Turning Interested Applicants into Engaged, Paying Members

Michelle: So last year I started a community and it's been good but I've kind of hit a plateau in terms of the number of members and my process for getting them in is an application is involved. It's very short, but I'm really making sure that I'm bringing in the right people. So my question is what are some suggestions to get them to convert after they submit the application?
When they submit the application, they are aware of the cost I have nine that have submitted the application in the last two weeks and I would really like to move them in but they haven't moved in yet. So I've started up a follow email sequence with them. But I was just curious if anybody had suggestions on how you would approach that. Since it's not just something like an abandoned cart necessarily, they actually put in a little effort to apply
Paul: Can I ask one clarifying question? Is this like adds to cold traffic or is this a warm audience that you're engaging already? And then they make the decision.
Michelle: So it is. It's no ads. It's more people that have met me or come to my networking events and I have shared the community with them or they've stumbled across it on like social media on my stuff. And
Paul: then second question, what happens after the application?
Are you just doing an email only or are you jumping on a call with them? Is this a high ticket? It's
Michelle: low. It's low ticket. Right now it's $30 a month. And what happens after they apply? I review it and then they get an email from me that they've been accepted and to complete the next step, to sign up to choose either monthly or annual. then what I did, I sent an email.
If they don't reply to that in a few days, then I send out another email just to see if they had any questions. put a screenshot of our calendar of events in that email so they can see all the good things that are coming up. But then it's just still been crickets. And I don't know if it's because I still don't have a sales page. I've sold this without it.
I'm building a sales page now, been the process so far.
Paul: Okay, coming back to the core question now is how to improve the conversions from application to you, Sending those emails out and getting people to come in.
Michelle: Yeah, especially with having nine right there. I mean, there's about 15 people in the group right now. So that's a significant number of completed applications that have been accepted and trying to get them over to make the decision to say yes.
Paul: Anybody have any thoughts
Melissa: whether you've done this to yourself or maybe even if you haven't? We always say that for the brainstorming piece, even if you haven't done this yourself with your business, if you've experienced this, if you've ever filled out an application and kind of the experience with that too.
Michael: Michelle, I wanted to jump in real quick and ask the question, do you. You said that you've been growing your membership over the last year and it's sort of plateauing now.
So is this a change then in sort of the conversion rate that you've seen historically as it dropped off
Michelle: Yeah, I would say this. batch of the last maybe couple of months that I'VE had applicants they haven't necessarily bought. Like some have, but not, not that many. And I was surprised. I. I had a networking event a couple weeks ago and I briefly talked about it and some of my members were at the networking event and I think they talked about it in their breakout rooms just in passing.
It wasn't anything super planned and so I was kind of surprised. I had, you know, a good number of applicants. I've had people come into the group and leave. So I've probably sold this at least 30 times. And the people who end up leave, they never come to the stuff that we do. They don't participate, despite all the efforts made to get them to participate. And I think some of that just could be.
It is a low price point and it might be too much of an impulse buy. I want to raise the price point when the community is bigger and more valuable.
Michael: Do you have something that you're giving them in that onboarding process? Like when they do the application and you send them the okay, you've been accepted. So now here are the next steps. Do you have anything that you're giving them that sort of like the quick win?
Like here is an introduction. while you're making this decision to go monthly or annually, here's something that I think will help you in the meantime.
Michelle: No, I don't. I'm totally open to incorporating something like that. Has there been anything that you've done that you found helpful?
Michael: I don't have anything in particular that I've done, although I'm getting ready to launch a membership and that's sort of one of the things that I'm doing is I have a couple of items for people when they join, they're going to get pointed to sort of immediately.
As in like the, before you even like come in and do the onboarding into the membership platform and like see what we have and all of that. Just a. This could be something that you find useful and just to help set the tone and get a sense of like level setting and getting them starting to move on that, on the membership process. So they get a sense of a.
