In this episode I walk you through the Open House Strategy — how to use it to effectively boost your membership enrolments by giving prospects an experience of your membership rather than just a “free trial”. I explain how this differs from typical free trials, how you implement it, why it works and what you need in place for it to succeed. Then I guide you to the next step: a quiz to check if you’re ready to scale your online business.

 

 

Connect with Teresa on Website, (Grow, Launch, Sell), Sign up to Teresa's email list,  Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Subscribe to my Youtube, Ep 427

 

Transcript

If you have a membership that you love, but yet you know how difficult it is to actually get people in. When they join, they love it and they barely leave, but actually getting them through the door can be difficult. And maybe you've tried webinars and free trials and challenges and other things like that and it just hasn't converted for you.

Well, in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you one of my most effective strategies. Fulfilling your membership, which feels so much easier than a normal launch and actually uses some really clever psychological and marketing tactics in order to get people to come and experience what your membership is all about.

I'm Teresa Heath Wareing and I have worked in the online space for the past eight to nine years, and I've been in marketing over 20 years. I have worked with hundreds of course creators, membership owners to help them grow their online business in a way that fits with them and the life that they lead.[00:01:00]

And over that time, I have used every strategy known to man in terms of launching and growing your online business. And the same goes for memberships, including my own membership. I have worked with hundreds of membership owners helping them find a much more effective way in which to grow their membership.

Because we all know that when we create a membership, it sounds awesome. You are creating the same content every month. You are basically just bringing more people in, and you are getting that recurring revenue, which is why memberships are so attractive, and you know that the value that you are giving inside your membership is brilliant, but you're a little bit confused as to why more people aren't understanding that and why they're not getting it.

Well, the world of online has changed massively in the last few years. That is also true for memberships and membership owners, which is why my open house strategy works so effectively. And that's what I'm gonna be sharing with you today. I'm going to be [00:02:00] sharing with you today what the open house strategy is, why it works so effectively, and some of the key considerations that you need to take into account if you are going to do the open house strategy for your membership. So let me start by sharing what an open house strategy is. And the first thing I need to say. It's not a free trial. Often when people hear open house, they think, well, I'm just giving them a free trial, and I do that anyway. This is very different from what you might normally do as a free trial. A free trial is normally something that is done often through Evergreen, and it's normally you giving them a very low cost first month or a free first month.

What it's not doing is it's not creating that experience around that offer. And as you know, when I talk about launching, what I really mean is a marketing campaign. And what I mean by that is a, an experience. We are creating some kind of experience in order to get people to find out about our offer and actually buy the thing that we're [00:03:00] selling.

So an open house is not a free trial. It's very different. What an open house is. You are opening up your membership for a set amount of time. Normally a week, maybe eight days, where you are inviting people to come in and join you in the membership and act as if they are in the membership for that amount of time.

During that time, you are giving them access to every live call that you normally do. So for instance, I used to have a membership. My business looks a bit different now and I have a closed membership. So the only way you can be in what we call T's world is if you come through Grow Launch Sell, my program.

But when I had an open membership. I basically had open cart all the time, and it was really difficult to create those kind of urgency and things, and the open house strategy worked brilliantly for that. So what would happen is I would promote that I was doing an open house, [00:04:00] and I would invite people to come and join the membership for a set amount of time.

During that time, I would deliver every live call that I normally deliver over the period of a month. So for instance, if you are doing one live call a week. Let's say, so for me, in my world, I do two coaching calls a month. I do a mindset call. I do an implementation session. I used to do things like networking, and we used to have a content hour.

What I would do is, instead of having that over the entire month, I would put all that in one week. Every single day we would have some kind of activity that we would do in the membership, and the idea is that they come along in the membership. With your members and they get to experience what it's really like. They join your community.

Now, when I had my membership in its original form, it was in Facebook, so I would allow them into the Facebook community where they get to mingle and see who else is in there. The key thing [00:05:00] about this is they don't get access to your vault. On a free trial, what will often happen is when I say vault, I mean all of the training, all of the past calls, anything that you have got sat in your membership, they don't get access to that.

That is for when they join and for paying members, the whole point is for them to come and experience the community, experience the live calls, get to know you, get to know who's in there. Actually, in a recent podcast episode I did, I talked about the fact that I spoke at Retain, which is a conference here in the uk, run by the membership geeks, and it was just all about memberships.

And Mike, who is head of the membership geeks, he basically talked about how the online space is changing, but the membership world is changing and content is not what we lead with anymore from a membership point of view. Because in a world of ai, we are awash with content. The thing that we have to lead with [00:06:00] is community and the people around them.

And actually this is where the open house comes into its own, because that's what we are focusing on. We're allowing people to come into the community, come into the membership and see what it's like. And the key bit about this is they get to mix with the current members. Your current members are your biggest and best advocate of your membership.

This works really well. Obviously if you have an existing membership, it doesn't work very well if you don't, but basically, they are the people who love what you do because they're in your membership. So the more that you can get them to mix with your current members, the better. So let's talk about why the open house strategy works.

The first thing that it does is it gives them a true understanding of what it is you actually do. They are getting to experience it firsthand. They are coming in, they are attending full, proper calls. This isn't like a challenge. This isn't like a bootcamp. This is a, if I do a [00:07:00] coaching call, come and sit on one of my coaching calls and see what I do.

