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Micah Mitchell is a partner in Memberium, a membership development and management plugin for WordPress. In today’s Infusioncast Joshua Millage is talking with Micah about the role of membership, integrating Memberium with Infusionsoft, and the importance of caring about customers after the initial sale.
What exactly is membership? While your other management systems handle content development, delivery and tracking progress, sales and marketing, and income, a membership site provides for a customer’s profile, a purchasing account, security and privacy, and social aspects of membership. Most of these services should be automated, and with membership platforms like Memberium that are intuitive to use and integrate easily with Infusionsoft, there’s no reason not to automate.
Micah recognized the need for better membership software while he was a CRM consultant. The primary membership platforms available at the time were difficult to use, had performance issues, and lacked support. So Micah’s partner created Memberium to address those problems, and Micah came on board shortly after.
Memberium is an automated membership platform plugin for WordPress. It allows customers to log into your business website, create an account and password, and access your shopping cart and services, all automatically with minimal manual intervention from you. An automated platform also monitors what a customer can and cannot access according to their membership level. Offering access in increments engages customers and encourages retention as well.
The importance of personalized involvement with customers beyond the initial sale is severely underrated. Too many businesses feel they are done providing service or incentives once the sale is made. Micah believes this is a mistake. Offering fresh content for continuing engagement maintains a flow of income rather than single, isolated sales. The element of actively caring about your customers’ experience with your brand forms a connection with your customers that keeps them coming back to you and puts you ahead of your less-personalized competition.
Make sure customers are receiving only as much information at a time as they can retain. They will not benefit from having everything given to them all at once, and they won’t have a reason to pay you an ongoing subscription or membership fee. This is especially important for eLearning where the benefit you offer is proof through testing and certification that students are gaining the skills they require. They must complete one level before progressing to the next, and passing a quiz will determine their eligibility to progress. Incentivizing with something as simple as a badge they can post to their profile increases engagement and motivation to continue with your programs.
Your focus, accountability, support, involvement with customers, and belief in your product makes the difference between simply making sales in the short term versus creating real wealth and longevity. Automating your basic services, including membership, actually gives you more of an opportunity to build that rapport and provide a good experience to your users, especially if you are a small or solitary business owner.
Using a learning management system platform such as LifterLMS that integrates with Memberium and Infusionsoft forms a complete automated system that provides value for your customers and income for you. It also eliminates the need for you to hire people to build your online business for you, as these tools are robust yet intuitive to learn and use. With this integrated software you can create your site, provide multimedia content, handle sales, payment and marketing, and provide membership benefits.
Thank you for joining us.
You can ask Micah questions by submitting them on Memberium’s Support page.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua Millage: Hello Everyone, welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I had the opportunity of interviewing Micah Mitchell of Memberium. For those of you who have done any sort of research into the best membership platforms that integrate with Infusionsoft, you’ve probably heard of Memberium. I think it’s a great piece of software for anyone who’s looking to build an automated membership site or wants a membership site that is deeply integrated with Infusionsoft. Micah and I talk a lot about membership sites from a tactical level as well as more of a philosophical level. We also discussed some of the things that app developers should think about when they’re launching apps. Had an incredible time talking to Micah. I really enjoyed having him on the show and I think you’re going love this interview. Without further ado let’s get into it.
Recording: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast: the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua Millage: Hello Everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast. The only podcast that teaches you how to be in Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Micah Mitchell. Micah is a partner in Memberium, an Infusionsoft membership plugin that allows you to build powerful, automated membership sites. Micah, welcome to the show.
Micah Mitchell: Thanks for having me Josh, appreciate it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I’m excited, Man. We had a brief chat at InfusionCon and really enjoyed meeting you and your team. I think you have an amazing piece of software here that can help so many of our audience listeners create really powerful membership sites. I often times get this question, what membership plugin do you recommend Joshua? Over the course of networking with some Automation Clinic people, they’ve all pointed me to you which is really, really cool, because they’re brilliant people over there. I’m curious before Memberium let’s starts at your origin point. How did you find this Infusionsoft community? Where did you start with it?
Micah Mitchell: I actually … It was about 10 years ago I was doing a little bit of CRM consulting.
Joshua Millage: Cool.
Micah Mitchell: I was talking to a prospect, and I had this other CRM, which is kind of a big enterprise custom thing, and I was talking to him. He said yeah, I’ll have a look at if you have a look at this other thing with me, which happened to be Infusionsoft. I took a demo of Infusionsoft, and I was just like, yeah no that’s … Yeah, you want to buy that. A little while later I bought that as well for my business and ever since then I’ve really just been using it. Then I’ve also been a consultant since before the first ICP class. They used to be called ICC and then a bunch of things in between here and there. I’ve used it almost ten years. I’ve been consulting with it forever. I’ve implemented for the first two ultimate marketers and was partners with the third, and then I took a few years off just hanging out with my buddy, and now I’m getting back into it with Memberium. I had a lot in the Infusionsoft space and took a little break and then about a year ago started at Memberium and have really been pushing on that.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. You’ve seen this community grow and mature over pretty much from the beginning, huh?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, the first InfusionCon I went to, I remember it was less than a hundred people. Michael Gerber was there, and everybody got to gather around and talk to him. It was really informal. It was cool.
