Amember, Aweber & Wordpress

I've been hunting around for a membership script that integrates well with aweber and wordpress.

I've been recommended Amember, but after reading through the forums and documentation I'm still not 100% convinced that it'll do what I want it to do.

Here's what I'm trying to do:
1. I have a wordpress-based website, part of which will be locked behind Amember.
2. To gain access to the locked section, people will obviously have to sign up, through an opt-in form of sorts. I don't mind if this is an amember form, an aweber form or some sort of custom-coded form.
3. When they sign up, they simultaneously get put into the amember database, as well as signed up to an aweber list.
4. When people unsubscribe from the aweber list, they are automatically removed/nulled from the amember database.

My main concerns are #3 and #4. With #3, the concern is with aweber and their whole 'the user must subscribe' thing, but I've seen plenty of sites that work around this. With #4, I don't mind if I have to have some scripts coded to parse unsubscribe emails and run them through the amember database.

So my question is: is this kind of integration possible with amember and aweber? If not, are there other autoresponder services (or even the one built into amember) available that work just as well with amember?

Thanks.

- Aaron

3 & 4 are the sticky issues.
aMember has a built in autoresponder you can use. Or you can integrate other scripts such as listmail. AWeber and other hosted solutions require an ip audit trail-this means the user has to manually submit a form to them so they know the user themselves are signing up. There are some scripts floating around to do this automatically, but don't think they are officially supported.

David

Thanks for the answer David. I think it might be worth just giving it a spin and see how it all goes.

Cheers,
- Aaron

The best solution for doing it this way is the following (for us it was)

They signup to your aweber list for free.

The first email they get contains a link to your amember free membership (this link can only be accessed through the email so build a custom link displaying only the free membership)

This way you guarantee'd get their email address. They must be double opted in to even sign up to your free amember.

3 & 4 as said above is difficult to sort out. This IP trail everyone goes on about is BS amember has all the data needed to pass onto aweber. I've spoken to aweber about it previously for similar scripts and when you speak to the right people, you get the right answers.

Cheers
Marc

any updates on this thread? i couldnt see anything about autoresponder on the amember homepage

Update: I worked around this by using Autoresponseplus instead of Aweber, and doing a boatload of custom-coding to get everything integrated...

It all looked good in the testbed, but now that the users have been set loose on it some interesting bugs are starting to crop up =/

- Aaron

@marclindsay how did you accomplish the following...?

"this link can only be accessed through the email so build a custom link displaying only the free membership"

Thanks

So we just have a paid membership and not setting up free access.

So do you just they opt-in and once they confirm that will take them to the payment page? That way we get them on our list first? Seems like these other suggestions just cause too much problems.

Butterly marketing script has Aweber integration so why cant it be done here?

I want to use amember, but have concern about getting people added to my aweber lists.. Its working fine in butterfly marketing.. When someone signs up, they are added to aweber and then aweber sends double optin form to them

Amember says it has partial integration with aweber, what does that mean? Will my amember signups be added to aweber list? I dont get it..

there is a plugin available but its not officially supported since aweber doesnt want signups via your IP. aweber wants to have an ip audit trail so they can prove your not signing up emails yourself. BFM doesnt seem to care about this.

If you don't care either, send amember a support ticket asking about the plugin.

David

Butterfly Marketing

You could buy the BFM script and integrate it (there are a few sites that have aMember running with BFM)

BFM does give an IP audit trail of the user submitting the form.

However, BFM costs $797 to $2035.

There are creative ways around it, usually by utilizing the path of aweber confirmation pages with aMember.

I will try to outline that in more detail when I have time.

Generalized Steps

1. The customer fills out your AWeber form and submits it to AWeber.
2. AWeber displays a 'thank you' page and sends the customer a confirmation email.
3. Customer clicks on confirmation.
4. AWeber sends the first message in the autoresponse sequence. This is a welcome email asking the customer to click on an encoded link with any information gathers on the first form (at least email) Note: Make sure you have track clicks OFF on this or it will not work.
5. Customer clicks on link and if provided the aMember signup form with any information that you passed in the link (including if it is FREE, a Coupon Code, whatever info you wish to complete.)
6. Customer completes the aMember signup process.

Yeah, there are some limitations and it isn't perfect, however, it does work and meet the requirements of the IP audit trail of AWeber.

I have some other ideas but am waiting to hear back from AWeber to see if they meet their requirements.

Any updates?

Radmoose:

Do you have any updates to this issue? I am trying to accomplish the same thing and was wondering what you may have figured out.

Thanks,

James

BFM meets all the requirements for AWeber according to the people at AWeber.

From the conversation I had with AWeber, the customer must instigate the AWeber form and have that data sent to AWeber using their form code. However, after that info is sent, you can 'recapture' the data (via AJAX as BFM does) and repost it to another form such as your signup form.

Now, the customer hasn't paid yet, hasn't confirmed via AWeber yet and hasn't really signed up yet, so you need to take those into consideration.

Now, you could make a "Click Here To Continue" button that shows up as the first page they get to after completing aMember signup and send the hidden form pre-filled to AWeber and then redirect to the normal landing page.

I think that is what the aMember AWeber plug-in does, but I am not sure.

I was going to work on it, but since I lost my job I don't have the time to spend on things that are not bringing income. =/

You could buy BFM and integrate that now.. but it is a bit pricey.

If you are using paypal- you can also use the paypal email parser to remove people from the free aweber list and move them to a paid list.

David

really? how so?

got details on that?

and has anyone made any plugins/hacks so far that update the aweber lists when people's subscription expires (or gets renewed or whatever the change may be) and move people from one list to another and so on?

There's an unofficial plugin (i think because it violates aweber terms) that will do that- you need to contact amember directly for it.

Using the paypal email parser is explained in the aweber site.


David

Simple Aweber-Amember integration

My own goal would be to just add my new Amember members to my Aweber list.
And...
If you use the aweber plugin, I believe you only end up with ONE Aweber list with all your members...and what every good marketer really wants is a different list for each product purchased.
(ie we want a post-sale autoresponder for each product, different from the others)
So why not just do this...
1) Create a regular Aweber optin form for your post-sale list, and set the thank you page to your member site's home page.
2) Create a regular, plain old Registration page (ie a squeeze page) with your Aweber form somewhere on your site. Message on that page should say something like "Add yourself to the Member's Mailing list (required)." Doesn't even have to be in a protected area, but it may as well be.
3) Set the Product URL value of your product to the URL of your Aweber form.
Now, when someone buys your product, they'll get sent directly to your Registration page.
Wouldn't that work?
I'm about to try it out myself.
My only thought/concern is that now any time someone logs in through the amember login.php page, they might end up on the reg form again...but that can easily be redirected using a cookie.
Any thoughts on this?
--Mark

Amember Aweber Integration

Well, I just cobbled this together, and IT WORKS. Pretty cool, too.
Make a plain old Aweber registration form, and a plain old Thank You page, and add a bit of PHP to the top of each, and that's it.
I even added the cookie code so that people who log in won't see the registration page every time.
Really easy.
But I'm curious to know something...
this seems so OBVIOUSLY easy. Why hasn't it been discussed before.
In other words, am I doomed to encounter some horrible problem soon because of this configuration?
-Mark

Should be ok, one the the ways I teach how to do it on my site is to cookie the visitor with the aweber info, so that when they go to the amember sign up form, some of its already filled out.

Most people do it this way
Squeeze -> aweber -> thanks (amember signup) -> amember thank you page with aweber form on it which they submit so it moves them from prospect to paid list.

David