MemberPress makes setting up your membership site super easy and fast, which enables entrepreneurs like you to get your ideas to market with super speed.
What might not come as easily is getting members to sign up when you’re ready to launch, and getting them to stick around when they do.
Fortunately, there are some common, basic marketing strategies that work for membership sites proven to increase revenue and retention so you can focus on delivering great content, and less about customer acquisition and churn.
The best part, you can implement all these strategies using Groundhogg’s MemberPress Integration. If you are already using a CRM and Marketing Automation service, you can still implement many of these strategies using tools like WPFusion.
Read till the end to learn…
- How to convert more free trials
- How to put your customer onboarding on autopilot
- How to automatically prevent churn
- How to recover lost members after a cancelation
- How to increase membership engagement
- How to target specific members with specific marketing
And if that’s not enough, at the end I’ll share with you how you can download the email and funnel templates for all the strategies shared in this article, and where you can learn more strategies to take advantage of Black Friday, BuddyBoss, LMS Tools, and more!
What you’ll need to implement these strategies.
Before we can get into it, you will need a few things set up and installed.
- Groundhogg
- Groundhogg – MemberPress Integration
- Groundhogg – Conditional Logic addon
- Groundhogg – Advanced Features addon
OR
- Any SaaS CRM like HubSpot or Active Campaign
- WPFusion
All the screenshots and exact steps will be based on the Groundhogg implementation, but the core strategies can be applied to most SaaS CRM and Marketing Automation tools.
Convert more free trials with less effort.
MemberPress gives you the very useful ability to offer free trials of your membership program. This makes it really easy to give members a taste before committing.
It’s not too difficult to get leads to sign up for the free trial, getting them to make it past the first billing period is not as easy.
There are a number of factors why people don’t convert.
- The content wasn’t for them
- They can’t afford it
- They no longer have the problem they needed solved
- Etc…
But more often than not, the real reason that people abandon trials is that they forget they signed up in the first place meaning they didn’t take advantage of the trial period to learn about the content, get the billing notification reminder, and cancel because they didn’t use it.
This is totally avoidable, and the process to do so is relatively simple.
We need to:
- Track who is, and isn’t, currently in a trial
- Send emails or text messages to those in trials
- Remind those in trials to login and consume content while in the trial
Groundhogg makes this almost too easy!
When editing a MemberPress membership plan, you will see the Groundhogg integration card. If a trial is enabled you will also see the “Trial Tags” option.
These tags are applied to a contact when they sign up for the trial and are removed when the trial is over, or when they abandon the trial.
What we can do now is create a funnel that starts when a trial is started to send timed emails to explain to the lead how the membership works and encourage them to participate and consume content.
Let’s say you have a trial that lasts 14 days, you can send an email every other day for a total of 8 emails, here are some popular topics to cover during a trial.
- Welcome aboard!
- How to get the most out of your trial.
- Don’t miss the great piece of content during your trial!
- You’re halfway through your trial.
- Did you see this really cool feature?
- Log in to see how you can do a cool thing…
- You’re doing great, keep it up!
- Looking forward to doing great things together (trial is over)
By staying in constant communication with the lead, we can ensure they won’t forget about the trial, and be confused when they roll over to being billed, or cancel altogether.
Here’s what that funnel might look like in Groundhogg.
We can then end the funnel when the trial tag is removed and filter that the member is still active for the membership, giving us a conversion rate of successful trials, which we can actually see in the reports!
Our report gives you an exact representation of how many trials for any particular membership you are selling so you can optimize and tweak to get the conversion rate higher!
Put customer onboarding on autopilot.
If you do not have customer onboarding, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. Customer onboarding is essential to ensure low churn and continued membership.
The customer relationship is not so different from a romantic one. Customers need to feel safe, valued, and loved, and that starts with onboarding.
Whenever a new member signs up, they will receive the general MemberPress active member tag which you can set in the Groundhogg settings.
Like the trial funnel, you can create a new funnel that starts when the active member tag is applied to send welcome emails to all new members.
Some important topics to cover during onboarding might be…
- Here’s where you should get started
- Navigating your dashboard
- Contacting support
- Updating your billing information
- What to do if you can’t log in
- Etc…
These topics help provide reassurance that they made a good decision, and help them navigate your membership more easily.
