Sell Group Memberships & Courses with Umbrella Accounts

Do you want to increase your profits? Selling group memberships and group courses through umbrella accounts can help.

Your search might have brought you here because of the umbrella feature, and you may be looking for new ways to setup your online business to sell more memberships or courses.

Small business owners who sell these types of products are able to make one sale, but earn multiple times the revenue. That’s because they don’t have to negotiate with each member of a team or group separately.

It’s not hard when you use the right WordPress plugin.

You just setup how many user seats are available in an umbrella account. Decide if it will cost per seat or a set price. And then anyone who purchases can invite their team members in by logging into the site with their email address and password.

What Are Umbrella Accounts?

Umbrella accounts are a way to offer access to online content to a group of people, instead of one account at a time. It’s a great solution for organizations that wish to purchase content in bulk.

An umbrella account holder will be able to invite their team members by logging into the site with their email address and password.

They can use this login information to invite other user accounts who need access. This saves time on having to buy an individual membership or course separately.

It provides more opportunities for long-term success because it doesn’t matter if someone leaves the organization.

Screenshot of Umbrella accounts self registration

An Example of Real-World Use Cases

For example, if Mary leaves the company then her user account can be assigned to John who comes in as her replacement.

An umbrella account is made up of one main “umbrella” owner (usually a business or manager) plus one or multiple “users.” From there, the umbrella owner can use the promote feature to add another user to the administrator level, so they can help manage members.

Umbrella accounts also have the added bonus that an administrative user can track user progress through courses and content.

How To Decide On Your Group Membership Rates

You need to decide on your membership rates before you can start selling group memberships.

It’s not complicated, but it does require some thought. Rates will vary depending on what type of product the group is purchasing. And how much value the key stakeholder is expecting for the price.

For example, if you are selling a membership site with monthly workouts, then your prices should reflect that. $20-25 might be fair per month for an annual membership, and you might multiply that by the number of seats. You may also decide to discount for bigger groups.

An account with 5 seats may cost $50/month, but one with 25 seats may only cost $100/month. Your membership pricing strategy depends on a lot of different factors.

If you sell educational courses with online classes where people pay between $200-$1000 each course, you can calculate a similar rate for groups.

You may want to add a new group user option to your menu offerings and see if any new customers would sign up.

Screenshot of umbrella account pages

How To Sell Group Courses Where Someone Else Facilitates

If you currently facilitate your online courses yourself, you know how much work is involved to help people learn.

Wouldn’t it be great to give the facilitation responsibilities to someone else and just sell your content and teaching system instead?

With umbrella accounts, you can do just that.

You create a membership site with all of your copyright content. Then you recruit other facilitators or companies who are interested using it.

This person can then invite their students through the system you set up. They can do their own livestream lessons, use their existing community setup, and use your content as the foundation.

This creates revenue with minimal additional work on your end because all the facilitation is done by others.

At the end of the day, you provide a lot of value as a facilitator. But your methodology, your intellectual property, and your content are worth a lot.

This is a great way to get the most out of what you have. All you need is the right setup based on your particular feature wishlist.

You should consider using an umbrella account system to scale up without burning yourself out. It’s a great way to make more money with less work on your end.

Screenshot of umbrella accounts administrative dashboard

Recommended Umbrella Account Software

Usually, there’s no shortage of software to review and share.

But when it comes to umbrella accounts functionality for online courses and memberships, there just aren’t that many options on the market.

Most platform-as-a-service options like Thinkific, Kajabi, or Teachable aren’t flexible enough to be able to enroll groups in umbrella accounts. Memberium is one popular option that integrates with Keap, Infusionsoft, and ActiveCampaign.

Giving New Life to Your Courses and Memberships

The other exception is AccessAlly, a WordPress plugin that lets you add umbrella accounts for your online content. Once installed, it’s easy to setup and turn existing content into new options for groups.

The great thing about this software is not just the ability to sell memberships or courses through bulk enrollment. It also comes with all the Learning Management System functionality you need.

Starting with progress tracking, interactive video courses, and quizzes. Plus the administrative user can see how well their team members are doing.

There are private notes where students can write down their thoughts on each topic. Or add notes that their team leader can read and contact them about directly.

AccessAlly also provides customizable certificates that are automatically created when a student completes an online course or membership.

So if you’ve done the search but haven’t found the solution for your umbrella accounts needs in other software, AccessAlly is worth checking out.

Once you have the team functionality set up, you can start selling training programs to corporations without breaking a sweat.

It’s Time to Give Umbrella Accounts a Go

Selling umbrella accounts instead of selling individual ones helps you earn many times more income for the same amount of work.

With AccessAlly it’s not complicated to setup an umbrella account.

Because it’s a WordPress plugin that will create individual accounts for any invited user, allow them to access and manage everything in one hub.

Try the AccessAlly demo and see for yourself.

Nathalie Lussier

I’m a writer, technologist, and regenerative farmer. I founded AccessAlly with my husband in one frantic weekend to solve my immediate course platform issues. Over a decade later the company has grown, and our product has evolved to serve millions of learners across the globe.

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