How to use WooCommerce to Sell Your Membership Program Or Online Course with Memberium for ActiveCampaign

Introduction

ActiveCampaign doesn’t have any built-in E-Commerce features. This means if you want to sell an online course, membership program, or any other type of digital product, you’ll need to use a separate piece of software to be able to sell anything.

The good news is you can use WooCommerce and Memberium for ActiveCampaign to be able to do this. Memberium for ActiveCampaign’s integration will work on all ActiveCampaign plans.

Throughout this article, we’ll show you how to use WooCommerce, ActiveCampaign, and Memberium for ActiveCampaign together to sell your membership program or course.

This post includes an in-depth tutorial that will show you…

1. How to sell an online course for a one time fee and deliver access to that course automatically after with Memberium for ActiveCampaign. The same process can be used for selling ebooks, or any digital product sold for a one time fee.

2. How to sell a subscription-based product, like a membership site, and how to deliver access to that membership site after automatically. We’ll also cover how to sell trial memberships with WooCommerce and ActiveCampaign.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular and widely supported E-Commerce plugins for WordPress. With our integration, you can trigger off actions in ActiveCampaign after someone has made a purchase, cancels a subscription, and when a credit card charge fails on a subscription. Outside of Memberium, you can use ActiveCampaign’s deep data integration with WooCommerce to sync the order details back to ActiveCampaign. They also provide you the capability to trigger abandoned cart actions. These options are covered at the end of this article.

How does WooCommerce Work With Memberium For ActiveCampaign?

With Memberium for ActiveCampaign, you’ll be able to deliver access to your course or membership site automatically after someone buys it. In a nutshell, the way this works after someone buys through WooCommerce is they’ll get an ActiveCampaign tag applied to their record (their membership level tag), access to the content will be opened based on that tag, and the tag can trigger an AC automation that can send a welcome email. You can then follow up after automatically about the next steps they should take and what else they get with the course or membership they just purchased.

In terms of passwords, members will choose their own password during checkout on the WooCommerce checkout page. This is very secure, reduces the need/potential confusion of randomly generated passwords, and allows your members to access their purchased content and billing details all with one login on your site.

Again, if you’re planning on selling a subscription product with your Memberium for ActiveCampaign site, you’ll need to use the paid add on from WooCommerce called WooCommerce Subscriptions, to be able to do that.

Merchant Accounts That Work With ActiveCampaign’s WooCommerce Plugin

The other thing that you’ll need to use WooCommerce with ActiveCampaign is a merchant account. You can integrate any of your preferred merchant accounts with WooCommerce. Such as Stripe, Square, Authorize.Net, PayPal, and others.

If you’re just getting started you can sign up for Stripe for free. Here are some simple instructions on how to install and configure Stripe with WooCommerce. There’s quite a few other plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce to choose from based on the merchant account that you’re using.

With that said, let’s dive in and show you how to use WooCommerce with Memberium for ActiveCampaign…

Beginning Steps: How to Have Memberium Apply Tags based on WooCommerce Actions

The first steps are setting up a product in WooCommerce and then configuring the Memberium settings for that product. I’ll walk you through this step-by-step.

Steps to setting up a one-time payment
(non subscription) product in WooCommerce

If you’re selling access to your Membership site or Online Course as a one-time purchase, follow these steps to get the product setup in WooCommerce.

1. In WordPress, go to the Products tab and click “Add New”
   
2. Enter the name of the membership or course at the top and include a description of the membership or course in the main content area.
   
3. Scroll down to the product data section, make sure “Simple Product” is selected, check the box for “Virtual”, and enter the normal price of your membership or course.
   
4. On the right-hand side, add any product tags, a featured image, and more optional images that you want to be displayed on the product listing.
   
5. You’re free to configure any additional options, but when you’ve set up those basics above, you can publish the product.
   

Steps to setting up a recurring or subscription-based product in WooCommerce

If you’re selling access to your Membership site or Online Course as a subscription (monthly, yearly, etc), follow these steps to get the product setup in WooCommerce.

1. In WordPress, go to the Products tab and click “Add New”
   
2. Enter the name of the membership or course at the top and include a description of the membership or course in the main content area.
   
