Membership marketing: Building marketing funnels that actually work

Imagine crafting a membership marketing strategy so good that allows you to totally focus on creating content and interacting with your community.

No more struggling every day to find, convert and keep your members happy and your business profitable.

No more trying to figure out how to make enough money to keep the lights on.

That’s exactly what you’ll learn in this guide.

We’ll show you how to design a marketing funnel that leads strangers to become paying members of your community.

Members that pay their way and help you make a decent living.

Let’s see how to apply the power of marketing funnels to turn your membership site into a healthy profitable business!

Membership website marketing strategy

Designing a marketing strategy for your membership website is similar to selling any product or service.

But there are two important differences.

The first is that managing a membership site is resource-intensive.

• Writing an eBook takes time, but after that the maintenance and support are minimal. Leaving you to fully focus on the marketing.
• Keeping a community vibrant and healthy while continuing to generate value on a recurring basis will leave you less time for promotion.

Your time and money will be more limited in this business model so a good marketing strategy becomes vital.

The second difference is that as a rule of thumb you’ll rely upon recurring payments from your members.

You’ll have to expend extra effort to keep them happy so they don’t abandon your site at the drop of a hat.

We’ll be following a 3 step marketing funnel here where you’ll:

1. Attract
2. Convert
3. Reduce churn rate

That’s the natural order of selling.

It’s the path a potential lead would follow, but it’s not necessarily the order in which you should work.

If you put all your effort into attracting and converting without having worked at all on reducing churn rate, all your effort may be in vain.

Our recommendation is to read all this post so you have a big picture view of the funnel, then work backwards.

It may seem counterproductive, but it’s much better to have the machinery greased and working perfectly before stepping on the accelerator rather than afterwards!

To keep things accessible, we’ll outline the funnel stages in order. You can always reverse them once you know what’s coming.

Stage 1: Attract

The tasks at the attract stage should grab the attention of the widest possible audience.

We’re looking for numbers here, not necessarily qualified leads. The idea is to attract as much attention as possible before filtering out those qualified leads further down the funnel.

You don’t have to use all these strategies. Some will work better than others for your particular case or will be easier for you to carry out.

1. Create free content

Creating content and distributing it for free to attract a potential audience is one of the best strategies you can try.

You have the power to decide who to attract based on the content you create, it works consistently in the long run and it increases your authority, which will help with conversions.

Depending on the type website you have, your audience will hang out on different platforms and consume different kind of content:

• Video on YouTube or TikTok
• Audio on podcast
• Infographics on Pinterest
• Text on a blog or Twitter.

At least at the beginning, put all your efforts on one platform and one type of media.

You can repurpose the content and leverage social media channels, but don’t try to cover too many platforms or you won’t stand out on any of them.

You can always add other types later.

2. Create paid content

Creating and selling paid content won’t help you reach as many people as offering it for free.

But the audience you’ll reach will be of much higher quality and hopefully, more willing to become a member of your membership site.

A small course on Udemy, a product on Etsy, or an eBook on Amazon are ideal ways to start as these platforms will offer you a new source of traffic.

This paid content should be low-priced. Its purpose is not to make a large return on the sale, but to attract and validate new customers for your bigger product.

3. Host events

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This is a great strategy to start expanding your circle of potential customers. It works best if the event is physical.

These events can be of a professional nature, where you give a workshop or interview other people from your same niche.

You could also organize something more relaxed and fun to attract your target audience.

Do you have a membership website related to eCommerce? Organize a WooCommerce vs SureCart store owners soccer match!

4. Collaborate

Building an audience and generating an impact on any channel takes time. If you want to speed up the process, use other people’s audience to reach more leads faster.

Write a guest post on their blog, collaborate on their podcast, co-create a product. The list goes on…

There are many options depending on who you want to collaborate with.

It’s very attractive to reach big players in the industry, but it will be easier if you make crossovers with people on your level. At least at first…

5. Launch an affiliate program

There is a way in which other people will be much more willing to collaborate with you. Pay them.