Joshua Millage: Wow, that’s pretty incredible. Yeah, that’s exciting. I didn’t realize I had an original gangster of the Infusionsoft community here so this is even more exciting for me. Tell me about Memberium. You got together with your partner, Dave right? Did you just decided to create this? Where did the idea kind of stem from?
Micah Mitchell: You know, it’s kind of a fun story. I won’t get into too many of the details, but basically years ago I sponsored InfusionCon in 2009. There’s a guy who came through there, Mark Summers actually, and I talked to him and he was a newbie user and told them I had a WordPress plugin for Infusionsoft. He went back and ended up hiring by Bob Keane who made iMember360. Then later I actually partnered with Bob. When I partnered with iMember, they only had like thirty-seven or eight subscriptions, not too many. A year and a half later we had hundreds. Then Bob and I parted ways. Memberium was really started, because people disliked iMember. There’s a few people who were having major issues with it. Whether it’s licensing or performance and that kind of thing or support. Everyone was just kind of begging for it. That’s why Dave started it and then it came full circle. About a year, a year and a half ago Dave and I first started talking and I decided we can make the thing work and put it out to market. He was going do it just as a pro bono, open-source free thing just because it was that needed and we decided to make a business out of it.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. Yeah, you know that’s really interesting because I didn’t really know that origin story. I’ve always kind of thought of it as the better iMember and that’s no disrespect to the people over there. Just in my experience using both platforms I really enjoy … I would just say the word that comes to mind cleanliness of how you things have things organized it’s much more logical, especially if people are familiar with WordPress. I really feel they’re going to enjoy using Memberium. Take me through … There’s just so many things you can do with Memberium. Maybe let’s just start with a use case of someone who wants to do an automated membership site. I’d like for you, if you don’t mind defining what an automated membership site means. Because I don’t think a lot of people understand the cool things that you can do with automation when it comes to a membership site.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, good question. What some people deal with believe it or not is they have something that’s not automated. I’ll describe that first. That’s where let’s say somebody buys from you and you get a receipt in your email. You think I better go create their membership level. You log into your system and you created a new account, and you send them permission, set a password or whatever. That has some sort of manual intervention. That’s a simple example, but there’s people doing that all the time where they have their shopping cart not fully integrated into a membership site. In the most basic sense, it’s where you can have someone either opt in for free or pay and have that automatically give them access to a private membership site. For those of you not terribly familiar with membership sites, think Netflix is a great example of we’re just selling access to content, and if you don’t have access you don’t, but once you buy it unlocks and you go in and you have fun. There’s different variables of that, but the automation really it can go a lot, a lot, lot further than that really as far as they can interact directly with Infusionsoft on every page. They check a box, they hit a button. That can set off actions in Infusion, and those actions in Infusion can push data back to the membership site to change the experience. It can get pretty complicated, but in essence it’s saying the whole membership experience is hands-free for the admins.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. I’ve seen people use it to kind of almost unlock content as a member matures in their membership, which I think is interesting. For example, you only have access to X amount of content on month one, but Y amount of content on month two. It’s kind of incentivizing people to say around. Talk a little bit about that because I think that that really helps with people sticking in with memberships, a lot of people I find just kind of join and then after a portion of time will jump out.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, and there’s … You’re absolutely right a lot of people will call that dripping content where they just give some of it at a time versus all of it, spoon feeding and that kind of thing. There’s a couple of ways to do it. It definitely increases engagement, more and more now that’s what membership site owners are being held accountable to. It’s not just, I created this content, you bought it we’re done. The user needs to feel, one that it was engaging enough to do it and that it was in the right format. I think they’re just getting pickier as everything gets better online they’re getting a little bit pickier. Which is totally fine and cool. You have the option to drip it. Let’s say someone’s going pay you $100 a month or whatever for a membership site. You can definitely say month one only give them this month, month two give them this month, month three give them more.
There’s a couple reasons to do it, one so they don’t go in the first month and buy everything some business owners are … I’m sorry not buy but watch everything, download everything just blow through in thirty-days. Some people are concerned about that. Really it’s more about allowing the client to go through it at the right pace because typically if they do blow through it in thirty-days, they’re not going to be able retain it, they’re not going to be able to do some of the exercises and some of the things that they probably should be doing with that information in that time anyways. Overall you’re trying to get the client the value. Dripping it is a pretty good way.
What I see more and more that’s really cool is they do … People will call it a learning management system or eLearning, where if you finish module one you click a button, marked complete let’s say and it goes to module two. Instead of we release every thirty-days, we release when you’re done. When you’re done with one, we go to two. You can actually combine them and say go at your own pace, you can unlock them as you go but we’ll only let you get so far in thirty-days.
The real kicker I think that is probably the best way to do it is quizzing. Some people will try to measure, let’s let them into module two once they watch 90% of module one. They’ll try to gauge how much the person is watching or how much they’re consuming by tracking the video views of the page views. What I’ve found more and more now getting into eLearning, the quizzing is really the only way to do it. Somebody can turn on a video and walk away and not get it or be checking their email and not get it. What are you really trying to do is you’re trying to get them to consume it and get value from it ultimately if you want them to spend more with you and to refer to you, you really need them to do that. It’s a combination of dripping it over time, letting them push it through by hitting mark complete as they go. Again, I think quizzes I think are the best way. You can do that with things like LearnDash. That way they finish the module, and they have to pass that quiz to get through it. Then you know okay they at least got it to a level. A basic quiz, you don’t want to overdo it. At least let them know that we’re trying to keep you engaged, we care about your experience and that sort of thing usually helps.
