The Multi-Dimensional Approach To Maximize Your Memberships – Episode 13

Melissa: We'll dive into Tara's question: " I have a digital subscription box for women in early stages of business to help them up their marketing understanding. There is a monthly group call to go over the info. I'm looking at a possible add on of an accountability group. Wondering if anyone has done something like this, or any advice on selling the accountability ideas to members or in the launch."

 

Awesome. So tell us about it, Tara. 

 

Tara: So we had more of a typical subscription or membership where you had to log in and we found that these women were just not logging in. They were too busy.

 

For whatever reason they weren't locking in. So we pivoted to sending it directly to their inbox on it is like a really actionable step that they can accomplish every month. So we're just finding that half of them are taking action no matter what are like: "I don't know...". I'm wondering if we need to roll it all in together and sell it as like at a higher price, the package, or if we keep with the original idea of having it as an add on.

 

So you can action it yourself or you can come and be accountable with us for these extra sessions. Just not sure how to sell that. If it's a reasonable idea, or if, I don't know, I've just been kind of spinning on this idea. 

 

Melissa: What's the price point difference with it? 

 

Tara: So it's only $10 a month right now.

We only launched a few months ago. So it's a group of 40 women at this point. And this was our like launch price to see it market validated. So it may be that it's too low, a price point. And these are the like dollar women who aren't. 

 

Melissa: Right, right. Yeah. Because that's what I was kind of thinking like it is a lower end.

So, and at the end of the day, you want them to take the action, right? You want them  to use it so that they have the results. So if you were to position it, where there is that accountability piece, it's packaged into it, it's a higher price point. You're going to have people that are actually doing what they need to do to get the results you're going to better testimonials.

 

You're going to get better clients to serve as well  and better results  to show too.So it's, kind of a win win because that transformation is going to, they have more skin in the game. Not to say, the memberships, you know, they're lower price points, it's the masses, right?

 

And you can get lots of results with that too. But when you do have that accountability piece and that price point goes up and there's more skin in the game, then like their transformation, the results just increases with that as well. 

 

Paul: We have a lot of friends that have memberships that are in the five to $10 range and they're more like printables and they're like crafts and like art driven type type things and the $10 range what I like about it and what I don't like about it, like, it's, it's kind of like the flip side of the coin.

 

I look at it more as like a planet fitness membership. Is that on average Planet Fitness, when they open up in a, in an area, they get about five to 8,000 members. So that's 50 to $80,000 a month where hard rush people come that franchise owner, whatever, like they start making money right out the gate.

 

It's because what they bank on is like 99% of those people not showing up at the gym, because if they did at any frequency, they wouldn't have the equipment for them to do it because the price point is so low, it's almost like a throwaway, like, "Oh, I am not going to cancel it. It's so cheap. I'll go next month. I'll go next week. I'll go whenever." 

 

But it doesn't pinch enough to get people to take action. And so what's good about the $10 a month, like that got you, your base crowd. Right? So when I had my nightclub,I always looked at like, how can I get people in the door initially? Because when the people are going to pay full price, that show up, I don't want them to come into an empty room. You know? 

 

So you could cultivate testimonials case studies get real transformation, like over delivered to people that are in there. At least the ones that have stepped up so that you can use them in your sales process to use their stories. They use their transformations. They use their epiphany moments that happen.

 

They're going to be your best salespeople. Now, they're also going to be very quiet because nobody else is going to be ever be able to get this freight again, type thing. Now here's the one thing I'm just going to give some perspective. That's something that I want to bring too, because years ago when Melissa and I had a photography membership, we had several hundred members in there.

 

And what we did originally was we were selling courses and stuff. You know, prior to that, and what we did is we went to all of our previous course owners and we gave them like a onetime opportunity. Like: "Hey, we're gonna create this membership and we're going to give you...", you know, it wasn't, we called it a beta.

 

You know, there was no founding member launch reference or whatever. It was just, it was a beta. And so what we did is we offered them. This is several years ago, maybe like 2015. So like five years ago. And what we did is when we put that out there we gave them a really sweet deal. So it was like 20 bucks a month or $97 for the year.

 

And well, we got over a hundred people that bought into that, like "$97 a year. Geez. We never bought anything that cheap from the guys like we're in boom.We did it." Now, if we looked at it one dimensional, and I always talk about this one dimensional versus 2d versus 3d. So one dimensional is oh man. These people we're servicing them a lot.

 

They're asking the same amount of questions or the other people later on, they were spending way more money, but also they help pre-fund the Facebook ads and the other things that we did, they also allowed us to do discovery where we're able to use them in a way to, in a win, win situation where they taught us like what their needs were, the questions or  struggles.

