MemberMouse Review: WordPress Membership Plugin for 5,000+ members
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TL;DR
MemberMouse is a powerful WordPress membership plugin to engage, grow and monetise your community. It takes care of all the hard work associated with running a membership site. So, with MemberMouse installed you can easily sell memberships and products, create member-only areas, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, and much more. To top it off, it does so without any additional code.
MemberMouse Pros
- Full features out-of-the-box
- Easy installation & setup
- Dynamic content via SmartTags
- Grow-with-you pricing
MemberMouse Cons
- Demands capability with your other WP plugins
- Enhanced customisation requires HTML/CSS
The Story
What is MemberMouse?
Running a membership business can be hard work. No so with MemberMouse. This WordPress plugin has a comprehensive set of scalable features to make signing-up and serving members a breeze.
The ready-to-go membership site and its clever automation can do the work of 10 people. Let them take care of manual tasks such as setting up accounts (whether free, trial or paid), taking payments, and ongoing account management.
MemberMouse is incredibly flexible. It doesn’t matter if you sell digital products, subscription content, software as a service, or ship physical goods. Or whether you’re overseeing a community of 100,000 or just getting started. A total gamechanger for anybody manually serving lots of members and struggling to keep all the plates spinning.
Meet the Maker:
Eric Turnnessen
MemberMouse is the brainchild of Eric Turnnessen. The former software engineer started scratched his own itch when wanting to build a membership site on the back of an eBook. As he told us: “I didn’t like any of the options out there, so I just built my own.” MemberMouse has evolved and grown over the years, accumulating an impressive set of features tuned in to the needs of the people who are using it.
Fast forward 10 years and the MemberMouse team is now seven strong and the software powering communities in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Eric remains at the helm and can found hosting his bi-weekly Office Hours, helping MemberMouse clients to keep their members happy and active.
The Product
How we tested MemberMouse for this review
I took advantage of the free 14-day trial MemberMouse offers. The old Surges.co was hosted on WordPress so after downloading and installing the plugin it was ample time to interrogate the tool and get to work on my make-believe membership site.
MemberMouse also has a great demo site for anybody wanting to see its core features in action before making a purchase. You can do so from both the member and admin perspective. Something I wish more SaaS tools would do instead of hiding behind demo calls!
Getting started with MemberMouse
Clearly, MemberMouse is not a standalone product. It requires the WordPress platform to run. But if you’re familiar with WordPress you’re a natural with MemberMouse. A quick installation, registration and setup of the basics of your membership scheme is all it takes to get started. Importing members involves a simple CSV upload, plus you can manually add members too.
Once you’re inside the tool, there’s lots of help resources on hand. A whirlwind tour and training videos cover the common questions about getting your membership site setup and serving your first members.
And if you need help on a particular feature - no problem! Click on ‘need help’ and you’ll be shown the relevant video and resources. Support is always a click away!
MemberMouse features you’ll love
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Sell your content – variable pricing
🛒Sell whatever you want (memberships, products or subscriptions), how you want. Setup different price points and split-test. Run trial offers and coupon codes. Free and paid trials. Payment plans. Recurring billing. And so on.
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Member-only access - Gated content
🔐Easily protect your premium content. That’s to be expected. However, you can also use MemberMouse to drip-feed and schedule content, stop it from being shared with MemberMouse’s auto-lock feature, deliver unique member home pages for each membership level, take care of forgotten password requests, and more.
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Manage Members - Without headaches
🤝Take the hassle out of accepting new members and taking orders. Their member dashboard is a gateway to a happy customer – showing order and activity history, access rights, easy pausing, cancellation and refunds, clustering and support. Managing member accounts at scale has never been easier.
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SmartTags - Triggered and tailored offers
🔛Powering dynamic conversations with members. This could be small touches such as displaying member date (e.g. first name, last name, billing address), purchase history (e.g. products ordered), past decisions (e.g. membership level, which affiliate has sent them, number of days as a member and targeted upsell offers. The possibilities are endless.
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Ready-to-go templates
📝Don’t waste time building common pages from scratch. The MemberMouse library includes tried and tested check-out pages, my account pages, member homepages, and more. Want to change something? All the functional elements are delivered via shortcode meaning you can quickly and safely customise MemberMouse to suit you.
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Automation abound - Goodbye manual tasks
⚙️Running a membership site can be admin hell. MemberMouse lets you automate common tasks and notifications such as fulfilling orders, sending welcome emails, managing subscriptions or responding to an event trigger. Integrations with Zapier make just about anything possible and the many self-service options keep support requests to a minimum, even as member numbers grow.
