3 Membership Site Features for Keeping Members Excited and Engaged – Part 1

Great!!  You got members to sign up for your membership site.  Cha-ching!  Time to celebrate, right?

Well not so fast.  Getting members to buy into your membership site is an accomplishment.  I'm not taking anything away from you.  But it's just as important to keep members engaged with your content and focused on finishing that course.

For example, we've built a site for a customer that works to get English speakers fluent in Spanish.  The end goal is very clear: proficiency speaking a new language.  We built another site that teaching people Android programming.  The objective is for their students to know how to effectively program the device.

If you are good at selling, you can get people to enthusiastically sign up and pay for a membership program like one of these.   When they make the purchase they are excited and mentally committed to your idea, your concept and set on gaining the value and benefits you offer.  Now once they got back to their business and sobered up to what it's going to take to get those beneifts, their excitement may die down a bit.

As a membership site owner, you MUST be as focused on keeping your members as you are about signing them up.  If people sign up and never complete what it is you have to offer, they are likely to:

• Feel cheated.  They may not have done their part, but they will still lay some of the blame on you.
• Keep from buying anything else you offer them.
• Be unwilling or unenthusiastic about recommending your solution to others.

So several months after members enthusiastically buy, you have members with this soured feeling about having done business with you.  So what's a membership site owner to do?

Here are three ideas we have seen work nicely at addressing these issues.

Idea #1: Monitor Progress and Take Action

Membership site platforms all provide visibility into what members do on your site.  You know when they log in, how long they stay on the site and what areas of the site they have visited.

We highly recommend that you closely monitor the progress members make on your site.  If you notice members a few weeks into your program that haven't logged in yet, you know there's a problem.  If some time has passed and they have haven't completed chapter one, that's a signal you have a less than engaged member.

It could be the member went of vacation just after they made the purchase, but barring that, you have an issue you need to address or this members will soon leave you.

So what if you set a timer to tag members that haven't logged into your site a few days after their purchase.  Tag those that are taking a while to finish chapter one has those that are "falling behind."

Here's what you can do with these.  What if you put people that are falling behind into a campaign that begins sending them encouraging email messages.  What is you invited them to a call with someone that can give them a hand?  What if you sent them a survey asking them, "How's it going?"  At the very least, the member will feel like someone cares.  They'll at least feel like you, the site owner, did something to reach out to them and they would be less likely to leave you with a bad taste in their mouth.

I knew a company that closely monitored a member's first log into their membership site and the time it took their members to complete chapter one of their 10 chapter course.   If they didn't see a login soon after the purchase, they gave them a call.  They actually had someone call them.  Then if they didn't see the member finish chapter one in a given time period, they made another call.  Those were two critical success indicators and they worked hard to make sure they got as many members as possible to accomplish them.  This had a significant increase on the overall completion rates for their program.

Click here to read the next 2 ideas in part 2 of this article.