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Promoting a membership site is way different from promoting a blog or an affiliate product. In today’s blog post, learn some membership site marketing strategies that you can apply to your membership site.
Simply launching your membership site won’t get people to come and sign up to your membership site. You’ll have to promote it and tell people it exists and how it can benefit them.
Membership sites are harder to sell than products because you’re selling content, community, and results. Your members have to commit for months or even years to gain value from what you have to offer.
I’ve talked about strategies like increasing traffic, participating in affiliate programs, and hosting contests to drive up membership signups, but these activities should ideally be going on alongside more long-term, marketing strategy.
In today’s blog post, I’ll be discussing membership site marketing strategies that you can apply to your own membership site so you can attract as many prospects as you can and keep your site profitable.
Before you begin any promotional activity, you need to prepare your sales funnel.
“But what’s a sales funnel?”, you ask.
Simply put, a sales funnel is a sequence of actions that are meant to guide prospects toward a decision; in this case, the decision you want them to make is to sign up for your membership site.
The general steps of a membership site sales funnel are as follows:
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Awareness. This is the stage where your prospects become aware of your membership site and what you have to offer.
Thus, here’s where your promotional contentcomes in.
This includes your traffic strategies: social media marketing, content marketing through your blog, email marketing to your existing mailing list (if you already have one), and paid ads, if you’re going that route.
The awareness stage is also where your promotions and contests/giveaways come in, specifically the ones that are for building awareness.
Interest. When your prospects are now informed about what you have to offer, and they decide they’re interested, they’ll want to find out more.
This involves clicking on the call to action (CTA) on one of your promotional materials, which leads them to your Landing Page.
Your landing page here is for your lead magnet in exchange for their email address so that they can be part of your email list you can send them useful content plus information about your membership site.
Your lead magnet here is a free piece of useful content, like an eBook, a checklist, a 1-minute video training, or anything of value that you develop as a giveaway. When using a lead magnet to promote your membership site, it’s good to emphasize that there’s more where that amazing piece of content came from so they’d be curious to know all about your membership site.
Desire. If your prospects dig the lead magnet, and they’ve read all about your membership site, it’s on you to increase their desire to sign up.
This stage is where you show your authority and that you actually do know what you’re doing. Instead of them looking for free information all over the internet, they can just go to your site and get all expert content at their fingertips.
Plus, this is where you show your prospects that you made the membership site with them in mind, and in joining, they’ll find like-minded people like them and that they’ll belong.
No matter how much free content or how many free communities there are out there, you need for your prospects to believe that yours is the best content out there that solves their problems. Plus, they need to believe that you’re hosting the best community on your site because you had people like them in mind when you created your membership site.
The first (sometimes only) chance you have to do this is in your Thank You/Confirmation Page. This is a fairly crucial page because they’ve just downloaded your lead magnet, they just signed up for your email list, and so this is the perfect time to tempt them further.
Action. You’ve made them want to sign up, and now you have to make them actually click the button and do it.
Your thank you page should then lead to your Sales Page, with all the features and benefits of your membership site plus really strong testimonials and social proof, because having a strong community is a good motivator to join a membership site.
Plus, before signing up to your membership, your prospects will want to see who’s joined so they know how popular your site is and if it’s really a community of like-minded people.
Your CTA here needs to be strong to convince them to sign up right there and then, because the next page here is your checkout page, asking for their payment details.
Here’s how the flow of a basic funnel looks like:
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Running a marketing campaign means you need to have a strategy.
But many membership site owners think they have a strategy when they only have a set of tactics. A strategy is more than that; it’s a clear, defined system with different tactics that work closely to achieve the results you want in the most efficient way possible.
Below are some membership site marketing strategies that you can try to apply to your own site.
After you initially launch your membership site, you might think you don’t need to ever do that again and just leave your membership site open such that you can promote it all year round and prospects can sign up anytime.
And yes, you can absolutely do that.
But what you might want to do instead is to only open your membership site for signups at certain times of the year.
You might think that you’re missing out on prospects that theoretically will be signing up for the rest of the year, but actually, seasonal launches can be even more effective in bringing in more customers because you create a sense of urgency; if they don’t sign up today, they’ll have to wait for the next launch in a few months.
Plus, being in launch mode twice or three times a year allows you to take the bits that worked in the previous launch and then take away the bits that did not work. This allows you to perfect your launch sequence and to become a better marketer.
An additional technique is to only open a limited number of slots. Having limited slots open in a limited amount of time plays up exclusivity and scarcity. Being a member of an exclusive club where only a select few get in can be very attractive to prospects and may just be the decision maker for those who are on the fence.
However, you don’t have to lose those prospects who somehow find your membership site and are interested but have the misfortune of finding your site when your enrolment is closed.
What you can do is turn your sales page CTA from leading into checkout page to signing up for an early notification mailing list. Here, you can continue to give them valuable content so they don’t forget you and lose interest, as well as tease your next launch date so that they’re ready for it.
You can also consider holding a private launch midway between your launch dates that’s only open to those who signed up for the early notification mailing list. Try doing it and see if you have a better chance of convincing them to sign up during a private launch than if you make them wait until the general launch.
Choose times of the year when members are likely to be looking for your membership site. For example, weight-loss and self-improvement sites are likely to be searched by prospects at the start of the year.
But if your niche is a bit unpredictable or has constant demand, schedule your launches for times of the year when consumers in general are likely to spend, such as the holiday season from Black Friday to Christmas, or during the summer.
When you were launching your site, there were prospects who showed interest in signing up for your site but never did.