 

So then we can message better. We can put better deliverables in the membership. And here's the interesting thing.  Several of those people, years later became thousand dollars a month private coaching clients, several of them actually 12, several of them to this day are in our "Paul & Melissa's Inner Circle" spending several hundred dollars a month to be a member. So we could've looked at that one dimensionally and said, these people, well, you know what, the reason why they're not paying anymore is because that's the offer we gave them, was the offer.

 

That was the confidence that we had and what we were creating five years ago. And that's the only reason why they spent, but you know what? They're so highly indoctrinated in love. What we're about. These people have traveled around the world to come to one and two day events with us. Like they've traveled.

 

Like they spent more money on travel and lodging in the past just to come to learn from us because they're that much more invested than the other people that have come later I want you to just look at like the, there's the short play of the $10 and like, what should I do or not? And what's the value the longer play is, as some of these people could potentially be your biggest raving fans, that'll be recruiters for you.

 

They'll probably bring people in at the higher amounts. And also we are going to be the perfect people to help you build.So what I would do is survey them and ask them if this additional service is actually something they would be interested in, because if you don't get enough feedback, you're now just creating an extra layer of things that are going to complicate this, because now you're trying to sell people on the two things, and then this higher level piece might not necessarily be what anybody wants either.So I don't want you to, like, it might just be you increasing the price of your current offer. So it attracts people that because they have a little bit more skin in the game. And again, we can talk pricing all day long, like are currently, you know, our "Paul & Melissa's Inner Circle", cause it's going to go up is $397 a month, US. 

 

That's enough pinch when people that make that investment that they show up on these calls and they do the things we talk about because the pinches are there, like the investments is there that they want to make the progress where if it was a $10 a month thing they made, it's like the planet fitness, they may or may not show up.Like it's like, all right, whatever, you know, and what's interesting.

 

What I know just through personal experience is as we increase this, our goal is eventually for "Paul & Melissa's Inner Circle" to be up to a thousand dollars a month. Now everybody's going to be grandfathered in where they come in at that time, right? The person paying a thousand dollars a month to come in their commitment level at that moment coming in is so much incredibly higher.You know what I mean?

 

Like that's the pinch that they have. So of course, they're going to take the actions. They're going to do the steps, the little uncomfortable things. So I just say like, when you're in, you could potentially just raise the rent of the new people coming in. And if you do decide to do some new ad-ons,you might be able to send some of the people that are in that maybe have the base plan. 

 

Right now behind the scenes, "Instaposts" is actually two different levels. There's a basic and a pro. We originally only offered out one plan last year. And then when we realized that some people just came for the prompts, they didn't want all the other extras.So we did is we split off and made two different, but what it is is you get one offer at any point in time, and you're given the ability to go to the ascend, to the other offer, but we don't do the reverse.

 

Tara: It's perfect because I mean, I'm still not sure. And you're right. I just need to survey some of the members awful to see that it's not there's options, I guess, and the none of are wrong, but it's Also partly the price point 

 

Paul: For all of us  I think what we,where you should start off with just saying, how much do I want this membership to make?  And then you reverse engineer it, the figure out what you should offer it per month, based on the number of members you would like to. Cause of course the higher, the price point, the lesser amount of people are going to come in,right?

 

The lower, the price point by playing the numbers. You're going to have more people that are just going to jump on it, but are they going to be committed or not? So it's like, what is that price point that can get you? Cause like you can get to the same number just by moving the decimal point over on one or the other,you know, one side or the other.

 

So like Mitch was in earlier on. So he started day one with his membership. And his is about running contests online contest rockets.  He started day one at $97, like that's, he just went right into the market and $97.So he made a decision that he can attract less clients and still make the same amount of money than trying to start at 10 or 20 and trying to get hundreds and hundreds of people initially were.

 

Now, if you just think about like what he just, that would have been the equivalent of with a seven members having 70 members at $10 a month or just seven at a hundred,you a lot less work for him to attract those people. Different types of different, it's a different type of person too.

Melissa: Yeah. 

 

Tara: That's helpful. And also I think the lifetime client idea of how people are spending a lot more money with you, even though you felt like you were spinning your wheels because that's really helpful. 

 

Mona: Tara, I was going to say, could you maybe , make a lifetime offer before you raised your price?

 

Maybe I don't know if that's a good model or not, but if you wanted to raise it, maybe you could make some kind of a lifetime offer or something first. I don't know. I know that I'm in a membership and every once in awhile he offers lifetime access to people who are paying monthly.  And I think a lot of people go for it.