It's a quick win. It's an immediate feedback. It's a. Okay, you're in, you're. You're doing this. kind of like, like starting that engagement off right from the beginning once they're. They're in.
Guest 5: Okay, I've got an idea for you, Michelle. Okay, maybe that help with engagement. I've Got something for my, my membership I went from like 6 people to now 87 people, thanks to Polo. Oh, wow.
Even with 87 people now, I still only get four or five people necessarily engaged on a call. Like, it's still the, it's like a 10% of people
who have signed up. Right. Come and get engaged. But what I, what I did for my people right off the bat was as soon as they went in, they linked them to a site and I gave them like, here's a five quick steps for how you can figure out what, how to get the most out of your time here.
Just something really quick and easy that they could do really quickly so that they know what the value is that they want out of it. And I even offered them each a one hour session with me if they wanted to talk to me about it, just so then I could meet with them in person. Because it was when I met with Paul and Melissa one on one that I was like, oh my God, I'm so excited about this and here's what I need to do.
And it made all the difference. And then I just give them a free tool of some kind every month as part of just being there. I just, I launch it the same day every month. And then they know that they're going to at least get that even if they're passive. So they're getting something from it. Just some ideas.
Michelle: Okay, so maybe I could do like a little quick video.
This is what's inside the community. I mean, mostly the community is just a slack where we can get feedback on our work and then we have brainstorming calls. So there's not like a library of content, but maybe just showing them what it looks like on the inside. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
Guest 5: Yeah, absolutely. Or how they can get
the most out of their time there. Because if they, I think if they can see what is the value that they're going to get out of your membership and being involved and how to get the most out of it, then they'll be more excited and you. And then they'll be, they'll tell their friends and they'll say, you got to come over too.
Michelle: Okay, great idea.
Thanks. I'll add that in.
Paul: Natalie, put something in the, in the chat for you as well. I'm not sure if you.
Michelle: Okay, great.
Diane (2): Yeah. But the loom recordings personalized to me, so that definitely was awesome. Personal, Personalized. Loom anytime. And just like what Michael said, like anytime you can get really personal with someone, even that one on one that's so personal and people really, really appreciate that.
Michelle: Okay, yeah.
Melissa: Any other thoughts? Yeah, I love both Michael and Robert said were awesome. And my other thought was, is like you had said something like, you know, there's people they kind of get there but they're, they don't have a sense of what it is and the showing up. So maybe even if you could send because you said you have like community, you have the Slack channel and like community group meetings, like maybe even if you could send a sample, even if it's not the full meeting, but like a clip of like if you had like a really great meeting with some aha's and be like, hey, here's what to expect.
Here's an example of like what just happened at one of our meetings. Even could even be like a montage of like a couple of clips of people just sharing ideas and things like that so that they can kind of get a sense of what this community is all about too. So they get again, create that excitement for it too.
Okay, yeah, I can do that.
Paul: Yeah. And I'm going to go rapid fire because I have a lot of thoughts on different things that you said you're meeting these people in person. Would you say that the majority of the people that you're meeting in these in person environments are already the quality people that you probably want to do business with anyway? Like are you creating too much friction for a $30 item to put an application there?
Because when people meet you in person and you're like, if you're a speaker in a stage or anything, you have people at the peak emotional state where they're highly connected with you, your authority is very high. And if you create an application and then you create a delay, now they're a week away from when they were seeing you and they're probably just going to fall off at a greater, higher level because they would have bought everything from you the day of the event itself.
How many people do you get an application from that you feel is not the right fit for a $30?
Could you just identify that within the first month and say hey, sorry, I don't think you're the right fit and get rid of people versus creating friction on the front because normally application basis for most of us is typically a high ticket item.
Right. You know, and so it just like what I would do I would.
And I would reverse the psychology. I would actually have an application based publicly. And then when you're at the live event, say look, know especially if you're presenting or networking, look publicly this is application only. But I really love your vibe, this room and everything. I'm going to give you a backdoor way of coming right into our program right now and I'm going to get you up and running as quickly as possible because then you'll probably see a higher level conversion and it feels exclusive because you're, you're taking them around the velvet rope and you're not like the, like a doorman, like stopping them from getting in.
