Have you ever thought about adding group memberships to your membership program or online course?
In this post, we’ll give you some examples of how you can include group memberships (AKA what we refer to as “Umbrella Accounts”) in your existing membership site or course.
If you’ve heard about group memberships, but haven’t been sure about how it could be used with your existing business model, this post should leave you with a few good ideas about how you could potentially add them to your site.
We’ll also show you five examples of businesses that include group memberships in their products, along with some key takeaways that we can learn from each.
Group accounts can be useful for almost any course or membership site.
Giving your customers the ability to create their own “teams” or invite a completely new person to your membership site or course has a lot of benefits.
What’s covered in this article:
- What are group memberships?
- Benefits of Adding Group Memberships to Your WordPress Site
- A Quick Overview of Ways That You Can Include Group Accounts With Your Membership Site Or Course
- 5 Real-Life Examples of Group Memberships In Membership Programs and Online Courses
- How Memberium’s Umbrella Accounts Feature Makes Group Accounts Easy For Any Membership Site or Course
What are group memberships?
In simple terms, group memberships work like this…
When a new customer joins, they can add a certain number of people to get access to the same membership program or course. How many people they can add through their membership is completely up to you. You can allow them to add up to one person, 5, 10, or even more than 5,000.
Your pricing and how you decide you want group memberships to work on your site is completely up to you. Some people offer tiered membership plans that allow you to add a certain number of users based on the plan purchased. Others only allow their members to add one user. We’ll show you examples of both throughout this post.
With a group membership, your customer sets up the account and has control over it. This main member (the “parent” user) can add or remove members under them at their own will.
Each time a new member gets added by the parent member, that person gets sent their own unique login to the membership program.
There’s a lot of other advanced automation you can set up with Memberium and Infusionsoft that we won’t cover here. To learn more about how group memberships work with Memberium click here…
Here’s a few of the other benefits you can get from group memberships that most people don’t realize…
Benefits of Adding Group Memberships to Your WordPress Site
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Increase Retention
Group memberships encourage people to keep paying for the account even if they’re no longer using it or have finished your full program.
Other members added to the same account may still be going through the program, or they might be planning on adding additional members in the future. This helps make people stick around longer.
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Marketing advantages – More Word of Mouth Referrals From Trusted Sources
When you enable group memberships, your members become your advertisers for you. Often times, the best leads any business can get are word of mouth referrals from trusted sources.
Using group memberships allows you to leverage that by turning your members into advocates for you. They’ll bring you more people that you can turn into customers in the future.
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Cut Down on Account Sharing & Build Your List
Sometimes business owners worry about customers sharing their membership access with others. If you have a great program, it’s going to happen.
Adding group accounts allows you to take advantage of that. Another benefit with Memberium’s Umbrella Accounts, you can capture the other person’s email and market to them after.
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Add More Value With The Same Info Product
A cool part about group memberships is it requires no changes to your existing content. Simply adding group memberships allows you to charge a higher amount for that ability, all with the same product.
All that’s needed are a few minor tweaks to set up group accounts on your site and a few minor automation pieces to be added to your Infsusionsoft app.
A Quick Overview of Ways That You Can Include Group Accounts With Your Membership Site Or Course
Have you ever thought about how you could include group memberships in your existing membership program or course?
To get some ideas flowing, here’s a few general ways you could include group memberships into your existing offer…
Option 1: Add the Ability To Invite A Certain Number Of Users To The Highest Tier Membership That You Offer Or Add An Additional Tier With This Option
A simple use of group memberships is to offer a higher priced membership tier with the ability to add a certain number of users. You can sell the same info product, at a higher rate just by including the ability to add additional users.
The number of members you allow people to add is completely up to you. It also helps to add something else in addition to this like Office hours access or some other bonuses to help stack your offer as Learn Do Become has with their productivity course in the above image.
Option 2: Tiered Memberships That Allow Members To Add A Certain Number Of Users Based On Their Membership
Similar to the first option, you can offer multiple tiers of memberships. Based on the number of users someone can add to each plan.
Three or four is usually the max number of tiers you can have before your offer gets too confusing. It’s always best to keep it simple with a smaller number of options to buy.
