One of the problems that membership site owners frequently want to solve, is how to use the power of the membership software to protect lead magnets from being accessed. This requires a few steps, and may seem daunting at first, but it’s REALLY not hard to do at all if you follow the steps in this recipe.
You’ll be doing it like a pro in no time at all!
Our Toolkit
Here’s our toolkit for this project
- Infusionsoft Lead Capture Web Form.
- A lead capture page on your site.
- A “thank you” page with the lead magnet content you promised your prospect.
- 2 1/2 spoonfuls of freshly squeezed Ambition, season to taste.
You don’t want to mix your lead capture pages with your regular membership website. Because they’ll autologin the user with just an email address that would be a risky thing to do. Use a 2nd copy of Memberium in a subdirectory install for your leads.
For this project you’re going to want to use either Infusionsoft’s built-in web forms.
Unfortunately LeadPages, GravityForms, ClickFunnels and other lead magnet capture systems that don’t capture the Infusionsoft contact data to pass on to the thank you page simply won’t work for this project. This is very frustrating since they create some truly beautiful landing pages and forms.
Unfortunately LeadPages, GravityForms, ClickFunnels and other lead magnet capture systems simply won’t work.
Configuring Memberium
You’ll want to make sure that Memberium is setup to handle your new leads. You’ll have to make some simple decisions and flip a few switches. If any of those decisions worry you, don’t hesitate to ask us on the Facebook Group, or through our support portal.
We’ll cover the settings you need to review below, and our thoughts on each one.
Require Membership
You don’t need to map Lead Magnet content to memberships, and in fact I would recommend NOT doing so as a best practice. If you choose to not use a membership for your page, then make sure that “Require Membership” is turned off in your Memberium settings. I generally recommend that this setting be left-off for most sites for other reasons.
If you DO need this setting “on” for other reasons, then you can still minimize your membership overhead by creating a single membership named “Lead Magnet” and use that same membership for all of your lead magnets. You can still lock down your lead magnets by requiring an additional tag, but you won’t bloat your membership configuration with dozens of extra profiles.
Enable Autologin
If you’re using an Infusionsoft Webform and you want the new lead to be immediately taken to their new content, then you will need to turn on autologin in your Memberium settings.
If you’re delivering your lead magnet content through a double optin email confirmation, you do not need to turn on autologin.
If you’re going to deliver your new member their username and password to login, then you don’t need to turn on autologin. This method is useful if you want to get your new lead comfortable with the idea and practice of logging into your membership site from the very start.
Generally, I recommend disabling autologin if you don’t need it.
Limiting Access
You have a couple of options to limit access to your lead magnet content page.
The simplest is to require ONLY that users be logged in to view the page. This is simple to implement and requires no tags. You would just autologin the user and have them go to that page. Anyone they share the page link with would be unable to view the page. Keep in mind, if the member shares the autologin link from the email, whoever they shared that with would be able to view the page and they’d be logged in as the member who shared the link. Any member of your site with a login would have access to your lead magnet thank you page. If this isn’t desireable then you would want to consider the next option.
The next path is to use a single tag. Ideally you would use a different tag for each lead magnet, so that a lead who signed up for one, couldn’t access the other. You can also use these tags to help you segment who’s signed up for what, so you really should be doing this anyway. This will also prevent your members from accessing your lead magnet pages.
The third path, if you require memberships to access the site is to use a generic, low access membership to allow the user to login, but an additional tag to govern what lead magnet content they can access.
Setting Your Page Protections
When you protect your lead magnet page, you’ll need to decide how to handle visitors who DON’T have access to that content.
The best practice here would be to set the prohibited action to “Redirect”. By default the page will redirect to your login form, but you don’t want that. Point the redirect link to the lead magnet capture page instead. This will ensure that if the link is shared, that the recipient will end up right where you want them — at your optin form.
Be sure not to protect the page with your optin form — it will reduce your number of signups to 0.