So I would look at that and then behind the scenes, Melissa, when it comes to engagement, Melissa and I look at our, customer journey. So prior to somebody making a purchase, that's a prospect journey. And the moment somebody makes that purchase, you have what we call is the. What is the perfect onboarding experience. So like, what is the thing that we would want to see ourselves and experience step by step?
And that starts with the thank you page. And that starts with the first email. And it's like, what would you want to experience? What would be the perfect. If you could just lay it all out per. Like, oh, if everything was per. Not some of these things, you may not be able to do that. Maybe a staff person in the future or an app or something. But like if you could just lay it out ahead of time.
This is the moment they hit that thank you page. This is all the bells and whistles. I want to be there the first email they get. Oh, and it would be a dream if somebody could just like send them a video message. Just like the loom or a bonbon or bonjouro, where it's like, hey, I saw you just signed up. You know, congratulations, can't wait to see on the inside, like, what would all the dream things be?
Because you might not be able to do all them, especially at the price point. But then also look at the retention. What's the perfect retention experience? So it's like. And you can separate that and say what's the perfect engagement experience? Like, what can I do to re engage? Because what most of us do is we bring members in and then we homogenize everybody. Or you don't see anybody as an individual and it's like, oh, do you have any triggers that's like, oh, Sam hasn't shown up in two months.
I'm going to create, I'm going to create a mechanism that's Going to cause the unengaged member. I'm going to re engage them personally. And that might be you sending a DM to them. Like the unscalable things.
Michelle: Right.
Paul: Where I think a lot of us have forgotten along the way is the old school. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's like, it takes like nine times the amount of cost and effort to create a new client than it does to retain an existing one.
Michelle: Right.
Paul: Whatever those numbers were. And we're also focused on, like, the next member. Most of us aren't doing the thing to just make sure the people we already have in our house is being seen, heard, and taken care of. Like, it's too much effort to like, send a direct message or to send an email. And it's like, well, that little touch point could like have somebody stay in or engage and not cancel.
And instead a lot of us go, it's not scalable, so we're not going to do that. And then we have to work five times as hard to get the next new person versus retaining the existing Hopefully that makes sense.
Michelle: Yeah, that makes sense. Part of the onboarding too, after they pay is they have a connection call with me so I can get to talk with them a little bit more and learn a little bit about what they're wanting to accomplish so I can start introducing them to members.
But I'm always so surprised the number of people that don't take me up on that too, so. And again, it could just be the price point. And then to your earlier question about do I get people who are not the right fit applying. Yes. Essentially it's a space for marketers to just support each other. And my concern was because I do talk to a lot of people who are early in their marketing career, that brainstorming calls would become completely different experience for my more experienced marketers that are 15, 20 years in of just always answering like, kind of newbie questions.
the founding members have really wanted to kind of keep it more experienced. And I understand those things. I want to, I want to split it off when I have the size to split it off, but it just doesn't make sense for my time right now.
Paul: Yeah.
Michelle: Yeah.
Paul: So for all of us, that's always the dilemma. And especially for such a low price point. Just keep in mind, number one, founding, founding members, don't give them that much power because they will never want anything to change.
Michelle: Yeah.
Paul: So. Oh, you build it this way. I don't want you to change anything. This happened in my real Estate company years ago. Like I made a mistake of getting the opinions of my agents about doing some changes. No, no, no. Status quo wants you to keep it the way it is because if it's smaller, they have more access to you. If it's this and that, blah, blah, blah, it's going to change.
But this is, this is where I want to loop you back as well. All the people have been around for a long time. They haven't sharpened their saw in a long time and they're working on old crap and they need to work on first principles, fundamentals. And all the advanced stuff is first principles, fundamentals. And sometimes you need a couple new people in the room.
