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How to Transition Your Membership Business Online

How to Transition Your Membership Business Online

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has left many brick and mortar businesses in a scramble. This article will help you think about ways to transition to an online membership model.

You can start by leveraging your current products and service offerings. Think about how you can meet your customers’ needs in our current marketplace and virtual environment.

Now is a great time to transition to an online membership model
For some readers, you may already operate an in-person membership business. But for some of you, your current business may not have a membership component. So to level set, let’s go over a few basics.

With a membership website, a portion of the website or the entire website is only accessible to members who pay a monthly subscription fee to gain access to exclusive, premium content.

If you have been thinking about starting an online membership business, now is a great time. In September 2020, only 38% of business owners said their companies were operating as normal since COVID-19 shutdowns.

No one knows if or when things will go back to “normal.” So transitioning entirely to an online membership model or even just some aspects of your business could help you thrive during the pandemic and onwards.

With most people spending more time at home, the demand for online content is higher than ever. In a membership model, you can create a membership community built around your products or services. Launching a membership site is a great way to build an online community, sell products, provide a service, and generate a recurring income.

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30+ Things to Know About Starting a Subscription SaaS Business

30+ Things to Know About Starting a Subscription SaaS Business

The demand for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is growing. So is the consumer desire for subscription-based pricing models.

Not only does subscription pricing make expensive software affordable for the end-user, but it also helps generate more income for the business. This dynamic allows many companies to create sustainable growth with their product MVPs, whether they’re creating those products as a relatively new startup or as market-dominating behemoth (looking at you, Amazon!).

If you’ve ever dreamed of starting a subscription SaaS business or moving your products to the subscription model, now is the time. Here’s a look a the stats behind the rising SaaS subscription economy.

The subscription model is nothing new. The idea of recurring revenue is as old as newspapers and periodicals. But if you feel like you’re seeing subscription pricing everywhere these days… you’d be right.

From multivitamins to home maintenance, snacks to shaving kits, workout programs to wine-of-the-month clubs, many businesses are capitalizing on the subscription boom. Even using a word processing program or ordering groceries can cost you a monthly fee now.

The beauty of the Subscription Economy (a fitting phrase coined by Zuora) — and the reason the model is becoming so popular among businesses of every industry — is that it opens the doors for accelerated growth and revenue while still providing convenient and often necessary services for customers. In other words, it’s a win-win.

Here’s a look at the stats behind the current Subscription Economy and why it’s a good idea to get in on it any way you can.

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The New Member Onboarding Guide for Better Retention

The New Member Onboarding Guide for Better Retention

There’s no doubt that it takes effort to turn a site visitor into a customer.

It can be even trickier for subscription or membership businesses because the one-time sale or lead capture isn’t the “end game” the same way it is in a more traditional ecommerce model.

You have to convince customers to buy into your product every day, every month, and every year — for the long haul.
And a simple “thank you for your purchase” email won’t be enough. You need to consistently engage and educate members, both immediately after sign-up and every day after, if you want to succeed.

You need a member onboarding process.

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The Membership Welcome Email Series Walkthrough

Why You Need a Member Onboarding Process
Think of a new member sign-up as inviting a guest over to your house for the first time.

You wouldn’t expect them to know where you keep the glasses in your cupboard, or where to find the bathroom, or whether or not it’s okay to put their coat on your bed. You have to show them what to do. You have to play host.

As Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos puts it:

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

An onboarding process is designed to educate members on where to go, what to do, how to interact with your team, and, in the meantime, give them enough positive reasons to come back and hang out with you again.

According to Len Markidan, head of marketing at Groove, there are two major milestones in the life of any customer:

When they sign up for your product, and
When they achieve their first “success” with your product.

An onboarding process helps guide members to their second milestone: success with your product or service. That success can be a major factor in reducing churn over time.

As Neil Patel says, “Churn is a reflection of customer satisfaction. Customers may lose interest because they get confused on how to actually use your services.”
Good onboarding processes help you sell faster, retain and engage better, and understand the needs of your customers on a deeper level.

But good “hosting” — successful onboarding — shouldn’t be left up to chance. You have to be intentional about what you do and what you don’t do when bringing your members up to speed.

Here are the top five components of a successful member onboarding process.

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3 Essential WordPress Plugins for Membership Sites

3 Essential WordPress Plugins for Membership Sites

What are the best WordPress membership plugins for creating and running a membership site?
Whether you’re developing your WordPress membership site yourself or you’re sourcing it through another developer or agency, it’s crucial that you choose the right plugins to give you the best support and functionality.

