Episode 10: If it Feels Hard to Sell Your Membership Right Now…
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:
I know, I know. There are so many conversations about how selling feels so much harder in business right now.
I’ve spoken with many membership owners behind the scenes who feel like their sales are slower or they have to work twice as hard — just to achieve the same result.
There’s a lot of chatter about selling in 2024, but I don’t feel membership owners are well-served by most of the perspectives that are being shared. (If anything, the more you search for answers, the more overwhelmed you feel.)
That’s why, in this episode, we’re having a conversation about what the current sales environment means for you, specifically, as a membership-driven business owner.
We’ll talk about:
How to tune out all the outside noise about “what’s working”, what you should be doing, and how your results compare to other business owners in your space (for the sake of your own sanity).
The specific strategy I recommend to give you the clarity you need to take action and learn what your audience needs from you right now — so you can stop guessing, and start gathering data about how to improve your membership sales.
Why I’ve been talking to all of my membership clients about “giving yourself more chances to win” and why it doesn’t make sense to hang all your results on just one BIG launch or promotion in 2024 (or 2025).
How to test out new messaging angles to sell your membership and grab attention with a “timed engagement event” that will bring new customers into your membership and drive retention on the back-end as well (win-win)!
Over the last few months, these strategies have helped my clients create results like doubling their conversions during membership promotions.
Listen now for a new perspective on how to improve your membership sales during “slow” seasons — and how to put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your own business.
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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:
Does it feel harder than ever to sell your offers right now? Especially your membership? I've had this conversation with so many membership owners lately—people who are seeing their launch numbers decrease over the years instead of watching their numbers go up, particularly over the last 18 to 24 months. People who, just to maintain their previous results, feel like they have to work twice as hard—maybe even ten times as hard—just to stay at the baseline they've currently set in terms of their sales. Does it feel like people just aren’t responding to what you're putting out there anymore? People used to be so excited by your membership, excited to hang out with you. And now you feel like you’re just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of people that your members could choose from, to work with, to learn from. And maybe they're just not paying attention to you anymore.
If so, then today's episode is for you. I know that many people are talking about what the hell is happening in the world right now. Why does it feel harder to sell our things? And also, for every person who says it feels really hard to sell their offers, to sell their membership, there’s another person out there who's saying that they're having the best results ever. But I know from behind the scenes that a lot of people who have seen success, who saw growth before the pandemic and then rampant growth during the pandemic—people who have been in business for anywhere from five years to 15 years, 20-plus years—many of them are feeling a shift. So, I’m not going to pretend that I have all the answers to why this is happening. We know that people have less money to spend at the moment due to inflation.
There’s also been this massive shift as many more people came online during the pandemic, and there’s now more exposure in your market to these kinds of offers. At this point, most people have heard about a membership before; they’ve bought other offers and been let down.
So, I think there’s a confluence of factors: a general sense of exhaustion, a huge range of choice, people being let down by past offers, a loss of the “new and shiny” factor, and of course, the fact that today’s money doesn’t go as far as it used to.
So with all of this happening, all of this affecting us, the question is: how do we get a sense of control back? While you will never truly be in control of your results, you can be in control of the actions that you take, the thoughts that you think, and the approach that you choose when selling your membership. So, what I want to talk about today is: what is a game plan?
What does it look like to approach things mindfully when selling feels harder?
How can we not fall into panic? How can we be really mindful, strategic, and make informed decisions about the best way to move ahead? And then, once we take action, how can we actually learn from those choices that we make? How can we assess the data, assess the results so that we can continue to improve and get somewhere, as opposed to just doing what someone else said is a good idea, throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall, being in constant motion, but feeling like you’re never actually getting anywhere?
A few things that we’ll cover today:
The first thing is that, when you have a membership, you are in a unique position to gather information, to gain insight about what your audience wants from you right now. You have an opportunity that other people with other kinds of offers don’t have because you don’t only have past customers—you have current paying members who are choosing to renew, who are choosing to stay with you, and who can give you so much information about how to position and talk about your membership so that it attracts more of the right people. So, we'll talk about how to do that.
We’re also going to talk about what it looks like to experiment thoughtfully with different promises, angles, and messaging—without throwing everything out, without freaking out your current members—and do it with something I call a “timed engagement event” that you can use to test a messaging angle for your membership. This can help you get new members in, but also surprise and delight your current members, driving engagement and retention for the people who have already chosen to be with you.
So, we’re going to talk about how to go about that and some things to consider to make that timed engagement event successful. And then we’re also going to talk about how to put less stress on yourself during a launch by thinking about it differently. I believe that memberships, because of their structure and design, inherently give us more chances to win.
