Tracking Member Logins

One of the most basic features of any membership site is the login requirement - or restricted access to your valuable content. Over time, we have noticed that many membership site owners/managers ignore the support requirements of the login requirement and don't adequately monitor member login failures and frustrations.

It seems relatively simple, a member simply enters an email address and password to gain access to the membership site. If a member forgets the password, the Reservoir system provides a link to allow the member to have a new password generated and sent to the email address stored in the system for that member.

While we have fine tuned the system to make the process as simple as possible (while remaining secure), we have still noticed login failure rates as high as 10% of all members. This means that up to 10% of your members may have been frustrated and unable to access your membership site in their last attempt. This is in ADDITION to the members who failed initially, but then reset the password and were able to access the site within a couple of minutes.

We don't believe this is unique to the Reservoir system - we just believe that other systems are not adequately tracking this data. And the sad thing is that you probably don't hear about it from most of your frustrated users - they don't complain, they simply cancel the membership.

We believe it is critical you monitor user login activity, and we have provided the tools to allow you to do this. The Reservoir system tracks logins (both successful and failed), reasons for failed logins and also password resets. You can view this information in the Reservoir Admin System. In addition, we have added this information to your CRM system to allow you to run queries and contact your users without having to even login to the Reservoir system.

You will notice the following custom fields (added by Reservoir staff) in your CRM:

  • Reservoir Password (hashed password to access Reservoir system)
  • Last Login Attempt (date of last attempt to login to the membership site)
  • Last Login Successful (was the last login attempt successful - Yes/No)
  • Last Login Failure Reason (if the last login attempt failed, this will provide the reason it failed)
  • Profile Updated At (date of last time the member updated the profile information)

Make sure to review this information about your members. At a minimum, we suggest:

  • Contact members with failed logins to see how you can help (would they like you to reset the password).
  • Pull a list of members who have NOT logged into the system with the last 30 days (or whatever period you think is best) to provide info on the new resources that are available to them.
  • Encourage members to update their profile periodically (you might need to give them some sort of incentive to keep information up-to-date).

Good luck - don't forget to keep your eye on membership logins so your members don't get frustrated trying to access the resources they have paid to view.