We’re not talking about sponsorships here, more like offering an affiliate program.

People would be much more willing to promote your membership website if they could generate money from it.

If your membership uses a recurring subscription pricing model, consider making the affiliate commission recurring as well.

This will put your affiliate program above those that offer only a fixed fee.

Just make sure that the math works out.

Note

ECommerce platforms like SureCart come with affiliate marketing functionality, or you simply use AffiliateWP to create an affiliate platform.

6. Advertise your membership

Advertising memberships on different platforms like Facebook or YouTube will allow you to test new ideas quickly.

You could send traffic to a sales page or to free content with a paywall blocking some content to see which works best.

It’s a good way to scale your membership once you have proven the conversion and retention are good.

You can easily outsource this step to a specialized company or freelancer. That will save you a lot of learning and testing.

Stage 2: Convert

All the strategies in the attract stage will ensure your membership site is receiving a constant flow of potential customers.

Now that people are aware of your product, the job of the convert stage is to encourage some of them to join your community.

Even if you have managed to attract your ideal customer you’ll have to make it as easy as possible for them to join.

Overcome their objections so that they have no doubts, and why not put the temptation in front of them to make them curious about what’s inside?

1. Offer free samples using trials and sneak peeks

People like to check what they are going to get before paying for it. That’s especially true if it’s a new product, service or company.

The ability to try before you buy lowers risk. When it’s your money at risk, anything you can do to mitigate it can help conversion.

That’s why there are so many reviews of millions of products and services all over the internet!

If you sell your membership using SureCart it will be really easy for you to offer a free trial.

You can enable it for as many days as you want with just a couple of clicks when you add a price.

Another way to accomplish this would be to allow people to peek into member-only areas.

They get to see exactly what they would get for their money, so are more likely to convert.

This strategy doesn’t work simply by leaving content freely available.

You should ideally protect it behind a free registration form so you can at least get the lead’s contact information.

2. Sell a different product

Instead of making your customers commit to a long-term relationship, let them check what you’re capable of with a simpler and more affordable product.

You can easily do that with SureCart.

When creating a new product you’ll be able to attach any kind of digital download to it.

So this is an easy way of selling an eBook, template, audio file or any other digital product you can imagine.

You can also sell physical products if that fits into your strategy.

The difference between selling something in a third-party marketplace or on your own website is that in this case you already own the traffic.

So this is not about attracting, but about:

• Getting their contact details so you can nurture them.
• Increase the trust they have in you.
• Making it easier for them to make future purchases.

3. Create a stunning sales page

A sales page will be your best ally to convert visitors into customers.

Especially if you include a VSL (video sales letter).

In most cases it will be where you’ll send most of the traffic you generate from the attraction stage.

Offering a professional image and showing all the information in a clear and useful way for a potential buyer is very important when it comes to closing the sale.

You can use Spectra to generate engaging sales pages.

It has templates you can import with just a couple of clicks and customize them as much as you like.

Spectra has all the necessary blocks to create a good sales page, such as testimonials:

FAQs:

Or calls to action.

Get your stunning sales page with Spectra http://wpspectra.com

4. Paywalls

Another way to promote your membership is by using paywalls.

If you implement a strategy of creating free content through a blog, you can lock small numbers of articles for members only and display a call to action for non-members.

For example, the written content might be free, but the summary video would be only available to paid subscribers.

Doing this with SureMembers is very easy. You just have to play with the block visibility settings in the WordPress editor.

For paying members, show them premium content.

And to non-members, show them a call to action to join.

5. Craft the best pricing strategy

No matter how hard you work on conversion strategies, if your pricing model is not right your membership may not work or not as well as it should.

This is a very important step.

That’s why we recently launched a guide about how to boost your revenue using different pricing models and strategies

6. Nurture via email marketing

All the strategies you have seen so far such as sharing free or paid content, showing an ad or a sales page, generate a small impact on your potential customer.

To push them to take action, you need to expose them to your message at least 7 different times.

