MemberVault review – If you want to create and sell courses or maybe your plan is to create a membership site. You’ll need a platform to host your content. You can do this on your own website, but it’s easier to have a standalone custom built platform, with features specifically for courses and memberships.
There’s a lot of choice with platforms that you can use. Teachable, Kartar, Podia, Thinkific, or all in one solution, such as Kajabi.
For years I used Teachable, but last year I made the switch to relative newcomer MemberVault. I’ll share why and what I love about it in this MemberVault review.
What is MemberVault?
MemberVault is a platform you can use to host your courses, freebies, and your membership site content.
MemberVault gives you great insights into how your audience are engaging with your content. They have created a “binge & buy marketplace”, which they believe can boost sales from existing subscribers.
If you’re not a fan of launching specific products or programmes at specific times, then this way of selling could be for you. Of course you can combine traditional launches with MemberVault, but it opens up a way to tap into even more revenue.
Showcasing all of your products in this marketplace means your audience is exposed to all your offerings and can purchase products when the time is right for them. Often they can be tempted by a product they’ve seen in the marketplace.
The genius of MemberVault is the insights they give you and the tools you have at your disposal to better serve your audience AND make more money. You get to see who your warm and hot leads are, as MemberVault shares how many times people have looked at the same product.
Warm leads are people who have checked out at least one of your free products (e.g. clicking through to a product page two times or more.
Hot leads are people who have repeatedly viewed the teaser content (like your sales page) for a product they don’t own yet. These are people who are invested in the product and are seriously considering making a purchase. They just need a little push. You could send a personalised email to these people offering them a special offer if they purchase.
You can also set up automatic segmentation based on how people engage with your content.
Despite MemberVault’s power and capability, it’s actually really easy to use.
Other benefits of MemberVault
Fast setup
Obviously, changing platforms (as I did) is never a walk in the park. To be honest, it’s a complete pain. However, it was easy to add my courses and freebies to MemberVault and it was great to see how my audience were interacting with products, as I was still adding other products. It was motivation to keep going!
You can add text lessons, images, modules, lessons, pdfs and quizzes. You can also add homework in a special section, add questions and videos (hosted on Vimeo or YouTube).
Ease of use
I don’t really struggle with technology and found MemberVault very intuitive, right from the start. Even if you’re not tech savvy MemberVault will not be difficult to use. They have great support and lots of resources to help you build your own marketplace.
MemberVault pricing
Most online learning platforms who offer free accounts do so until you’re earning from your courses. So you can run free courses, but not paid ones without paying for your account. This can be tricky. When you start selling courses, products or your membership, you might only sell a few, but you have a big bill for the platform. Not ideal, when you’re just starting out.
This is where MemberVault stands out from the crowd. They offer free accounts for your first 50 users and they include ALL the features. So you can have 50 paying customers and you only pay when you sell your 51st course or product. This is such a great way of structuring their pricing and it’s VERY customer focused. It gives people a way to get started with no risk.
They have currently have 3 pricing options:
- Forever Free: $0 – for up to 50 users
- Base $39 per month: for up to 1,000 users
- Pro $69 per month: for up to 25,000 users (upgrade to 250,000 users for $99)
I started with the free option, which was great as it meant I wasn’t paying for two platforms, while I was moving my content over. Then, when I reached 51 users, I was happy to pay the $39 per month fee.
Fully customisable
When you’re sending your customers to another site, you want to customise these additional places, so they look and feel like your site. This helps continuity.
There are many elements within MemberVault that can be customised. Button colours, text, background colours can all be customised to match your business branding. This makes the transition between sites smoother for your audience.
You can add a site title, add a logo, put links in the footer and add in your brand colours.
In the ‘Welcome Area’ you can add a GIF, image or video and add some text to welcome your users. You can also add two call to action buttons.
You can adjust the layout so your products show either in two or three columns. This is great if you have lots of products, you can pick three columns so your audience aren’t scrolling forever to get to the bottom of the page!
There is also an additional notification bar for adding a specific call to action. These are great for special offers or limited time discounts.
Gamification
In this MemberVault review I wanted to be sure to highlight Gamification. Gamification is becoming an increasingly popular way of getting your audience to engage with your content. People can’t get results if they don’t actually complete the training. Gamification encourages people to finish the courses they sign up for or pay for.
You can add quizzes; either create long text or multiple choice quickly and easily. These are great for encouraging people to interact and move forward through your content.
Within MemberVault your audience can earn engagement points (EP), members can earn points by completing things. You can add extra bonuses, which your audience can unlock by reaching a certain number of EPs.
People can earn EP’s one point at a time based on certain actions. 1 EP is earned by:
- Viewing a lesson (can be done once a day)
- Marking a lesson as complete
- Completing all lessons in a module
- Completing all lessons in a piece of content
There’s a ‘Top 10 Leaderboard’ which shows the position of members in each marketplace ranked by EP.
Regular, Progressive, Dripped & Bonus
When you set up a product, you can set it as active (visible in your marketplace) or inactive (not visible). ‘Not visible’ is useful if you have a course or piece of content, which is for your membership site, but not yet for general sale.
You can also pick the type of product; Regular (no time or order forced), Progressive (lessons and modules must be completed in order), Date Dripped (modules released on specific days), Timed Drip (modules released X days from signup) and Bonus (unlocks automatically based on the users total EP).
Awesome community & support
MemberVault are all about supporting their users. Whether that’s their super helpful emails, the Collaborative Facebook group or their actual product support, you’ll never have a question that has to wait long for an answer.
The founders of MemberVault are very visible in the business and are in the Facebook group themselves helping people.
Advanced tools
You can link your MemberVault to your email provider and use webhooks, actions and automations.
If you’re a coder, you can add custom CSS to integrate many more features.
“One-click link” to login
This one-click link automatically logs people when they click it.
For example, add this link to your welcome email. When people click it, it automatically logs in to the platform. Saving them a step.
How else can you use MemberVault?
Besides adding your courses and using it as the hub for your membership, how else can you use MemberVault?
Create a freebie library
A great way to get new people into your marketplace is to create a freebie library or subscriber hub. A central place where all your freebies live. When people have had a taste of your free content, they will browse around your paid options.
This is my ‘SubHub’.
Host a challenge
My most effective lead generators are always free 5 day challenges. MemberVault make hosting challenges really easy, especially as you can drip the content out to your audience on a timed basis.
Personally, I like to also email participants, as getting into their inbox with a reminder every day is so beneficial. But it’s great to have all this content in a central place. You could also reward them for joining in with EP points.
Let your audience become your affiliates
You can make any of your products into affiliate products. Encourage people to sign up to sell your products and receive a commission in return.
MemberVault Review: Points to remember
It’s separate from your site
There’s an argument that taking people away from your site could confuse them. However, having this separate platform means you don’t have to worry about hosting or any of the techy stuff, as MemberVault will handle all of that for you. I also think people expect course creators to use a third party platform.
You’re building your business on ‘rented land’
Unlike your own website, which you own. You will never own your MemberVault marketplace. Just a thought to bear in mind.
MemberVault is an awesome platform for anyone with digital products or who wants to create a membership. The affordable pricing and 50 free users makes it accessible for people who are just getting started with their course/membership businesses. I hope this Membervault review has highlighted a new tool, which you can use to bring more revenue into your business.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means if you click one of the links in this MemberVault review and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission. This doesn’t cost you any extra and I only recommend tools I use and love.
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