The Membership Manual Personal Use Ebook

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Section 3 - Best Practices

Membership sites can be challenging if you've never used them before. In this section, you'll learn "best practices" experienced membership site owners have developed over time.

Build a Relationship

You also need to decide how you will communicate with your members. How will you send them e-mail updates and information? You can add their e-mail addresses automatically when they sign up. This becomes your email list to send updates and information.

How often will you send updates? Every week? Every day? Think of it this way: what you are trying to do is build a healthy relationship with your members.

The rules of communication you use to maintain good relationships "in the real world" apply just as well online.

Remember that you may not be a known entity to them when they first come to your site. Try to encourage them right away in terms of getting involved in your site. For example, you may want to consider giving away your contact information. Or call them on the phone with a warm welcome. It helps them feel part of the group.

After you've nurtured relationships with members, you can begin to ask them questions about they want out of the site. Maybe no one has asked them before what their expectations or needs are. They might have requests you can address. However, you can only help them if you know what their needs are. It gives you the opportunity to create content and products that will help them.

Retaining Members

One of your biggest challenges will be to get them to stay on as repeat members. It's true that some may invest in the site at first and then never use it for a long time. Still, be sure you keep adding content and value to the site no matter if some members are using it or not.

The reason is they will eventually stop back in to see what the site has offered lately. If you slack in adding value or content, they will tend to leave if they feel they're being neglected. You want to create content and value that exceeds expectations. You want them to say, "Wow, this is fantastic content! I'm glad I joined and I don't even think about paying my monthly fee."

Consider having content that is exclusive to your membership site they cannot get anywhere else. This might be in the form of interviews you conduct with industry leaders, private training on topics and subjects that are new or cutting-edge, and more. You might also provide a level of advice or support from you or your team that is not available to nonmembers.

Whatever you do, the perceived value has to be considerably more than the investment they make. Don't let yourself off the hook. Continue to challenge your team and yourself to add massive value and top quality content to the site.

Levels of Membership

A very common error that new membership site owners make is they offer a series of membership levels. For example, they might have Bronze, Silver and Gold levels. Members might start at the Bronze level, while Silver offers more value, and Gold level provides complete access.

The problem with this approach in the beginning is it lowers conversions. People get intimidated and confused by many options. It's much simpler to get someone to say "Yes!" to join your site if you only offer just one choice: either they join or they don't.

You'll gain more confidence in your operation and development if you see a steady stream of new members joining your site. It's even a good idea to let new members stay on as long as they want at their initial rate, even if you increase the rate later for new members. You may think that you will lose money, but it will increase loyalty and the "lifetime customer value" of each member. In addition, they will spend additional money on specials and premiums you offer.

Affiliates

One way to drive considerable traffic to your site is to utilize affiliates. Affiliates are marketers that promote your site to their own "tribe" of fans and followers. For example, let's say an affiliate is running banner ads for your membership site on their site. If a prospect clicks the ad, visits your site, and signs up as a member, the affiliate gets a commission for the sale. It's not unusual to have commissions as high as 50%, 75% and even 100% of the sale.

Why would you give an affiliate 100% commission? Consider that the "Lifetime Customer Value" of each new member is much higher than the initial commission payout. Lifetime Customer Value is the average total amount of spending you can expect from a typical member.

For example, if you charge $50 a month for your membership site and the average length of time someone stays a member is six months, the Lifetime Customer Value of a member is $300. Of course, some will stay much longer and others will leave sooner. Lifetime Customer Value is an average.

Now you know that an average customer will spend $300 in your membership site. From here, it is easy to determine how much you want to spend to acquire that customer. Even after paying 100% commission rate, you are making a good profit. Don't feel like you are locked in, because you can still customize the structure for an individual affiliate.

Closely monitor the margins in your affiliate commission structure. Affiliate sales will give you plenty of traffic and help build sales. Many of the membership site plugins have modules that can manage your affiliate sales and tracking.

Another idea is that you can run a separate affiliate sales model outside your membership site using third-party software and service. You might have several different affiliate structures going on at the same time. There is no single way to do it, and the right balance for you will come from testing and experimentation.

Consider giving "lifetime commissions" where an affiliate receives commission from all sales from their referral for the length of time the referral stays on as a member. It becomes a little challenging to track it--there are cookie-based tracking methods and other ways. If you get into heavy affiliate marketing, it may benefit you to consult with, or hire, an affiliate manager to advise the right setup for maximize profit.

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