Episode #005: Behind the Scenes of Our NEW Membership Launch (100 New Members)
Today’s Episode:
Welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast! In this episode, I am breaking down how we were able to launch our brand new membership, get 100 members in our first week as founding members, and the lessons you can take away from it. If you are looking to launch something, this episode is for you!
We are talking about a five-figure membership launch that we ran in our business. I am breaking down for you how we launched our new membership.
Show Notes:
[01:43] We were able to launch without a webinar, challenge, or video series and solely email, a little advertising, and organic marketing to get our first 100 founding members. We were able to convert about 1.35 of our email list into our membership.
[02:14] When you are doing a promotion and you are just starting out, expect about 1% of your email list to buy.
[04:07] We decided if we wanted to keep up with this membership and for it to be a primary focus of our business, we had to simplify.
[05:55] Total revenue of our launch about $11,300, profit about $9,000, monthly recurring revenue about $3800, and yearly if we retain and grow it will be about $45,000 a year base.
[06:24] The membership is called Not Your Average Membership. It is for the person that is not ready to go crazy with their education yet, but they are ready to take action. We wanted to create something that was accessible, affordable, and actionable and actually gets results for people.
[08:41] You need to actually create the demand for your product.
[09:29] You can start talking to your audience about who you are, what you believe in, and your values.
[10:38] For us, this wasn’t just let’s create a membership that sells, we are trying to embody the identity of how we want to see marketing go.
[11:09] Next we opened up a VIP waitlist for early access to the membership. Out of the 135 people on the waitlist, 23 of them bought on soft cart open day.
[13:19] The next day we opened the cart to our entire list. In retrospect, we would warm our email list up for the offer. We did a founding member rate.
[14:40] On the last day of the founding member rate, we sent three emails with a countdown timer.
[15:35] After sending these emails, we shared with our audience why we were using timers. In our last email, we left our list knowing that it was not their last chance.
[17:00] You can do feel-good marketing and still get results.
[18:04] We do not have a Facebook group for this membership. We are doing everything inside our program Circle.so.
[19:06] We are embodying the principles that we are talking about on this show and we are getting results. You can do marketing that feels great. You can advertise and feel good about it. You can email and feel good about it.
[20:30] I want to embody the mission I am communicating on this show, I want to take you behind the scenes of what’s working, and I want to encourage you that you can do hard things.
[21:42] You can do hard things and they can still feel good.
[21:50] What membership? Check out the Not Your Average Membership.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number five. And in this episode, I am breaking down how we were able to launch our brand new membership, get 100 members in our first week as founding members and the lessons you can take away from it. So if you're looking to launch something, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, not so average marketer, I'm so excited for this week's episode, because we are talking about a pretty successful launch that we ran in our business, a five figure membership launch. And I keep saying, we're going to get a little intro music and we are going to do that, but I am more right now focused on delivering an awesome experience for our members, delivering awesome content for you as a listener. And I hope you don't mind. So little [inaudible 00:00:52], that's the intro music for this episode.
So I am really excited and I wanted to break down for you, how we launched our new membership. Now, comes with a big disclaimer, and that is that I've been doing this for a long time and I've built up an email list, but I actually have been focused more on the agency side of my business for the last few years. And we're coming back into the course and membership world and the podcast world. If you followed me for any period of time that the podcast was kind of dead for a while and we're trying to revive that and we still have a relatively engaged list, but our list is small in the grand scheme of how long we've been doing this. So just to get the numbers out there, we have about 7,400 people on our email list. And I know that if you're listening to this episode, you might be like, "I'm nowhere near that," or maybe you're past that.
And the only reason that I share that information with you is that I want you to understand that we were able to launch without a podcast... I'm sorry, not without a podcast. We were able to launch without a webinar, without a [inaudible 00:01:56], without a video series, solely email and a little bit of advertising, of course, organic marketing to get our first 100 founding member. Now, I share that information not so you can be like, "Oh, great. This episode does nothing for me, because I don't have a big list." I share that because I want you to understand that we were able to convert about 1.35% of our email list into our membership. Now I have a friend Denise Duffield-Thomas who teaches the rule of 1%. And I love this. She says, "When you do a promotion and you're just starting out, expect about 1% of your email list to buy."
