As you’ve noticed over the past two weeks, MemberVault is a powerhouse vehicle for relationship marketing, engagement and content delivery.
Episode 43 was with MemberVault co-founder Mike Kelly, we then followed this with power users and MemberVault fans Jaclyn Mellone in Episode 44, Jenni Waldrop In Episode 45 and Jereshia Hawk in Episode 46. Today to wrap up the series, I’ve split the episode into three segments:
- What to consider when looking to add MemberVault to your tech stack
- The Golden Hamster and other built in goodies
- Use cases outside of how Jaclyn, Jenni and Jereshia are currently using MemberVault .
Then we’ll wrap up. Remember, I am an affiliate for MemberVault and would appreciate you using this link https://techofbusiness.com/mv/ to sign up for your MemberVault account. It doesn’t cost you anything extra to use the affiliate link, but it does show me that you’re appreciating this podcast!
Let’s get into segment 1… what to consider when looking at MemberVault for your tech stack
I think there are three types of businesses that can benefit from getting started with MemberVault .
The first, is a business has created two or more lead magnets, freebies, challenges or other gift in exchange for email address type products. For you, MemberVault creates an easy way to deliver and keep your freebies organized rather than having them spread across your WordPress media library, free or paid cloud storage locations or within an email marketing provider repository.
As discussed with Mike, this will make it easy for your list of prospective clients to access the gifts without hunting through their inbox and on their own schedule. You’ll also be able to re-engage and invigorate your list with every new freebie you create as your business evolves and you refine your message.
This is exactly how I started the Tech of Business vault – by placing all the freebies that I have created in the pass couple of years into the Subscriber Hub. I would love for you to check those freebies out at https://techofbusiness.com/vault/.
The second type of business that can benefit from getting started with MemberVault is a business providing one-on-one services or small group programs where there are materials to distribute. Just like the freebie content, your paid program content needs a reliable home for your clients to easily access from anywhere. I think this is a particularly good option because your clients don’t have to necessarily go through the content sequentially but do need reliable access. It’s super convenient for them to log into a single portal and the added benefit is that you can “check in on their status” with the insane amount of logging and data provided.
I offer two one-on-one services that I run through my MemberVault … a Tech Audit and my Tech Tamer Intensive. For each of these services, I use MemberVault’squizzes to understand my clients’ desired outcome from our work together and the modules to provide them with downloadable instructions, walk through videos, checklists and guides.
And the third business that would benefit from looking at MemberVault is one where you have a course, workshop, membership site or other high volume of content that you want to deliver to a lot of people and build a relationship with those people.
This is what Jereshia, Jenni and Jaclyn all do. They all provide high touch with their self-directed courses and programs which leads to higher completion rates, greater success and more referrals.
No matter where you are at in business, I could likely find a case for you to use MemberVault … but that’s not the point of this episode nor the entire mini-series.
If you have systems that are working in the area of content delivery and client engagement, then don’t look at MemberVault right now. If you’re in need of a tool to help with proposals or bookkeeping, onboarding, customer service or webinars – then this isn’t the platform to look at right now.
It’s totally fun to play with new tools, I get it – but I want to encourage you to stay in your zone of genius and focus on your highest value activities.
If you do decide to grab a MemberVault account from https://techofbusiness.com/mv/ then I also strongly recommend following the amazing resources and guidance provided by the MemberVault team in the Home Base and join the MemberVault Collective where you’ll have access to Mike and Erin.
Now, speaking of Mike and Erin – let’s get into the second segment of this deep dive into MemberVault . The Golden Hamster and other goodies.
The Golden Hamster is essentially an incentive for getting your MemberVault account up and functioning in your business within the first 10 days of signing up for your account. You can do the work for the Golden Hamster on the free account – but beyond bragging rights the biggest bonus to the award is the boost that it gives the Base paid tier.
