Membership marketing is tricky. Unlike the typical B2C sales, once you got the customer, got the customer forever (well, most of the time)!
Membership models, however, requires prolonged nurturing, converting, and re-engagement efforts. It can be time-consuming and – more prominently – a never-ending process.
So how can you manage your efforts and maximize membership growth?
To answer this, we put together a common in membership marketing practices.
Here are 10 marketing practices for membership websites.
1. Identify your target audience
It’s hard to sell something if you don’t understand your target market. Before you can effectively market your membership program, you need to know your audience inside and out.
To establish target markets, marketers typically keep track of all aspects of engaged users, including demographics, behavioral data, profession, geographical locations, and psychographical data, including personal opinions, values, and beliefs.
For instance, if you’re selling online courses, your audience isn’t just people looking to buy them. Those people may be taking them for professional qualifications, rather than personal enjoyment. If you can identify that it’s those looking for professional qualifications that are engaging with you, then you start to think of marketing strategies that appeal to this audience, instead of a more broad approach that would appeal to all course buyers in general.
Consequently, you should run several types of marketing campaigns to discover your key audience types and what makes them tick.
2. Craft an irresistible value proposition
The heart of your membership program lies in the value it delivers to members. Whether it’s exclusive resources, expert insights, networking opportunities, or discounts, your program should offer a compelling reason for individuals to join and stay engaged.
Consider conducting surveys or focus groups with your target audience to understand their pain points and needs. Tailor your membership benefits to address these specific concerns, ensuring that your program becomes an indispensable part of their professional or personal journey.
Furthermore, clearly communicate the value proposition in all your marketing materials, making it easy for potential members to see the benefits of joining.
3. Create an access funnel
Nope. Not the type of funnel that is deployed for sales… Yet, it has been proven a great way for membership conversion.
Thus, having a free taste of your membership gives confidence to potential members and is a great onboarding strategy.
Here are three levels of access funnels:
Level 1 – Gated content for a minimal asking cost
It is content locked for members only and accessible for an attainable condition. For instance, submitting an email to access a blog post or subscribing to a newsletter.
For example, you can protect specific sections of a post or courses and give access in exchange for an email.
Level 2 – Freemium
The appeal of Freemium programs is no secret — free access for a limited time or limited programs.
You create a Freemium program to give members an overview of the membership experience they would be receiving, and what type of content you provide in your membership.
Level 3 – Open Days
It is opening your membership only for a certain period to let potential members experience the whole membership for a set period — which pertains to courses, tutorials, content, and perks.
This type of funnel is usually time-sensitive, access to membership is limited only for a couple of days or weeks until the doors open for the public again. Thus, allows you to focus solely on converting these members by creating demand-spiking campaigns until the final deadline.
📖 You might also like to read: Password Protection vs Membership Plugins
4. Create valuable content
Besides word-of-mouth, content is king. Create a content marketing campaign that establishes authority in a given topic or industry over a period of time. In fact, content marketing (27.4%) is one of the most common marketing strategies used to bring in new members (Membership Geeks).
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can start creating valuable content that resonates with them.
Content marketing comes in different formats, such as blog posts, articles, webinars, podcasts, videos, case studies, white papers, infographics etc.
It may also be a good idea to make this content freely available to increase reach. The main aim of content is to alway provide value to your audience, even if it’s free. Free offerings act as a natural funnel to paid premium memberships, as potential user can get a taste of what you have to offer and make informed buying decisions as to whether upgrading is worth it or not.
Pillars of a good content marketing strategy should focus on evergreen content and topics that answer questions, solve problems, or provide insights that are relevant to your ideal member. While creating content, you should also work on SEO since 51% of new members comes from SEO practices.
5. Establish a strong online presence
Creating a good online presence goes hand in hand with content marketing.
Alongside an authoritative website set up with search engine optimized content, that has a clear navigational path for potential members to subscribe, you’ll also need to leverage social media sites.
From LinkedIn, Instagram, X (Twitter), Tik Tiok, Facebook, and Youtube, and so on – there’s a constant battle for consumers’ attention across these platforms. Social media marketing (15.1%) is the second most used marketing channels used to bring in new members (Membership Geeks).
So, make sure you can handle it, create a strategy that is focused and aligns with your target persona the best, rather than spreading yourself thin across all social media websites.
Formats will differ across sites, but some key strategies that work well across them all include the following:
- Consistent technical quality and schedules – for example, always live stream expert sessions at the same time in high quality (audio, video, and resolution).
- Showcase your products or services – give real-world examples of your membership services in use to establish trust.
- Engage with your local community and beyond. E.g., collab with similar services and cross-promote to user bases.
- Create brand consistency across social media channels. E.g., matching colours schemes, log, and brand messaging tones.
