Notify Members of Upcoming Recurring Payment / Automatic Renewal for Membership

by Travis Lima | General, Recipes

Our Recurring Payment Email Reminder Add On allows you to notify members that their membership renewal payment is processing soon. This recipe shows you how to use the pmpro_upcoming_recurring_payment_reminder filter to modify when that notification is sent.

View the Add On

About The Code Recipe

By default, the Recurring Payment Email Reminder Add On will send a notification 7 days prior to a member’s recurring payment date. In the example below, we are modifying that default to send the notification 14 days (or two weeks) prior to renewal. Annual plans may want to adjust this to 30 days prior (roughly 1 month) or another value that best fits the needs of your membership program.

The Code Recipe

This code recipe requires a Plus Account or higher.

View Membership Options

Email Marketing Integrations for Paid Memberships Pro

by Kimberly Coleman | Add Ons, Newsletter

Below is a list of the third-party email marketing integrations available for Paid Memberships Pro.

Third-Party Email Marketing Platforms

 
Sign Up for AWeber

AWeber Integration

Integrate User Registrations with AWeber. Adds members to lists based on their membership level.

View the Add On
AWeber Signup

 
Sign Up for Constant Contact

Constant Contact Integration

Integrate User Registrations with Constant Contact. Adds members to lists based on their membership level.

View the Add On
Constant Contact Signup

ConvertKit

ConvertKit Integration

Integrate your ConvertKit tags with Paid Memberships Pro membership levels. This Add On is provided and supported by ConvertKit.

View the Add On
ConvertKit Signup

 
Sign Up for GetResponse

GetResponse Integration

Add users to GetResponse campaigns, with or without Paid Memberships Pro.

View the Add On
GetResponse Signup

 
Sign Up for MailChimp

MailChimp Integration

Integrate User Registrations with MailChimp. Adds members to lists based on their membership level and includes level ID and name as merge fields.

View the Add On
MailChimp Signup

On-Site User Email Systems

Email Users Integration

Easily kick off an email to your WordPress site users directly in the WordPress admin. You can segment users by a few criteria, including their Paid Memberships Pro “Membership Level”. The Paid Memberships Pro integration is built in to the core plugin.

View the Plugin

MailPoet Integration

Adds a checkbox on checkout page for your customers to subscribe to your MailPoet newsletters. This Add On is provided and supported by MailPoet.

View the Plugin

Membership Checkout Notification Methods via Apps, Text Message or Slack

by Kimberly Coleman | Add Ons, Newsletter, Recipes

If you’d like additional notification when members complete checkout on your site, here are a few options, including a code recipe for SMS/Text Message notification, the new Slack Integration add on, and the PayPal or Stripe apps.

paypal-app-ios-notificationsPayPal App [iOS] [Android]

The PayPal App, available for both iOS and Android, allows you to keep track of your PayPal account. It includes push notifications for incoming money (i.e. Membership Checkouts) and outgoing funds (i.e. Refunds or other purchases with your PayPal account).

I use the PayPal app to receive notification of membership checkout for our PMPro Core and PMPro Plus levels. It’s very quick to setup, simply download the app then login with your PayPal account credentials for the PayPal account linked to your membership site. You can also easily transfer fund from your PayPal account to your linked checking/savings accounts via the “Wallet” > “Withdrawal” screen.

Notifications can be configured via Settings > Notifications.

stripe-app-ios-notificationsStripe Dashboard App [iOS]

The Stripe Dashboard App, available only for iOS, allows you to keep track of your Stripe account. Toggle the push notifications that you want to see, including Today’s Summary, Payments and New Customers.

If you’re on Android, use your Chrome browser to navigate to the Stripe Dashboard. Then, click the ”  ” icon and click “Add to Home Screen”. This will add a shortcut link to the very mobile-friendly Stripe Dashboard.

Just like the PayPal app, Stripe Dashboard is very quick to setup, simply download the app then login with your Stripe account credentials for the Stripe account configured on your membership site. Notifications can be configured (in the iOS app) via the “gear” icon in the upper right under Notifications.

Note: I stopped using the Stripe Dashboard app due to some bugs related to the app “resetting” my push notification settings. (we’re shared into more than one Stripe account and I only want notification for my main account, but it kept refreshing and sending notification for all accounts).

Get an SMS/Text Message

Here’s a quick code recipe that will send a short email or sms message to the specified address(es) after Membership Checkout. Set your notification addresses on line 9 (to get the notification address for your mobile carrier, see http://www.emailtextmessages.com/. Set the level(s) you’d like to receive notification for on line 12, or completely remove lines 12 to 14 to receive notification for ALL Membership Checkouts.

This code recipe requires a PMPro Plus Account or higher.

Copy and paste this code recipe into a helper PMPro Customizations plugin.

pmpro-slack-app-notificationsSlack Integration Add On

We’ve just released a new Slack integration, that allows you to receive Membership Checkout notification in a specified Slack channel.

