Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Lead generation is a critical part of the sales process for membership owners.

For most membership businesses, this means getting people to subscribe to your email marketing list, where you can engage with them further on a more direct basis and guide them towards joining your membership site.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I talk about how to convert website visitors into email leads, and give my top tips for increasing both the quantity and the quality of the leads that you generate.

It's easy to get carried away when creating a membership website.

We often turn to other memberships for inspiration, and as a result end up with a wishlist of shiny bells and whistles that we absolutely MUST have for our own website.

And the end result of cramming all of those features into your membership is a convoluted frankenstein's monster of a website that's a pain to manage and an even bigger nightmare for members to use.

It's not just the tech side of things that people tend to over-complicate; we see the same thing happening with marketing, sales and overall business strategy too.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I warn against adding too much complexity to your membership business and discuss the benefits of embracing simplicity.

As the year draws to a close and many inside your membership and your wider audience will be in a festive mood, what sort of things should you be doing as a membership owner?

Whether you're a Christmas fanatic or a modern day Scrooge - the festive season brings with it a few unique opportunities for your membership business.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I talk about 6 things you should do in your membership over the holiday period.

• Creating "year end review" content - what we do at The Membership Guys, and some ideas you can try
• The importance of taking time away from your membership over the holidays
• Reviewing your achievements in the past year and setting goals for the next 12 months
• How the festive season affords you more opportunities for promotional campaigns

Membership websites have a whole mess of moving parts - plugins, themes, integrations, payment processors - they all add up to make memberships one of the most complicated types of sites that you can build.

And even if you have help getting everything up and running, chances are there'll be numerous times you'll need a bit of tech support in the day to day running of your membership.

But finding reliable help with the technical side of building and maintaining a membership can be a crap-shoot.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I run through some of the most viable options for finding tech support that you can rely on for different stages of your membership.

• The number one resource for learning how to build your membership site yourself (Spoiler alert: it's Member Site Academy - because of course it is!)
• How to distinguish between a legit web developer and someone who has just learned how to configure a handful of plugins and themes
• Why it's not essential that your chosen web developer has specific experience with membership sites
• Where to get help with ad hoc tech issues and day to day maintenance

The "one to many" aspect of a membership site is what makes it such an attractive business model.

The ability to leverage your time, skills, experience and expertise in order to serve hundreds or even thousands, without having to deal with issues of increased expensive, strained resources or limited capacity that can come when trying to grow other types of businesses make memberships one of the most scalable models there is.

However sometimes in order to get to the next level, you need to do a few things that don't scale too well...

• How to add a personal touch to your membership without spreading yourself too thin
• Times where offering a "done for you" or "done with you" service may actually benefit your membership as a whole
• The value of taking your community offline and organising real world meetups
• The biggest challenge in selling a membership, and the specific tactic that works best for overcoming it

Much of what we discuss here at The Membership Guys revolves around building and growing a successful membership.

But once you've reached a point where you can call your membership "successful" - what's next?

For many, the continued growth of their membership - increasing member numbers and revenue - is the be all and end all of their ambitions. And that's a perfectly valid goal.

But for those who want more, what does that "next level" look like?

In this episode, I discuss 5 ideas for how you could take an already successful membership business to even greater heights.

• The damaging effects of becoming complacent in your approach to your membership
• Memberships are an evolution and should change over time, but not ALL change is good...
• The biggest mis-steps membership owners make when it comes to their community
• Why you shouldn't blindly follow the advice of experts and "gurus" - and yes, that includes us!

Running a membership requires you to get into the routine of regularly showing up, serving your members by creating valuable content, interacting in your community, answering support queries and so on.

These day to day habits are the cornerstone of any successful membership - however when developing those positive habits it's all too easy to also develop bad ones.

In this episode, I highlight some of the more common bad habits we see membership owners falling foul of, and give my top tips for breaking them.

• The damaging effects of becoming complacent in your approach to your membership
• Memberships are an evolution and should change over time, but not ALL change is good...
• The biggest mis-steps membership owners make when it comes to their community
• Why you shouldn't blindly follow the advice of experts and "gurus" - and yes, that includes us!

Cancellations are an inevitable part of the member journey.

Everyone running a membership deals with them.

However that doesn't mean you just have to sit back and let cancellations happen!

In this episode I share some simple ways that you can pre-empt cancelling members and reduce the number of people leaving your membership.

• Why it's crucial to get feedback from outgoing members in order to help you zero in on problem areas (and easy fixes!)
• Monitoring member activity and engagement, and taking action to salvage people who might be slipping away
• "I haven't got time" is a common reason members leave - what does that really mean and how can you tackle it?
• Dealing with involuntary churn from failed payments - what's the answer?

Are you worried about the churn rate of your membership? 

Many membership business owners look at the numbers dropping and panic. They might even believe that the membership business model is flawed, and maybe they should try their luck elsewhere. 

In this episode, I talk about churn rate and why it shouldn’t be the one thing you think about. 

This episode instead focuses on THE most important metric – customer lifetime value, and why that should be your focus before you make any decision about the future of your membership. 

If you’re considering switching from a membership model, listen to this episode first.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why people get worried about churn rate
• Why there’s no industry average churn rate
• How to look at churn rate with context
• What lifetime value is and why it’s the most important metric

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• Despite What You’ve Heard, Average Member Retention is NOT Only 3 Months
• 5 Stages of the Member Life Cycle
• 21 Quick Tips for Improving Member Retention
• The Most Effective Tools for Reducing Membership Churn

Key Quotes:

“The lifetime value for courses max out on day one.”

“The idea of lifetime value of your customers maxing out is not exclusive to memberships.”

“It's important to realize that whatever model you go with for your business, whatever type of business you run, it all essentially comes down to customer lifetime value.”

“Anything you sell has a churn rate. Churn rate is merely a factor in determining the endpoint after which you get no more money from that person.”

Creating a membership is an exciting time. The creative juices are flowing, the sense of accomplishment from building and launching something new can be exhilarating, and there's an undeniable buzz you get with every new member who joins.

But what about 6 months down the line? 2 years? 10 years? Is that buzz still there? Does your membership still excite you?

Or perhaps it's started to feel like a chore?

Maybe things haven't gone as planned. Or maybe you've just become complacent. Whatever the cause, if you're starting to feel weighed down by your membership then this can be the start of a very slippery slope.

Check out this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast can find out how to prevent this from happening, and what you can do to turn things around if your membership is starting to feel like a burden.

• The vicious cycle that occurs when you start to treat your membership like a chore
• How solid systems and processes, plus well-controlled boundaries, can make a huge difference in your role as membership owner
• Why you need to be mindful of the reasons you started a membership in the first place
• The importance of fighting the instinct to focus on negatives, and staying positive without becoming complacent