10 Reasons I love MemberVault - my review of this course platform.

MemberVault is amazing. Read on to find out why, and then try it out for free yourself!  

What is MemberVault?

Firstly, what am I talking about?!  MemberVault is a platform for hosting and selling all your online offers, free or paid, all in one place so you can easily launch and grow your online business in a myriad of ways.

It’s easy for you to create and sell, and easy for your audience to buy, consume and engage.  Plus it adds in some gamification and fun to the process too.

It’s created, developed and run by Erin and Mike Kelly. They are committed to their users, and to being inclusive, positive and supportive, so you can see they are fabulous humans!

I use MemberVault (known as MV for short) for my membership, running live courses, running challenges, selling self study evergreen courses, my free lead magnets, a resource library, a community hub, 1:1 work, my annual summit, and it probably does much more!

So here are my top ten reasons why I love it, and why I think you will too...

Reason #1: The Flexibility.

As I just said in the intro, it works for all my different online offerings, and even some offline too like taking deposits and providing extra support and info for my branding photography, and I love that it works for everything!

Reason #2: The ‘Binge And Buy’ Strategy (part 1).  

This really drew me to using MemberVault rather than another course platform. Everything you create (and set to being active) is visible on your marketplace page, so anyone looking at that page can see what else you have to offer, and easily sign up or buy what they like.

Reason #3: The ‘Binge And Buy’ Strategy (part 2).

Plus when a customer is in one of your products, they can also scroll down and see what else is available from there too.

Reason #4: The Gamification.

This is all built in through the EP (Engagement Points) system so I can reward clients the more they take part in challenges, work through courses, sign up to more of my stuff etc!  It makes things more fun, and adds a bit of competitiveness in there too :) 

Reason #5: The Saving System.

I know, a weird one right? But when you’re busy writing course content, you definitely don’t want to lose it.  And MV saves your work for you automatically really often, plus if you just click on the screen it saves for you too!  (Just remember when you're typing something elsewhere that it's no longer saving as you go!)

Reason #6: The Branding.

The branding. I’d have to mention this wouldn’t I!  You can easily brand your MV site to your own branding colours and fonts so that it matches everything else you create, and it all looks cohesive and lovely.

Reason #7: The Speed and Ease.

It’s so quick and easy to add new products to my MV site, and to amend or update anything too.

Reason #8: The One Click Links.

When you email your clients, you can easily give them their own personalised link to click on that will log them straight in to their product – so helpful when they first sign up, and in later emails to remind them too or to send them to something else. Isn't that clever?

Reason #9: The Community.

There’s an absolutely fabulous Facebook community for people using MemberVault.  If you’re stuck with something, ask in there and you’ll get help very quickly from other users, from the team, and from Erin and Mike themselves when needed. 

It's called the MemberVault Collaborative, and you can even join and ask questions / read past posts before you sign up to use the platform.

Reason #10: The Support.

The support from MemberVault’s owners is incredible, I just haven’t seen this anywhere else.  If there’s something you want MV to be able to do, you can ask Mike and he’ll very often be able to make it happen very quickly, or add it to his list of things to do soon!  He is always upgrading and improving and adding to MV’s features.  And for support with using MemberVault, along with growing and improving your business, Erin is so helpful too.

A few more thoughts. 

There are a couple of cons I want to share to make this a fair review!

- MemberVault doesn’t host videos for you, you need somewhere separate.  This can be for free with unlisted YouTube videos, or a more 'professional' platform like Vimeo, Adilo, Muse.ai, ScreenPal etc.  Those other platforms integrate really easily into MemberVault though.  It means MV don’t have to provide all that storage space (and have to charge more for it), and means you can easily re-purpose videos in different places if needed etc. 

- MemberVault doesn’t send emails for you, you need a separate email system. However, whenever I see complaints about all in one course platforms, it’s generally that they don’t do everything well, and people end up using a separate email system anyway etc.  And what MemberVault does, it does really well.  Plus this means you don’t have to transport your current email addresses into MV when you join, and whichever system you use it will most likely integrate perfectly into MV anyway.  AND the actions and tag system works really well to create different email lists/groups/tags in the different email platforms so you can segment your lists.