And that's what we saw. We saw about 1.35% of our email list buy initially in the promotion. Okay. We chose to launch this way because we wanted to test out our product. I didn't want to do a big, heavy launch. I was tired from having done a lot of in-person work recently. And I just had this idea for a membership. This is something that's been brewing within me for a while. And there's a little bit of backstory here. I know you're kind of like, "Get to the good stuff." I promise I will, but I wanted to preface by saying, a couple years ago we had a membership, it was called the monthly marketing playbook membership. And that membership was great. We actually enrolled over 100 people when we opened that membership, but we shut it down for a couple reasons.
And I think this is important because I want to be a super transparent podcaster and leader in this space and tell you that we shut it down because frankly, we couldn't keep up with the content. It was a lot to keep up with. My team was smaller. My time was limited. I was doing courses and I was starting to do coaching services and I was starting other services. And I was of course, managing a membership and I was trying to release content monthly. And I just didn't have the infrastructure that we have today. Now you might be like, "I don't have a ton of infrastructure either." That's okay. The reason we shut down that membership was because we planned out two months ahead, and then we burned out because we were like, "What do we do next? What do we do next?"
This time when we launched our membership, my team, and I actually sat down, we had a membership planning meeting, and now we have a monthly membership planning meeting, a quarterly planning meeting, and a yearly planning meeting for the business. And we said, "What's happening in this membership for the next 12 months?" My number two, Jessica basically said, "if we don't have the next 12 months, we can't do this." And I love that. I love that my team is in a position where they can kind of tell what to do a little bit and I love that. So we basically decided, look, if we want to keep up with this membership and we want it to become a primary focus of our business, we have to peel back a few things. We did take a few things off my plate. We lowered how many clients we're taking on in the agency.
We are peeling back some of our course offerings. We're peeling back some of our funnel entry points. And we're trying to simplify. I said in the first episode of this podcast, that our word for the year of 2021 was like ease and flow and we have not lived that. And we thought a membership is a great way to really serve our core audience, really implement that ease and flow if we structure it correctly. Okay. So with all of that being said, you're probably dying for the goods. So let me just give you the good stuff that we created in this membership. So in the launch, here's the hard numbers. We generated revenue of $11,320 cash in hand. We ended up generating a monthly recurring revenue of about $3,800. Okay. My notes actually say $3,800.13, but it's an even number.
So I know that's wrong. Right around $1300 a month. And we'll project over the year, including annual subscriptions. And if that monthly recurring were to stay about $45,000. Now we spent about $1,300 on advertising and about $1,000 on design work. And I'll get into all of that in a few minutes, but I just wanted to lay out the numbers because everybody wants to know the numbers. Right? We walked away with about $9,000 profit in hand, not counting team costs. I retain the members of my team. So I don't necessarily build that in. They're helping me with everything that we're doing. So I did not include team costs here. Okay. We also use a software that costs about $80 a month. So we offset the first month of that software in the profit. So safe to say, revenue about $11,300 profit about $9,000, monthly recurring revenue about $3,800 and yearly if we retain and continue to grow the membership, it'll be about $45,000 a year base. Okay.
So those are the numbers. I like to share those early because I don't know when I listen to podcasts, I'm like, "Where's the good stuff? I want the numbers." But I feel like it's important that I tell you what exactly is the membership. So I talked about that we launched a membership and that we're doing the membership and that we planned out of your content. Well, the membership is called not your average membership. And we'll link it up in the show notes. You can check it out at join.notyouraveragemembership.com. But the not your average membership was basically this brainchild of something that I noticed was missing in the marketplace and something that I noticed a lot of my students asking about, and that is it's designed for the person who's not ready to go crazy with their education yet.
Maybe they don't want to spend $2,000, $3,000 on a course, but they're ready to take action. Okay. We said, "How do we create something that's accessible, affordable, actionable, and actually gets results for people?" And we wanted it to rival some of the best premium in information out there. So what we did was we said, "What's the one piece that's missing?" And for us, that was implementation and action. That's what we feel is missing in a lot of content online. It's like, you want to get results but you're also not at a point to be investing tens of thousands of dollars. So what do you do? Well, we said, "Let's create a membership." So our membership is structured in a way that once a month you get a content drop. It's a training that teaches you a piece of content that generates leads in sales.
