The thought of having recurring revenue can put dollar signs in anyone’s eyes! You can see those dollars increase and save yourself a lot of heartache by thinking through your long term membership site strategy. It’s critical to work through the entire customer experience, so you don’t find yourself scrambling and have frustrated customers. My clients are always surprised by the items they haven’t thought of when we discuss their membership strategy.
To increase the success of your membership site launch, I use these three membership site strategies.
1. Plan out the ENTIRE Sales and Customer Process
Whiteboard, digital or scratch piece of paper, it doesn't matter. Plan out your entire process. Use some of these questions below to help you ensure a better experience for you and your customer. It’s not just about delivering content on your membership site, it’s also about the experience your users have when getting your content.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Decide one point of entry where you'll drive traffic for them to purchase your membership program. A customized landing page is always best!
- How are customers to learn about your membership site? Website home page, email, landing page, or social networks.
- What happens after they buy? Where do they go, what to they get? Many people think “ka ching” send them the content and we are done.
- What type of content are you providing? Do they get a download? Do they go to a portal of information?
- Do they get an email? Setting up auto responders will save you time and create a better customer experience. Does it require several emails? or just one?
- Do they get a password auto created for them or do they create their own?
- Is this content interactive? How long do they have access to the materials?
- How are you going to charge? By the download, access for 3 months or six months, is it a one time access or unlimited.
- How often are you updating content? Daily, weekly, monthly or everything is already there.
- Is the membership ongoing or does it open and close?
- It’s is self paced? or require interaction with customers through webinars, teleconference or regularly updated content?
- What happens to your customer when your membership expires? Does it expire?
- If you have various membership content options, how does a customer move through each content? Upsell, cross sell, etc.
2. Keep Things Simple
Make it simple to buy, simple to sign up, simple to login, and simple to access content. Brainstorm all the content you want, or could, deliver through your membership site. Then figure out how it goes together in the simplest form. It’s easy to say “I want to charge $29 a month for people to get my awesome knowledge.” It's another thing to ensure people are getting value for $29 a month. Customer support issues will drastically be reduced when your membership site is simple and easy to access the content they've paid for.
3. Have a system for handling Customer Support
Technical support issues are the last thing any membership site owner wants to deal with. Even though you hope a magic fairy makes technology work perfect and you hope everyone is as tech savvy as they should be, customers will have technical issues and/or questions. Everything from real technical issues to not understanding what do to. To reduce support having a solid membership site platform is the first and most important tip to reduce membership technical issues, the second is having a system to manage their questions. Create an FAQ page, a knowledge base, email system, or phone number. You decide, but make it easy to get help. When you use a well built membership system, customer support decreases, but dealing with these issues can be frustrating, especially when you receive an email that says “I downloaded your eBook and I don’t know where it went” —- that is clearly an issue on their end, but nonetheless they are going to expect you to be able to solve the issue for them. Customers having problems resetting their passwords, with problems accessing content, having technical issues with old browsers or devices, having problems accessing from mobile devices, and not being able to login are just a few common support issues you need to be prepared for.
When you make the customer experience awesome, you'll see those dollars signs will not just be in your eyes, they'll be in your bank account!
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