Interactive Email for Online Courses & Membership Sites

Learning membership is a paid course platform, not another checkout button: subscribers pay a recurring price, sign in to a real portal with a magic link — no password, no separate MailInApp account — and watch lessons that track their own progress. You still promote it, remind people about live sessions, and follow up on a webinar the same way you'd send any other MailInApp campaign, with the same fallback engine keeping every announcement working in every inbox.

A membership isn't a single email — it's a catalog people keep coming back to. Learning membership gives you a real hosted course platform under your own account: upload lesson video, price a recurring plan, and let subscribers sign in to their own portal to watch, track progress, and join live sessions. Everything you already use MailInApp for — campaigns, the fallback engine, contacts — still runs the promotion and follow-up around it.

What makes this different from a single interactive email

Every other MailInApp use case lives entirely inside one email and its hosted live-view fallback. A membership is bigger than that: it needs a catalog that grows over time, a place subscribers return to again and again, and billing that renews on its own. So Learning membership adds a genuinely new surface — a member portal at /learn/<slug> — alongside the studio you already know, rather than trying to force a subscription catalog into a single mailed message.

Courses, lessons and video

Build a course as an ordered list of lessons, each with an uploaded video, written notes, and an optional pass/fail comprehension quiz. Video runs through a built-in pipeline — upload, transcode, private streaming — so there's no third-party video host to wire up separately, and nothing is ever a public link anyone could pass around. Mark a lesson (typically the first) as a free preview to let prospects watch it before they subscribe.

A real member portal, not just a landing page

Subscribers never get a MailInApp account. They sign in to your portal with a one-tap magic link emailed to them, browse your published catalog, and pick up a lesson exactly where they left off — their watch progress is tracked automatically. Losing or gaining access takes effect the moment their subscription status changes, checked fresh on every single lesson they open.

Billing that runs itself

Price one or more recurring plans — monthly, yearly, with an optional free trial — through the same connected Stripe account the Product block's checkout uses, extended to real subscriptions. A subscriber who signs up gets a welcome email with a link straight into the portal; a failed payment gets a dunning notice pointing them at their account page while Stripe retries automatically; a cancellation gets a plain notice with a link back to resubscribe. None of this needs you to build a billing system — Stripe's own Customer Portal handles plan changes and cancellations for you.

Live sessions — for subscribers, or opened up as a free webinar

Schedule a live session from the dashboard and it's gated to your paying subscribers by default — perfect for a monthly critique call or live office hours, complete with a shared chat and a separate, moderated Q&A queue running alongside the stream. Flip the same session to public registration instead, and it becomes a stand-alone webinar: anyone signs up with just a name and email, gets a signed join link with no account needed, and you can send a one-click reminder to everyone confirmed as the date gets closer. Registrants are tracked completely separately from paying subscribers — no free signup ever counts toward, or against, your membership numbers.

Promoting it with the emails you already send

Nothing about promoting a membership needs a new kind of campaign. A Countdown block ticks down to a live session or a lesson-drop deadline; a Poll asks subscribers what to cover next; a Video block shares a free preview clip; a Rating block collects feedback once a session wraps. Point a button at /learn/<slug>/subscribe?plan=<id> — or use the built-in "Subscribe" starter preset — and the fallback engine keeps every one of those emails working the same way it does for any other campaign, in every inbox from Gmail to classic Outlook.

Getting started

Claim your /learn/<slug> portal URL and connect Stripe under Settings, create your first course under Courses in the dashboard, and set at least one recurring plan. Publish the course once it's ready — publishing goes through a quick review step, the same "a human checks before it goes live" idea as the public template gallery. From there, announce it like anything else: a campaign with a button pointed at your subscribe page, and a Countdown block once you've got a live session on the calendar.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the Product block's Buy Now checkout?

The Product block is a one-time purchase — set a price and stock, and a recipient buys once straight from an email. Learning membership is a recurring subscription with its own hosted video catalog and member portal at /learn/<slug> — priced monthly or yearly, with subscribers signing in over and over to watch new content rather than checking out once.

Do subscribers need to create a MailInApp account?

No. A subscriber signs in to your portal with a one-tap magic link emailed to them — no password, and no relationship to your own MailInApp login. It's a wholly separate identity from your team account, the same way a recipient replying to a support ticket never needs one either.

Can I run a free webinar without charging anyone?

Yes — flip any live session to public registration and it becomes a stand-alone webinar: anyone signs up with just a name and email, no subscription required. Set a capacity if seats are limited, and registrations past it are automatically waitlisted, same as the free RSVP block.

What can subscribers do during a live session besides watch?

They can post in a shared live chat and submit questions to a separate, moderated Q&A queue you triage during the stream — not just a silent broadcast. Both re-check that their subscription is still active on every single message, not just when the page loads.

What happens if a subscriber's payment fails?

They get a dunning email pointing them at their account page to update their card while Stripe automatically retries the charge. Access only changes once the subscription itself is no longer active — a single failed attempt doesn't lock anyone out immediately.

Can I let people preview a course before subscribing?

Yes — mark any lesson (typically the first) as a free preview, and it plays for anyone who reaches your portal, subscribed or not. Every other lesson stays gated behind an active subscription, checked fresh on every single playback request.

Build this in the studio

Start on the free plan — every interactive block and the full fallback engine are included on every tier.