10 insights for a successful membership website

Building a members' website or community platform? Ten lessons from real projects — from pricing strategy to retention.

Read this before you make costly mistakes that waste your time and money!

What is a membership or membership website platform? It's an online business where customers gain access to content exclusively for members. Membership sites are often paid subscriptions and the content is exclusive.

A membership site or membership website platform is a great online business to run. It can be a wonderful community of users, a creative outlet and a profitable business. Best of all, you can add a membership site to your existing digital business.

But don't be mistaken, right now it seems like membership sites are simple. Everyone can do it. Really?!

… 😉

I'll give you some insights shortly, but first I want to tell you about…

My experience with membership websites.

There's a lot involved in creating and running a successful membership website platform. And believe me when I say this, I know exactly what you're going through. Fortunately, I've had the opportunity to work with various large and small accounts over the past 10 years.

• Creating content, videos, PDF workbooks.
• Setting up the website, sales pages, registration pages.
• Setting up technical components, membership plugins and integrations.
• Going back and forth over product names and pricing.
• Oh yes, and let's not forget that you'll probably change your mind a hundred times.
• Then you launch.
• Then you realise it's not going the way you expected and you're forced to take a different approach.
• Removing things and repackaging them.
• … then you RELAUNCH … to the same list (oh how embarrassing!)
• Then you redesign your new website all over again.
• Then you RELAUNCH again!
• Then you try advertising.
• Next you try random things out of curiosity and desperation.
• Maybe you pause for a bit. Or you carry on and support the remaining 30 members as if it's a whole job.
• And then you come back to it later with a fresh perspective.

It's so much work, you forget your original ideas. I want to be honest with you:

If you're doing this membership solely to earn passive income, you should just stop now. It's not an easy way to make money.

Maybe it's easy to make friends and fans. Easy to get loyal customers who want to hear your voice every day…

But you should only start a membership site if you're willing to go all in. Your customers expect to receive valuable content on a regular basis. If you don't deliver that, they'll ask for a refund or simply unsubscribe.

I manage membership sites for clients.

The membership sites of the clients I help range from few to many members. I've also helped with every part of their membership. Newcomers need help with basic marketing strategy or setting up the system. Established users need help with coding and server management (since their site is now struggling under the weight of enormous success).

So….

I've had the opportunity in practice to set up and manage various membership sites. I'm happy to share a few insights and I hope this helps you.

Only apply if it makes sense for your situation. If you need help, send me a message.

1. Differentiate your membership PLANS

There are generally 2 types of plan differentiation:

• User-focused
• Solution-focused

Let's take as an example that you're selling a membership for online football lessons. A user-focused plan might look like BEGINNERS, ATHLETES, PROS. A solution-focused plan would be TECHNIQUES, TRAINING, STRATEGY.

I can't tell you which one you should follow. Generally speaking, I think the user-focused route will deliver more valuable and long-term benefit to your potential customer. Whereas the solution-focused route feels more like a quick and easy short-term fix.

Eighty per cent of memberships (or other businesses for that matter) will go the user-focused route.

But … if you're selling to people who know what they want / need, then you should go the solution-focused way.

2. Be careful with "membership" LABELLING

Be very careful about how you use the word 'membership'. The word isn't as valuable as you might think. If by "membership" you mean a SUBSCRIPTION… I can tell you that nobody wants to sign up for a subscription.
Nobody wants to keep paying for something.

• Is it an exclusive club?
• Is it an ongoing service?
• Is it something that makes your customer happier every day?

You need to be very careful about how you sell this.

Most people who try to start a membership site have the fantasy that future members will pay their bills for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, the reality is different. For a hundred and one reasons.

• Is your membership built around a short-term problem? Customers will soon stop.
• Is your membership built around a long-term problem? Even then, customers can still stop.
• Is your membership built around an absolutely essential service? Internet, phone, etc.
• Is your membership built around other benefits? Savings, useful recurring task, etc.

You really need a very strong value proposition to sell a membership. Perhaps even stronger than selling a one-off product. But to keep it simple… your membership must have ongoing benefits to justify the ongoing costs.