This boost increases the number of subscribers you can have in your account from 1000 to 2500. That’s huge for anyone who is working to grow their an engaged list and create true relationships.
The Golden Hamster course is a beautiful demonstration of MemberVault itself. It takes you through the process of setting up your MemberVault with one or more paid offers, the freebie library which is generally referred to as the Subscriber Hub and adding users into the system. That third module shows just how easy it is to integrate with an email marketing provider.
MemberVault , as you know from the other episodes in this series, is huge into ActiveCampaign as their primary email marketing platform – and quite possibly one of the reasons I took a second look at MemberVault when I was looking at doing a series like this in the first place. I’ve been using ActiveCampaign myself and with many of my clients for over 2 years now. And I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of getting the two systems working together.
Maybe that’s the geek in me, maybe not. But regardless, if you don’t want to get all the bells and whistles working together when you start out with MemberVault, that’s okay – and if you want to outsource it, I’m happy to chat… in fact, the best way to chat with me is to go to my MemberVault at https://techofbusiness.com/vault/ and book a tech breakthrough session.
But I digress… this segment of the episode is on my experience with MemberVault as a creator on the platform as well as a user inside the MemberVault home base. So, let’s get back to it. The data, oh the data – so much information.
For each subscriber, you have the ability to see what they’ve clicked on, which modules they’ve completed and the answers to their questions.
And as of yesterday, you can also directly reply to the quiz questions via email. (Yes, I seriously waited until the last minute to record this episode because Mike is constantly working on the product and I didn’t want anything to be outdated!)
There is a section on the main admin dashboard that shows your sales, hot leads and warm leads and with the integration with ActiveCampaign , it also shows what tag has been assigned to the user in your ActiveCampaign .
So essentially, if someone has the tag membervault_teaser_10 I know that they have looked at the Tech Audit product. I could then run an automation that triggers on that tag being added to a user… it might simply be to send me an email letting me know to look into their account and connect with them outside of automation… or it could be to send them through a warming automation that shows the successes of people who have gone through the Tech Audit and let them know how other clients have been able to move their business forward after a cleanup. It’s not about a hard sale, it’s about knowing where your next sale might come from.
Another area I spent a lot of time working in when I was setting up the Tech of Business vault was of course the product section itself.
I would recommend starting outside MemberVault and getting all your content organized before heading in to get everything loaded up.
There are five different types of products that we can house inside MemberVault and I have tried out three of them: Regular, Date Dripped and Bonus. The other two are Progressive and Timed Dripped.
The Regular product is almost always what you’ll want to use. I can see some use cases for Progressive which requires each module and lesson to be completed before the next is unlocked. This is a super helpful product type for courses that build upon themselves. And I’m seriously giddy about the Bonus modules – these ones are unlocked when a user hits a certain number of EPs.
My reason for frowning a tad on the Date Dripped and Timed Dripped product types is not because they aren’t effective but because they have the potential to halt the progress of the enrolled student.
This is also something that differentiates the MemberVault relationship-based method from most other online delivery channels I’ve worked in… so I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re determined to do a drip content based program, you’ll be missing out on some of the biggest benefits of the MemberVault methodology and there are likely other platforms that will suit your needs better.
I’ve said it on this series and in a lot of other places – I am tool agnostic. It doesn’t matter to me if you use MemberVault or ActiveCampaign or any of the other tools that me or my guests mention. What does matter is that you use the best right tool for your business and your clients and that you use it to the best of its ability.
Let’s get back to setting up a product and the next decision I had to make – how to grant access to my products.
So, for free products, like the Subscriber Hub, it’s just an email opt-in form that gets configured within MemberVault – no need for a separate landing page program or complicated set of steps to get someone from another system through your email provider into MemberVault .
And for paid products, MemberVault connects with PayPal and Stripe (I use Stripe exclusively) to make it super easy to get paid right in the platform. This is what I use for the Tech Tamer Intensive, Tech Audit, and Virtual Summit Workbook – it’s so cool, the payments show up on my dashboard too.
