, they’ve already thought of that as well to keep you protected.
When a customer purchases a plan through you, their credit card information isn’t stored on your site. Instead, it’s located on your payment processor’s server.
This means that when you get paid through something like Stripe, the information travels from the processor to the vendor, payment is collected, and that information is not stored for security purposes.
Pros and Cons of Paid MemberMouse
Pros
- Marketing Tools: Upselling, analytics, coupon creation, and cancellation prevention help you attract new members, and keep the ones that you already have nice and happy. Marketing is hard, but with tools like these, it almost feels automated.
- Payment Options: There are enough payment options to be considered helpful. Plugins are usually limited in this regard, but MemberMouse is good at making sure your customers have plenty of options. You customers can even change payment preferences before renewals if they have a new card or new way to pay.
- Third-Party Integration: Other plugins, third-party apps, and CRMs all get access to MemberMouse. Well, most of them. You can integrate your pre-existing systems with MemberMouse to prevent disruptions. When a plugin doesn’t work, typically MemberMouse has a workaround or another plugin to help compensate for it and keep your business on track.
- Scaling: There’s no limit to the number of students that you’re allowed to have, so you can just keep scaling up and growing without any repercussions. There’s no additional fees to pay for a certain number of members, although your hosting package may hit a limit (psst, we have a guide on hosts for WordPress, too).
- Video Tutorials: MemberMous is one of the few membership plugins with a lot of educational content. Many plugins feel like “Okay, you paid, now you figure out how to use it,” but MemberMouse has excellent video tutorials to help you along every step of the journey. Their customer support is also helpful if you get stuck on something.
Cons
- Individual Plans: If you have two membership sites, you need two subscriptions to MemberMouse; you cannot run more than one site off of one subscription. If you’re charging people and expecting them to join, operating costs will probably be low, but it’s still a pain.
- Tons of Options: There are a lot of options you may never use that clutter up the UI in your dashboard. It’s good to have options, but once you know how you want your site and memberships to go, it’s annoying to navigate through a sea of options without having the ability to remove them.
It’s Time to Start Selling Your Online Courses With a Good Platform
WordPress plugins seem to be a dime a dozen, which is why MemberMouse wanted to become something different (which they pulled off exceptionally well).
Up against some of the other WordPress plugins that we’ve reviewed on EdWize, MemberMouse has quite a bit to compete with, but they’re definitely a great beginner’s membership plugin.
Because they’re constantly evolving, as many of these plugins do, you’ll see progressive updates at no cost to you.
MemberMouse knows what they have to compete against, and with their constant evolutions, you’ll only benefit. A great first-time membership plugin, and for the long haul, we’ll just have to wait and see.