Probably more as membership sites usually require a recurring payment.

To help you with this task we recommend you to use the power of email marketing. To bolster your outreach efforts, implement a robust DMARC policy, ensuring secure and consistent message deliver.

You’ll have more control over the communication with followers without depending on the algorithm of a social network.

The best thing you can do is to start managing your email marketing directly on WordPress, as you’ll have more control.

7. Optimize checkout

Checkout is the final barrier a potential customer must overcome to become an actual customer.

You need to simplify and optimize this checkout as much as possible to remove any friction that might get in the way.

The checkout included with SureCart does a great job in this regard:

• It’s fast.
• Its design perfectly adapts to mobile devices.
• It supports multiple payment processors: Stripe and its 13+ payment methods in +135 currencies, PayPal, Mollie, Google Pay or Apple Pay.
• You can add conditional fields or hide the unnecessary ones.
• You can embed it anywhere on your site, avoiding the need to go through the additional shopping cart step.
• You can enable express payments.

The best part?

It also includes a tool to recover abandoned carts.

Even though some potential customers might leave without purchasing, you can easily try to recover that sale.

It works automatically too!

Stage 3: Reduce churn rate

This is the stage that really makes the difference between a membership site and other online business models.

After attracting leads and converting them into customers comes one of the relatively more complex parts, keeping them active as customers and encouraging them to stay.

We have a full guide about membership retention strategies where we share many tips to keep your members long-term.

Here are some of the most important tips!

1. Set up an onboarding

One of the most common problems that can appear on membership sites is where new members are not able to see all the value.

Onboarding tends to be more common in SaaS but you can apply it to any type of membership:

• Record a short tutorial explaining where each section is and how to use it.
• Link to a knowledge base.
• Show ways to contact you for support.

All these little things will reduce the small frustration anyone feels when arriving at a new and unknown site.

2. Drip content

Drip content means delivering content little by little over time.

Either at specific dates or after a specified time from the time they joined.

Drip content can help prevent users from binging, subscribing for short periods of time to consume as much content as they can.

But the important thing here is that drip content is a type of onboarding.

Instead of throwing users into a pool of content and possibilities, you’ll help them digest everything.

This way they won’t get saturated and will have a more structured way to enjoy themselves.

We have a full guide about how to use the drip content feature using SureMembers.

3. Gamification

Gamification is a powerful technique to improve how your members interact with memberships.

It makes everything more enjoyable and fun. Members will want to participate more and be reluctant to leave.

GamiPress is one of the best plugins for WordPress that will help you with this purpose.

Gamification can help you use:

• Rankings
• Achievements
• Daily login rewards
• And many other competitive elements

4. Offer a last chance

SureCart has a nice feature called subscription saver that creates a special discount coupon that triggers when the member wants to cancel the subscription.

One of the reasons why users abandon memberships is due to economic reasons.

This tool can help avoid those losses by offering a discount. It works automatically and won’t take you any effort to implement.

4. Get insights

No matter how well you do your job, cancellations will happen.

The best thing you can do is to embrace them and analyze them to reduce them in the future.

SureCart incorporates a dashboard to analyze all your churn so you can easily see how many people are leaving and why.

Here you’ll also see how well the subscription saver is doing.

The more data you have, the more informed your decisions can be.

Conclusion

Attracting attention to your membership site is relatively simple as you have many channels and ways to do it.

Free content on your blog or YouTube channel, selling mini-products on third-party marketplaces, collaborations or simply paying for advertising to reach your target audience.

The key lies in having the ability to convert that traffic in a profitable way to make your business model functional.

A good pricing strategy presented on an attractive sales page with an optimized checkout are the big 3 ways to achieve this.

For your membership to grow, the number of new members should always be greater than the number of members that drop out.

Implementing a good retention strategy that incorporates onboarding, drip content, gamification and on-time discounts will help you reduce the number of unsubscribes.

But when they occur, analyze them in order to improve the weak points of your membership site so that you can improve and continue to grow in the future.