Episode 7: If Your Members Aren’t Making Progress, Here’s Why

Written By Natalie Taylor

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

About this Episode:

Do you feel like your membership content is smart, brilliant and original — but members aren’t using it?

If your churn is higher than you’d like, or your engagement feels low, this episode is for you.

We’ll explore:

  • Why low membership engagement isn’t just about creating great content

  • Why all membership owners are in the business of behavior change — and how to use it to help your members get better results

  • The 2 levels of behavior change that happen inside every successful membership

  • The four “O’s” of how to support behavior change for your members… so they engage more, get better results and stay for longer

  • Plus, a bonus “O” you definitely need to look at if you’re a prolific creator (or someone who LOVES to share new ideas with their members).

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

If your membership churn is higher than you want it to be (people are canceling at a higher rate than you would like) and engagement is lower than you want it to be (people aren't logging in, consuming the content, participating in group calls, or engaging in your community) then it’s most likely not because your content sucks.

In fact, I have a feeling that your content is smart and brilliant.

Most likely, this is happening because you actually have a secret job title that you may not be aware of.

And here's what it is:

Memberships are actually in the business of behavior change.

And that's because when you have a membership, by design, they are cyclical. We show up and do things in a certain rhythm again and again, and that usually aligns with the routine and the flow that you set inside your membership.

That lends itself to members creating a practice, which is a way of behaving.

And so if you can't help members embody new ways of behaving and new ways of showing up, then it doesn't matter how good your content is.

Why Great Content Isn't the Only Key to Membership Success

Instead of looking at your content and thinking, "Yes, this is really smart. I love these ideas," what I want you to be doing by the end of this episode is looking at your content and thinking:

  • How can someone apply this?

  • How does this fit into the bigger picture?

  • And how am I going to make it easy for someone to get through this and take the next step?

Do that, and you will be astonished by how your member results improve. And that is exactly what we are talking about today.

Why Being “Prolific” Can Hurt Your Membership Growth

This episode is absolutely for you if you are someone who considers yourself quite prolific. And in fact, I think that you sort of need to be prolific in order to grow your membership to a certain volume of more than a couple of hundred members. You've got to be putting content out there. You've got to be sharing your ideas.

Usually, as your membership grows, you have systems and a team in place to support you in producing content. And in a very strange way, producing content—being prolific—is almost like a comfort zone for a lot of the membership owners I work with. They're never short on ideas. They're always thinking of their next framework or strategy to help their clients, and they love sharing that with their community and their members.

The problem is that you can often find yourself in a place where, as your membership grows, it feels like you're sort of running a garage sale—there’s stuff in every corner, and it doesn’t quite fit.

As your ideas have evolved over time, some of the old stuff just doesn’t belong anymore. This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

I actually think that all memberships go through this, and they will go through it multiple times over their lifetime. But I want to just put our finger on the fact that your tendency to be prolific, to operate as a creator, to always want to share ideas may actually not be in the best interest of your customers and your members getting results — unless we’re really focused on creating a thread that connects your content together and guides people towards what you want them to do next.

When Creating Too Much Content Overwhelms Your Members

So if you feel like you are constantly creating, and your membership is so full of amazing ideas, and yet there’s a little bit of a sense of clutter there for you—and perhaps a feeling of overwhelm, whether you sense that in your members or they’re directly giving you this feedback, like, “My god, this membership is amazing, but I’m really overwhelmed,” then I think you’re really going to benefit from today’s episode.

More generally, if people aren't engaging in your membership the way that you'd like them to, then you'll get a lot from this episode too.

Streamlining the Member Experience to Reduce Churn and Boost Engagement

What I want to talk to you about today is some of the work that I do with my clients, particularly in a service where I work with them longer-term to streamline what their member experience looks like so that it's easier to market, but also so that members can get better results.

One of the main things I do with my clients is developing and mapping out what their member engagement cycle looks like.

The fact that it’s called an engagement cycle is really important because, as I mentioned earlier, memberships lend themselves to being cyclical in nature. We go through a rhythm. We often repeat the same steps, and if you're delivering new things to your members, that usually aligns with how regularly you drop new content for them.

Mapping the Member Engagement Cycle: A Key to Keeping Members Active

But even if you're not producing new content for members all the time, there's probably a rhythm and a cycle that you want your members to go through in order to get results.

And then what we have to do as the owners of the membership, the people delivering it, is support that engagement cycle in happening.

Your member engagement cycle stretches far beyond just the content or curriculum that you want them to consume.

When you can learn to think of yourself as someone who is supporting behavior change, it really will shift the way that you show up. First of all, because we tend to have a tendency to map out learning outcomes or skills that our members are building in sort of like an A-to-Z, “do this, then that” process. But behavior change really doesn’t work that way at all.

Building a skill is rarely linear. We take a step forward, we take two steps back. We fall off the wagon. We come back. We forget things. We lose motivation. We have to find our motivation again. So it’s very rarely a linear process. There are speed bumps and hurdles and things that we have to figure out.

Adjusting Expectations for Behavior Change

But the problem is that we often think that if members aren’t seamlessly creating a result, then either something is wrong with them or something is wrong with us. When actually, the thing that we need to address is our process for supporting members. And even adjust our expectation that members are going to struggle a little bit, and that’s okay. They’re going to trip and stumble, and we need systems and support in place to catch them when they fall.

The first thing I want to do is frame up where this behavior change happens, because there are really two areas that you need to be paying attention to.

Supporting Member Behavior Change: 2 Key Areas to Focus On

The first area where behavior change is happening for our members is the behavior required for them to log in and consume the content in the first place.

Even if someone is an experienced online learner and they’ve joined memberships or taken online courses before, logging into your platform is still going to be out of their usual routine. It’s going to be something that isn’t currently a part of their day. So, they have to build the ritual of logging into your membership, checking out the content, and actually sitting down and consuming it.

The second area we need to support behavior change, which is probably what most of us think of more intuitively, is for them to actually do the thing. Once they’ve consumed the content, it’s a question of “what next?”. And our role is to make that next step very clear, straightforward, and simple for them. Then we need to support them through the “what next?”.

Clarifying the next step and putting supports in place for them to navigate it is a key part of what will make your membership successful, what will make your members successful, and why they will stick around and happily recommend your membership to their friends.

Supporting Members and Improving Results Requires a New Mindset

I really want you to get this mindset, and this is a mindset I want everyone with a membership to adopt: we are not in the business of delivering information.

We are in the business of supporting people through taking action. Information is a core part of that, but there are behaviors required for people to get results, and it’s our role to support those behaviors.

In the same way that I can purchase a meal plan if I want to improve my nutrition, I can find that meal plan valuable, but there are so many things required for me to get a meal on the table at the end of the day, and for me to do that consistently seven days in a row, 14 days in a row, and get the benefit from it.

I've got to go shopping. I have to get groceries. I have to do meal prep. I have to actually do the cooking and the cleaning. And then maybe I even have to manage other parts of my life so that the prep work required for me to eat in a certain way isn't eclipsed by other stuff that might come up.

And it's the memberships that can support people in all the surrounding “stuff” where people are going to get the most success.

And I really want you to think about your membership in the same way too.

So the question is: how do we support people?

How do we create the scaffolding and the safety net?

When I do this work with my clients, there are four key ways that we make it happen

I want to talk you through them at a glance, so that you can see maybe some opportunities where you could be supporting people better.

And if you're curious about how to work with me to develop your own custom way of supporting people, in a way that works for your capacity, in a way that works for how your members like to engage and how you want your membership to look, and in a way that you can be insanely proud of and confident that this is a place where people get results, then check out the show notes below and you can see all the information for how to work with me.

The Four Key Areas for Supporting Members

1. Onboarding: The First Step to Reducing Membership Churn

Onboarding is really how we welcome people into our world. When we think about onboarding, you might think about getting people into the community group, getting them their login, and maybe you get them to watch the first piece of content. But one of the things that I do with my clients is we really map out what a successful member is doing in their first 24 hours, in their first seven days, and in their first 30 days.

How does our onboarding communication support that? Quite often, a template is not going to get you there because what you want your members to do is unique to you.

But always come back to: rather than the stuff I want them to log into or consume, the question is, what do I want them to do today, in the next seven days, and in the next 30 days? That’s really what your onboarding is targeting.

2. Orientation: How to Set Your Members Up for Long-Term Success

In addition to onboarding, our second key area is orientation. Orientation is that initial foundational content we want our members to consume, which is going to set them up to succeed. This might be foundational knowledge we want to share with them, or it might be clarity around how to use the membership.

A lot of people have a membership tour in their orientation, which is great, but we have to go further than that.

Orientation really is about helping somebody set their intention and get their bearings inside the membership.

Great orientation content is how you make sure that your members enter the room with a plan every time they log in, because their goal is not just to watch your really smart content. Their goal is to get a result and an outcome.

The best orientation content will orient members not only to the membership platform—how to log in and where to go—but also towards their goals. It will orient them to the result they are working towards and explain how to use the membership to start working towards that result.

So the best thing you can do inside orientation is help your members clarify for themselves: Why am I here? What do I want to achieve? And what does my next step need to be?

3. Ongoing Communication: How to Keep Members Engaged and Taking Action

The third key area is ongoing communication. These are the emails that we send to our members on a regular basis, plus the prompts we post in our community and any live touch-points, events or calls.

And again, it’s so much more than just, "Here’s what’s new in the membership," or, "Here’s a call coming up."

The emails that I help my clients create in their memberships are all about supporting people in taking action. Rather than thinking of these emails as delivery emails—like, Here, log in and do this thing—the best emails are about reminding members what is available to them, what their next step is, and what to do if they are feeling overwhelmed. Make it easy for members.

Our ongoing communication should remove some of the friction and overwhelm people are going to feel, no matter how good or streamlined our membership is.

In addition to emails, ongoing communication also includes the prompts we share in the community. There’s no shortage of prompts, icebreakers, and conversation starters you can share in your community, but I love it when prompts direct people back to the main goal of the membership. Also, prompts should bring people back to the current focus. What are we here to do in this given time period? What’s our focus for the month or the quarter? How can I engage with that?

This is a great way to prompt people to share their progress, share pictures, ask questions, and engage around what we are here to do—both at a macro level (why the membership exists) and at a more micro level (what’s the current focus).

The last piece of ongoing communication includes any live events that you may offer. These live touchpoints can be regularly scheduled calls, like Q&A calls, coaching calls, hot seats, coworking calls, or even time-bound events like mini-challenges, bootcamps, or specific bonuses tied to a launch that happens shortly after the cart closes. These are all great ways to engage members around the result they’re here to achieve.

And this is why I think calls that only focus on Q&A are really doing a disservice—and are probably quite boring for you to deliver as well. Answering questions without something that grounds you or gives you a North Star or a compass can just feel like going through the motions. But if you design your Q&A calls around themes, or if you’re really clear about the purpose of this month’s call, you’ll better support members in taking action and getting results.

So, look more closely at every live touchpoint you offer and ask yourself: Am I just going through the motions, or am I here with a purpose, a vision, and a clear sense of how this relates to what we’re all here to do?

4. “Oh-No” Content: How to Re-Engage Members Who Have Fallen Off Track

The fourth key area, and I think this one is my favorite, is “Oh-No” Content.

I mentioned earlier that as part of behavior change, we’re going to screw up. We are going to slip up. We are going to stumble. We’re going to get things wrong. We’re going to lose motivation. Your members are going to get distracted and forget to log in for three months. And that doesn’t mean that your content isn’t good. But it does mean that we need to provide a very easy on-ramp for them to get back into the membership.

The thing that happens when members have forgotten to log in for a little while is that they start feeling guilty. They’re like, Oh my god, I’ve missed three months of content. I have so much to catch up on. And so, your “oh-no” content really gives them an easy button. It acknowledges that it is completely normal for them to stumble, need time off, and that we are here for them. You can step right back in and continue to get results.

One of the things I love to suggest to my clients is: If someone has forgotten to log in for a few months and is thinking they should cancel because they haven’t used the membership, what would you say to them to help them get back on track today? This week? What are some micro-actions we can support members with? And can this live as a micro-training inside your membership?

If you implement nothing else from today’s episode, “oh-no” content will help your members stick around longer, and it will help them when they feel like they should cancel. This will make it easy for them to get back into the membership, back into the groove, and continue seeing results.

Bonus: Organizing Your Membership Content for Better Engagement

I’m going to share one more “O” with you, and that’s organization. I want you to think about organization in two ways.

First, organization relates to how we visually organize our content inside the learning dashboard. This is your filing system—where you organize things, the folders or modules that content lives in, how members see where to go to get certain things, and how to find certain topics. I find that we constantly need to look at and refine what our organization system looks like.

But in addition to that, think about organization on a more micro level, which is how we organize each individual piece of content in terms of its structure. I’ve seen this with almost all of my clients: you’re brilliant and smart, and you know your stuff. The quality of what you teach is exceptional. But I’m always looking for ways to bookend that content with a reminder of what the goal of the membership is, and then once you deliver that amazing content, give people a clear next step so they understand how to integrate that content into their monthly experience or quarterly experience, and the actions you want them to take.

So always bookend your information with that insight around how it fits and what to do next. I’m always working with my clients on how to structure this effectively and how to make it easy for members not only to find content, but to do something with it once they find it and watch it.

Brilliant Content Isn’t Enough to Reduce Churn and Keep Members Engaged

So, if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it’s this: Brilliant content is simply not enough. That is now the expectation—that the quality of what you teach is going to be strong and useful. But an exceptional membership, one that people are delighted to subscribe to, one that they stick around for and refer their friends to, is one that makes it easy for them to take action.

And I want to be really clear: If you have ever described your membership as the “Netflix” of your industry, then it’s likely that you are not thinking in terms of the behavior change required for your members to get results. And even if you have specific teachings on how to change behavior, this needs to be integrated into every piece of content you deliver, every piece of member communication, and even the very structure of your content and the membership itself.

Recognize that we aren’t just smart people teaching smart ideas. I know that about you—I know that’s who you are. But we are helping people change how they operate and how they show up. That is what will continue to set your membership apart, and that is what will elevate your membership above the rest in 2024 and beyond.

So, if you’re interested in looking at what you can really do to take your brilliant ideas and make sure that your members are utilizing them, acting on them, and making progress—what you can do to decrease your churn and increase your member engagement—first of all, try some of these ideas. There’s a couple here that you can put into action right away.

But I also encourage you to reach out to me. This is what I do with my clients, and I would love to talk to you about how I may be able to support you in making your membership even better than it currently is.

I’d love to hear from you. I always love hearing your thoughts—what’s working well, what’s not working, and what ideas you’ve walked away with. I love your feedback. All the information on how to work with me is in the show notes below. And until then, thank you for joining me. I’ll see you next time.

READY FOR THE NEXT STEP?

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Natalie Taylor
Next

Episode 6: How to Nail Your Membership Change Project