3. BILLING for customer lifetime value

No member stays forever. Don't fool yourself!

Most membership-based products use the recurring revenue model to INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE. And if you don't calculate things correctly, you'll probably get the opposite effect. The idea is to adjust your billing in your favour.

Here are a few examples…

• Imagine you're a gym and most people quit within the first month. Knowing that you probably want to sell them a cheap 12-month deal upfront.
• Imagine you're a mobile phone shop and most people want to buy an iPhone for €1,000 upfront. Knowing that you probably want to sell them a payment plan over a 24-month period.

So…. Sometimes you earn more by selling long-term plans to short-term customers. Other times it can be the opposite. You need to price yourself based on how long they're (likely) to stay.

• Price for the long term if they quit within three months.
• Short-term pricing if they stick around for a while.

4. Design Your "FREEMIUM" Experience

Every membership site (or business) uses the freemium model.

This is true, whether you realise it or not. Even Louis Vuitton uses the freemium model. And the freemium model is this. Users who don't pay receive a certain level of free product or service. And the users who do pay get "the good stuff".

Most premium products and businesses use the "freemium" model in an interesting way. Let's take Louis Vuitton for example. Their freemium experience is that you walk into their shop and try their products for free. Smell them, touch them, maybe even try them on. But that's it! If you don't pay, you can't take that experience home with you.

The freemium model is simply a matter of giving users the opportunity to taste things and build their desire for the premium version of it. Easy for some products and businesses … but how on earth do you do that for your membership site?

Perhaps you start with a free membership. Or a blog with lots of useful advice. A newsletter, etc. Yes, it's a lot of work. This is why I say that membership sites aren't easy to do! The positive side is that the freemium content will help you build a following and authority within your niche. Which over time pushes people off the fence to try your product.

One thing I know for sure. It doesn't matter how great your sales pages or adverts are, if you give nothing away for free … and lock all the good stuff behind a subscription payment plan, that membership won't grow very fast. And don't bother with "free trial" either.
Nobody trusts that.
I really do think it's easier to sell your first month at a normal price than with a free trial period.

5. Continuous "PREMIUM" Experience

Recurring payments require ongoing value.

Can you imagine paying €15/month for Netflix if they never added new shows or films? Imagine logging in every day and it looks EXACTLY THE SAME every single time. Okay… now think back to your membership idea.

Are you actually going to create new premium content every week/month/year? Because again, how on earth are you going to justify that recurring payment to your customers?

There need to be new things, new announcements. Something is always happening! Every time your customer considers cancelling, they see an announcement and suddenly experience FOMO (fear of missing out). They think to themselves… "ahhh, I'm not going to cancel… I might want to see that".

Or would you prefer they think: "Ehh… it's the same every time. I think I'll cancel my membership now and sign up again later."

No… I didn't think so.

Here's the other part of the PREMIUM experience. Whatever your membership sells, it needs to be something a customer uses every day (or every week). Because if they don't use it, they certainly won't keep paying for it. And if your product isn't essential enough to use, then it's not premium!

My tip here is to tailor your content to how people actually use it. Too often we create content the way we want to sell it, or in the way that's easiest for us to produce.

• Try a series of 2-minute videos released every couple of days instead of a 60-minute video.
• Try a weekly summary of the most popular discussions instead of annoying emails for every forum reply.
• And if you're not planning to create a lot of new content, know that your members won't be there after three to six months. Most will quit after a month.

6. Convenient user engagement

The best way to increase user engagement is to go where they are!

Currently, these are the 2 places … Facebook and email. That's the fastest way to grow your member community. Create a Facebook group and keep them informed via a newsletter exclusive to members.

Your members are already active on those 2 platforms. It's no effort for them to stay informed, log in, and participate with likes and comments.

There are different community growth tactics for different community sizes.

If your membership is small or doesn't exist yet, you start with Facebook and email. But once it grows … you can then begin migrating to your own managed forum on a private domain. And on your own private site you can offer more benefits. More interesting things to click on. More information, and so on and so on. But that's only once the Facebook group has grown large enough.

