The right learning management system can take the stress away from setting up, documenting, tracking, reporting, and automating your resources.
You can also get help with your marketing features and keep your students engaged with you – but which platform should you choose?
Today, we’re going to take a look at Membervault vs Teachable.
These two competitors have a LOT to offer, and we’re here to help you choose the right option for you.
What is Membervault?
Membervault is a popular, all-in-one relationship marketing platform that can be used to set up your own marketplace, host courses, manage memberships, take payments, and more.
Membervault was founded by Erin Kelly, and it has fast become a pretty popular platform. (Check out ‘MemberVault Review: What you Need To Know About’)
With Membervault, not only can you put all of your course content, downloadables, and membership site programs in one place, but you can also get extra insight into some useful statistics and see how your audience engages with your content.
These personalized insights allow you to build your business and your marketing strategy all from one place.
Membervault also claims to help its users increase the number of sales from their existing subscribers without needing to relaunch a new marketing strategy or content.
So, instead of doing lots of traditional promo launches to drive subscribers to your sales pages, you’ll be planting the seeds of your products into their minds at earlier points in the sales funnel, which can help you streamline your marketing messages and pull in more revenue.
Membervault: Key Features
Feeling intrigued?
We’re not surprised – Membervault has a LOT to offer its users, so much that if you’re unfamiliar with the platform, it can all seem a bit daunting.
Don’t worry – we’re here to condense all of its key features and offerings into one place, so you can see how Membervault works.
Gamification
One of Membervault’s biggest selling points is gamification.
It’s one of the main pillars of the platform, and it aims to grow and retain your users by rewarding those who are most engaged with your business.
You’ll be able to use the platform to ‘gamify’ your account.
You can choose from numerous triggers to help engage and reward your users, such as giving controlled access to secret products and more.
You can even use an old-style leaderboard layout that’s visible to all – this will show your most engaged users (by their first name, to protect confidentiality), but this works as great social proof that people are engaged with you, and it will inspire other users to become engaged, too.
Of course, not every user will want to be listed on a leaderboard, so they’ll have the chance to opt out.
Audience Insights and Engagement Tracking
Next up, we have audience insights and engagement tracking.
On the front end of Membervault, you’ll be presented with a graph that shows your engagement over time, your engagement by product, and the total number of EP (engagement points) per user.
You can track engagement according to the number of people enrolled in a specific product, and Membervault will work to identify both warm and hot leads for you.
These are pretty important, so we’ll give you a brief explanation below:
Warm Leads
Warm leads are people who have shown some sort of interest in any of your free products.
This could be because they viewed a product page at least two times or they completed certain assignments related to your product.
Hot Leads
On the other hand, hot leads are people who have repeatedly viewed certain products or ones that they don’t own yet.
These customers are more engaged and more likely to buy from you in the future, hence why Membervault classifies them as hot leads.
Membervault can help you target these personalized, automated messages to encourage them to buy your products and thank them for their interest.
The Subscriber Hub
With Membervault, the Subscriber Hub is one big directory (and resource center), filled with the people who subscribe to your email list.
When your members subscribe to the list, they’ll get put on the subscriber hub.
From here, you can send your subscribers important files or information that’s embedded into the platform – this means your info won’t get lost in someone’s emails or downloaded folders forever.
This is also a great way to encourage your subscribers to consume more content, which means they’re more likely to buy from you further down the line.
Your Product Section
The Your Product Section is a place for you to list all of your offers, services, and products (free and paid), all in one place.
Your available products will be listed on the front end (so people can view them directly), but you can hide unavailable products (or products you don’t want them to see yet) with just a few clicks.
Only the people you’ve added to a specific product will be able to see it.
You can create unlimited products in this way – this is something you can’t always do on other platforms.
Affiliate System
Membervault also has a pretty cool affiliate system that you can be a part of, regardless of what payment plan you’re on.
With the Membervault affiliate system, you can receive a 45% recurring commission whenever you refer to MV upgrades.