Joshua Millage: Right, exactly. The listeners know that our background here at codeBOX is in building high-end learning management systems and we have a WordPress plugin ourselves called LifterLMS which helps with that. I’m all about what you’re talking about, and I think you’re completely right. Actually let me ask you. This could kind of ruffle some feathers. I think that there’s a change happening in the internet marketing world where there’s kind of individuals who care about the sale, which is important don’t get me wrong, but that’s kind of all they care about. The sale happens and then they’re really worried about retrition and refund rates and all that. They’re not actually tracking or giving a lot of thought to, Is the customer or the student who just enrolled in my course actually learning? I think that’s where the blend of this learning management system can really help with that. It’s making sure that the person who bought is also accountable to intaking the information. You can only do that so far if someone really doesn’t want to learn or take time to go through the information there’s not much you can do. I really see the people that are excelling in the info marketing space who are building courses are doing a really good job of setting up these different triggers to get people to engage. I think what you’ve built here, allowing tags and things to be applied when certain things happen really can help pull people back in with the power of Infusionsoft and WordPress and your plugin. What do you think? Do you think that’s a trend? Are you seeing that happen? Do you think it’s good?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, I think it’s definitely a trend, and you kind of hit it on the head in a way I hadn’t heard before. Where there’s kind of a division of those that are selling to sell and those who are selling because they believe in their product and they follow it up with a good experience in that. The ones who sell to sell, they’ll probably always be around honestly it’s not like they’re going to go out of business. There’s always enough people I guess for them to sell to enough first-time buyers let’s say, right? The people who are trying to build a business and long-term wealth in that are definitely going over there. We did a webinar recently and titled it basically, “What’s Replacing Old-Fashioned Membership Site?” It was eLearning like your LifterLMS … I’m sorry, I didn’t even realize that was you. Dave I believe had lunch with your partner the other day and …
Joshua Millage: Yeah.
Micah Mitchell: No, that’s awesome. I didn’t realize it was you. So you’re all about it.
Joshua Millage: We want to make sure that we’re compatible together as best as possible and can be able to support each other. Yeah, anyway total digression but I’m definitely a fan of what you’re doing on the membership side, and we’ve approached it from the learning management side. The kind of combo here is really powerful.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, for sure. For those of you who don’t know and for a minute it took me to figure out, okay where’s the line between LMS and a membership site. They’re kind of … They do slightly different things. The LMS really just presents the content and engages the customer and tracks them and all that. Maybe you have a better way to say it but I see it as it’s the one doing the interfacing of the content and the membership is doing the interfacing of the purchasing and the credit card update and account maintenance and changes and things like that and the logging in and out. There’s always overlap, definitely a fan of all the LMS stuff as well.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s been interesting for me to take a step back out of the WordPress and Infusionsoft space and just take a more macro perspective of what’s going on with online eLearning and online course creation. Two really just interesting observations where Noah Kagan over at AppSumo built, I think it’s called The Monthly 1K Course now, but it was originally How To Make Your First $1,000 or something like that. He’s changed it around. I’m sure it was as a result of some A-B test. He built a completely custom LMS, and it’s really lightweight but he had a lot of these triggers to get people to come back based on when a quiz was completed and/or how a quiz was completed. What I mean by that was if you received an average score or a great score, not so great score. He actually had team members following up, actual humans from AppSumo follow up based on answers and how people were performing. I just was really inspired by that, because it was like wow, there’s a lot going on here. He cares that people are intaking the information and engaging in the community. I don’t know how well that community’s performed, but it was really inspiring to see the kind of the tech behind it. One of the things I thought was really interesting was when you would go to navigate away or log out of the course, it would ask you through a dialogue mogul when would you like to be reminded to come back? I thought that that was really cool. I’m sure that you could create something like that with Infusionsoft and these WordPress plugins, too. I thought that was really interesting assuming that you wanted to come back, so it was asking you when you’d like to be reminded.
Then another one was the guys over at the foundation and what they were doing. I think the beautiful thing is for people who are listening you can create some pretty incredible things, and you don’t need to go to hire a full development team that knows rails or something to program up a custom membership site or learning management system. You can do all of that with WordPress and a program like Memberium and Infusionsoft and create just a very dynamic experience for your members. It’s exciting to me, and Micah can you tell me a little bit about some of the ways your plugin engages Infusionsoft? I’ve looked on the features page and it looks like you can apply tags and that sort of thing. Can you run action sets? What are some of the triggers and features?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, it goes really pretty deep. In most places where you can apply a tag you can also run an action set or run a campaign builder goal directly. That helps, because tags are not a hundred percent on starting the campaign goals, and you’re just kind of skipping a step. A little more efficient to go to campaign builder goals but in most places you can do all of those things, and that’s saying whether they hit a page or click a button or click a link or whatever kind of the starting action. In some of our integrations it’s when they for example complete a quiz same thing you can run actions in. We try to hook that general feature set into as many things in WordPress as we can so that you get the members, whatever they’re doing is being tracked in Infusion or setting off automation in Infusion. Kind of the core of it is when they log in, we sync them from Infusion. When your member logs in we pull all their information out of Infusionsoft, and you can check what you want to pull so you don’t have to pull it all. You can get their affiliate info and their e-commerce and all that stuff. You can display it to them, you can let them pay bills and update credit cards and cancel accounts and do one click up-sell’s and pretty much anything. We call it Memberium because it’s all membership related, we’re not trying to do everything but anything a member would do once they’re in your site or anything the site would need to do to a public user to get them to be a member we’re all over that end of things.