6. Use incentives and promotions
Incentives and promotions are highly effective membership marketing practices for attracting new members, with a study by Juniper predicting that digital loyalty programmes are set to reach over 32 billion memberships globally by 2026, reinforcing the value of incentive-based strategies in the digital age.
Try different techniques to get a matter of what works best, some examples includes:
- Discounts – Limited-time discounts for new members. E.g., give 20% off for the first three months. Just make sure to notify subscribers when the discount period is ending to save any awkward conversations or churn risk. Also remember, you can set this up automatically with a payment processor like Stripe.
- Loyalty schemes rewards customers for staying subscribed.
- Affiliate schemes – sell memberships on behalf of you for a commission.
- Refer a friend schemes – earn commission or get x amount of time free for every new subscriber you bring in.
- Create urgency – One-off promotions that run for a limited time to create urgency in people to join. E.g., were you planning on runnin a promotional campaign coinciding with the end of the month? Well, you might want to think again, as the days assigned to flash sale are key to success as a new report has revealed that Sunday is the worst day to launch and Tuesday is the best day of a limited-time sale.
- Installments – inflation is making it hard for us all. There force, offering payment installment methods could be a game changer.
7. Host events and webinars
Social media is oversaturated and consumers are awash with articles.
Digital events can be a great way to remind consumers you’re human and establish great personal relationships with them through genuine conversations.
Think of virtual events, including webinars, workshops, or Q&A sessions, as the first point of contact when meeting members in real life. You want to leave a good impression and initiate a long-lasting relationship, where members will feel comfortable enough to reach out to you for help if needed.
Crafting virtual events to give members the ability to ask industry experts questions about their professions or interests, is a good way to establish authority and give direct access to members. This also builds trust that you know what you’re talking about.
8. Create a member community
It can be difficult to retain your first x amount of members. Typical drop offs occur because there is limited content, which is to be expected in the early stages.
Therefore, it can be helpful to create an online community, this offsets the amounts of work you have to do, because over time enough users will be active and provide value to each other.
Instigating good community practice can empower members, increase engagement, and even decrease churn rates, communities must constantly reassert their vitality. Indeed, the more successful the community, the greater the threat of decay. This is due to orbiting consumers blind to the norms that have developed and the benefits that have accrued and with only a limited understanding of the community’s origins or the need to sustain it through hard work over time;
Furthermore, the importance of social learning cannot be overlooked either, members tend to act like mimick octopuses and repeat what they see from other mimicker, this allows the mimicked to get on with more important tasks. Therefore, particularly distress-formed communities (unexpected events, e.g., covid19) should also shift to a reliance on symbolic stewardship of community values and traditions.
9. Utilize engaging membership email marketing
For sure!
Email marketing stands as a cornerstone of membership marketing strategies.
It’s one of the effective top-of-the-funnel acquisition channels and a customer-centric mode of communication.
It allows you to nurture and re-engage with members in an effort-based campaign — as much as your input is as powerful the results would be. It can be automated, personalized, and a great cost-value advantage for both ways (i.e. compared to push campaigns such as ads.)
76% of membership sites say email is the best way to re-engage members and generate renewals.
But how can you effectively use email marketing for membership growth?
Use and add (to email lists) content upgrades
Email newsletters convert to members via a stream of valuable content on the go, and use the opportunity to nurture members in the pipeline with thought-leadership content until they decide to sign up.
Also a great channel for existing members to inform them about perks and updates.
Add content upgrades in your content (blog posts, social media posts, and others.)
Send out primary campaigns
- Membership onboarding emails. — Welcome emails that are sent to members with necessary information are reported to have 86% higher open rates than other types of emails.
- Freemium or gated content emails — Send valuable content to leads that are interested in your membership program.
- Membership renewal reminders and invoices.
- Dormant & cancellation notifications. — Sent out to engage members, such as when a subscriber hasn’t logged into the membership site for X days.
10. Use social proof
Social proof is a great passive membership marketing strategy — content to sell membership from existing members on 2 opposing ends of the spectrum; influencers – business Moguls. (aka the dependent ones) and friends & family of prospective members.
VWO indicates that incorporating social proof elements (such as user testimonials, community member counts, and case studies) on membership pages can lift conversion rates by 10–15%.
Customer testimonials and case studies are highly persuasive, as they provide real-world experiences and social proof of the value your membership program offers.
This social proof helps build trust in your membership program and makes spreading awareness of your membership “everyone’s business.” Nielsen reports that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know and 70% trust online reviews.
You can either reward the effort (i.e. posting review/rating or writing feedback) or reward the final outcome (i.e. a lead member converted to a lead.)
Wanna build your membership website?
Around 472 million websites (or roughly 43% of all websites) are built on WordPress.
And, according to Membership Geeks, 53.28% of membership sites are hosted using a membership plugin on WordPress.
Here are useful resources to get started with WordPress membership:
You can use WP Full Members to create membership website with WordPress. Learn more about it here.