But often, we go into a launch thinking, “This launch has to go well, or I’m a failure, or something is broken.” But if we can really embrace an experimental mindset, I believe that you’ll get more runs on the board and give yourself more chances to win, rather than just hanging everything on one launch per year or two launches per year.
When we don’t have much room to get things wrong, especially right now, I think this season is calling on all of us to experiment, to try different things, and see what resonates. You need to give yourself the space to do that, to actually see what sticks. So, we're talking about all of this in today’s episode.
I think you’re really going to like it.
Before we get into things, I want to let you know that if you love what you've heard so far on this podcast, or in previous episodes, or if you love what you hear in this episode, you can hear from me every single week. I send a newsletter just for people who have memberships, and we really go deep into how to think about your membership, how to make it a sustainable, profitable part of your business, and different opportunities to deliver on your membership and to sell it that you may not have thought of yet. So I’ll put the link to sign up for that—it’s totally free—in the show notes below. You can also just go to membership-drivenbusiness.com/newsletter, and you can hear from me each week in addition to the podcast.
Keep in mind that we can also do some of this work together. All of my work is focused around supporting membership owners. I’ve spent the past nearly eight years now supporting people with memberships, some of them for four or five years at a time. So, I have an amazing amount of insight and experience into how we sell memberships, how we refine them, how we dial in messaging, and make them work for you. So again, I’ll put all the information in the show notes below about the different ways you can work with me. Why not just reach out and see if there’s a fit? I'd love to chat with you.
To ease into this topic, I want to talk a little bit about the “now”—what is likely happening for you and possibly some different ways to think about your current situation, just so you can free up some mental resources and direct them away from maybe panic or discouragement and towards opportunity and action.
And most importantly, mindful action. Intentional action. I don’t want you to feel like you need to go on a scattershot, massive-action, stressed-out sort of approach. We really can be intentional here. And I know that that is really hard to do when you’ve got sales targets to hit, you’ve got launch goals, you’ve got revenue goals, and right now, the launches and promotions that you're doing just aren’t it.
Maybe they're not huge failures. Maybe they are—that's okay too. But maybe you just feel really disillusioned. This can be really frustrating when you have a membership, especially because a lot of the revenue for memberships is made, of course, on the back end, with the recurring revenue and the repeat customers who choose to stay with you. And particularly if you’re running ads, it’s rare for you to turn a profit off each new member that you get unless they stick with you for a significant amount of time.
We’re talking about at least a few months. And so, when we’re doing these membership launches, we already have to have our mindset right because we don’t have those huge launch paydays like somebody who is selling a $2,000+ course, collecting a lot of revenue upfront.
Yours happens over the long term. And so, seeing that initial launch payday number shrink can be really discouraging. That’s why a long-term view is so essential, and I really want you to carry this long-term view through this whole conversation today because that's the only way that you’re going to get out of this thing intact. And it runs against our nature because we want a solution right now. But I know that you're going to be okay.
You will figure this out. Give yourself some time and space to experiment because you have a membership—you’re already playing a long-term game. And so when things are tough, lean into that. But I know it’s still really stressful when those launch numbers are shrinking, and you’re like, “God, I feel like I’m getting so little return for all this work I’m doing.” But just hold on to that nugget: stick to the long-term, and that is what will carry you through.
And that’s true whether your membership is selling really well or not so well. The temptation when things aren’t going so well is to be looking everywhere else externally for answers. And like we’ll speak about today, the best thing you can do is actually turn inwards.
And I don’t mean that in a woo-woo way. I don’t mean pulling some tarot cards—unless that speaks to you. I mean really getting reflective on what the options are based on your own ideas, your own desires, and, critically, what your existing members have to say to you. They are an asset that other people with other kinds of offers do not have.
And that’s because they are active paying members, and the fact that they are choosing to pay you now—and not just people who chose to pay you in the past—is really important. So we’ll get into that. But what are we doing instead? We tend to look outward. We scroll social media, looking for answers. Maybe you're Googling.
Hey, maybe you found this podcast, in which case that was a great choice. Maybe you’re buying courses and small programs. Maybe you’re thinking about different ways of launching, right?
Maybe you’re thinking, “Oh, should we switch from a three-day challenge to a five-day challenge? Should we do free versus paid? Should I be doing a podcast tour instead? What can we do to get leads? Is it time for us to do Facebook ads? If we have been doing Facebook ads, do we need a new ads manager?
Do we need a different approach? Maybe this is the time for me to go evergreen. Maybe we need to set up a digital shop instead.” You probably have, at any given time, three to five different options for how you could go about selling right now that you are seriously considering, and these just take up space inside your head. Some of them could work really well.
You won’t know until you try them. While I’m a huge fan of experimentation—in fact, it’s going to be the theme of this entire episode—we really have to resist the urge to think that somebody else has the answer on what the perfect way is right now to sell our membership.
What people can tell you is what has worked well in the past. In fact, in this episode, I’ll be telling you a lot about what is working really well with all the clients I’m working with. But choosing a prescription from someone else is really dangerous, and I think this is true the further along you get in business, because things get more nuanced and complex, particularly with a membership.
There are so many dynamics involved in how you set it up, how you design it, what you deliver, and what you promise, because this offer really has to be sustainable for you and valuable for your members, your specific kind of person that you’re serving. And the unique blend that is going to be very specific to you. So, we end up sort of scrolling ourselves into this sense of overwhelm, a sense of doom, thinking that somebody else has the answer.
There has to be a framework I can replicate somewhere. We end up making ourselves feel really bad because, as I said, for every person who says it’s really hard out there—which only confirms our belief that it’s really hard—there’s another person who’s doing really well. And then we think, “Well, then what’s wrong with us?”
“What’s wrong with me?” And this can cause you to act in really erratic ways—putting things out there really quickly, moving rapidly between strategies—so the things we try, we’re not even reflecting on properly to understand what worked, what felt good, what’s worth keeping, and what we should throw away. And it only dials up the sense of overwhelm. When actually, the best thing we can do is give ourselves some space, so that we can be mindful, be intentional, and actually look at the results of what we’re doing.
And we’ll talk about that in today’s episode. But if you are currently stuck in this sort of doom scroll pattern, if you’re looking outside for answers, this is only amplifying the problem. And so I think you’ll really enjoy what we’ll talk about today, which is ways to get internal insights, both from within your business and from your members, which is better than any data you could get from the outside.
What I do know is that if you’re in this position, you may be having thoughts about whether it’s finally time for the other shoe to drop, like, “Well, I’ve had really good success up until now, but this is it. Things are done. I’m cooked. There’s no more.” And it can be really tempting during times like this to consider backing away from your membership, waiting until a better time to sell it, to focus on creating new or other offers, or just to defer making a choice at all, which is where you sort of spin your wheels.
You don’t make a decision, you try a bunch of small things, but you never really commit. And then, of course, you’re frustrated when you don’t make progress. So, I hope that by the end of this episode, you have a sense of confidence back. And it’s confidence, really, in your ability to figure things out and to try things, based on what is happening, based on your own wisdom, your own knowledge.
What is happening in front of you? Rather than what some other expert has to say about the perfect way to do things. And this is really what it’s like when you work with me. I bring a ton of experience to the table. But ultimately, I’m going to help you figure out the best way to move ahead, based on the numbers in front of you, the facts and feelings that you’re bringing to the table, and the vast experience that you have. The answers are waiting there, and we need to just wade through it, make a plan, and then decide, once the plan rolls out, which information is going to help us get even better results next time.
So I’ll give you a sense of what that looks like.
Your mission now is to do things that give you back your sense of power and to think, like I talk about in the first episode and all the episodes after that, to think like a membership-driven business owner. You are a community builder. You are a community leader. You’re not just another person who sells passive products online. Nothing about your work is passive.
You are actively involved in supporting your customers, supporting your members. You are in a relationship with them. And right now, that relationship is about to be worth its weight in gold for you. It’s an asset. But most of the time, we miss this opportunity right in front of our eyes.
So, instead of saying, “I’m going to replicate this approach from someone else who said it’s really amazing, and I have to do it. I’m going to do a five-day paid boot camp. I’m going to do a two-day paid challenge. I’m going to do a private podcast. I am going to do a three-part video series. I’m going to spend the next month, the next six months, going evergreen. And I’m going to hang everything on that because someone else said it will work,” which totally externalizes all that power, all that control—what we’re going to try instead is making informed decisions.
Committing to a certain way of experimenting because, based on my own feelings, my own data, my own insight, my own members, my current customers, and what we see happening in our business, in our unique space, we think this has a shot to work right now. And this is what people really need. And we’re going to experiment with that in a launch in a small and manageable way.
It doesn’t need to be a big launch, by the way. It might be a small promotion. However you sell your membership, decide that you’re going to experiment with this idea thoughtfully, mindfully. And you’re going to look at the feedback and keep iterating from there.
This will change the way that you feel about your business, about your membership. The answers are there; we just have to find them. And this is often what a lot of the conversations with my clients look like who have memberships, whether they have 50 paying members or up to 8,000 paying members. We’re always talking about, “Okay, what’s going on here?”
Let’s wrap our arms around this. Let’s wade through this. Ah, that’s an interesting direction—let’s lean into that. Let’s talk about how to execute that. You’ll feel much more confident, and you’ll start operating like the accomplished business owner that I know you are. It’s how you got here. It’s how you got this far. We can lean on that strength more.
I have a client with an early childhood education membership who I’ve worked with in various capacities since 2021. I’ve written for her launches, helped her develop her messaging, and consulted with her on the structure of her membership, on how to engage, retain, and support members. And she has definitely noticed that it’s getting harder to sell the membership. And we have done a ton of work on establishing the value of that membership, making it as engaging as possible for members. She recently celebrated her highest month of retention ever—over 98%. Which is incredible for a membership that supports over 2,000 paying members, with people being satisfied with the support and experience they’re getting. We’ve spent the best part of a year testing and iterating on different messaging angles, different engagement events, and reasons for people to join now.
And I’ll give you a sense of what that engagement event can look like as we go. But in order to figure out that engagement event, something that you can wrap your promotion around as a unique hook or angle, there’s something we have to do first. And that first step is to get out of your head, get out of your bubble, and reconnect with your customers. Your paying members have so much insight to offer you. People who have bought from us in the past can be helpful to talk to, but sometimes this can be tricky because they may have bought from us a year ago.
And so much can change in a quarter, in 90 days, let alone in a year. But when you have paying members, you have people who are choosing to pay you in the past month. They’re choosing to stay with you, and they can tell you what it is that they find valuable, what they need, and really what is happening in their world right now.
So, my number one, my very first action for you is to get in conversation with your members. You’ve worked so hard to invest in this relationship with them. Now is the time that you can draw information from them about what they need, how to support them, and what this might mean not just for retention but for sales, because your engagement event can help you optimize and improve both. So how do we do it?
Think about all the different ways you can be in conversation with your members.
Here are some ideas. If you have a community group, I’d love for you to post questions there. I’ll tell you the kind of questions that could be helpful to ask soon. Ask questions before and during the live calls that you host, if you do hot seats, live sessions, any kind of coaching, or any kind of coworking calls.
If you’re in the room live with customers, that’s a great time to start seeking information from them and be in conversation. You also have the ongoing emails that you send to members. You can embed surveys or questions within your member emails or send separate emails as well. Just think about different ways to spark conversation, whether it be via email, live calls, or in your community forum. Really, what you’re looking for here is a sense of “What is front of mind for you right now?”
And I’m recording this episode at the end of October 2024, so make it timely for wherever you are. I’m thinking about the end of the year, and your members likely are too. We’re going into the holiday season. If you’re planning on doing a promo between now and the end of the year, this is a great time to ask:
“What are you hoping to achieve by the end of the year?”
“What will make you feel successful at the end of the year?”
“What seems to be getting in the way of that?”
“What do you wish you had support with?”
“What are three things you really want to tick off and celebrate?”
What’s important to you as it relates to this hobby, this profession, this part of your business—whatever that niche is that you work in? Maybe you’re listening to this a few months in the future, and it’s the beginning of the year. You’re thinking about the year ahead. Again, ask people, “Where do you want to be by the end of the year?”
If that’s a long way away, get them thinking about the next month, the next 90 days.
Really, you’re just trying to get a sense of the landscape. I talk to my clients about this; I ask them all the time, “So what’s happening in your space right now?” And the funny thing is, while you have a sense of what those things may be, it’s never going to be as rich as the information and specific wording you can get from your members. So, even though I know that you have a gut sense of what members need right now, you might be really surprised by what your audience and your members have to say to you. So, if nothing else, post the question in your community group, ask it on the live calls, ask it in the emails you send.
And if you’re not getting the response that you want, send a dedicated survey and send them multiple reminders about that survey.
Going forward, I’d love for you to have, as part of your onboarding, a couple of questions where members can answer, “What’s important to you right now? What does success look like for you? What’s the reason why you joined? Where do you hope we can support you the most?” That would be great for you to add to your onboarding, although it’s not as urgent as I think sending those questions out right now, because we want that mass of response that can give you information to act in the next 30 days.
Ideally, whereas in onboarding, you’ll start to get a trickle of answers, or if you do a big launch, you’ll get a big slew of answers. But you want these answers before the launch. We tend to only gather data when someone cancels. My experience is that most people with memberships are not formally making contact and gathering information from their members as often as they could be.
And really, I’d love to see you do it at least twice a year. Maybe four times a year would be the most—I wouldn’t want to survey people more than every quarter or ask these questions, but anywhere from two to four times per year is really going to give you a sense of what is on your members’ minds right now.
Where is the value in the membership? What do they want support with? And that’s going to give you some ideas for how to support them, but also for how to talk about these problems in your messaging as well. So, get in conversation. As I was saying earlier in the episode, this is about tuning out the language from everybody else about how hard it is or what’s going to work and using your internal compass. Your members can be your internal compass. Of course, sit down and talk to your team, and think on your own as well, about where the market is going as a whole. Really, it’s when you can combine those two things—your insight and your audience’s feedback, your current members’ feedback—that you’re going to get literal gold.
And what you’re looking for here is a specific result or outcome. Now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a little while, you know I feel strongly that the days of memberships that simply provide content—those Netflix-style libraries where we can just access a bunch of masterclasses or trainings on a topic—are getting harder and harder to sell. The days of those working really well, I think, are over, unless you’re in a niche where it hasn’t been done before. Now, with our members or potential members being really exposed to content, competition, and just so many different ways to get information and knowledge, what we want to give them instead is the practice of taking action consistently so they can make progress. A very specific result that they can get excited about and that feels attainable, and an experience of us being there to support them every step of the way.
So, it’s likely that you already—or I hope if you’re not, this is a good reminder—to think less about the information or the content you can offer to people and more about the result you want to promise and the experience of how you will support them in taking action consistently. And if you have found that your membership is getting a little bit tricky to sell, then it might be because perhaps the outcome you’re promising isn’t quite tangible enough. It’s not quite close enough to their daily life.
Or maybe because you’re very focused on the deliverables and the content and less about the practice, the result, and the consistent actions that they will take and be supported in to make progress. That’s what I’m noticing now—that the more that we can dial that in with our membership promotions, the better my clients are able to do.
I would recommend listening to past episodes, particularly about behavior change. I talk a lot about what it takes to support people in the practice, and particularly the episode about making your membership irresistible—I go more into this idea too. But for our purposes here, really what you’re looking for when you talk to your members is, “What are the small, micro-actions that my members want support with?”
They might not tell you the actions, but they will tell you the results they want. And then it’s your job to reverse engineer, “Okay, so what actions am I going to support members in taking? How can I make that feel easy for them?” That might give you some amazing angles for messaging, hooks, and promises to begin playing with in your next promotion.
And so that brings me to my second point, which is, once we have that information, once we’ve waded through our ideas of what members might like, but also hard data from our members about what is important to them, what’s top of mind, the results they want, and what’s getting in the way, what I want you to do—actually, what I invite you to do—for your next promotion is to think about creating a timed engagement event. You might wonder, “What the hell does Natalie mean by this?” Well, I’ll tell you.
You don’t have to throw away the sales page for your membership. You don’t have to write a ton of new emails. What I want you to do instead is experiment with a new angle or a new promise and then design an event, whether it’s a bootcamp, a live workshop, or some piece of content inside the membership, that you deliver in a set timeframe, usually just after your launch, where members can get a taste of that very specific result. So, I’ll give you an example.
One of my recent clients, her name is Shelley Easter, has an incredible course with an ongoing community component called Shop School. This helps online creators and makers—people who sell things like, for example, jewelry—get their Shopify websites up and running. She was going into a promotion for Shop School, and we were thinking about, “Okay, so what is it that potential members, potential customers, are really interested in right now as we’re getting towards the end of the year? What is going to be important for them?” One of the conversations that we had was just the importance of feeling capable and confident about their holiday promotion.
So, this was a couple of months ago. They’re thinking about, “What do we do during Cyber Monday? Thanksgiving? Getting ready for the holidays?” This is a massive opportunity for people with online shops to generate a significant amount of income. And so, Shelley and I spoke about a few different ways that we could angle that, position it within her current messaging, and the very low-lift way that we came up with was that the very next office hours, the very next live group session after the launch ended and when all these new customers would be joining, was going to be a deep dive on how to nail your holiday promotion. And while we made some improvements to her sales page—this is what I help people through as part of the mini VIP day that I offer—the main thing that we did was call out what that specific office hours session was going to be about and make it a reason to join now. This is great, not only for current members because it supports them and gets them excited, but it’s also a reason for members to choose to join now, whereas they might not have in the past.
So, we also wove that messaging, that reason to join now, into a sales webinar. She incorporated it into her sales emails as well.
The result was that Shelley doubled her conversions based on the number of people who were signing up for her webinar. Twice as many people joined as they did before we worked together. I really believe that coming up with a timed event that made her offer feel timely, relevant, and close to what her potential members wanted right now was a huge reason why they decided to take the leap and join.
Now, we did make some other changes, as I mentioned, to her sales page. This is one of the things that you and I will do if we work together in a mini VIP day: we will optimize your sales page together. But I think that a timed event really gives you something to get excited about. It gives you something to sort of wrap your promotional energy around and use as a talking point. And it also helps you see what language and ideas actually resonate with your potential members. If it goes well, then it could either be something to lean into further as you promote this membership, or if it’s not a fit for the membership longer-term, it may branch off into other ideas for offers that you could create in the business if people are really asking for it.
And it makes sense for you to deliver. I’m going to give you another example, because there are so many different ways that these engagement events can look and work. It’s one of the things that I work with my clients on very closely. Pretty much none of them escape me when we do this kind of work together.
We talk about what these events can look like, because I think they’re just so potent. The early childhood education client I mentioned earlier tested an engagement event back in a launch in May this year, where she offered a micro-certification to members. That was really successful for her.
We have seen her engagement and her retention not only increase but reach a higher level than it has ever been. As I mentioned, she celebrated her highest retention month ever just this past month, at 98%, with over 2,000 members. People responded really well to this micro-certification.
And so, because she has quite a robust team, she was really willing to lean in with this experiment and develop micro-certification curriculum, and she had the resources to deliver that inside the membership. But the engagement in the membership dramatically went up as a result. Because it worked so well and her audience responded so positively, we then spent the next few months after that developing seasons of micro-certifications. This way, in a given year, the membership rolls through four different micro-certifications for early childhood educators on specific topics that are timely, that support the ideas the business wants to be known for, and that give an exciting reason to join now. If this specific micro-certification is of interest to them, it’s a great reason to join at that time.
You don’t need to do a micro-certification. As I was saying earlier, maybe you want to make your office hours have a really specific topic and focus.
I think the lowest-lift way to do it is to take something that you’re already doing and put a specific focus or topic around it that you think will really appeal to members, and then lean into that in your promotion. Or, you might want to do a series of live calls about a specific topic. Maybe there’s a little micro-class that you want to teach, but really, what’s important here is making it have some kind of engagement element where you’re there live with people, and the sense is that you’re solving a problem together. So, you really want to make this timed engagement event tangible in that they should walk away with a specific result or a specific problem solved, based on the information you got from being in conversation with your members.
One of the things I love is that memberships are designed to support experimentation like this and to support initiatives like this. So, based on how this engagement event works, as I said, we can lean further into it.
And as I mentioned regarding execution, I want you to highlight this engagement event on your sales page. Make it very obvious. I would suggest including a banner on your sales page that sticks when they scroll or that is up at the top, and make it bold—either in the bonus section or in the offer section. Repeat it in your pricing table if you do an offer stack where you bullet out everything that’s included, and repeat it there.
Repetition is the name of the game here. So make sure they cannot miss this engagement event. I want you to mention it in your webinar. If you’re doing a sales webinar, if you’re doing any kind of sales event, this is the exciting reason to join now. And, of course, I want you to mention it in your promo emails, and even dedicate one or two promo emails specifically to this engagement event.
So, where to from here?
Step one is being in conversation with your members. You are literally sitting on gold. Talk to your members. They’re choosing to pay you. They are actively deciding to be customers. There’s a reason for that, and you can lean further into it. This will support your retention, which, as we’ve discussed, is crucial because memberships are a long-term game. You can make a lot of money when your retention is strong, but it will also support your sales too. So, it’s a very holistic approach to think this way.
It’s long-term, which is what you need to make your membership work for you. Once you have a sense of what your members or audience is really craving right now in terms of a specific result, a tangible outcome, we can design an engagement event around that. It will surprise and delight your existing members, likely driving engagement and retention up in your membership, and this is also a messaging angle for us to test with the aim of improving sales. And if it doesn’t go as planned—there’s always a chance that it won’t—I’m going to talk to you about how to approach this so that you don’t feel like you’ve failed and so that you can still turn this engagement event into a success.
So, you can continue to work on improving your membership and the revenue it generates for you. And the way that we do that, the last piece of this puzzle, is by giving ourselves more chances to win. I think that the days of the once-a-year launch, or the twice-per-year massive launch, are coming to an end. And as I say this, I know that there are so many people who are still doing one or two times per year with these massive launches.
These people have been my clients. I’ve worked with clients who have made over 80% of their annual revenue—and we’re talking about multimillion-dollar companies with robust teams and overheads—from these annual launches. So it’s very much a viable way to operate. Perhaps I was being dramatic when I said those days are over.
I think there are so many different ways we can make our business work. My personal opinion on the matter is that this is a very stressful way to operate. I also know that it’s true because I have seen how much stress the business owner is under when they’ve got one launch and one shot to make their money. It is stressful as heck for the team as well.
I’ve been on those internal teams. I’ve been the one writing the copy, developing the messaging, and ideating on the launch strategy to make this thing work. And we are all stressed out because we really, really want it to work. And as I said earlier, we are in this strange season of business where it’s not that things aren’t working, but a lot of the things that did work don’t work as well. And I don’t think anybody really gets to escape this. We all are being called in some way to try new things, to iterate.
And to test—I think that’s just reality right now. We have to accept that. And so, if the current moment is calling on us to iterate, if we cannot avoid experimenting, then let’s give ourselves more chances to win from those experiments. What I mean by that is, let’s talk about and sell our memberships more often. Your membership is so nimble.
There are so many ways for you to sell it. You don’t need to do just one or two big public promos. I’m a big fan of public promos, by the way—these big launches. But they’re not the only thing that you need to do. You can do small sales, you can do flash sales, you can do internal sales just to your audience. By “sales,” I don’t necessarily mean discounts.
I simply mean promotions. Of course, there’s evergreen as well, which is quite a project to set up. I think that’s a future podcast episode about what it’s really like to evergreen a membership. Of course, evergreen is a potential sales opportunity for you, though I think it shouldn’t be your only sales opportunity because you may miss out on other forms of promotion and may end up feeling frustrated. But there are also ways to promote our membership on the back of other promotions for other offers.
And I’ll speak about that in a little bit, but really, what I’m getting at here is, if you’re thinking about your membership and sales feel slow, my question is: how often are you selling it? How often are you promoting it?
If it’s just once or twice a year, then it’s no wonder that you’re frustrated. The world is moving so quickly right now, and so much is changing. If you’re only selling it once or twice a year, it might be hard for you to feel like you’re able to catch up and keep pace. I think in the current moment, deciding that at least every quarter—every 90 days at a minimum—we’re going to do something to promote our membership, to sell it, and to test out possible angles and messaging for our membership to see what works, then we are giving ourselves more chances to win, more chances to see what is working, what feels good, what members are responding to, and also just to expose a potential audience to this offer. We need to talk about our stuff more.
We need to talk about it more loudly, perhaps, than we used to in the past. So, give yourself more chances to win.
So, if you haven’t yet, I really want you to look at your calendar. Right now, we’re at the end of October 2024. It may or may not make sense for you to promote your membership, although I think there probably is a way that you could—even if you just do a small internal promo to your existing subscribers, something chill and low-key. But really, take a look at your calendar. As you’re getting ready to think about your calendar for 2025, ask yourself: are we giving ourselves opportunities to sell our membership at least every 90 days?
That might include one or two public launches where we’re really putting our energy behind it. But if not that, then are we selling our existing subscribers on the membership at the end of a promotion for a different offer? Could we do a backdoor invitation to people who didn’t buy that offer and invite them into the membership? Is there a time to invite people who have bought our other offers into the membership? Just look for all those different opportunities and give yourself more chances to win. And with each of those promos that you do, particularly those public promos, commit to doing an engagement event where you test an angle and see what lands and what feels good.
Critically, when you give yourself more chances to win, it’s so important that we stop, slow down, and look at what actually worked here. One thing that I’ve decided to include recently in all of my mini VIP days for people who have a membership is a debrief on their launch. A lot of people, even experienced business owners, are not debriefing properly on their launches. You might know those top-level numbers, like how many sales you got or what your sales page converted at, or if your webinar converted well if you did a webinar, sure.
You know those numbers, but a lot of the time we are not turning those insights into valuable information about what messaging actually worked, where the weak link was in our promotion, and what we should dedicate our energy to in our next promotion. So, even if you’re already in action and you’re like, “Hey, I am giving myself a ton of chances to win here; I feel like I’m selling this thing nonstop,” how closely are you looking at what’s working and where the weak link is, so you can prioritize your effort, your energy, and your strategy? That is so important. That is why I debrief with everybody who works with me on a launch. Again, you don’t get to escape it because there’s so much gold there.
One thing I want you to consider is that launching and promoting your membership creates so many different currencies and value for you, and only one of them is immediate sales. Only one piece of currency, one piece of value from your launch, is immediate sales. I’m repeating that because it’s so important. When you have a longer-term view, you see it this way: the value in each promotion isn’t just sales. It’s also the positioning that you build, the awareness in your potential customers’ minds that you establish about what your offer is and what you’re here to do. That is so important.
Another kind of value and currency you can get is data. This is why the debrief is so important. You gain data from yourself about what worked well, data from your team about what was hard and where the bottlenecks were, data from your new customers, and from your “I wish they were my customers but they didn’t buy” audience members about what they needed and what they wished you had done instead. There are so many currencies you can capitalize on from each promotion that no promotion is truly wasted.
This is why I think giving yourself more chances to win and thinking about each promotion with a longer-term view means that you’re never really losing, because with every promotion, at the very least, you’ll gain something. You are going to grow your revenue with a timed engagement event like we’ve been speaking about, you’re going to improve your engagement, and I hope that you’ll see your retention numbers—and therefore the revenue from your membership on the back end—tick up. But you’re also going to build more awareness in your potential customers’ minds, so they’ll be more likely to buy next time. You’ll also get that data about what people need and what they want.
And that debriefing is so, so important. So, in giving yourself more chances to win, make sure you also give yourself the space and commit the time now to reflect on each promo that you’re doing. If you really want support understanding what works well in your promotions and where to focus your energy next time, doing a mini VIP day with me is a great choice. Not only do we develop a strategy, and figure out your timed engagement event, but I’ll also be there with you to look at it all after the fact and make sure that your launch was worth it, no matter what happens, no matter what you do.
And so that you feel more confident and capable moving forward.
Before we wrap up, I just want to address a question that you might have, which is, “Well, Natalie, this sounds really good, but my membership isn’t my only thing. I actually have other things planned that I want to sell this year, and I can’t just focus all my energy on selling my membership.” Maybe you want to do that, maybe you don’t, or maybe it’s just not viable for you. Whatever the scenario is that you’re in, I say that’s totally fine. Most people don’t just have a membership.
Maybe you also sell a group program, maybe you have a signature course, maybe you have digital products or a shop, maybe you have a mastermind—that’s fine. I love that mix for you. When I talk about being membership-driven, I don’t mean only having a membership. I don’t mean being “membership monogamous.” I actually mean that having a membership requires you to ensure that all of your offers support each other, because if your membership exists in a silo, you’re going to be stressed out.
And you’re also going to be missing out on opportunities to cross-pollinate and support your customers in different ways—not just in your membership, but in your other offers too, and vice versa.
So, as I was talking about earlier, when I think about giving yourself more ways to win, really what I’m thinking about here is that because your membership requires ongoing energy for you to deliver, you should give yourself ongoing opportunities to sell this membership. So, I do think once or twice per year, at least, you should have a dedicated promo that you run for your membership, but the rest of the time, look for ways to maybe sell your membership on the back of the momentum from a promotion for a different offer that you just ran. Think about ways to invite your existing subscribers into your membership in between promotions.
Really, what you’re doing is just wanting to get that flywheel running so that people are aware of your membership and there are different ways to invite them in. So don’t worry at all if your membership isn’t your only offer. You don’t have to change your business so that you’re only ever selling your membership. Really, what I want you to do here is just fine-tune that lens, that perspective, and look for opportunities to sell your membership and test out new messaging angles. Do it with an engagement event. It can be really simple—like Shelley, who doubled her conversions with our work together. All she did was change the topic of her next office hours.
That was so low-lift for her. Or, you can go all-in and create new content or new curriculum for members with your engagement event. It’s really about the season of business you’re in, the support, resources, and capacity that you currently have, and also what would be really fun and exciting for you to do and could be valuable for your members too.
So, I hope that these ideas today have helped you feel a sense of power.
That is my goal—to help you realize that you are sitting on a gold mine of currency and value in terms of your own ideas and what your existing, current, paying members can give you for ideas. Continuing to shape your membership around a very specific result and specific actions that your members can take to solve a problem that is timely for them will help you strengthen your launches.
That’s what I’m doing with all of my clients right now. And designing an engagement event that can help you test out messaging angles, get your current members excited, and maybe tip would-be members over the line so they actually buy from you is an excellent way to experiment right now and stay in motion.
Give yourself more chances to win and, importantly, make sure you’re debriefing on that information—not just looking at top-line sales or revenue, whether you hit your goals or not, but really digging deep under the hood into what worked, what was the weak link, and where do we go from here.
You will stay in a position of power and confidence if you can operate from this place. And if you’re looking for support in doing this, there are many different ways we can work together. A great place to start might be with the Irresistible Offer mini VIP day that I’ve developed just for membership owners. I’ll work with you to find that intersection of what your members need and want now—that will get them to buy, get them to stay subscribed—and how to wrap that into a promotion, whether it’s low-lift or all-out. You get to decide, and we can decide together based on what makes sense for you. This helps you find your angle for how to sell your membership right now. You get my feedback on your sales page, on your offer, and on how to talk about your membership in new ways so that it resonates and feels exciting to you in this moment—not just to your potential members, but to you, too, because keeping your excitement and energy going is really half the battle. It helps you keep moving forward, even when it feels like you’re stuck in molasses.
I will be raising the price on this mini VIP day in 2025. I’ve just added new inclusions to make it even more valuable for you, which includes extended support, more access to me, and a full launch debrief—which, traditionally, I have only ever offered to my done-for-you launch clients, who pay me upwards of five figures to work with them on their launches. So, this is a really high-value offer. The price is going up, so if you’re considering doing one, now is a great time to do it to wrap up the year feeling strong and to uncover some amazing new opportunities for 2025.
So, I hope today’s episode was helpful. As always, I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out if you’re interested in how to work with me or ways to get in touch. I’ll put all the information in the show notes below. Here’s to using this amazing resource that we have—our own insight, our own wisdom, our own ideas, and feedback from our members. It is worth so much to you. I hope that you get some great ideas from today.
And if you want help wading through any of this, contact me. I’m here to help. I’d love to speak with you. Okay, talk to you soon.