How many members are allowed for each tier depends on the content you’re selling. Does your training appeal to individuals or companies?
Programs aimed at helping individuals will probably want to offer group memberships for a small number of people. The ability to add 1-3 people, such as your spouse, friend or other family member.
On the other hand, if your course offers skills that may be appealing to certain companies, associations or business owners who want to train their employees, then larger group membership options could be a great idea for you to try.
There’s a lot of flexibility with how you could set this up. Memberium gives you the flexibility to play around with your numbers until you find what works best for your business. It allows you to offer group memberships for up to 5,000+ sub members under one account!
Option 3: Add a Small Number of Group Memberships As a Free Bonus To Your Existing Membership Or Online Course
A great way to stack value to an existing offer is to include the ability to add 1-5 users to a membership program (or course) as an added bonus. This gives users the ability to invite their spouses, colleagues, employees, or friends. Netflix is a great example of this strategy.
This option also helps add a lot of perceived value to your offer without changing any of your content. In this case, the perception of being able to get multiple memberships (or up to five) for the price of one, can help make your offer seem much more enticing.
Going through an online training program by yourself requires discipline. Adding the ability to go through a training program with someone else can make it a much more engaging experience.
Bonus Opportunity: Increase Retention & Keep Members Paying you Longer with Group Accounts
If you’re running a training program with a clear beginning and end, your members have little reason to keep paying you after they’ve finished your course unless you have a strong community aspect built into it. With group accounts, you can keep more people around long after they’ve finished.
With group memberships, members have the ability to add future employees or team members to their accounts, giving them a reason to keep paying their membership since they know they’ll want to have future employees or their current team members go through your program.
5 Real-Life Examples of Group Memberships In Membership Programs and Online Courses
Want to see how other businesses have leveraged group memberships successfully? Here are five examples of online businesses that successfully leveraged group memberships…
Each company chose to implement its group memberships a little differently. Checking out these examples should give you plenty of ideas about how you could implement group memberships with your own WordPress site.
Digital Marketer’s HQ Program
Digital Marketer is the leader when it comes to digital marketing training. Their HQ program focuses on training individuals and teams how to become digital marketing experts. Having this type of expertise in house is indispensable for any business in 2019. Digital Marketer offers six different group tiers, with prices adjusted for each based on how many users you can add. This type of program is built with groups in mind.
The program provided by Digital Marketer is offered as a quick way to train a digital marketing team (they advertise a 60-90 day completion time). This opportunity is perfect for a group membership option, because companies will likely keep their memberships past the 90 day mark.
They’ll have future team members they’ll want to train through the program. The member will also want to keep their existing team trained on digital marketing best practices as the courses are updated or employees want to take additional courses, giving business owners another reason to keep their membership active.
Quick Takeaways:
- Short courses can use group memberships to boost retention and add value to your course without having to create any additional content.
- Could your training be useful to certain types of businesses?If you’ve always sold your products to individuals, consider positioning one higher level tier membership with the ability to add a small number of group accounts as a test. If that goes well, take it a step further and consider adding multiple tiers for larger groups of users and expand your marketing efforts towards these type of customers.
- If your product does appeal to business owners, consider changing your sales messaging to focus on the benefits they’d get from having their team go through your program. DMHQ does a great job of positioning its program this way.
Learn Do Become: “Steps to Everyday Productivity” Course – Invite Your Spouse
This is a great example of a well done personal development course. Learn Do Become offers an “invite your spouse” option to their “Steps to Everyday Productivity” course.
The idea is you can through the course with your significant other. This group membership is only for one other person, but is still really effective.
People will be much more engaged in a course like this if they have someone to go through it with, especially with their significant other! Going through a program like this with your spouse also makes it a much more memorable experience together.
By using group accounts, each person gets their own unique login and can complete the course at their own pace. They’ll also both be able to serve as an accountability partner for each other going through it. Making it a lot more likely they’ll finish the program.
Quick Takeaways:
- Even adding the option to add just one person, like your spouse, a close friend, or family member, can add a lot of perceived value to your offer. The perception of being able to get multiple memberships for the price of one, will always make your offer seem much more enticing.
- The type of content you offer should help dictate what your group membership options will be. What do you think would work best for your program?