Office Hours is a free offer that I have setup through Acuity so instead of using the built in form or the payment portal, I use the Link option that allows office hours attendees to signup and also get the necessary reminders. There really isn’t anything inside MemberVault that is needed for this, so I’m just taking advantage of the Binge and Buy marketplace to make it visible to my subscribers.
And similarly, the Tech Breakthrough sessions that I offer do not have anything that needs to be provided to my clients inside MemberVault so right now, I have that setup as a Link that goes to Acuity as well. Acuity is also linked with my Stripe account and I can see myself moving the breakthrough sessions into MemberVault in the coming months. I think there are some distinct advantages to doing so… which I’ll be sure to announce in an email when the change is made.
The rest of the product setup is so well documented by Erin in the MemberVault Home Base that it’s not a good use of your time or mine for me to go through more of it here. Let’s wrap this segment up with this: There is a lot that can be added to a product but without adding your product there is nothing that you can add – getting started is the best next step.
The final segment of this episode is a few use cases I’ve seen or come up with recently that are outside of what Jenni, Jaclyn and Jereshia.
The first of which is one of my favorite topics – virtual summits. It’s come up in the MemberVault Collective a few times that people are interested in running their virtual summit inside MemberVault .
This is a really interesting scenario because between MemberVault and ActiveCampaign content can release and expire automatically and seamlessly because there are actually no links other than to the MemberVault user dashboard. In all other Virtual Summit cases that I’ve worked on, either we do things manually at session launch or expiration or we have to build extra pages to avoid broken links.
Using MemberVault for a virtual summit would be fantastic – especially if you’re looking for an all in one solution that transitions people into a paid offer that you also host on the platform.
Another use case is to simply broker the financial side of your coaching business. Sure… there are a lot of shopping cart systems out there but the unique advantage to MemberVault for just doing the shopping cart is that it’s easy for a subscriber to access their billing history and update their credit card if needed. In this case, you will likely not have a Binge and Buy Marketplace but rather than all your products go through a WordPress website or landing page tools.
Or we can flip that around to something quite similar to what Jenni does where the only content on your MemberVault is the Subscriber Hub and all the other products are just shells that lead to landing pages and shopping carts housed off the platform. This to me is the best first step if you could not imagine doing what Jereshia did and grab your calendar and move everything around to fully implement and integrate MemberVault in a matter of days.
Mike said it in our first episode, MemberVault acts as an extension of your email list. And with all the tagging that MemberVault does inside ActiveCampaign , there are millions of ways to wow your audience, increase engagement and build honest relationships with your subscribers.
I truly hope you have gotten a lot out of this MemberVault series. It’s been a blast digging deep into the platform with and for you.
When I decided to do this series, I had only had a couple of Facebook Messenger chats with Mike, on non-MemberVault topics and hadn’t even signed up for a free tier account yet. I could have done this first series on a more “established” platform but instead I went with my gut and brought something new and groundbreaking to the podcast space.
Now – I have stacks of ideas as to what to bring to the podcast in the coming weeks and months, but I want to hear from you…
Do you want more series on newer, up and coming software or do you want to have me dig into some of the bigger players?
Do you know someone doing really cool things online, rocking a certain platform or would be a great fit for a tech breakthrough episode on the podcast?
What is keeping you up at night? Have you found your soul mate software and want to jam on about it?
I really want to hear from you – go to https://callwithjaime.com and book a 10-minute call with me. On that call, you’ll have the chance to let me know what tech you want discussed on the podcast, what’s working really well for you and what you’d like to hear more of. I’d love to know how you best translate what you hear into action in your business and whatever else you want to share.
Before I sign off, I want to remind you that the Tech of Business affiliate link for MemberVault is https://techofbusiness.com/mv/ and you can check out the Tech of Business Subscriber Hub at https://techofbusiness.com/vault/