Starting your membership business is exciting, especially if you have effective strategies. Once you can establish a list of loyal members, you’ll be able to have a handful of customers who are paying for your services every month. As a result, you’ll have a passive source of income while helping individuals solve specific pain points using your offers.
While a membership program benefits your finances, growing your audience is hard, especially if you don’t know how to attract them. Even if you ever persuade them to sign up for your membership programs, you might still lose members if you don’t know how to keep them. Fortunately, you can avoid this situation by having well-structured strategies that’ll help you thrive in this enterprise.
This article provides a guide to starting a membership business.
1. Choose A Niche
Niche marketing is essential in helping you identify your target members so you can focus your promotional efforts on introducing your offers to them. Instead of publishing content that’ll resonate with the general audience, you can set your advertisements for a specific buyer persona, reducing your advertising costs. In turn, your ideal members will be able to differentiate you from the competitors and become loyal subscribers of your services.
When choosing a niche, you must know if you want to penetrate industries like health, business, entertainment, home security, or technology. Next, you have to assess the current competition within your chosen industry. Doing so will allow you to identify an underserved market need, which enables you to soothe a pain point.
2. Develop A Member Persona
Building personas will enable you to study the preferences, behaviors, and goals of your target members. This strategy will help you create more relevant marketing campaigns that appeal to their specific desires, which encourages them to subscribe to your program. In turn, they’ll become your qualified leads and turn into loyal members of your organization, which significantly increases your revenue.
When developing a member persona, you have to conduct competitor research so you can see the types of content they publish that speak directly to their market. Once you do so, you should collect this information and use a membership management platform like Impexium that’ll help you organize the tiers of the members.
3. Select A Pricing Plan
After identifying your target members, you have to price your membership offers. However, this process is tricky because overpricing offers might cause them to disregard subscribing to your services. Similarly, charging too little may make them believe that your offers aren’t valuable and a waste of time.
When selecting a pricing plan, you have to understand what prospective members look for as they consider whether they’ll subscribe or not. Therefore, you should research your competitors so you can determine what’s included in their membership plans and if they call for additional products and services.
4. Handle Payments
The real challenge in starting a membership business is when you have to keep up with more than a hundred members. Without assistance from experts, you’ll face obstacles in identifying who signed up during a period and which rate they got. Aside from that, you also have to deal with customer complaints, especially those seeking refunds for failed services.
To help you handle these incidents, you need to find software that’ll help you manage payments, track downgrades or upgrades, and organize subscription data. Additionally, you can expect this technology to help you automate technical aspects like sending timely notifications to members with billing reminders. Furthermore, this modern tool should have features like accepting all types of payments and handling tax compliance with legal authorities.
5. Create A Mobile-Friendly Website
After organizing essential processes in running your membership program, you need to create a professional website. This online platform is where you’ll engage with your members while giving them direct access to your exclusive services.
When creating a membership site, you must ensure that mobile users can easily navigate all features without sacrificing page design. Once you secure mobile responsiveness, you have to match the colors, style, and fonts with your branding. Aside from that, you have to establish a sign-up page and put in a clear call-to-action (CTA) that’ll persuade them to sign up for your services.
6. Promote Your Business
Once you prepare everything, it’s time for you to get the word out about your membership business. This strategy will help you attract your target members and turn them into loyal buyers, which will improve your subscription services.
When promoting your membership program, you have to build professional pages on social media. Once you create accounts, you have to optimize them with accurate information and high-quality visuals to show credibility. After that, you must establish a private Facebook group where your members can interact and where you can organize live webinars.
Key Takeaway
As an owner of a membership business, you have to consider following these six steps. Doing so will help you handle payments properly so you can monitor payments easily. In addition, you’ll be able to encourage your members to stay engaged with your program and consider inviting more prospects.