Michelle: Okay.
Paul: Who jolt the old timers, be like, oh yeah, I remember, I did that five years ago.
Oh yeah, I used to do that 10 years ago. so I would just be careful. from a growth standpoint for all of us, good, better and different, there's always way more people that are spending money at the newer stages than there are people at the advanced stages. this is what's probably making you struggle and appealing and growing.
And also what you're saying is you don't have enough people yet to split. But the irony is, if you got rid of the application and you actually just created a back end, like choose your own adventure, you would actually appeal to these new people and create a second cohort for them and just do a second one hour call with them, whatever frequency, because you would give them the time and space because you did attract them.
So instead of denying them entry, why don't you just give them a different path? Yeah.
Michelle: Okay, so when it, when I've created communities that were kind of structured like this before, I also had the problem of people would buy, but then they wouldn't take the steps that I had laid out to properly onboard them, like filling out short applications so I understand where they're at or booking a call with me if I remove the, the barrier to entry, but still need to collect that information.
Do you have suggestions on how do you actually get people to follow through, especially when it's so community based, focused and like that's the draw of just being able to be in a collaborative environment. anybody has words of wisdom on that too, because I think that's also contributing to the problem.
Michael: have some thoughts on that because I'm setting up a community right now and I'm doing it through Membership.io
so I've got the platform features in there, they have attributes that they have where when you said somebody joins up, they're sort of like as part of the onboarding process, you can give the, you can ask questions and you can make it clear like some of those can show up in their profile and some of them can be kept on the back end kind of secret for you.
If you're not working with a platform, I would just say put a Google form together and in that initial email sequence, when somebody comes into the program, just put a link in there and say, hey, you know what, I want to make sure that you get the best experience possible here. And so I have a couple of questions that are really important to help me understand what, what you want, what you're trying to get out of this so that I can tailor what I'm doing to better fit you and then ask them a couple of questions in there.
You want to keep it short, but I mean, whatever those really important things are that you feel like you want to know, to help personalize it, you know, ask them those questions and make sure they know in the email, you know, like, hey, it's just, it's whatever, four questions and it'll take you two minutes to fill out. But it's really important for me to be able to help you.
That could be something that you do that doesn't take up too much and does feel like a barrier to entry.
Michelle: Okay.
Paul: And then follow up on something Michael said earlier on when he said that now he has like 84 members but only 10% of them show up. You're worrying about a group of people that are going to keep paying you monthly and probably aren't going to disrupt your calls anyway.
Michelle: Yeah,
Paul: yeah. You know what I mean? one side thing, and then we'll move on. That I remember years ago, I, many years ago when we, we bought into, I think, James Wedmore's program, bbd, and I just went immediately to go right into the Facebook group and I looked in all the emails and everywhere and I could not figure out how to get into the Facebook group.
And I even hit their support and they're like, well, our first email said you need to first go and watch these three videos inside the platform. And if you do that, we'll reveal to you what the link to the Facebook group is. You know, I didn't love that as a consumer, but it was just like, like they're making me follow this path of onboarding. So I kind of respect from a business owner, I kind of respected it.
It was kind of like it wasn't an email. Like here's all the things. Go do it. Because I would just like bypass the trainings just went right into the group because more or less that's what we bought into it for. So it's just one of those things. It's like you could kind of control, you know, by giving them only one asset that they can consume that then onboards them to the second thing and then that controls the third experience.
It just said most of us don't love friction and that's why we bounce out of things. But ironically a lot of us are members of a whole bunch of things that we don't use. It's like a Planet Fitness membership. So when you have something that you're dealing with business owners and they're only paying 30 bucks a month, it's one of those expenses. It's not going to be the first thing that they cancel.
You know, because it's more complicated to go log in and figure out how to cancel than it is worth their time that you know, just to have it on the side. I would just decrease a lot of the friction.
Michelle: Okay, thanks everyone. Awesome. Great question.