How to Get More Subscribers to Your Membership Business

Starting a membership business was the hardest part. If you've got one already, you're a few steps away from turning it into a profit.

The main goal is to increase the number of members and retain them. And the question is also simple: how many members are enough?

As a digital content creator, educator, or blogger, a membership site only increases your chances of building a loyal community. And you do need an ever-growing number of subscribers.

To achieve this goal, you are going to implement a set of measured strategies. And, we're here to help you by showing a handful of proven and actionable tips for that.

1. Nurture Your Current Members

A membership site can help you build a recurring revenue system. It shall begin with your existing members. People who are already on your subscription list, enjoying your content and paying money. They are the prime asset you must utilize in multiple ways.

Some of the best ways to nurture your current members are –

a. Keep them in the loop, send newsletters, ask them for feedback

b. Sending them loyalty rewards, you can also introduce a loyalty program.

User engagement is key here. You should always look to their feedback and user experience, and help them to create content that improves their lives.

Besides, engagement, your game should cover a wider area. For example, you can create premium plans and convince your primary subscribers to upgrade. You may build add-ons and try to sell them.

The goal is to keep them interactive with email, forum discussion, and content – which we will discuss later in this article.

2. Spread Word of Mouth with Your Community

Word of mouth is a powerful way to acquire new members more than any marketing approach. 92% of people trust friends or familiar recommendations over a brand message, while 83% go for recommendations rather than advertisements (WebFX).

When you have an existing following or subscribers, you can get their help in the first place to grow your membership site.

Well, how to inspire your members to share good word of mouth? Doing your job simply, socialize with them, talk to them, and improve your service even more. Then you may like to initiate a 3 steps strategy to spread good vibes for your brand –

a. Facilitate easy sharing: Let the member share your content the social media as simply as possible. You can add social sharing buttons, create more social media-centric content, and tell them to share your content with their friends and family.

b. Incentivize Referral: Announce a referral bonus for each referral made by your current members. Monetary value inspires faster than anything.

c. Focus on online reviews: You can try to increase your online reviews on community platforms like Yelp, Medium, or Google. Simply tell your members to share their true experiences with your brand on these social or community platforms.

User-generated content is something you can cherish, and only a loyal base of members can bring in a lot of user-generated content.

3. Give Free Trials for Paywalled Content

After the first two steps, usually, you are going to have good traffic to your membership site. And, to cash it, you need to offer something irresistible. A free trial is something most people love to get before making decisions to purchase.

As a content creator, you sure do have a range of paywalled content. For example, you are a writer, and to inspire new people to subscribe, you can let them read some of your best articles, essays, stories, etc.

The same process applies to podcasters and makers of webinars. Let's open the lock for 2 or 3 premium content and give the best experience to your website visitors. This surely gonna increase your subscriber numbers.

Another way is to utilize the paywalled content directly. How to do that?

• Choose one of your best pieces of content
• Promote it to social media, and you can even sponsor it as an advertisement, or send to your newsletter subscribers
• Make the content halfway-paywalled

The people who stumble upon this content gonna subscribe if they like half of the content or feel intrigued.

4. Strengthen Business Partnership

Building a partnership isn't easy. As most businesses are competitors. But you are doing membership site business, and the basement of this business model is trusting the community and the welfare of the members.

Most content creators around the world maintain a community. They do so because it helps them share ideas, and promote each other to increase brand value and awareness. Besides that, these communities play a big role in maximizing profit and overall industry growth.

Choose any type of content creator, social media influencer, Instagrammer, or book reviewer – they all maintain strong partnerships with each other. So, why not you?

Along with that, a better alternative would be partnering with brands or companies who have a similar user base to yours, and their customer is likely to purchase your membership.

For example, if you are a lifestyle content creator, you can easily pursue a way to build partnerships with a fashion brand, lifestyle, and health brand.

And, the partnership helps to grow because your membership site going to have a loyal group of people who are well-accustomed to believing a brand to improve their day-to-day life.

5. Create Membership Tier

Tiered membership means offering different levels of access to your members. For example, you can design a tier by their scope of access of type like – good, better, and best. With each membership tier, offers and pricing change.

This is a way that can offer more freedom to your possible members to choose, a sense of freedom, they can purchase the membership following their needs, and preferred pricing.

Here's an example of the pricing tiers of Option Alfa, a membership platform for traders –

To create membership tiers, you need to design a pricing strategy and craft a better tier experience.

According to our experience, you can't through a plethora of membership tiers which might exhaust the decision-making for a subscriber. Also, you can't offer less. The best tiers in the most proven way offer three or four options, not more than that.

To learn more, you can read our detailed guide on Tiered Membership and How to Create It in WordPress.

6. Start an Affiliate Program for Your Membership Business

How affiliate program can help your membership site grow? It could be the first question raised in your mind after seeing this strategy.

Everyone loves hard cash and this is so simple: you can give the affiliate marketers some real reason to promote your membership business.

26% of marketers allocate between 21% and 40% of their total marketing budgets to affiliate marketing efforts

Shopify

So, set up an affiliate program so good that it attracts marketers around the globe, and then proceed with a proper strategy.

You can ask affiliate marketers to join your program as well as your existing members for which they will be earning a good commission for each successful conversion. They can promote your membership site through the following mediums –

• Write reviews on their blog
• Create and share video content on various platforms
• Promote your business via social media
• Send invitations to new people through their newsletters

If you want a faster growth, then an affiliate program would be your saviour in this regard.

7. Focus on Content Marketing

As you are a content creator yourself, what good it will be to maintain a dedicated content strategy for your membership content?

Well. it's a bit different, and the primary goal of this marketing would revolve around generating a lot of organic traffic to your membership website.

Content marketing has evolved a lot over the last few years, and still remains the best marketing effort any business could ask for. If you go for it, you shall not expect an overnight success.

But quality content is for the big game, and can help you bringing in a lot of new members for years. Also, good content helps you to retain your subscribers, and develop a better relationship.

For example, you can publish blog that promote not only your brand but also your partners. You can generate stable traffic through content like blogs and videos. The more traffic you gain, the more possibilities gonna open.

A well-crafted content marketing strategy is all about helping it's target audience to learn and improve. And, your articles, eBook, webinar, podcasts, and videos on social platforms only help your existing and potential customers to engage with you even more enthusiastically.

Nowadays, most popular brands using shorts or live to get connected with the members. You can do the same, or generate little clips from your premium content and keep the interest ever-growing.

Pro Tips: Choose the Right WordPress Plugin

WordPress is the most affordable and flexible platform for creating your membership site. This CMS lets you use powerful tools that will enable a lot of features to manage your website and maintain your member's activity.

WP User Frontend is one such plugin. It will let you add multiple frontend features for your members. Some of the top features are –

• Creating subscription pack
• Creating a paywall or content restriction
• Enable members to post on blogs, forums, and discussions directly from the frontend
• Drag and drop builder, custom taxonomy, custom post types, etc

Other features are available including event registration and content submission which allows you to build a public platform where you can invite content creator to post their content.

Also Read: How to Create A Subscription Based Membership Site Using WordPress

Choosing a WordPress plugin for your membership site is crucial. You need to check the features, and analyze the scope and balance to suit your prospect, also you must find the best one that matches with your budgets.

Final Thoughts for Growing a Membership Business

If you want us to summarize everything we've shown you so far, our suggestion is this: you ought to keep moving with the strategies we've shared and keep your eyes open for more.

There are a lot of tips and hacks out there, we only wanted to help you with those that work for others and can be implemented easily.

The best way to grow your membership business is to start growing, and it's possible if you are already up to make real action.