What is a Membership Plugin? Everything You Need to Know (original) (raw)

Want to monetize content and enhance member’s experience on your WordPress website? A membership website is the best solution. But to make it happen, you’ll need a Membership plugin.

The best part? You don’t need any complex coding, tech skills or a big budget for a membership plugin.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about membership plugins. From what it has to offer to how it helps you create a membership site. We can also help decide which membership plugin is best for you based on your requirements. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

What is a Membership Plugin?

A membership plugin is a tool that lets you control access to your specific content.

With a membership plugin, you’ll easily be able to create gated content and to access it, your members will have to buy your membership. You can also create different membership plans with different prices and different access rights to your content.

If we take ARMember for example which is a popular WordPress membership plugin. It allows you to protect and monetize your content with rules for individual pages, categories, URLs, or any content area of choice.

You can also tease out a particular part of your content by partially restricting content. Moreover, you can also provide user specific private content for a better personalized experience.

The best part? It also comes with powerful features such as drip content, robots set of payment gateways, third party platforms and community features to enhance your member’s experience.

In a nutshell, a Membership plugin’s main feature is to protect your content and control access to it. However, plugins like ARMember go the extra mile and offer powerful features and functionalities to create a full-fledged membership site.

How Do Membership Plugins Work?

Let’s say you have an OTT membership site. You upload your premium content aka videos, series, live streaming and all. Now you want only your members to get access to your premium content in order to make money online. So what will you do?

In a real life scenario, you might say assign a guard so it lets only authorized members in. Well to your surprise, a membership plugin works the same way. It’ll act like a gatekeeper (guard) of your membership site and will make sure only the users with specific memberships can access the specific content.

Now let’s understand how a membership plugin will work for your membership site in simple terms.

Types of Membership Models

To build a sustainable membership site, you have to monetize your content with different membership models with different pricings and access rights.

Yet this has to be done in the right way. Choosing the right membership model is not all about setting up prices. It’s about deciding how your business will make money out of it, how users perceive your content and if they become a lifetime customer or churn after a short time.

You must have seen popular membership sites like Netflix and Amazon; And how they offer multiple membership plans with unique perks for all. You have to do the same to grow your membership business.

Thus, here are the different types of membership models you can use:

Free membership

This membership model is considered best for attracting new members. Let’s agree that visitors don’t want to risk directly jumping on a paid plan. So for that case, this free membership model can work.

A free membership model can be the most beneficial model if you are new in this membership business. It can help you generate leads, attract potential members and increase brand awareness.

Here are a few benefits of free membership model:

While this may be a good business model, this has to be considered and planned carefully. Make sure you only offer a limited amount of content to give new visitors a taste of paid membership. Also, not too less that they might start thinking your paid membership will also be the same.

Thus, this membership model needs strategic planning and if implemented in a smart way, it can be the most beneficial one.

Lifetime or Per-Per-Access Membership

A lifetime membership model is well suited for those businesses who offer static content. Suppose you are a coach or tutor who wants to launch an online course on “Basics of IT”, with 3 hour duration and downloadable resources such as e-books or digital notes. Now if you are not planning to further expand this course, you can easily give it access under Lifetime membership.

Also, suppose if students only want e-books and notes, not the whole course via lifetime membership, then you can use the Pay-per-post model. It allows your visitors to pay for what they want only.

Here are a few benefits of lifetime or per-per-access membership model:

However, remember this model also needs a lot of payment as strategic planning. Also make sure the lifetime value of a customer doesn’t exceed the cost of the lifetime membership.

Recurring Subscriptions Membership

This is one of the most popular membership models out there. If you are looking for a way to generate recurring revenue, this is a perfect model. This membership model allows you to set up multiple revenue cycles like weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. for user payment flexibility as well as consistent income.

One of the best advantages of this model is predictable revenue. You can generate a stable and continuous income stream, perfect for businesses that offer ongoing access to service, content, or community.

Here are a few benefits of recurring subscriptions membership model:

This is one of the most used membership models yet you must have to strategize it properly otherwise it might fall back.

Hybrid Membership

Ever thought of coming all these membership models into one? That’s exactly the hybrid model. It simply combines all the pros of free and paid memberships to create a perfect custom membership plan.

Let’s say you run a fitness website. Now you can allow free, signed up users to access basic workouts and community features but for advanced and personalized training or one-to-one sessions, they need to opt for paid memberships

Here are a few benefits of Hybrid membership model:

This may be the easiest to choose yet it needs proper management in order to avoid future confusions and errors. Also, make sure not to over complicate your membership pricing structure. Customers like simplified pricing models with clear comparative perks.

Do You Need a Membership Plugin for Your WordPress Site?

Ever wondered if you actually even need all advanced features and a membership plugin itself?

Well, you are not alone. This is a common thing to consider before investing your time and money on a membership plugin. You must have to make sure it actually helps your business to grow and also grows alongside you.

Here are some signs that say yes. You need a membership plugin if:

If any of this matches like your future plan, then a membership plugin can be the best investment for your membership business.

However, you actually don’t need a membership plugin if you are planning to make a:

Common Use Cases for Membership Plugins

Membership plugins are used in multiple sectors of business and industries.

Now that you are sure about getting a membership plugin, let’s take a look at the most common use cases for using a membership plugin.

Key Benefits of Using a Membership Plugin

A membership plugin goes beyond just protecting your content. It allows you to create robust membership plans, automate subscription management and email notifications along with flexible payment collection options for generating revenue.

Monetize and Protect Your Content

A powerful membership plugin helps you protect your exclusive content with advanced content access rules.

ARMember protects your content with its advanced set of content restriction rules. It comes with an easy to use user interface so you can restrict access of any content with just a simple checkbox and toggle button.