The good news is that we’ve put together a quick list of the top three membership plugins we use and recommend, all of which are user-friendly (for the DIYers) and robust in features for maximum usability.

Here are our recommendations for the best WordPress membership plugins.

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The Basic Membership Toolkit for WordPress Users

1. MemberMouse
WordPress is a fairly robust tool all on its own, but most membership sites require functionality and features that don’t come out-of-the-box.

You’ll need to sell membership and subscriptions, for one, as well as create member sign-in pages and members-only areas, produce various forms of content (that may or may not be member-specific), and in some cases sell products or other services.

Even the most experienced developers might struggle to incorporate these features in WordPress, even if they’ve been building traditional sites for years. It’s a lot to do.

That’s where a plugin like MemberMouse comes in.

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What to Know About Creating Online Courses for Your Membership Site

What to Know About Creating Online Courses for Your Membership Site

There has never been a better time to create online courses.

With traditional tuition costs at an all-time high and the increasing availability of high-speed internet, high-quality video, and instant streaming, online education is revolutionizing the way we learn. In fact, the EdTech industry is predicted to grow to $325 billion by 2025.

For membership and subscription businesses — a $400+ billion industry in itself — the pairing of online courses is a match made in heaven. Subscription-based online education providers like Coursera are now worth billions, and smaller EdTech startups like Khan Academy still boast over 12 million monthly users with annual revenue of almost $28 million.

Of course, designing an online course is no easy feat. There are hours of planning, implementation, and marketing involved with building a single profitable course, much less an entire online empire. But the good news for even the smallest membership site is that it’s not impossible to create a high-performing course (or courses) for your members in a relatively short time.

In fact, many membership sites are finding great success with online education, and with the right knowledge and resources, you can too. Here’s what to know.

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Sell Better! 9 Pricing Strategies for Your Online Courses

Planning and Financing Your Online Courses
So, how much time, money, and commitment does it take to build a great course, exactly? According to the EdTech experts over at Racoon Gang, there are three elements to consider:

Research and analytical expenses
Time and money invested in online course design
Time and money invested in content development and implementation.
You may also need the services of subject matter experts (SMEs), a graphic designer and/or videographer, a project manager, and a technical or DevOps person.

All-in-all, you could be looking at roughly 100-160 hours for production and a $7,000-$40,000 investment for 1 hour of online learning.

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Membership Site SEO 102: A Guide for WordPress Optimization

Membership Site SEO 102: A Guide for WordPress Optimization

How do you optimize your WordPress site for SEO?

In our last post, we covered the basics of SEO for membership sites, including what search engines like Google look for when crawling your pages and what it means to optimize for searcher intent. If you’re not familiar with these SEO best practices, take a few minutes to read that post first, then come on back!

In part two, we’re diving into the nitty-gritty of WordPress SEO to ensure your landing pages are Google-ready. This is by no means a comprehensive guide, but it should give you a launching point to boost your organic traffic.

We have a lot to go over, so let’s get started…

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The SEO Guide for WordPress Blog Posts

Step 1: Benchmark Your WordPress Site Metrics
The first step in the process starts with metric tracking. By setting up tracking before you optimize WordPress, you’ll be able to see and measure changes in real time and adjust your strategy on the fly.

Once your site is being tracked, the first thing you want to do is pull some metrics. The exact metrics will depend on your specific site and business goals, but as a general rule you’ll want to benchmark stats for the following:

Page Speed
Mobile-Friendliness
SERP rankings (for your top keywords)
Click-through rate (for your top keywords)
Goal conversion rate
We highly recommend using Google Analytics to measure the bulk of your metrics. It’s free and it already knows what Google looks for in terms of SEO. If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up in WordPress, here’s a short how-to guide.

Aside from Google Analytics, there are some other tools you can use for tracking and measuring. We’ll cover some of them here, but if you want a full list of free and paid SEO tools, be sure to check out our previous post.

Page Speed
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your pages load. Google has considered page speed a factor for SERP rankings since 2010, so improving your page speed is important. We’ve covered this topic before in this blog post, but we’ll go over it here too.

First, test your loading speed in person. Because your browser caches your site, you want to test with and without caching. You can disable caching in your browser settings. It’s a good idea to test it out several times using different browsers to get the average loading speed.

Then, use tools like Google Pagespeed Insights (recommended), Pingdom Tools, or GTMetrix to get a rating for your site loading speeds.

For Pagespeed Insights, a “good” score is around 85% or higher.

Gather your speed scores and put them into a spreadsheet or document so you can monitor your improvement over time.