Getting Your Autologin URLs
If you’re using Infusionsoft web forms or email to deliver your new lead to their content, then you’ll probably want
Your autologin URL’s are located on your “HTTP POST/Links” tab in Memberium settings. There are two different kinds of autologin URL’s you’ll use. One type of URL is for email links, and the other type of URL is for webform thank you pages. You’ll need one or both depending on where you want to use the links.
When you get the links from the site, they’re 99% ready to go and need only minimal adjustment to do what you’ll need done. Don’t fret! We’re talking super basic stuff here.
Fine Tuning the Autologin URL
Your autologin URL will look something like the example below. The URL’s are slightly different between email and webform versions, but the differences are minor, and the change we’ll make is identical to both.
http://example.com/?memb_autologin=yes&auth_key=qwerty&Id=~Contact.Id~&Email=~Contact.Email~&redir=/your-page/
Adjusting the Login Page
Near the end of the URL you’ll see the parameter: redir=/your-page/
What you’ll want to do is replace this with the partial URL of the page that your lead magnet content is on. Don’t point it to the page with the optin, and don’t use the full URL, you want the part of the URL without the domain.
Using the full domain will work on some servers, but not others. Keep it simple.
If your site is hosted in a subdirectory, you’ll want to include the subdirectory as well. Just don’t include the domain.
Applying Tags
If you’re logging in the new lead directly from a webform, you’ll also want to have your autologin URL apply any tags that the
person needs to access your content.
You’ll want to add the tag_ids parameter to your webform autologin URL.
http://example.com/?memb_autologin=yes&auth_key=qwerty&Id=~Contact.Id~&Email=~Contact.Email~&tag_ids=123,456&redir=/your-page/
This will ensure that your new lead gets their access instantly without waiting for Campaign Builder to run the sequence.
Keep these autologin URL’s handy. We’ll be using them soon (So Exciting!)
Setting Up Your Lead Web Form
You’ll go ahead create your lead capture form in Campaign Builder. An entire book could be written about lead capture form design and best practices. We won’t go into that here, but I HIGHLY recommend further education with Digital Marketer’s DM Labs.
NEVER use an Infusionsoft webform to capture the password from a lead or customer.
A typical lead capture form will have at minimum a capture for your prospect’s first name, and their email address. That’s really all you need.
Once you have your form designed, you’ll want to setup the thank you page. Setup your webform thank you page to go to the URL you specify. You’ll paste your webform autologin URL here. When you select this option, you’ll also see a checkbox to “Pass contact’s information to the thank-you page”. Be sure to check this box.
Once this is done, mark your form as ready, and publish your campaign. You’ll want to get your form code and paste it into your site. Infusionsoft has three options for embedding form codes.
- The first is their JavaScript snippet. In theory this may have some benefits. I would strongly recommend avoiding it. It loads on the page slower, uses an iframe, has been prone to breaking completely in the past, and just isn’t worth any perceived benefits.
- The second is HTML Code. This will bring the form and it’s styling over to your WordPress site. It creates a ton of code, and may or may not mesh well with your look and feel.
- The third is HTML Code (Unstyled). If you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS this is the best option. It doesn’t carry any styling with it, so it’s more likely to mesh nicely with your page look and feel.
Campaign Sequences
You’ll want to follow the normal process of new user creation in your form sequence. Apply any appropriate tags, run your makepass HTTP POSTs, send confirmation emails, start nurture campaigns, etc.
Why Not Use [memb_registration_form]
Memberium’s registration form shortcode is designed for a very specific application; signing up the user for your site. While it’s more intelligent than the Infusionsoft webform and has a more secure, built-in autologin, that intelligence becomes a limiter in this application.
It’s not uncommon for a site to have many lead capture forms, and for a prospect to sign up for several before formally joining the site. The registration form will only let someone sign up once, which would be a terrible user experience the second time a prospect signed up for your lead magnet.
It would be possible to change the registration form shortcode to allow for this, but at that point why not simply use the autologin form.
Test! Test! Test!
Be sure not to use your WordPress admin email for this testing, as it won’t work.
