Keeping Your Memberium Site Members Around Indefinitely – Part 1

You've done the heavy lifting and convinced a good number of people to buy into your Memberium membership site. They've agreed to pay you monthly. This is an accomplishment worth celebrating.  It's not an easy thing to do.  Hurray!!!

Ok.  Enough with the celebrating. What are you doing to keep these members around happily wanting more?  

If you offer an automated subscription and charge your members monthly (if could be quarterly or some other time period), they aren't overtly revisiting the decision to stay in your program every month.  The charge just happens.  At some given moment, they are going to come up for air and ask themselves, "Is this worth the money I'm paying every month?"   It's a question you need to address as part of your  business model.  If you don't, your churn of outgoing members will become the next issue you'll need to face.

If you've built your membership site, offering course material is usually at the heart of it.  You provide some information or training that your members value.  They're idea when they started was, "I'm going to get this expert's advice so I can accomplish Goal X."  Examples of these goals might sound something like this:

• For real estate agents, their goal might be to increase their income past some specific amount.  When they hit that number, they may think, "I'm done."
• For aspiring artists it could be to increase their artistic skills by some amount.  When they compare their work before and after they worked your program, they may decide enough of that.
• For a soccer coaches, it's likely to be to increase player skills or to keep players more engaged by using a better variety of drills.  When players provide the coach with positive feedback or even start winning more, you're course has done it's job.  They leave.

(BTW These are all goals from projects my team and I have built for our Memberium membership site customers.)

For a membership site to keep your members happily coming back from more month and month, you MUST take action to make yourself the continued irresistible option for them.  In this series, I'm cover ideas any membership site owner can consider and it doesn't require producing more content. These scaleable options for increasing member stickiness and minimizing churn.

Idea #1 - Offer Office Hours or Weekly Calls

Your initial offering may have been content your members wanted.  It was attractive enough for them to sign up.  If that's the case, it's likely they would value having access to the "expert."  Now you do have to be stingy with your time.  A big benefit of building a membership site is that it leverages your time better.  But what if you made yourself available for questions and answers specific hours of the week.

You already provide your members with your content.  Adding you in a limited way to the initial program or as an upsell to your base program can be seen as a huge value.  You can run these calls something like GoToMeeting or Zoom.  You use a Q&A format that requires no prep on your part.  You can allow members to submit their questions beforehand or you ask people to submit their questions via chat while to call is in session.  You may consider opening up the line of the person that raises their hand in a session, but be careful.  The technical part of this can become a real time waster if your members aren't technically savvy.

A big benefit for you is that your members get to know you better.  Your sharing your expertise with your members further establishes you as the expert.  They hear your and maybe even see you if you turn on your webcam.  Don't underestimate how valuable this is.  It tightens their connection with you and makes the feel like they are a part of your tribe or community.  That alone increases member retention.

While on the call your members typically have similar questions.  The ones that voice their questions get them answered.  Those that are shy about asking questions are likely to have the same questions so they get them answered. Those that are less experienced in what it is you offer hear the questions from members farther along in the program.  They get to know more about what they don't yet know.  That re-enforces the message that they need your program and increases their likelihood they stay around knowing it's the right approach for reducing their knowledge gap.

You absolutely MUST record these sessions and offer them up as recorded content.  Those that can't make your scheduled calls can catch up at their convenience.  It's a win for you and a win for them.

Stay tune for the next article in the series where I'll cover adding an online community to your membership.