Joshua Millage: That’s great. Wow, so you could create a membership portal that’s just a place that’s branded for people to update information that they have in your Infusionsoft app. It wouldn’t necessarily have to just have to do with contents?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. Some people do use it as kind of a mini customer hub, but most of them have a membership need first and a collections need second.
Joshua Millage: Got it, wow, that’s really cool. Yeah, I love that expandability. If people want to check out just the awesome shortcodes you have. I’m kind of a nerd so I get into the shortcode side of things. You have so many that can do so many different things for Infusionsoft users, it’s really cool. Micah, one of the questions that just popped into my head, because I know a significant portion of our listeners are people who are interested in building technology that integrates with Infusionsoft and/or they have some sort of app that they’ve built that runs on Infusionsoft. What kind of recommendations can you give them if they’re struggling with growth or getting their app out into the marketplace and getting it in front of as many potential customers as possible? I think you and Dave have done a great job of kind of penetrating the market of over the course of the last year and I’ve really just sensed a ground swell of great positive feedback. I’m curious if you could just lend any ideas on how people can do that?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, definitely a couple of things that we did when we started Memberium. One, we made sure we had good focus and some of this touches back on classic strategy or marketing, but we wanted to make sure our product was perceived the right way. As far as make it easier to use for sure, because when you talk about features it’s very easy for me to rattle off some features and for someone’s eyes to gloss over. Unless I reassure them that it’s really easy for you to do this, and it’s a total breeze to do that and that kind of thing. We made sure right from the beginning even though the technology was great, Dave was totally … His background impresses me. I feel dumb around Dave honestly, my developer that makes Memberium. We knew the software was going be good, but that’s not really what we talked about. We didn’t go out and say our software was good, we really focused on what they wanted which was to have their own membership site. It was about how you can easily build a membership sites with WordPress, not the most powerful plugin or a hundred features or any of that stuff. We made it more about the experience. Especially like high-tech, I think it was Stephen Covey talks about this how high-tech needs high-touch to go with it. We really tried to provide that, honestly yeah, the software is great but it’s been a lot of hard work on support. Just supporting every customer. We for the first long time gave out an hour consultation to new customers to help them get set up. We really backed up with supporting that. Even if you’re not tech savvy, it’s easy through support at least. The guy you’re talking about, Noah, with his course you can tell even though some of these things are easy to do with technology or easier than they once were, that’s where he’s putting his effort and for us it was on support. We really talk about our support in that kind of thing. It’s going be different for each person, that’s why I say it goes back to some of the marketing and strategy stuff, because our main competitors positioned very technically but has poor support, we completely went the other way. Used their weaknesses as our strength versus try to compete head-to-head. Those of you who are putting apps into a competitive market, I’d say you’ve got to be different. More different than you think you are, a lot, lot, lot more different. To where people see that you’re solving that problem in a different way. If you have an incompetent competitor, maybe you can beat them on what they do as well or how they portray themselves as, but for most of you aside from the building and how you build the software and whatever assuming you’ve got a good app. When you go out to market it’s really about, I think anyways, the problem you’re solving. I’ve been on both sides of this obviously, I make some software and I have in the past, and I’ve sold to Infusion users, but also being an Infusion user I really get the frustrations. I feel them all the time. Even when I’m looking for apps, I won’t name it. Hurt anybody’s feelings. It was highly recommended and I got it, and it’s one of these super popular apps. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I can program, use Infusionsoft, make sites, everything. I couldn’t figure out how to do this thing. Couldn’t find tutorials or support very well. It’s nothing against them, I’m not trying to say anything bad, but it was just knowing that’s the frustration that my users are feelings and that maybe you’re making an app your users are feeling. Seeing it from their perspective is really pretty powerful versus your own, and it will really change what you say. We really try to just say this is for you to make a membership site; this is for you to get more members, for you to get your first member, for you to keep your members. That’s what they want; they don’t care about our features. You know what I mean?
Joshua Millage: Right, absolutely.
Micah Mitchell: Some of that, I hope that kind of answers it or was what you were looking for.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think that building technology’s one thing and getting in front of the right customers and having those customers purchase it is a completely different thing, and I think that you and your team have done a great job of that. Micah, I am just so excited that you were able to come on the show with me and talk a little bit about what you’ve created. If someone has any questions about Memberium or just has any questions for you, what’s the best way for them to contact you?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, you go to our site which is Memberium, Memberium.com and just go to the support tab it’s on the right of every page. It’s like a widget thing and you can ask in there and those will end up with me.
Joshua Millage: Awesome, well thank you so much for doing this interview. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, and thanks Everyone for listening. I appreciate it.
Recording: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
[/transcript]
The post Micah Mitchell: Memberium and the Element of Caring appeared first on Infusioncast.
80 episodes
Infusioncast with Joshua R. Millage - The #1 Infusionsoft Podcast
When?
This feed was archived on October 02, 2018 01:43 (
Why? Inactive feed status. Our servers were unable to retrieve a valid podcast feed for a sustained period.
