How to Build a Fully Automated Drip Membership Site in WordPress

Here’s the ultimate drip membership site scenario:

You create your training courses and set up your WordPress membership site. You integrate it with your email marketing system (like Drip), so you can still use the same tags and email automation software as before.

Then, you just kick back and watch as the website sells itself and keeps your students engaged like a well-oiled machine.

Sounds like a pipe dream, right?

It’s not.

Whether you’re offering online courses, products, a social network, or any variety of resources inside your membership site, you can absolutely automate the whole thing, using just two software tools: AccessAlly Pro as your WordPress membership plugin and Drip as your email software platform.

What Does an Automated Drip Membership Site Look Like?

Let’s talk specifics:

To fully-automate drip content in WordPress, you’ll need deep integration between email marketing software and a WordPress membership management plugin. The two pieces of software communicate with each other frequently, passing key tagging information to kickstart automation and add (or revoke) permissions for individual subscribers.

In order for the process to work, a Drip WordPress membership site built with AccessAlly Pro uses the following elements:

Protected Content

A membership site restricts content, only allowing certain logged-in users to access it.

Drip and AccessAlly Pro work together to protect your training content and allow your paid subscribers to view the material they purchased.

Automated Access Based On Purchases or Opt-ins

There’s no need for you to manually create usernames and passwords each time someone purchases a subscription to your membership site. With its’ Drip membership integration, AccessAlly Pro includes sales forms that will automatically add the right permission tags to a subscriber, so they can access the course material the minute their purchase goes through.

Interactive Dashboard

If you’re selling each course separately inside your membership site, an interactive dashboard will help to organize the courses and provide a natural upsell opportunity. This upsell strategy is known as the Login Optin™ Strategy. Learn more about it at Original List Building Ideas Using The Login Optin™.

A Fabulous Design That’s Easy To Navigate

When you’re selling a membership website, you’re not just selling content. You’re selling an experience. This is where the WordPress theme you choose can actually make or break the success of your offer.

Standalone or Drip-Fed Courses

Are you going to release your course content all at once, or slowly “drip feed” a lesson at a time? The drip feed membership site you build with AccessAlly Pro can include either/or/both types.

LMS Features To Keep Subscribers Engaged

After putting all that work into creating your membership site and selling it, you don’t want subscribers to drop off from frustration, overwhelm, or simply because they “forgot”.

Organic Upsell Opportunities Built In Throughout the Site

A Drip membership site built with AccessAlly Pro can house one course or many. You can use automated opportunity points throughout the site to create unique upsell and cross-sell opportunities for members.

The Short List of Tools You’ll Need to Build Your Site on WordPress

To build your Drip membership site in WordPress, you’ll need three tools:

• A Subscription To Drip software
• A Subscription To AccessAlly Pro, a WordPress plugin – $79
• A WordPress website

How an Automated Drip Membership Site Works

Drip and AccessAlly Pro maintain a deep, two-way integration to provide the power and automation for your membership site.

Very generally put, each tool has its own role to play:

AccessAlly Pro limits access to your membership site, helps you create the courses, and includes some neat LMS gamification features (quizzes or homework notes, anyone?) for your subscribers.

Drip powers the automation itself: emails, applying/removing permission tags for each user, and any automation behind a stage-release course, for example.

But the two systems communicate throughout:

Dripped Content Example

Someone purchases a recurring subscription to your website via an AccessAlly sales form. AccessAlly adds a tag to this user, and passes the information on to Drip.

Inside Drip, a workflow is set up to ask AccessAlly to create a new username and password, then send an automated email to the new subscriber with their unique login information.

The first time they log in, AccessAlly adds another tag and communicates with Drip so that a second email is sent, congratulating the new subscriber and asking if they need any help…

Whew.

Yes, there is a learning curve associated with totally automating a complex ecosystem like a Drip membership site. Fortunately, AccessAlly Pro comes with step by step video tutorials to walk you through the entire process.

Making Your Investment Work

The price tag associated with investing in a robust, fully automated membership site can be daunting.

But this is definitely a case where investing in business tools at a higher level can make or break your membership site endeavor.

If a membership website is truly the next step for your business, then using a plugin (AccessAlly Pro) that integrates with software you already have (Drip) is a solid choice.

With these two tools, you can truly automate the entire site (using those same Drip tags and workflows that you use in your email automations), lifting a lot of the stress and burden from your shoulders. And since the dirty work is taken care of (after that initial setup!), you are freed up to work in your own zone of genius… or just sit back and take a much-needed break.

Grow Your Membership Site with an Integrated Affiliate Functionality

Now AccessAlly also offers a Drip affiliate management integration, so you can start to build your own referral network of affiliates.

This helps you reach more potential membership site customers while expanding your reach. You don’t need anything other than AccessAlly and Drip software to start earning more by offering an incentive for affiliates to promote your Drip membership site!