Infusionsoft Membership Sites: What Are My Options? – Part 1
Infusionsoft membership sites are in big demand. Fortunately, good solutions for building them are now available. This is a huge step forward from the available options a few years back. When I first reviewed Infusionsoft membership site options, the only ones I thought to include were CustomerHub and iMember360. In this article, I've included five. The market is clearly moving ahead.
The ones I've included here are ones that offer a comprehensive set of features and ones I consider "tightly integrated with Infusionsoft." By that I mean they were initially designed for use with Infusionsoft and leverage Infusionsoft features well.
My team and I have used most of these in real customer projects. In the sections corresponding to each membership site solution below, I mention how we've worked with each one. The ones I've included here are ones Infusionsoft users wanting to build a membership site should definitely consider.
I do want to point out that I have NOT included all the available solutions. I have not included membership sites solutions that are major players as general membership site building tools and support a less than complete subset of Infusionsoft features. If you think I've missed solutions I should have included, please let me know. I'm open to hearing what else someone out there thinks I should have added.
I have listed the solutions in alphabetical order. I give my opinions in each section and reference sites where readers can learn more. This should NOT be construed to mean anything more than that I had to list them in some order.
The Infusionsoft membership site solutions I'll be reviewing are:
AccessAlly
Nathalie Lussier and her husband Robbin are the names behind this one. From my conversations with her, I discovered she started off as a software engineer and later became a women's entrepreneur coach. Her focus was and still is on supporting women business owners with online marketing being her specialty being.
They developed what eventually became AccessAlly as a way to support their own membership site needs. They had used another Infusionsoft memberships site solution, but ran into performance issues as her site grew past 10,000 members. That's when they decided to build their own. It eventually led to what is now AccessAlly and the set of products list here, that together provide an extensive set of membership site and online marketing features.
- ProgressAlly - This is a Wordpress learning management plugin that provides course organization, navigation, gamification features, leader boards, and quiz builders. The tool's goal is to improve the membership site experience and improve student engagement.
- PopupAlly - This is a WordPress plugin that provides a popup form builder. Their claim is they provide opt-in forms "without being annoying." I really like this one.
- WebinarAlly - This is solution for automating online marketing webinars.
If you visit Nathalie's 30 Day List Building Challenge, you'll see they provide much more than a membership site technical solutions. They provide course ware for marketing your business. It's simple yet fairly comprehensive. The tools they sell support users following the recommendations from their course ware.
AccessAlly is built as a Wordpress plugin. They released it as a product in 2015. It provides the content protection features you would expect from a membership site solution, but it doesn't offer many advanced features some of the other solutions include. AccessAlly and their collection of products together provide membership site features so you can both protect you connect and keep your members engaged using their suite.
In order for our team to learn AccessAlly well, we will soon be releasing an updated version of our own Larry Jacob Internet Marketing membership website using AccessAlly. As we make use of it and put its features to work, I'll be including lessons learned in future blog posts.
You can listen to my "Defining Infusionsoft Success" interview with Nathalie.
CustomerHub
CustomerHub was an Infusionsoft membership site solution built by a small firm. Several years back, Infusionsoft purchased them and now sells and supports CustomerHub via the same support channels used to sell and support Infusionsoft. It's the Infusionsoft membership site solution offered by them.
CustomerHub is a very easy-to-use membership site platform. It is self hosted and is not dependent on Wordpress or other website building platform. When you purchase CustomerHub, your membership site is hosted at a URL with the format: http://(your app name).customerhub.net. All your course content resides there. You are then given an administrative interface for adding content to your site. CustomerHub provides a full set of features for assembling and organizing your content. You can upload your video, images, PDF files and copy there. Even with minimal technical knowledge, you can have your membership site built and nicely integrated with Infusionsoft.
CustomerHub allows you to build your site using their standard membership site layout. You have a header at the top with navigation. Courses are viewed beneath that. You can change the color scheme and visual design colors. It doesn't allow for any variations on that.
My concern with users selecting this platform is it may fall short as your membership site needs grow. We built a CustomerHub site several years back and after launching it, the client requested a "few additional features." We could not enhance CustomerHub to support them. We tried to do some fancy programming to extend it and had some success, but it was less than ideal.
If you want a site you can build yourself without outside consulting help and if you don't expect your membership site needs to grow, this solution may work for you. If you anticipate needing an visual design beyond menu at the top and courses beneath that, consider one of the other solutions.
You can learn more about CustomerHub by visiting their site.
In part 2 of this article, I cover iMember360, JoomFuse and Memberium.