With the affiliate tracking features, you can allow your users to become affiliates for your products straight from inside Membervault. You can track and pay your affiliates with just a few clicks.
You can use features such as “payout type none” and “payout type percentage” to determine the payout.
If your affiliates have free products, choose “none”, or use the percentage feature to determine their payout based on how much they paid for the product.
The Binge and Buy Marketplace
A whole host of these features work together to create the Binge and Buy Marketplace.
The Binge and Buy marketplace is made up of the Subscriber Hub, your paid products and services, and foot traffic.
The binge-and-buy marketplace aims to replicate the real-life shopping experience – a taste test, time to determine whether you like the product, then you can go and buy it.
The binge-and-buy marketplace aims to generate as much revenue for you as possible by using these individual components to build up a successful shopping experience.
This isn’t something that’s offered by many other competitors in this way, and we have to say, it can be pretty effective, depending on how you use it.
Membervault: Pros and Cons
Membervault may sound complex, but now we’ve broken it down, you’ll hopefully see that it’s a pretty easy platform to use. Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of Membervault, so you can decide whether it’s right for you.
Pros
- Easy Set-Up: It’s pretty easy to get started with Membervault and the online registration process. You won’t have to worry about themes, software, and plugins – simply create your courses or modules, move them around, upload your documents, and it’s all done.
- Customizable: Membervault offers lots of customization options, so you still have complete control over your background colors, text colors, and more – but without the hassle.
- Gamification: Gamification is one of the biggest selling points of Membervault, and it works pretty damn well. By earning experience points (EPs), members feel like they’re taking action, seeing results, and reaping the rewards – and they are. It’s a great way to keep people engaged with your content and boost your performance and revenue.
Cons
- Lack of Ownership: Unfortunately, Membervault is a standalone platform. It’s kind of like using eBay or Etsy to sell your products – you’ll never fully own your site. However, this does eliminate the stress of sorting out hosting and managing servers.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is another popular online course platform that allows you to create and sell your own educational resources, online courses, and coaching.
This all-in-one solution platform is loaded with features to help make your selling and hosting process a breeze, and you’ll have plenty of power over your own branding, student data, messaging, and more.
Teachable is a learning management system, and it’s pretty extensive. Teachable is integrated with a number of eCommerce technologies to make it easier to develop and sell material.
Teachable helps you create and distribute your material through different sales sites, affiliate programs, promotions, discounts, and more.
The platform has been in full swing since 2013, and it has since raked up a large number of loyal users.
Teachable: Key Features
So, what is it that makes teachable so popular?
Let’s explore some of its key features below. (Check out ‘Teachable Review – All You Need To Know.’)
Data Tracking
One of the first notable features of teachable is data tracking.
With data tracking, you can keep a close eye on the performance of your courses so that you can monitor their success and make any adjustments if needed.
With data tracking, you can use Teachable’s dashboard to track metrics like student attendance, enrollment, completion rates, and more.
If you want to, you can also design surveys that gather student feedback on your courses, so you can make actionable changes to your content and keep your students engaged.
Course Builder
Before we get to the point of data tracking, though, you’ll need to build your courses with development tools.
Teachable offers a pretty comprehensive course builder.
Your course will automatically come with three product pages: a sales page, a thank you page, and a checkout page. You can edit and launch these pages with the course builder and customize them to suit your needs.
You can add additional pages, including the homepage, privacy policy, and terms of use, and many of these pages come pre-designed for you.
You can use the drag-and-drop editor to customize these templates and add different content to suit your business; PLUS, you can create as many additional pages as you want!
Creating an Online Course Website
Unlike Membervault, you’ll get to set up your own course website with Teachable.
Don’t worry – teachable makes it easy to create your own website.
There are several components that go into creating a website with teachable, such as choosing your course design templates, customizing your website theme and choosing your branding options, configuring your domain, and more.
With Teachable, you’ll have the option to use a default Teachable domain, or you can connect a custom domain or subdomain. It also features ready-made navigation links; however, you can alter these if you want.
