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Section 3 - Best Practices

Membership sites can be challenging if you've never used them before. In this section, you'll learn "best practices" experienced membership site owners have developed over time.

Build a Relationship

You also need to decide how you will communicate with your members. How will you send them e-mail updates and information? You can add their e-mail addresses automatically when they sign up. This becomes your email list to send updates and information.

How often will you send updates? Every week? Every day? Think of it this way: what you are trying to do is build a healthy relationship with your members.

The rules of communication you use to maintain good relationships "in the real world" apply just as well online.

Remember that you may not be a known entity to them when they first come to your site. Try to encourage them right away in terms of getting involved in your site. For example, you may want to consider giving away your contact information. Or call them on the phone with a warm welcome. It helps them feel part of the group.

After you've nurtured relationships with members, you can begin to ask them questions about they want out of the site. Maybe no one has asked them before what their expectations or needs are. They might have requests you can address. However, you can only help them if you know what their needs are. It gives you the opportunity to create content and products that will help them.

Retaining Members

One of your biggest challenges will be to get them to stay on as repeat members. It's true that some may invest in the site at first and then never use it for a long time. Still, be sure you keep adding content and value to the site no matter if some members are using it or not.

The reason is they will eventually stop back in to see what the site has offered lately. If you slack in adding value or content, they will tend to leave if they feel they're being neglected. You want to create content and value that exceeds expectations. You want them to say, "Wow, this is fantastic content! I'm glad I joined and I don't even think about paying my monthly fee."

Consider having content that is exclusive to your membership site they cannot get anywhere else. This might be in the form of interviews you conduct with industry leaders, private training on topics and subjects that are new or cutting-edge, and more. You might also provide a level of advice or support from you or your team that is not available to nonmembers.

Whatever you do, the perceived value has to be considerably more than the investment they make. Don't let yourself off the hook. Continue to challenge your team and yourself to add massive value and top quality content to the site.

Levels of Membership

A very common error that new membership site owners make is they offer a series of membership levels. For example, they might have Bronze, Silver and Gold levels. Members might start at the Bronze level, while Silver offers more value, and Gold level provides complete access.

The problem with this approach in the beginning is it lowers conversions. People get intimidated and confused by many options. It's much simpler to get someone to say "Yes!" to join your site if you only offer just one choice: either they join or they don't.

You'll gain more confidence in your operation and development if you see a steady stream of new members joining your site. It's even a good idea to let new members stay on as long as they want at their initial rate, even if you increase the rate later for new members. You may think that you will lose money, but it will increase loyalty and the "lifetime customer value" of each member. In addition, they will spend additional money on specials and premiums you offer.

Affiliates

One way to drive considerable traffic to your site is to utilize affiliates. Affiliates are marketers that promote your site to their own "tribe" of fans and followers.

For example, let's say an affiliate is running banner ads for your membership site on their site. If a prospect clicks the ad, visits your site, and signs up as a member, the affiliate gets a commission for the sale. It's not unusual to have commissions as high as 50%, 75% and even 100% of the sale.

Why would you give an affiliate 100% commission? Consider that the "Lifetime Customer Value" of each new member is much higher than the initial commission payout. Lifetime Customer Value is the average total amount of spending you can expect from a typical member.

For example, if you charge $50 a month for your membership site and the average length of time someone stays a member is six months, the Lifetime Customer Value of a member is $300. Of course, some will stay much longer and others will leave sooner. Lifetime Customer Value is an average.

Now you know that an average customer will spend $300 in your membership site. From here, it is easy to determine how much you want to spend to acquire that customer. Even after paying 100% commission rate, you are making a good profit. Don't feel like you are locked in, because you can still customize the structure for an individual affiliate.

Closely monitor the margins in your affiliate commission structure. Affiliate sales will give you plenty of traffic and help build sales. Many of the membership site plugins have modules that can manage your affiliate sales and tracking.

Another idea is that you can run a separate affiliate sales model outside your membership site using third-party software and service. You might have several different affiliate structures going on at the same time. There is no single way to do it, and the right balance for you will come from testing and experimentation.

Consider giving "lifetime commissions" where an affiliate receives commission from all sales from their referral for the length of time the referral stays on as a member. It becomes a little challenging to track it--there are cookie-based tracking methods and other ways. If you get into heavy affiliate marketing, it may benefit you to consult with, or hire, an affiliate manager to advise the right setup for maximize profit.

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Prospect - Someone who doesn’t know your product and probably doesn’t know who you are comes to your sales page.

Lead - That prospect enters their email address into your opt-in box to receive a free report as advertised in a popup on your sales page. That person then becomes a lead.

Buyer - The prospect reads your free report and likes the content, and then returns to the sales page to finish reading it, finally buying the product.

OTO Buyer - The buyer reads your One Time Offer (OTO) and decides to purchase this offer as well.

If you notice a lot of people making it to one particular stages but making it no further, you might want to send your leads a survey asking them why they aren’t making it past that stage. You could also make this a popup on your website for people who leave your page without buying.

Customer Satisfaction Improvement

Finally, you can use surveys to improve your customer satisfaction, making people buy more products from you, trust you, and become loyal (potentially even avid) fans, who might even tell others about you.

As you probably know, customer service is one of the most important aspects of business. If you keep buyers happy, you minimize problems.

And if you respond quickly to the few problems you do have, you’ll ensure your customers always stay happy.

Surveys are a great way to ensure customer satisfaction. You can use surveys to improve satisfaction in the following ways:

Ask how their experience was after using your help desk or customer service email or phone number.

Ask them how they are enjoying the product after they buy, and if they have any questions or concerns.

Ask them what you can do better in general sense.

Tips for Creating Great Surveys

Surveys are only useful if people are willing to take them, and unfortunately, most online surveys are not conducive to getting people to complete them. People don’t have a lot of time to waste, and they certainly aren’t going to spend several minutes taking a survey just to help your business.

Here are some ways you can

1. Keep Surveys Short - One of the biggest mistakes people make with surveys is trying to find out too much at once. People have lives. They are busy. They don’t have a lot of time to help you, even if they really want to. So when you create a survey, make it short and easy to take. Ask no more than five or six questions, and make as many of those questions as possible multiple choice in order to make taking the survey go as quickly as possible.

2. Ask On-Point Questions - Never go off on a tangent and start asking questions that are unrelated to your main topic. Stick to asking specific questions that related to your primary objective. If you have multiple objectives, use different surveys.

3. Don’t Use Leading Questions - Never ask questions that try to lead a survey taker to answer in a specific way in order to try to trick them into feeling a certain way about your company. For example, do not say, “As you know, the Mega Sales System is the top of its class for helping you generate more sales. How do you feel this product best meets your needs?” Instead, just ask, “What did you like most about this product?”

4. Use Multiple Choice - Don’t make people work too much. Keep most questions multiple choice, and keep potential answers to six or fewer. The harder it is to take a survey, the fewer people will fill it out.

5. Don’t Get Personal - Ask as little personal information from respondents as possible. If you don’t need their phone number, don’t ask for it. Again, the more personal information you ask for, the fewer people will fill out your survey.

6. Ensure Privacy - Let people know you won’t share any of their personal information, and that survey data will be kept anonymous. This will make people feel like they won’t be spammed and that they won’t have to be embarrassed to answer how they really feel.