7. Membership MARKETING

Sell the journey, not the solution.

This advice might seem backward from everything you've ever heard about marketing, but it's valuable to me. You need to sell memberships differently than one-off products.

You can't talk about solutions and features, because then people start thinking about whether they actually need a membership. The hardest part about selling the membership is justifying why it even needs to be a membership in the first place.

Let's take a membership piano lesson course as an example. Why can't that be a book or a 60-minute video? Why does it have to be a "membership"? Do you see what I mean?

In those moments, you need to focus on the "ongoing benefits" of that membership. That there's a person to guide them personally. Or that there are other members to ask for advice and tips. Or that there's an active board with recently updated resources or performances for pianists. Again… the key phrase is "ongoing benefits".

8. SETTING UP your membership site

Keep your membership site simple!

If a site requires advanced training to navigate, you'll lose members.

I cannot stress this enough. Most membership sites I see waste all their time and money building a (complicated) fancy site. It ends up being too difficult to build, too difficult to manage, adds no value for customers, and costs time you could have spent creating valuable content!

Users should see a clean homepage, pricing tables with benefits and a registration page.

Make content easy to access and keep the site straightforward.

A new user should be able to start navigating your site almost immediately. Once logged in as a registered member, they see their members' content. That's it!

Stop experimenting with expensive sales pages, upsells, funnels, extras, chat sections, forum sections, and more distractions. Stop building non-essential pages.
Small (or starting) membership platforms need a simple user process. Only when you get large numbers of members (and different types of members) does it make sense to build extra areas and features for them!

Last but not least, please don't try to build everything yourself if you're not technically inclined. It's better to hire someone else to build it, so you can focus on creating content and marketing.

9. Choosing the right PLATFORM for membership

Should you opt for your own (e.g. WordPress-based) or a third-party platform (e.g. Kajabi, Click Funnels, Huddle)?

I hear people complaining about the pros and cons all the time and I think NONE of them have ever actually run a successful membership site. For me, it's not about the features or which one helps you get up and running faster. The most important criterion for me is which one works best for you once you have more than 1,000 members.

THINK AHEAD!

Whichever platform or plugin you use, check how scalable it is once you have more than 1,000 members. Some platforms are very limited.

• They don't allow other features you may need.
• Their user interface is cumbersome for managing a certain number of members.
• The costs are too high.
• They cannot integrate with other tools/services you use (and so you have to purchase different software to monitor the flow)

And if you ever have to migrate platforms, it's SO painful and SO expensive. I definitely prefer WordPress over a third-party platform. Of course it may cost more time and money to build out, but it's absolutely worth it given the expansion and scalability. You're welcome to do what feels best to you.

10. What to do with a SUCCESSFUL membership site

Think about a new / permanent content schedule for your membership.

What new things will you add in the long term? And how will those new releases be scheduled? Monthly? Half-yearly? Annually?

You'll probably do one of the following:

• Realise that memberships take far too much time and effort and gradually move back to selling products.
• Or retain members and upsell them to products or more expensive memberships.
• Add other ‘authority figures’ to your membership to create content and facilitate community discussions.
• Exit your niche completely and invest your money elsewhere, such as property. Sell your membership to someone else.

Bonus: Keep your former members on good terms!

A former member can always come back!

A member leaving your site can sting, especially in the early days when you're really missing out on recurring revenue. Remember, however, that former members have shown enough interest in your site to sign up once, and they can be persuaded to do so again. That's why it's important never to burn your bridges.

Find out why the member left. Exit surveys are a great way to see what you're doing wrong and give you clues on how to entice former members to return. A person may have experienced a change in financial circumstances, but if all your members are leaving because costs are too high, you may need to reconsider your pricing.

Some members will leave because they've exhausted the available information, in which case you might entice them to return if you keep them informed of new content. Perhaps your site isn't delivering what members expected, in which case you can identify the broken connection and fix it.

If a member wants to cancel their account, try to guide them towards a lower or free tier instead of letting them delete their membership outright. This way, they'll still interact with the site and can still receive notifications about new content updates, sales and promotions, and more that might encourage them to return to a paid tier.