The chances are that you already know about people launching membership sites and making millions. Membership sites are booming, and people love them! But reaching out to people and cutting through the noise to reach your potential clients is not as easy as it sounds.
The start might be easy but maintaining your subscriber base and keeping them happy is another story altogether.
Think of this scenario.
You have started a sports membership website, and you invite a few peers to join.
Things might go smooth initially, and you might even get a few more clients through referrals.
But eventually, you start to repeat the same sports content with no fresh inputs.
It’s obvious that retaining your subscribers becomes quite difficult, let alone bringing new ones.
We have all hit it- The wall that seems to sap away all your creative efforts. All you need to improve your membership site is a bit of help to bring your marketing strategy back on track.
Before getting into how to promote your membership site, let’s look more in-depth into it.
What exactly is a membership website?
Membership websites are online businesses that work on a subscription-based business model. Think of it as a gym membership.
Before you are allowed to leverage the advantages of a fitness studio, you’ve got to sign up as a paid member. Once you are in, you have access to everything unlimited. Often you can also benefit from different membership tiers. Simple enough, right.
This is exactly how membership sites work; the only difference is that it is on the internet.
There are different types of membership sites that fall under diverse niches when it comes to membership sites. Here are some of the membership websites you can find online.
- Cooking membership sites.
- Services membership sites- Marketing & business, tutoring, SEO services, coding and development, accounting services, legal services.
- Content production service membership sites.
- Digital art membership websites.
Membership marketing ideas to promote your subscription business (and boost sales)
Marketing strategy 1. Adopt different styles of launching
One of the most tried and tested marketing strategies to drive more sales for your membership site is adopting different launch types. For example, for the first year of your membership site launch, adopt an open membership strategy wherein your subscribers can access the content for free.
When you are starting out, market it all the time to get people in the doors. And once you have thousands of followers, modify the style of your membership. Change your open membership to closed membership, where you do specific content launches for a fee.
Are you skeptical about switching from open to closed memberships? But trust us, it works wonders. If you want to know more about balancing free and premium content and how to rank it in organic search, check this tweet out. It makes for an insightful read.
Marketing strategy 2. Run targeted promotions
To drive sales, you must have a firm grasp on who your target audience is and where they spend their time. If you get it right, it becomes easier to reach more and more new prospects every day. You can’t just hop on Facebook or Instagram and shout out random people to tap the link in your bio or swipe up to visit your membership site.
Instead, you need to schedule a calendar of targeted promotions and plan out specific promotions around relevant dates and holidays that suit your business and could be beneficial for your audience.
For example, you can run targeted promotions on Black Friday, New year, or the start of summer. Take advantage of digital advertisements like Facebook and Instagram paid ads to help with the marketing of your membership website. Keep this in mind- Rapid growth requires rapid investments.
Marketing strategy 3. Implement a sales funnel
A simple sales funnel anatomy that helps most membership sites is as follows.
Free Content- Free Giveaway- Sale
The free content you host can be on social media profiles like Instagram, Facebook, or even YouTube. Make sure the content you offer to the audience for free is of great value. Occasionally lead them to free giveaways using the free content, which is often offered for exchange of their email address.
You can use these email addresses to build relationships and send sales emails about your membership programs. The beauty of this approach is that you are already building all of the content required to set up this funnel, and it doesn’t take much effort to automate and duplicate the content for other promotions.
Take some of your premium content and offer it for free to make it more appealing. The advantages of this approach are several and are as follows.
- Your target audience can see exactly what they receive from your premium subscription plans
- Allows them to share their email address with you as the content is premium and compelling.
Marketing strategy 4. Bring in traffic using YouTube
What if I told you that you could create a marketing powerhouse that pumps out money? All you have to do is to feed it using YouTube traffic. This works perfectly if you already have a fan following on YouTube. Or else, you can begin by creating a YouTube channel after launching your membership website.
You can create informative videos on YouTube that are related to your niche. You can also create video tutorials based on the content from your membership site. YouTube can help direct your organic traffic back to your site, which means you get more opportunities to bring in leads.
Bonus tip. Building your community
If you can keep your existing members, it means you can save more while offering more value to your customers. We see most communities having high churn rates as they lose focus on connections with members and lose them eventually. The tip is to build a tight-knit community around your programs.
This works great as people come for unique content, but they stay on the site for the community. Work towards creating and maintaining an active and highly engaged private community created around subscription programs, and that is where raving fans are acquired.
Conclusion
Many subscription websites and membership sites that are popular now were built out of the real need for something fresh and radical. Creating a membership website is not a challenging task, considering the number of software we have in the market.
However, the most important skill you need to launch a thriving membership site is to adopt a customer centric approach. Delivering great experiences to your subscribers is what will help grow your membership business, bring in more members, and complement all your marketing efforts.