The best ways to increase engagement on your video membership site
Learn how video galleries can create a better experience for your members
If you’re not already offering video content on your membership site, you’re missing a huge market opportunity. Video has proven to be one of the best ways to deliver premium content to your members, and it’s a great hook to keep your viewers coming back for more.
Many people think that the barrier to entry for video production is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be! In part 1 of this series, I wrote about how to create high-quality videos on a budget. Now, I’ll share with you the best way to set up your membership site with video content that will keep your subscribers coming back for more.
Once you have more than just a few videos in your collection, you’ll quickly notice that embedding video after video on your site just isn’t going to cut it.
Where Multiple Embedded Videos Fall Short
While video hosting providers like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo allow you to embed individual videos on your own site with a simple snippet of code, the user experience that video embeds provide leaves much left to be desired.
Video embeds slow down your site
Each embedded video on your site makes a new request to the video host site for the contents of your video. If you have multiple videos embedded on the same page, your site will make concurrent requests to the video hosts which will ultimately slow the loading process of your website.
Video galleries can fix this by only embedding one video at a time and then loading videos into that initial player on demand when your user’s click to watch the next video thumbnail.
Video embeds give you limited information
Since the interactions with your video embeds are anonymous, you don’t get a lot of useful information about who is watching your videos or how far they’ve progressed through your content. Custom video galleries can track the interactions that your users make with your video content, giving you greater insights in the way your members are viewing your videos.
Video embeds provide a poor user experience
It is not easy to navigate or find specific videos when you have a long list of video embeds on your site. Without extra attention to the layout of your videos, it might seem to your members that video is an afterthought on your site, and worse, they may become frustrated and leave your site altogether. Video galleries can enable search capabilities and direct links to specific videos in your galleries, making it much easier to drill down to specific videos in your collections.
Using Vimeography to showcase your video collection
Make your video collection searchable
The quicker that your members can find the content they’re looking for, the happier they will be with their experience on your site. With Vimeography Pro, you can easily add a search bar to your video collection, which will help your users filter through your videos to find exactly the content they’re looking for.
Display your videos in a functional design
Video galleries allow you to create a much more memorable user experience for your customers by using a unique gallery design for your video layout. Custom gallery layouts show that video is a priority on your site and is a much more professional approach to displaying your collection. The navigation improvements that video galleries provide makes your video content much easier to navigate, which encourages further exploration of your video content
Leverage video thumbnails to tease video content
Your video thumbnails can (and should!) be customized to promote the contents of each of your videos before the user even begins to watch them. This includes combining text and images to create a call-to-action that will encourage your viewers to start playing your videos.
Create shareable links to specific videos
There are times where you may be emailing your users referencing specific videos in your collection. You can use the Vimeography Pro direct link feature to create a link that will automatically load the video you’re referencing into your gallery’s player, allowing your users to load up the right video every time without needing to find it on their own.
Track your members viewing habits
By using Vimeography’s gallery player event hooks, you can track which users are watching your videos and find out how engaged they are with the videos that you are producing.
How to get it all set up
By using MemberPress and Vimeography together, you’ll be able to create your own Netflix-style membership site, protecting your premium content and making it available to your paid subscribers.
First things first: install Vimeography by visiting your WordPress admin dashboard, going to the Plugins page and clicking Add New. Then, simply search for Vimeography in the plugin search field and click Install Now.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll be brought to a page which will help you to create your first Vimeography video gallery. Vimeography works best when you create an album over on Vimeo and then use that album link as the source for populating your videos in your gallery, but a Vimeo username, channel, or group will also work.
This tells the plugin to take all of the videos in that collection and display them in your new Vimeography video gallery. Just like that, you’ll have created your first video gallery!
Now, let’s add it to a WordPress page. Try adingd a new page in WordPress by selecting Pages from the left admin sidebar and clicking Add New.
We’re going to call our new page Video Library. Select the Vimeography gallery helper from the toolbar and choose your gallery name to insert the Vimeography gallery shortcode on your page.
Once you publish your page, you’ll have a fully-functioning video gallery on your site with all of the videos in your Vimeo collection. Awesome!
Since we want to protect this content and only display it to our paid subscribers, we’ll use MemberPress to create the actual membership that your users will sign up for.
To do this, make sure you have the MemberPress plugin installed. Then, select Memberships from the left admin sidebar and click the blue Add New button at the top left of that page.
We’re going to call our new membership tier Premium Video Content and give a price to access the videos. Ours will be set to a monthly recurring price of $9.99 Now, click the blue Publish button on the right side of the screen.
Lastly, we need to create a rule that tells our site to only provide access to our video library page if our users have signed up for the Premium Video Content subscription membership.
Under the MemberPress menu item, select Rules and click Add New. On this new rule page, we’re going to tell MemberPress that we want to protect the Video Library page that we created earlier and only allow access to members of the Premium Video Content membership.
To do this, select “A Single Page” from the Protected Content dropdown and type Video Library in the text field that appears next to the dropdown. An auto-completer will display which will allow you to select the Video Library page.
Lastly, under Access Conditions, click the dropdown box and select Membership, and in the second dropdown box that appears, select the Premium Video Content membership.
Your screen should look like this:
That’s it! Click the blue Save Rule button on the right side of the screen. You’re now ready to test things out and make sure everything works as expected.
When you’re logged out of your site, if you try to access the Video Library page, you should be displayed a message that tells you that you’re unauthorized to view that page.
However, if you try to login as an admin or sign up for the Premium Video Content membership, you’ll see the videos are now available!
Wrapping up and next steps
We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what you can do when you use Vimeography and MemberPress together to create a powerful video subscription site. You can use a combination of custom gallery themes along with a MemberPress site theme to make your WordPress site one-of-a-kind.
If you have any questions about setting up your own video membership site, feel free to email us at support@vimeography.com and we’ll be happy to help!