Free registration

Offering a free membership lets you reach a wider audience of visitors who want to explore your content before committing to a paid plan. Free memberships remove barriers to entry, give you a way to showcase what you offer, and create opportunities to convert free members into paid members. In this help article, we’ll walk you through how to enable free registration, customize your free registration form, and share content with free members.

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Why offer free registration

Our free registration feature enables your members to sign up without any cost or obligation for a paid subscription. This group of free members can be targeted in our WordPress integration, member website and newsletter, as well as our email newsletter integrations. Free members will appear in your Memberful dashboard with a full member profile but without card details or membership to a paid plan.

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Enable free registration

To enable this feature, go to Website → Forms → Free registration and toggle on Allow free registration.

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Customize your free registration form

To customize the free registration form text, go to Website → Forms → Free registration. You can edit the title, subtitle, and button text. You can also redirect free members to another URL after sign-up under Website → External website → Custom redirects → After free registration redirect. You can also create custom fields for your members to fill out right after creating their free account.

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How to subscribe free members

Add the free registration URL to a button or link on your own website, or our Memberful member website, so members can sign up for free. If you’re looking to subscribe members and don’t have a sales page, use our member website with our built-in custom subscribe page. This allows your members to sign up for free alongside your paid plans and standalone downloads.

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How to target free members

If you’re using Memberful along with our WordPress plugin, you can protect certain pages and posts for All members - inactive, active, and free. If you’re using our member website, you can create pages and posts that are protected for all members, including free members, or send a targeted newsletter to free (and inactive) members. If you’re using any of Memberful’s email newsletter integrations like Mailchimp or Kit, you can target free members with a newsletter using the “Free registration” signup source. Since members never lose this designation, make sure you build a segment that excludes those members who are subscribed to a paid plan. e.g. Free registration = True and is not subscribed to = Monthly plan

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Track your free members

To view all free registered members who don’t have an active subscription, go to the members tab and choose the filter: Free signup (never subscribed). Members are automatically removed from the free signup list after upgrading to a paid plan. You can also view or export a list of your free members to monitor them.

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How free members can subscribe to paid plans

After enabling our custom subscribe page, you can guide free members to purchase paid plans on your subscribe page by clicking the subscribe page link in their member account page.