- MemberVault easily integrates with Stripe and Paypal for payments, recurring subscriptions and payment plans.  Which means if you ever change course platforms you wouldn’t have to get those clients to sign up to pay you again.  But it also means you don’t have the tax/VAT capabilities that other payment carts might have, or the order bumps and upsells that other payment carts can do.  Thrivecart or Samcart etc will integrate well if you want to use them I'm sure, though I haven't tried myself.  But you can get around order bumps etc with different payment options and utilising the thank you pages.  And improvements to all this is on the roadmap for 2023 too.

(See, even the cons aren't that much of a big deal...)

** Want to give it a go too? **

You have two free weeks to give it a try, find your way around, and even get your first product set up or more, before you need to enter your credit card details!  Here's the website.  

[And now I realise another Con - there's no affiliate system any more, so I don't get anything for recommending it, apart from a warm fuzzy feeling for telling you about something I love!!]

Interested in other things I recommend too?  Here's a whole page of tools, tech, templates, courses, resources and people that I love and recommend :) 

I couldn't stop at 10 favourite things about MemberVault by the way - here are 11 more!!

Reason #11: The Pages.

The new MemberVault Pages mean that you can turn your MV site into a full website if you don’t want to keep it separate from your courses or you don't have a website anywhere else yet. I spent time thinking about this, and am now in the process of moving everything into MV. 

Reason #12: The Blog.

There’s new blog capabilities in MV now too - this is the first time I'm trying it out!  (Being able to catalogue them should be coming soon too).

Reason #13: The Tracking.

You can easily see how far through courses your customers have got, or what they’ve looked at and the actions they’ve taken inside MV. It’s very useful stalking!  It means you can get in touch to see if they’re stuck or to congratulate them for finishing (lots of that can be automated too!).

Reason #14: The Quiz Function.

The quiz function. This is so helpful, I might have put this further up the list! I can ask questions to see if they’ve understood something in a course, to get to know them better, for feedback, for a testimonial, for homework, and much more.  And all answers are just visible to me.

Reason #15: The Comments Function.

This is fairly new and still needs some improvements, but I can see it should work well to create more of a community within MemberVault.  I'm trying to do this in my Client+Student+Subscriber Hub!  I can ask questions, and clients can answer, and vice versa, with everything viewable by anyone with access to that particular product. 

The Comments function is on the roadmap to be turned into a full community function by the end of 2023 which will be fab.

Reason #16: The Help Centre.

There is a vast amount of help docs to take you through everything you need to do inside your MV, right from getting started and finding your way around to how to easily set it all up and much more.  And once you have a paid account, there's a whole set of resources from Erin to get you set up and selling too.

Reason #17: The Unlimited Plan + the Product Plans.

You get all the features included right from the start, you don’t have to keep paying more to add more customers, more storage, more products or extra features.  It's now all included for $99 a month, for all the products you ever want to add!

And there are now lower cost options too which is so good.  If you start on a lower plan they include all the features too, and just limit you by the number of products you can create, so you can work your way up, and upgrade when you need.

Reason #18: The Customer Experience.

This is great too, and it's so important that your customers can easily find their way around your MV and the product/course/whatever they’ve bought or signed up to. 

I especially love it when I buy something that's housed in MemberVault, the instant access to the thing as soon as I sign up/buy, without having to create an account myself or go searching for an email for the log in info is so helpful.

Reason #19: Coupon Codes and Free Trials.

These are features I often utilise, so they’re very handy to have!  Coupon codes allow me to offer a discount on a product to everyone, or just to some people, and I use the free trial as a tripwire for people to try out my membership, and see how fab it is before they start paying (they have to sign up and give their card details first).

Reason #20: Affiliate Capability.

I love this feature too, though I’m just getting in to using it properly now.  MemberVault itself will create and track affiliate links so you can get your audience to grow your sales for you!  So you don't need to add a separate affiliate system to your tech stack.

Reason #21: The Celebrations Feature.

How could I forget this! Such a fun way to keep your audience engaged and motivated – set it up to spray confetti over their screen and display a message of congratulations or motivation to your user. 

(I wonder if it's possible to make it go off when someone reaches the end of a blog post or clicks a CTA button?!  Might have to request that!)

Here's the link again to their website to find out more / start your free trial.  

Let me know if this blog was helpful and if you tried MemberVault out!

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#Reviews and Recommendations