You get a live training drop where we expand on that information, teach it live, answer questions live, you get an implementation drop where once a week, I'm sorry, once a month for a week, we actually drop a daily action item for you to get the results from the membership. And then of course, everybody is looking for coaching and support. So we have a monthly coaching stations and coffee call. And that's where I just show up with coffee and kind of hang out and answer questions with everybody. And we do those two calls over Zoom and the two content drops through our membership portal, which I'll talk about is a little bit different than what we've traditionally seen with memberships. So we called it not your average membership and the big promise is that every month you will generate more leads and sales in your business as a direct result of being in the membership.
Okay. So how did we actually release this thing into the world? Well, I actually talked about this inside a reel that I did on Instagram today. And in that reel, I talked about how you need to actually create the demand for your product. And I think that that's something that's been missing in our marketing personally and in marketing as a whole is kind of like, "Oh, create your product, do a webinar, sell it." But we said, "What if, instead of just trying to sell a product, we created like this excitement and engagement and movement behind it?" So if you listen to episode zero of the podcast, you'll know that we're trying to create a movement here of not average marketers doing things that feel good, creating marketing that doesn't just make money, it makes moves, it makes movement and it makes you feel good about what you've done.
So what we did was a couple weeks before we launched the membership, we actually teased the new podcast. And we started talking about the values that we wanted our audience to have. So if you're listening to this going, "I don't have a big list or I'm just getting started. What can I take away from this?" It's that you can start talking to your audience about who you are, what you believe in, your values. And we did that a couple weeks before the podcast released or about a week before the podcast released. And then we sent another email a few days later saying, "Hey, we also have this membership coming up that's really going to crystallize what our belief system is about the online marketing space." What we did next was we released the podcast and we didn't even talk about the membership on the first few episodes.
We just talked about the movement, the people we wanted to work with, who our customers were and we really tried to embody that spirit of who we wanted in our membership, who we wanted to help, who we wanted to serve. And for us it's business owners that are in that first few years of business, or are stuck in that, like, "I'm not making more than a couple thousand a month. I want to do more." We want to work with the more entrepreneur, the online business owner who's like, "I know I can do more. But I just need someone to help me, tell me what to do, give me consistent action items and help me move through the process." So we released three podcast episodes to drop the show and the movement. And I just really want to crystallize this. I've said it several times, but for us the not your average marketing or... Sorry, let me try that again.
So I really want to say this to crystallize it because I know I've said it a couple times, but for us, this wasn't just, "Oh, let's create a membership that sells." It's like we are trying to embody the identity of how we want to see marketing go. So we talk about that on the podcast, we talked about that on my Instagram, we talked about that in my emails. And then we dropped the first few episodes and really talked about who and how we wanted to serve. And whether your email list is 5 people, 50, 500, 5,000, 50,000, that's something I think you can take away from this episode.
Now, the next thing that we did that was really strategic is we opened up a VIP wait list for early access to the membership. So now that we've like planted the seeds of who we want to serve and our mission, and then planted the seeds of we've got this membership coming, then we said, "Hey, if you like the idea of this membership and you want to get in on this, then you absolutely should get on the wait list for our membership. It's going to be opening soon."
We sent out two emails explicitly about the membership wait list and we sent out one email that was about a podcast with a PS to join the wait list. So we sent out a handful of emails. We did resend one to non openers. So you might have seen four emails, but that was the basic gist of what we did. So this is where it gets fun. What we did for our membership was we created a founding member wait. We basically said, "Look, if you have faith in us with this brand new offer that we don't have a ton of testimonials for, but we really believe in, you can join in at $40 a month where it's going to be $49 a month when we go public." And this worked out really, really well. So I want to walk you through the sales timeline and tell you what happened each day, and then go back and give you some tips and tricks and insights that you can use in your business.
So the VIP wait list was super great. We ended up with about 135 people total, couple people unsubscribed, but out of that 135 people that were on the wait list, 23 of them bought on cart open day. We converted 17% of our wait list on, and I should say soft cart open day. The day before we actually emailed my entire list, we emailed just the wait list, gave them the, "Hey, you can get in early, get in at this rate, get a couple bonuses." And we emailed that to them. Now we did add two bonuses in. One was a roadmap on how to take your first idea or next idea from a low ticket product to a $10,000 revenue stream in your business. And the second one was a complete training on low ticket products that we had used in other places that we put into the membership site for all new members.
We ended up sending two emails that day. One in the morning, one in the evening. And then the next day we did the same thing. We sent very similar to emails to my entire list. And that was on the 9th of September, it was the public open. And we only got seven sales. And we started to say, "Oh my gosh, what is happening?" And I realized that's because we didn't really prime the entire list, we just kind of primed the wait list. So in retrospect, I would do more work to warm my email list up for that offer. But then on the 10th, we dropped a bonus and sent two emails. One in the morning, reminding them that we were doing our founding member enrollment and one in the evening with a bonus. And we ended up with 15 sales on the 10th. The next day was a Saturday.
We sent an email, five sales, pretty quiet day, nothing crazy. And then Sunday, we find that Sundays do well for us. We sent standard email, one email for the launch, 10 sales. Now this is where something big occurred to me. Up to this point in the membership, we had the promise of two bonuses and content coming. The first action plan for September didn't actually drop until Monday the 13th. So I think people were kind of like waiting for that first piece of content because on Monday when we said, "Hey, the first piece of content is available. Come enroll." We got 16 sales. Other than our VIP wait list up to that point, our biggest day ever. Then on the last day, Tuesday, September 14th, we said, "This is your last chance. We're going up at midnight to $49 a month." And we sent three emails with a countdown timer. All three emails to countdown timer.
Now I want to take a minute to talk about this because I actually had really mixed feelings about using a countdown timer. And I thought countdown timers, to me, they feel like high pressure, just high pressure, like, "Oh, you have to decide right now." So we did a couple things. One. We surveyed my audience. We actually went to my Facebook, asked around, 93% of people said, "I actually like countdown timers because all dates feel very abstract to me, especially when I'm not in your time zone and it tells me specifically when I need to take action by." We also found out we have a large international audience who said, "I just don't do the time zone conversions in emails. You Americans [inaudible 00:16:33]. But you really only think about yourself sometimes. And I don't know when things are closing when you just give me a time in America."
So we sent these emails, but we did something really intentional. One, we shared with our audience why we were using timers. And two, in the last email we sent, the last email of the launch is we called the SOGOP email. And I'm sure I got that wrong, but basically the, you know what, or get off the pot. That's what we used to call it. And a lot of marketers call it that. And it's basically like, are you in or out make a decision. And what we did with our final email that I felt so good about that I really think incentivized people to join because we saw a big influx of sales in the last several hours. We saw multiple sales in the final 30 minutes. We basically said, "Hey, you know what? This isn't your last chance to join.
Our membership is going to be open 24/7 at $49 a month. And if now is not your time, now is not your time. No big deal." And this, I think really cemented what we were trying to communicate with our audience. The subject line was, this is not your last chance. And we just told our audience, "Look, I'm going to be around to answer your questions. But if it's not the right time, that's okay. We'll be here when you're ready." And I felt so good about this email because it really embodied the mission that we're trying to get across over at the, not your average marketing membership... Oh my gosh, let's try that again. I really like this email because it embodied the mission that we're trying to get across in this membership and with this podcast and that is that you don't have to be like, "You must join now or you will lose money.
You must join now or you will not get results," to get results. You can do feel good marketing and still get results. So real quick run through. September 8th, we got 23 members from our VIP wait list with two emails. September 9th, we got seven sales with two emails, the 10th, we got 15 sales with two emails. And then we did one email Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and we got 5, 10 and 16. And then on the final day we got 24 sales. The other things that we did were we spent $1,300 on Facebook Ads. We ran ads to everybody in my warm audience and anybody who visited the sales page and anybody on my email list, pushing them to the sales page. We spent about a $1,000, $997, working with a phenomenal designer who created all the marketing assets for our podcast that we used for the membership.
