Memberium Umbrella Accounts. We’re Singing in the Rain Now!
Memberium Umbrella Accounts: What Problem Does It Solve?
A problematic Infusionsoft scenario comes up all the time that Memberium Umbrella Accounts are built to address. You have one person making a purchase that involves someone else. Infusionsoft is great for handling scenarios involving a single contact record, but once you need two or more Infusionsoft contacts related in some way, things get complicated.
For example, suppose you're selling tickets to an event. If one person buys one ticket and they are the one attending - no problem. Infusionsoft supports that scenario just fine. However, if one person is buying tickets and someone else is attending - not so good. How do you get the information for that second person?
What if you want to sell a block of tickets to an event? That's a common scenario. You can take their money, but how do you get information about the group of people attending? That's not something you can do with Infusionsoft.
I run into customer requests all the time where one person makes a purchase and another person uses what was purchased. Think of a boss making a purchase with the company credit card so someone else on the team gets access. It's someone else in their firm that is making use of the resource they purchased. You can't do that with Infusionsoft.
Here's another problem that comes up often. It involves recurring payments or subscriptions. It's the first person that has a credit card. What happens when that person's card gets declined? You have to suspend someone else's access.
These and many other multi-contact scenarios cannot be addressed (easily anyway) with Infusionsoft.
Memberium Umbrella Accounts: How Does It Solve This Problem?
Memberium released their umbrella accounts or parent/child feature and it is aimed at addressing these scenarios head-on. It's available to all Memberium's Pro and Advanced users. Memberium Umbrella Accounts is NOT a feature you will find in Memberium Standard accounts.
What are these umbrella accounts? What Memberium has done is allow you to create a parent membership level. This includes an additional WordPress configuration panel in the Memberium section. It comes with a set of shortcodes. These enable you to make Infusionsoft contact parent members when they purchase a specific Infusionsoft subscription. Memberium allows you to define actions to be taken when someone purchases a subscription. It gives the person configuring Infusionsoft and Memberium the ability to run legacy action sets or campaigns to set tags and configure the role of each contact exactly as you need it. You can configure parents and child accounts so they have the same or completely different access. The system allows you the power and flexibility you need.
The features allow you to limit the number of children a parent can set up. Let's say someone buys a subscription that includes five memberships. This would be a membership allowing 5 members login access to the features offered. The parent gets sent the information they can use to invite others on their team to get access. It keeps them from creating more child accounts than they purchased. It can also be set up so if they run out of child accounts, they can purchase more. It's a great upsell opportunity.
What you typically do is define an admin panel on the membership site the parent can use to manage the memberships. It can be set up so the parent is automatically given access or so the parent must give themselves access depending on your business model.. The configuration enables you as the person doing the setup to be as flexible and creative as you like.
I'll be providing more details in future blog articles, but enough is to say Memberium now offers a way to address these multiple contact scenarios. Prior to this, you had to resort to expensive and more complicated programming options to get this done. That's no longer necessary. This is a clean and flexible solution that provides the capabilities we have needed for a long while.
