Have you ever wanted to offer your memberships and training to groups, teams, or corporate accounts?
We’ve got a new feature in Memberium for ActiveCampaign that will enable you to do just that.
With Group Accounts, one main account signs up for the membership and can then add child or sub-accounts that share access to the purchased content. This makes it easy for multiple people within an organization (or family) to sign up under one parent account while having their own logins and permissions. It also means everyone gets charged on the same credit card instead of each person needing their own subscription!
Pro + Advanced Feature
Group Accounts is a feature that is available only with Memberium for ActiveCampaign – Pro and Advanced subscriptions. This feature is not available for Standard subscriptions. You can easily upgrade your license by clicking here.
One thing that many site owners combat is account login sharing. Even major corporations such as Netflix struggle with this. Memberium does have some built-in features to help with this, but a solution we often recommend is allowing your members to add their team, family, co-workers, etc. to the site for a small cost or including a few seats for free in order to boost your core offer.
What can you do with Group Accounts?
Below I’ve outlined a couple of the primary use cases and ways you can use Group Accounts. However, bear in mind that these are just examples and the way YOU implement this feature on your site can be completely different.
Boost your base membership offering
Similar to how Netflix and Masterclass.com allow you to have simultaneous screens going at the same time (to share with your household), you can offer the same exact thing for your membership program.
If you want to boost your core membership offerings, add the ability to share access with 3-5 team members, family members, etc.
You could even raise the price of your base membership package.
Sell access to corporations that need each member to have their own login
Similar to what I’ve described above, there are corporations where purchasing training programs is usually done in bulk. 100+ seats required.
Group Accounts can facilitate this by allowing you to charge for each seat. The technical details on how to set this up is explained in our other documentation, but in short, you get to define how many seats each member on your site has to add sub-accounts.
This can be based on ActiveCampaign tags or based on a number field in ActiveCampaign.
For a corporation, you could sell and grant them 500 seats.
The best part is that you don’t have to manually add all of those accounts.
Group Accounts has a feature that lets the main account holder generate a unique signup code to be shared with their team members or employees. Each person uses that code to create their own account.
The main account member can also manually add sub-accounts if needed.
How you can use Group Accounts to increase your revenue
As with most membership sites, the goal is to generate more revenue. Even if your primary mission is to train or teach others about your field, you have to have $$$ to do so.
Group Accounts lets you add an additional income stream without having to create additional content.
You will be able to sell individual sub account seats to your existing members. You might give them 3 seats included in their membership or you might give them zero to start with.
Then they can pay X amount (per month?) in order to add a team member, friend, or colleague.
We would suggest providing a discount to incentivize sales. If your course is normally $499 – allow them to add a sub-account for only $299.
I would strongly recommend that you give members at least a single seat for free. This way they can invite a friend. This encourages referrals naturally and spreads awareness about your site and brand.
Who should use Group Accounts?
Group Accounts is for anyone using Memberium for ActiveCampaign that wants to be able to sell access to teams, corporations, or boost their main membership offering.
It was designed as a way to encourage existing members to refer you to their friends and colleagues and a way to make additional income.
If your membership site is content focused, Group Accounts is naturally a good fit.
Who shouldn’t use Group Accounts?
Group Accounts is not intended for those trying to serve schools in most cases. The biggest reason is that Group Accounts only supports a two level hierarchy.
Parent -> Child.
Main Account -> Sub Account.
Where with a school, you generally need more levels such as:
School -> Teacher -> Student
Group Accounts also won’t be a good fit for site that are mostly based around 1:1 consulting or coaching. Although there may be some applications where it makes sense, generally it’s designed to share access to content such as online courses, eBooks, audios, etc.
How do I get started with Group Accounts?
Getting started with Group Accounts is easy. The only requirement is that you’re using Memberium for ActiveCampaign and have a PRO or Advanced license.
If you have a Standard license and want access to this feature, email support@memberium.com so they can assist you in upgrading your license.
Out of the box, many of the features just work. You will need to make some minor adjustments to your onboarding automations (mainly apply a tag to the main account), but here’s a quick overview.
- Update Memberium to the latest version.
- Create a new “Parent” tag which will be used to control who can add sub-members. Assign this tag under Memberium > Group Accounts.
- Enable the Whitelist Memberships option to give the sub-accounts the same membership levels as the main account.
- Configure a “Child Added Automation” which will email the password to the new child/sub-account. Please note you need to use “CRM Plaintext Password Field” feature under Memberium > Settings in order for password to be saved in an ActiveCampaign contact field.
- Create a page with the key shortcodes for the main account to add the sub-accounts: [memb_groupaccount_enroll_child] and [memb_groupaccount_list_children]
Of course, there are more options available and different configurations you can setup, but at the most basic those 5 steps is all you need to do.
Group Accounts FAQs
I’m not seeing Group Accounts on my site?
Most likely you need to update your Memberium plugin. You also need to have a Pro or Advanced license. If you’re still not seeing it, email support@memberium.com with your site and admin login so we can take a deeper look.