What now? You might be able to find a more up-to-date version using the search function. This series will no longer be checked for updates. If you believe this to be in error, please check if the publisher's feed link below is valid and contact support to request the feed be restored or if you have any other concerns about this.
Micah Mitchell is a partner in Memberium, a membership development and management plugin for WordPress. In today’s Infusioncast Joshua Millage is talking with Micah about the role of membership, integrating Memberium with Infusionsoft, and the importance of caring about customers after the initial sale.
What exactly is membership? While your other management systems handle content development, delivery and tracking progress, sales and marketing, and income, a membership site provides for a customer’s profile, a purchasing account, security and privacy, and social aspects of membership. Most of these services should be automated, and with membership platforms like Memberium that are intuitive to use and integrate easily with Infusionsoft, there’s no reason not to automate.
Micah recognized the need for better membership software while he was a CRM consultant. The primary membership platforms available at the time were difficult to use, had performance issues, and lacked support. So Micah’s partner created Memberium to address those problems, and Micah came on board shortly after.
Memberium is an automated membership platform plugin for WordPress. It allows customers to log into your business website, create an account and password, and access your shopping cart and services, all automatically with minimal manual intervention from you. An automated platform also monitors what a customer can and cannot access according to their membership level. Offering access in increments engages customers and encourages retention as well.
The importance of personalized involvement with customers beyond the initial sale is severely underrated. Too many businesses feel they are done providing service or incentives once the sale is made. Micah believes this is a mistake. Offering fresh content for continuing engagement maintains a flow of income rather than single, isolated sales. The element of actively caring about your customers’ experience with your brand forms a connection with your customers that keeps them coming back to you and puts you ahead of your less-personalized competition.
Make sure customers are receiving only as much information at a time as they can retain. They will not benefit from having everything given to them all at once, and they won’t have a reason to pay you an ongoing subscription or membership fee. This is especially important for eLearning where the benefit you offer is proof through testing and certification that students are gaining the skills they require. They must complete one level before progressing to the next, and passing a quiz will determine their eligibility to progress. Incentivizing with something as simple as a badge they can post to their profile increases engagement and motivation to continue with your programs.
Your focus, accountability, support, involvement with customers, and belief in your product makes the difference between simply making sales in the short term versus creating real wealth and longevity. Automating your basic services, including membership, actually gives you more of an opportunity to build that rapport and provide a good experience to your users, especially if you are a small or solitary business owner.
Using a learning management system platform such as LifterLMS that integrates with Memberium and Infusionsoft forms a complete automated system that provides value for your customers and income for you. It also eliminates the need for you to hire people to build your online business for you, as these tools are robust yet intuitive to learn and use. With this integrated software you can create your site, provide multimedia content, handle sales, payment and marketing, and provide membership benefits.
Thank you for joining us.
You can ask Micah questions by submitting them on Memberium’s Support page.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua Millage: Hello Everyone, welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I had the opportunity of interviewing Micah Mitchell of Memberium. For those of you who have done any sort of research into the best membership platforms that integrate with Infusionsoft, you’ve probably heard of Memberium. I think it’s a great piece of software for anyone who’s looking to build an automated membership site or wants a membership site that is deeply integrated with Infusionsoft. Micah and I talk a lot about membership sites from a tactical level as well as more of a philosophical level. We also discussed some of the things that app developers should think about when they’re launching apps. Had an incredible time talking to Micah. I really enjoyed having him on the show and I think you’re going love this interview. Without further ado let’s get into it.
Recording: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast: the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua Millage: Hello Everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast. The only podcast that teaches you how to be in Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Micah Mitchell. Micah is a partner in Memberium, an Infusionsoft membership plugin that allows you to build powerful, automated membership sites. Micah, welcome to the show.
Micah Mitchell: Thanks for having me Josh, appreciate it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I’m excited, Man. We had a brief chat at InfusionCon and really enjoyed meeting you and your team. I think you have an amazing piece of software here that can help so many of our audience listeners create really powerful membership sites. I often times get this question, what membership plugin do you recommend Joshua? Over the course of networking with some Automation Clinic people, they’ve all pointed me to you which is really, really cool, because they’re brilliant people over there. I’m curious before Memberium let’s starts at your origin point. How did you find this Infusionsoft community? Where did you start with it?
Micah Mitchell: I actually … It was about 10 years ago I was doing a little bit of CRM consulting.
Joshua Millage: Cool.
Micah Mitchell: I was talking to a prospect, and I had this other CRM, which is kind of a big enterprise custom thing, and I was talking to him. He said yeah, I’ll have a look at if you have a look at this other thing with me, which happened to be Infusionsoft. I took a demo of Infusionsoft, and I was just like, yeah no that’s … Yeah, you want to buy that. A little while later I bought that as well for my business and ever since then I’ve really just been using it. Then I’ve also been a consultant since before the first ICP class. They used to be called ICC and then a bunch of things in between here and there. I’ve used it almost ten years. I’ve been consulting with it forever. I’ve implemented for the first two ultimate marketers and was partners with the third, and then I took a few years off just hanging out with my buddy, and now I’m getting back into it with Memberium. I had a lot in the Infusionsoft space and took a little break and then about a year ago started at Memberium and have really been pushing on that.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. You’ve seen this community grow and mature over pretty much from the beginning, huh?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, the first InfusionCon I went to, I remember it was less than a hundred people. Michael Gerber was there, and everybody got to gather around and talk to him. It was really informal. It was cool.