 

Paul: I just give one copy out to that. Good friends. Justin & Jill Stanton had a membership called screw the nine to five years ago and they also offered a lifetime membership. And this was in the thousands cause their membership was like $70 a month. And they made a decision one day to no longer do the membership and to go in a different direction.

 

And that caused some chaos for them because they had a good amount of people that bought into a lifetime thing. So just make sure you have a good exit strategy that if, and when you come to the time where you, like, I don't love this thing anymore and I want to send it on his way and do something different.I just, I just want to give that not, not as a doomsday thing, but just like we know a couple people and that's just one example that they came to a crossroads and they're like, ah, I want to do something else.

 

And then, then it's like you, you made a certain level of promise. I just want to at least put that in the back of your mind, just to be aware when you do, cause you still will indefinitely when you still have this thing going on, you're still going to support those people. So it does have the time resource that's involved, if it's a community base or if it's you giving.

 

So if they they'll start collecting, and you still have to give the same amount of energy, even though you spent their money three years ago, you know what I mean? I just, while it is good and it is good for like crowdsourcing and to, to build projects and other things, sometimes when you see influencers do a lifetime access thing,it's cause they're really trying to, pre-fund a bigger project.

 

So they're trying to get people to convert because what they know is that they might know their numbers. And this is when we get more in a bean counting later on, like if you know, your average client only stays for four months, then it's worth giving them a lifetime access membership because you might make four times the amount of money off of them knowing that a lot of lifetime people are just like planet fitness,like they're going to buy it and go, Oh, I have this forever.

 

And then they don't show up. Like they just go into the, into the dark, you know, carvers you, I just want you to be careful because you can slowly collect people that will show up. And it's like, now you've got all these people that you have to serve indefinitely.And if they love you that much and they're really involved then, and that was my only caveat, on that 

 

Molly: In fact don't do it.

Paul: Oh no. I didn't mean it that way..Molly, Molly I didn't mean it that way.

 

Molly: I know you didn't it. I just kept listening to you. I'm like, no, that's important. 

 

Paul: I’m always open. You know, you get into this internet marketing bubble and everybody's shows you the back of the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag and everybody's fine. And everybody's like, Oh, that's the only way of doing it.

 

Like, that's the formula. Cause it's on the back of the, and you always, you guys always have to keep it. We have to be a little bit careful because everything that's taught is to have to be universal enough to be able to work for three or 4,000 people that bought into a thing. So it's always the what's being taught is always at a scale.

 

It's never like individualized. Now, most of us are going to do very well on our businesses because we did not do what everybody else did. Like that's the point of differentiation is like, we're not going to do the vanilla on this. We're going to put sprinkles and we're going to put chocolate.Like I'm still hungry. this school. 

 

Amy: I'm so leery of, of saying lifetime in anything in my niche. Just because I was a Craftsy instructor, which became blueprints and they were selling lifetime memberships and lifetime access to their classes and they're shutting it down.And I just found out today I've been sold.

 

So I have some lovely feelings about that. But yeah, people just were losing their minds over lifetime. And because that's the say niche I'm in, I don't think I could even try to say there's lifetime access, which is one of the reasons I did a membership instead of a course or a series of courses.I'm wondering how over time, how that pushback's going to get with people, questioning lifetime access.

 

Mona: Isn't it, wouldn't it be helpful to say, you have this price for as long as you are in good standing with the membership and then that's kind of lifetime because that means as long as you can, you get to have it for nine bucks or you get to have it for whatever.And then if it goes, it goes or if you act up like you want to give somebody lifetime access, if they're going to be acting up.

 

Paul: I think the difference was like grandfathering in pricing, having people staying the same, I think is good. I think what they were referencing is like a onetime fee,like a buyout in the way, like going from that $10 a month to like here's for $150, you now have lifetime access where they don't have to make another payment after that point.

 

In the short term that definitely drives some good money and in that helps out,  you see it in the in the SAS market, which is software as service market, you go to like AppSumo and a couple of other websites where like, they're, they're trying to crowd funding, get resources and finances.

 

So they'll put out the app as like a lifetime access, just so they can get a lot of money in so that they can then afford to build the next version of that app that they can sell publicly for a monthly amount or whatever,or for them to pre-fund the go to the next project, you know, type type thing. Just all of us being small business owners and a lot of us being solopreneurs.

 

I just always want to be careful, like just there's a short term decisions, but also you always gotta be careful of making sure those decisions that you make in the short term don't impact you negatively in the, in the longterm as well.