Before we dive into this episode of Ask Carrie, I just wanted to let you know that my amazing friend, Stu McClaren, is hosting a free workshop series, where he’s going to be teaching how you can build a successful membership site that generates recurring revenue every single month!
Click here to save your spot!
In this episode of Ask Carrie, I’m answering a great question that I get asked a lot:
“In your experience, what has been the most successful way to bring people into your membership site?”
Over the past years of growing the FEA Members’ Club to over 5,000 members I’ve tried so many different things – some worked really well and others not so much.
What strategy will work best really depends on where you are at in your business.
Let me share a little bit of my experience and then I’ll share my thoughts around what I think works best depending on the size of your audience and where you’re at.
My experience growing the Members’ Club to 5,000+ members
When I first launched my membership back in 2013, I was marketing it all the time.
During the entire first year, I was putting it out there as much as I could: telling people about it, trying out Facebook ads, sharing on social media and emailing people telling them about what we had going on inside the membership.
At the end of that first year, we grew to 1000 members and I couldn’t believe I’d figured out a way to get 1000 people into my membership!
But soon hit a plateau and it became a struggle to grow as fast as I wanted to.
That next year, I closed enrollment to the membership so that no one new could join.
It worked out really well because I had been so overwhelmed trying to constantly juggle the marketing and the membership itself.
When I closed enrollment, I could just focus on creating an amazing experience for my members and looking at how I could organise a big launch for the next enrollment period.
Launching after enrollment was closed
While enrollment was closed, I built up a waitlist of people who were interested to join the membership when it reopened.
I also worked on a launch with a free 3-part video series encouraging people to enrol during a 7-day enrollment period before the membership closed its doors again.
During those 7 days I got 1200 people to join… It had taken me a whole year to reach the first 1000 before that!
I quickly realised how powerful launches were.
Ramping up to create visibility and offering amazing value while putting an offer out there that’s only available for a limited amount of time was a really great combination for bringing members on board.
So I kept doing launches for a good few years. And then when I hit 4000 / 5000 members it seemed to plateau again.
It was really hard to create bigger growth because it meant having to significantly scale up my launches.
Switching to an evergreen model
That’s when I decided to switch to an evergreen model, going back to being open all the time.
In the case of the Members’ Club, people can take an online quiz or attend a workshop with me and then join the membership now that we have these 2 funnels built out.
Here’s my advice…
In my experience, different strategies work best depending on where you’re at.
So if you’re just starting your membership and you’re not sure what the best way to get new members to join is, try leaving enrollment open, experiment and play around with what works.
This is especially important if you’re starting out with a smaller audience as you wouldn’t want to launch and then close enrollment with only very few members.
You could even try something in the middle, by doing a webinar every week where you open enrollment and invite those people on that webinar to join your membership. Your focus would then be on getting more people onto that webinar and getting it to convert really well.
Keep learning and improving as you go
As you go through that process, you will learn so much and your ability to get people to convert and join is going to evolve and improve.
It will also give you a really good understanding of what people need, what their biggest blocks are and what might be holding them back from joining during that webinar.
And once you’ve nailed that and your webinar converts really well, you can scale that up, start paying for ads and driving more traffic so that you can grow the membership.
Once you know your messaging converts really well, you have a growing audience and you feel more confident, then you could look at doing a live launch (rather than betting everything on a launch early on when you’re not sure it will go well).
Scaling up your launches
Once you’ve tried one or a few types of different launches, such as a free workshop, a video series or a live challenge inside a Facebook, you could do a bigger launch and run Facebook ads to get more people signed up.
There is no perfect formula – it’s all about experimenting, playing around and just seeing what works, but the most important thing is actually making sure that your messaging converts.
Once you have that nailed down, whether you choose to follow an evergreen model, or whether you choose to do an open/close launch model, you will be able to get it to work and convert for you.
I really hope these tips help you and that you feel all fired up to start figuring out how to grow your membership!
And remember to join my friend, Stu McClaren, for his free workshop series on building a successful membership site! He’s the go-to expert on this topic and always shares the most incredible strategies!
Click here to save your spot!