3. Scroll down to the product data section and select “Simple Subscription” then check the box for “Virtual Product”.
   
4. Next, enter the price and frequency of the subscription. You can charge daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
   
5. On the right-hand side, add any product tags, a featured image, and more optional images that you want to be displayed on the product listing.
   
6. You’re free to configure any additional options, but when you’ve set up those basics above, you can publish the product.
   
   

Steps to connect the product to ActiveCampaign with Memberium’s Integration

With the product(s) setup, we are ready to connect them to ActiveCampaign. When someone purchases the product, we want to apply a membership tag that will give them access. Memberium for ActiveCampaign will assist you with this by automatically applying a tag you tell it to when someone makes a purchase.

Applying an Access Tag after Purchase

On the right-hand side of the product page, you’ll see a box labeled “Memberium WooCommerce”. In this box, you’ll first set up the “Access Tag”

The Access Tag is the tag you want to be applied when a purchase of that specific product is made. This is typically going to be your membership tag. If you’re unsure, you can go to the content you’re selling, look at the Memberium content protection box, and see what Membership Level is protecting that content. In the example below, I would want to apply the “Demo Membership 1” tag.

Running an Automation after successful purchase

From the same “Memberium WooCommerce” box, you can find the option to run an automation.

 

To run the automation upon successful purchase of the product, you’d select the automation from “Order Automation” dropdown. There’s also other options to run an automation for cancel order, payment failure and suspend/on-hold.

Selling a subscription-based membership/course?

The settings described below are designed for site owners that are selling subscription-based access. If your course or membership is a one-off/one-time payment, you won’t need these settings.

Applying a Tag when a Payment Fails

As you may be aware, Memberium has a unique system for cutting off access to members whose payments have failed. Rather than removing the access tag, we opt to apply an additional tag called a PAYF tag. That tag will stop the member from accessing protected content while also providing context as to why the member can’t access said content.

For example, you can quickly see based on the tags that their payment failed. You’ll also have the ability to trigger actions in ActiveCampaign when this tag is applied.

Memberium’s integration with WooCommerce will allow you to automatically apply this tag when a subscription renewal fails. This is designed to work with WooCommerce Subscriptions.

If you have automatic payment retries setup and it successfully collects payment, the PAYF tag is automatically removed by Memberium. 

If your customer adds a new card to their record and makes a successful payment, Memberium will remove the PAYF tag automatically.

If your membership was created in Memberium, you’ll already have the PAYF tag setup (we do that for you). You can view it by going to Memberium > Memberships > “Edit” on the membership level in question.

If you don’t have the tag set up, you can create a new tag and then select it from that dropdown.

Applying a Tag when a Subscription is Cancelled

Similar to the use case above, when a member cancels their subscription, you’ll want to remove their access. With our integration, you can apply a Memberium CANC tag which removes the member’s access to the paid content.

Use the box to set up your cancellation tag. You can read more about PAYF, SUSP, and CANC tags here.

Members can cancel their subscriptions through WooCommerce on your site (if you enable it). Keep in mind that by default WooCommerce fully cancels the subscription at the end of the billing cycle. This means the tag set here will only be applied after the billing cycle is completed.

Applying a Tag when a Subscription is Suspended

In WooCommerce, you have the option to pause or suspend a subscription. Our integration allows you to apply a tag whenever that action occurs.

You can suspend a subscription as an admin by finding the subscription in the subscription list and clicking “Suspend”

Disable Guest Checkout

Memberium Integration Conclusion

In conclusion, the Memberium for ActiveCampaign integration with WooCommerce does two things:

• Automatically creates contact records in ActiveCampaign when a new member makes a purchase through WooCommerce.
• Applies ActiveCampaign tags when a member makes a purchase, cancels a subscription, the payment fails, or the subscription is suspended.

Our integration, although simple, is powerful because it lets you take actions that happen in WooCommerce and trigger more, potentially advanced, actions in ActiveCampaign.

Free WooCommerce Automation

We’ve put together an ActiveCampaign automation made specifically for delivering a course or membership program through WooCommerce and Memberium for ActiveCampaign.

It’s triggered by the Access Tag described above, it includes a welcome email, and a series of followup/onboarding emails – all pre-written.

You just need to import it, make a couple of changes to match your course, and mark it as active. Super simple!

Watch this video for instructions on importing and making the changes: