Best Practices to Get the Most out of your Membership Site

Whether looking for guidance on pricing, onboarding, or winning back lost members, we know a thing or two. We did some digging into what makes membership sites successful and rounded up some of the tried-and-true advice we’ve given over the years.

Here are Restrict Content Pro’s best practices for all things membership related.

Price your membership right

While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to pricing your memberships, what you create can point you in the right direction. Here’s how we recommend pricing your membership based on your offering:

Single tier memberships. One of the simplest pricing models, these work if your goal is to give all your members the same value and access. Common single-tier memberships include content subscriptions, subscription box services, and digital courses built using a plugin like LearnDash.
Tiered memberships. Tiered memberships work if you offer premium versions of your product or servive. They also help you personalize member journeys and expand your revenue avenues.
Metered billing memberships. Here, members pay based on how much they use, download, or consume. A basic example of this service is utilities. This method also works if you want to limit downloads or free accounts that have a limited offer before billing begins.
VIP memberships. This is the business model that discount clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club use. Amazon Prime is a great example of how the digital VIP membership can work. Members pay a monthly or annual membership fee to have access to features like free and fast shipping, on-demand video, and other benefits.

Create a compelling onboarding experience

Onboarding is your chance to make a first impression. Sites without good onboarding sequences are ones where initial churn can be high. Here’s our blueprint for a stellar email onboarding experience.

Email #1: New members should immediately receive a confirmation email when they sign up. This should let them know their payment went through and provide helpful links. Link to their account settings page, member dashboard page, discussion forums, and anything else relevant.
Email #2: Members should also receive their welcome email, written in your personal voice, after signup. Include a well-crafted mission statement and the reason you started your membership program. Add to a video overview if you have one. Include a personal signoff and ask them to reply if they have any questions. We like “If you ever have any questions, hit reply – I respond to every email I get.”
Email #3: Two to four days later, point them to another part of what you’re offering that builds community. If you have discussion forums, point them to the “introduce yourself” thread if there is one (if not, start one!). Again, ask for feedback and offer them help.
Email #4: In another 3-5 days, highlight a popular area of your membership site. Rinse and repeat this until you’ve provided a thorough walkthrough of your site’s key areas.
Email #5: Somewhere around the 25-day mark, tell members what new content you have planned for the next few months. Give them a taste of what they’d be missing if they decided to cancel their membership before the next billing cycle.
Email #6: If you have both monthly and annual memberships, send monthly members and offer for a one-time special on an annual plan. Lay out any extra benefits they get by being an annual member as well as the financial benefit (e.g. 12 months for the price of 10).

Drip Your Content

Drip content means to release your content in parts. You could release chapters of an e-book or the modules in an online course according to a time-based schedule. Use drip content for engagement, protection, improvement, and efficiency. Here are our tips for getting started with drip:

Implement a strategy. Email is a simple way to get started with drip. You can send an email when new content is posted to your site (no more than weekly). You can also implment drip with Restrict Content Pro’s Drip Content Add-on. With this add-on, you can strategize if you want content to be released manually, on a schedule, or when a user completes a certain activity.
Design a drip flowchart. A flowchart helps you plan how you’ll release your content to your audience. For example, what does a user need to do to receive your content? This can also help segment your audience and determine who gets what, especially if you have tiers or trials in your membership.
Create a drip content schedule. A drip schedule lets you control when your members will receive your content. Your content and audience will help you determine what the appropriate schedule would be. We recommend trying out a few scenarios to see which drip frequency sees the most engagement.

Win back lost members

Churn is an inevitable part of running a membership site, but convincing lost or lapsed members to come back isn’t only about persuasion. It’s about value, strategy, and emotional connection. Here’s how you can find out why members cancelled and what to do about it:

Don’t burn bridges. It can feel like a huge letdown after doing all the work to get your members on board. But, it’s vital that you don’t allow the frustration to overshadow the member experience. In other words, don’t make it painful for members to cancel.
Issue a member exit survey. It can be something as simple as: “What made you cancel your membership?” Or, you could go friendlier, like “What can we do better?,” or “what made you cancel?” You can use services like Gravity Forms or Survey Monkey to get an exit survey up and running right away. Make it open-ended, too: there’s a 785% increase in exit survey completion when questions are open-ended.
Wait at least a few months. Before you get back in touch with your lost members, give them some time. You want them to notice that they are indeed missing out. It also gives you time to address the issues that caused them to leave in the first place. Then, once you’ve added new features and content, or allowed them to have the chance to miss you, you have a bit more leverage.
Consider a limited-time win-back promotion. You might decide to give former members a limited-time opportunity to rejoin at a deeply discounted price, or with other special bonuses that are only available for a specific window of time.
Give your members options. There may be members who decide to cancel because they don’t want everything included in your membership. They could potentially be won back if they knew there was an option that better suited their needs. Think about offering different payment plans, options for downgrading to a less expensive tier, and/or an option where members can pause their membership.
Make that change. If you’ve been meaning to do a site upgrade, or make changes to your site or content, now’s the time. When attempting to win back lost members, having something fresh and new to show them helps. As long as the changes you want to make are doable, completing them sooner gives you more leverage!

It may take some time to implement some of these best practices, but running a successful membership site is worth it. With strong foundational practices, your membership site should run smoothly from month-to-month.

Want to try it out first? Explore Restrict Content Pro’s live demo, or checkout the Pro version of our plugin to maximize your membership site’s potential.