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Upsell/Downsell offers
💸Make every sale stretch further with one-click upsells. Offers can be tweaked based on the unique actions of individual members, their membership level and account status. MemberMouse can even automatically rescue unhappy customers, making a split-second downsell offer when they attempt to cancel. Genius!
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Insightful Analytics - Handy dashboard
📈So, your membership community is growing, but is it actually making any money? Get on top of KPIs such as lifetime value, churn, refund rates, and more, all by source and use that intel to grow your membership business. Note: Advanced analytics and reporting requires a MemberMouse Advanced Plan or above.
Things to consider
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Plenty of Integrations
Of course MemberMouse isn’t an island. It excels at the membership side of things and partners with the best-in-class-providers for the rest. When it comes to payment, all the usual suspects can be called on including PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, Braintree and Coinbase. Their “card-on-file” integrations will allow for 1-click upsells that do not require the customer to enter their credit card details when making additional purchases. Email-wise, syncing with MailChimp, GetResponse and the like, ensures that mailing lists are automatically kept up-to-date with changes to an account. For everything else there’s the API or WordPress hooks.
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Switching to MemberMouse
What if you want to migrate from another WordPress membership plugin? Their import wizard works with the WordPress user system, so if a user already exists in WordPress, MemberMouse will simply use the existing account and append any additional member data. For everybody else, uploading a CSV file of members will create a new account for them.
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Future updates allowed
If you want to make custom modifications MemberMouse provides developer tools such as an API, PHP functions and WordPress hooks and filters so that customisations can be made in accordance with WP best practices. Once you take this step with other platforms, you’re locked into that version, sacrificing any future updates. Not so with MemberMouse.
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Run your own affiliate scheme
MemberMouse works with all the big affiliate networks so you can launch your own low-maintenance referral programme. By placing a pixel-tracking code on MemberMouse you can record who came from where, track commissions on rebills, and even set-up revenue splits. Issuing partner payouts is also super easy.
MemberMouse Pricing & Offers
from $29 per month
All plans come with a free 14-day trial and you can get an exclusive 50% off a Builder Plan with Surges.
MemberMouse’s basic tier includes all the core functionality meaning its enterprise-level features are perfectly within reach of new membership sites.
MemberMouse Alternatives
Truth be told, there’s no shortage of alternatives. MemberPress is an easy to use WordPress Membership Plugin, offering unlimited members on its basic pricing plan (vs. MemberMouse’s 1000), but a smaller feature set. Personally, I’d rather grow into MemberMouse.
There’s also plenty of enterprise solutions such as Wild Apricot, Hivebrite and VeryConnect. What I love about MemberMouse is its flexibility, even with enterprise level tools, which you tend to lose with these.
And then there’s the big course and content hosting providers. Perhaps not the most cost-effective option, but you get to hand over the mechanics of charging and managing users to somebody else.
MemberMouse Support 👍 or 👎
Embarking on a new membership site can be a bit daunting. So many possibilities, too many people to please, and not enough time.
MemberMouse’s onboarding process does a great job of talking you through the basics and then helping you to add one layer at a time. With over 14 years’ experience behind them and a background rooted in running their own membership sites and businesses, they’ve developed a solid system for success you can tap into and are on hand to talk through the specifics.
This comes in the form of support tickets answered with 90 mins, 700+ support articles and video tutorials, as well as regular live Q&A sessions with Eric Turnnessen, MemberMouse Founder/CEO.
The Verdict
Surges score
86%MemberMouse prides itself as being an easy-to-use and affordable way to power a membership website on WordPress.
I have a confession to make: my experience of WordPress plugins was installing tiny widgets that fixed very isolated issues on my website. A decision taken out of necessity not possibility. MemberMouse caught me by surprise. The fact that such a powerful and all-encompassing membership solution is available out-of-the-box blew my mind.
MemberMouse contains all the features and functionality you need to run a membership site efficiently and profitably. That’s something that is built-up with skin in the game, something that Eric alludes to in his interview with Surges.
Running your membership site on MemberMouse replaces a ton of manual work. It taking care of sign-ups, onboarding, community management, account management, monetisation and retention – if it’s needed to keep members happy and your site profitable, MemberMouse has thought of it. All its features are purpose-built for running a membership site and fully customisable, meaning you can spend more time and resources on running and growing your community, rather than having to develop everything in-house.
MemberMouse should work with whatever WordPress theme you’re using – just make sure all your other essential plugins are up-to-date and compatible.
A solution this comprehensive would be perfectly entitled to command a premium. However, as MemberMouse’s pricing is primarily based on number of members and layers of reporting, its abundance of features are perfectly within reach of new membership sites. Your pricing tier grows with your community.
With a 14-day free trial, you can install the plugin and try it for yourself in a matter of minutes. Go!
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