Memberium Expert Advice: How to Migrate Your WordPress Course Memberium
As a Memberium expert, my team and I build a lot of Wordpress online courses. We build many of these without using Memberium. Memberium is a great platform. We are Memberium experts and are Memberium Certified Implementation Partners. But just because we know it well doesn't mean every business owner building their first site needs it.
When building their first online course site, we often recommend small business owners use LearnDash. It's great of organizing course materials and making your courses available on a Wordpress website. LearnDash provides some very basic e-commerce features, so we add WooCommerce as the e-commerce platform. It's is well integrated with LearnDash, it's inexpensive and provides all the e-commerce features you could possibly need. Together, they provide a starter platform that can serve a small business owners needs for a very long time.
We get this question a lot. It's usually from a business owner that's already offering a membership program or online courses. They may be using a Learning Management System (LMS) like LearnDash. Some are using systems like Memberpress or something similar like Wishlist to manage memberships in Wordpress. They have now adopted Infusionsoft (now renamed Keap Max Classic) and they want to integrate their membership site with Infusionsoft. They're considering Memberium for this, which makes a lot of sense.
Memberium comes into the picture when the business owner want to start doing some automation. It could be they want to do some marketing automation building sales funnels promoting their programs to potential customers. They want to run campaigns to get people to get access to their free lead magnet you make available to them. They may want to give potential customers free access to the first few lessons of a course. That would be a try and buy approach looking to sell them to their complete program.
It could be they want to track student program through their program. They want to offer the ability to offer students the next program in a learning program when they approach the last few lessons in their course. Once they finish lesson 8 of 10, for example, they want to display a banner on the site recommending the next course you can offer them. This can definitely allow them to promote the next course via email and text.
What Memberium does is allow you to connect your Wordpress site to a CRM system like Keap or ActiveCampaign. Both are excellent platforms with pros and cons that make one better for some small businesses versus others. Memberium provides the connection between the two.
If you have have started on a LearnDash / WooCommerce configuration like I mentioned before, enhancing your site using Memberium so you get that tight integration with a CRM is a straight foward exercise. In the next section of this article, I've included an explanation on how to allow users to continue using their same login credentials to login after they have moved to Memberium. Memberium expert features allow you to do that so the customer experience is nothing but positive.
Like I said, the technical steps required to make using of Memberium are straight forward. What it does is open you up to endless possibilities made possible by the CRM system. My team and I are expert Keap and ActiveCampaign consultants. I am a Keap Certified Consultant and am authorized to sell Keap to customers (at the same prices charged by Keap if you buy it directly from them.) With that combination of platforms, now you have so many more marketing features for promoting your services, automation features for reducing manual work required to run your online courses and opportunities to engage your students in ways you just couldn't with your Wordpress only platform.
How Do I Migrate My Users from Wordpress?
The question they ask me is, "Do my members need to reselect a new password?" Wordpress passwords are encrypted so they are safe and protected. You can't just download users with the passwords out of Wordpress and upload them to Infusionsoft. This is a good thing. If Memberium could do that so could hackers wanting to get at your member's password. Their concern then is do they need to go through the process of having all their members get new login credentials. That's a big customer service headache.
If you visit Memberium's MemberPress to Memberium Migration articles, you'll get Memberium's step-by-step for MemberPress to Memberium / Infusionsoft migration. You follow a similar process if you are moving from other platforms other than MemberPress.
What I want to point out is that Memberium does allow members to continue using the same login credentials. Here is how.
Like I said before, Wordpress encrypts user passwords so it doesn't allow Memberium to view user passwords. However, during the login process and only after a members successfully logs in, plugins like Memberium that make use of hooks provided by Wordpress can see the password.
So to migrate users from Wordpress to Memberium, you export all the users out of Wordpress and you upload them to Infusionsoft. That means that you have all your users listed in both the Wordpress user tables and in Infusionsoft. You tag them in Infusionsoft so they have access to all their content. Then, since you don't have their password, you enter the string of characters PASSWORD_PLACEHOLDER into Infusionsoft's custom field where the Memberium password is kept. That string of characters signals to Memberium that it wants the member's password copied to the Infusionsoft custom field.
When you first launch your new Memberium membership site, all members will have that PASSWORD_PLACEHOLDER string in the password field. Then one by one as members login, the string gets replaced with the member's Wordpress password. It happens very elegantly.
I'm hoping this answers this questions for the people planning a migration. Let me know if there are other questions you'd like me to answer for you.