Proactively preventing churn.
Churn is the percentage of members that sign up, then cancel. We want to prevent cancelations before they happen.
So, why do people cancel? The most common reason for cancellation is…
“I didn’t use it”.
We often sign up for things with good intentions, like the gym! But life gets in the way and lo and behold after 3 visits we’re right back on the couch trying to cancel over the phone…
So the best way to prevent churn as a result of apathy is to promote customer engagement! People who use the product and get results generally continue to pay for it.
Some popular ways to promote engagement are…
- Tracking and changing engagement
- Rewarding engagement (think gamification)
- Provide quick wins (feeling of fast progress)
- Use expiring content (leverage FOMO)
Some of these are easier to implement than others. The easiest one to take advantage of is tracking and changing customer engagement patterns.
Sounds complex right? It’s not.
An easy way to track engagement is to track login or page visit behavior. If a member doesn’t log in or visit their dashboard within a few days, they become at risk of falling off the bandwagon and might cancel.
We can set up a funnel to send a reminder SMS or email to prompt the member to re-engage.
In Groundhogg let’s create a login reminder funnel. It starts when the member logs in for the first time.
If after seven days we see they don’t log in again, we send an email prompting them to visit their dashboard.
Life happens, sending a nudge once in a while can prevent members from totally abandoning their membership.
Reactively preventing churn.
Okay, so we covered how to prevent churn by promoting engagement. But sometimes that’s not enough, and the member is canceling no matter what.
There could be a number of reasons for that…
- They didn’t use it (even though you promoted healthy engagement)
- You solved their problem and no longer need access
- They’re having financial problems and can’t afford it
- Found a competitive offer elsewhere and have decided to switch
- Etc…
Many times, depending on the circumstances, there is nothing you can do to get them to stay and you just have to say goodbye.
But sometimes, the stars align, and sending the right offer can change someone’s mind.
In Groundhogg, when a member loses access, whether, through explicit cancellation or expiration, their access tag is removed from their profile.
You can use that to start a funnel and send an offer of several days, providing them an incentive to re-sign up.
Generally, 3 emails is the sweet spot. Any more than that and you risk alienating them.
The way we would set up our funnel would be to wait 1 day between each email, and the emails being something like…
- Sorry to see you go, can you tell us why?
- Can we change your mind? Tell us what would help you stay…
- Would 30% off sweeten the deal? If you resubscribe take 30% off your next year!
This will convert between 5-10% of all cancellations back into paying members.
Also, 30% off may seem like a lot, but would you rather have 30% of something or 100% of nothing? Take the money.
Target members, and find new business.
The ability to target specific people on your list is essential to finding and drumming up new business. In most systems not only is it hard to find the data you need, it’s next to impossible to act on it.
However, when you are using the Groundhogg CRM, it’s super simple to find the people you’re looking for and act on that data too.
Using our CRM search filters, you can filter your list by…
- Active memberships
- Subscription and transaction status
- Total spent
- Transaction count
- And more…
Not to mention all of the other standard search filters we offer to help you narrow down those most likely to spend more money.
For example, there is…
- Page visited
- Last login date
- Lead score
- Email activity
- Funnel activity
- And much, much more…
Let’s say you want to create a special offer for anyone who’s spent over $100, you can filter your email list by “total spent is greater than 100” and then send those people an email!
I can’t stress enough how powerful this is not only for marketing, but reporting as well and truly understanding your customer.
Next steps to level up your membership site.
What I’ve shared so far might seem like a lot, but actually, it’s the bare minimum of what you can and should be doing to create a healthy membership site.
Having these systems in place will ensure maximum retention and revenue, and are essential to have in place if you plan on building your business to sell.
If you’re ready to implement what I’ve shared so far, here’s what you need to do.
- Sign up for the Groundhogg Pro plan. It includes all the tools you’ll need to make it happened. Use code MEMBERPRESS15 for 15% OFF the first year.
- Install and activate Groundhogg and the MemberPress integration on your site.
- Download the MemberPress funnel template pack (all the funnels and emails shared in this article) and import them into your site.
- Create a Groundhogg Academy account to learn how to leverage Groundhogg for Black Friday, BuddyBoss, LMS, and more!
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out by starting up a live chat with our team, or join our free Facebook Community!
Thanks for reading!