“Hey, guys! Come back!”
These could be the prospects who signed up for your waiting list during a launch (or your early notification mailing list if you’re applying the previous strategy) but never signed up, or went through to the checkout page only to close it or go to another page without ever submitting their payment information.
Create an email sequence for those in your waiting list but didn’t sign up for your site. Send the first email in the sequence the day after the final day of the launch period, reminding them to sign up, listing all the features and benefits of your membership site, and probably asking them why they never signed up.
Build a separate email sequence for those who made it to the checkout page but didn’t end up inputting their payment details. Life isn’t convenient all the time, and something may have happened while they were filling out the form. Send these prospects an email sequence, with the first one being sent within the first hour after they abandoned their checkout.
Personalize your emails and offer to help them out if they had any questions or concerns that made them hesitate. Plus, more importantly, don’t make them go through the whole sales funnel again; provide a link straight to their checkout page so that the only thing left for them to do is to input their payment details.
Offer an incentive/reward for signing up or finishing their signup. For instance, you can offer a one-off discount if they sign up within 24 hours of your email being sent. Or offer a free trial for a few days to help them make up their mind.
Making this offer time-sensitive will make it more urgent and will be more compelling than if you just leave it open-ended.
If the term “tripwire marketing” sounds foreign and even menacing, allow me to explain what this is.
“Tripwire” in this context means a part of your membership site that you sell to your prospects after they subscribe to your mailing list. It’s also called a product splinter, front-end offer, or introductory offer.
A tripwire is different from a lead magnet in that a tripwire isn’t free but costs much less than your membership fee. It’s a way to give prospects a low-cost, valuable taste of what you have to offer before they take the plunge and actually sign up for your membership site.
If you employ tripwire marketing, your sales funnel will change slightly. After your prospects download the lead magnet, they are NOT YET opted in to a mailing list.
The Thank You/Confirmation page for getting the freebie will then show the features and benefits of your tripwire instead of your actual membership site.
If your prospects purchase the tripwire, they’re subscribed to a separate mailing list that gives them information about the tripwire: how to use it, what they can expect, and an offer to contact you with any concerns. At some point in the mailing list, you can promote your membership site (or the “full” product) and include a link to the sales page of your membership site.
If your prospects don’t purchase the tripwire, they’ll be enrolled in the usual mailing list that gives them information about their freebie and eventually promotes your membership site as well.
The important thing to remember here is that prospects who download your lead magnet and buy your tripwire shouldn’t be enrolled in two mailing lists. Receiving twice as many emails from you is potentially annoying and is counterproductive to what you want to do, which is establish a good relationship.
Don’t do this to their inbox.
Now that you know how tripwire marketing works, what can you actually use as a tripwire?
If you’re offering online courses on your membership site, then you can offer one of your courses as a standalone product. If you’re running a community-based membership sites, you can offer a one-week pass for $5 (less than a dollar a day!).
You might be wondering how tripwire marketing works when it’s easier to tempt people with free stuff. But actually, getting offered so much free stuff has made people suspicious now; if they get offered something that they know is really valuable for free, they think “Hmmm, what’s the catch?”
So if you offer audiences something that’s clearly more valuable than the freebie they just downloaded, they then think, “So if I spend a little bit more money, I can get more value.” Conditioning them to think this way makes them more open to signing up for your membership site when it’s time to offer it.
Plus, when prospects have bought from you and it goes well, even though it’s a relatively small purchase, they’ll be much more open to spending more; that is, by signing up for your membership site.
Once you get the hang of this, you can have multiple tripwires targeted to specific subsets of your target audience so you’ll have more chances of convincing prospects to sign up for your site.
Growing a thriving, profitable membership site involves continuous promotion efforts. Learning a variety of marketing strategies will help you get more prospects to look at your site and consider signing up for your membership site.
Remember: You don’t have to use just one. Feel free to mix and match the marketing strategies you are most comfortable with and those that are compatible with your preferences and membership site. Test them out and find out which ones work and which ones don’t.
Once again, here are the membership site marketing strategies discussed earlier.
1. Holding Seasonal Launches. Opening your membership site for enrolment only during certain seasons or times of the year is more effective than leaving your site open all year round.
2. Email Remarketing. Email remarketing gives you a chance to run after those prospects who showed interest but didn’t sign up for your site.
3. Tripwire Marketing. Offering a part of your membership site for a low price gives your prospects more value than a lead magnet for a lower investment than your membership fee.
I just have a couple more reminders before you implement these strategies.
I’ve made this point when I was talking about tripwire marketing, but it bears repeating.
Automated email sequences make an online marketer’s life easier, for sure. But setting them up carelessly can spell disaster for your campaign.
When you set up your mailing lists and email sequences, make sure you avoid sending the same emails to the same prospects. Also, make sure that if they are on multiple mailing lists for downloading different freebies or lead magnets or tripwires.
Write down all the tasks involved in your chosen marketing strategy and schedule them in your calendar properly. This organizes your marketing tasks, which you actually need as they coincide with your content creation and member engagement tasks.
Not only do you need to be more organized, you need to know if your strategy is working and if it does, how well it works in terms of number of signups and amount of profit earned.
How are you currently marketing your membership site? What marketing strategy has worked for your membership site? Is there a strategy that I missed? Share it with us in the comments!
JoAnne is your average, everyday, sane stay-at-home mom who believes in the power of the internet to make dreams come true. She has an insatiable appetite for chocolate, as well as all things internet marketing. She keeps up with the latest trends in blogging, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and more.
