I’ve seen a whole bunch of offers from $1, to free, to a higher ticket with a lower back end. I talk about it in my Profitable Membership Business training. The thing that I found worked best is selling off the back of something else, especially live events, especially higher-ticket products. If you have a recurring subscription off the back of that, it’s usually less of an amount and it’s easy to get retention. That’s the number one cohort I’ve had in all my memberships.
These days, I just let people buy monthly, or annual, because it’s a performance-based program. So what I don’t want is a whole bunch of people to join because something’s free or a dollar. If they’re joining because it’s $1, or because it’s free, that’s not the reason I want them to join. I’d rather them join because they have a problem, and that I can solve it and they see it and they’re prepared to invest in themselves. And I get a fantastic level of customer. And I have programs that start from $10 or $99. So there’s access points that are very achievable for people, I don’t need to do a $1 trial, or free.
Now I have endless free content. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of podcasts. Like 800, or even 1000 episodes, if you add up my different podcasts. I’ve got little social media videos that go out on the internet. I’ve got referrals, I’ve got a book. So there’s lots of ways people can experience and test drive my stuff before they get to the membership.
So, if you’re going to sell a membership directly, and if you’re going to charge a fee, then the idea is to build your pre-marketing content, warm up your customers give them things to consume and get excited about. I was just looking through my analytics reporting this morning. And what I discovered is my help desk, my podcast, those things bring in the conversions. That’s the point of conversion: the help desk. And the podcast is a very, very warm introduction. And of course, my social media. My earnings per lead for social media videos is something like $350 a click at the moment, that is a very strong indicator that the pre-sales content warms up people.
So if you don’t have that, then you’re going to have to do something to entice people. And you might maybe make your product part of that, the free part and then the trial thing comes in. But what I have seen over and over again with the membership is $1 trial will usually always beat a free trial when it comes to actual number of customers who stay past the first billing point.
And I’m also going to throw this one in there: if you do a trial period that’s $1 or free, you absolutely, like, unequivocally have to no matter what, remind people they’re about to get billed before they get billed. Or else you’re going to have a chargeback problem or a major issue with your finance provider, the bank or PayPal or Stripe or whoever it is. They’re not going to be happy with you if you get all these people who get a surprise billing and then do a chargeback. So you must make sure you have very, very strong onboarding, like super strong onboarding, very clear communication about the upcoming billing event. Or you’ll run into trouble with that.
But ideally, you do pre-marketing. That’s the best solution I could possibly recommend before you lead people to a paid membership solution.
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