- Gifting access to spouses, family members, or friends can be a great way to leverage group memberships for personal development type products.
Code Academy – Business / Corporate Accounts
Code Academy is another training site that targets businesses looking to train their staff on how to code and improve their development skills. If your training program could benefit certain types of businesses, then group memberships should be a must have with your membership site.
Code Academy offers more than half a dozen group membership tiers in order to cater to all sizes of companies. They also follow up with leads through live sales reps, a large business account with a lot of users could be really valuable.
Quick Takeaways:
- The value of training employees on how to master or improve certain skills is huge. Companies are willing to invest in this. Savvy membership site owners can leverage this by offering group memberships that are targeted to companies like this.
- Having additional tiers for being able to add different numbers of people is a great way to expand your offer without any extra work. You can also consider the ability to create “custom” packages for larger amounts of users.
MMMastery Infusionsoft Training – Including Group Access With Your Program at No Extra Charge
MMMastery Infusionsoft Training (now retired) used group membership options to appeal to two types of avatars: solopreneurs who do everything themselves and the busy business owner with a small team they want to train.
MMMastery’s group memberships make it easy for business supervisors to delegate training Infusionsoft to their staff without having to take time out of their own schedules to be involved. Once someone gets added, they’ll get their own login and automated email reminders to complete the training until they finish.
Any membership site can use group memberships as an added bonus to increase its existing content’s value. It can also be useful in the sales messaging for your site. Individual buyers aren’t alienated, while at the same time, it also appeals to business owners looking to train their growing team.
Knowing that you’ll also have the option to invite additional team members in the future if you need to adds peace of mind for the customer.
Quick Takeaways:
- It’s possible to simultaneously present a solo and group membership option in the same offer.
- Offering group memberships for no extra charge can serve as an additional way to get people to stick around for longer with your program.
Code Kingdoms – Offer Family level Plans or Team Plans Side by Side With Your Individual Memberships
Family plans: the greatest idea that phone companies ever came up with.
Code Kingdoms shows how effective team and family plans can be and leverages this idea.
Marketing a “family plan” version of your program is an easy way to sell a higher priced tier of your program, without having to update or change any of your actual content. All using the same info product.
Quick Takeaways:
- Group memberships can increase sales without requiring new content be made.
- Wording is important. Family and team plans may seem interchangeable, but they market to different groups. What wording would work best for your program?
How Memberium’s Umbrella Accounts Feature Makes Group Accounts Easy For Any Membership Site or Course
At this point, hopefully, you have more than a few good ideas about how you could include group memberships for your WordPress site. Memberium makes it easy to add automated group memberships that you can depend on. Here’s a quick demo of how it works…
If you’re interested in finding out more about how group memberships work with Memberium (what we refer to as “Umbrella Accounts” with Memberium ) you can check out the full post here…
Memberium’s Umbrella Accounts feature is quick and easy to get up and running with our pre-built templates. This feature is available for all Pro and Advanced Memberium plans.
Once you’ve successfully added Umbrella Accounts to your site, you can start offering group memberships to your members any way that you’d like to. Memberium’s Umbrella accounts feature is super flexible (and powerful) with what you can do with it. It also doesn’t require any major changes to your existing membership site.
If you’re an existing Memberium customer with a Standard Memberium license and want to start using Memberium’s umbrella accounts feature, contact support and they’ll be able to help you upgrade your license for you automatically.
Setting up group accounts doesn’t require any major changes to your membership site. You simply add a new page where your members can add, invite and manage members.
An example of a page where you can add and manage members added to your Memberium site with Umbrella Accounts. These two examples use our pre-built templates that are available for anyone to use.
We have some step by step video tutorials and page templates to guide you through the whole process. On top of that, Memberium support is there to help you out with anything if you somehow get stuck along the way.
No Limits to Group Memberships
With Memberium, you’ll have full control over how group memberships work with your site. Memberium’s Umbrella Accounts can support more than 5,000+ sub-members per member. Of course, this is all set up by the settings you choose.
To get started using Memberium Umbrella Accounts for yourself, purchase a Memberium Pro or Advanced license. If you already are an existing Memberium customer with a Standard license and want to get started, just contact support today to have them upgrade your license automatically for you.