With ARMember, you can smoothly set content protection access rules for your WordPress pages, posts, custom posts, post taxonomy, navigation links, archives and more. Also, all new pages or posts you create will automatically be created with default access rules you set in the global setting.

Collect Membership Payments

Another benefit of using a membership plugin is super quick automatic payment collection for your monetized content. Multiple popular plugins smoothly connect with payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, automating recurring payments and subscription management.

The more, The merrier. This also goes for payment gateways as your members will get more flexibility to pay for your membership with their preferred payment method.

A membership plugin also supports multiple payment options and multiple revenue cycles like weekly, monthly, yearly and so on for offering a flexible payment process.

With ARMember, you get over 21+ popular payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, WooCommerce, and more for a fast and secured payment.

Schedule and Drip content your content

Imagine releasing your content like a Netflix series, episode by episode for keeping your members excited and engaged. If you also want this amazing feature then you can take advantage of the drip content feature for scheduled content.

Drip content is a process of releasing your content over a period of time. It helps keep members excited for new content. Worth mentioning, this advanced feature comes already inbuilt in ARMember.

With ARMember, you can easily add new drip content rules alongside 5 different types of drip rules.

These drip rules are simple to set and enhance member engagement and retention. Thus if you are also looking to offer a personalized experience to your members, drip content can help a lot.

A membership plugin helps you create a dedicated online community that fosters a feeling of trust and belonging. Unlike open social media platforms, these communities can be for exclusive and authorized members online.

With membership plugin, you can enhance your community with its amazing social media like feature but more exclusive. Mostly it offers member profiles, forum and discussions boards, members-only area, personalized recommendations and gamification elements.

Worth mentioning, ARMember gives you all you need to boost your community. You can build a meaningful on-site connection with your members with its ready-to-go public member profiles, fully customizable directory templates, flawless BuddyPress/BuddyBoss Forum Support along with awesome gamification elements.

These awesome gamification elements include badges, rewards, and points. These are best for gamifying your LMS websites and gym or fitness membership websites.

Furthermore, you can also enable members to create subsites to run their own network within your WordPress membership website.

Offer Amazing Discount Coupons and Gifts

Everyone loves discounts and gifts. It is one of the best ways to attract more customers and keep your existing members happy. If you also want to offer amazing coupon codes and discounts to your loyal members, a membership plugin is your best solution.

A membership plugin allows you to create and manage discount coupon codes. You can control everything from how many times they can be used, their expiration dates and more.

If you are planning to use the ARMember membership plugin then you are in luck. ARMember comes with 57+ in-built addons such as coupons management. It allows you to create and manage up to 1000 discount codes in just a few clicks.

Moreover, you can also take advantage of its premium Gift Membership Addon to let your members gift your membership.

Automation of Important Tasks

With a membership plugin, you can automate most of your important tasks. The membership system can save a lot of your time by automating multiple things which used to require manual work before.

You can automate user signups, collection of payments, refund process, cancellation process, forgot password emails, welcome notification and expiration notification, access permissions and so much more.

There’s no end to this list but with a membership plugin, you can let the system handle everything in background while you focus on growing your business.

ARMember membership plugin can automate everything you can name. It’s super easy to automatically streamline all your important tasks such as sending automated emails for subscription events, processing payments and syncing user data.

More interesting, you can send automatic reminders and notifications via popular medium such as Emails, WhatsApp and SMS for better reach.

How to Choose the Right Membership Plugin for Your Site

As we move forward, we understand the awesome benefits of using a membership plugin.

However, not all membership plugins are the same. While the core features are the same, it’s additional features, no useful integrations and beginner friendliness makes the whole difference.

Thus, here are a few factors to keep in mind before choosing any membership plugin for your WordPress membership website.

Best WordPress Membership Plugin Examples

There are dozens of membership plugins in the WordPress plugin market, everyone claiming themselves as best. Yet, the one that steals the spotlight as the best example of membership plugins is ARMember.

ARMember-best-WordPress-membership-plugin

ARMember is a powerful and easy to use WordPress membership plugin, offering a complete membership management solution. It lets you create a countless number of membership plans with different access rights and pricing.

No matter whether you want to build an online coaching platform or a premium Content platform, ARMember is an all-in-one membership plugin and best for all use cases.

It is one of the best plugins out there for both beginners and advanced users. It comes with advanced features such as in-built community features, advanced drip content rules, in-built form builder, along with over 21+ payment gateways for flexibility and scalability and has over 50k happy customers globally.

Key Features of ARMember:

That’s why, ARMember is the best example of a complete and all-in-one membership plugin for WordPress.

However, there are many other popular examples of membership plugin you can consider such as:

Final Thoughts: Are WordPress Membership Plugins Worth It?

In a nutshell, A membership plugin is a powerful tool for creating and managing your membership site. It allows you to protect your premium content with a paywall and set content access rules based on membership plans.

Lastly, it’s time for the final question, “Are WordPress membership plugins worth it?”

The answer is clear as day. A membership plugin is worth your time and investment if you are looking to monetize your content and generate recurring revenue. It comes with a robust set of powerful addons, payment integration, content access rules, drip content and more.

Thus, choose your right membership plugin now and get started!

FAQs About WordPress Membership Plugins

What is the best membership plugin for WordPress?

ARMember is the best membership plugin for WordPress with a robust set of advanced features. You can create unlimited numbers of websites with different access rules and pricing. It is ideal for both beginners and advanced users.

How to Create a Membership Site with WordPress?

Here are the simple steps for creating a membership site with WordPress:

Is WordPress good for membership sites?

Yes, WordPress is the perfect for creating and managing a membership site. It offers multiple WordPress plugins and themes with a friendly user interface for your membership site.

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