How does MemberVault work?

MemberVault is a platform mainly for online courses and memberships/subscriptions. I say "mainly", because some have made it work for other types of digital products too. And physical ones! 

I use MemberVault myself (it's also where this blog post lives - yes, they do blogs) and I thought I'd show my group how MemberVault works.

Jump to the video or carry on reading (if you're more into written text).

What can you use MemberVault for?

I'm going to say digital products. That could be:

• Online courses (one-time fee) 
• Subscription/membership products (recurring fee) 
• Products without a fee, say a free download or a free video replay
• Anything else you can think of and adapt MemberVault to do

How much does it cost

There's been a recent shake up in their pricing structure which I won't cover in detail here. Essentially, if you're an existing MV user, make sure you're on a paid plan by the 31st of March. You'll stay on that price unless you want to upgrade later. From April 1st, new users will pay $99 a month. 

The highlights of creating a product

Setting up products is nice and simple. You get 2 layers to organise your content - modules and lessons. 

Think of the modules like containers for your lessons and you can release them all at once, in a strict order, or on a timed schedule (say a 5-day challenge). 

Within lessons you can upload files like workbooks or extra resources. Also within lessons, you can add questions to get feedback or use as a quiz.  Your users can even upload files/videos with their responses. How neat is that?

What other tools do you need?

MemberVault is not an all-in-one platform. You need to bring your own email marketing tool and video host (the links will list which tools work best with MV).

Before you gasp, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It means, if you ever need to move platforms, it's just your course content that needs migrating. Your emails, videos and payments will still exist. 

Speaking of payment, you can use Stripe and PayPal with MemberVault out-the-box. If you want to handle payments elsewhere, you simply link out to it.

What's the user journey like?

Now, this is what makes amazing MemberVault for me. Within MemberVault, you can see how your users interact with your content and respond accordingly. Hopefully, not in a stalkerish way, but to nurture and cheer them on. 

Here's a snippet of what I mean:

• When a user signs up, you seamlessly trigger a welcome email from your integrated email tool
• You can unlock bonuses or add them to a bundle of products
• When they view their first lesson, you can throw some celebratory confetti on the screen
• Or you can clock when they haven't viewed a lesson after, say 10 days, and check in on them

The good thing about how it works is that the information is sent straight to your integrated email tool (or a tool that uses webhooks). No need to involve a data go-between tool like Zapier to ferry that information out.

What else do I love about MemberVault?

So apart from the gamification and everything else above,

• It's simple* to get started and meets most straightforward use cases. 
• You get great customer service.
• It is actively being improved (feature-packed roadmap) and the owners listen to the users. 

* Simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. Every platform will have a learning curve but I like the way things are laid out in MV.

What I don't love so much

All platforms have those niggling "features" that you learn to love or accept. MemberVault is no different.  I am excited about the features that coming, but here's the current state of play (from my perspective):

• If your product isn't a simple course, membership or digital deliverable, you'll probably need a few workarounds to make it fit the MV structure. E.g. you can't do a paid trial. 
• Users can't cancel memberships from their profiles. They have to get in touch with you for manual cancellation.
• The editor is quite plain so fancy pages and lessons requires some design flair or code knowledge. 
• The checkout is a bit basic & you can't capture extra fields like a phone number
• You need to pay separately for video hosting and an email tool.
• You can't send messages to users within MV
• No central media storage section so management of common images is tricky in some cases. 

You can watch the video below and/or click here to let me know whether you're just getting started with MemberVault, or you're ready to maximise its potential or you're already rocking it?

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