If I'm running a mindset session, a workshop, come and take part in that workshop. So it's an actual chance for them to come and take part. So they are getting a full experience of what it's like to be in your world. The way in which we market the open house sometimes can make it feel very exclusive. I often would talk about, it's almost like inviting them around my house.

It's almost like saying to them. Come on in, come and see what it's like. These doors are normally closed. You can't normally see this. You can't normally attend a coaching call, but I'm allowing you to come and join me for this short amount of time for you to see what it's like so you can make it sound super, super exclusive.

Another great thing about the open house is that it's qualified leads, and what I mean by that is when we do something like a challenge or a bootcamp. We often focus on a transformation. So someone joins your webinar or your [00:08:00] bootcamp or your challenge because you are offering them a transformation during that time that they're with you.

So for instance, you might come to my bootcamp 'cause I'm teaching you the five things that you need to have in place to have a really successful launch. Now what I'm not necessarily doing is saying to them. And you are going to find out what it's like to work with me and potentially buy my stuff. Now we all know 'cause we're not stupid.

That basically that is what a launch is about. However, when you are doing an open house, you are specifically marketing it as you get to come and see behind the scenes. If you've ever been curious what my membership is like then. Come and see behind the scenes and come and find out what the membership is like.

So you are having much more qualified leads coming in than if you did any other type of launch experience. The other brilliant thing about an open house, as I said, when I had my membership, I had a completely open [00:09:00] cart all the time. And it made it really difficult to create that fomo, to create that scarcity, to create that deadline because there wasn't one.

Because if someone wanted to join today, they could. If they wanted to join in three weeks time, they could. If they wanted to join in three months time, they could. Now, whether you have an open or closed cart, what is so good about the open house strategy is that it gives you a deadline regardless. So what happens is, as I've mentioned, you bring them into your membership and into your community for a set amount of time where they get to experience it, they get to join all the calls, and then what you do, so let's say I finished my open house on a Friday.

I would give them until the Tuesday midnight, so end of Tuesday to decide whether they wanted to stay. And if they didn't come Wednesday morning, we would remove them from the group. That gave such a good deadline when I didn't have one. I didn't have a closed cart, I didn't have [00:10:00] something. And often bonuses are really tricky for memberships because as membership owners, we want to do all the things and we want to give them everything, which makes bonuses very difficult.

But when you do an open house. You have that deadline of we are removing you from the community. There's also something very powerful about the psychology behind when someone has something, they don't want to give it up. So when you give someone something, they feel like it belongs to them already. When you say, I'll have it back, please, then that creates a bit of dissonance and basically means they don't want to give it up.

So giving them an experience of something, which is why people do free trials. Giving them an experience, something makes them want to hold onto it even longer. And like I said, the best thing about the open house is they are mixing with your current members. You are giving your current members all those extra calls.

So all they're doing is getting bonus calls that they wouldn't ordinarily get. Because as a side note, I still do those calls over the [00:11:00] rest of the month. It's not like I say to my members, all our calls are gonna be in one week and there's nothing for the rest of the month. I'm just doing extras during the open house week.

The other reason it works so well is you don't have to create anything new. You basically show up and do the thing that you are doing every single month in your own membership. Yes, you're doing it in a shorter space of time, but you are not having to come up with a particular challenge. You're not having to rerecord new lessons.

You are literally just showing up and doing the things that you are doing. So the open house strategy is a really powerful one. Okay, and then finally, there's a few things to note. If you are doing an open house strategy. The first thing to know is you are going to get less signups. Let's say you've done webinars in the past, and let's say you are getting a hundred people sign up to your webinar. I would fully expect that to drop to maybe 50 or 30 people just because these are super warm, super qualified, because you are not giving them a transformation first.

You are [00:12:00] inviting them in to come and take part in your membership and therefore they really need to be interested in joining your membership. But even though it's less numbers, your conversion rate is going to be much higher. In a previous video, which we will, um, put in the notes in the comments below.

In a previous video, I take you through the numbers that you can expect to get when you are doing some kind of launch experience or promoting your online offer. Normally it's between one and 8% of the people who opted into that launch experience. So the people who signed up for the webinar or the challenge, the open house between 1 and 8%.

When I last ran my open house, I got it in at 35%, which is huge, but my numbers going into it were much smaller, but my conversion was much, much higher. A couple of other things to know you need a warmer audience. Now, it doesn't have to be solely a warm audience, but it really helps if they are a warm audience and they know that you [00:13:00] have a membership and they've inquired about it before or they've thought about it before.

It really helps if you have a warmer audience. And the other thing that is crucial for an open house, you need existing members because we need those members who are raving fans of ours to welcome them into the open house, to basically be there. Now. As a quick side note, we're not instructing our members to do anything particular.

We're just asking them to be who they are, but because they're in our membership, they obviously like what we do. So it's not like we're saying, right. When everyone comes in, you need to say how amazing I am. Not at all. You're just going to let them hang out with them, and because they're in your membership, by default, they like your membership.

So you need those existing members and hopefully you've got some raving fans in there who think you're amazing. And as I mentioned previously, if you have an open cart all the time for your membership, this is a great strategy to use because it gives you that element of [00:14:00] deadlines, scarcity, because. You are taking it back off them because you're saying you need to make a decision.

And one final note, when it comes to the selling, for me, this is one of the easiest things for me to do, the sales side of it, because basically what I'm doing...