Question about Recurring Payment Customers and Getting Autoresponder Messages to Them

[MarkGM]

Hi everyone and Happy New Year,

I'm looking for some free advice here. I'm offering a subscription product for sale and I wanted to make two options available to my customers -- a pay by the month option, and a discounted pay-the-lump-sum-all-at-once option.

Do you think that is a standard practice with on-line subscription payments -- or by offering the pay-by-the-month option, am I making everything too complicated?

(I want to send out e-mails twice a month with links to each new lesson in the e-mails.)

I know that AWeber has an 'autoresponder for customer list' available, but it
seems designed for customers who pay for the entire subscription up front in one payment, using the PayPal "Buy Now" button.

But the system becomes unwieldy and difficult to manage for the recurring payment customers. It has no way of keeping up with 'who's making their monthly payments' and 'who isn't.'

So it appears that I may have to cobble together two different solutions -- one for each set of customers. The monthly customers and the "lump sum" customers.

For the "lump sum" customers, the solution appears to be using the AWeber 'customer list' autoresponder for those who pay up front (with the PayPal "Buy Now" button.)

And for those subscribers who wish to pay by the month, it seems best to use a different autoresponder (to communicate with them and send them their lessons) i.e., an autoresponder e-mail sequence such as that in a membership site software, such as aMember.

(I do have the aMember software installed on my site but haven't used it for anything yet. I could could use it for this sequence of e-mail messages if I have to. )

So that means, on my sales-letter web pages I would have two different button options -- the "Subscribe Now" button for those who want to pay month to month, which would take them to a "membership site" list,

By making both options available to prospects on my sales page, am I being too complicated. Or giving customers a reasonable option?

Or am I creating management headaches for myself by being willing to let them pay month to month in the first place?

Any insight or recommendations you might have re: this issue of recurring subscription payments and autoresponder e-mails to these customers

would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thank you!

Mark Mitchell

[David-MA]

aMember can definitely be used for sending out sequential emails, and for collecting monthly vs. yearly subscription. Suggest you put your license to work!

David

[MarkGM]

Thank you, David.

[FernHill]

I second what David said. I've been using Amember exactly like that, and it works like a charm. The only downside I find with Amember is that once someone has subscribed with you, or become an affiliate, they then have to "add product" to buy anything else from you. i.e. they can't just use the regular purchase link.

If that's confusing, I'll try to explain with an example. I have a membership site. Person X is an affiliate only. Now Person X wants to join the membership as a paying customer. They click "join membership" on my sales page and then Amember won't let them join because they are already in the system. The solution is for them to click "add product" and ADD the membership to their existing account. This can get confusing for people.