We got permission, don't worry. We used the same assets for the membership. And that's where you saw a lot of the testimonials come from. And we spent $80 a month on software for the membership. Now this software, you all, this is the crazy part. I really want to throw this out there because I'm just so excited about it. We don't have a Facebook group for this membership. We're doing everything inside of a software called circle.so. We'll link up to this in the show notes. But circle.so is a community platform. So it's community focused, content secondary. So yes, content is primary to our membership, but we're trying to lead with our community. So it's almost like a forum style where people can access all the content in one section and access the community in another. And check out circle.so. If you guys want, let me know, we'll do an episode on how we structure our membership and things like that.
But basically, we spent just over $2,400, about $2,500 actually and we ended up making $11,320. So I share all of this with you not because I think it's this wildly duplicatable, replicatable, "Oh my gosh. [inaudible 00:20:37], I can just go launch my list of 7,000. Don't you wish you or me? [inaudible 00:20:43]" Did you like that? I share this because I want you to understand that we are embodying the principles that we're talking about in this show and we're getting results. So you can do marketing that feels great. You can advertise and feel good about it. You can email and feel good about it. And I want to touch on two quick things. One, we actually have been averaging one or two sales a day after we closed the cart.
And because we didn't close the cart, we increased the price to $49 a month. We've been getting sales pretty much on a daily basis. I think we've had seven sales over the last seven days. So we average about one a day. We do talk about it passively on social media and in our podcast and on our newsletters. So we're not just like getting sales out of nowhere, but I love this model because it feels good. It's like when someone needs help, we're there. And just to kind of throw things out there, so you guys know our current goals are to retain 88-92% of our people month to month, which 90% or higher we feel like indicates people are really enjoying the content. We want to see 10-15% month over month growth in the membership.
And we're going to launch the membership in October. We're still working with my team. I'm actually meeting with them yesterday. If you're listening to this podcast the day it came out, I met with them yesterday. If you're not listening to it, somehow in the past, I'm meeting with them later this week, you wouldn't be though. We're planning to get 100-150 new members in October through a formal launch strategy. So the reality of this episode is, I want to do three things here. I want to embody the mission that I'm communicating on this show. I want to take you behind the scenes of what's working and I want to encourage you that you can do hard things. It stretched me a little to email my list this month, when I haven't been emailing on a weekly basis for a year plus. It stretched me a little to make an offer and give my team new responsibilities and grow a membership and birth a new idea.
It stretched me a little to say, "We're not going to do a Facebook group like is the norm. We're not even going to do a form. We're going to use new software that's not popular in our industry." But you all, we are so happy with the results and the people and the connection and the community. And the last thing that I'll say is that we actually asked our members mid-launch and this was such a great strategy that I want you to play with, "Why did you join?" And do you know, the majority of people told us, "The reason I joined is because it doesn't feel skeezy. It doesn't feel slimy. It doesn't feel like I'm not getting what I need right." Now, a lot of people said, "Oh, I love the content. The flow is great. I love the direction you're going."
We wrote really great copy written emails in my opinion, I had my team edit them, but the takeaway is that you can do hard things and it can still feel good. So I hope you got lots of value from this episode. If you were like, "Dude, I'm just listening to this episode. A membership, tell me more, I'm very interested." You can head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com to see the sales page. Currently open for enrollment $49 a month, $490 a year. I won't bog you down with the details cause I kind of already did in this episode. But if you have any questions, let us know and we'll get you taken care of. If you enjoyed this episode and you want to revisit any of it, get the resources, we're still working on what we're doing with our domain, full transparency, heartsoulhustle.com. So for right now you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap005.
That's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap005, for Not Your Average Podcast 005, episode five. And we'll have the show notes for you as a full transcript. So one other thing we're doing is we're transcribing every single episode. It drives me crazy when I go to like, "I want just a little nugget info from a podcast and I can't find without listening to the full thing." We are transcribing every episode in full so that you can always head over and read the show notes. So I hope you got lots of value from this episode. I cannot wait to hear your thoughts. Feel free to email us, message us, drop a comment on the blog, message me on Instagram. I love hearing from you guys. I want to know that you like the direction the show's going. So don't hesitate to reach out. Until next time, this is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, and we'll see you next time.
