Whew! Just published our Buyer’s Guide to WordPress Plugins to Sell Subscriptions. I looked at a good number of paywall plugins but ultimately decided to review these 10: aMember, Digital Access Pass, InfusionWP, Magic Members, MemberWing-X, PaidMemberships Pro, S2MemberPro, WishList Member, WPMU DEV Membership, wp-Member. In researching these plugins, I was surprised at how they missed a number of marketing opportunities:
- Every plugin touted the fact that it offers multiple membership levels. But guess what, most of them do – so that hardly makes any one of them special. Marketing tip for the plugin industry: Tell me something that differentiates you in terms of membership levels. I loved to see when a plugin offered a separate welcome page for each level. Great chance to upsell to a higher level of membership.
- I had to really dig (mostly by contacting the developer) to find out what the actual paywall page – the most important page on a subscription site – would look like. The sales websites would show sample sites that are using the plugin but never showed a sample of the paywall page or gave information on how much it could be customized in terms of colors, graphics, registration fields.
- None of the sites I looked at mentioned group sales. If these paywall plugins want to attract businesses selling to other businesses, the ability to make group sales is crucial and a great differentiating factor.