Joshua Millage: Wow, that’s pretty incredible. Yeah, that’s exciting. I didn’t realize I had an original gangster of the Infusionsoft community here so this is even more exciting for me. Tell me about Memberium. You got together with your partner, Dave right? Did you just decided to create this? Where did the idea kind of stem from?
Micah Mitchell: You know, it’s kind of a fun story. I won’t get into too many of the details, but basically years ago I sponsored InfusionCon in 2009. There’s a guy who came through there, Mark Summers actually, and I talked to him and he was a newbie user and told them I had a WordPress plugin for Infusionsoft. He went back and ended up hiring by Bob Keane who made iMember360. Then later I actually partnered with Bob. When I partnered with iMember, they only had like thirty-seven or eight subscriptions, not too many. A year and a half later we had hundreds. Then Bob and I parted ways. Memberium was really started, because people disliked iMember. There’s a few people who were having major issues with it. Whether it’s licensing or performance and that kind of thing or support. Everyone was just kind of begging for it. That’s why Dave started it and then it came full circle. About a year, a year and a half ago Dave and I first started talking and I decided we can make the thing work and put it out to market. He was going do it just as a pro bono, open-source free thing just because it was that needed and we decided to make a business out of it.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. Yeah, you know that’s really interesting because I didn’t really know that origin story. I’ve always kind of thought of it as the better iMember and that’s no disrespect to the people over there. Just in my experience using both platforms I really enjoy … I would just say the word that comes to mind cleanliness of how you things have things organized it’s much more logical, especially if people are familiar with WordPress. I really feel they’re going to enjoy using Memberium. Take me through … There’s just so many things you can do with Memberium. Maybe let’s just start with a use case of someone who wants to do an automated membership site. I’d like for you, if you don’t mind defining what an automated membership site means. Because I don’t think a lot of people understand the cool things that you can do with automation when it comes to a membership site.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, good question. What some people deal with believe it or not is they have something that’s not automated. I’ll describe that first. That’s where let’s say somebody buys from you and you get a receipt in your email. You think I better go create their membership level. You log into your system and you created a new account, and you send them permission, set a password or whatever. That has some sort of manual intervention. That’s a simple example, but there’s people doing that all the time where they have their shopping cart not fully integrated into a membership site. In the most basic sense, it’s where you can have someone either opt in for free or pay and have that automatically give them access to a private membership site. For those of you not terribly familiar with membership sites, think Netflix is a great example of we’re just selling access to content, and if you don’t have access you don’t, but once you buy it unlocks and you go in and you have fun. There’s different variables of that, but the automation really it can go a lot, a lot, lot further than that really as far as they can interact directly with Infusionsoft on every page. They check a box, they hit a button. That can set off actions in Infusion, and those actions in Infusion can push data back to the membership site to change the experience. It can get pretty complicated, but in essence it’s saying the whole membership experience is hands-free for the admins.
Joshua Millage: That’s really cool. I’ve seen people use it to kind of almost unlock content as a member matures in their membership, which I think is interesting. For example, you only have access to X amount of content on month one, but Y amount of content on month two. It’s kind of incentivizing people to say around. Talk a little bit about that because I think that that really helps with people sticking in with memberships, a lot of people I find just kind of join and then after a portion of time will jump out.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, and there’s … You’re absolutely right a lot of people will call that dripping content where they just give some of it at a time versus all of it, spoon feeding and that kind of thing. There’s a couple of ways to do it. It definitely increases engagement, more and more now that’s what membership site owners are being held accountable to. It’s not just, I created this content, you bought it we’re done. The user needs to feel, one that it was engaging enough to do it and that it was in the right format. I think they’re just getting pickier as everything gets better online they’re getting a little bit pickier. Which is totally fine and cool. You have the option to drip it. Let’s say someone’s going pay you $100 a month or whatever for a membership site. You can definitely say month one only give them this month, month two give them this month, month three give them more.
There’s a couple reasons to do it, one so they don’t go in the first month and buy everything some business owners are … I’m sorry not buy but watch everything, download everything just blow through in thirty-days. Some people are concerned about that. Really it’s more about allowing the client to go through it at the right pace because typically if they do blow through it in thirty-days, they’re not going to be able retain it, they’re not going to be able to do some of the exercises and some of the things that they probably should be doing with that information in that time anyways. Overall you’re trying to get the client the value. Dripping it is a pretty good way.
What I see more and more that’s really cool is they do … People will call it a learning management system or eLearning, where if you finish module one you click a button, marked complete let’s say and it goes to module two. Instead of we release every thirty-days, we release when you’re done. When you’re done with one, we go to two. You can actually combine them and say go at your own pace, you can unlock them as you go but we’ll only let you get so far in thirty-days.
The real kicker I think that is probably the best way to do it is quizzing. Some people will try to measure, let’s let them into module two once they watch 90% of module one. They’ll try to gauge how much the person is watching or how much they’re consuming by tracking the video views of the page views. What I’ve found more and more now getting into eLearning, the quizzing is really the only way to do it. Somebody can turn on a video and walk away and not get it or be checking their email and not get it. What are you really trying to do is you’re trying to get them to consume it and get value from it ultimately if you want them to spend more with you and to refer to you, you really need them to do that. It’s a combination of dripping it over time, letting them push it through by hitting mark complete as they go. Again, I think quizzes I think are the best way. You can do that with things like LearnDash. That way they finish the module, and they have to pass that quiz to get through it. Then you know okay they at least got it to a level. A basic quiz, you don’t want to overdo it. At least let them know that we’re trying to keep you engaged, we care about your experience and that sort of thing usually helps.
Joshua Millage: Right, exactly. The listeners know that our background here at codeBOX is in building high-end learning management systems and we have a WordPress plugin ourselves called LifterLMS which helps with that. I’m all about what you’re talking about, and I think you’re completely right. Actually let me ask you. This could kind of ruffle some feathers. I think that there’s a change happening in the internet marketing world where there’s kind of individuals who care about the sale, which is important don’t get me wrong, but that’s kind of all they care about. The sale happens and then they’re really worried about retrition and refund rates and all that. They’re not actually tracking or giving a lot of thought to, Is the customer or the student who just enrolled in my course actually learning? I think that’s where the blend of this learning management system can really help with that. It’s making sure that the person who bought is also accountable to intaking the information. You can only do that so far if someone really doesn’t want to learn or take time to go through the information there’s not much you can do. I really see the people that are excelling in the info marketing space who are building courses are doing a really good job of setting up these different triggers to get people to engage. I think what you’ve built here, allowing tags and things to be applied when certain things happen really can help pull people back in with the power of Infusionsoft and WordPress and your plugin. What do you think? Do you think that’s a trend? Are you seeing that happen? Do you think it’s good?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, I think it’s definitely a trend, and you kind of hit it on the head in a way I hadn’t heard before. Where there’s kind of a division of those that are selling to sell and those who are selling because they believe in their product and they follow it up with a good experience in that. The ones who sell to sell, they’ll probably always be around honestly it’s not like they’re going to go out of business. There’s always enough people I guess for them to sell to enough first-time buyers let’s say, right? The people who are trying to build a business and long-term wealth in that are definitely going over there. We did a webinar recently and titled it basically, “What’s Replacing Old-Fashioned Membership Site?” It was eLearning like your LifterLMS … I’m sorry, I didn’t even realize that was you. Dave I believe had lunch with your partner the other day and …
Joshua Millage: Yeah.
Micah Mitchell: No, that’s awesome. I didn’t realize it was you. So you’re all about it.
Joshua Millage: We want to make sure that we’re compatible together as best as possible and can be able to support each other. Yeah, anyway total digression but I’m definitely a fan of what you’re doing on the membership side, and we’ve approached it from the learning management side. The kind of combo here is really powerful.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, for sure. For those of you who don’t know and for a minute it took me to figure out, okay where’s the line between LMS and a membership site. They’re kind of … They do slightly different things. The LMS really just presents the content and engages the customer and tracks them and all that. Maybe you have a better way to say it but I see it as it’s the one doing the interfacing of the content and the membership is doing the interfacing of the purchasing and the credit card update and account maintenance and changes and things like that and the logging in and out. There’s always overlap, definitely a fan of all the LMS stuff as well.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s been interesting for me to take a step back out of the WordPress and Infusionsoft space and just take a more macro perspective of what’s going on with online eLearning and online course creation. Two really just interesting observations where Noah Kagan over at AppSumo built, I think it’s called The Monthly 1K Course now, but it was originally How To Make Your First $1,000 or something like that. He’s changed it around. I’m sure it was as a result of some A-B test. He built a completely custom LMS, and it’s really lightweight but he had a lot of these triggers to get people to come back based on when a quiz was completed and/or how a quiz was completed. What I mean by that was if you received an average score or a great score, not so great score. He actually had team members following up, actual humans from AppSumo follow up based on answers and how people were performing. I just was really inspired by that, because it was like wow, there’s a lot going on here. He cares that people are intaking the information and engaging in the community. I don’t know how well that community’s performed, but it was really inspiring to see the kind of the tech behind it. One of the things I thought was really interesting was when you would go to navigate away or log out of the course, it would ask you through a dialogue mogul when would you like to be reminded to come back? I thought that that was really cool. I’m sure that you could create something like that with Infusionsoft and these WordPress plugins, too. I thought that was really interesting assuming that you wanted to come back, so it was asking you when you’d like to be reminded.
Then another one was the guys over at the foundation and what they were doing. I think the beautiful thing is for people who are listening you can create some pretty incredible things, and you don’t need to go to hire a full development team that knows rails or something to program up a custom membership site or learning management system. You can do all of that with WordPress and a program like Memberium and Infusionsoft and create just a very dynamic experience for your members. It’s exciting to me, and Micah can you tell me a little bit about some of the ways your plugin engages Infusionsoft? I’ve looked on the features page and it looks like you can apply tags and that sort of thing. Can you run action sets? What are some of the triggers and features?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, it goes really pretty deep. In most places where you can apply a tag you can also run an action set or run a campaign builder goal directly. That helps, because tags are not a hundred percent on starting the campaign goals, and you’re just kind of skipping a step. A little more efficient to go to campaign builder goals but in most places you can do all of those things, and that’s saying whether they hit a page or click a button or click a link or whatever kind of the starting action. In some of our integrations it’s when they for example complete a quiz same thing you can run actions in. We try to hook that general feature set into as many things in WordPress as we can so that you get the members, whatever they’re doing is being tracked in Infusion or setting off automation in Infusion. Kind of the core of it is when they log in, we sync them from Infusion. When your member logs in we pull all their information out of Infusionsoft, and you can check what you want to pull so you don’t have to pull it all. You can get their affiliate info and their e-commerce and all that stuff. You can display it to them, you can let them pay bills and update credit cards and cancel accounts and do one click up-sell’s and pretty much anything. We call it Memberium because it’s all membership related, we’re not trying to do everything but anything a member would do once they’re in your site or anything the site would need to do to a public user to get them to be a member we’re all over that end of things.
