Running a membership is great, but it will require work before it becomes the stable income stream you'd want it to be.
Your Online Team's Kat Jarman knows this. And having dealt with a number of membership businesses, she shares the most common issue she's helped owners resolve.
James: Why don’t we talk about the types of memberships you’ve currently been serving to give us a feel for what’s happening out there?
Kat: Sure. So as an online business management agency, we have worked with loads of membership site owners, and it’s actually one of our favorite businesses to work with, because not only are they awesome businesses, they also have very similar needs in terms of how, like, every membership needs a retention strategy, or every membership needs to either be launching or be open and closed or like, all the sales strategies are quite similar.
And one thing that we really like as an agency who, we love the back end operations and the systems, is that a lot of memberships need similar things in terms of the admin and the back-end systems that nobody thinks about or nobody wants to think about.
And what we’re finding lately, or all the time, really, is that a lot of membership owners, they get really excited at the start, because having a membership is great, and they can see, James, you’re really good at telling them the vision of the recurring revenue and how amazing it’s going to be, and it really is.
And then there’s this pain that comes along, after you’ve done all the setup work, you’ve opened your membership, you’ve launched, and then all of a sudden you might have, I don’t know, maybe like 50 or 100 members and things are going amazing, but at the same time your to-do list is just gigantic every day. And you’re juggling all the things that James is telling you to do to grow your membership, but you’re also juggling all of the back-end administration as well.
So we’ve worked with some really awesome businesses lately, like the Merrymaker sisters, for example. And they didn’t realize that their membership is quite successful. They came in with a few hundred members when I first spoke to them, and they didn’t realize that their day-to-day, it went from growth to more of an admin role. So they were both performing admin roles for their business, which is amazing, but it doesn’t do anything for growth. So they didn’t realize that literally 75 percent of their day-to-day was administration. And they very quickly did after working with us for a few months, and we were able to remove 75 percent of their day-to-day. And the immediate impact that had, by removing all of that, was that their membership immediately grew by 45 percent, just by tweaking, ‘Okay, let’s not be admin managers here. Let’s go back to being the people in charge of our business and in charge of the growth of our business.’ And they’re so much more the happier for it.
And we’ve had a lot of stories like that, over the past couple of years. And I know from when I had a membership, I think it was in 2016, and I actually closed my membership down because the day-to-day had gotten too much for me. And I think back, and I think, oh, if only I had known that you can actually make your life easier in a membership, you don’t have to be all the things to all the people, but it does require you to step out of your comfort zone and actually make some changes and not just do the same thing, day in day out.
Watch the full episode here
Need help with your membership backend? Contact Kat at YourOnlineTeam.com
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