Test your site on multiple speed tools to get a second opinion. One tool might not give you the whole picture.
Keep in mind that speed tests aren’t a perfect reflection of performance, which is why you want to use other metrics to measure SEO improvements as well. Many site speed tests bypass caching, and like we said earlier, most browsers cache sites by default.

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Case Study: What to Consider with a Membership Website Redesign

Case Study: What to Consider with a Membership Website Redesign

We’re humbled and extremly excited to bring you this authentic case study by one of our customers – Brenda Power. Brenda talks about her experience with membership site builds and re-design projects, along with her experience working with us. Enjoy!

This post was written and created by: Brenda Power

Brenda is the owner of choiceliteracy.com – a membership site for educators. Brenda’s background also includes work as a newswriter, college professor, and senior editor for a literacy publisher.

So you’re thinking about launching a membership website, or redesigning the one you have? It’s almost impossible to convey what either experience is like. Next to giving birth, launching and redesigning my membership website are the scariest and most exciting things I’ve done in my life.

I recently worked with MemberDev to redesign my membership site, Choice Literacy. Choice Literacy is a subscription site for teachers who have leadership roles in K-12 literacy education. My site was launched in 2006, and content has been added weekly ever since. A redesign would include transferring over 3000 print features, 900 videos, and 11,000+ current and expired member information files.

If you already have a successful site and are considering a redesign, this is the case study for you. If you are just launching a membership website, consider using an “all-in-one” solution. That is what I did in 2006, and it’s by far the most economical way to launch a site and see if it makes sense to develop a more customized site later. An all-in-one solution worked for five years for me, but eventually the site grew to the point where I needed a custom solution.

Learning from Past Mistakes
The last major redesign I went through was in 2012 with a different web design firm. It was stressful. Deadlines were missed, there were lots of code glitches, and the final two months were a blur of 18 hour days trying to stamp out dozens of bugs. To be honest, I put off this redesign much longer than I should have because I dreaded going through that experience again.

I was determined to have a better redesign experience this time. I began the process by searching for the right team. I had three core criteria:

1. Experience

The redesign team had to have extensive experience with membership sites. Membership sites have sophisticated code, and different audiences present unique coding needs. A firm without experience may promise they can do the work, but you’re sure to end up with clunky code.

2. Team

I didn’t want to work with a large agency (too many people and too much overhead) or one guy working out of his garage (because what happens if god forbid that garage collapses someday?).

3. Proximity

I wanted to work with a local team, to keep the project in my home state.
After a month of research, I soon realized I would need to drop #3 off my wish list. As I looked for a design team, I discovered there is almost no one outside of large agencies that has much experience with membership sites.

MemberDev was the only firm I found that was small and had extensive experience with subscription sites.

Most important, the sites they design are beautiful and intuitively functional for members. I contacted some of the site owners who had used MemberDev in the past and asked two questions:

  1. Would you hire MemberDev again?
  2. Did your project come in on time and on budget?

Everyone who answered was enthusiastic and very positive about their MemberDev experience.

If you’re launching or redesigning a membership site, there is a continuum from an all-in-one (or one-size-fits-all) site where the coding is set and you plug in your content, to a site that has completely custom code. Having lived on both ends of that continuum, I knew the best solution would be to find a design team that could do work somewhere in the middle. I wanted coding and plug-ins that were common and standard enough that it would be relatively easy to update them in the future, but I also wanted some custom coding to reflect the unique content of my site and needs of my users.

I was impressed with the variety of designs from MemberDev for sites with very different membership audiences. At the same time, I was relieved to hear their sites were built on the WordPress platform, one with hundreds of thousands of users (and thousands of coders available) throughout the world.

I’d found my team. Now we just had to determine if the project was one they could take on.

Making Contact and Contracting

When you contact most web design firms with a bigger job, they will assure you they can take on the work and will be eager to contract as soon as possible. Ali Jafarian responded immediately to my query about working together. But I soon discovered MemberDev isn’t like most firms. Ali worked with me over a few weeks to determine if my project was a good fit for MemberDev. He and his tech team examined the code at my current site to see if they could work within it to transfer materials to a new site. We had a couple of long conversations about what worked well at my old site, and what definitely needed to be upgraded at a new site. We negotiated what a timeframe and budget would look like.

After these conversations, there was a short stretch where I waited (and hoped) MemberDev would be able to take on my project. I knew at this point they would not take on any project where they couldn’t be true to their word and meet all the deadlines and expectations, and they were going to have to find room for my project within a fairly full calendar. But they did, and we moved into the actual work.

Taking Time to Get It Right

What’s different about MemberDev from many firms is how much time goes into the early or conceptual phases of the work. After contracting, Ali developed a “mood board” for the site before beginning any real design work. This board contained a few photos, colors, and words to convey what the “feel” of the final design would be. We went through four revisions of that dinky little board to get it right — the first drafts had images of kids at work that were too solitary, used stock photos I didn’t like, and included descriptive words that weren’t quite right. But eventually, the mood board was perfect. And when Ali did the actual design, it needed almost no revision, just the most minor tweaks, because he took extra time at the start to understand exactly what I was looking for.

Because we took the time to write out reams of specs for what was required at the new site, as well as lots of time to negotiate what I wanted in the design, the actual coding and design process was streamlined.

There was no need to renegotiate the timeline, specs, or budget during the heavy design and coding phases of the work because of misunderstandings. Every deadline we’d negotiated at the start was met, and my site launched on the day promised (even though we had a tight schedule).

If you’re considering a redesign of your website that will cost tens of thousands of dollars, I encourage you to read some of the horror stories on the web of redesigns that have run amok. They almost always start and end the same way — contracts signed quickly with little in the way of clear benchmarks and expectations. Then halfway through the project, deadlines are missed, specs are renegotiated, and costs skyrocket. MemberDev has a process in place to ensure this doesn’t happen with their projects. They were clear about their deadlines, and also firm about which ones I would need to meet in providing materials and critiques of their work.

MemberDev is not for you if you have trouble sticking with deadlines and plans. They have the gift of making you feel like you are their only client. But you aren’t. Seriously, they work with a lot of clients. Their timelines are reasonable, but their work is terrific so their calendar is full or will fill up quickly.

The Final Countdown

The last few weeks before the launch of my new site were a blur of testing out new features, tweaking content, hunting for bugs and helping the tech guys squash them. What was remarkable was the level of responsiveness from MemberDev, especially Ali.

One incident in particular sticks out in my memory. We were less than a week from the launch date, which was just before the Christmas holidays. One important element of the site, the ability to download and print articles, was still not working correctly. Ali and I both explored lots of alternatives and none of them were great. I finally said, “Let’s go with this one since it’s the least terrible of many bad options — it’s not great but we need to do something.”

Ali replied, “Let’s step back and rethink this. This isn’t a good solution. We can do better.” Ali never settles for “barely good enough.” Within a day he had come up with an elegant, smart solution that was completely different than any of the plug-ins we’d been considering (and involved no plug-in at all).

Even at the end of the process, when we were rushing to complete work at the site, there were no compromises in quality.

After the Launch

Ali and the tech crew were immediately available for tweaks throughout the first hours, days and weeks of the site launch. My members are older, and I expected complaints about the changes because no one ever likes changes to a site that they use often and are comfortable with as is. But the complaints never came. The site is familiar to subscribers in terms of the color scheme, content, and photos, but so much better in terms of functionality and attractiveness. And MemberDev made sure all the member files transferred cleanly, so there were no issues with subscriber accounts or passwords working.

On the administrative end, it’s a pleasure to post articles and update files on such an intuitive and functional system. I never realized how many “work arounds” I’d developed at my old site till I had a new site that just… works.

Now I’ll answer my own questions about working with MemberDev:

Would you hire MemberDev again?

In a heartbeat. I was almost sorry to see the redesign process end, and believe me, I never thought I would say THAT about a website redesign.

Did your project come in on time and on budget?

Yes, and it was a challenging timeframe and reasonable budget.

I love being my own boss and what I learn from the members at my website. Occasionally redesigns are an essential part of the work, and it’s a relief to know I can return to MemberDev to upgrade and enhance my site in the future.

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Find the Right Pricing Strategy

Find the Right Pricing Strategy

Cost is the biggest factor in member retention.
It can be difficult to find a balance between managing the bottom line while still offering the best competitive prices for your members. Some membership and subscription businesses never really find that balance.

Take the Meal Kit subscription, for instance.

In a poll by Money Magazine, 49% of members who canceled their meal kit subscription cited cost as the top reason for cancellation, and of those who had never tried the service, 59% said that cost was the biggest deterring factor.

Other studies showed that members hate being locked into their subscription, feeling obligated to use services even when they wanted to do something else, simply because they’ve already paid for it.

The simplest solution — especially if you’re targeting Value Seekers — is to find a lower-cost pricing strategy that works for both you and your members.

We’ve written about the different types of pricing strategies you can use in more detail here.

Having a pricing strategy that works for your membership doesn’t mean you have to charge bottom-of-the-barrel prices, however.
Netflix frequently raises their prices and still retains a large percentage of their membership, for example. But they also offer cost-sharing benefits for their members, like multiple account creation.