Will the sub-accounts inherit all memberships the parent has?
If you set the “Inherit Memberships” to NO – they will not get any of the memberships automatically. If you set it to YES, they will get all of the memberships.
In order to give only certain memberships, you should set it to NO and then use the “Tag Inheritance White List” to whitelist the membership tags you want the sub-accounts to also have access to.
Remember: In the example above, if the member doesn’t have the “Gold Membership” the sub-account would not receive it.
How does Memberium calculate how many seats a parent member has?
Memberium determines how many sub-accounts a member can add by adding up the following items:
- Minimum Child Accounts setting
- Additional Children Field
- Tag Grants
The ‘Minimum Child Accounts’ setting determines the base number of seats someone has. If you set this to zero, they will have none by default. If you set it to 3, all parent members will have 3 seats available in addition to any other they get from options 2 + 3.
The ‘Additional Children Field’ setting lets you connect an ActiveCampaign field that contains a number. This number determines how many additional sub-accounts the member can have. You can use this in conjunction with any eCommerce system that can trigger an ActiveCampaign automation which then uses math to increase the value of the field.
Lastly, the ‘Tag Grants’ option lets you grant an additional number of child seats if a specific tag is applied. You can set different values for different tags.
Ready to Start Using Group Accounts with Your Membership Site?
This feature is available only for Memberium “Pro” or Memberium “Advanced” license holders. You can easily upgrade your license by clicking here.
If you’re a Standard license user that’s interested in using this new feature, you can contact support, and they can help upgrade your account.
Setup Overview
The ‘Group accounts’ feature by Memberium for ActiveCampaign allows your customers to create sub-accounts. Your users can add and remove sub-accounts (called “child accounts”) through a self-service interface. Each child account is a full-fledged ActiveCampaign contact that can be marketed, added to automation, etc as well as a WordPress user with their own login.
The Group accounts system can also be referred as parent/child, team accounts, umbrella or corporate accounts.
Group account works on the concept of parent and child accounts. Parent accounts holds the access, and children inherits that access from the parent.
By default, a child account inherits “all” of the tags that a parent account has. This behavior is core to the group account system, and cannot be completely disabled, although it can be modified to work a number of ways, through whitelisting and tag translations.
Group Accounts General Settings
Child Added Automation – The automation to run on the child account when a child is enrolled by the parent account. This is the most critical action, and it should send welcome email with the password. If this action is not supplied, then the child contact record is created using the supplied information, but no further action happens. Please note you need to use “CRM Plaintext Password Field” feature under Memberium > Settings in order for password to be saved in an ActiveCampaign contact field.
Child Cancel Automation – The automation to run on the child account when a child is cancelled by the parent account.
Parent Added Automation – The automation to run on the parent account when a child is enrolled.
Parent Tag – This tag will grant parent access to a user. Adding this tag to a user will make them a parent user.
Inherited Fields – This is a list of Contact Fields that will be inherited from the parent account down to the child account. The field will only be inherited (and not copied) to the child account.
Inherit Memberships – By default the child account inherits any/all membership tags held by the parent account. When this option is enabled, it will allow the child user to inherit all the membership levels of the parent user but no other tags will be inherited.
Tag Inheritance Whitelist – A list of tags that the child can inherit from the parent account. Entering tags in this field will disable the default behavior and only the tags in this field will be inherited.
Minimum Child Accounts – The default number of child accounts a parent starts off with before any other factors are added. For example, if we enter “10” in this field, then the parent user will be able to add up to 10 child accounts.
Additional Children Field – This setting optionally points to a contact field on the parent record that will be used to increase the child count. You can select any field from the contact record, however, it should be a field that contains a simple numeric value. For example, let’s say you have a field named “Child” in ActiveCampaign and if we enter “10” in this field, then the user would be able to add 10 more child account. If the number in this field is negative, it will be subtracted.
Tag Settings
Tag Grants
Tag Grants gives you the power to give your parent accounts additional child slots based on which tags the parent account has. Each tag the parent have can grant a different number of child slots. You can assign a value to each tag, and that value will be added to the minimum number of child accounts that the parent has. To delete a tag from this list, simply click on the delete icon.
This method of granting child slots can be used either with or instead of the other settings for child slots.
Tag Translation
This option gives you the ability to translate tags that the child inherits from the parent.
For example, if you wanted the parent with a “Gold” account, to have children with “Silver” accounts, you could whitelist the membership tags to be inherited, and then add tag translations so that “Gold” would be translated to “Silver”, “GoldPAYF” to “SilverPAYF”, etc.
Shortcodes
[memb_groupaccount_enroll_child]
View [memb_groupaccount_enroll_child] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_child_count]
View [memb_groupaccount_child_count] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_list_children]
View [memb_groupaccount_list_children] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_has_children]
View [memb_groupaccount_has_children] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_is_parent]
View [memb_groupaccount_is_parent] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_is_child]
View [memb_groupaccount_is_child] documentation…
[memb_groupaccount_show_code]
