How to Use the Auto Upgrade Feature to Drip Content

What auto upgrade does is that it upgrades the member of any membership level to another membership level automatically in the background based on what you have scheduled (you as the admin can schedule and setup these upgrade paths).

Auto upgrade works based on the time duration that the user stays a member of a particular membership level. This time duration is specified by the admin in the “Auto Upgrade” tab under the “Members” menu.

So for example, let’s say you have three membership levels:

Basic Membership
Premium Membership
Ultimate Membership

Now let’s say you have set the auto upgrade so that a member who stays as a basic member for 14 days will get automatically get upgraded to premium member.
Basic Membership -> Premium Membership = after 14 days

or
Premium Membership -> Ultimate Membership = after 30 days

Now For example, if Joe signs up to the Basic membership and stays a member for 14 days he will automatically get upgraded to premium membership after 14 days.

Once a member gets upgraded to the next level he/she gets access to the new content based on this new membership level. This is why this feature is very handy when you are developing a membership site that will be used to deliver an online course and you want to drip the course content over a period of time.

Important Note: It important to keep in mind that the “number of days” value that you use in the following field when configuring auto upgrade is an absolute value from the subscription start date of that member (this value is not based on when his account got upgraded to the next level):

Auto Upgrade Interval Settings

So using the above example model, if you want a member to be upgraded to “Premium Membership” after a week and then to “Ultimate Membership” after another week the corresponding “number of days” value for the auto upgrade will be 7 and 14.

12 Comments »

Kimberly Castleberry said:

Is it possible to drip feed someone that’s on subscription or does that confuse the whole subscription process? I assume it would be changing from one subscription plan to another equally priced (and configured) plan, paypal would just keep working in the background, unaware of what was being done?
Kimberly

# 11 July 2010 at 7:55 am

admin (author) said:

The “Auto Upgrade” happens based on the the scheduled time interval that you specify when you configure it. As long as the person in question is an active member he/she will traverse through the auto upgrade path that you have specified.

It doesn’t have anything to do with he subscription payment interval or the receipt of the payment. If the subscription payment is cancelled by the user then the whole membership account will get deactivated so you don’t have to worry about the auto upgrade there.

# 11 July 2010 at 8:48 pm

Kimberly Castleberry said:

So if the entire account is deleted, then there is no way for them to preserve their user data (forum comment ownership etc) if they leave the subscription to buy into the yearly plan or to revert to the free plan? That doesnt sound so good.
Kimberly

# 12 July 2010 at 5:25 am

admin (author) said:

The account never gets deleted unless you delete it from the admin dashboard. The status of the account gets set to “expired” or “unsubscribed” which means they won’t be able to see the protected premium content. As soon as they renew the membership or upgrade to another membership, their account status gets updated to “active” again.

# 12 July 2010 at 6:24 am

Camaleo said:

I have a customer that is willing to sell a membership that will show new contents every month for one year, so he basically needs 12 levels.

How many subscription “levels” are available?
thanks

# 20 October 2010 at 10:53 am

Janice Manson said:

This sounds like the perfect solution for me. Given people may be staggering their membership. Wonderful.

# 20 October 2010 at 1:03 pm

Ivy said:

@Camaleo, Membership levels are unlimited. So you can have as many as you would like. =)

# 20 October 2010 at 8:55 pm

Mary Ann said:

This is brilliant! Thank you so much for wonderful software and awesome online resources and support. Greatly appreciated.

# 11 February 2011 at 9:06 am

John Morgan said:

How does this function when the system is set to handle multiple membership levels at the same time?

# 25 September 2011 at 1:13 am

Ivy said:

@John,
The auto upgrade applies to the primary membership only. You can have multiple membership levels but only the primary membership level will be auto upgraded.

# 25 September 2011 at 7:55 pm

eMember — Membership Plugin Review | WP ;) said:

[...] ability to automatically upgrade members to any of those levels after a certain period is passed (more details).Mixing membership levels and content delivery features imposes some limitations on how you can [...]

# 27 September 2011 at 6:01 am