Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

“Cancellation” is a word that sends a shiver down the spine of any membership site owner, but are membership site owners missing a trick when it comes to how they handle cancelled members?

In our own membership, Membership Academy, 25% of members who leave end up rejoining. This is why it’s essential not to burn your bridges – and to put a rock-solid win-back strategy in place.

Join us in this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast to learn what a win-back campaign is, how to structure it, and what some of the essential tactics you need to use are.

Essential Learning Points:

• Where many membership site owners are getting it wrong when it comes to cancelled members
• How to create a win-back sequence that gives lapsed members a great reason to come back
• What the three key notes you need to hit are if you want to create a compelling case for re-joining your membership

Important Links & Mentions:

• Try These Tactics to Pre-empt and Prevent Member Cancellations
• 4 Essential Email Automations Every Membership Website Needs
• Facebook Remarketing Strategies for Membership Websites
• What To Do (And What to Avoid) When Someone Cancels Their Membership
• Membership Academy
• Membership Mastermind from The Membership Guys

Key Quotes:

“People may leave your membership site for a variety of reasons and many of those reasons will have nothing to do with them being unhappy with your membership.”

“You need to give people enough time to realize what they’re missing, to get past the issue that may have caused them to leave in the first place.”

 “As part of your win-back campaign, you should be asking outright – what would it take for you to return?”

 “At Membership Academy, we find that about 25% of members who leave come back.”

Your blog and your website host all of the content used in your marketing – so how do you join the dots between your blog and your membership?

There are plenty of ways membership site owners can do this, but many don’t because they’ve heard bad advice from marketing ‘gurus’ or they’re worried about sounding salesy.

The good news is there are direct and indirect ways of linking from your blog to your membership – and all of them are good, easy ideas to implement!

So, listen in to this episode to learn why it’s so important to build that path from your blog to your membership and how you can do it – with examples from ourselves and our members at Membership Academy.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why it’s so essential that you use your blog as a promotional channel for your membership
• Direct and indirect approaches you can use to drive traffic your membership from your blog
• Why you need to discount one particular piece of advice that some internet marketers swear by

Important Links & Mentions:

• How To Use Content Marketing To Sell Your Online Membership
• Membership Academy
• How to Decide Which Content Should Be Free vs Paid
• How to Generate Email Leads for Your Membership Site
• Facebook Remarketing Strategies for Membership Websites 

Key Quotes:

“Your blog is a primary place to promote your membership.”

 “Often all someone needs to be ready to buy is awareness that you have a solution to their problem.”

“We get so many people clicking through from the CTA on our thank you page and we have so many members inside our community whose sales significantly increased once they added that CTA to their thank you pages as well.”

“You need to make sure, if you’re getting people subscribing to your email list, that you have an initial series of emails that sells your membership.”

Despite my protests over the years, I’m ready to admit that there are a few instances where it is a good idea to use a closed door membership model.

Some of them are very niche, some of them require a few “ifs” and asterisks, but they are entirely valid and are all better suited to a closed door model.

This episode is well worth checking out if you’re just starting out or if you’re trying new things with your membership. It could make a foundational difference to the way you run your membership!

Essential Learning Points:

• What the difference is between closed door and evergreen membership models
• The six situations that suit a closed door membership model best
• The one universal truth that applies to every membership model

Important Links & Mentions:

• 5 Reasons Why I Dislike the Closed Door Membership Launch Strategy
• Why You Should Run a Beta Test for Your Membership Site
• Creating an MVP to Test and Validate Your Membership Idea
• Lean Live Launch strategy
• Promoting Your Membership Site with an Affiliate Program

Key Quotes:

 “If your model uses cohorts – a set intake of students and schedule – then the closed door model is essential.”

 “If you’ve been running your membership for a year or two and you know that there is a clearly-defined off-season period – where demand subsides and sales drop – then you might be better served by taking sales and marketing out of the equation for that period.”

“Whether you choose an evergreen model or the closed door approach, keep in mind that you still need to show up for your existing members.”

Community is often the heart of membership sites but working out the best way to introduce it to your membership isn’t as easy it might seem.

Often, we see debates around how to host membership communities that end up focusing on quantity of engagement, rather than quality.

Quantity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not always what you’re actually aiming for.

If you want to find the signal in the noise and determine the right community model for your membership site, you’re going to need to dig a little deeper into your purpose, your membership structure, and the goals your audience have.

This episode of The Membership Guys podcast will help you do that digging!

Essential Learning Points:

• What the Signal vs Noise ratio is in communities and why understanding the differentiation is important
• Why understanding your membership and its purpose is key to deciding the role your community should play
• What we have learned (and are still learning) about our own experiments with forums and Facebook groups

Important Links & Mentions:

• Should I use a Forum or Facebook Group for my community?
• Do You REALLY Need to Add a Community to Your Membership?
• How to Add an Online Forum to your Membership Website
• Membership Mastermind from The Membership Guys

Key Quotes:

“It is crucial to understand that activity and engagement are not the same thing.”

“The importance of your signal to noise ratio will depend on how important community is to your membership.”

“We’ve clearly defined the role of the forum and the Facebook group, and how the two connect. Because of that, we’re not experiencing any problems.”

 “The type of role that your community plays is entirely up to you and it’s going to be dependent on what you know will work best for your audience.”

Member retention is critical to the long-term success of your membership website.

It costs 7-10 times more on average to win a new member than it does to hold on to an existing one; and if you’re losing more members than you bring in then your business won’t last long!

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, we’re giving you 21 quick tips for improvements you can make to your membership strategy in order to improve your member retention.

Every industry, topic and niche has its fair share of jargon.

And memberships are no different.

There’s already so much to juggle as a membership site owner, so the last thing you want to have to worry about is needing to wrap your head around all of the lingo!

So to make it easier for you, we’ve rounded up the 9 key terms and phrases you need to know if you run a membership.

Facebook remarketing is one of the most exciting developments in online advertising in recent years. 

Now, instead of being limited to picking demographics and targeting options that we think relate to our target audience; we can actually leverage actual user behaviour to determine which ads they are shown.

This enables us to show the right message to the right person at the right time, which dramatically improves the effectiveness of our Facebook ads.

When it comes to membership sites, there are 6 key ways in which you can really leverage Facebook remarketing - and I'm sharing them all in this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast

Running a membership site is a juggling act.

There’s a seemingly never-ending list of things to keep on top of; and with much of the focus revolving around things like producing content and marketing to bring in new members it’s easy to see why some of the basics get missed.

However it’s often the relatively minor day to day activities that have the real impact on how successful a membership site is.

In this episode I discuss 4 such activities you should make sure you’re doing each and every day in your membership

Social proof is a powerful, persuasive factor when it comes to making buying decisions.

If we see others behaving in a particular way, buying a product or, say, joining a membership site; then we're far more inclined to follow suit.

More and more, customers are basing their buying decisions on what other people recommend, rather than promotions, discounts and other sales tactics.

In this episode, I share 7 ways that you can add social proof to your membership sales page.

Memberships are a marathon, not a sprint.

Unlike other products where the sale is the end of the journey, with memberships it’s just the beginning.

That “journey” – the Member Lifecycle – typically breaks down into 5 key stages: acquisition, onboarding, engagement, retention and reactivation.

In this episode, we’re looking at each of these 5 stages and what they mean for you as a membership website owner.