Joshua Millage: That’s great. Wow, so you could create a membership portal that’s just a place that’s branded for people to update information that they have in your Infusionsoft app. It wouldn’t necessarily have to just have to do with contents?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. Some people do use it as kind of a mini customer hub, but most of them have a membership need first and a collections need second.
Joshua Millage: Got it, wow, that’s really cool. Yeah, I love that expandability. If people want to check out just the awesome shortcodes you have. I’m kind of a nerd so I get into the shortcode side of things. You have so many that can do so many different things for Infusionsoft users, it’s really cool. Micah, one of the questions that just popped into my head, because I know a significant portion of our listeners are people who are interested in building technology that integrates with Infusionsoft and/or they have some sort of app that they’ve built that runs on Infusionsoft. What kind of recommendations can you give them if they’re struggling with growth or getting their app out into the marketplace and getting it in front of as many potential customers as possible? I think you and Dave have done a great job of kind of penetrating the market of over the course of the last year and I’ve really just sensed a ground swell of great positive feedback. I’m curious if you could just lend any ideas on how people can do that?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, definitely a couple of things that we did when we started Memberium. One, we made sure we had good focus and some of this touches back on classic strategy or marketing, but we wanted to make sure our product was perceived the right way. As far as make it easier to use for sure, because when you talk about features it’s very easy for me to rattle off some features and for someone’s eyes to gloss over. Unless I reassure them that it’s really easy for you to do this, and it’s a total breeze to do that and that kind of thing. We made sure right from the beginning even though the technology was great, Dave was totally … His background impresses me. I feel dumb around Dave honestly, my developer that makes Memberium. We knew the software was going be good, but that’s not really what we talked about. We didn’t go out and say our software was good, we really focused on what they wanted which was to have their own membership site. It was about how you can easily build a membership sites with WordPress, not the most powerful plugin or a hundred features or any of that stuff. We made it more about the experience. Especially like high-tech, I think it was Stephen Covey talks about this how high-tech needs high-touch to go with it. We really tried to provide that, honestly yeah, the software is great but it’s been a lot of hard work on support. Just supporting every customer. We for the first long time gave out an hour consultation to new customers to help them get set up. We really backed up with supporting that. Even if you’re not tech savvy, it’s easy through support at least. The guy you’re talking about, Noah, with his course you can tell even though some of these things are easy to do with technology or easier than they once were, that’s where he’s putting his effort and for us it was on support. We really talk about our support in that kind of thing. It’s going be different for each person, that’s why I say it goes back to some of the marketing and strategy stuff, because our main competitors positioned very technically but has poor support, we completely went the other way. Used their weaknesses as our strength versus try to compete head-to-head. Those of you who are putting apps into a competitive market, I’d say you’ve got to be different. More different than you think you are, a lot, lot, lot more different. To where people see that you’re solving that problem in a different way. If you have an incompetent competitor, maybe you can beat them on what they do as well or how they portray themselves as, but for most of you aside from the building and how you build the software and whatever assuming you’ve got a good app. When you go out to market it’s really about, I think anyways, the problem you’re solving. I’ve been on both sides of this obviously, I make some software and I have in the past, and I’ve sold to Infusion users, but also being an Infusion user I really get the frustrations. I feel them all the time. Even when I’m looking for apps, I won’t name it. Hurt anybody’s feelings. It was highly recommended and I got it, and it’s one of these super popular apps. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I can program, use Infusionsoft, make sites, everything. I couldn’t figure out how to do this thing. Couldn’t find tutorials or support very well. It’s nothing against them, I’m not trying to say anything bad, but it was just knowing that’s the frustration that my users are feelings and that maybe you’re making an app your users are feeling. Seeing it from their perspective is really pretty powerful versus your own, and it will really change what you say. We really try to just say this is for you to make a membership site; this is for you to get more members, for you to get your first member, for you to keep your members. That’s what they want; they don’t care about our features. You know what I mean?
Joshua Millage: Right, absolutely.
Micah Mitchell: Some of that, I hope that kind of answers it or was what you were looking for.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think that building technology’s one thing and getting in front of the right customers and having those customers purchase it is a completely different thing, and I think that you and your team have done a great job of that. Micah, I am just so excited that you were able to come on the show with me and talk a little bit about what you’ve created. If someone has any questions about Memberium or just has any questions for you, what’s the best way for them to contact you?
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, you go to our site which is Memberium, Memberium.com and just go to the support tab it’s on the right of every page. It’s like a widget thing and you can ask in there and those will end up with me.
Joshua Millage: Awesome, well thank you so much for doing this interview. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Micah Mitchell: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, and thanks Everyone for listening. I appreciate it.
Recording: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
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