Membership Portals 101: Key Benefits and How to Get Started

A Membership portal or membership platforms are an inseparable part of today’s digital landscape. From having a weekly grocery subscription portal to music portals, fitness portals, or even cleaning portals, the market of business membership is on the rise. A portal that centralizes everything and also personalizes content, is in demand by clients. Fulfilling audience demand is a crucial step to business success and thus, you must think about creating a dedicated membership portal for your business. 

What is a Membership Portal?

A membership portal is typically a platform where various businesses, organizations, and communities provide exclusive content, services, and access to special events. Overall, it is an exclusive experience for members wherein premium resources are provided based on their membership level. 

As observed usually, there are multiple types of membership portals for different utilities. For instance,

Educational Portals: Herein, the audience join a membership to access varied courses, talk with tutors or classmates or even post in community regarding their progress and learning. This kind of a portal also provides facility to download study materials, join webinars, and give tests. In this regard, ARMember’s Online Course Addon is the perfect tool to create such an education centric member portal. 

Membership Communities: An online community portal is a group of people interested in a specific area or niche. So to say, it can be hobby groups or professional networks wherein people exchange information about the field, tips, or any other helpful resources, all in one place. 

Nonprofits: An NGO can leverage a membership portal to display their cause, ask for donations, and create a community of donors. Further, all the updates regarding the proceedings of how the amount is used, who is benefitted, or a meet and greet can be posted at one place. 

Employee Portals: Many organizations create a dedicated portal for their employees. Eventually, this single portal can show upcoming events, birthdays, leaves, performance, policies, and so much more. It can also provide individualized information for each employee. Above all, it can be a place for internal communication. 

Fitness Portals: Have you seen a fitness membership? You definitely have! Herein, you join a specific program based on your skill level and can access all the workouts with a proper schedule. Additionally, you get nutrition guidance, community support, and so much more. 

A membership portal is suitable for almost all industries. Its usage is diverse and keeps your members in one place for better communication and retention. 

Key Benefits of Creating a Membership Portal

You might be thinking why to create a dedicated membership portal? What are the benefits? However, there is not just one but multiple benefits when your customers become member. 

• Centralized Access to Exclusive Content/Services: You can provide a wide range of exclusive services and premium content to your paying members. For instance, downloadable, discount offers, forums, or events, all in one place. This centralized platform keeps your audience hooked and helps you with a stable customer base.
• Improved Member Engagement and Retention: With a dedicated portal for members, you can provide engagement and retention tools like personalized recommendations and discussion boards. At the same time, the content dripping feature keeps your members attached to your content and boosts the retention rates.
• Monetization Opportunities: For exclusive services, you can charge exclusive prices. In that regard, a membership portal allows you to offer multiple tiered plans, subscription options, and pay per post content. This eventually brings in a wide array of customers with different requirements and budgets. 
• Enhanced Data Collection and Personalization: You can track member data like their content preferences, usage patterns, and most active time. Given these points, you can tailor your services and improve your offering. 

Must Have Features for WordPress Membership Portals 

A rewards program software or a membership portal must have certain functional and special features. To ease out your thinking process, here’s a list. 

• User Registration and Login System: A secure login system with easy signup, login, and account management features is of utmost importance. With tools like ARMember, you get inbuilt features of invisible spam protection, brute force login protection, login lockup system, and many more to make your members feel safe. 
• Membership Levels and Access Control: Provide multiple membership levels with predefined access controls. Because of this, a wider range of audience with different budget levels can be attracted. All in all you will have a large audience base. 
• Content Management Capabilities: The membership portal must make it easy for administrators to upload various content and organize events. Furthermore, the UI must be smooth so that the audience can view and access the content easily. 
• Payment Gateway Integrations: Make sure your member portal provides multiple payment gateways so that it is easier for users to join membership. Popular payment integrations i.e. PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and direct credit card payments are a part of ARMember’s 21+ payment gateways. 
• Reporting and Analytics Tools: Make sure you get inbuilt insights and analytics tools without a doubt. It helps you understand member behavior, performance of your content, trends of subscription, and much more. 
• Email and Notification Systems: Inbuilt email alerts, reminders, and third party email marketing integrations allow you to keep your members informed and engaged. 

These features let you establish a user friendly and attractive membership portal. The good news? ARMember comes with these and many other features to thus establish a thriving membership portal. 

Steps to Create a Member Portal on WordPress

Define Your Membership Goals

• Target audience: Firstly, you need to know your audience demographics. For whom are you creating the content? 
• Type of content/service: What do you offer? Or what is your membership portal about? Based on that, define the content or service you would offer on your membership. 
• Membership levels: Define varied membership levels from free, paid (finite), paid (infinite), or recurring subscription. 

Choose the Right Platform or Tool

Herein, a WordPress Plugin like ARMember will support you through and through. 

• Setting up various membership plans
• Enabling payment gateways of your choice
• Enabling plan wise content restrictions 
• Plan wise opt-in integration
• Editing and publishing the membership join now form

Set Up the Technical Foundation

Ensure that you are registering your domain, hosting provider, backup, and security plugins. There are a bunch of plugins that are a must have for a membership site. Further, you must also install the ARMember membership plugin to start with your membership portal setup. 

Design and User Experience

You must start customizing your design as per your brand colors and feel. A member must feel associated with your brand on every page or interface of your portal. Additionally, ensure that your portal website is responsive to all the devices due to the rise in mobile utility. 

Secure Payments and Subscriptions

Enable your preferred payment gateways on your membership site or allow basic bank transfers to suit the needs of every person coming to your membership portal. 

Add Value to Members

Start creating exclusive member content for your portal. Keep on updating the content and create live sessions, Q&As, Polls, Membership Communities etc. to keep the lively atmosphere going on in your portal. 

How to Monetize a Membership Portal and Earn Money 

Membership portals have an ability to earn you a side income or maybe even a full fledged membership site business. How? Well undoubtedly here are a few monetization techniques that you can implement. 

1. Subscription Models: Subscription market is expected to reach $1.5 trillion in the year 2025 itself. From food to TV to games and studies, every industry is adopting a subscription model to earn a consistent income. Leverage this model for your business to offer monthly, quarterly or yearly membership subscriptions. 
2. One Time Fees for Premium Content: Using the pay per post module by ARMember, you can sell an individual post as a premium offering. Thus, this opens up the door for people who want access to your specific content without joining the membership. 
3. Upselling and Cross-selling: You can always offer discounts to your current members for upgrading their plan or for choosing another plan. This would be a perfect opportunity to give them more and encourage them to join now. 
4. Affiliate Programs: Affiliate marketing is one of the sure shot ways to bring in more members to join now. When you incentivize your current members, their marketing efforts would work wonders for your membership portal. 

Wrapping Up

A portal for membership brings together a group of people with similar interests. It acts as a place for centralized communication and information sharing. With profound tools like ARMember, it is easy to establish a membership portal very smoothly. From tiered membership portal plans to payment gateway and email marketing integrations, everything can be done using this intuitive WordPress membership site plugin. Try now!