If you can’t lower costs without negatively impacting your bottom line, you will have to make sure that the value provided is equal to the price tag.

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How to Increase Your Member Retention Rates In the Next Year

How to Increase Your Member Retention Rates In the Next Year

One retained member is worth a hundred new members.
Studies show that 80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers, and retained customers will make it much easier to grow steadily over time.

The probability of selling or upselling a current member is around 60-70%, while the chances of selling your membership to a new prospect is only 5-20%.

But member retention isn’t always easy. The average business loses 20% of their first-time customers and 15% of their total customers over the course of a year.

If you want members to stick around for the long haul, you need to figure out why they’re leaving so you can course correct before it’s too late.

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Member Retention Quick Wins You Can Start Today

Why Do Members Leave?
A recent study on membership retention and preferences found that the biggest reasons for member churn had to do with high costs and low-value offerings.

Of those surveyed:

34% said their membership costs were too expensive
26% said that the organization offered too little value
19% said they no longer needed the membership
13% said they simply forgot to renew

For those that indicated they would renew their membership, 52% said they would stay with a brand if they were given benefits like industry information, educational resources and opportunities related to their own interests.

In other words, the more value the membership provides, the higher the retention rates.
The study also broke down member types into three distinct categories:

Super Members — “Brand Evangelist” members who are the most committed to the brand and most likely to refer others
“Rank and File” Members — Members who are satisfied with their membership but don’t feel completely connected to the brand or business
Value Seekers — Members who stay solely based on the value provided and are at the highest risk for churn
Interestingly, these member types were also broken down by generational divide, with Millennials making up the highest percentage of Value Seekers and Boomers making up the majority of the Super Members (Gen X fell in between).

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How To Build a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) Platform

How To Build a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) Platform

How much content do you produce on a daily basis?

From emails to blog posts, web applications, free guides and downloadables, social media posts, videos, webinars and every other bit of content in between — you’re creating (and consuming) way more than you realize.

Every minute over 300 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. 347,222 Tweets are sent. 4 million Facebook posts are liked.

Over 2 million blog posts are published every single day.
People want content. More importantly, people want your content. But the real issue for most online businesses isn’t creating content, it’s delivering content.

How will you make sure that all of your content is readily available on multiple channels exactly when and where your audience wants it? How will you manage all of your content? How does your audience find it?

Enter: Content-as-a-Service (CaaS).

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5 Key Facts About Content-as-a-Service (CaaS)You Should Know

What is Content-as-a-Service (CaaS)?
Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) is a strategy for delivering CMS-managed content to Web applications and other channels.

According to Roland Benedetti, VP of Product Management and Marketing for eZ Systems:

“The main idea behind CaaS comes from the digital revolution. We went through a paradigm shift where content does not carry its meaning and value in the context of […] a fully operational website, but as an independent asset that can be delivered and live in many different places [at once].”

In other words, content you’ve created doesn’t have to stay put. It can be delivered to different websites, different web pages, different social networks, and even through different mobile and web apps.

With CaaS, content is free to live where it pleases, regardless of where it was created.
Building a CaaS Platform on a CMS
A CaaS platform allows you to create content that can be distributed to other channels through APIs. Think of it as a structured content source that turns content into data.

There are two ways that you can go about creating a CaaS Platform: You can either “layer” CaaS architecture onto an existing CMS, or replatform to a “headless,” cloud-based CMS.

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Platform Features

Here's an overview of what's included in this platform demo:


Sales Funnel

Grow your online sales with a revenue focused sales funnel. Sell memberships, subscriptions, courses and one-time products.

Member Dashboard

Give your members an intuitive member dashboard. This includes streamlined navigation, user favorites, content feeds and more.

Content Library

Create and manage your member-only content with a powerful and flexible content library. Upload various media with content categories and tagging.

Courses

Provide your members with course-based content. This includes lesson/module management, user progress tracking, and other custom course features.

Events

Manage all your member events with a simple and sleek calendar interface. Map your events to content, products and permission based settings.

LIVE Content

Create and schedule "LIVE" content with member-only access and live chat threads. This allows you to keep real-time member content behind your platform.

Member Profiles

Let your members create custom profiles to represent themselves and interact with other members in the platform.

Forums

Boost engagement and retention with member forums. Your community will run on autopilot with message boards and rich commenting.

Member Messaging

Provide real-time messaging for your members. This gives you a secure and private medium for member-to-member communication.

View our plans and pricing page to get a free quote today!

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