Can I offer Membership Plans by Email Extension?

You can offer a particular corporate plan to members that have emails ending with @company.eu or offer a student plan to any student with a registered @school.edu address. This can be done by using a wildcard search.

A 'Wildcard' search can be used to identify all email addresses connected to a particular email subdomain. Wildcard email domains act as a "catch-all" for all addresses ending in the sub-domain that you search for, without having to know each individual email address domain name.

How it works for Company/Organization/Student plans:

A wildcard (*) is substituted for any words that are connected to the remainder of the email domain. For example:

• @*.edu
• @*.co.uk
• @*.company.com
• @*.company.co.uk

These wildcard domain searches would populate any email address ending with any of these sub-domains. For example, [e-mail], [e-mail] etc. 

Why would I use Wildcard search?

1. Offer an entire organization a particular membership plan without the need to import or know every email address (or every address created in the future) in that organization.

2. Any group that shares a particular email domain may be offered a particular membership plan. For example, you may offer any student that has a registered .edu email address a particular plan or just any student that has a registered @harvard.edu email address. 

3. Employees of an organization may use different email domains, even though they are in the same organization. For example, an employee of SilkStart may have an email address that ends in @silkstart.com or the sub-domain @eu.silkstart.com. Both can be supported and offered the same membership if desired. 

How does an employee join using their email address?

1. The company's admin completes the 'Email Domains' field when registering their company.
2. When an employee joins, they select "Does your Company already have a membership with us? Sign Up using your Company email address."
3. The member enters their work email address.
4. SilkStart looks at the email domain they entered and compares it to the email domains attached to companies in the database.
5. If it finds a match with any company, SilkStart sends the member an email at that address, prompting them to confirm that it's a valid email.
6. The member clicks on a link in that email, which sends them back to the signup form and allows them to register as an employee of their company.

Email domains can be enabled either to grant an individual plan to single users (ie. let all members with a @harvard.edu email address access a specific plan) or to let employees join under their company's plan. 

Enable email domains for an Individual membership plan:

1. Log in to your admin panel and navigate to Settings > Plans
2. Select your Individual plan
3. In the 'Email Domains' field, enter the email domains you wish to support

On your website’s join page, users will now see an option to sign up with their organization or university email address:

Enable email domains for an organization in your database:

1. Within your admin panel navigate to Organizations > Basic Info > Email Domains
2. In the 'Email Domains' field, enter the email domains you wish to support

 

On your website’s join page, users will now see an option to sign up with their organization email address and join their company in SilkStart:

 

Check out our these FAQ articles for more information regarding Corporate/Organizational Plans: 

How do I add an individual to a corporate membership plan?

What is the difference between Individual and Organization plans