Slack is a messaging app for teams. You can use Slack in your browser or via a native app for iOS, Android], Mac], or Windows.

BONUS: If you have notifications set up via the Slack app you wouldn't need any of the other methods above!

Installation

  1. Members with a valid PMPro Plus license can install and activate this add on via the Memberships > Add Ons admin page. Or, download the zip file here and upload the ‘pmpro-slack’ directory to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory of your site.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. Navigate to Settings > PMPro Slack in the WordPress admin to configure the add on.

Settings

You’ll need to create a Slack web hook URL.

  1. Go to https://slack.com/services/new/incoming-webhook
  2. Create a new webhook
  3. Set a channel to receive the notifications
  4. Copy the URL for the webhook

Then under Settings > PMPro Slack in the WordPress admin…

  1. Paste the webhook URL into the “Webhook URL” field
  2. Select the levels you’d like to receive Slack notifications for
  3. click “Save Changes”

pmpro-slack-settings

View the Add On

Set Up a Landing Page to Capture Email Addresses

by Kimberly Coleman | FAQ, Memberlite

I recently created a tutorial video on how to set up a landing page in just 5 minutes using PMPro + Register Helper + the Memberlite theme.

Set Up a Landing Page to Capture Email AddressesThe landing page in the demo gives access to a video, but you could offer other freemium content like an eBook, White Paper, audio file, subscription to a newsletter, or file download.

Watch the Video

A landing page is a great way to ensure that you are capturing all possible leads on your site – and this tutorial streamlines the signup process as much as possible. We don’t want a single barrier to capturing that lead!

Note: The tutorial does not require Memberlite - it just makes it look nicer (IMHO).

You will still need to generate traffic to your website, but having a setup like the above will ensure that some percentage of people visiting your site will convert to mailing list members… that you can upsell later… wink, wink.

For Paid Memberships Pro, roughly 1,000 people visit our site every day, and about 50 of them convert into mailing list members. That’s 1,500 new subscribers every month or 18,000 new subscribers every year. Not too shabby.

Enjoyed the tutorial?

Let us know your thoughts below. What are some other ways you capture leads? What are some things you can give away as “freemium” content to build your list?

Methods to Totally Disable, Reroute, or Selectively Disable Paid Memberships Pro Emails to the Member/User or Admin

by Kimberly Coleman | Newsletter, Recipes

Paid Memberships Pro sends a variety of emails to the admin and member as related to their membership, subscription status, expiration, confirmation and more. If you’d like to alter the default distribution of these emails, below are a few methods to do just that. See a list of all PMPro-generated email here.

Use the Email Templates Admin Editor Add On

This add on (available through the WordPress.org Repository) allows you to selectively disable emails sent by Paid Memberships Pro. Just install and activate the add on, then navigate to the Memberships > Email Templates admin page, select an email to modify, and check the box for “Disable this email?”.

This is useful if other plugins on your site or third party services like Mailchimp or other email marketing programs are already sending emails to your customers for confirmations or cancellations. Just disable the corresponding PMPro email so your customers don’t receive multiple emails serving the same purpose.

View the Add On

Use the PMPro Toolkit Add On

Among other administrative features, the PMPro Toolkit add on allows you to automatically redirect all Paid Memberships Pro emails to a specific address. Just install and activate the add on, then navigate to Settings > PMPro Toolkit in your WordPress admin.

This is useful if you are testing emails on your site and want to see the emails that would be sent to your members.

View the Add On

Code Recipe to Automatically Disable All Email

The function below will disable all email sent by Paid Memberships Pro – both for the member and the administrator.

Copy and paste this code recipe into a helper PMPro Customizations plugin.

This code recipe requires a PMPro Plus Account or higher.

Code Recipe to Disable ONLY the Member/User Email

The function below will disable any email sent to the Member/User by Paid Memberships Pro. The admin emails will still be sent as intended.

Copy and paste this code recipe into a helper PMPro Customizations plugin.

This code recipe requires a PMPro Plus Account or higher.

Code Recipe to Disable Email for a Specific Membership Level

You could change the logic of these gists to selectively disable other kinds of emails. For example, here we look up information about the user to disable only emails for certain membership levels.

This code recipe requires a PMPro Plus Account or higher.

How We Built A Subscriber List of 24,000+ Members

by Kimberly Coleman | Business, FAQ

Paid Memberships Pro has always been and always will be 100% GPL and available for free to download from WordPress.org. So how are we capturing (and hopefully converting) all of these free users of our plugin and documentation?

Below are a few tactics that have helped Paid Memberships Pro grow into (one of) the most used membership plugins for WordPress.

  1. Give away quality content for free on your website.

    Share on social media. Guest blog. Post free plugins to the WordPress.org repository. Anything to get traffic to your site. Make sure the free content is useful to your target customers.