Email Marketing
No all-in-one platform would be complete without email marketing.
With Teachable you can put your email lead forms on your sales pages and collect leads as you go.
Teachable makes this process simple by giving you a ready-made email leads form to place on your page.
All you need to do is enable or disable the double opt-in for leads option, so you can choose whether or not to send your leads an email confirmation.
You can email specific students, all students, or students enrolled in individual courses in just a few clicks, and you can even add custom codes for your emails because of the email service provider.
Sales and Marketing Features
Teachable also comes with a comprehensive marketing suite to help you connect with new students, grow your lists, and turn visitors into customers.
Some of Teachable’s sales and marketing features include:
Drip Content
With drip content, you can release specific amounts of content to your users over time.
Publish sections when or where you feel like it, and you can even include email announcements to help engage students with releases and nurture leads.
Order Bumps
You can add order bumps to the checkout page – this feature can increase order values close to the checkout option, which can help you make more money from your courses.
Essentially, customers can buy promoted products over original products, meaning you can sell more of your original products and increase your total number of sales.
Upsells
With Teachable, you’ll also be able to upsell. This means that you can encourage students to buy additional courses and get yourself an extra stream of revenue.
Upsells can help you promote bonus products, and you can add in your upsell features in just a few clicks.
Student Interaction
You can also encourage student interaction on the platform, as Teachable’s comment section allows students and their instructors to keep in contact.
Comments can be enabled for specific lectures, and you’ll be able to moderate comments, add attachments, and more.
What’s more, once your students have completed a course, you can also assign them a certification.
You’ll be able to choose from three certification templates offered by Teachable.
Or, you can create your own custom certifications using Liquid HTML.
Teachable: Pros and Cons
Teachable is another great all-in-one membership management platform that’s loaded with features, but what are the pros and cons of using it? Let’s find out.
Pros
- Unlimited Courses: With Teachable, you can create unlimited courses for your students, which makes selling online courses much easier. This is a feature not offered by many compliance management platforms.
- Email Marketing: With email marketing automation, you can communicate with your students, encourage sales, and grow your revenue with just a few clicks.
- Additional Sales and Marketing Features: With Teachable, you’ll have access to extra sales and marketing features such as upsells and drip content, which can help push your course content out there, boost revenue, and improve connections with your students.
- Great for Students: Teachable isn’t just great for you, it’s also great for your students. Teachable is easy to navigate, it can be accessed on desktop or mobile, and it’s fun and interactive, which will help keep your students engaged.
Cons
- Limited Customization: Although Teachable does a lot to make building your website a breeze, some users feel like there are limited customization features.
- Third-Party Platform Sometimes Required: If you want to build a sales funnel, you’ll probably need to use another third-party platform such as LeadPages, or ClickFunnel.
Membervault vs Teachable: Which is Better?
Okay, now it’s time for that all-important question.
Which is better, Membervault vs Teachable?
These management platforms both have some exceptional features, and we’re truly impressed by both of them.
We’d say they both score pretty highly in terms of maximum ease of use, features, design, and support; however, teachable is much better for deployment.
Membervault deployment is SaaS only, whereas teachable is SaaS, iPhone, and iPad.
If you’re struggling to get to grips with these platforms, you’ll also find that Teachable has far more comprehensive training features, such as webinars, documentation, and live online training.
If you don’t want the hassle of creating your own website and you want a ‘hands-off selling experience’, we’d recommend Membervault.
Although you won’t own your site, almost everything you could need has been thought of, and you can get going in just a few clicks.
Although Teachable has many of the same features as Membervault, you’ll have to build your own website.
This can be a hassle for inexperienced users, but it does give you more freedom over your branding, which can make a big difference to your course performance.
The Bottom Line
There are so many collaborative learning management systems to choose from, but Membervault vs Teachable are both incredibly popular competitors for good reason.
If you want to engage your students, increase sales, and get started with just a few clicks, we’d recommend either platform for your learning management needs!