  2. Have a desirable product to encourage users to share their email on your site.

    With Paid Memberships Pro, we ask you to become a free member before you can download the plugin or view our documentation. You could use white papers, 15-minute consultation calls, free samples that are inexpensive to ship, or anything that would convince users to subscribe.

  3. Synchronize your free members with MailChimp or another email marketing applications.

    See our MailChimp add on or browse all of our third party integration options here.

  4. Add email forms EVERYWHERE.

    Add them to the bottom of your posts and pages. Use plugins like OptinMonster to ask for emails in a slightly annoying (but totally effective) manner.

  5. Set up a landing page to capture email address.

    In a couple days we’ll be posting an article about how to easily set this up with Paid Memberships Pro.

Post a comment if you’ve tried these tactics.

I’d love to hear if you are having success with list building using these concepts. Or, share a comment about other list-building techniques that you’ve found successful.

Getting People to Open Your Email: Two Tactics for A/B Testing Email Subjects

by Jason Coleman | Business, General

Here are two tactics we use to get people to open our emails:

First, we try to send targeted (non-newsletter-type) email out on a Tuesday.

Tuesday is generally considered the best day to start a marketing campaign or launch a product. You can read an interesting breakdown of which days to send email on here (or another here), but one theory is:

  • People avoid email on weekends. (Normal people anyway.)
  • Mondays are hectic for everyone.
  • People are likely to be off Friday or spacing out.
  • Tuesday-Thursday are all similar, but you might as well send as early as possible in the week.

Second, we A/B test provocative subject lines to get you to open the email.

A/B testing means trying out multiple versions of something and then choosing the one that performs better. Mailchimp makes it really easy to A/B test subject lines. They have a whole article about it here.

We generally test 2 subject lines to 20% of our total list (10% receive subject line A and 10% receive subject line B). MailChimp (and other email marketing programs) may recommend a larger quantity depending on your list size.

After a specified time period of gathering data (we set the delay to 4 hours), MailChimp picks the winning subject line and automatically distributes to the remaining 80% of your mailing list.

pmpro_mc_a_b_testing

I hope this increases your email open rate.

If you want to A/B test other components of your campaign, MailChimp provides tools for testing From Name, Delivery Date and Time, and Content. They have also recently added the ability to A/B test the full email content although we haven’t experimented with it yet.

Post a comment below about your experiences with A/B testing – if you use another email marketing tool, let us know if they have better (or worse) A/B testing options. We’re partial to MailChimp, but always open to suggestions.

Paid Memberships Pro Addons for Email Marketing

MailChimp Integration Sign Up for MailChimp

Constant Contact Integration AWeber Integration

Use wpMandrill to Get Delivery, Bounce, Click Rates on WordPress Email

by Kimberly Coleman | About PMPro, Recipes, Troubleshooting

Mandrill_LogoIf you’d like better information about how system-generated emails are being received, read, clicked or bounced, you can configure Mandrill as your outgoing mail service. Mandrill harnesses the delivery rates of MailChimp and overrides the wp_mail function included with WordPress. This method can be used for sites with and without Paid Memberships Pro.

This is also useful for troubleshooting email delivery issues as explained here.

Setting up Mandrill for your WordPress Site

Install and activate wpMandrill from the WordPress Plugin Repository.

You can install directly through your admin by navigating to Plugins > Add New > “wpMandrill”. Or, download the plugin here: wpMandrill

Follow the setup steps for the plugin. This will include creating an account for Mandrill and entering some configuration data within the Settings > Mandrill admin page within your WordPress site. Mandrill is free to use up to a set threshold as rated by your account.

Once configured, you will be able to log in to Mandrill and see all kinds of stats about your wp mail (delivered, bounced, rejected, opened, clicked, country and more).

The data is per-message, so you can even see a report on a single email sent to a specific member. Neat!

Creating and assigning a template for WordPress and PMPro Email

Paid Memberships Pro has a built in method for creating an email template. This method will not be used if you decide to implement Mandrill as your transactional email service. Instead, you can create the template directly within your Mandrill account OR share an existing template from your linked MailChimp account.

Just make sure you template has a defined mc:edit=”main” placeholder (this is where the email’s body message will be placed — whether it’s the WordPress-generated body text like password reset and recovery, your bbPress or JetPack comments update emails or Paid Memberships Pro-related member information).

Note that if you are using the Email Templates Admin Editor add on, any modifications made to the body message and subject line will still be used. Mandrill simply overrides the “appearance” of your email and uses the template selected in Settings > Mandrill.

Get wpMandrill (the plugin) Set up a Mandrill Account

BCC Additional Email Addresses on Member or Admin Notifications

by Kimberly Coleman | Plus and Unlimited Member Content, Recipes

Default Paid Memberships Pro emails are sent to the member and the admin email address defined in your WordPress site’s Settings > General. The code recipes below demonstrate how to alert additional email addresses or BCC (blind carbon copy) a defined email address on member-only notifications.

The code recipes below can be modified for your needs and included in a helper PMPro Customizations plugin.

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